Zero Day Read online

  He looked in the direction everybody was running from and saw them: black threads. Or, rather, dots that were packed so closely together that they looked like a solid mass. It reminded him of that painter, the one who made pictures using only dots. He could remember what the technique was called. Pointillism. He could clearly see the image of the famous painting that hung in the Art Institute of Chicago: French people spending the afternoon by the banks of a river. But he couldn’t remember the painter’s name.

  He sighed. Was this going to be the way he went out? Sitting in a second-floor restaurant that didn’t have walls, feeling defensive about being a bad boyfriend to a woman he was not actually dating? Eating a fried-pork-rind sandwich while trying to remember the name of some painter? It was certainly lacking in romance.

  On the street, the fleeing people had become a mob. He saw a man go down, but the people behind just trampled him. Farther back, Pierre saw people overtaken by the scourge of spiders: men and women running in horror, turning into black pillars, then—slowly enough that it was more terrifying than if it had been quick—flattening out. Other people simply fell and lay still as if paralyzed, spiders swarming over them, coating them with hazy films of silk.

  But here and there he saw people left untouched. An old woman who had fallen to her knees in prayer. A child frozen in fear. A man in a suit. The spiders simply flowed around them, splitting and rejoining like a river washing around a rock.

  Soon enough, the first black tendrils reached the restaurant. The spiders were either pure black or black with red stripes. They moved quickly and together. He watched as the crowd became even more panicked. He thought he saw Dr. Botsford, but it was hard to tell as the spiders washed over the struggling figures. Inside the restaurant, the choked pack of people at the door trying to get out suddenly reversed course, like an ocean’s waves pulling back into the water. He saw Bea knocked backward and over a table, her head banging painfully off a chair. Around her, people scrambled and panicked: they no longer wanted to leave the restaurant, and there were cries to close the door and lock it.

  It was fruitless, of course, Pierre realized. Why bar the door when there weren’t any walls?

  He couldn’t understand why he wasn’t panicking, but as he heard the sick brush of the spiders pushing against the ground floor and starting to skitter up the outside of the building, he reached out to take a last sip of his beer.

  Seurat! The painter’s name was Seurat!

  It felt like some sort of a victory to remember the name, and he closed his eyes, readying himself for the inevitable.

  And yet, as he heard screaming and shrieking, prayers and pleas, the sound of furniture being overturned, bottles breaking—as he felt the overwhelming rush of spiders moving around him—he remained untouched and his eyes stayed closed.

  He counted to thirty, forcing himself to go slowly, each number a separate word, a separate moment. It was hard to do, to summon the willpower to keep his eyes shut, but it was also somehow easier; the sounds of the world around him were too much to consider.

  By the time he got to thirty, it had grown quieter. Not quiet, because there were still screams and cries and sobbing, car horns and the breaking of glass, but it had moved farther away, to the next building, and the next, and the next. But he scrunched his eyes tight for one second longer, listening as hard as he could. There, underneath the sounds of fear and panic, a soft brush that sounded like fabric rubbed together, like hundreds of leaves tumbling down from a tree in a gust of autumn wind.

  When he opened his eyes, he took it all in at once: tables and chairs overturned, clothing that covered only bones, and perhaps half a dozen people slowly disappearing beneath layers of silk. A young woman, eighteen or nineteen, was staring at him, her eyes unblinking as spiders worked over her, coating her in webbing. Pierre could see a thin stream of tears coming out of her eyes, and although she couldn’t move, that didn’t stop Pierre from reading the terror in her eyes. To be paralyzed like that? To feel the spiders crawling over you, the silk wrapping around your body, to know that you were doomed?

  He had to look away.

  Which was almost weirder, because there were those left untouched: a diminutive but muscular man standing still in the middle of the restaurant, his hands over his ears, his eyes bugged out and his mouth moving silently; a black college-aged dude who was kneeling and rocking back and forth gently, his hands folded in a tent of prayer; a lumpy woman wearing a colorful patchwork dress, sitting at a table and crying with hysterical gulps of air.

