Dead World | Novel | Dead Zero Read online

  The Hemisphere doctors had scanned him and proven as much. There were plaques in his brain, they’d explained at the outset. The BioFuse injections they gave him couldn’t ever change that. Instead, it would teach his brain how to grow new pathways, letting him think around the disease-causing plaques.

  They ordered him to keep his mouth shut about it. They told him it was a big secret and that they’d deny anything he tried leaking to the public. Of course Rick had blabbed anyway, but his talk had backfired. Instead of being impressed at his father’s cure, Thom had told Rick it was just another one of his paranoid fantasies.

  What’s more likely, Dad? Thom had asked during their inevitable argument. That a multi-billion-dollar corporation has shifted its work around you because you’re so special, complete with secret agents who circle you in black sunglasses and blacker helicopters, threatening you into secrecy? Or is it, instead, more likely that as a man diagnosed with a mental illness, this is all taking place in your head?

  Rick didn’t buy Thom’s way of seeing things for two reasons: because his own eyes and ears and brain told him that his son was wrong and he was right, but also because the idea of being so fundamentally deceived by your own senses was so totally terrifying. He preferred to believe and go down swinging if he had to eventually fall.

  But he wasn’t an illogical man. Rick understood that Alzheimer’s did exactly what Thom described, even if he was convinced the disease wasn’t presently doing it to him. So there was a shadow of possibility, and that shadow was what made Rick hesitate even when he was otherwise sure.

  Sure he was being followed by apparitions in long coats, sure that strange doings were afoot, sure it was really Miles Pope’s voice (and, increasingly, the voices of others) he kept hearing in his head.

  And it was, in the food court after that scream and thick sense of danger, the thing that made Rick look at Rosie’s shoes as if nothing was the matter. Every nerve was alive, but what if he was wrong?

  As much as he hated it — as much as he hated the notion that maybe sometimes Thom was right while Rick was incorrect — he at least owed rationality the benefit of the doubt.

  “What about your shoes?”

  “They’re white!”

  “So?”

  “It’s after Labor Day!”

  Rick looked up again at the Macy’s corridor. There was still nothing obviously wrong, but a subliminal beat kept insisting that the foot-traffic patterns had changed. More were now coming out than going in, and there was an unusual rush to the egress.

  Like watching a platoon run from a napalmed jungle — early stages, not yet at panic.

  “Okay.” Rick had been standing over his chair, not fully committed.

  He stepped away from it, glancing at still-oblivious Carly and putting a hand on Rosie’s back. Other than a few quick glances at his immediate surroundings (Rosie, Carly, his feet to make sure he didn’t trip while stepping over the chair’s seat), he didn’t move his eyes away from the corridor.

  “Okay, Rosie. You want some brown shoes, let’s get you some brown shoes.”

  “At Penney’s?”

  “Penney’s is closed.”

  “What? When?”

  He guided her up, sparing another glance. “Come on. We can go somewhere else.”

  “Dillards?”

  “Actually,” Rick said, guiding her away from the table and toward the escalator, eyeing Carly and moving fast, “I was thinking we’d try Macy’s.”

  Eight

  Government Plates

  Shouts and screams erupted from everywhere.

  Then everything seemed to happen at once. One second he was holding the door and preparing to enter the security office. The next, the officers were coming to him same as the first one had, when he’d surprised him eating lunch.

  They didn’t ask what Thom needed. They ordered him out of the way.

  Thom shouted while they gathered outside, first indignantly (he was a customer, after all), then with frustration and a plunging sense of what-the-hell when they stopped gathering and started running.

  He had no idea what to do. None of the guards were armed, and yet they were rushing and running in ways that didn’t exactly shout “pepper spray and detainment.” Some of them even stayed on the upper level and sprinted through the crowd toward Macy’s, while others rushed down the stairs and escalators toward The Cheesecake Factory and dome-topped playground at one of the mall’s several middles.

  Nobody, Thom saw, was going where he’d instructed.

  Nobody was headed toward the food court or its bloody hallway.

  Thom heard a few screams coming from that direction, but it was slowly falling apart.

  “What’s going on, Dad?” Brendan asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is it … like … terrorists or something?”

  That was a step up from zombies, but equally ridiculous. Not that much made sense right now. Thom realized as they waited that he’d already rapid-repressed something back at the bathrooms — something he didn’t want to remember and definitely didn’t want to drop in Brendan’s mental hopper as chum for nightmares.

  The person who’d grabbed the fire axe back there … Thom was pretty sure he’d seen a big downward swing as they’d been turning to run. He was also pretty sure that, once they’d started running, he’d see that same biter up and stumbling with that very same axe in her back.

  But no. That hadn’t really happened.

  “I don’t know, Brendan.”

  “What …” Now just a kid again, scared and turning to his father. Not that Thom had much to offer. “What should we do? Hide?”

  “We have to find your mother. And Grandpa and Rosie.”

  Their heads whipped in the other direction, and down to the lower level.

  “Let’s go.”

  Rushing down the stairs, Thom tried to find a balance between rational actions and terror-flight. He didn’t want to overblow the situation (there were a lot of guards, and though they didn’t have guns, they had numbers and could, of course, always call the police), but he also didn’t want to treat the situation too lightly.

