James Knapp - Element Zero

“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.

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—”