Authors: James Knapp
Calliope Flax—Pyt-Yahk District, Bullrich Heights
Initialize node 23948. Inception time 21720202091103.
Current version: 010000064013C.
Current instruction set(s) pending.
Outstanding message. Urgent. Please respond.
The words flickered in the dark when I came to. The ground was hard and cold under me, and I smelled blood. My dead hand tingled. It wasn’t supposed to do that anymore.
Urgent. Please respond.
I opened my eyes. I was facing a concrete wall with a bloodstain on it. There was a big splatter on the floor under that, with a broken tooth in it. Yavlinski was gone.
Urgent. Please—
I pulled up the message. It was from Singh.
Fawkes pulled the trigger. Call in.
I sent a confirmation back, then tried to get Wachalowski on the JZI, but there was some kind of hold on his line.
Great.
My muscles were stiff, but I could move. Nothing felt broken when I sat up. My brass knuckles were on the floor a few feet away. I grabbed them and stuffed them in my jacket pocket with the other set.
My hand still had pins and needles. I flexed the gray fingers and they worked, but they were stiff and slow. The static in my head had turned to a steady whine.
If my clock was right, I’d been down over an hour. I checked my pockets, and the bag of Zombie was still there. The brass knuckles, the gun . . . it was all still there. The room was empty.
I got up and limped through the door, back the way I’d come in. My bike was still there, the alarm panel red. Someone tried to heist it but couldn’t get it started. They must have left in a hurry.
I walked it back toward the metal door that led outside. When I pushed it open I saw light but no people. The lot was empty. Wind blew snow across the blacktop, and a cardboard cup with blood spatter on it rolled past.
Wachalowski, pick up.
I ran diags and they came up clean, mostly. My body checked out okay, but my head hurt like a bitch. The ringing in my ears wouldn’t let up.
I looked around. Cinders glowed in the metal drums, but the people were all gone. I made my way over to one of the tarps they’d set up and pulled open the flap. Someone’s shit was in there, but he was long gone. I let the tarp go and the wind blew it shut. I listened, but didn’t hear any voices—just wind and the flap of plastic.
I straddled the bike and kick-started it. The engine turned over, and I headed back the way I’d come in. I didn’t pass anyone in the alleys. When I got to the main road, it was full of cars, but they all just sat there. None of them moved.
Nico, pick up, goddamn it.
Up ahead, a store window had been smashed, and the sidewalk was covered in broken glass. In the street to my left, a car’s doors hung open and the windshield was caved in. Shell casings lay on the sidewalk next to it, and the snowbank was stained red.
I looked down the street. A long strip of bloody cloth blew in the wind, snagged on a car antenna. A lot of car doors were open. I saw broken glass and trash where people had dropped their shit and run. There were footprints in the snow, between cars and up and down the sidewalks. A few car lengths down, a black armored truck had jumped the curb and crashed into the side of a building. Way down the street, a trail of smoke rose from somewhere I couldn’t see. In the street, between the cars, a few guys stood with their backs to me. They didn’t move as the wind whipped through their coats.
“Hey!” I called. They didn’t answer. Down the street I saw a few more. None of them moved.
Flax, this is Singh. You copy?
I copy.
Shit. I was starting to think you were dead.
What the hell happened?
Fawkes happened. He activated the carriers an hour ago. Where are you?
Still in the Pit.
That’s a hot zone. You want to get out of there right away.
No shit.
That area was hit hard. There are a lot of revivors still in there.
How many we looking at?
No numbers yet, but thousands. Can you get back to base?
The streets were blocked. Back the other way, I could barely make out the flash of blues and reds on the other side of an old, rusted bridge.
I’ll manage.
Good. You okay?
I’m fine.
“Hey, you!” I called to the guys in the street. They still didn’t move.
Wait,
I told Singh.
I might have some survivors.
Be careful.
I took the bike closer, in between the abandoned cars. I pulled up next to the three men.
“Hey, what are you, fucking deaf?” I asked, but by then I could see.
Shit.
The three guys had blood down the front of their shirts and pants. It was smeared around their mouths and beaded up on the ends of their fingers. Black spots bled through the whites of their eyes. They were Huma carriers, revivors, but the signal I usually picked up from them wasn’t there.
