James Knapp - Element Zero

If she is still alive, tell my wife I’m sorry—about Panya and everything else. Tell her that no matter what she hears in the days to come, I swear I didn’t know.

Included were some images that didn’t mean much at first glance. There were rows of photos, close-up shots of dog bites. There were also rows of X-rays, each panel showing the progress of what looked like revivor nodes growing in the skulls of different dogs. There was a satellite map as well, with The Eye and the nuclear deterrent shield called out. Another map had locations circled and connected with lines, including the Stillwell base, Black Rock train yard, Palos Verdes, and Heinlein Industries.

The last image, though, stopped me cold. I stared at it in the HUD, realization slowly sinking in.

Alice, come in.

Hsieh here.

The image was a satellite photo of the city that included a section of the coast. The image was dotted with tiny red points, and as I watched, more began to appear. As the dots began to bleed together to form clusters, a timer counted off the seconds, minutes, and hours in a fast time-lapse. As days ticked by, the red clusters began to slowly cover the map, then leak out over the bridges, out of the city. At the base of the map were two words:

Alice, I know why Fawkes went back to Heinlein.

What we found at the train yard suddenly made sense. Fawkes didn’t care about reanimating animals, and he wasn’t testing the new code on them either, not directly.

We already know that, Alice said.

We were wrong, I said. Dissemination, self-replication …the simulation wasn’t charting the spread of revivors through the city, it was charting the spread of a disease. Fawkes didn’t just switch off the ghrelin inhibitors of the people he’d converted, he’d changed them far more fundamentally than that.

No matter what else happens, Alice, we can’t allow Heinlein’s transmitter to be damaged or destroyed.

It’s how he’s controlling the satellites, Nico. It’s how he’s controlling revivors across such a wide radius.

I know, but it’s also the only way to introduce any change to their existing systems. It might be the only way to undo what Fawkes has done.

And what is that, Agent? What is it? What did you find?

I think Fawkes knows he can’t hold Heinlein forever. He wants to spread the Huma variant to the rest of the city before that happens.

How? I looked over at Deatherage as that bitter taste filled my mouth again. His body was paralyzed but his eyes pleaded as he continued to repeat his message:

They bite.

They bite.

They bite.

When I came to, I was sitting on a hard, uncomfortable chair. The room was quiet, and I could hear the soft buzz of an electric light over my head.

I took a deep breath and opened my eyes. I was sitting on a folding metal chair in front of a table near one end of a small, concrete room whose walls were painted green. A single light flickered overhead, throwing shadows in the dark.

“This place,” I whispered. A heavy metal door that led out of the room was open, and the doorway was dark. From outside, I heard footsteps echo, then disappear. My head hurt and my throat hurt. Every time my heart beat, pain went up the back of my neck.

For a long time, the Green Room was just another nightmare place I ended up in when I blacked out, but now I knew it existed, or would exist, and that I was one of only a few people to ever see it, which meant I was one of the few people who might be around to see it. It was a vision from inside the void, something from the aftermath of the event. I hadn’t seen it in a long time.

I looked at the tabletop and thought it wasn’t the same one as last time, but I wasn’t sure. It was worn, with laminate peeled up in one corner. I thought maybe it was a different shape. Certain things were always the same, like the green paint and the basic layout of the room, but sometimes the details changed. Not enough people had seen it to be sure. No one knew what the room was for.

“It’s almost time,” a voice said.

I turned around and saw the dead woman, the one with the short blond hair and the nice cheekbones, standing next to a silver metal panel that was fixed to the wall. Her skin looked thinner than the last time I’d seen her, with more of those black veins underneath. She stared at me from near the switchbox, her eyes glowing in the dark like moonlight.

“I know who you are,” I said. “Your name is Faye Dasalia.”

She was the one Nico used to be in love with. The one he was still in love with. She tried to kill me once, but instead I almost killed her—almost.

“We will meet one last time,” she said.

“When?”

She reached over to the electrical box and threw the switch. A spark flashed with a loud bang and fell down onto the floor, where it sputtered out. Two of the lights at the end of the room slowly got a little brighter, while the one in the middle stayed out. Another spark spit from the socket there.

As the lights came up, I saw two figures had appeared, one standing under each of them.

The first one was Nico, and when I saw him, I put one hand over my mouth. A few years back he’d ditched me and never tried to contact me again, so I had mixed feelings about him, but even so, he looked horrible. He was wearing slacks and a sleeveless undershirt, and the scar that covered his neck and chest ended on his left side at a neat seam where his whole shoulder and arm had turned pale and gray. Black veins stood out over the bicep and down the forearm. There were big, dark bruises on the right side of his body, especially his face. The eyelid that drooped showed only white underneath. He looked half-dead.

“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!”