Zero Dark: The Novel 1 - 2

Don Carter made his way through  the dense undergrowth with the patient care of a lifelong hunter - a proper one, who relied on his skills to survive, he reflected, not your rich-boygirl tourist hunters looking to impress their friends with their killer instincts who most often just chucked up on the floor at the sight of blood.

He paused often, listening and glancing upwards.  The monitor drones didn't tend to linger here, close to the city walls, but this was where they came and went from.  If they were paying attention, they might spot him if he rushed.  But moving slow, with his heat-reflective camo cape and the decent overhead of the dense valley oak  branches, he was probably safe even if they did buzz overhead.

All the same...

Don didn't like going to the city if he could avoid it, for all that he had been born there.  He just didn't fit in.  He didn't get it.  It was a place of rules and ideas and expectations that just made his skin itch, somehow.  He was better off in the wild, mostly.  But for all that he wasn't built for city life, Don had had to accept that he also wasn't built for the solitary life, either.  And although there were others out here in the wild - outlaws, like him - it was dangerous to spend too much time together.  You couldn't build a home.  You couldn't  have more than about three people in any one place.  You couldn't raise crops.  The drone would spot it.  Then fire would come.

And not everyone out here was someone you much wanted to meet in any case.  Outlaws were outlaws for a reason and not all of them just because they couldn't live in a city, like Don.  Some of them were bad people: real bad people, with bad thoughts and bad blood.  And you couldn't tell who was good and who was bad just by looking.  So you tended to stay away unless you saw someone you knew was OK, which was maybe twice a year.  Then you might stop and talk for a bit, swap some stories and some liquor.  But you couldn't stop for too long.

Damn drones.

So once in a while, Don had to come back to the city.  He came back for ammunition.  He came back for liquor and for smokes.  He came back for medicine, when he could get it.  But mostly he came back for sex.

He could tell it was time to head into the city when the knotholes on trees started to look appealing.

Luckily, there was always a market in the city for what he had to sell, which was mostly animal bones, plus a few things like particular herbs and mosses.  Chinatown was good for that stuff.  They paid good prices for volume.  But there were a few collectors for things like skulls or teeth: anything that spoke of the wild.  He went through a fence for that, though.  No point getting your face known for the wrong kind of thing.  And the fence knew other people, too: people who wanted to taste the wild in a more... explicit kind of way.

For a while, he'd given it away for free.  He'd wanted it as much as they had, after all.  But eventually he twigged you could get more stuff - some booze, some drugs, some useful tech - from the clients, just by asking.  The weirdos loved it.  Some of them wouldn't even have sex with him until he'd shaken them down for something.  Don reckoned it made the whole thing a bit more "wild" for them.

But before he could do any of that, he still had to get into San Diego.  This time, he thought he'd take the I-8.  It was an easy route in, where the smashed up and broken remains of the interstate's surface met the hundred-foot-high outer walls of the city.  The foundations of the wall were driven deep but, right here, water erosion had eaten away the soil and debris, leaving a tricky but navigable maze of rubble that a patient man like Don could follow right into the basement of the city itself.

He didn't come this way every time.  It was well-known to the local police so they sometimes posted a guard in the area and motion detectors.  But there had been heavy rain last night.  The maze was ankle deep with water still, which would mess up the detectors, and the flatfoots wouldn't want to hang out there in the dank and dark.  So it was probably safe.

Don clambered down between the blocks and rubble and made his way through the dark labyrinth by touch and memory alone.  It wasn't far.  Getting out on the other side was the hardest bit, because you were never sure what they may have blocked up or sealed since the last time.  But he was lucky first time round, today: someone had already dug through into an abandoned maintenance basement.  It was a mess, but a bit of crawling saw him into the city's massive storm drain system and then onto the streets.

And then...

Don was used to silence.  Moving through the deep Californian forests, you were immersed in silence most of the day.  But when you spent long enough in it, there was a volume to the silence of the deep forests: the wind in the branches; the frantic scattering of unseen birds; the distant crack of a rifle; the crackling of undergrowth as some unseen animal dashes to safety.  But this was just weird: the silence of a city.

