Element zero, p.20
Element Zero, page 20
part #3 of Revivors Series
“You can help him,” the dead woman said, “but you can’t save him. He will destroy Fawkes forever.”
“I stop Fawkes.”
She didn’t say anything.
I got up out of the chair, and when I stood, my head pounded. It was all I could do to limp a few steps closer. I couldn’t stop shivering. I was almost sure I hated him for turning his back on me, but still, I could barely stand to see him like that.
“He will need you,” she said.
“I needed him,” I said. My voice was low and hoarse.
The dead woman didn’t answer. She pointed to the other figure, Flax, with her short hair and mean face. I felt my face get hot.
“She will bring about destruction,” the woman said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know. She’s a carrier. They’re going to use her as a back door to shut down the rest of them.”
She didn’t say either way. In the quiet, I could hear the low hum from her chest.
“She will take the last thing that is dear to you,” she said.
I clenched my fists, and felt tears well up in my eyes. My hand shook as I pointed one index finger up at her face.
“Enough!” I said. “I’ve had enough! She’s not taking anything else from me! Nothing else! They’re going to kill her, like they should have done a long time ago! The next time I see you, I’ll put you down for good. Do you hear me? If I so much as see you I’ll—”
Faye moved closer to me. I backed away until I bumped against the concrete wall, and her cold hands grabbed my arms. The cool, lifeless skin of her cheek pressed against the hot red of my own, and she spoke into my ear.
“He will call to you one last time,” she said. “If you accept him, you could still—”
“Screw you!” I said, and shoved her back. She staggered into the table and caught herself before she fell, as the chair clattered to the floor. “You’re not real!”
I put my hands over my eyes and pressed. My head throbbed so bad it made me feel sick.
“I’m tired of this! All of this! Get out of my head and just leave me alone!”
I took my hands away and opened my eyes. Dark spots swam in front of me. I was still in the Green Room and the chair was still knocked over, but the dead woman was gone. It got quiet, and I could hear myself panting. I wiped my mouth and looked around. No one else was there.
My heart rate started to slow down as I took a deep breath, like Ai had shown me. There was no reason to get upset. The visions weren’t something to be afraid of; they were glimpses into a possible future. They provided valuable information, and visions that came from the place even Ai couldn’t see into were the most valuable of all. I had to try to calm down and pay attention.
I picked the chair back up and put it in front of the table. I could be pulled back at any time, and with things going the way they were, I might never be back in this place. This might be my last chance to learn something, anything, that could help us. I smoothed down my hair and leaned back against the cool concrete wall, breathing slowly.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay . . . pull it together . . . ”
As I let my eyes lose focus, the hard lines at the corners of the room seemed to vibrate and hum, like a tuning fork. I forgot about what the dead woman had said and about what was happening back in the real world. I relaxed and let the light get brighter.
Show me . . .
Slowly, an outline, like a ghost, appeared in the room with me. Three more appeared around it, but I couldn’t tell who they were. As the color bled away, the outlines of the ghosts got sharper. There were three men. . . .
I brought them into focus. They weren’t like my visions of the dead woman or Karen or the others who tried to pass me information. . . . These people had really been here, or would be here, someday. Prior to then, it had been just a location, a staging ground for psionic feedback that I couldn’t control. Now I saw the room as it really was and its true occupants. Somewhere, in someone’s future, this was happening.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. The ghosts flickered, and I was afraid I might lose them.
Not now . . .
The phone buzzed again. I took it from my pocket but stayed focused on the figures who had appeared in the room. Two of the men were part of a group. They were older, and wore some kind of uniform I didn’t recognize, with their names stitched over the front pocket. The first man was a big, blocky guy named Gein. The second guy had very pale skin and an angular face. He had a scar under one eye. He looked different from when I’d last seen him, skinnier and more tired, but I recognized him right away; it was Hans Vaggot. The expression in the men’s eyes scared me.
The two of them half dragged a third man to the back of the Green Room and shoved him against the wall.
“Don’t move,” Gein said. The man looked scared. He stood against the wall under the middle light with his hands held up in front of him.
“I’m okay,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “I’m telling you I’m—”
“Shut up,” Vaggot said, and right then a woman walked through the door. My eyes widened. The phone buzzed again in my pocket, then stopped, but I barely noticed.
The woman wore the same uniform as the men, with leather jackboots and a pistol that hung from one bony hip. Her red hair was cut short, and I saw the scar from a bite wound on one side of her neck. Her beaky nose had been broken at some point.
It’s me, I thought. I checked the name patch to be sure. It read OTT.
I stared, stunned, as she crossed the room to the table and dropped an electronic pad down in front of her. She turned it on and started opening programs with a stylus. Her face looked mean, and unlike me, she was stone cold sober. Her eyes were hard, and focused.
“Hit the lights,” she said. Gein went over to the switchbox and threw the switch.
The room got dark except for the single light over the man against the wall. It shone dimly, and made shadows under his brow.
“Starting the scan,” she said.
