Zero State Read online

"Yeah?"

  "I'm going to kill the motherfuckers that did this to you."

  "I'd appreciate that."

  "No," Zoe whispered. "Please, no."

  "Don't watch," Logan said.

  Barnes drew a breath and screamed. A mist of gas and saliva sprayed from his mouth. There was a spark as his thumb rolled the tinder wheel, and his hand burst into flames. Then his arm. Then his chest and head and the rest of him. His scream cut off as the fire sucked the oxygen from his lungs.

  Logan fired three shots into the burning torso and watched it fall. He fired two more into the head once it was on the ground.

  Zoe stood next to him, her eyes wide, her jaw slack. A state of shock.

  Logan held her by the wrist and pulled her along as he ran away from the sound of approaching sirens and the smell of burning flesh and the echo of Barnes's final scream.

  CHAPTER 22

  "9-1-1 emergency."

  "Right now you have police and ambulances responding to a report of a naked, bleeding man terrorizing a crowd. Your first responders are going to find the man dead, his body on fire—"

  "Sir, if this is a threat—"

  "Shut up and listen!" Logan shouted into the phone. The harshness and volume of his voice felt unfamiliar. It sounded unfamiliar. He felt control slipping away for the first time in years.

  The voice on the other end of the call went silent.

  Logan continued. "I'm a military contractor who has worked in close proximity with biological weapons. I was having dinner in the park. The man was showing outward symptoms of a highly contagious and extremely lethal disease. He was bleeding from the eyes, nose, and ass. He showed signs of confusion and fear likely due to fever and brain swelling. You need to quarantine everyone who was at the park and then quarantine everyone who they've been in contact with. You need to call the CDC and tell them to deploy a response team. You need to do these things immediately. Do you understand?"

  "Sir, can we have your name?"

  "Your computers will not be able to trace this phone number. Do not ignore the information I gave you."

  He ended the call and tucked the phone into a pocket. He was in the driver's seat of the car, speeding down a side street two blocks from the park. Sirens blared between the buildings—police, ambulances, fire trucks.

  "Zoe," he said. She was in the seat next to him, catatonic. She hadn't said a word since the park. He'd had to open the car door for her, help her inside, buckle her seatbelt.

  "Zoe," he said. No response.

  He wouldn't be able to get back to the apartment using the route they'd taken here. The streets around the park were being closed off, traffic was piling up. In the rearview mirror, he caught a thin feather of smoke rising into the sky. Barnes was still smoldering. He wondered if burning Barnes alive had even done anything to stop the spread of the contagion. At the very least, no paramedics would try to resuscitate a body that had been set on fire and had most of the skull blown apart—they'd put out the fire and wait for homicide to arrive.

  "Zoe..." No response.

  He let the flow of traffic determine where he drove, staying away from the bottlenecks that were forming on every other street. He had no familiarity with the city, he just knew he needed to keep moving.

  "The fucking mutants from the island. There's more of them. They know who you are. They came here for you. Because you killed some of them."

  He needed to call this in. Call the number on the card he was supposed to call when the job was over. Tell his employers what had happened, what was happening.

  He needed to call the salesman he'd met that morning and acquire something more powerful than a handgun and four nonlethal grenades. Anti-material rounds. Explosive rounds. Something with stopping power. He needed to—

  The window next to him exploded and the driver's side of the car was punched inward. Airbags burst from the steering wheel, from the dashboard, from the crumpled door next to him, blunting the impact.

  The car skidded sideways, then rolled. The windshield turned to frost as thousands of cracks spread through the glass.

  Above/beneath his head, metal scraped on pavement, and the upside-down world spun around him.

  His first thought was that they'd been hit with an IED, a roadside bomb. Even as the thought passed through his mind the actual cause of the impact occurred to him: they'd been struck by another vehicle.

  It was a truck, he saw, looking through the shattered window at his left. Like a large delivery truck or a moving van. It had an enormous grill, shaped like a shield. It was maybe thirty meters away.

  The truck doors opened and two figures emerged, followed by two more. Each wore a white hazmat suit and carried an assault rifle. Ammo mags and grenades were strapped across their chests.

  They didn't open fire right away. He didn't understand why, and then he did: they were going to drag him out of the broken vehicle and make a show of his execution.

  He was upside down, held in place by his seatbelt. Zoe was next to him, hanging limp in the passenger seat, unconscious.

  The car had landed in some kind of open space, a parking lot maybe. The nearest cover was another car, forty yards away. He'd never make it there. They'd kneecap him the moment he got out, shred his legs with a burst of gunfire and then finish him off with whatever grisly method they had planned.

  His first instincts were to run, to fight. What he did next did not come naturally.

  He played dead.

  During the impact, he'd been tensed up, gripping the steering wheel. This had helped his body avoid whiplashing around in the driver's seat. Aside from a few scratches and bruises and muscle pain, he was uninjured.

  He relaxed his body.

  He slid his gun from the holster on his hip. He'd reloaded as they'd walked out of the park, after he'd put five bullets into Barnes.

  He closed his eyes.

