Zero State Read online

  There were no spotlights along the airfield's fences or the hangers. The only light was a campfire burning outside one of the buildings.

  He walked over. He heard conversation as he approached.

  Four company men were seated in cheap lawn chairs, their rifles leaning within arm's reach.

  There were minor differences among the men, but they all shared the same basic look—short haircuts, unshaven faces, thickly-muscled bodies. He was at least ten years older than any of them, leaner and more scarred, but not all that different.

  They were drinking beer. In addition to the campfire, they had a charcoal grill.

  "Hey guys," Logan said.

  "It's the jumper," one of the company men said. He had thick forearms covered in tattoos, like comic book pages had been grafted onto his skin. His eyes were glassy. Half a dozen beer bottles were set in the dirt beside him.

  The rest of the men muttered approval.

  "Get him a chair."

  "Give him a beer."

  One of the men unfolded a chair and Logan took a seat. A beer was uncapped and handed to him.

  "Glad you're doing alright," said the one with the inked forearms. "I was one of the guys who brought you out of the boat. Things get dicey out there? They mostly don't tell us shit, but we saw what you brought back. Nasty piece of work."

  Logan asked, "What's on the grill?"

  "Steaks and chicken at the moment. We've got burgers in the fridge inside. More than enough to go around. Mostly everyone is gone. It's just us, you, and a half-dozen guys patrolling the fence. Skeleton crew."

  Logan drained his beer, and someone handed him another. The fire felt warm, dry heat cutting through the tropical humidity.

  One of the men was shuffling and reshuffling a deck of cards. Not a deck of playing cards, the kind used for poker or blackjack, but some kind of roleplaying game. Orcs and warriors instead of jacks and queens. Logan smiled. This was familiar. During his decade in the military, he had spent countless nights with guys like this.

  An alarm went off on someone's wristwatch. The guy with the inked forearms. He pushed a button to silence the alarm and said, "Time to flip the steaks."

  He lifted the cover off the grill and blood and brains sprayed across the cooked meat, sizzling on the coals, as the top half of his head disappeared.

  The man to Logan's right was the next target. Three bullets punched through the back of the lawn chair and out through the man's chest, killing him where he sat. There was no report, no sound of gunfire.

  Logan rolled out of his seat and onto the dirt as more bullets cut the air. He toppled the grill with a kick to its legs. The grill crashed, spilling coals and throwing up a plume of smoke, heat, and light.

  Logan didn't decide to do this so much as he realized why he did it—to distract, to ruin depth perception and night vision, to hopefully throw off the next shot the shooter had lined up. He realized this the same way he realized he'd grabbed a rifle as he bolted for the shadows of the nearest building.

  Someone—the guy with the deck of cards, which were now scattered everywhere—returned fire. Silenced gunfire answered back.

  The exchange went back and forth. Logan kept moving. He thought about what he'd faced earlier that day and what would happen if there were a dozen of those things converging on the airfield right now.

  He checked the weapon he'd grabbed, the assault rifle that had been leaning on the chair to his right. It had belonged to the guy with the tattoos. Logan was familiar with the make of the weapon, he'd used one before. He checked the chamber, the magazine, the safety.

  More gunfire. Further away because he'd moved further away. He felt guilty about leaving the two company men behind but ignored the feeling, knowing it was nothing more than the echoes of military training that had instilled the idea of fighting as a team, fighting for the man next to you. The kind of thinking that you had to abandon when you became a freelancer.

  He headed toward the barracks, the area of the airfield where he'd spent the most time, the area he knew the best. This familiarity might give him a slight advantage. Or less of a disadvantage.

  His phone vibrated inside his back pocket. Zoe. He slid a foam bud from the phone's case and slipped it into his ear, then slid out a thin disc and placed it against his throat, where it adhered to the skin.

  He tapped a button to answer the call and slipped the phone back into his pocket.

  "Flat drop, Logan."

  "I know, I'm—"

  He heard an explosion through the earpiece, followed by static.

  "Zoe?" Panic rose in his chest. He fought the urge to scream her name into the phone.

  "Logan, I'm here."

  "What was that?"

  "My security system of last resort. An EMP to wipe my computers and a pound of Semtex to kill anyone inside."

  "Who?"

  "I have no idea. Logan, I need to drop this phone. You need to drop yours. Good luck."

  "Zoe..."

  He didn't know what he was about to say, but it didn't matter. Zoe ended the call. He pulled out the earpiece and threw it away in frustration, then did the same with the disc stuck on his throat.

  Three years of constant contact and that could have been their last conversation. Flat drop, Logan. She was walking away from everything, stepping into some new identity she'd set up for herself. Whether she survived or not, flat drop meant he would never hear from her again. The thought was anxiety inducing. He forced himself to focus on his own situation.

  There hadn't been a burst of gunfire in over a minute. The surviving company men were either killed or had gone to ground, trying to out-stalk the shooter. Logan saw the barracks up ahead, but decided against going inside—whoever was out there might have been watching the airfield for the past couple of days and might look for him there.