A bright red line flickered across the far wall, near the ceiling. I followed it back and saw a small lens mounted in the cinder block that I’d never noticed before. A light fixed on one side began to flash.
The line began to move down the wall, tracing contours over the man’s face and neck before traveling down the rest of his body.
“I have a kid,” the man wheezed, as the laser moved down his body. Next to him, I could see divots where bullets had punched into the concrete. I hadn’t noticed them before.
“Shut up,” she said.
I looked at the screen and saw an outline of the man displayed there. Information was being called out, but the text was too small for me to read. I moved closer and leaned in; then the screen turned red and flashed.
“You’ve made a mistake,” the man said. He looked terrified. The red laser went out. The other me tapped the screen in front of her, and it went dark too.
“I said shut up,” she said. She turned to the uniformed men. “Cover him.”
Their guns came out and they aimed at the man from halfway down the room. He held up his hands feebly.
“What are we looking at?” Gein asked.
“It changed again,” she said. “Goddamn it, it changed again.” She crossed to the silver panel on the wall and swiveled it around to reveal a handset. She picked it up and spoke into it.
“We need a containment team down here,” she said.
“You’ve made a mistake,” the man whimpered. “You’ve made a terrible mistake. . . . ”
“If he says another word, shoot him,” the other me said. Gein and Vaggot glanced at each other nervously.
“You can’t stop this,” the man said. The other me slammed down the handset.
“Gein, shoot—”
The man seized up all of a sudden, and the cords in his neck stood out. It happened really fast; in a second, the back of his skull melted away under his skin. His neck shriveled and his eye sockets sank until his eyes bugged out of shadows.
“Shit!” Vaggot shouted. He looked ready to piss himself, but stood his ground. The two men stood there, weapons aimed, but not shooting for some reason.
The man’s deformed head bobbed at the end of his chicken neck while his clothes draped over a body that wasted away beneath them. He looked around the room like he didn’t recognize anything he saw.
“You can’t stop this,” he gurgled. It looked like his tongue had split down the middle.
“Hold him,” the other me said. “The team is on their—”
“You can’t stop this!” the man shrieked, and shambled forward, toward the two men. He held out his hands and they were like spindly claws.
The man stumbled, and when the soldiers moved out of the way, he just kept going like they weren’t even there. They followed him with their guns as he reached the table and shoved it aside. It flipped and crashed into the wall as he kicked past the folding chair and came right toward me, the real me. It was like he could see me. I backed away, into the wall, and dropped my phone. It clattered to the floor, and I saw the screen light up as a voice came over its speaker.
“If anyone is receiving this message, listen carefully,” a woman shouted through the phone, as the thing stopped a few feet from me.
“Wh-what?” I asked. The men in the room were taking aim, ready to fire. When I looked down at the phone, I could just make out the caller’s name on the LCD.
NOELLE HYDE
“If any of this gets through, then listen. The nukes may be your last chance. . . . ”
“What?”
“ . . . were wrong . . . the missiles don’t cause the event; they stop it,” she said, her voice rising in pitch. “You have to launch . . . ”
My heart skipped a beat and I felt the strength go out of my legs as the guns came up in slow motion behind the man. His mouth stretched open, drooling gray spit, and I saw his teeth were stained red around that horrible, divided tongue.
“ . . . the detonation overshadowed the rest,” the voice shouted from the phone. “It was all we could see, and we missed the cause behind it. . . . The lines that die out aren’t the ones that can’t stop the launch; they’re the ones that do stop it. . . . ”
Words appeared on the green concrete wall across from me, wet black lines creeping down from the hastily painted letters.
ELEVEN FROM ZERO
The deformed thing’s hands grabbed my shoulders, and as the first shot went off behind it, I screamed. The next thing I knew, all I could see was fire swirling all around, throwing hot orange embers up into the night sky like stars. The world was one fire. Everything was burning, and as dark figures lurched blindly through the flames, I heard her voice, low and hoarse, in the back of my head.
“They were wrong,” she whispered.
“It was us all along. . . . ”
My eyes snapped open and I sat up on the sofa where I’d been lying, knocking something over and sending a metal pan down onto the floor. Penny was there, kneeling next to me, and she reached out to grab me as I started to flail.
“Easy,” she said. “Take it easy.”
I looked around and saw two armed men and a man in a bloodstained white shirt standing nearby.
“He just stitched you up,” Penny said. “You’re okay. Take it easy.”
Something smelled funny. I looked past them and saw that the sofa I was on was arranged in a big lounge in the middle of a huge condo. Two other sofas and a big love seat all faced in toward a big, heavy wooden table with a thick surface of smoked glass. A bunch of different kinds of glasses, some still half-full, were sitting on the table. There were silver platters of fancy food lined up, half-eaten. Lobster tails and raw oysters on the half shell sat in a crystal serving dish, floating in melted ice. Caviar, pâtés, and leftover hors d’oeuvres were all still sitting out, and it smelled.
“Sorry,” one of the men said. “There hasn’t been time to clean it up.”
“We’re all set,” Penny said. “Thanks, guys.”