I looked down the street and saw more of them. Some leaned into cars; others were down on the ground. None of them moved.
Singh, I’ve got hostiles down here—
Cal, just get out of there.
No, listen. Something’s up. They’re not moving.
What are they doing?
Nothing. They’re just standing there. Hold on.
I scanned the closest of the three and picked up a lot of wireless traffic. It was the same for the rest.
They’re all getting some kind of major data dump,
I said.
What kind of data dump?
Hold on.
The eyes of the closest one were moving around, just barely. As I watched my hand twitched, and a string of garbage code rolled past one corner of my eye. I’d seen this all before.
I know what it is,
I told Singh.
You want to share?
That steady screech in the back of my head was because code was coming in. The blood in my hand was picking up the change too; that’s why it was tingling again. I looked up and down the street at the frozen bodies. They were all stuck in standby; Heinlein was upgrading them.
Is Heinlein pushing something down from central?
I asked.
Pushing what?
I don’t know. But the jacks used to do this in the field when a control-module update came down from the satellite.
The shutdown virus is based on the prototype, Cal. Heinlein wouldn’t go messing with that even if they could.
I’m telling you—someone’s sending something down because I’m getting it too—I can feel it.
I’ll look into it. You just get the hell out of there.
I watched them as the wind blew over them. None of them blinked while they were blasted with snow. The closest one’s eyes just kept up that slight jitter as the bloodstained shirt flapped around his bony, scabby body.
Roger that.
I took the bike past them and back to the sidewalk. There was more blood on the snow just ahead. A hand, short a little finger, poked out from under a car. There was a big bite mark in the meat of the thumb.
Nico was still offline. I hated talking to that asshole Van Offo, but he was my next-best bet. I tried his line, and he picked up.
Van Offo here.
It’s Flax.
Miss Flax. I was going to contact you.
I didn’t like the sound of that. I hated him, and he knew it. We had only one thing in common.
Where’s Nico?
He’s safe.
My fist tightened on the throttle. I wasn’t in the mood for that twerp’s bullshit runaround.
I didn’t ask if he was safe. I asked where he was.
He’s at the VA hospital—that’s what I was going to—
What happened?
Don’t worry. He’s alive.
I asked what the fuck happened to him.
I can’t give you any more details than that right now. I’m waiting to hear myself—
Where the hell were you during all this?
I was being shot. We were attacked while following a lead. He saved my life.
“Goddamn it!”
I kicked the car next to me and the taillight crunched under the heel of my boot.
I don’t care about your life, you motherfucker!
I know.
What hospital?
The streets are blocked. You won’t get there. Listen to me, Cal—
Fuck you.
I cut the connection.
Singh, I’m on my way but I need your help.
What do you need?
Work your mojo and find out what hospital Agent Nico Wachalowski is checked into. Find out his status. I want to know everything.
You got it, Cal.
I heard a voice shriek then, just over the idling engine. I looked around, but I didn’t see anyone. Wind blew snow across the street, and when it died down, I heard it again.
Thanks, Singh.
Whoever it was, they were close. I cut the engine and listened. It was hard to make anything out over the wind, but it was definitely a person.
“Hello?” I called. I looked around for any movement. “Hello? Is anyone here?”
A voice called back. I couldn’t make the words out, but it came from a girl.
I turned on a thermal filter and swept the area. Up ahead, in the middle of the cold, I saw a red-orange glow from the rear of the crashed armored truck.
I closed in and parked the bike ten feet away. The truck was unmarked and painted black. The front end had smashed through the brick face and the doors hung open. The rear plate was marked with the letters MIL.
Military vehicle.
I climbed off the bike and stepped closer. There was an emblem in the corner of the back window.
STILLWELL CORPS. It was one of ours.
I looked around the side and saw a revivor up front, standing frozen. It still had the driver by the wrists, blood smeared down the front of its face. The driver hung there by his arms, limp. His head lolled, blood running down over his face. His throat had been torn open, and the snow at their feet was red.
“Hello?” a voice called from the back of the truck. It was female, with some kind of accent. “Who’s there?”
