Zero Day Read online

  Soot Lake, Minnesota

  Mike looked at the ladder skeptically. His ex-wife’s husband, Rich Dawson, wasn’t the kind of guy who did his own maintenance. That was probably the worst thing Mike could say about him—well, that and the fact that the guy was a criminal defense lawyer—but it meant the old shed out back was full of cast-off tools and bits and pieces that dated from the construction of Dawson’s cottage. After last night’s storm, somebody had to fix the gutter. Unfortunately, that somebody ended up being Mike. He wasn’t particularly handy himself, but his partner, Leshaun, begged off on account of the fact that he’d been shot relatively recently. The meat of his arm, where the bullet had gone clean through, was healing just fine, but he’d also broken a couple of ribs where his vest stopped a round, and those were nagging.

  Which meant Mike was the one staring at the old, rickety aluminum extension ladder. It had been hanging on a pair of rusty hooks on the outside of the shed. The ladder was splattered with paint, and when he’d pulled it down it rained dirt and pine needles on him. He’d expected it to feel more substantial, but it was weirdly light, and when he jammed the feet into the dirt next to the cottage, it gave an ominous, tinny rattle. He leaned it carefully against the roof and looked at Leshaun.

  “You keep hold of this ladder.”

  “Come on dude. Let’s go. We don’t want to be out here longer than we need to. You were the one who said we want to try to minimize our exposure to radiation by staying inside. Hurry it up.”

  “Hurry it up?” Mike shook his head. “Easy for you to say. I don’t see your black ass getting ready to climb a ladder.”

  Leshaun laughed. “Now, now. As if nuclear war wasn’t bad enough, now you’re bringing race politics into things?”

  “Tactical nuclear strikes,” Mike said. “Not nuclear war.”

  “Does it matter?”

  Mike ignored the question and stuck three screws between his lips for safekeeping and then shoved the screwdriver in his back pocket. He put his foot on the first step and then, experimentally, his other foot. The ladder shook a little, but it seemed like it wasn’t in imminent danger of collapsing.

  Ugh.

  He kept his eyes on the rungs in front of him, trying hard not to look down as he climbed. A mist of rain had made the metal cold and slippery, so he stepped carefully. When he got up to the roofline, he reached out to where the section of gutter was hanging down. He pulled it up and held it in place with one hand as he reached with the other for the screwdriver and then pulled one of the screws from between his lips. It made him feel horribly exposed, up on the ladder, both hands occupied with something other than holding on. He jammed the screw through a hole that was already in the gutter, pushing it far enough into the wood that it held for the second or two it took him to get the screwdriver seated.

  He felt the ladder vibrate and almost dropped the screwdriver.

  “Huhawn!”

  That was as close as he could come to saying his partner’s name while keeping the extra screws between his lips.

  “Sorry, sorry. Just getting my feet set.”

  Mike glanced down and immediately wished he hadn’t. He was only ten feet off the ground or so, but he wasn’t great with heights. And, okay, so Dawson wasn’t the kind of guy who could fix a gutter, and Leshaun had a pretty good excuse himself, but it wasn’t like Mike was 100 percent. There was the lack of sleep and all that, but his hand was still sore. He’d cut the heck out of it on the jagged metal of the downed jet that had been, near as he could tell, the first real sign that things were about to become monumentally messed up.

  He’d lost track of the days. It had been only a couple of weeks, but it could have been merely a day ago or it could have been a lifetime ago that he stood in the burned tube of metal, watching a spider eat its way out of the face of one of the richest men in the world. And since then? Oh, nothing much. Just mayhem. Panic. And, most recently, the brilliant second sun of a nuclear explosion wiping Minneapolis off the map.

