James Knapp - Element Zero

“What?”

“ …were wrong …the missiles don’t cause the event; they stop it,” she said, her voice rising in pitch. “You have to launch …”

My heart skipped a beat and I felt the strength go out of my legs as the guns came up in slow motion behind the man. His mouth stretched open, drooling gray spit, and I saw his teeth were stained red around that horrible, divided tongue.

“ …the detonation overshadowed the rest,” the voice shouted from the phone. “ It was all we could see, and we missed the cause behind it…. The lines that die out aren’t the ones that can’t stop the launch; they’re the ones that do stop it…. ”

Words appeared on the green concrete wall across from me, wet black lines creeping down from the hastily painted letters.

The deformed thing’s hands grabbed my shoulders, and as the first shot went off behind it, I screamed. The next thing I knew, all I could see was fire swirling all around, throwing hot orange embers up into the night sky like stars. The world was one fire. Everything was burning, and as dark figures lurched blindly through the flames, I heard her voice, low and hoarse, in the back of my head.

“They were wrong,” she whispered.

“It was us all along…. ”

My eyes snapped open and I sat up on the sofa where I’d been lying, knocking something over and sending a metal pan down onto the floor. Penny was there, kneeling next to me, and she reached out to grab me as I started to flail.

“Easy,” she said. “Take it easy.”

I looked around and saw two armed men and a man in a bloodstained white shirt standing nearby.

“He just stitched you up,” Penny said. “You’re okay. Take it easy.”

Something smelled funny. I looked past them and saw that the sofa I was on was arranged in a big lounge in the middle of a huge condo. Two other sofas and a big love seat all faced in toward a big, heavy wooden table with a thick surface of smoked glass. A bunch of different kinds of glasses, some still half-full, were sitting on the table. There were silver platters of fancy food lined up, half-eaten. Lobster tails and raw oysters on the half shell sat in a crystal serving dish, floating in melted ice. Caviar, pâtés, and leftover hors d’oeuvres were all still sitting out, and it smelled.

“Sorry,” one of the men said. “There hasn’t been time to clean it up.”

“We’re all set,” Penny said. “Thanks, guys.”

My head pounded and my mouth tasted sour. I waited until the nausea passed, then stood up while Penny hovered near me. The room spun a little as I wobbled over to a big serving table where a bunch of food was left out in chafing dishes and serving bowls. I saw ends of rare meat on carving blocks, the edges crusted. Stray flowers of sashimi had shriveled, and raw shrimp lay drowned in a glass bowl of wine. The smell of it all made my stomach turn, but I needed a drink. A bottle of cognac was sitting on the marble tabletop, and I picked it up. I grabbed an empty crystal shot glass from the stack next to it and filled it, my hands shaking so bad I sloshed half of it onto the floor. I gulped it down and poured another one.

“You look like you saw a ghost,” Penny said. “What happened?”

I shook my head. Through the cobwebs, I checked my phone to see if Noelle’s name was there, but it wasn’t. The LCD read WACHALOWSKI.

All at once, my throat burned and my eyes were filled with tears. I half laughed and half cried, spraying spit.

“Now he calls,” I sniffed. I wiped my eyes with my sleeve and took another long pull off the bottle.

“You probably shouldn’t—” the doctor said, but his voice dribbled off.

“We’re good,” Penny said again, staring at him. “Thanks. You can go.” She stepped closer, carefully. She wanted to touch me, I could tell, but she didn’t.

“Zoe, what did you see?”

“Nothing,” I said. I could barely form the word.

“That wasn’t nothing,” she said.

The men left the room, though I noticed the guards stayed outside the door. Penny followed me as I limped over to the wall of glass that looked out over the city below. Off in the distance, a big cloud had risen behind the buildings and begun to lean away from the rush of snow.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Fawkes dropped one of the nukes,” she said. “It might have triggered what you saw.”

“What?”

“Fawkes’s army surrounded the three towers: the CMC, TransTech, and here. Osterhagen ordered a Leichenesser charge dropped in the middle of the blockade outside to try to clear a path out.”

She held up a computer tablet so I could see the screen. A feed from somewhere outside looked out onto the front steps of Alto Do Mundo. From where the camera watched, I could see hundreds of people out there, surging shoulder to shoulder. They all had dirty hair and dirty faces. A lot of them bared bad teeth, and their clothes looked like they came from garbage bins. They were all facing up the huge marble stairs at the entrance to our building, staring with wide eyes that were stained black.

“That’s when Fawkes dropped the nuke,” she said. “It was a warning, I guess.”

“There’s so many of them,” I said. There was only one spot that was clear, right down the main steps where sets of clothes and shoes were strewn, deflated and empty. They flapped in the wind, and when it blew, it stirred traces of white smoke that lingered around the remains. It looked like hundreds had been wiped out, but hundreds more were taking their places even while I watched. “We’re in trouble, Zoe.”

“Something’s wrong,” I said, still staring. The cloud outside was huge. “How long was I out?”

“Not long,” Penny said. “They’ll have Flax soon if they don’t already. With any luck, we can stop him from dropping the rest.”

You have to do it. Make sure they launch …

My head was still spinning. I took my next swig straight from the bottle and swallowed three big mouthfuls before gasping in a breath.

“What’s the matter?” Penny asked.

“What if we’re wrong?” I said, looking down at the lights below. Off in the distance, I could see the flashing lights from one of the helicopters as it circled the building.

“Wrong about what?” Her expression changed then. It turned a little hard, and I thought I sensed suspicion coming from her.

“Nothing.”

“No, tell me.”

“Nothing,” I said. “Never mind.”

The bottle clinked against the rim of the glass as I poured myself another one and drank it. The hard look in Penny’s eyes softened again.

“Okay,” she said. “It’s okay.”

“Thanks, Penny.”

On shaky legs I stepped away from her, and turned the cell phone over in my hand as I watched that big, deadly cloud lean closer and closer to the shore. At the window, I looked out onto the city below.

“It was us all along…. ”

I reached out around me, sensing the others in the room. They had begun to focus on me as something unspoken was passed around between them.

I took one last drink, then returned Nico’s call. I held the phone to my ear, my breath fogging the window in front of me as it rang. After three rings, he picked up.

“Wachalowski,” he said. And in spite of myself, I began to cry.

“It’s me,” I said, soft enough so no one else would hear.

“Zoe,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“No.” I tried to keep the slur and the shaking out of my voice as I spoke. “I’m not supposed to be talking to you.”

“But you are.”

“She told me you’d call,” I said. I felt dizzy and had to put one hand on the window to steady myself. I leaned forward so that my forehead was on the cool glass, and I was staring down into the sea of lights below.