Element Zero (9 page)

Nico Wachalowski—VA Hospital

It was dark, and they were all around me. Their bellies were swollen, and the meat inside them had begun to rot. They’d dragged me underground into what used to be an old ammo dump, with decaying wooden walls and a ceiling that buckled under the soft earth above it. It was filled with bones and scraps of clothing. They’d used this place before.

Move. You have to move.

I’d relived that day more times than I could count. Every time I told myself to fight, and every time I didn’t until the first set of teeth bit down. No matter how many years passed, I couldn’t shake it; from the crooked teeth that punched through first, to the cold tongue that touched the mouthful of skin.

Pain bored into my shoulder as the thing’s wet, grimy hair tickled my neck and face. I heard the crunch and screamed. It raised its head with a chunk of my flesh clenched in its teeth, while another one crowded in and bit down where the blood was pumping out. They were eating me. They were eating me alive.

You have to move.

I pushed against them, but the space was too tight. They were too heavy. A knee bashed into my ear. I tried to twist my head, but they had me pinned. A thumb slipped into my eye socket and warmth gushed down my cheek, into my ear. With the eye I had left, I saw one of them pulling a big strip of skin away. In the dim light, I could make out the chest hairs sprouting from it.

I’m going to die,
I thought.

I vomited. One of them shoved the eye it had popped free into its mouth. Cold fingers groped at me, holding me. All I saw were sets of teeth stained red. I slipped into shock, and my mind disconnected. The cold feeling turned warm, and something deep inside began to soothe me. It whispered for me to let go.

You’ve done enough,
it said.
It’s okay. Don’t struggle. Just rest now . . .

I’d relived this memory again and again, but a part of that day was gone. They told me it might never come back. The next thing I could ever remember was Sean’s voice calling my name.

Then there, in a gap between the bodies that crowded around me, I saw a face I couldn’t remember ever seeing before.

It was the face of a young boy with black skin and tangled black hair. He was a native; scrawny, dirty, and out of uniform. He couldn’t have been older than twelve. His pulse throbbed at his neck and his eyes were wide.

I wasn’t alone down there.

Someone else had been down in that tunnel with me. In the light of the single, swaying overhead bulb, I saw the flash of metal as the boy positioned the tip of the blade behind the closest revivor’s neck. How could I have forgotten that?

He pushed the knife into the flesh and twisted it. From the way the revivor dropped, I knew he’d severed the primary nodes at the brain stem. He moved to the next one, the blade shaking and dripping black.

“Wachalowski! Wachalowski, where are you?”
A voice was shouting my name, muted, from somewhere up above. Sean’s voice. My squad had found me somehow.

I fought them then. My brain seized on the hope that I might still survive, and I fought.

They saw the boy. One of them swung, but he got out of the way as the bayonet tugged at his filthy shirt. With most of my strength gone, the others turned their backs to me and closed on their fresh victim.

He tried for the side tunnel he’d come through, but another one had come in behind him. He was cut off. He scrambled back until he hit one of the makeshift walls. One of the planks was broken, and behind it was a small space that someone had dug out to hide food or munitions.

The boy squeezed through just as they reached him. He retreated back into the cubby as grimy fingers clawed an inch from his face. I pushed myself up and got on my hands and knees next to the revivor that lay facedown in the dirt. I looked for something, anything to stop them with.

“Wachalowski!”

Hands grabbed me from behind and pulled. I tried to scream, but my throat burned with something salty and warm. I choked, and coughed up blood.

Sean, wait . . .

He pulled me away, away from the backs of the revivors crowded around the broken plank. He thought I was alone. I could just make out the boy’s face, terrified, as I was dragged from the room and back up the tunnel.

“Shit! Set up a perimeter!”
Sean yelled. I heard gunfire. The trees spun above me as Sean leaned over and shined a light in my one eye.

“Nico, stay with me,” he said. I tried to speak, but I was choking. Blood ran from my mouth.

