Zero day code, p.10
Zero Day Code, page 10
part #1 of End of Days Series
It happened quickly. His rage always boiled over like that.
He pushed Yolanda out of the way and used the same fist to break Omar’s jaw with fast, looping roundhouse punch. A set of dentures flew out of his mouth, which was pretty fucking funny, and they both went down like bags of wet shit, Yolanda tripping over her fat feet. Omar groaned loudly all the way down, until his head hit the concrete floor and he stopped making any noise at all.
Somebody screamed, but whether it was a man or a woman Jonas couldn’t say.
Couldn’t give a shit either. He turned and walked for the exit.
Canada was only a three- or four-hour drive away, a straight shot north on Interstate 5, and he had a third of a tank of gas in his pick-up. He probably didn’t want to risk the main crossing at Blaine. Border control had hardened up in the last of couple of years. It started after 9/11 of course, but weirdly enough it got much worse when the stupid cheese tariff war got out of hand.
Whatever.
He’d gas up, head a few miles east, and take one of the quieter, unguarded roads into British Columbia. Jonas had a temper, he knew that. But he was not an irrational man. There’d been nothing to keep him here as soon as Tamoreau pulled out that file. He would go, but he’d be damned if he’d go on their terms. Jonas Murdoch was not some broken soyboi who would be put down without a fight.
People were coming out of their fugue state around him. Some were staring and pointing. Others hadn’t seen him hit the two supervisors and they either ignored him or shrugged in theatrical helplessness.
Whatcha gonna do?
He was gonna haul ass is what. He had four hundred bucks on his PayPal from Centurion tee shirt sales and merch and shit, and a couple of hundred more in his Amazon account from affiliate fees and royalties off the manifestos. It would be enough until the podcast paid off, and that couldn’t be long now. Not after the epic reveal he’d recorded in yesterday morning’s pod. Not with Tucker fucking Carlson and Cernovich sniffing his ass, like two dogs checking out the new arrival in the park. He could hold out.
The day was bright and hot outside, but it was a clean heat, not the thermal brutality of broiling alive inside the giant oven of the uncooled warehouse. Jonas stopped just outside the door and took a moment to savour the relative cool and quiet. The sirens were muted out here. Nobody was shouting. The air seemed much fresher and even crisp with the possibilities for redemption.
It took nearly half an hour to drive two blocks because the lights were all out and some idiot had T-boned a Mister Softee van at the intersection of Butte and Third. Cell reception was shitty enough to be useless, so Google Maps could show him he was locked into some monster ass traffic jam, but not how to get out of it. The entire grid was red and it wasn’t updating.
Jonas’ surprisingly good mood at having quit his terrible job and made a giant fucking bonfire of all the bridges behind him quickly soured as the traffic delay dragged on.
He didn’t need long to close down his ops here. He always—always—had a go-bag packed and ready. Not because he was some Deep State conspiracy fiend. A man didn’t need to believe in a shadowy unseen, unelected government to be wary of his freedom. The government they had was plenty oppressive enough, right out in the open. Having just punched out a couple of fools he’d be lighting up their threat boards soon enough. He couldn’t afford delays.
Jonas checked the phone again.
No reception.
He thought about mounting the sidewalk and going cross country, but that’d definitely attract the attention of any cops nearby, and besides even the side roads were heavy with slow moving or stationary traffic.
Finally, he gave in and turned on the radio.
Jonas never listened to commercial radio if he could avoid it. Most of the FM dial was filthy with rap. Talk radio, even conservative stations, simply served to remind him how lethally fucking stupid most people were. (Especially the conservative stations, if he was being honest). And the incessant consumer babble of advertising enraged him so much he’d once cracked the dashboard by hammering at it in fury over a thirty second spot for anti-depressants.
The cure for depression, he knew, was action. Not serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
With great reluctance he turned on the AM receiver and searched for a news broadcast or traffic update. It didn’t take long.
