James Knapp - Element Zero

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.