Zero State Page 11

  When Zoe didn't reply, he added, "What about you? Are you staying on for the next job?"

  She shook her head. "I'm sticking to the plan we made in the diner. Southeast Asia by way of Germany. We get on a plane, we get lost."

  She was trying to get a read on him, he realized. She was trying to decide if he really wanted out. He'd told her he wanted out a dozen times, but she still doubted it. And she knew him well. Knowing this made him doubt himself.

  "I want to show you something," he said.

  ***

  Zoe gave him a puzzled look when she saw what he'd racked on the roof of the truck.

  "What?" he said.

  She shook her head. "This is something about yourself you've never mentioned. Ever." She added, "That's not a bad thing."

  "Ever tried it?"

  "A couple of times."

  The day was gray and overcast, and occasional rain spattered the windshield as they traveled on a succession of roads and highways, heading east. After forty-five minutes, they turned onto an unpaved road that led into a forest made of pine trees and craggy hills. Eventually they arrived at a clearing. Logan pulled off to one side and parked.

  "From here, we hike."

  They divided up the gear they'd brought with them. The trail they followed had been blazed at some point, marked with blue tiles nailed to the trees or squares painted onto the bark. But the paint had faded, and some of the tiles were blanched white.

  "What is this place?" Zoe asked.

  "An old state park. The trails used to be maintained, but funding must have dried up at some point."

  The hike didn't take long.

  As they emerged from the trail, Zoe saw the ocean, a churning blue expanse that looked like a denser and more troubled version of the moiling sky above. The sight didn't surprise her. She'd known they were heading for the coast since seeing the items Logan had racked on the roof of the truck, the same items they'd been awkwardly carrying strapped to their packs as they made their way through the woods. Surfboards.

  ***

  Wind bit their skin as they stripped out of their clothes and changed into wetsuits. They found a dry spot for the packs and descended a staircase of wet stones. Iron-gray waves exploded against the rocky shoreline, giving them their first taste of the frigid salt water.

  ***

  "Where'd you learn how to surf?" Zoe asked.

  It was hours later. They were on a flat section of the beach, sitting next to one another in front of a fire they'd built with driftwood, sipping beer from bottles. They'd changed out of their wetsuits and into warm clothes.

  "A long time ago," Logan said. "A guy I served with taught me. We were stationed near a beach and went whenever we had leave."

  "How'd you find this place?"

  "I was looking at a map, looking for places to run. I found the trail, and once I came out here and saw this place, I decided I'd try to surf here. The water can get rough, there's rocks everywhere… coming out here alone wasn't the safest thing I've ever done. But definitely not the most dangerous thing either."

  "Does anyone else know about this place?"

  Logan shook his head. "I've seen signs of other people on the trail, but I've never run into anyone."

  "Ever bring anyone else out here?"

  "You're the first."

  She kissed him.

  ***

  They woke the next morning in a tangle of limbs and tired muscles. They were still at the beach, inside the tent and sleeping bags they'd brought with them. Logan made breakfast: bacon and eggs cooked over a fire, in the same skillet he'd cooked dinner in the night before. Zoe prepared coffee.

  It was a better day than yesterday, sunny and a few degrees warmer. They spent the morning in the water. Logan tried to ignore the idea that this would be his last time out here, and wondered when he'd gotten so sentimental.

  When the tide retreated, they packed up and Logan took a final look at this small piece of the world that felt like his own. He hated the thought of never seeing it again, and was glad he'd finally had the chance to share it with someone.

  ***

  Back at the apartment, they ate lunch, showered, and packed. They each took a single bag. Twelve hours later, they were on the other side of the country.

  CHAPTER 16

  Two vehicles rolled through the empty streets, each a massive shell of armor riding on a dozen 400lb. tires. Each carried eight men, six in the main compartment, with one in the driver's seat and another manning the twin cannons mounted on the roof.

  The town was deserted. There were no pedestrians, no other vehicles. No trash or litter or other signs of habitation. Nothing on the thermal scans that registered as human in size or body temperature.

  But the town still had power. Traffic lights were changing from green to yellow to red. Street lamps glowed. Neon letters were lit up above drug stores, gas stations, and bars. There were lights everywhere except behind the windows.

  "The lights are on, but nobody's home," Barnes muttered under his breath. He was seated next to the driver in the lead vehicle, manning the cannons. The monitor in front of him was linked to a ring of cameras mounted above the barrels, giving him a 360-degree view of their surroundings. The screen showed a vacant world in shades of ghostly gray. Night vision. Daybreak was still an hour away.

  He tapped a button on his collar, activating his comm unit.

  "Stop here for a minute," he said. "I want to have a look around."

  Two voices spoke through his earpiece, acknowledging the order.

  The vehicles rolled to a stop. Barnes stayed still a moment, staring at his screen. The world outside remained unchanged.

  He pushed the display aside and stood, and walked toward the back of the vehicle. "Open the hatch," he said into his comm unit. The back of the vehicle opened, and a ramp lowered to the pavement outside.

