Element Zero

I’d used to carry that girl out of Juba.

The spooky chick followed my eyes and looked back at it.

“Yeah, sad story,” she said. “You could have washed the blood out anyway.”

“I don’t want to wash it.”

“Keeping it real, huh?” she said. “What’s the point? You didn’t save her; you just put off the inevitable.”

“I saved her life.”

“A single life doesn’t mean much.”

“Fuck you.”

The girl smirked. “Can’t argue with that,” she said. She yelled over her shoulder. “You guys ready for her?”

“Yes.”

It was a guy’s voice. It came from the wall behind the flag.

“What the hell?”

She stared at me and stepped closer. The dizziness got worse. I felt drunk.

“How about you follow me into the next room?” she asked. I felt myself nod.

“Sure.”

She stepped around the corner, across from the bathroom, and moved the flag out of the way. There was a door back there, behind it. I remembered I thought that was wrong. There was no door back there. I wouldn’t have put the flag up in front of a goddamned door. If I had an extra room, I’d use the damned thing.

The girl smirked again.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “There’s no door. This door isn’t here.”

There were a few padlocks on it, but they were all open. She turned the handle and pushed it open. When she did, it pushed a sheet of clear plastic out of the way in front of it.

“Inside,” she said. I felt myself nod again.

My feet moved like they were on their own. I walked up to the door and when I got close, I saw a bunch of guys in white coats in there.

“In.”

My feet moved again. I stepped through the slit in the plastic, into a room I’d never seen. It didn’t make sense. I’d moved in and set the whole place up. I’d have known if there was a room there….

The walls and floor were covered in clear plastic. There was a gurney in the middle with an IV rack next to it. There were three guys inside. They all wore white and had on face masks.

My eyes moved to a tray next to the gurney. There were scalpels lined up on it, and a needle. The spooky girl followed me in and walked up to the gurney. She patted it with one hand.

“Hop up,” she said. “Let’s get this party started.”

My eyes opened and I woke with a start. It was cold, and I was facedown on the hard ground. Off in the dark somewhere, a bottle skittered across concrete, then popped against a wall. My head throbbed.

Goddamn it …

I pushed myself up off the ground and saw a palmsized pool of blood around a squashed piece of gum. I wiped at my forehead and it came away red. My dead hand felt like it had pins and needles. At some point, someone put a coat over me. I let it hang off my shoulders.

1 message(s) outstanding.

The words floated over the stained concrete. I pulled the message and opened it. It was from Nico.

Cal, in case we don’t talk again, I want you to know I’m glad we met. Neither one of us is good at this kind of thing, but you mean a lot to me.

My head was still spinning, but a knot formed in my throat.

“You’re such a fucking sap,” I muttered. I kept reading.

I have your location, and I’m sending a metro car to pick you up. This is over, Cal. I don’t want you to get caught up in it. The car will take you to a platform across the river. I hope I’ll see you on the other side.

“Son of a bitch …”

Back on the platform, people were huddled up. The revivors were gone, but they’d drawn some blood. One guy lay on his back, alone and not moving. The rest licked their wounds. One woman had a bite mark on her face, and a fat man had a scarf wrapped around his bloody hand. It looked like he might have lost a finger.

I heaved myself back up on my feet and took a second to let the head rush pass.

“You okay?” The voice echoed in the dark, and I turned to see a gray-haired man in the shadows nearby.

“Yeah,” I said. Something banged down in the tunnel. The old man pointed toward the sound, and I saw a nasty bite on his hand.

“They went that way,” he said. I nodded.

“This your coat?”

“You looked like you could use it,” he said. I shrugged it off and handed it back.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. You with the military?”

“Kind of.”

I looked around and saw a couple bodies down next to the tracks. There were a few more on the platform where the concrete was splattered with blood. I didn’t see the kid.

“How long was I out?” I asked the old man.

“Not long. Few minutes.”

“The kid I was with,” I said. “Where’d she go?”

“She got dragged that way,” he said, pointing down the track. “I didn’t see. Things got pretty crazy.”

Down on the tracks a guy lay on his back, not breathing. I could see the black spots in his eyes, and blood was smeared around his mouth, which still hung open.

“This is fucked,” I said under my breath. Pain drilled into my head as I got back up on my feet. I didn’t get bitten, and I still had my gun, and my knife.

“Never seen ones like that before,” the old man said. I ran a check on my JZI and eased some painkiller into my bloodstream. A map of the tunnels was there, with the platform called out where the car would be waiting, and something else …orders for my squad—Singh, Ramirez, and the rest. I was still on the roster, it looked like. The ones that were left all got regrouped and sent to Alto Do Mundo on some kind of extraction mission.

“Thanks for the coat,” I said to the old man. I drew my gun and jumped down next to the track. “Watch yourself.”

I turned up the light filter so I could see where I was going and started down the track in the direction the old man had pointed. I stepped over a couple more bodies, both male. When the tunnel curved and the platform was out of sight back behind me, I layered a thermal filter over the night vision and saw a thin trail. Someone came down this way alive. My boot splashed into a puddle of cold, dirty water as I followed it.

It had gotten quiet. The sounds from the platform back down the tunnel echoed a little, and somewhere up ahead, in the dark, I could hear far-off movement. I scanned the tracks, but all I could see were bottles, a couple syringes, and an old sneaker next to a tipped-over shopping cart. The trail of heat was starting to spread out, specks scattered over the floor and the concrete wall next to me. Blood.

As I walked, I repositioned the subway map to show where I was. I packed up the feed from my Stillwell squad and got ready to shut it down when a name jumped out at me.

ZOE OTT

“What the fuck?” My voice echoed down the tunnel as I stopped short. I rechecked the orders, and I hadn’t read them wrong. My squad had been sent to Alto Do Mundo, up to the penthouse, to “incapacitate or kill Zoe Ott, along with anyone else who might be tied to the launch.”

“Too much,” I muttered. Singh was one of them, for fuck’s sake, and so were the rest. Were they turning on each other now?

It wasn’t my problem. I shut down the feed and looked around, picking up the heat signatures again. If Nico