I grabbed the handle to the back door and pulled, but it was locked.
“I’m not here to hurt you. Come on, open up!” I said. I thumped the door with my fist.
“Who are you?” the voice asked from inside. The accent was Russian, maybe. I looked through the bulletproof glass and caught a glimpse of what looked like a kid.
“I’m not dead. How’s that? Open the damn door.”
I heard the bolt let go, and pulled the door open. When I did, a rank smell blew out.
There was a girl back there, some street teen with a dirty face and ratty hair. She wasn’t alone.
The back of the truck was filled with bodies. They were all naked, and stacked along the sides in metal trays. The crash had thrown them so that arms and legs hung over the sides. Blue fingers and toes stuck out in the air. A couple had spilled out onto the floor, and one’s neck had been slashed on a sharp edge of the rack, and blood covered the floor. The girl knelt on the floor, her knees and hands red.
“Get me out of here,” she said. Her hands shook.
The whole back smelled like BO and decomp. The bodies were scrawny and scabby. They had to be thirds, people they’d pulled off the streets.
“Please . . . get me out of here . . . ”
All the way back, a window looked into the cab. The dash and the windshield were splashed with blood. On the seat was an electronic manifest, the screen spattered with red.
This is the retrieval team. They were here to pick up the carriers I’d tagged.
“What happened here?” I asked.
“I don’t know . . . everyone just . . . fell down. When they got back up . . . ”
“How’d you get in here?”
“It was already crashed. Men with guns got out.”
“What men?”
“Men in uniform. They tried to hold them, the dead ones, off, but there were too many. They took them.”
There were some footprints in the snow behind the truck. Some blood, and shell casings too. Except for the driver, though, there were no bodies.
“Took them where?”
She shook her head.
“Okay, I get it.” Her eyes were wide and she shook, still kneeling down in the blood. “Come on, get out of there.”
“Are they . . . ?”
“Those things in there with you could still get back up,” I said. “ Let’s go.”
She crawled out in a hurry and stuck near me.
“We’re getting out of here. What’s your name?”
“Vika.”
“You’ll be okay, Vika. Follow me.”
I took her back to the bike and she got on behind me. She put her arms around my waist and laced her fingers as I kick-started the engine.
“Hold on,” I said.
She squeezed tighter as the rear tire kicked up snow and I took us through the wreckage.
Zoe Ott—Main Drag
Back in the car, I saw Penny was rattled. She didn’t turn the music back on, and she didn’t call Ai, either. When I offered her the flask again, she grabbed it and took a big swallow. Then she drove to a bar.
Things got a little fuzzy after that. We didn’t talk about what the general said, or what we saw in the lab. We didn’t talk at all until maybe three drinks in, and even then we didn’t talk about anything serious. She didn’t flirt with the bartender or punch up any music. She just drank until she got to the point where she could laugh, but even then, her eyes looked worried.
At some point we stopped at a liquor store, because I spilled ouzo while trying to refill the flask, and Penny was drinking grappa straight out of a long-necked bottle while she sped down the street. Then she did turn the music back on, louder than before, like she was daring someone to pull her over and give us a hard time. By then I didn’t care. By then I was having fun, and I was glad to forget about the whole thing, at least for the night.
A cop on a motorcycle pulled up alongside us and matched our speed, the reflective faceplate of his helmet turned to look down at Penny. She took a long swallow from the bottle while he watched, then looked over at him as snow spit past the window. A few seconds later, he slowed down and peeled off.
The incoming-call light came up on the dash for the third time. The ID said it came from Stillwell Corps. Penny took one last swig from the bottle and stabbed the stereo button with her finger, cutting off the music. She answered the call, but they’d already disconnected.
“At least they got it working, right?” I offered.
Penny wasn’t biting. She shook her head. “The point of all this,” she said, “the only point of all this is to change that future. Literally nothing else matters.”
“I know.”
“An attack here and there, even by that many revivors, that all heals,” she said. “Not that big, empty nothing. We have to fix it.”
“I know.”
“If an infinite number of times everything dies, then there have to be an infinite number of times we get out of it. We have to figure this out. The turn’s coming up fast.”