  And, near the middle of the room, Bea, slowly getting to her feet, rubbing at her head where she’d hit it. She looked bleary-eyed and was probably concussed, but there was no panic in her demeanor. Even as a spider skittered up her leg and across her chest and then off again, moving over a table and joining ten or more other spiders diligently cocooning a body on the floor, Bea didn’t seem bothered.

  She saw him and then worked her way across the room. He couldn’t decide which was worse, watching her or watching the way the spiders—perhaps a hundred, two hundred of them—that were still in the room spun silk in quick layers over the men and women on the floor, the frozen, terrified faces disappearing beneath translucent webs. No. That was actually an easy call: he watched Bea.

  The chair’s wooden legs made a sharp sound against the floor as Bea pulled it out from the table so she could sit down. “It figures, doesn’t it?” she said. Her voice was glum.

  He looked at her and then around the room again. The spiders seemed to be completely uninterested in them. One of them ran across the top of the table, scrambled over the remains of his sandwich, and then disappeared over the edge.

  “Should we, I don’t know, run or something?” he said.

  “Doesn’t seem much point. I think if they were going to eat us, they would have done it already.”

  Pierre nodded. He couldn’t tell if he was nodding because she made sense or because he was just too freaked-out to do anything else. Except, he thought, he didn’t feel freaked-out. Did he? He tried saying it aloud. “I don’t feel as freaked-out as I should.” And, having said it aloud, he decided he believed it. “Right? Shouldn’t we be more freaked-out?”

  Bea sighed. She looked sullen. “Aren’t you even going to ask me what I meant when I said, ‘It figures’? I think, clearly, I was fishing for you to ask me what I meant.” She reached out, grabbed his beer, and took a sip. “Because what I meant is, it figures, doesn’t it, that everybody else gets eaten, and it’s just the two of us?”

  “Technically, it’s not just the two of us. There are a bunch . . . well, not a bunch, but some other people. Plus there’s . . .” He trailed off and sort of waved one hand pathetically at the bodies being cocooned on the floor. It felt so unreal. Like he was watching this happen to somebody else. He put his hands flat on the table and stood up. He didn’t want to sit here and watch those poor men and women get covered in silk anymore. He wanted to leave.

  “You’re going?” Bea said, clearly surprised.

  “Yes,” he said. “I think so.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, but then he did know. “To the spider line, I think. To see what’s there. You should come with me.”

  It was odd picking their way through the restaurant and down the stairs. They were both very careful not to step on any of the bone-filled pieces of clothing or to accidentally hit one of the spiders still skittering about. Outside, on the street, there was more space to move. There were cocoons everywhere. Black spiders with red stripes across their backs scuttled about, spinning webs and completely ignoring the other survivors, people like Pierre and Bea, who were wandering around. He thought the other people looked dazed and forlorn, and, looking at Bea, he realized they must look that way, too.

  They walked a hundred feet or so, moving slowly, walking together but separately. After a bit of hesitation, Pierre reached out and took Bea’s hand. As he touched her fingers, the warmth of her skin was
reassuring. After all that had happened, what else did they have if not a human connection? What point was there to survival if they couldn’t survive together?

  As he had the thought, he turned to look at her.

  She was scowling and she stopped walking. She yanked her hand away from his with a fierceness that was matched by the venom in her voice. “Good Lord. You really think that’s what I want?”

  She strode off, leaving him scrambling to catch up.

  God, he thought, he wished he were with Julie Yoo.

  Càidh Island, Loch Ròg, Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides

  Aonghas opened the wardrobe as quietly as possible. There were a number of wool blankets folded neatly on the top shelf. They had the faintly musty smell of all wool, and it made him smile. It reminded him of his childhood.

  On the bed, Thuy was already under a small mountain of covers. Aonghas wasn’t sure if he was imagining the draft or not, but the wind wicking the waves outside was real enough. The temperature had dropped enough over the last two days that even his stoic grandfather commented on it.

  “Sweater weather.”

