James Knapp - Element Zero

I answered the phone, and static crackled in my ear.

“Hello?” I asked. The wind blew again and made my clothes snap.

“We were wrong,” a woman’s voice said. I could barely hear her over the wind and the static.

“What?”

“If any of this gets through,” she said, “you have to do it.”

“Do what?”

“We made a mistake. You have to be the one to—”

The line cut out.

“Hello?” The display on my phone said the call was disconnected.

“What mistake?” I wondered out loud. I had to be the one to do what?

I looked out over the wreckage again. Wind kicked up more sand and I saw more bones underneath. More than sixteen million people had lived there once.

We were wrong. What did that mean?

When I tried to call back, the phone wouldn’t work. It lost power and went dark.

“Come on …”

I shook it and was trying to get it to turn back on when I heard a growl in front of me and looked up. A dog was standing at the base of the blacktop slope. It was a big, black-and-white dog with blue eyes that stared up at me. One of its haunches was shaved, and there was a bite mark on the bare patch.

Standing next to the dog was a woman. She wore combat boots and an army-green T-shirt, and with her almost-shaved head, she looked like a guy. She had on black lipstick, and a spiderweb tattoo covered one side of her neck. A pair of dog tags hung around her neck, and I could just make out the name FLAX, CALLIOPE T.

My face flushed, getting hot as anger surged up from inside me. I knew that woman. I’d never forget that face as long as I lived. That was the bitch that went to Karen’s apartment that day, looking for me. Because of her, my best friend was dead.

“It’s a bitch, huh?” she asked. The dog let out a low growl, and when I flinched, she smiled to show a missing tooth in the front.

“What the hell do you want?” I asked. She knelt down and pet the dog on the side near the shaved patch. When she looked up at me, I could see there were black spots, like ink, spreading through the white parts of her eyes. It was like the carriers Penny and I had just seen at the Stillwell lab. The Huma carriers got them after they died and came back. She smiled again, and all of a sudden, I understood.

“You’re one of them,” I whispered.

Ai and the others knew she was still alive. They even knew she was important, important enough that they wouldn’t let me or anyone else kill her no matter how many times I asked. She was off-limits, one of the elements that would play a crucial role when the event either did or didn’t occur. They didn’t know she’d been injected, though. They didn’t know she was a carrier. That could be a game changer.

I leaned closer to get a better look. I couldn’t see inside her or anything, but somehow I knew. I was sure. How was it that no one had picked her up?

Nico.

I frowned. He knew; he had to. He knew, and he kept it quiet. He was immune to our influence, so he was one of the few people that could keep secrets from Ai. He’d done this.

The dog barked, making me jump.

“Good dog,” Calliope said. It bared its teeth and growled again. When it did, I saw its gums were bleeding. A string of rust-colored drool oozed between its fangs and blew in the wind.

My heart started to race, but instead of lunging, the dog turned and ran off. It kicked up sand as it headed toward the remains of the skyline. I let out a breath and looked back at the phone. It was still dark. I stowed it in my pocket. When I looked up, Calliope was gone too.

“Hello?” I called. No one answered.

Carefully, I stepped down the slope. Sand squished under my leather boots as I followed the dog tracks toward the broken wall of a building. The remains of a stairwell there led up to a chunk of what used to be the second floor. I climbed up and stood on the edge, then looked out over the wreckage for anything that seemed like it might be important.

If you stay calm, Ai had told me again and again, then you’ll know what you’re looking for when you see it. You’ll feel it.

Ai was, hands down, the strangest person I had ever met in my life. Never mind her stunted body with its baby hands and too-big head; half the time it was hard to understand what she was even talking about. Half the time she wouldn’t look at you when she talked to you, and she’d answer things you said like you’d just said something totally different. She spooked me at first, and sometimes, secretly, she frustrated me.

I realized, though, after a while that all of it was because she was like me, only worse. She had visions almost all the time, but she learned to stay at least semilucid during them. When you were with her, a lot of times there were others in the room that only she could see. Sometimes I think they were other versions of people who were already there. I don’t know how she kept it all straight. Honestly, I don’t know how she didn’t kill herself years ago. It was bad enough when it happened on and off. If I had to live in that nightmare full-time, I’d have gone off the deep end before I hit puberty.

She was strange, and she spent half her time floating in an isolation tank, and the other half running on custom-made psychoactive drugs. But she was, in a weird way, almost like a mother to me, which is something I hadn’t had in a long time. She taught me more in just a few years than I think I’d ever learned before in my whole life.

I looked out over the ruins and sighed, smelling gas fumes again. If Ai was right, then this place really did exist somewhere, just one version of the city in an endless string of them. The closer that one of them matched ours, the more it bled over for people like me to see. Visions like the wasteland bled over a lot. It meant that’s where we were headed.

“We made a mistake. You have to be the one to—”

Me. Element One. I was supposed to somehow help stop all this. But how?

In the distance, more bodies lay half-buried in the sand. The sun glinted off shiny, metallic bits that were scattered around. They were some kind of components that came from revivors. From the amount on the ground, there must have been thousands of them there at one point, but whatever happened, they were long gone, along with everyone else.

Up ahead, I could make out one building that was more intact than the rest. It must have been huge when it was still standing, because what was left looked like it could fill a city block. The wreckage drew my attention. It seemed to vibrate, almost like a tuning fork. I could actually sense a far-off, high-pitched wail. That spot was important.

That’s it. That’s where it starts, the thing that triggers all this destruction. When I looked at it, something almost pulled me forward. I brushed my hair out of my face and climbed back down the steps.

I hiked toward it while the sun beat down on my scalp and sand got in my boots. The air was so dry, it made my throat hurt. When I finally got close enough, I stepped into the shade of what was left of the building and rested. The base of the building was piled with rubble, and nearby a big metal trash bin lay on its side, scorched and warped. Crushed against the pitted concrete were the remains of a sign that might have been mounted on the side of the building at one point. Sockets for lights were arranged to form big letters, but it was too damaged to tell what it said. Giant metal brackets ran down one edge of the frame, twisted and snapped.

I stared at the sign and let it fill my line of sight like Ai had told me. I stared until it blurred in front of me and the light around me got brighter. Sometimes if you focused just right, you could see not just the possibility being presented in the vision, but all the ones before it too. The farther out you went, the farther ahead the timeline went so if you flipped through them going backwards …