Zero day code, p.18
Zero Day Code, page 18
part #1 of End of Days Series
What Tammy did know was that she and Roxarne had very little food at home. And about thirty-eight dollars between them. Payday was at the end of the week; she planned on a big shop for Saturday. But looking around the crush of people backed up at the registers here, Tammy Kolchar knew that she’d never make that trip. This place would stripped bare in an hour or two.
And she knew the truck wasn’t coming.
Mister Gutterson had said so.
When a man entered the store cradling a shotgun, Tammy made a snap decision. She rang the button for the manager one last time, waited, rang up another irate customer, and emptied the twenties tray when the drawer slid open. One smooth, unnoticed motion was all it took to commit grand larceny. She closed her drawer and spoke up.
“Sorry folks, I’m going to take a break. Be back in five.”
Wynette glared at her with axes in her eyes.
The crowd groaned and few people protested, yelling at her to stay and serve them. Tammy ignored them all.
With a pounding heart and a pocket full of cash, she left the Dollar General, pushing through the close-packed crowd and out of the sliding doors. She walked directly to her Olds, fired the pig up, and drove away.
She was going to get Roxarne and the kids and pile them into the car and drive west for her brother’s place. He had a farm.
Tammy wasn’t smart.
She wasn’t a deep thinker.
But for some reason it seemed vital that they get on the road and away to Michael’s place as quickly as possible.
She never returned to the Dollar General, or Dillonvale. A small food riot started soon afterward when the guy with the shotgun couldn’t get what he wanted and loosed a round into the asbestos roof tiles to emphasize his disgruntlement with the service. The Sheriff never did show up.
No one missed those twenties she swiped either.
18
A Carnivore in Silverton
There was no run on the US banking system, until there was. The three cell phone notifications that caught James O’Donnell’s attention in the hallway of the Eisenhower Building were spam texts spoofed up as news alerts from The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and The New York Times. They contained links to dark-mirror sites which almost perfectly reproduced the content of the legitimate news services, updated every thirty seconds, but with one major difference. The dark-mirror sites all reported as their lead story a run on six major US banks. They even had ‘live’ video of customers waiting in long lines to withdraw their cash. (General Chu’s merry pranksters used archival footage from the 2008 financial crisis and a Spanish bank collapse in 2014 and although the ruse was called out on a reddit thread within forty minutes, and The New York Times itself an hour later, the correction made little difference. All the clicks went to the hotter links, and the collapse of America’s banking system was white-hot clickbait.)
The spam text, blasted out of a server in eastern Europe which had previously been used for Russian mafia phishing scams, arrived within seconds on more than a hundred and sixty million cell phones in North America alone, including the thousands of employees of the three targeted media companies. The alarm within the Journal, the Times and Bloomberg was immediate, but management soon determined that their own servers remained secure. All three refreshed their home pages to publish stark, unmissable warnings about the spoofed text messages and phantom websites.
It made very little difference.
If any.
Within five minutes, a Google news query would return more than five thousand hits on search strings built around phases such as “US banking collapse” and “run on the banks”. Most of those stories simply cut and pasted the text from the mirrors. Within half an hour there were more than ten million new results for the same Google search and by late afternoon, when Jonas Murdoch peddled his roommate’s stolen bicycle into the small town of Silverton, on Woods Creek Road, about eighty miles northeast of Seattle, there were long lines snaking outside the Wells Fargo branch and a local savings and loan called Farmers Mutual Provident. Smaller groups clustered here and there at cash machines, and it was one of those crowds that brought him to a halt when two men got into a fight which spilled out onto the road directly in front of him.
Jonas had been riding hard all day.
He was fit, strong and most importantly he was young. He worked out. He’d worked hard in that goddamn warehouse, and he had the spectre of the law on his heels to keep him peddling when his thigh muscles started to burn on the long, uphill stretches of road reaching into the heavily wooded hills outside of the city. There was another three or four hours of good daylight ahead, another forty or fifty miles he could put between himself and what he’d done back in Seattle, as he enjoyed a gentle, curving glide down into the main street of Silverton. He was tempted to lay up there for the night. Spend some of Mikey’s money on a room and a hot bath, because he was sure enough gonna need the rest and a long soak before he put his ass on the road again in the morning. But Jonas was no dummy. The cops would not prioritise his simple assault and robbery, but if by some bizarre fluke they decided he was public enemy number one, it wouldn’t take them long to work out how far he could get on Mikey’s wheels. Best answer to that was to go further in another direction. He’d already laid a few breadcrumbs heading south, paying for a bottle of water with his credit card in a gas station back in the city—they’d had to use one of those old slide machines to take an imprint—and buying protein bars at a Wholefoods a few miles further south. He made sure the security cams got a good look at him there, in a collared business shirt and jeans he took off in a blind alley a few minutes later.