  The jungle at his back seemed like a good option. He could wander off into the trees, try to find civilization. Stay off the grid.

  He could wait it out till dawn, when sunlight would even the playing field.

  But the shooter could call in reinforcements. Could track him through the forest.

  And he didn't want a level playing field. He wanted to end this quickly, decisively, and violently.

  And he wanted to know who was trying to kill him, who was trying to kill Zoe.

  He moved toward the runway, staying close to the wall of one of the buildings, a small hanger. He moved very slow, cautious to the fact that the shooter probably had night vision, either goggles or a scope. Things Logan would have brought with him if this were his job.

  The glow of the campfire was off to his left. He could see the silhouette of the dead man sitting in the lawn chair and used this to estimate where the shots had come from. The other side of the runway. At least the first volley. The shooter would have moved to a new position once bullets were traveling in both directions.

  Where?

  It was wall-to-wall darkness out there. The glow of the fire only burned through a few meters of night and the starlight didn't reach down this far.

  This was the shooter's strongest advantage in the situation, the protection of the wide, empty darkness. Logan needed to create an opening.

  He retreated along the edge of the building, moving even more slowly than he had approached, imagining what the airfield looked like through night-vision goggles.

  It took him ten minutes to locate the item he was looking for. He found it inside one of the hangers, in the cockpit of a rusted-out twin-engine plane that probably hadn't been off the ground in decades: a small metal case, the plane's emergency kit. He felt along the edges, snapped open two rusted clasps with his thumbs. Inside, he found a flare gun.

  He loaded a flare—it resembled an oversized shotgun shell—and pocketed two more.

  Outside, he stood behind the building and aimed the flare gun into the sky, over what he estimated to be the center of the runway. The gun sounded like a toy as a flar
e was punched from the stubby barrel.

  Logan dashed from the spot where he'd fired, moving along the shadowed edge of the hanger.

  The flare lit up the runway as it rose. At its peak, it seemed to catch and stick on the sky, blinding the stars and casting a harsh glow on everything beneath it.

  And there, in the center of the runway, a lone figure scrambled for cover, like a vampire running from a sunrise.

  Logan opened fire, leading the target and aiming low. He saw the figure stumble as if tripped.

  The flare burned out as it dropped. Darkness fell like a curtain. Logan loaded and fired another flare, and ran for the cover of another shadow.

  The figure was facedown, motionless. Logan fired another burst from the assault rifle, stitching a line of wounds across the target's back, seeing a spray of dark liquid in the overexposed light.

  He changed position and waited fifteen minutes before going over to check the body. He used the small flashlight mounted under the barrel of the rifle.

  The shooter's legs and back were shredded. Stepping around the pool of blood, Logan used a boot to roll the body onto its back. The face was unfamiliar and offered no answers. He searched the dead man's pockets, and found no ID, no phone.

  ***

  The four company men by the campfire were all dead. So were the five guards that had been patrolling the fence. Logan took a few minutes to lay them down, shoulder to shoulder, and cover their remains.

  He found a rucksack and filled it with ammo mags, a change of clothes, and as many water bottles and energy bars as it would hold. He shouldered the heavy pack and walked to the south edge of the airfield. Just before he reached the jungle, he took out his phone. He was hoping to have a message from Zoe. But there was nothing. He smashed the device with the stock of the rifle. Then he turned and walked in the opposite direction, heading north.

  CHAPTER 5

  The sun separated from the sea like a yoke breaking from an egg, bright and yellow and runny.

  She bobbed along the surface of the water, far away from where the island had been but no longer was. The protective suit she wore had a built-in lifejacket that kept her afloat on the open ocean. To an observer, she would have looked like an astronaut who had crashed on reentry.

  With her squadmates dead, the vehicle gone, and obliteration approaching from above, she'd sprinted from the abandoned village. The edge of the island was three miles away. She'd reached it in under fifteen minutes.

  Though she could swim nearly as fast as she could run, she was still dangerously close to the landmass when the black bombs began to fall from the sky. Only a few meters away from her, coral and water were unmade into gray nothingness. She felt the ocean pull her toward the void as water shifted to fill the empty space left behind by miles of displaced matter, and then it was like going over a waterfall. For a moment she was airborne, tumbling amid the spray, and then the ocean crashed against her from all sides, a rising white churn from underneath and a relentless pounding from above.

  She pulled a cord to inflate the life jacket on her suit just before her arm was yanked away from her body and dislocated at the shoulder.

  When she broke the surface she had been underwater for over five minutes. Her lungs felt like they would explode with that first gasping breath. She was covered in a kind of gray goo, a mix of salt water and pulverized matter. She drifted, her body too exhausted and damaged to swim. She didn't think about death or survival. She knew she was alive and that this was important. The gray goo homogenized with the ocean water and she floated away into the endless blue. The sun went down and she slept.

  ***

  At sunrise, she was no longer the only object in the water. A boat drifted on the surface, perhaps a mile away. Strength had returned to her limbs, and she began to move, a sideways crawl that accommodated the arm that was still out of its socket.