  The authorities should be able to handle whatever-it-was. The area had been entirely peaceful and ordinary only moments ago, so what possibly could have gone so wrong? The only thing that’d threaten everyone would be something like a gunman (but then why were they running in several directions) or … and this made sense in a weird way … a fire.

  “Dad?” Brendan had caught him thinking.

  “I’ll bet it’s just a fire.”

  “Just?”

  “An electrical fault. Someone dropped a cigarette. Some asshole, playing tricks.”

  “But that woman we saw—”

  Thom was rolling; it was the only way to keep his feet churning. Truth, in Thom’s opinion, was overrated. Belief could be practical. Yes, Brendan’s point was valid. The woman they saw was definitely not a fire. But at the same time, if Thom let himself wonder if all those scrambling guards were for incidents like her, he might totally lose his mind. Of course it wasn’t a fire; he couldn’t smell smoke and everyone was running everywhere, not clearly from one place or toward the exits.

  But still Thom forced himself to believe it.

  It’s a fire. Just an ordinary fire.

  “Quiet, Brendan. It’s a fire.”

  Brendan didn’t look like he agreed even a little. But he was obedient, and stayed beside his father all the way down, all the way across the atrium toward the fountain. Thom spied the yogurt stand, in front of which half a dozen tall stools had been upended and were lying like pick-up sticks. No employees or customers. A few folks were in as much denial as Thom, some milling about the area and a few sipping coffees where they’d always been.

  But there were no customers by the yogurt place. No Rick, no Rosie.

  And, turning his head, Thom saw that there was no Carly by the fountain, either.

  “Dad?”

  “She’s
with them. Of course she’s with them. She’d have to be with them. That’s what she said.”

  “Dad?”

  Brendan sounded worried — more than before.

  “They went outside. Right? They went outside.” Thom turned his head. A long line of brown-painted exit doors lined the wall. They were back exits, not the showy front ones. He looked in time to see one easing closed.

  Yes, people had gone that way. It was right nearby; the builders had put those exits off the main space to allow easy evacuation in the case of incidents (fires) such as this.

  “They’d go outside if there was a fire.”

  “But Dad … How can it be a fire if—?”

  Thom dragged Brendan toward the doors.

  He was sure they’d have locked behind the last one to leave because that’s the way things always happened in the movies. When a way out was needed, all exits were blocked. But naturally the doors had been placed for exactly this purpose and were, when pushed from the inside, almost for-sure kept unlocked.

  Fresh air — cool in the shade, promising autumn in earnest — kissed his skin.

  There was a crowd out here, but smaller than he’d imagined. It wasn’t hard to scan them all and see he was wrong. Carly and the others weren’t anywhere in sight.

  “She went to the car.”

  “She didn’t go to the car, Dad.”

  “Of course she did. She wouldn’t stay in the mall. We have to get to the car.” Thom’s eyes wandered and, in the spacey few seconds that followed, he realized from outside himself that he was probably in shock.

  It was odd to behave one way, then see that same behavior from above.

  He was being crazy. He thought there was a fire, and so he ran scared.

  The thought alone jostled him. Could he really be the wuss his father always said he was?

  Right now, his reasoning was sound. Carly, Rick, and Rosie were absolutely together, and if they were together then of course they would head for the exit. Why would they do anything else?

  His theory was hitting a logjam already. The car, near as Thom could tell with his shoddy sense of direction, was clear on the mall’s other side and up a level thanks to uneven sloping of the surrounding ground. It wasn’t a short walk, and as much as Rick blustered, walking was agony on his bad leg. But he could do it, and for that reason Thom might have kept right on thinking they’d simply hoofed it around the building. Rosie wasn’t fast; she moved and looked like Thom remembered both of his grandmothers at the end. With her in tow, they couldn’t all run. Carly would have to trust them together for as long as it took for her to the car …

  Nope. There were two problems with that, Thom was already starting to see.

  He had the keys, not Carly. She could go to the car, but she wouldn’t have any way of driving it back.

  It also didn’t make sense to exit here and rendezvous all the way over there. Carly would want to wait for her husband and son, and this was the most logical place to do so. Even if they’d decided to walk around, the speed limit imposed by Rosie and Rick should make them visible.

  The mall couldn’t have been evacuated that quickly.

  “DAD!”

  Thom looked. Brendan was extending his phone, waiting for his father to either look or take it.

  He wasn’t sure what he was seeing at first, but then he noted the open app on Brendan’s phone and understood. Carly wanted him to live as a free-range teen, arguing that kids needed their autonomy and therefore tracking their son like a lost dog would be an invasion of independence and privacy.

  Of course Thom had won that battle and Brendan had been on an invisible tether ever since getting his phone, but the street ran both ways. The same app let Brendan see where his parents were, too. As Thom zoomed in, he saw the dot indicating Carly’s dot not circling the mall, but still inside it.

  “The GPS isn’t perfect,” he told the screen. “There’s a margin of error.”