Pretty much every station was live with chatter about some internet outage which had brought the city to a stop. Horns blared around him and the sun flashed off car windows and metal trim. The pick up’s air-conditioning struggled in the heat as Jonas flipped around the dial, looking for usable information. He finally had to settle for the NPR affiliate, which was just starting a run through of southside traffic conditions before going to a news bulletin about the nation-wide outage.
Jonas practised his deep breathing techniques while he sat in the cabin and listened to a bunch of a yammering idiots panic about not being able to Uber up a pizza. Amazon Web Services had probably fallen over, he thought, and indeed one of the NPR cucks confirmed as much a few minutes later. But they went on to say that most of the internet’s backbone in the US appeared to have been ‘filleted’ over the previous twenty-four hours. Eventually the net had not been able to route around the points of failure and…
“He we are,” Jonas muttered.
Just before the engine of his eighteen-year-old F-100 blew up.
11
My First Drink In A Year
Rick had never seen Mel wear anything other than exercise gear before. Dressed for their date – it had to be a date, right? – in boots, a light summer dress, jewellery and make-up she looked a different person. Stunningly so, to his eye, but less… What?
Capable? No.
Sporty? Butch? No, that was just stupid. Even sweating in leggings and an old T-shirt there was still no ignoring her very feminine grace.
No, that wasn’t it. He understood as he watched her bending over to scratch Nomi behind the ear that she had gone to some effort in prettying herself up. For him. Every other time they’d met, they had met as colleagues, sort of, and she had been dressed for work. But more importantly than that, her entire focus had been on the kids or the other clients she was training. She didn’t just do school groups. One self-defence class she’d run in the big function room at the Bretton Woods clubhouse was just for retirees. A club member has asked her to do it after hearing from his granddaughter about the classes Mel had run for her prep school.
Now as she stood up and gave Nomi a final pat, Rick could see that she had refocused. On him. He felt himself inspected and judged as her eyes scanned quickly up and down his own outfit; brown suede boots, pressed khaki drill pants, and a collared shirt in a light blue check. He was suddenly as nervous as a green recruit on his first parade.
“You scrub up all right don’t you,” she said. “What are we going to do with Nomi?”
He faltered again, slightly unbalanced by her compliment, and noting the way that she had asked what ‘we’ might do about his dog. It was just a form of words, a simple thing, but he felt that she had somehow drawn a small invisible circle around them. Rick had not often felt himself included in anything since he left the Army. He had not wanted to be included.
Nomi was sitting on her hindquarters, her tail wagging feverishly. She was panting and smiling in that way that dogs do when they anticipate that a caper or a treat might be in the offing.
“She likes to sit out on my front porch at night,” Rick said. “She’ll wait.”
“I brought her a bone, if you’ll let her have it,” Mel said. “It’s, like, pretty big, it should keep her amused for a couple of hours.”
Rick smiled at his little friend.
“Did you hear that girl? Would you like a bone?”
Nomi’s tail wagged even harder.
“I think that’s a yes.”
She followed them out into the warmth of the early evening. Mel had driven her pickup truck, a battered, dusty-looking Toyota. It was parked just outside the gate to Rick’s small front garden. He appreciated that she was careful to close the gate behind her every time she passed through it, even though Nomi was too well trained to take off on her own. Man and dog waited patiently, both curious to see what came of this. Mel fetched something that looked like a dinosaur femur from the tray in the rear and held it up in offering. Nomi whimpered, but she did not move. She looked up to Rick, who said, “On credit.”
Nomi whimpered a little louder.
“On credit.”
She started to tremble and looked like she might even bark.
“Paid for!”
The dog barked, which always set Rick’s nerves just a little on edge, but he was getting better about it. That was one of the things Nomi was helping him get over. The dog leapt high, turning a full circle in the air before bounding over to Mel, who tossed the bone a few feet away. Nomi fell on it.
“Is that just a cool trick or some sort of super dog training thing?” Mel asked.
“It means she won’t take bait from a stranger,” Rick explained.
“Did you teach her that?”