  He heard boots on pavement, approaching.

  He waited. The boots crunched on the bits of broken window just outside the car.

  When a gloved hand grabbed him by the collar, Logan grabbed the wrist and yanked the arm forward. Logan's eyes opened. The face inside the hood was male. The blunt features were familiar.

  Logan had the thing's arm in a basic joint lock, a technique he'd drilled tens of thousands of times in preparation for a moment like this one.

  The arm was like none he'd ever felt, the muscles like flexible stone, promising strength many times his own. When he committed to the counter-attack, he knew he had a half-second at most before the thing tore him from the car.

  A half-second was all he needed.

  He already had the barrel pressed underneath the thing's chin, against a seam where the hood and faceplate connected to the rest of the suit. He pulled the trigger. The face exploded like a chunk of raw beef inside a blender. Blood and pulp painted the inside of the faceplate. The bullet punched through the top of the hood.

  Logan laid his gun on the ceiling of the upside-down car and yanked something from a pocket on the dead thing's chest. A grenade.

  With his other hand still holding onto the body, Logan pulled the pin with his teeth. The throw was awkward, but he managed enough force to send the metal egg skittering across the pavement outside and enough aim to direct it underneath the truck. Logan pulled on the dead thing's arm and the rest of it's body slumped forward, blocking the shattered window next to him.

  There were two explosions in quick succession. First, the grenade. Then, the truck, as hot shrapnel ripped through the fuel tank.

  The second explosion was much larger and impossibly loud. Heat and shards of metal blasted the side of the car. Logan braced himself by holding onto the body and using it as a human shield. The shockwave sent the car skating across the asphalt on its roof.

  ***

  Zoe was coughing, having been jolted back into consciousness.

  Logan's gun had gone missing as the car was thrown away from the explosio
n.

  A knife was sheathed on the dead man's chest. Logan used it to cut his seatbelt and then the shoulder strap of the dead man's assault rifle. He lowered himself onto the ceiling of the car, kicked the shattered windshield free, and rolled outside, bits of broken glass biting his skin.

  All that remained of the truck was a twisted heap of burning metal, the ground surrounding it black.

  Logan stood and staggered forward, dizzy from the crash, the explosion, and being strung upside down. He was still staggering as he raised the assault rifle and sighted on his first target. One of its arms was missing, and a ragged stump hung from half a hazmat sleeve. Logan's first burst of gunfire missed. The second tore through the suit's shell and the body underneath.

  He'd regained his balance when he spotted his next target. It was on its back, struggling to stand on a pair of ruined legs. Logan shot it through the front of its faceplate.

  Three, he thought. He'd seen four get out of the truck. Two from each door.

  He moved closer to the wreckage, rifle still at his shoulder, wondering how close the other one had been standing to the blast. Was there anything left of it?

  He saw movement in his peripheral vision and looked to see a fat disc of fire spinning through the air, toward him. He turned, trying to move out of the way, unable to move fast enough. He took the brunt of the impact on the thick muscles of his arm and back. He felt his feet leave the ground and his body reconnect with it a second later.

  Tire, he realized, as he rolled over to smother the flames clinging to his clothes. Someone had thrown a burning truck tire at him. He picked himself up. His ribs ached and his skin was seared. And he'd lost the rifle.

  A figure stepped toward him. She had removed her hood and the top half of her hazmat suit, stripping down to the bulky pants and skin-tight shirt. She was built like a swimmer or a cross-country skier, all lean, hard-packed muscle.

  She was the same one. From the island. The female. Not a copy, or a twin. This was the same girl. He didn't know how he could tell, but he was convinced.

  She didn't have a weapon, but neither did he, and he was far outmatched. She'd just thrown a two hundred-pound tire as if it weighed no more than a discus.

  He started to move, to put distance between them, his eyes searching the ground for a gun. His only chance was to stay on his feet until he could get his hands on a weapon and shoot her, and he needed to do that quickly. In five or ten seconds she'd be on top of him. How long he lived after that depended on how slowly she wanted to kill him.

  The assault rifle he'd dropped was closer to her than it was to him, and he didn't entertain the thought of making a rush for it. Instead, he ran for one of the bodies. The one he'd shot in the face while it tried to sit up. He'd seen a sidearm strapped to its thigh.

  He broke into a sprint.

  She caught him within ten strides. A hard blow knocked him down. She stepped in front of him, blocking his path to the dead body and the sidearm holstered on its thigh and any chance he had of living through the next minute.

  He looked up at her. One of her ears was mangled. There was something different in her eyes, something that hadn't been there during their first encounter. There was emotion there now.

  "How did you get off the island?" he asked.

  For a moment, the expression on her face changed. She looked not confused, but curious.

  There was the crack of a gunshot, and her head snapped to the side. She stepped back and fell.

  Logan turned to see Zoe standing outside the upside-down car. She held a gun in her hand. She was bleeding from a cut on her forehead.

  He looked at the body sprawled on the pavement. Zoe had shot the female through the left eye. Blood was pooled around the head.

  Zoe walked forward and helped Logan off the ground.

