Element Zero

Understood.

“Mr. Deatherage?”

He lunged, and the desk jumped an inch as his arm was pulled taut. Jin and Anders’s guns came up, but neither fired. Deatherage bared his teeth and reached with his free hand to grab me.

“It’s okay,” I told the two men. “I’ve got him.”

I looked through the musculature of his neck and was able to make out the nodes that had formed around the spine. The communications node was active, and I connected.

There wasn’t much contained in the memory; Deatherage hadn’t been a revivor long. He’d switched over long after the original kill code was sent, so Fawkes must have had him on a separate trigger. A safeguard, maybe. Deatherage was supposed to be in on his plan, but when Fawkes realized he’d been betrayed, he used it to make sure he didn’t talk.

“Mr. Deatherage, can you understand me?” I asked. Spittle hung from his lip as he stared at me and strained against the plastic tie. With his free hand, he thumped his palm against his stomach twice.

“Why’d they restrain him?” Anders asked.

“I think he restrained himself,” I said.

“Why?”

“Maybe so he wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

They bite.

The words appeared in front of me, floating in front of Deatherage’s face. They’d come over my connection to his revivor node. He was trying to communicate.

What happened here? I asked him. His eyes rolled in their sockets. What did you do?

They bite.

What did Fawkes have you working on?

He didn’t answer. His brain was scrambled. He used his free hand to thump his belly again.

When I moved my scan away from the revivor nodes around his spine to look down at the hand, I caught a flash of something behind the muscle wall in his abdominal cavity. He was trying to tell me something.

“Hang on. I’ve got something here,” I said. I zoomed in and peered through the soft tissue. Inside his stomach, there was a small piece of plastic with electronics inside.

A data spike.

Deatherage lunged again suddenly, his cold fingers brushing my face before grabbing a fistful of my jacket. Without thinking, I drove my dead fist into the side of his face and his head snapped to one side. A gob of blood splashed the desktop next to him as I pulled back and grabbed his wrist, peeling his fingers away from my lapel.

Do it …

I bent his fingers back until I heard a series of dull pops, then twisted his arm around so his broken hand faced the floor. I drove the heel of my palm down onto his elbow, and the bone crunched. Anders took a quick step back.

“Woah!”

Deatherage’s arm bent the wrong way, but his face didn’t change. He didn’t feel it, but I didn’t care. The same urge that came over me at the hospital was back, stronger than before, and I fought to control it.

I kicked the chair out from under him, then shoved him face-first down onto the floor. As the chair toppled, the tie twisted his wrist and I heard it snap. Before he could move again, I drew my field knife and stuck the point between two vertebrae just under the revivor nodes. Careful not to damage the nodes themselves, I drove the blade through the spinal cord, and he went limp.

Calm down. My heart rate was spiking. Just calm down. The other two officers stood a few feet away, guns still drawn as I took a deep breath and let it out.

Do it …

“Wait outside,” I said. Anders backed out of the room as I jerked the knife free again.

I flipped Deatherage over, the tie cutting his wrist deeper until the fingers of his hand turned dark and fat. I pulled his shirt open to expose the pale skin underneath, and found the outline of the data spike under the surface. I pushed the knife in below his ribs and cut open his belly.

“Jesus,” I heard Jin mutter.

“Wait outside.”

I used the backscatter to help guide the knife as I cut through the stomach wall. When the opening was big enough, I pushed my fist through and felt around until I found the edge of the plastic. I grabbed it and pulled it free.

They bite.

“I get it.”

I wiped the spike as dry as I could on his shirt before guiding it into the bay of my cell phone. It was loaded with data, some kind of specs, maybe, for the code he’d worked on, but there was a text message included with it:

Fawkes lied. He wasn’t supposed to kill them all. What I did, I did for the good of all mankind. It was only supposed to wake them up. No one was supposed to die. That’s what I was told.

Ang was just supposed to provide protection for their network, but I found his secret location and now I know what he really worked on. His lab is at Black Rock Yard. He worked on dissemination. I don’t know where she worked, but I found out Dulari was one of the Huma payload specialists. She figured out how to make them self-replicate. This kind of research is illegal for a reason. This isn’t how it was supposed to be.

None of us knew what the other was doing, or I would never have done it. Alone, any one of these traits could be explained away, but together they could prove unbelievably dangerous. This cannot get out.

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:

PROJECTED SPREAD

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.