“That one was mine, yeah” he said, closing the front door behind him and heading out through the little gate to where Melissa waited on the other side of the fence. He took a small, weatherproof padlock from his pocket and used it to secure the gate as he left.
A cool breeze coming up off the river rustled leaves in the trees overhead. The killing heat of the summer past had eased off a bit in the last week or so, for which Rick was grateful. When the humidity got up like it had been of late, and the mercury hovered in the high 90s at the end of the day, he would sit in his shorts on the front porch and drink gallons of water as the sweat poured out of him. Not quite the look he was going for tonight.
“Is she going to be okay? Like, really?” Mel asked, giving Nomi a worried look as they climbed into her pickup. “She could jump that fence pretty easily I reckon.”
Rick nodded.
“She could, but she’ll still be here chewing on that bone when we get back. I guarantee it. She won’t eat my tomatoes or dig up the basil plants either. Nomi,” he called out in his command voice. Instantly the dog attended to him. “Stay and guard.”
She barked, as if acknowledging the order.
“That is one smart dog,” Mel said, turning the key in the ignition. The engine rumbled to life and they pulled away from the cabin.
Morty’s was an old-fashioned steakhouse about fifteen minutes east on River Road, just before the Stoney Creek turn off, heading north. The short drive did not take them out of the Virginia countryside, but Rick knew that the edge of the outer suburbs wasn’t that far away. If Mel stayed on this road, they would reach Bethesda in half an hour, and DC proper a little ways after that. That was plenty close enough for him. The properties out here ran to acreage, and the vehicles parked in the lot outside the steakhouse tended to fall into two categories; expensive SUVs without a droplet of mud to stain their highly polished grillwork, and expensive pickup trucks with a few artfully splattered droplets of very expensive designer mud here and there to let everyone know that the owners were serious about their rural pretensions. Parked in among them, Mel’s old Toyota stood out like a junkyard dog at Crufts.
She gave no sign of caring or even noticing.
They took turns choosing the music on the way over. Not that there was time for more than three or four songs, but Rick took his choices seriously. He didn’t try to impress with his knowledge of what was hot or happening or any of that shit. He had no idea and hadn’t for a long time. He just played a couple of his faves. An old blues number by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee. And Luke Bryan’s “Little Boys Grow Up and Dogs Get Old,” which made Mel a bit teary. She gave him a backhanded smack on the shoulder for being an asshole and messing up her eyeliner. Except she pronounced it ‘arsehole’, which he thought very posh, and she sort of laughed while she was snuffling and hitting him.
He didn’t recognise her tunes, but they were okay. A funny one, he thought, about a girl who got in trouble and so ran herself a bubble bath. And some shouty, punchy sort of rock-rap anthem about a girl gang which ‘boy, you wish you could join.’ He was tapping his suede boots in time to the chorus when they pulled into Morty’s. The sun was down now, and the restaurant’s parking lot was three quarters full already. Mel cut the engine and with it the music and the air-conditioning. As they stepped out of the cabin, the lingering heat of the day fell on them like a warm, wet blanket.
She stopped and turned to him as her feet crunched down on the gravel.
“Hey, you’re not vegetarian are you?”
He stared at her.
“Vegan,” he said flatly. “I only came along to feel superior. But if there’s veal, I might have to get difficult.”
He maintained his poker face until she said, “Just for that you’re only getting celery and a wheatgrass juice.”
He had the ribeye, medium rare, and a bottle of pale ale from the Caboose Brewing Company. “Because,” he explained, “they have a happy hour for dog owners at their brewery, and there’s free treats. Also, the beer is good.”
He raised his mug in a toast and Mel clinked her champagne flute against it. Now that he was here, and settled in, and he had a cold beer to hand, he had finally started to relax. He’d never eaten at Morty’s—couldn’t afford it—but he heard folks at Bretton Woods talking about it every now and then. It looked like a secret lair for James Bond villains from the 1960s. It was all exposed rock and rough-hewn timber and groovy looking furniture like you saw on Madmen. The music sounded like old school lounge classics, but he realised after listening to a vaguely familiar tune that it was all stuff like Guns & Roses and Metallica played by some soft jazz combo. He thought that was pretty funny. The menu ran to hundred-dollar cuts of rump, and Rick really wanted to try the goose fat fries, but Mel had insisted that she’d be paying, and he didn’t want her to think he was taking advantage. He let her choose the fries and he had a basic T-bone.