  And without exchanging a word, they ran.

  CHAPTER 23

  Logan and Zoe stopped running eight blocks later.

  They stood in an alley, catching their breath. Dumpsters lined the brick walls on either side, reeking of rotting food. They had no idea what neighborhood they were in, where they were in relation to the apartment, or what to do next.

  "Guess I'll be wearing long sleeves to work tonight," Logan said, digging a small piece of glass out of his forearm. He tore off the cleanest part of his t-shirt and stepped closer to Zoe. "Here," he said, and cleaned some of the blood from her face. He found the cut on her forehead and saw that it wasn't bad, just a small break in the skin.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "About before. After Barnes. I've never seen anything like that, not up close. It's a dumb excuse for going away like I did."

  "You came back at the right time."

  "That thing, she was the one from the island? The same one?"

  "Yeah. I'm sure of it."

  "How's that possible?"

  "Did you see how fast she moved?"

  "Do you think there's more of them?"

  "Yes."

  "What do we do?"

  "I'm more worried about what happened to Barnes. How many people in that crowd did he infect? How many people are they going to infect?"

  Zoe was silent for a moment, thinking. "Barnes was right. We have to call this in. We have to call the company."

  "Do you have a number to call for this type of situation?"

  "We use the one we're supposed to call when the job is done."

  Logan thought about it. Numbers like that only worked once. If captured, freelancers would have no information linking them to their employer. If anyone dialed a number and didn't say the right thing, they would be told they had the wrong number and the call would be terminated. If they called back a minute later, there would be no answer. Thirty minutes later, and the line would be disconnected. If they had time and money and luck, they might trace the call to an empty room that looked like someone had camped out there for a few days. The less fortunate might be met with a door wired to a ball of plastic explosive.

  Logan knew this from experience. He'd manned rooms like that before, early in his career.

  He stared at the number on the card and thought about what he would say.

  Then he dialed.

  A male voice answered on the third ring.

  "Hello?"

  Logan gave the pass phrase he'd memorized.

  "You're outside the timeframe for this call."

  "The timeframe has changed. Relay the call."

  The voice started to say something. Logan cut him off.

  "Do you know the first fucking thing about my job? Relay the fucking call."

  "Fuck you."

  There was a fifty-fifty chance. The guy would either hang up or he would transfer the call.

  There was a long moment of dead air and then Logan heard a four-digit code being entered. Then the line went silent. Then the phone rang twice and a different voice answered. Female. Flat. Cold.

  "You're outside your window. You're early."

  "I need to speak with someone who is fully briefed on this mission."

  "You have the asset?"

  "I just killed one of your other employees. A man named Barnes. I helped him set himself on fire, and then I shot him five times. He had been infected with a contagion I was hired to steal from a plane crash on an unpopulated Caribbean island, two weeks ago. He was bleeding from his eyes, nose, and ass. He was set loose inside a crowded park. Before I was able to immolate and execute him, he was in direct physical contact with multiple people. His blood got on them. His shit got on them. Is any of this sinking in? Does any of this mean fucking anything to you?"

  The voice was silent. Then, it said, "Please hold."

  There was a click. Muzak started playing.

  "Are you on hold?" Zoe asked.

  He looked at her and nodded.

  "They have hold music?"

  "Yes."

  Several long minutes passed. Logan began to regret making the call. The city was going to turn
into a war zone once the first people started showing symptoms. He and Zoe should get out now, before they were trapped inside the quarantine, before the contagion began to burn through the city's population. They should—

  The muzak cut off.

  "Hello?" Logan said.

  "Hello, Logan." The words were warbled and distorted, like they were coming from a radio at the bottom of the ocean. The person on the other end of the line was speaking through a voice scrambler. If it was only one person. He could have been speaking to a room full of people, disguising their voice as one.

  "Who am I speaking to?"

  "Someone familiar with the work you've done for us. Explain your current situation."

  Logan recounted the events in the park, what Barnes had told him, how Barnes had died. Then he recounted the getaway, the crash and ambush, the short but loud battle that had ensued afterward.

  "I'm watching the newsfeed now," the voice said. "Every news station in the city has a drone in the sky. The explosion—it looks like it was a truck. This is what you're referring to?"

  "Yes."

  A pause. "You're sure Barnes was infected with the same contagion?"

  "Yes." He repeated his conversation with Barnes.

  "You're sure it was the same people you encountered on the island?"

  "One of them was, yes."

  Another pause. "Proceed with the job as planned."

  The line went dead.

  Logan lowered the phone from his ear.

  "And?" Zoe said.

  "We need to break into Paradime tonight."

  ***

  The city was chaos. Police had blocked off a wide circle surrounding the park, and a wider circle surrounding the site of the ambush. Sirens blared in every direction. Cops dressed in riot gear herded vehicles and pedestrian traffic. News drones buzzed in the air above like giant insects.

  It took Logan and Zoe two hours to reach the apartment. Logan thought about the people in the park, the ones who had come into contact with Barnes's blood and vomit. They would be showing the first symptoms now. He wondered if the 911 call he'd made would make any difference.