“I know,” I said, not really understanding her completely.
“Do you?” she asked. “Do you have any idea what I’ve . . . ” She trailed off and took another drink from the bottle. I tipped back the flask and swallowed, past tasting it.
Like the map they used to chart it, I didn’t understand the future as well as some of us did. I knew what Ai believed, and that the visions weren’t so much looks into our actual future as they were bleed over from what she called alternate possibilities. I knew there were an infinite number of those possibilities, and that meant an infinite number were almost identical to ours. She thought we could see into them, and that their present was our future. They were all almost the same, and some pitched off the cliff into nothing, while others somehow avoided it.
At least that was what she thought. I don’t think she really knew. Not for sure. All I understood was that we wanted to be one of the ones that avoided it, whatever “it” was. The dark void that no one could see into meant we were on the wrong path. We were making mistakes, the same mistakes as the rest. Was the virus a dead end? Was that the mistake?
“Look at it this way,” I said. “Even if this plays out a million times and everyone is wiped out every time, we could still make it, right? We could be on the right path.”
“No one sees past the end of their own life. You know that.”
“But we don’t know that for sure. If what we see comes from somewhere else, couldn’t it just be that they all die, but we live?”
Penny opened her mouth to answer, then closed it again. She smiled, and for a second the worry left her eyes.
“You know, I think that might actually be deep,” she said.
“Hey, it could be true,” I said. “Admit it: you don’t really know.”
“Ai—”
“Ai is amazing, but come on, at the end of the day she’s just a person like you or me.”
“She’s not like you or me.”
“Penny, she isn’t a god or anything.”
“What is this insolence?” she asked. She was kind of kidding but kind of not.
“I’m just saying, she’s a person, she makes mistakes just like everybody else, and she doesn’t know everything.”
“Then you think she’s wrong about all this?”
“No, but—”
“Because if she’s wrong about this, then what the hell is it we’re trying to do here?”
“Fix it,” I said, getting annoyed. “Fix everything. That’s why we sneak around messing with everybody’s head, so we can fix everything, because we know everything, and everyone else is a bunch of stupid sheep—”
“Hey, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.”
“Yeah, well, just because you break a bunch of eggs doesn’t mean you get an omelet either.”
Her knuckles turned white on the steering wheel as she took another swig from the bottle. She was drinking more than usual, a lot more. If I hadn’t been so drunk myself, I’d have probably thought more about the fact that although she wasn’t any bigger than me, I’d seen Penny break men’s fingers. I’d seen her stab people and shoot people.
“I think you’re talking some dangerous talk,” she said.
“I think you’re drunk.”
“I think
you’re
drunk. I think you’re always drunk.”
“Screw you, Penny.” I growled. That was crossing a line. She wasn’t allowed to bring that up. “My drinking is not a problem.”
“Who do you think you’re talking to?” she snapped back. “Do you know how many times I’ve held your hair while you puked your guts out?”
There were actually tears in the corners of her eyes. That was something I’d never seen before, but I kept going.
“If you didn’t, they’d probably throw you out on the street,” I said. My face was hot and my hand had made a fist around the neck of the flask. “Just like they did with what’s-her-face—”
“She had a name!” Penny shouted. I didn’t think I’d ever heard her do that either. It actually stopped me cold for a second.
Before me and before Penny, Ai had pinned her hopes on some girl named Noelle Hyde as the one that was going to save the world. She didn’t work out so good, though, and so from what I could get, they had to kill her. Penny never talked about her. I never really thought much about if they knew each other or how much or for how long. I could tell by her face that this time it was me who crossed the line, and opened my mouth to maybe take it back or something, but it was too late.
“She had a name,” she said in a low voice. Every muscle in her body looked tense, like she wanted to break my neck or something.
She wouldn’t, though. Even if she tried, she wouldn’t be able to. I was no match for her physically, but if I had to, I could make her stop. If I wanted to, I could kill her.
“I know,” I said. I was breathing hard.
“Sometimes you keep talking when you really should just shut up,” she said.
Heat rushed up my neck, and I was just about to lay into her when the screen on the dash lit up again with an incoming call. This time it was from Ai.