Someone craned back my head, and I felt a tube slide down my throat. I could breathe again. I groped for Sean’s sleeve and pointed back down the tunnel.

Sean, wait,
I said over the JZI, but I never finished. He leaned in close and stared into my eye. I felt dizzy as his pupils got wider, and as he stared, I felt the pain and the fear ease back. My heart rate went down.

“Sleep, Nico,”
he said. I felt myself relax.
“It’s over now. Don’t try to talk. Just sleep.”

I wanted to tell him about the boy, but when I tried, I couldn’t. The words wouldn’t form. He didn’t know. None of them knew. He was six feet underneath them, and none of them knew. Why couldn’t I respond? What had Sean done to me?

He leaned in until his lips were at my ear.

“You will forget this,”
he said.
“I can’t do anything about the physical scars, but I can do this. I don’t know if I can take it away completely, but I’ll try. Just forget . . .”

Forget . . .

“ . . . forget what happened down there.”

The medevac came. They airlifted me out. One of the revivors, its teeth stained red, came back up and watched the chopper. The gunner turned on it and cut it down as we left the boy who’d saved me to his fate, forgotten.

I opened my eyes. I was in a hospital, lying in bed while a doctor stood off to one side, turned away from me to examine an X-ray. I could still picture the boy’s face in my mind.

Was it real? Had it been a dream, or had that old memory finally worked its way back to the surface?

Outstanding message: Flax, Calliope.

There were many other beds in the room, all occupied. Off to my left I saw a man with bandages wrapped around his face, and in the bed across from his, another man whose hand was wrapped. At least two of his fingers were missing. A woman on a gurney had been wheeled in and pushed along one wall to wait her turn. Her face was lacerated, and there was a tube down her throat.

Outstanding message: Flax, Calliope.

The words flashed near the corner of my eye. I opened it.

Where the fuck are you?

I smiled, and felt a knot on the right side of my face. The time stamp on the message said it was two hours old. She was alive, or at least she had been two hours ago. I shook off the dream and accessed the Bureau’s system to find out what was happening out there.

FBI alerts had piled up, and they were still coming in. All across the city, thousands of people had dropped dead, only to get back up minutes later.

“MacReady was right. . . . We should have listened. . . .”
I remembered. The basement caller, maybe Deatherage, had said that. Did he mean Bob MacReady, the same man I knew from Heinlein Industries?

I put in a call to him over the JZI, but he didn’t pick up. His communications node was still active, though. Wherever he was, he was alive. I left the channel open and set it aside in case he responded.

Out in the hallway, another patient was trucked by while a man shouted instructions. The hospital was overrun. According to the reports, the revivors had initially shown violent aggression, and riots broke out. Vehicles were abandoned in streets that became gridlocked. Stillwell soldiers had scrambled to assist local police, but before they could get a handle on the situation, the damage had been done.

I closed my eyes and cycled through incident reports. A citizen tip site had been set up, and flooded almost as soon as it came online. The FBI was scrambling to process the incoming information, but phones, data, and even JZI links were getting jammed. The media storm had networks nearly at a standstill.

It was a disaster. The carriers were slipping past perimeters set up after the initial assault, and disappearing. No one could say for sure where they were going or if there was any organization to their movements. The entire city was in a panic.

“He’s awake,” I heard a voice say. “Call the Agency and get them off our backs.”

“Doctor Pellwynne, process him, then get him out of here,” another voice said under his breath. “We’ve had two hacks into our system, looking for info on him, already. And anyway, we need the bed.”

Most media reports agreed that the transmission that triggered the carriers had come from Heinlein Industries, and the FBI’s information backed that up. There were unconfirmed reports of a security breach over at Heinlein as well. An automated emergency call had gone out, then been cancelled. No one at the campus had called out since, and all incoming calls were being bounced to the messaging system. Even JZI traffic was blocked.

“Agent Wachalowski?” a woman’s voice said. A cold hand gently touched my forehead. I opened my eyes and saw a pretty woman with skin the color of chocolate and black hair grouped in short twists. She looked down at me with tired eyes. As the report scrolled by between us, she smiled.