Then he turned the bike around and headed north past miles of gridlocked traffic.
Jonas had never intended to stop in the small logging town. He judged it as being way too close to the scene of his crimes for comfort. The map apps on his phone had all frozen, but he had a pretty good Rand McNally road map of Washington State folded up into his go-bag. He’d already circled an obvious tourist trap village near a lake with a bunch of camping grounds another two hours further on. This time of year, there'd be a lot of traffic through the place. A lot of new faces and transients like him every day. Probably a lot of sweaty guys in spandex, rocking $3000 road bikes too. That was a crowd he could blend in with. Unfortunately, the crowd outside The Farmers Mutual had other ideas.
There was only one road into Silverton, two lanes of blacktop hugging the side of a steep, thickly forested hill that fell away hard on the downslope. With his core temperature raised by hours of cardio and some real tests of strength through the steeper climbs into the foothills of the National Forest, Jonas was grateful to be able to coast down the dip in the road and let the relatively cool, pine-scented mountain air wash over his face and exposed arms. It was such a pleasure that he even thought about stripping off the slightly too small riding vest and letting the breeze of his passage play over his upper body. Would have been nice. Didn't happen, though.
What did happen in rapid succession was; he passed a hand-carved timber sign at the town limits, announcing he was about to enter SILVERTON, POPULATION 485; he realised he was going way too fast coming into a built-up area, and he applied the brakes just a little too hard; the front wheel started to wobble as he lost his balance; the gentle curve of the road shortened into a much tighter turn; and he suddenly found his path blocked by dozens of pedestrians who'd spilled onto the tarmac from the pavement in front of a two-storey brick building to which even more people appeared to be laying siege.
Jonas barely avoided crashing into them, by veering left and mounting the grass verge on the other side of the road in front of a vacant lot. His front wheel hit the gutter and almost threw him over the handlebars. He managed, but only just, to effect a full stop without coming off, and shaking a little from his second shock of the day he climbed off the bike.
It took one look for him, like everyone else, to be transfixed by the sight of two men fighting. Or rather, the sight of one guy beating the hell out of another. Unlike everyone else, however, he didn't remain spellbound by the violence. The guy doing all the punching, and some kicking, and a little bit of elbow work (Muay Thai-style, just to spice things up) was easily as young and fit as Jonas. He was also pretty obviously some sort of gang banger. He wore jeans, motorcycle boots, and a white wife-beater singlet that was soaked with sweat and splattered here and there with dollops of blood. Not his own. He was covered in tattoos, but not with sleeves of nicely inked Celtic designs or tribal motifs, or even old school conventional skin work. His arms and shoulders and neck and face crawled with crude designs in blue-black prison ink. Jonas had no idea what sort of crew this asshole ran with, but he recognised the species. He'd been a lawyer in Miami after all, the major US entrepot for the Mexican cartels.
And the guy this dude was beating on? Well, he didn't look like he was quite ready to retire to Miami, but he wasn't far off. An older guy, overweight, balding, and clutching a plastic shopping bag to his chest like a kitten he was trying to rescue from a house fire. He probably wouldn't have been able to defend himself anyway, but by holding onto that bag, by curling around it like it was more important to him than his own life, the old guy made it ridiculously easy for the carnivore to go wild on him.
All of this, Jonas took in between one thumping heartbeat and the next. Already angry and looking to punish someone, he was off his bike and charging – literally charging – at the gang banger, before his heart had a chance to beat again, or before his common sense told him to ride on. Jonas wasn't being a hero. He was not a white knight. Jonas Murdoch was pissed at nearly crashing his bike and nearly breaking his neck. But more than, oh so much more than that, he purely and simply hated those taco eating motherfuckers.
His boss in Miami? Fucking Hondo? The reason he'd been disbarred and barely escaped doing time? The reason his wife had left him, and he couldn’t see his kids anymore? A greasy fucking beaner.
The cop who come after him? Same thing.
Both of them as crooked as a dog’s back leg.
Subscriptions to his pod always surged whenever he unloaded on these assholes. Not like they’d spiked this week, of course. But he’d have wailed on them anyway, even if nobody was listening. Same way he’d have charged in like a raging bull, if he’d come around the corner and seen the same jacked-up Mexican beating on someone’s old grandpa.