  He’d been outside with his daughter, Annie, when Minneapolis was turned into a sea of glass. He’d known immediately what it was. He didn’t want to believe it, but he’d known. From the moment he’d gotten the message from his boss at the agency that he and Leshaun were on their own—they’d been trying to pick Annie and his ex-wife and Dawson up from the cottage and then get back to Minneapolis to get on a government plane headed east—he’d known that things were going to get worse. And they had, with the president ordering the highways and byways, the veins that carried America’s lifeblood, bombed into the Stone Age. But it was clear pretty quickly that conventional weapons and explosives weren’t going to be enough to stop the swarms of spiders marauding across the country. So when he saw the stunning flash to the south, he’d hustled Annie inside.

  Since then, since Minneapolis had been nuked, they’d been hunkered down inside the cottage. Dawson had a slick setup with solar power, but Mike figured that would start to be a problem. He didn’t know enough about what caused a nuclear winter, but the best they’d been able to tell, most of the major cities from Chicago on west had gotten the gift of fusion. Or fission. Mike couldn’t remember. Maybe it was both. Physics hadn’t been his strong suit in high school. Either way, he figured there’d be enough dust and smoke in the air to cripple the solar cells. In the short term, it was okay, however. They’d used duct tape to seal seams as much as possible, taped up garbage bags, filled every available container with water. Anything they could think of to keep the outside out, which was why he was bothering to fix the gutter; because of the broken gutter and the rain, water was streaming through the seam where the roof met the wall, a line of dampness working its way inside the cottage.

  Fixing the gutter, taping the windows—all of that was short-term, though. He was pretty sure that staying hunkered down inside the cottage wasn’t a good long-term solution. How long could they stay where they were? How much radiation was too much? For him? For his ex-wife, who was pregnant? For Annie? And even if he knew the answers, he didn’t have a way to measure their exposure.

  He finished screwing the gutter in place and realized that maybe not knowing was an answer in and of itself. He didn’t have a Geiger counter, he didn’t have an expert he could consult. All he had was his gut to go by, and his gut was telling him it was time to get out of Dodge. Fixing the gutter on Dawson’s beautiful cottage, with its mullioned glass and cedar shakes, its deck that cascaded in multiple levels until it met the dock, had been a waste of time. All of it had been a waste of time. There was no way to keep safe if they stayed in place.

  There weren’t any good answers, not with the spiders, not with the deliberate destruction of America as a defensive measure, but they couldn’t stay. The moment Minneapolis bloomed radioactive was the moment he needed to get his daughter—get all of them—to a safe distance.

  If there even was such a thing. Was anywhere safe?

  But they could go east. The roads were destroyed, the world on fire—and who knew if the spiders were coming out for another round of feasting—but they could go east. The best they could tell, the East Coast was still untouched. If they could get from Minneapolis to the East Coast, they’d be safe, Mike thought.

  Or as safe as he could make them.

  Now all he had to do was figure out how to get them there.

  Boothton, South Dakota

  She could feel herself growing stronger, which was good. But there was not enough food here to sustain her in this place. The little ones had almost exhausted what was available nearby. Soon enough, she would have to move. There was food elsewhere.

  Although she knew that some of her sisters were no longer communicating, there were still many out there. She could feel them like the pulse of her body, could feel them as clearly as if they were her own little ones, and through them she could feel their little ones.

  There was food elsewhere. All she had to do was go find it.

  Kearney High School, Kearney, Nebraska

&n
bsp; The flock of pilgrims had swelled to more than five thousand. Which sounded impressive, but it was a headache for the Prophet Bobby Higgs. Interstate 80 was impassable by vehicle, and trying to keep that many people walking together wasn’t easy. Worse, however, was the weather. Since they’d seen the twin nuclear suns of Denver and Lincoln, one behind them, one in front of them, the unseasonably warm weather they’d been enjoying had turned. The sun disappeared behind the gray decay of clouds and rain. Sheets of water drenched them. And when the rain slowed, it was replaced with an inescapable mist that crept through the seams of jackets and shirts and left people shivering and feverish. Perhaps they should have been worried about fallout, but that seemed like something that was a long way off. The worry right in front of them was exposure. They’d lost nine pilgrims already on the march.