Then she chose the goose fat fries anyway, bless her.
“How many of those do you think you can have and still drive?” she asked when their drinks had been served.
“The beer?”
Rick held out his glass and examined it, as though it might come with a warning label.
“Don’t know for sure, but I do know I can drink a couple of normal beers and blow through a breath test. Why?”
She smiled and held the champagne flute to her lips, taking a sip.
“Because this,” she said, “is my first drink in a year.”
“Whaaat?” Rick went, his expression comically surprised, and then a little too quickly, he asked, “Are you falling off the wagon tonight?”
Mel laughed loud enough to draw the attention of all the Bond villains and heavy metal jazz fiends at the tables around them.
“No,” she smiled, and her eyes sparkled in the candlelight. “No. I broke up with a fella just over a year ago. My husband, actually. A Yank. And it was pretty bad break up, but I had to do it. He wasn’t good for me. I came out of it a bit of a mess. I was kind of fat…”
“No way!”
“Yep. Like a telly tubby. You get them here? And I was just sort of down on myself and life. So I made a few changes. I needed to lose the weight and a good way to start was cut all the booze out of my diet. We drank a lot. So I decided to give myself a year off. And here I am, a year later. Cheers to me. I am Melissa Baker and this is my story.”
They clinked glasses again and Rick found himself smiling at her easy way with words. She’d just dumped a couple of chapters of her life story on him and it felt like a she was just recalling a funny thing that happened to her on the way to the grocery store. Where they had met, of course.
“You don’t look like you’ve ever been fat,” he said. “You look amazing, Mel. Seriously. How’d you do it?”
She leaned forward as if to whisper.
“Top secret,” she said. “I ate less shit and burned more calories.”
“Whaaat?” Rick said again, purely for comic effect this time.
“And I didn’t watch TV. I just read books or worked out. And I didn’t date. So I had no arseholes negging me into feeing bad about myself. And then I met a nice fella and I thought, you know what, I reckon I’m good to go again.”
Rick’s heart stopped for a second.
“You met someone?”
She laughed, pointing at him.
“You. I met you, Rick. Omigod the look on your face just then. I like you, mate. That’s why we’re here and I’m having a drink again. I know you like me. Girls always know. But we been getting up close and real personal now for over a month on those practise mats, and you’ve been a complete gent. You never got bumpy or grindy or even a little bit handsy. So, you want to go out or what?”
He was stunned. Speechless. Not at getting called out like that. She was right. He did like her.
But he had never before been fronted like this by a woman.
A gay guy once tried it on, and Rick had been very courteous but very clear.
No thanks. Not his thing.
“I… I…”
“You should probably say yes,” she grinned. “Because you want to, and because I will totally walk out and leave you to pay if you don’t. And those goose fat fries you’ve been inhaling are pretty fucking spendy, darlin’.”
He knew that she was joking and that was all he needed to know.
She was funny. And she got him.
“Yes,” he said. “I would like to go out with you, Melissa.”
“And here we are,” she said, winking at him at and taking another sip of her champagne. “Going out.”
It was an almost perfect first date, except for two things. After twelve months of green tea and mineral water, Mel got absolutely hammered on three champagnes and a frozen margarita. That didn’t matter so much. As soon as he knew there was a chance he might have to drive, Rick switched to soda. He tried to order a Coke, but the waiter told them they were out. The delivery truck hadn’t arrived. Again, no biggie. The only other hitch came as they were leaving. Mel was leaning against Rick, swaying slightly, her arm linked through his for support. She offered up her credit card to pay for the meal and again the waiter apologised but said it would not be possible.