  That’s all his grandfather had said, but from Padruig it amounted to shouting it from the rooftops. He wasn’t emotionally reserved—or no more so than one would expect from a man of his generation—but he was not prone to complaining about the weather or physical ailments.

  Carefully, Aonghas opened a blanket and added it to the ones covering Thuy. He’d heard from his friends who’d gotten a head start on him with marriage and children that the first trimester could leave a woman wiped out, but he thought they’d been exaggerating. However, for the last couple of days, Thuy had been taking early-afternoon naps and going to bed almost immediately after dinner. Not that there was much else to do. They were stuck on the island.

  He stood up, feeling dizzy at the thought. They were stuck on Càidh Island. The world had gone to hell, and he and Thuy and his grandfather were on one of the few places on earth that seemed entirely secure. His grandfather kept BBC Radio nan Gàidheal on constantly, to the point where Aonghas felt anxious without the quiet, clipped voices in the background. Not that radio made him feel less anxious: the list of places that had been overrun by spiders or destroyed by men was overwhelming. They’d stopped trying to keep track of what pockets of the world were still safe—though, at least for now, it seemed like Thuy’s family was doing okay. Other than that, the only thing Aonghas was sure of was that the world apart from Càidh Island was terrifying, all the more so because he was now an expectant father. Here, at least, they were surrounded by the ocean, and the chance of any boat—let alone one carrying that scourge of eight-legged monsters—happening upon them seemed remote at best.

  For how long, though? How long were they going to be stuck on this rock? He loved it here: loved the way the castle sat brooding and sharp above the ocean, loved the smell of the library, loved the deep maze of the cellars filled with wine and port, loved the winding staircases, loved the grand sweep of windows that he could look through while he was cooking. But that was always a love based on knowing that he could leave this solitude whenever he wanted. And, good god, Thuy! What if she got sick? What if they were still here in . . . how many months until she had the baby? She tracked her period, so they’d been able to figure out her due date was New Year’s Day, but what if they were still stuck here? What if the baby came early? Or late? What if he had to deliver the baby on his own?

  He leaned over, putting one hand against the top of the headboard for balance, and kissed her hair. It was all he could do not to start crying. She wasn’t a delicate sort, but wasn’t it his responsibility now to take care of her? A terribly sexist thing to think, he knew, but he couldn’t help it. Wasn’t that what the ring he’d given her meant?

  He straightened and then moved to the rocking chair by the window. For a while he simply watched the light and the white of the waves frothing against the rocks. And then, for another while, he watched Thuy softly breathing.

  It could be worse, he thought. To be stuck here with Thuy and his grandfather? That wasn’t so bad. There were so many worse places in the world to be right now.

  They could ride out the storm.

  The Interstate 80 High Times Truck Stop and Family Fun Zone Restaurant and Gas Station Taco Bell Pizza Hut Starbucks KFC Burrito Barn 42 Flavors Ice Cream Extravaganza Coast-to-Coast Emporium, Nebraska

  He’d seen news footage of refugee camps before. That was the closest equivalent that the Prophet Bobby Higgs could come up with. He was up on a rise that overlooked the truck stop, and from his vantage point the sea of people reminded him of nothing less than a refugee camp. Which was almost certainly a fair comparison, he thought, because what was a refugee camp but a place for people who were fleeing from danger?

  His best guess was that there were two or three thousand people down there. Enough to create a sense of chaos but not so many that he was worried. His flock was easily double that. And, judging by the lack of armed sentries, the people below weren’t expecting any sort of an attack. At least not from people. He was sure that they were worried about spiders, although perhaps the relative isolation of the truck stop was enough to give a false sense of security.

  He was surprised that Macer didn’t have sentries out. It was unlike the man. Macer wasn’t just opportunistic. He was a forward thinker. How else could he have turned somebody like Bobby Higgs into the kind of religious leader who could gather the number of people needed to break through a military quarantine zone? Why else would Macer, that son-of-a-bitch, leave Bobby on the side of the road and then end up here, in the middle of nowhere, running his own fiefdom? That wasn’t the sort of thing that happened through luck and happenstance. You needed to be a planner for outcomes like that. A thinker.