The familiary background hum of traffic was entirely gone.  The chatter and clatter of over a hundred million people living on top of one another was still.  Don could hear the rattle and hiss of a broken air-conditioning unit two blocks away.  He saw a paper flyer caught on a breeze and clearly heard it shimmer across a glass wall: sssssss....

There was a brief flurry of wings as a pair of roosting pigeons fought for space, a hundred feet up on a higher street level.

Don went his usual way to Chinatown and saw no one.  The streets were empty.  The walkways, deserted.  The shift tubes were still, but working.  He hardly ever used them, because the cops monitored them, but with no one to be seen, it was easy to pop up a block and over three in a few seconds.  The crosswalk lights still blinked red.  He ignored them.  When he got to the Blue Dragon Emporium, he went in through the front door for the first time in seven years.  The little bell chimed.  The hologrammic displays jumped into life at the detection of his approach.  But there was no sign of Chu Li, the proprietor, or any of his three children who worked there sporadically, more as a favour to their father than because they needed a job.  No one in the city needed a job.

Don had been wandering in a state of low-level freak-out, half suspecting that he was hallucinating: that he'd eaten the wrong mushroom (or possibly the right one) and was experiencing a dissociative vision.  Or that it was some kind of police sting to pull in out-of-towners and they'd leap out with tasers in hand and force him into the gestalt, like it or not.

Now, in the deserted shop, in the deserted Chinatown, in the deserted level of the deserted city, he had a complete, total, high-level freak-out.

He stopped screaming after a few minutes and started shouting instead.

'Hello!' he yelled, running out into the narrow street outside Chu Li's.  'Hello!!  Is there anyone out there!?'

His voice echoed between the towering blocks.  Was that an answer in the distance?  Or just a last, distant echo?

'Hello!!' he bellowed with all the energy he had.

Nothing.

Deep breaths, he told himself.  Deep breaths.  Calm down.  Think straight.  A whole city full of people doesn't vanish overnight.  Mind you, it was three months since he had last come in.  They could have all died from a disease, or been trapped and rounded up by aliens, or...  No, that was not a rational thought.

Don had met several proper nut-cases in the wild.  Fruit-loops who thought aliens from another dimension were reading their thoughts.  He knew some of his clients got off on thinking that all the outlaws were like that, but Don wasn't.  He didn't buy in to the city life, but that didn't mean he thought the urbanites were evil or wrong or corrupt... Well, not all of them, anyway.  But the point was, he was not a nut-job.  He could think straight and plan and, even if he couldn't explain things, he could do whatever was the sensible thing to do.  Probably.

Radio.

Of course.  He had a short-wave radio set in his backpack.  The batteries were dead so he'd not used it for a couple of weeks.  Hardly anyone used short-wave, these days, so the outlaws sometimes chatted on a few frequencies to stay up to date on where folks were and where the drone patrols were denser.  He usually charged it up when he came to town, but he could just plug it right into Chu Li's mains.

He headed back into the shop and went into the small office at the back where they usually did business.  Chu Li's place was a family thing.  It had been running, the old man said, for almost two hundred years.  He would keep running it just as long as people wanted weird stuff from a weird old shop, even though he spent half his day in the gestalt, like pretty much everyone else except Don and his sort.  There was an old mains induction panel on the wall and Don pulled the set out from the bottom of his pack and leaned it up against the panel.  The charging light came on.  It should be good to use straightaway, so he flicked it on.

'Ho there, brothers and sisters,' he began with the traditional outlaw greeting, 'is anyone out there today?'

Dead air greeted him.

'I've got an empty San Diego, here.  Anyone in town?  Anyone know where everyone's gone?'

It was normal to find no one on  air at this time of day.  Night time was when the outlaws got out their radios, if they ever did.  But all the same, the absence of response was somehow more unnerving than the silent city outside the shop.  He flicked to another frequency often used by outlaws.

'Ho there!  Ho there!  Am I talking to myself, here?'

Don took a deep breath and walked away from the radio for a moment towards Chu Li's ancient refrigerator, humming away in the corner.  He pulled open the door and saw, amongst the stacks of wrapped, unidentifiable and definitely suspicious meats, a block of cans.  He pulled one out, popped the lid and went back to the radio, taking a deep swig of sweet juice.

'Where the hell is everyone?' he barked into the handset, feeling foolish and afraid.  'Is there anyone out there?  Can anyone hear me?'