Penny frowned, and we glared at each other, but when Ai called, you didn’t keep her waiting. Penny took a deep breath and answered.
Ai’s face appeared on the screen. Her eyelids were half-closed, like when she was concentrating, and her pupils were dilated. The prominent vein on the right side of her neck bulged, and every few seconds she twitched, just barely. She’d drugged herself like she sometimes did to enhance her abilities, and she looked like she was tripping hard this time.
“Where are you two? What is your exact location?” she asked. I closed my eyes for a second and when I concentrated, I could sense her. She was reaching out from the top of Alto Do Mundo to find us. Something was wrong.
“We left the Stillwell base,” Penny said. “We’re headed back now.”
“You left the Stillwell base nearly two hours ago,” Ai said, still staring into space. “Listen to me carefully: forget whatever you’re fighting about and—”
“She started it—” I said, and before the last word even got out of my mouth, I felt her reach into my head. She reached right through the anger and the drunkenness, and it was like a cold hand grabbed some primal part of me and made my body jump. Penny jumped in the seat next to me, her mouth stuck open.
“Don’t ever interrupt me,” Ai said. “Listen, and do what I say. You’re both in danger—”
Penny could still drive, but that didn’t change the fact that she was drunk and about as distracted as you could get. Her reflexes were good, but even she wasn’t fast enough to react when a man appeared in the headlights in front of us.
For a second, everything seemed to slow down so much that it almost stopped. I could see Ai’s big lips move as she kept talking, but all I could hear was a sort of dull, white noise as Penny cut the wheel and the car tilted on its suspension. Through the windshield, big flakes of snow drifted toward us, past the man in the street. He was dirty and bundled in filthy clothes that hung from his scrawny frame. His cheeks were hollow, and through his parted lips I could see teeth that were yellow and brown.
He looked up from the headlights that bore down on him. He looked right through the glass, right at me, and I could see black spots that branched through the whites of his wide eyes. They followed me as the car began to veer, and he just stood there like he was completely unaware of what was happening.
You’re in terrible danger,
I felt Ai’s presence say from where it sat in the back of my mind. She was calling us, calling us to come back home. She wanted us to come quickly, and I could feel the urgency building up inside me.
I didn’t think; I just reached out to the man in the street the same way Ai was reaching out to me. Certain minds were easier to control than others. If a mind was receptive enough, I could reach across the city and touch it, but from a few feet away I could push almost anyone. If I could snap him out of his trance and make him move, then he might have enough time.
The inside of the car got bright as my pupils opened all the way and the light from the dash and the headlights swallowed up almost everything except the man’s face and those strange, blotchy eyes. I concentrated on him, looking for the swirling colors of his consciousness and the bright electric bands underneath that controlled everything. I focused on him as hard as I could as we bore down on him, but instead of the aura that should have been there, I pushed through into nothing but a black void. It was like stepping off the side of a cliff into a huge, bottomless pit.
He’s dead,
I thought. Where his thoughts should have been, there was just emptiness. He was dead. It was a revivor.
The car struck him above the knees, and the expression on his face never changed as muscle rippled under the impact and the bones inside snapped. His body pitched forward over the hood as his feet left the ground and one old boot flew off, the rubber heel flapping. His face struck the windshield, and half-rotted teeth shattered against the bulletproof glass.
The car was sliding, and Penny cut the wheel again to compensate as the man’s body tumbled past, tearing the side mirror free as he spun like a rag doll in the air. Only a few feet away, two more men stood in the path of our car, and as I heard the shriek of tires cut through the white noise, I screamed.
Past the two men, I saw three more, and then the road curved past a building face to join the main drag, where every car was stopped. Penny cut the wheel again, but it was too late. The car went into a skid, and I felt the two bodies slam against the door. A head struck the window and sprayed blood, but as everything streaked by, I saw nothing but darkness around them. They had no lives to lose. They were all already dead.
They’re all revivors,
I said to Ai’s presence.
We hit the guardrail head-on. The street, the people, and all the cars whipped past the windshield as the rear wheels came up off the ground behind us, and then we were spinning, end over end through the air.