  And yet, inexplicably, there wasn’t any sort of security perimeter. There were a few armed men apparently guarding a tractor-trailer, and Bobby wondered what could be in the truck that was of enough value for Macer to post men there but not around the grounds.

  One of his disciples started to say something, but Bobby shushed him. He wanted to think.

  For the next five minutes he looked through the high-powered binoculars, trying to find what he was missing. Was it a trap? Did Macer know he was coming?

  He saw movement. Nothing sudden or suspicious, just the swirling movement of humanity that indicated something was happening. Sure enough, a group of people parted and Bobby saw Macer with Lita beside him, followed by a small cadre of men who were clearly serving as bodyguards. They all had the looming presence that Macer preferred in his flunkies, although they didn’t have the professional swagger that Bobby recognized in some of his own men who were former military. He counted four, no, five men, plus Lita. She almost floated, moving so gracefully that from this distance he would have been willing to believe that she wasn’t touching the ground. She was the dangerous one. Even more so than Macer, because she existed solely as his weapon. Without her, he thought, Macer was a toothless dog.

  He watched for a few more minutes as Macer moved around the facilities, stopping to chat here and there, occasionally smiling, at one point directing one of his goons to help a woman get something down from the roof rack of a car. Macer called out to the men by the tractor-trailer, and one of them gave him the thumbs-up. But that was it. There was no sign of any security beyond men watching the truck and Macer’s small group of bodyguards. It was as if Macer felt invulnerable.

  Bobby lowered the binoculars and crawled backward until he was behind the rise of the hill. And then he did something he would have laughed at even a few weeks ago: he prayed.

  He knelt on the soft dirt of what had been Nebraska farmland before this all began. Around him, his disciples followed his lead, kneeling and praying. It moved outward from him in a wave, those closest to him stopping whatever they were doing—which was mostly waiting for him to make a decision—and mimicking him, dropping to their knees to pray, and then, as those people knelt, those far
ther out saw and copied. It was an odd sensation, hearing and feeling the way hundreds of people and then thousands came to stillness in prayer. What they prayed for, he didn’t know, but he prayed for guidance. He prayed to know how, exactly, God wanted him to exact his vengeance. Because if there was one thing the Prophet Bobby Higgs was sure of, it was that Macer needed to suffer.

  When he finally got to his feet, he knew.

  If Macer felt invulnerable, Bobby could fix that.

  He went and talked to a select group of three men—all former military, all extremely good with a rifle—and made sure they were ready. The trio had taken to calling themselves the Angels of Death, and although he thought it was a bit silly, he’d run them through their paces during the march, and the name was not unsuited.

  Then, silently, without motioning or explaining to anybody else, he walked over the hill and down to the truck stop. He didn’t look back. He didn’t need to. The sheer number of men and women and children following him was such that he simply knew they were there. And, likewise, he didn’t need to check that the men and women who had experience with weapons—he shouldn’t have been surprised to find so many veterans out here in the heartland—were close to him. He had ordered that they stay with him at all times, and thus it was so.

  As they got closer to the ragged rings of people around the truck stop, he could see the refugees stop what they were doing and take stock. Some of them just stared, unsure what to make of the Prophet Bobby Higgs leading his flock down from the mountain, but others seemed to sense that the winds were changing.

  He walked past tents and parked cars and shelters made of little more than cardboard and garbage. He walked past gas pumps and a truck wash. As he passed, the men and women who were not part of his flock came to join them. As he moved by the tractor-trailer, the three guards—each carrying a shotgun—watched him warily, but none of them made any move to try to stop him. At the building, a crazy conglomeration of bright plastic colors and logos, he closed his eyes, waiting to be shown the path. When he opened them, Macer was in front of him. Lita was by Macer’s side, her right hand stuffed deep in the pocket of her jacket, a shiny black number that looked like something a triathlete would wear. He knew that her fingers were wrapped around the butt of a gun. The burly men whom he’d identified as bodyguards were standing in a semicircle behind Macer. They looked even bigger up close, and they were all armed.