He sighed.  Now he thought about it, when was the last time he had seen an outlaw?  Last week?  The week before?  Days and dates didn't have a lot of meaning in the wild, so it all kind of blurred together, especially when he might sleep most of a day and spend a night hunting a few times.  It was one the things he'd always loved about it: not being on a tick-tock schedule like the gestalt workers, but just doing stuff when he damn well wanted to (or because he was hungry and short on food, or because the damn drones were up and chasing him again, of course).  But now it was hard.  He'd heard a shot, though, not two nights ago.  And he'd seen that guy with the fishing line down on the river when he'd been up high on the ridge, tracking that deer.  That had been, what?  Five days ago?  Something like that.  So he probably wasn't the last person on Earth or even in California.  Probably not.

Hell, he chuckled to himself, imagine if every other soul got raptured up to God's side but poor little Don Carter!  Wouldn't his grandmama be proud of that little accomplishment!

'This is Captain FinAcer of Martian Exploratory Vessel Caroline,' his radio barked suddenly, making him jump and drop his can.  He scrabbled for it before it spilled all over the floor.  'Please identify yourself.'

He grabbed up the handset.

'Oh, thank God!' he cried out, suddenly feeling the full weight of loneliness for the first time.  'What the hell is going on?  Where is everyone?  This place is empty!'

There was a long pause and he had time to process what the caller had said: "Martian Exploratory Vessel" - it was a spaceship calling him!  From Mars!  He'd always known there were people on Mars, of course.  He'd seen footage from the wars when he had been a kid.  But it had never really been a thing he'd worried about.  He'd seen the lights criss-cross the sky on a clear night, aware that they were vessels only in a vague and detached sense, never imagining the people on board them.

'This is Captain FinAcer.  Who am I talking to?'

Damn.  He thought.  This was getting a bit official for his liking.

'Ah... Jeff,' he lied.  It was hardly going to matter if they knew his name, surely?  'Where is everyone?'

'Jeff, where are you?' came the eventual response.  Jeff had a vague recollection from school that these signals took time to get out into space.  He guessed that might be it.  He figured it was OK to tell them where he was, at least.

'San Diego,' he replied, and then added: 'there's no one here.'

That was, after all, the important bit here, wasn't it?

'What do you mean there's no one there, Jeff?'

Oh, I'm an outlaw from the wild who's broken into a city when the owners were away... Yeah, that wasn't going to wash.

'I, um, came out of my apartment and there's no one here.  This place is empty.'

He wasn't sure how much more clearly he could put it.  It didn't sound like these guys had any more of a clue than he did.  Damn Martians.

'I guess that's not normal?' asked the Martian captain.

Normal??  An empty city!?

'In San Diego??  No!!' he screamed back at them, furious.  'Where are you?'

'We're about an hour away from Terran orbit, Jeff, trying to get instructions from Orbital Control.  Do you know what might have happened to them?'

Jeff stood up, threw his half-empty can at the wall and snatched up the hand-set again:

'What happened to everybody!?'

The hand-set was silent for longer, this time and he thought they'd gone.  But he guessed if they were as clueless as he was, maybe they were having some sort of conference.  I mean, he was a captain, right?  So presumably he must have a crew?

'Jeff,' came a different voice: deeper, more like an outlaw's.  'This is Colonel Colyn Gryre.  Do you know what Earth's plans are for Ammit?'

Whose plans for what, now?

'For what?' he asked, confused.  He was an outlaw: he barely saw a dozen people between brief visits to the city.  And now Martians were asking him about Earth's plans?

'Ammit,' replied the Colonel.  'The asteroid due to intersect in... about thirty minutes.'

Don's brain struggled with the sudden change in direction the conversation had taken.  He had begun wanting to just know where everyone had gone, but now this guy was telling him an asteroid was going to...

'Intersect?'

'It's going to hit Earth, Jeff, if no one stops it,' Gryre clarified.  'The Joint Council haven't told us their plans to intercept it.  Do you know?'

How the fuck was he supposed to know!  He wasn't wired into the gestalt.  He didn't get the daily news feeds pumped directly into his frontal lobe or whatever the fuck they did!  No one ever asked Don his opinion on how to run the goddamn fucking planet!

