Element Zero

The officer went down with the thing on top of him. Smoke drifted from the revivor as it clamped its gray, meaty fingers around the man’s throat.

I fired a burst into the back of its skull, and black fluid splashed across the fresh snow. A rifle shot slammed into its chest, and it let go. The officer shoved the body to one side and got back up.

Something heavy landed on my back. I slipped on the ice and fell as it came down on top of me. Coarse hair brushed my neck, and rank-smelling breath huffed over the side of my face.

I twisted onto my back and saw a dog baring sharp yellow teeth. I got one arm between us as it went for my throat, and clamped down instead on the body armor covering my forearm. Its paws dug into my chest as it thrashed its head and growled.

A shot went off near me as several shapes leapt, trailing smoke, out of the storage car. As I struggled I saw two more dogs, large huskies, hit the ground and scramble on the ice. Exposed ribs stuck out where the hide had been blown off of one, and another was missing a back leg. Growls, punctuated by loud barking, sent clouds of breath through the frigid air, and I saw moonlight yellow in one set of eyes.

I pushed myself to my knees as the dog on top of me continued to thrash. The weight of it pulled me down again, and claws raked my face. I pushed the barrel of my gun into its flank and pulled the trigger three times. It let go, but didn’t go down. It snapped its jaws as I pulled away, and saliva flecked my face.

I put a shot through one of its eyes, and it staggered and fell. I peered through the hide and saw components clustered along its spine.

They’re reanimated, I broadcast. Destroy those dogs.

One of the officers fired, and the dog nearest him jerked and went down. The third lunged and clamped its jaws down on the man’s calf, thrashing as the rifle went off three more times.

A bullet tore through the animal’s side and it went limp. The SWAT officer pried the jaws free and let it fall.

Hold your fire.

The last shot echoed off, and the yard got quiet. The remains of the revivor lay crumpled in the snow, along with the three dogs and the SWAT member who got caught in the blast. Nothing else moved from the direction of the car.

A few feet away, the body of the man in the black apron lay face down in the snow. I used the backscatter to scan into the bloody hole in his ear, and saw traces of shrapnel that had been pushed from the inside out.

“That’s Fawkes’s work,” Van Offo said.

I looked over the body. The only thing the man had on him was a drugstore cell phone. It was clean; no numbers were stored. I pulled the ID from it and fed it back to Alice Hsieh back at headquarters.

Alice, we’re at the site. I need a number run from a cell phone we recovered. Can you trace the last circuit?

Hang on.

The SWAT leader was calling in an EMT, his breath blowing plumes as he barked into the radio. I put in for a biohazard team to come impound the revivors.

Got it, Alice said. I was able to go back twenty-four hours. One call only; someone named Harold Deatherage.

Thanks.

“Last call went to a guy named Harold Deatherage,” I told Van Offo. He shook his head.

“Do you know that name?” he asked.

“No.”

“The car is clear!” a voice shouted. I looked through the thinning smoke and switched to a thermal filter. There was nothing living left inside, and no active revivor signatures.

I waved smoke away as I crossed to the entrance and through the doorway. The inside of the car was a mess of twisted metal and broken wire cages. There were remains scattered through the car, but it was hard to separate them all out. Some were canine; I could see singed fur and pointed teeth buried in the mess. A human leg and two misshapen arms were sprawled among other, unidentifiable pieces.

Near the back of the car were several scorched gurneys. I could make out frayed wire and a broken housing for electronics, along with an IV rack that was bent in half. Some kind of test had been run there, but there was no way to know for sure what they’d been doing without a forensic reconstruction. Van Offo crept through the debris behind me and surveyed the scene.

“Why dogs?” he asked.

“You got me.”

In theory, anything with a brain could be revived, but the bottom line was that a real dog was cheaper and easier to maintain. It didn’t make sense.

Out at the edge of the yard I saw the first group of camera eyes gathering, recording everything they could see. A van pulled up behind them while I watched. In twenty minutes the place was going to be mobbed.

Alice, this was definitely Fawkes. We’re going to need a forensics team down here. They were able to blow the inside of the unit, but I think we can salvage something from it. We need DNA identification on two bodies, and put a rush on that revivor impound; this is too public.

Understood.

I looked around the car. The broken shells of computer terminals were scattered in the wreckage, along with a second gurney. When I scanned the floor, I could make out surgical tools. The head of a dog lay a foot from its body, eyes staring up at me.

Run Deatherage’s name. See if anything comes up.

I’m on it.

The SWAT leader appeared at the doorway behind us and leaned in.

“Agent, it looks like the techs picked up a transmission just before the explosion,” he said.

“What kind of transmission?”

“Some kind of large transfer. We think it was a core dump, to save the data before they blew the place.”

“They get a destination?”

He nodded.

“A copy?”

“No.”

Alice, it looks like they did some kind of backup or core dump before they blew the place. We’ve got a destination.

Where? I checked the SWAT channel. When I saw the name, I grit my teeth.

Mother of Mercy. It was a clinic downtown.

Isn’t that facility on our list? she asked.

Yes. We’d been there several times to pull records and hadn’t even marked the place as suspicious. I’d been there once myself. Things were slipping through the cracks.

Forensics will clean up the storage site. Take SWAT and get over there. Let me know what you find.

I looked at Van Offo. “You heard the woman.”

“Mother of Mercy,” he said. There was a strange look in his eye.

“Problem?”

“No.”

Back outside, the wind gusted. Grit and snow pelted the side of the train car. Van Offo looked out at the revivor’s remains, its shirt flapping in the breeze.

“Let’s go.”

You have one job now, he told me early on. Manpower, equipment, funds…anything you need, you’ll get.

He was right. I got everything I needed. As long as in the end I put Fawkes down for good, nothing else mattered. Obstacles disappeared. Any footage taken from any camera that put the investigation in a bad light disappeared. If it did air, it was pulled. They were willing to search anyplace and detain anyone. None of it got me any closer to Fawkes.

I climbed back through the wreckage, back out into the cold. Van Offo followed, staring out through the snow