  But the GPS’s margin, though theoretically in place, had never applied as far as Thom had seen. Sometimes when Carly parked to run in and grab something from the grocery store, he sat in the car and watched her, able to tell when she reached the meat counter, when she ran past the dairy, when she tore through the frozen aisle.

  Right now her dot said she was in the Macy’s corridor. That was where he thought he’d heard that second set of screams — where half of the rushing security guards had gone. And now he couldn’t get the chills to vacate his body.

  Thom shook off his fear. Native or not, there was no time. Nobody else was going to be in charge here. It was him or nothing. “I have to go back in for her.”

  “What about Grandpa and Rosie?”

  “I’m sure they’re all together.”

  He hoped they were all together. Rick didn’t have a phone; one of his paranoid regulars was a certainty that all phones spied on their users. Unlike most of his conspiracy theories, that wasn’t an especially delusional notion. Thom knew that was at least mostly true.

  They might have been separated.

  (They also might be dead.)

  But that was crazy talk. So Thom pushed it away, not truly disbelieving it so much as unwilling to consider something so ridiculous. There was really no reason for anyone to be dead (except the man who got attacked by the biter, plus maybe the biter thanks to that axe in her back), and a single crazy person wasn’t, statistically speaking, dangerous enough to fear.

  Except that there was more than one.

  And now he could never ignore it, thanks to what he’d already seen of the distributed chaos inside.

  Thom jogged for the exit doors with Brendan on his heels. He turned around and said, “You stay here.”

  “I don’t want to stay here.”

  “Do as I say!”

  Brendan heard him. He was usually an obedient kid who listened to what his parents told him to do. But still he acted deaf.

  Thom put a hand on the door handle. “You want to help? Call 911. When someone shows up, tell them what you saw, then stick close to them. I’ll look for the sirens when I come out.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  Thom moved between Brendan and the door, then channeled paternal anger like never before. A primal emotion, deep down where does sacrifice themselves for their fawns, and bucks spar to ensure the endurance of their genes over another’s.

  “Get out of here, Brendan. Now.”

  His son seemed near compliance, but the door Thom had tugged on wasn’t opening. He looked and saw no latch — just a lock. Of course. These were utility doors, not a main entrance.

  “Maybe if you wait for someone else to come out,” Brendan suggested.

  So Thom waited. Three seconds. Four. It was taking an eternity, and he couldn’t move his eyes away from the pulsing blue dot indicating Carly’s position. It kept moving; that felt like a good sign. But it could also be GPS inaccuracy again, and in truth her phone might be stationary after all, possibly two floors down with its screen smashed while his wife’s body, prone far above and bloodied by attack, dangled with one hand—

  “Nobody’s coming out.”

  “It’s been like five seconds.”

  Thom looked right, ran long the building, then scrambled up a slope high on nature and low on landscaping. He came through a bush, then saw that he could easily have circled around it and emerged without scratches. Brendan came up behind him.

  “I told you to stay. Why aren’t you listening to me?”

  When Brendan didn’t answer, there was nothing to rebuff.

  He rushed on around the big building and his son kept pace behind him.

  Thom stopped suddenly. He reached out and grabbed Brendan’s arm before the boy could rush past him and assume the lead. He pulled them against the building, behind a line of succulents and decorative tufts of grass.

  “What?” Brendan asked.

  “Do you recognize those vans?”

  He looked. Then shook his head. “Just vans, Dad.”<
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  And they were just vans, but they bothered Thom nonetheless. For one, there were five, all identical and parked in a cluster. Second, Thom and Brendan hadn’t made it around to an entrance yet, and their position now was at another set of emergency rear doors — this time for the new holiday store occupying the defunct Penney’s.

  Something bothered him about those five identical vans, parked against an exit instead of an entrance. And no matter what Brendan recognized or didn’t, Thom found them oddly familiar, would bet just about anything that he’d seen them before.

  Behind me on the drive over? Didn’t Rick say one of his “followers” was a van?

  Maybe. Thom crept closer, keeping an eye out for … for anything, he supposed.

  Government plates, plain as a tax form.

  So they were government vehicles?

  But no; now that Thom was close enough, he saw HEMISPHERE in slightly-off paint along the sides — the kind of job that marked “unmarked” police cars, so you could only see the writing on their sides once it was already too late for escape.

  The company’s motto was printed below it, just as hard to see: UPGRADING NATURE.

  Subtle paint.

  Hemisphere vans.

  Five of them. Parked out back. With government plates.

  Brendan ran a hand over the cool metal side of the closest van. They seemed to be empty. “Hemisphere,” he read, then looked at his father. “Isn’t that the name of those people doing that test thing with Grandpa?”

  Thom didn’t so much as nod, but yes, that’s exactly what Hemisphere was. He’d researched the hell out of the company before agreeing to Rick’s BioFuse trial. A poor man’s background check before the group entered his extended family’s life.

  From what Thom had seen, they were both forward-thinking and aggressive in their approach — something Thom had appreciated at the time. Hemisphere was close to curing a dozen or more diseases the wider world had already given up on, and at the same time they were overflowing with proactive research — human optimization, telomere treatments that were supposed to slow aging, and more.