  As she approached, she saw a man standing on the back of the boat, bare-chested and sipping from a mug, staring out over the flat blue nothing. His tanned, leathery skin was pulled taunt against a large stomach that hung over the waistband of his swim trunks.

  When he saw her swimming toward him, he spilled what was in the mug and threw a life preserver overboard. It smacked the water in front of her. She reached it and let him haul her toward his boat.

  There was a look of surprise when he saw her face, his expression a near-perfect imitation of the man who'd tried to kill her in the village the day before.

  She seized him by the forearm. His bones snapped as she threw him headfirst into the water. Her hand grabbed the nape of his neck, there was a pop, and his body turned to dead weight below the broken vertebrae. The water around his face bubbled as he sunk below the surface.

  On the aft deck of the boat, she gripped her dislocated arm by the bicep and forced the ball back into the socket. Then she removed her waterlogged suit, stripping down to a pair of gray skintight shorts and a matching sports bra.

  Below deck, a woman was asleep in a bed. One fist grabbed a handful of the woman's blonde hair and wrenched the head back, the other fist slammed into the woman's throat, smashing it flat against the spine. The blonde woman's bladder and bowels emptied as the body was dragged topside and flung overboard.

  ***

  She drank four bottles of water. She found canned food in a cupboard and ate it cold. She found a mirror and examined her injuries.

  Most of her hair and part of her left ear had been burned off. There were additional burns down her right side and along her back and legs, and cuts where shrapnel had punctured her suit.

  She found a first aid kit and cleaned her wounds. She removed the pieces of shrapnel that were still lodged in her flesh and used bandages to close the wounds that needed to be closed. She applied ointment and healing accelerant to her burns.

  Each task obeyed a programmed logic, each action based on the condition of her body or her immediate environment, and following a hierarchy of necessity. Threat elimination. Hydration. Shelter. Caloric intake. First aid.

  Once these basic needs were met, other parts of her mind began to wake up. She understood that she was alone. That her squadmates were dead. That Daniel was dead.

  She hadn't seen the shots that detonated the flamethrower. One second she was standing inside the village, surrounded by walls of crumbling concrete and rotting lumber. The next, she was facedown in the dirt, her body on fire.

  She'd rolled in the steaming mud, extinguishing the flames that clung to her hair and melted her suit against her flesh. Then she'd lifted her head, breathing air that was still thin in the wake of the explosion. Half her faceplate was shattered, the other half melted.

  She lifted her head and saw Daniel, ten steps away. The explosion had left her deaf, like her ears were packed with cotton. She didn't hear the gunshots. Daniel's chest erupted in a silent spray of blood and liquefied tissue. His body collapsed in a tangle of limbs held together by a shredded containment suit.

  The memory was a cold, hollow feeling in her core.

  She lay in the bed where she had killed the woman. She touched herself the way Daniel had touched her and thought of the ways she had touched him, trying to push away the knowledge that he was gone, that his body had been cut in half by a swarm of bullets and then erased by the bombs that had fallen not long after.

  Eventually, she slept.

  When she woke, these feelings passed, replaced by more programmed logic, more tasks that needed attention.

  She buzzed away her remaining tufts of unburnt hair with an electric trimmer she found in the bathroom. She showered and found clothes: a long skirt and a button-down blouse, and a scarf that she wrapped around her head to cover her blistered scalp and ruined ear.

  Dressed, she made her way to the boat's steering and navigation. Her fingers tapped a touchscreen and her location was displayed on a map. She chose a direction and a destination, an island to the southeast.

  By the time she arrived, her
wounds were mostly healed.

  ***

  The air tasted of fuel, salted humidity, and several kinds of smoke—charring meat, tobacco, cannabis. Weak yellow light glowed from pane-less windows covered by mosquito screens and from garlands of cheap lamps strung along the sides of buildings. The town was a bigger, still-living version of the village on the island. Its larger buildings were made from cement blocks and poured concrete. The smaller ones were made of wood that had swollen with years of moisture and were topped with metal roofs.

  The bag slung across her shoulder held all the money she had found on the boat, along with canned food and water bottles and a shotgun, the only firearm she'd found onboard. It had been unwieldy to conceal, and she'd sawed down the barrel and the stock.

  The thin cotton blouse clung to her damp skin. She would have removed the headscarf but her ear hadn't fully regrown, and it was the kind of mangled thing that would cause people to look at her twice. And she stood out enough already. She was one of the only light-skinned people on the street, and the only one not in some chemically-induced half-consciousness or in a state of undress. Eyes, dim and red from alcohol and cannabis, followed her from the small crowds as she passed.

  Finally she found what she was looking for: a red neon sign, showing the universal symbol for an internet connection.

  The building used to be a casino or a market, but the card tables or stalls had been removed long ago, replaced with long tables arranged in narrow rows, the space between each crowded with chairs set back to back. Computers covered every inch of table space. The machines were old, castoffs from companies or schools that had gone out of business or found the budget for something new. Wires and cables snaked across the floor in every direction. The air in the room was cold and stank of coolant, unwashed bodies, and smoke.