Element Zero

never happen in time. If the wind changed direction, most of the people there were going to be caught in it.

Pain pulsed in my head and I felt my jaw clench, the teeth grinding together. I needed to get back to headquarters to get checked out, but there was no place left to go back to. Even if there had been, there wasn’t time.

I pushed open the door. The lobby inside had glass scattered across the floor and I saw shell casings littered in with the debris. Some of the overhead lights were out, and some flickered where the ceiling had taken a stream of gunfire. A handful of tenants sat along one wall, watched by a pair of soldiers.

I drew my weapon and headed down a stairwell with concrete walls. The door clanged shut behind me as I reached the landing and entered the hallway. Following the unit numbers, I turned right, then down a long hallway where two soldiers waited. The younger one’s name patch read JIN. The other read ANDERS. When they saw me, they waved me over.

At the door, I switched to the backscatter filter and peered through. I didn’t see anyone on the other side. The scanner LED was green; the door was unlocked.

“There’s three inside,” Jin said. “We got them on camera.”

He angled the screen so I could see. From floor level, I saw a crumpled figure, and a woman’s face dotted with blood.

“That’s your guy’s mistress, Panya Garg,” the other officer said. “She’s confirmed dead. No word yet on whether your guy is in there or not, but we’re not picking up any vitals.”

“Power’s cut,” Anders said. “But we’ve got electrical activity and some light, so they’ve got some kind of backup.”

On the camera I saw a flicker—a flashlight beam, maybe. I heard movement from somewhere on the other side of the door.

“I’m going inside,” I said.

They nodded. I pushed open the door, and they took position behind me.

The front entrance opened into a short hallway, and up ahead I could see what looked like the living area. Heavy footsteps moved in one of the rooms nearby. I scanned through the walls on either side of the hall and didn’t see anyone.

I approached the woman’s body. She was dressed to go out, and there was a suitcase next to the front door. Blood had pooled behind the body from a wound in her back that probably came from a revivor’s bayonet. It was the wrong day to be associated with Harold Deatherage.

The living room was small and crowded with old, mismatched furniture. A set of dirty boot tracks crossed the matted carpet, away from the body and through a doorway on the far end of the room. A short connecting hallway extended from there. A flashlight swept through the room on the other side.

I approached, and the soldiers followed. The doorjamb was splintered where the door had been forced, and through the doorway I could see three male figures; two were standing and one was seated. None registered any body heat.

I’ve got three revivors here.

The room had been converted into some kind of makeshift work area. Two wall racks bordered a workstation, both stacked with equipment that looked out of place in such a run-down unit. Deatherage had been doing more here than just cheating on his wife.

The air inside was hazy, and I smelled smoke. I watched for a minute as one of the revivors rooted through a desk drawer, and the other pushed a collection of data disks from a shelf mounted behind the workstation so that they scattered onto the floor. It moved off to one side, out of my line of sight.

They’re looking for something.

The third revivor was seated in a chair in front of the workbench. The monitor glowed softly, silhouetting its face.

The equipment was still running on backup power, but the computer screens were blank. Threads of smoke rose from several chassis mounted in the racks. I zoomed in and pulled any names and model numbers I could read, then handed them off to a data miner to see what it could find.

The revivor in the chair shifted, and I heard a low scrape against the floor as the workstation desk moved. It had one wrist tied to the desk frame with a plastic zip tie. Blood leaked from a gash where it had dug through the skin, but the blood was red; human. A carrier, maybe.

The first revivor gave up on the drawers and looked around the room. After a minute, something sloshed, and the second came back into view, carrying a plastic gas can. It approached the seated revivor, and I smelled fumes as it poured a stream of gasoline down on top of its head. As the liquid splashed down over the desk and floor, I spotted an unlit road flare clenched in the revivor’s other hand.

I stepped inside, Jin and Anders moving in behind me. The revivors turned as I fired at the one with the can and caught it in the forehead. Its head pitched back and the can thudded to the floor as Jin fired at the second. The first round tore through its neck, and the second was a clean headshot. It fell back against the bookshelf and crashed to the floor. The second body staggered and left a streak of blood down the wall before it slumped down against the computer table. The road flare rolled behind a chair.

“Hold your fire!” I said.

The third revivor looked up from where it sat, hair plastered to its head. There were black blotches in the whites of its eyes. The first two were dressed in old, dirty clothes, but this one had on a buttoned shirt and a tie. Jin had his gun pointed at the revivor’s head, his finger on the trigger.

“Just wait,” I said.

I moved closer to the third revivor and scanned its face. The computer pulled up a match.

“It’s him,” I said. “This is Deatherage. Stand down.”

I lowered my gun and removed a penlight from my jacket pocket. I shined it in one of the revivor’s eyes. The black hemorrhages branched through the whites.

Alice, I’ve located Harold Deatherage.

Is he alive?

No. He’s been reanimated. It looks like a Huma case. I found some kind of work area here, but it looks like most of it has been destroyed.

The chair creaked under Deatherage’s body as he strained against the plastic tie.

“Mr. Deatherage?” I said. He looked up at me, but didn’t respond. “Mr. Deatherage, can you understand me?”

I scanned his head and saw a dark blotch inside the brain pan. Revivors relied on existing brain pathways. The kill switch had caused some damage in there.

I looked around the room. The computer equipment was all dark and surrounded by smoke. Cables and wires trailed across the floor.

An icon flashed in my periphery as the data miner came back with its first round of results. Information began to scroll by in front of me. The model numbers were getting hits on some very specialized equipment used to develop and test nanotech code. A high-security clearance and a federal permit were required to obtain half the technology on the list.

Whatever he was working on here, it was something major, I told Alice. The electronics in here are worth millions.

Did he get it through Heinlein?

You need permits for this stuff; they’d never have signed off on it. This was something he didn’t want them knowing about, or he’d have done it there.

I looked around the room, waving smoke and gas fumes away from my face. The revivors had been sent by Fawkes to destroy evidence, so he knew a place like this existed. Deatherage’s main residence was hit first, though, which suggested he hadn’t known exactly where it was. Whatever they were doing, the others, Chen and Shaddrah, had to be in on it, but they hadn’t known the location either, or hadn’t told Fawkes.

Their work was tied to Chen’s, then. Was there more to it than just safeguarding against the shutdown virus?

Wachalowski, a tech team is on its way, but we’re working against the clock here, Alice said. Wind patterns could put fallout over that area in an hour; get what you can and get out of there.