  Barnes pointed to three men seated on a bench to his right. They were dressed the same as he was—all black, body armor from head to toe. They carried heavy assault rifles. Ammunition and grenades were pocketed across their chests and belts. "With me," he said, and the three men followed him down the ramp.

  The world outside was almost as gray as it had looked on the monitor. The only splashes of color were the lit-up signs that advertised gas, a pharmacy, cheap beer. The signs gave him the creeps. He wondered if there were mass graves hidden inside any of the buildings. It was almost more disturbing to think that there weren't, that everyone had disappeared or been abducted wholesale. That this place was actually as empty as it looked.

  Barnes stepped away from the vehicle. The three men fanned out behind him, their eyes watching alleyways, watching rooftops, watching the distance for any sign of movement. They found none.

  Barnes stood in the middle of the street. The transport engines rumbled behind him, coughing exhaust.

  He wasn't a superstitious man, but the feelings he got from a particular situation—a sense of being watched, or that a job would go badly—had proven accurate too often in the past. He liked to think of it as some primal instinct, a trait left over from his lizard-brained ancestors, that had kept him alive for nearly fifty years of combat.

  Right now that instinct was telling him that his squad wasn't out here alone.

  He thumbed the safety off his rifle and walked underneath the gas station's glowing sign, past the pumps, to the kiosk where the attendant would have sat if the place were open. A security camera was mounted outside the kiosk.

  He stared at the glass eye of the camera, wondering if it was on, if it was recording, if anyone was watching the feed, watching him right now. He thought about putting a bullet through the lens, but didn't.

  A few minutes had passed and the sky was a shade lighter than it had been when he'd gotten out of the vehicle. Daybreak was getting close, and he wanted at least some cover of night when they reached their objective, a facility a mile outside of town.

  He walked b
ack to the vehicle. His men followed. The ramp folded up, sealing them inside, and they drove on.

  ***

  The primary function of Barnes's department was to provide military support for the corporation that employed them. But the company also saw his department as a revenue stream, and loaned them out for freelance work. When another company—usually a smaller company—needed more firepower or muscle than they had on staff, they outsourced, and jobs like this one went to Barnes and his team.

  The facility they were here to secure had gone dark a few days earlier. No communications were going in or out. The owners wanted the site secured, wanted a report of what was going on. Beyond the general layout of the place—a mix of both vacant and occupied buildings, labs, and training facilities—Barnes knew very little. This wasn't unusual. He'd gone into jobs with a lot less information.

  Up ahead, the site rolled into view.

  A double-layer of razor-wire fencing marked the property line. Further back was a collection of buildings. Anything visible from this distance looked abandoned—empty windows, broken walls, fallen bricks piled like scree on the outside. It was a good place to set up an ambush, a lousy place to roll into. If it were up to Barnes, if his orders weren't to secure the site and gather data and explain what the hell was going on, he would have parked at the gate and unloaded the cannons. Demoed anything within range and buried anyone hiding inside.

  But that wasn't an option.

  The driver stomped on the gas pedal. The front of the vehicle accelerated into the fence's gate and ripped it free. Chain link and razor wire twisted under the wheels. The second vehicle followed.

  They entered a gauntlet, a narrow maze of fencing and barricades intended to prevent vehicles from approaching at full speed and leave anyone on foot vulnerable to rifle fire. Through the mounted cameras, Barnes could see sentry towers standing tall on the open ground to their left and right. He couldn't see if the towers were empty or occupied.

  "Brace for impact," the driver said through the comm channel as the vehicle surged forward. The front end smashed into a concrete barricade, sending up a cloud of dust and broken stone as the obstacle was demolished.

  A second later they hit another barricade with the same result.

  Barnes felt his adrenaline ratchet higher with each jarring impact.

  They covered the distance from the outer fence to the inner fence in half a minute, leaving smashed barriers in their wake, their speed never dipping below 40mph.

  Another gate waited at the end. It snapped from its hinges like it was made of cheap plastic.

  A hollowed-out building formed a tunnel. They rolled through and emerged onto a road that connected the various parts of the compound.

  They moved further inland, weaving between a series of buildings. The briefing had said the place used to be a farm, some kind of grain processing plant. The sun was up and the night-vision on Barnes's monitor switched off automatically. It was a moment before his eyes adjusted.

  The vehicle steered off the road, onto an open field.

  On the monitor, Barnes saw something up ahead. A henge of black, twisted shapes. Ten, twenty, over thirty of them, he counted.

  "Stop," he said into the comm unit. The driver braked. So did the driver in the vehicle behind them.

  Hackles stiffened on the back of Barnes's neck, his lizard-brain processing the sight before the rest of his mind.

  He touched one of the controls on his monitor to zoom in. It was a half-second before the image sharpened.

  The henge was made up of bodies, burnt black. Each had something around its neck. A coil of wire.

  "Shit," said a voice through the comm channel.

  Every soldier in his squad could tap into the video feed from the vehicles' external cameras. Most had probably been watching all along. Any that hadn't were watching now.