My head pounded and my mouth tasted sour. I waited until the nausea passed, then stood up while Penny hovered near me. The room spun a little as I wobbled over to a big serving table where a bunch of food was left out in chafing dishes and serving bowls. I saw ends of rare meat on carving blocks, the edges crusted. Stray flowers of sashimi had shriveled, and raw shrimp lay drowned in a glass bowl of wine. The smell of it all made my stomach turn, but I needed a drink. A bottle of cognac was sitting on the marble tabletop, and I picked it up. I grabbed an empty crystal shot glass from the stack next to it and filled it, my hands shaking so bad I sloshed half of it onto the floor. I gulped it down and poured another one.
“You look like you saw a ghost,” Penny said. “What happened?”
I shook my head. Through the cobwebs, I checked my phone to see if Noelle’s name was there, but it wasn’t. The LCD read WACHALOWSKI.
All at once, my throat burned and my eyes were filled with tears. I half laughed and half cried, spraying spit.
“Now he calls,” I sniffed. I wiped my eyes with my sleeve and took another long pull off the bottle.
“You probably shouldn’t—” the doctor said, but his voice dribbled off.
“We’re good,” Penny said again, staring at him. “Thanks. You can go.” She stepped closer, carefully. She wanted to touch me, I could tell, but she didn’t.
“Zoe, what did you see?”
“Nothing,” I said. I could barely form the word.
“That wasn’t nothing,” she said.
The men left the room, though I noticed the guards stayed outside the door. Penny followed me as I limped over to the wall of glass that looked out over the city below. Off in the distance, a big cloud had risen behind the buildings and begun to lean away from the rush of snow.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Fawkes dropped one of the nukes,” she said. “It might have triggered what you saw.”
“What?”
“Fawkes’s army surrounded the three towers: the CMC, TransTech, and here. Osterhagen ordered a Leichenesser charge dropped in the middle of the blockade outside to try to clear a path out.”
She held up a computer tablet so I could see the screen. A feed from somewhere outside looked out onto the front steps of Alto Do Mundo. From where the camera watched, I could see hundreds of people out there, surging shoulder to shoulder. They all had dirty hair and dirty faces. A lot of them bared bad teeth, and their clothes looked like they came from garbage bins. They were all facing up the huge marble stairs at the entrance to our building, staring with wide eyes that were stained black.
“That’s when Fawkes dropped the nuke,” she said. “It was a warning, I guess.”
“There’s so many of them,” I said. There was only one spot that was clear, right down the main steps where sets of clothes and shoes were strewn, deflated and empty. They flapped in the wind, and when it blew, it stirred traces of white smoke that lingered around the remains. It looked like hundreds had been wiped out, but hundreds more were taking their places even while I watched. “We’re in trouble, Zoe.”
“Something’s wrong,” I said, still staring. The cloud outside was huge. “How long was I out?”
“Not long,” Penny said. “They’ll have Flax soon if they don’t already. With any luck, we can stop him from dropping the rest.”
You have to do it. Make sure they launch . . .
My head was still spinning. I took my next swig straight from the bottle and swallowed three big mouthfuls before gasping in a breath.
“What’s the matter?” Penny asked.
“What if we’re wrong?” I said, looking down at the lights below. Off in the distance, I could see the flashing lights from one of the helicopters as it circled the building.
“Wrong about what?” Her expression changed then. It turned a little hard, and I thought I sensed suspicion coming from her.
“Nothing.”
“No, tell me.”
“Nothing,” I said. “Never mind.”
The bottle clinked against the rim of the glass as I poured myself another one and drank it. The hard look in Penny’s eyes softened again.
“Okay,” she said. “It’s okay.”
“Thanks, Penny.”
On shaky legs I stepped away from her, and turned the cell phone over in my hand as I watched that big, deadly cloud lean closer and closer to the shore. At the window, I looked out onto the city below.
“It was us all along. . . . ”
I reached out around me, sensing the others in the room. They had begun to focus on me as something unspoken was passed around between them.
I took one last drink, then returned Nico’s call. I held the phone to my ear, my breath fogging the window in front of me as it rang. After three rings, he picked up.
“Wachalowski,” he said. And in spite of myself, I began to cry.
“It’s me,” I said, soft enough so no one else would hear.
“Zoe,” he said. “Are you all right?”
“No.” I tried to keep the slur and the shaking out of my voice as I spoke. “I’m not supposed to be talking to you.”
“But you are.”
“She told me you’d call,” I said. I felt dizzy and had to put one hand on the window to steady myself. I leaned forward so that my forehead was on the cool glass, and I was staring down into the sea of lights below.
“Who told you?”
I wasn’t sure why, but somehow I knew what Noelle had said to me in the Green Room was true. I knew too that no one would listen to me at this point, no matter what I said. As important as I supposedly was, none of them would ever listen to me say that there was no way to get out of this and still stay on top. I knew all that, and I knew that Noelle was right too. She’d been right all along, right from the start. This whole thing was a big, cosmic joke. The city was going to burn. One way or the other, it was all going to burn.