'What the fuck are you talking about!?' he yelled into the hand-set.

But Colonel Gryre had nothing to say.  The hand-set was silent.  Don waited several minutes before the Colonel's words filtered through.  They were expecting an asteroid to hit.  They were expecting it to hit in under half an hour.  Less that that, now, given the minutes he'd spent standing around.

Damn.

I mean, he had to go and watch that, didn't he?

He snatched up the radio without bothering to stuff it into his pack and ran for the door.  There was a shift tube at the end of street.  He didn't often go much further up the city.  Cops were scarce down here, but they got more plentiful the further up you went - drones, too, watching everything.  But there was no sign of any of them today.  He punch the keys to take him as high as the tube would go and felt the suspensor field pick him up and hurl him skywards.

As he broke free of the dense lower levels, he punched out among the soaring upper steps of San Diego.  They were lighter, brighter and more aesthetic than the reinforced supporting levels of the lower city and the sun, still creeping its way through mid-morning, was bright through the wisps of late summer cloud.  As he pushed past one glass-and-steel block, Don could see the sea.

He liked the sea.  He used to go down there in the summer, sometimes, and watch the surfers.  He would scavenge along the shore for whatever washed up of interest and camp out on the beech watching the sun set over the Pacific while he grilled fresh fish on a camp fire.  The drones didn't often head that far out, so it was usually safe.

He'd never seen it from this high up in his entire life.  The sun was behind him and threw a long shadow out onto the water of the thrusting towers of the San Diego citystate, but he could still see the shades of deep blues and greens.  It was a beautiful morning, up here.  Almost worth the price, he guessed.  Almost.

He popped out on a sealed walkway.  Any other day, he would have be spotted immediately, stopped, arrested, beaten up and dumped into a lower level apartment, his bags and weapons stolen and a gestalt jack in his neck.  But not today.  Today the holo-ads spun and sparkled for his attention alone.  The walkway was as empty as every other part of the city.

The radio-set in his hand suddenly barked into life again:  a woman's voice.

'People of Earth, if you can hear me, find shelter immediately.  A massive asteroid is about to hit your planet.  We fear the Joint Council has taken no steps to prevent it and we have no way to intervene.  The impact will be in the North-West Pacific Ocean in approximately ten minutes.  Find shelter immediately.  The deeper, the better.  Go to cellars, bunkers, underground parking lots.  Take whatever food and water you can gather in the little time you have.  Many of you will die.  Some will survive.  The people of Mars are coming to your aid.'

Take shelter?  Don thought about it.  He still had time.  He could get back down the shift tube to the lowest levels, grab everything he could form Chu Li's place or wherever and hunker down, wait it out and hope for the best.

Or he could stay just where he was.

North-West Pacific?  He probably wouldn't see it land, he guessed.  It's probably going to come down thousands of miles away.  But something like that, I mean, it's going to cause a hell of an explosion, right?  He'd see it from here.  What if there was no one else?  What if he was the only one - perhaps not alive, but who knew it was coming and was going to be stood right here to watch it happen?

Don picked up his radio again.  Maybe no one was listening, but it needed to be said.

'This is Don Carter, outlaw.  I am standing at the upper levels of San Diego city-state, waiting for an asteroid to collide with my planet from a place where I should be able to see it happening.

'If you can hear me, and you're afraid, you do what you've got to do.  Go find a deep place.  Take your food and your loved ones.  Hide out.  Stay safe.  I hope you're going to be fine.

'But I'm going to stay right here and watch this happen, because someone has to.

He paused for a few moments.  Then -

'I see a bright light in the sky over to the south.  I can see it coming.  It's brighter than I can look at, but I can see a black path of smoke or debris or something pouring out the back of it.

'Oh, my God.  It's gone already.  It was so fast.  I see a bright light on the horizon to the north west.  It's brighter than the sun.  It's already fading, though.  There's something...'

He paused, momentarily feeling as if someone was, actually, out there listening to him.

'There's something rising up from where I think it hit.  It's like... I was expecting a mushroom cloud, like the old nuclear war picture from school.  But, my God, this just looks like... It's like nothing I've ever seen.  It's like the Earth has jumped up to touch the sky.

'This is going to be bad, people.  This is going to be really, really bad.'