  It weighed on him. As the Prophet, Bobby rated one of the eleven tents that the horde of pilgrims had among them, and at night he could have been warmed by any one of the many women who were eager to spend time with him. But he chose to sleep alone. There was a time, before he was the Prophet Bobby Higgs, back when he was just Bobby Higgs, street hustler, when he would have availed himself of the flesh, when he would have tried to use his power to fleece his flock. But Bobby found himself in the curious position of feeling responsible. These five thousand men, women, and children were looking to him for salvation, and, by god, he wanted to give it to them.

  When they approached the outskirts of Kearney, after nearly fifty miles of walking, he’d decided to give his followers a day or two of respite. They took over the high school, setting up volunteers in the cafeteria to cook, people eating in shifts. Bobby had tasked his disciples—the people in the first twelve vehicles that had joined his caravan had taken to calling themselves his twelve disciples—with organizing scavenging parties to gather clothes and food. They’d stripped the Walmart and the Hy-Vee almost bare. Kearney had been a welcome relief, but there was no more solace to be found here. No solace, no sustenance, just the promise of a slow misery if they stayed. And perhaps it would be a slow misery for them if they kept moving, but at least that would come with the hope of finding something good. Didn’t the Israelites wander in the desert for forty years before they reached the promised land? And wasn’t the Prophet Bobby Higgs a kind of Moses?

  He had just come to the decision that it was time for them to head out the next morning, marching who knew where, but forward, forward, forward, when he heard the voice on the shortwave radio: Macer Dickson.

  Macer.

  The man who, in the aftermath of the first wave of spiders eating their way through Los Angeles, had helped transform Bobby into the Prophet Bobby Higgs. The man who had orchestrated the break through the quarantine lines. The man who had left Bobby standing on the side of the road. Stranded. Alone.

  Macer’s voice was so clear through the headphones that if Bobby had closed his eyes he would have believed he could reach out and touch him.

  And what was Macer doing on the radio? He was offering sanctuary to any person who was willing to work and who brought supplies—food or gas or anything else of use—to where he was holed up, at some sort of a rest stop on the interstate.

  Bobby called to one of the disciples to bring a map.

  Huh. Near as he could tell, Macer was broadcasting from less than fifteen miles away.

  Bobby smiled.

  And then he organized work crews to go out and bring back something even more useful than food or clothes or camping gear: guns and ammunition.

  He was going to war.

  Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Church, Pistol Gap, Ohio

  There had been many, many days when Father Thomas resented living in Pistol Gap. He’d long since reconciled himself to the idea that he wasn’t going to be part of the Catholic Church’s elite. For a very short time, when he first entered the priesthood, he had fantasies about the Vatican, but at heart he was a Pittsburgh kid who loved the more pedestrian parts of his calling. Even in his early fifties, being a priest still felt that way to him: like a calling. But, honestly, how had he ended up in Pistol Gap?

  His first posting had been in the Bronx, and he’d loved it. This was back when the city was still gritty, and his church was in a neighborhood that hadn’t been desirable in decades. He was twenty-five and newly ordained and every morning he woke up full of God’s grace. He threw himself into the community, reinvigorating programs that had gone stale, fully immersed in God’s work. Even though he knew it was coming, it was jarring when he was reassigned after six years. But that was to Phoenix, Arizona, and when it was January and sunny and in the mid-sixties, it was just fine that the Bronx seemed far away. He was there long enough to learn Spanish to go along with his Latin. He conducted Mass in both languages, and grew the parish by embracing the location and doing things like celebrating the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. So it made complete sense to him that his next posting was Laredo, Texas. He was happy enough there, but he was more than ready to move on after five years of dealing with a small group of female parishioners who thought volunteering gave them the right to meddle in church business. He assumed that he would be reassigned near the border. But then, just after he turned forty-three—Father Thomas was not blind to the fact that forty-three was ten more years than Jesus had been given on earth—he was moved to Pistol Gap.