“Welcome back,” she said. “I’m Doctor Pellwynne.”

“Where am I?”

“The VA Hospital.”

I looked around. It was crowded, but the facility was first tier. It was a far cry from Mother of Mercy.

“Why here?”

“You needed some special work done,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

She approached the bed and sat down in a chair next to it. I saw an orange flicker inside her pupils.

“What do you remember about the attack?” she asked.

“You don’t have time for this,” I said, “and neither do I. I’m sorry.”

“We have time,” she said. “What do you remember?”

“They mobbed us,” I said. It was sketchy, but I remembered the room filling up with bodies. They were revivors. “How many of them are out there?”

She kept her face calm, but there was fear there, in her eyes.

“A lot. That’s all I know. I haven’t had time to think about it; we’re running at triple capacity. The hospital is secure—for now.”

“I need to get out of here.”

“I understand, but I need to speak with you first.”

“Why?” I didn’t understand.

“What do you remember about the attack?”

“I . . . ”

I remembered falling down into the water. I’d been hit in the head. I was disoriented and went down on my back. I fired as one of them lurched toward me.

The ax.
It had taken the ax from the wall.

Under the blanket, I’d closed my right fist and felt no pain. I stretched the fingers and made the fist again.

I looked down and saw a crease near the joint of my right shoulder where some kind of major work had been done. It was deep, and the skin there was thick and white. The scar that had been there since my last tour ended abruptly at that crease. I heard the tempo on my vitals monitor pick up.

“Before you look,” she said, “I want to prepare you—”

I pulled the blanket away and held up the arm in front of me. It was gray. Under the skin, I could see a network of black veins.

A cold feeling sank in the pit of my stomach. The sound of the heart monitor sounded faraway as it began to blip faster.

“Calm down,” Pellwynne said.

I flexed the fingers again. The muscles worked under the skin, but the hand wasn’t mine. The arm wasn’t mine. My tattoo from the service was gone. The scars, the calluses, even the body hair . . . they were gone. In their place was the smooth, gray limb of a dead man.

“Calm down,” she said again. She reached out and took the gray hand in hers, then placed her other over the back of it.

“Feel that,” she said. Her hands felt hot, like warm wax.

“They’re warm,” I said, but it wasn’t true. The fingers she had touched my forehead with were cold.

“You’ll get used to the temperature difference.”

“Who authorized this?” I asked. It was all I could think to say.

“It was at the Agency’s discretion,” she said.

“Who, specifically, authorized it?”

“I can’t tell you that. I’m sorry.”

She gave my hand one last squeeze and then let go of it.

“You will get used to it, Agent. I promise.”

I checked my JZI, and it had detected the new system. Information regarding the nerve interface and the paper-thin filter that separated the living tissue from the dead popped up and scrolled by. System vitals appeared and provided feedback on the arm’s condition, right down to the nanoblood version.

“Where is . . . ” I started to ask.

“By the time anyone got there, it was gone,” she said. The revivors had taken it.

“You’ll have full use of the new arm in two weeks, and it will be stronger than the original,” she said. “Until then, you’re running at near ninety percent. You can go back in the field, but be careful.”

I nodded. I’d seen replacements fitted in the field before. I’d told myself it was the next best thing. The reality of what had happened hadn’t hit home yet. It buzzed at the edge of my mind, like a fly at a window that couldn’t get in. I felt weirdly distant and calm.

“How long was I out?”

“You’ve been in surgery for four hours.”

Four hours. Fawkes had issued the code four hours ago, and we were still at a standstill. I had to get out of there.

Van Offo was offline. I tapped into the hospital records and checked the inpatient list; he’d been brought in to have the bullet removed from his neck, and was discharged two hours ago.

The man arrested at the site, Rafe Pena, hadn’t fared as well; he was still checked in. He’d suffered broken bones, internal injuries, and multiple bite wounds. He was listed as being in serious but stable condition.