  Barnes narrated for anyone who was wondering what they were looking at. "We have bodies. Over thirty of them. Burned, looks like they were alive when it happened. Those things around their necks are steel wires, the kind you find inside car tires."

  The trucks idled. Barnes stared at the twisted, burnt body on his monitor for another moment, then zoomed out, scanning the rest of the area. There were a few discarded fuel cans. The ground was muddy and chewed with boot prints. There were no signs of anything living.

  He tapped his comm unit. "I'm stepping out. Anything moves out here, blow it to pieces."

  The ramp in back lowered into the mud and Barnes walked out and around. Two men followed, covering the surrounding area with their rifles. The vehicles rolled forward a few feet, adjusting their positions into a V that opened toward the bodies, providing cover. They were out in the open, but the vehicles were big enough to shield them from everything but an airstrike.

  Barnes approached the outer edge of the henge. The bodies were like charcoal statues. The air smelled of charred meat and fuel. Every face of the dead wore the same expression—jaw stretched wide, revealing a black mouth, black throat. Some had been men, some had been women.

  He'd seen executions before. Stuff like this, stuff worse than this.

  Still, it was the kind of thing he'd never really gotten used to.

  He stepped forward, past the first row of charcoal statues.

  "Why the tires?" one of the men behind him asked.

  "Slower death," Barnes said. "Plus the added step of putting a tire around someone's neck adds to the ceremony, makes it more terrifying to the person it's being done to, and anyone watching. It's called 'necklacing' or a 'Brazilian microwave.' Popular with drug cartels and South African death squads."

  "Why this? Why out here?"

  "Whoever did this was pretty fucking pissed off at these people. And they wanted to send a message to whoever showed up afterward."

  He looked at the kneeling bodies around him, his attention focused on one in particular. A female. Her mouth was closed. Eyes too. She was less burned than the others.

  He took another step closer, and the female's eyes opened.

  As quickly as she'd blinked, she was on her feet, launching herself forward.

  Before Barnes could raise his gun, a boot smashed the center of his chest. He felt the air knocked from his lungs and the world tilted under him. His back hit the dirt, fragments of thoughts rattling inside his head—ash, camouflage, ambush.

  Three more bodies came to life. They were holding weapons. Flamethrowers. Paratrooper-style, fed with a fuel canister attached under the stock instead of a fuel pack strapped to the user's back.

  The barrels glowed blue and breathed fire.

  One stream of flame hit the men who had followed Barnes outside the truck. The other filled the back of the truck, where four more men were still inside.

  The men outside dropped and rolled.

  The men still inside the truck screamed.

  The ash-covered enemies continued to spray fire.

  The open vehicle rolled forward, the driver kicking down on the gas, either from logic or panic. A flaming body tumbled out of the back. The vehicle traveled thirty yards before someone launched a grenade into the open door. The heavy armor boxed in the blast. Shrapnel and scraps of bodies shot from the back like confetti from a cannon.

  Barnes felt the heat of the explosion against his face, felt shrapnel whipping through the air above him. He tried sitting up and a searing pain at the center of his chest forced him back down. His sternum was cracked. Through his body armor, through the impossibly dense muscles of his chest, that ash-covered bitch had broken something with a single kick.

  He fished an injection pen from the first aid kit on his hip and jabbed it into his wrist. Pain killers flooded his bloodstream. He sat up.

  Someone was returning fire, raking the rows of blackened bodies with bullets, shredding charred skin and bone. Barnes raised his rifle and added to the mix. Voices screamed across the comm channel.

  The gunner inside the remaining vehicle op
ened fire with the cannons. 30mm shells pounded the field, turning the blackened corpses to dust. Barnes caught a flash of black legs running from the cannonade and saw a body blown to pieces, obliterated by rounds designed to destroy tanks and buildings.

  Barnes screamed, feeling a sudden rush of adrenaline at the sight of an enemy killed.

  He looked around and found himself alone. Black smoke billowed from the burning wreckage of the destroyed vehicle and dozens of smaller fires. The air was dense and choked with dirt and the dust of the charred corpses. Visibility was only a few feet. Bullets and 30mm rounds continued to cut the air around him. Barnes knelt, his eyes scanning for movement, for targets. He tapped his comm unit but got no response.

  An explosion ripped through the smog off to his left, and Barnes saw the remaining vehicle lift up and smash nose-first into the ground. The rocket wouldn't have been able to pierce the truck's armor, but the person who had fired it hadn't been aiming for the armored shell. Instead, they'd fired into the ground underneath the front wheels, blasting a hole into the mud.

  Barnes jogged forward, the center of his chest numb.

  Up ahead, he saw the remaining truck tilted nose-down into a crater, its wheels spinning against the muddy edges as it tried to gain traction and climb out.

  Bodies swarmed on the disabled vehicle like ants. Some were blackened with ash. Others were camouflaged with mud and grass—they'd been lying in wait on the field, hiding in plain sight.

  Through the smog, Barnes saw the glow of a chemtorch. They were cutting one of the vehicle's escape hatches.