  He couldn’t complain about the church itself. Our Lady of Mercy was surprisingly beautiful and well maintained. The parish had been consolidated in the late 1990s, so there were enough parishioners and resources to keep the church and its grounds in fine condition. Nor could he complain about the numbers. If not every pew was filled on Sunday, it was close enough. And the people? They were every wonderful stereotype ever made about midwesterners. Friendly, solid, thoughtful, polite, conscientious. But the town itself?

  In the triangle that could be drawn linking Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Columbus, Pistol Gap was almost directly in the middle. Far enough away from all of those cities so that Pistol Gap was convenient to none. And while the church itself was a testament to the glory of God, he could not, in all honesty, find another single building in all of Pistol Gap with any charm. It was a town of strip malls full of discount stores and restaurants with apostrophes. When his parishioners took him out to dinner, they brought him to places where you could get an appetizer, dinner, and dessert for less than twenty dollars, and the portions were so big that he’d go home with enough leftovers to provide him with lunch for days.

  He’d resigned himself to making the best of it, knowing that it was only for a few years. But after three years, and then six years, his posting was extended again. He had been told, however, that this coming fall he would finally, finally, finally be moved, and he’d gotten hints that it was somewhere that was going to make him happy. Perhaps, he thought, San Diego.

  And then the spiders came, and for the very first time Father Thomas was thrilled to be in Pistol Gap.

  He knew that it was shameful, that he shouldn’t be delighted to be kept safe from earthly harm when so many innocent people had died, and yet he was. It was not uncommon for laypeople to forget that priests like him were also men. Flesh and blood. No matter how much faith he had, he still didn’t relish the idea of being eaten by spiders. Nor, if he was continuing to be honest, was he particularly interested in dying in the hot, quick whiteness of a nuclear bomb or, for that matter, of the slower, insidious corruption of nuclear radiation. Everything else being equal, he was quite content to stay alive. But he needed to believe there was a reason he had stayed alive, a reason tens of millions of people had perished but he, Father Thomas, was still here in Pistol Gap, Ohio, still holding Mass at Our Lady of Mercy, still taking confessions, and still visiting the sick and the elderly in the community.

  Which was why it filled him with such guilt that his first reaction had been to recoil from the homeless man.

  He’d spent his entire life in the priesthood serving in places where ministering to the homeless was a substantial
part of his week. And though the populations of homeless men and women and, yes, children, were so much greater in the Bronx and Phoenix and even Laredo, Pistol Gap was not immune. He’d coordinated with Pastor Grace at the Unitarian Church to start a food pantry, and at times, when the weather was severe, he’d opened the church’s recreation center as an emergency shelter. So this was certainly not the first time he had encountered somebody used to sleeping in the rough.

  He’d gone for a walk on the trails in the preserve behind the Pistol Gap library, hoping to find some clarity. Mrs. Hounslow, who had been the secretary at Our Lady of Mercy for nearly forty years, was the one who’d forced him to go. She insisted that he needed to take a break—that even a priest could benefit from some time away from the church. Father Thomas hadn’t wanted to admit how good the idea sounded, taking an hour to himself, free from the parishioners who were coming to the church in droves seeking comfort, seeking safety, seeking something he couldn’t give: the promise that God would protect them. Oh, he was clear that God had not deserted them, that everything happened for a reason, that God’s eternal love never wavered. But that’s not what they wanted to hear. At this particular moment, most of his parishioners were uninterested in eternity. They were worried about the here and now.

  The preserve itself was not large, perhaps twenty acres at most, but a network of trails wove in and out and around the land, so that at a modest pace he was able to walk aimlessly and allow his thoughts to drift away. As was his wont, when he was trying to relax, he said the Hail Mary, first in English, then in Latin, and then finally in Spanish before repeating the series. It was, he supposed, a form of meditation, and he found that it helped center him in God’s grace. He said the prayer slowly and evenly in a quiet voice: “. . . in hora mortis nostrae. Amen. Dios te salve—”