It was the right thing to do.
Jonas closed the distance between himself and the two men in about four or five strides, a long enough run up to really to put some speed behind his considerable mass. Everything seemed to move impossibly slowly. He felt as though his senses were both heightened and dulled in different ways. Sounds reached him as though through a thick blanket and the edge of his vision greyed out, even as the colours popped vividly in the centre. He’d played a lot of football in high school. Been good enough for a half-scholarship to law school, too. Not a great law school, no, but affordable because of his football. And it all came back to him, ten years later. He had no training in the martial arts. Had never done so much as a single boxercise class. But he stood six-three and topped out the scales as a heavy weight. Less than twelve percent of his body mass was fat. Jonas Murdoch was a solid fucking wedge of hard packed American beef and when he hit that loose meat tortilla, he blew through the motherfucker like a hurricane through a trailer park.
Dude didn’t even see him coming. Not many did, except for a couple of kids who captured his whole thunder run and head-high tackle on their phone cams. The rest of the crowd was still frozen with bystander paralysis, but they reared back as though struck by a shockwave when Jonas smashed into the perp and knocked him flying clean through air and into a lamp post. He heard a sort of sympathetic ‘ooh’ as everyone heard the sick, wet crack of bones breaking against the cast iron pole. Barely slowing in his forward momentum, he drove on, legs pumping, fists clenched, and he connected a second time, smashing his knee into the gang banger’s upper torso.
If he was being honest with himself, Jonas would admit that he hadn’t been much of a lawyer. He lost most of the cases he fought and defaulted to talking his clients into pleading out most of the time. Truth was, they were either guilty as charged, or they were guilty of something they hadn’t been charged with. None of them were a loss to polite society when they disappeared inside America’s gigantic correctional labyrinth. One thing he did learn from reading hundreds of briefs of evidence, though; street violence was Hobbesian. When it happened it was always short, nasty, and brutish. Most criminals, especially drug addicts, were animals. If you got into a fight with one of them, you either put them down, or you suffered for your weakness.
Jonas was not weak.
He drove another knee into the gangsta’s face, and rained a windmilling frenzy of blows down on his head and neck until something broke the spell hanging over the crowd and a couple of men found they still had a pair on them and pulled him off the limp, unconscious form of the…
What? What was he? A Mexican. A Colombian? Did it matter?
As Jonas passed through the red rage that had taken hold of him, he became aware of his surroundings again. Panting for breath, his eyes stinging with sweat that blurred his vision, he could hear cheering. And clapping, and he flinched away a little, expecting to be tackled to the ground himself by the local sheriff who must have just turned up.
But somebody pressed a bottle of cold water into his hand, and someone else had an arm around his shoulder and was leading him away from the bloodied ruin he’d made of another man, and the cheering got louder and he realised at last that the cheers were for him.
He was the hero.
A police siren whooped and Jonas almost ran. He was still jittery from the near accident on the bike, his head roaring and his blood singing with the madness of real violence. He was not thinking straight. But the adrenalin backwash also robbed him of strength and when he took a step his legs folded up underneath him. He was quickly surrounded and held up by onlookers.
“Whoa there big fella, take it easy.”
“Sit him down give him some air.”
“Over here, give him water. We got some water.”
A little dazed he let himself be led to a wooden bench and lowered on to the seat where somebody fanned him with a magazine and someone else splashed cold water over his face. He realised he was still wearing the bike helmet and he tried to take it off, but again he was overwhelmed by helpers and he let his hands drop and somebody undid the plastic latch on the chin strap and the helmet came off and his head felt as though it might float right off his shoulders.
More cold water came, this time poured directly on top of his head, and it was glorious.
Gradually his wits returned and he got his breathing under control and the crowd parted as a great round barrel of a man in a brown sheriff’s uniform came at him, but with his hand out as if to shake, and a smile creasing the corners of his eyes.
“Thank you, son, thank you very much,” the man with the sheriff’s badge said and Jonas wondered if he’d come off the bike and hit his head. Perhaps he was lying on the road hallucinating all this, as his brains leaked out of his shattered skull.
But the crowd, which had closed in around him, parted again and a second man, the old guy he’d…
Well Jonas had saved him, he guessed.
More helpers half-carried the old guy over to the wooden bench. They gently lowered him to the seat, and he was splashed with cold water, and a woman in a doctor’s coat, like a real white lab coat, kneeled in front of him and shined a torch in his eyes and waved a finger in front of his face, asking the guy to follow it, while Jonas watched on dumbly before she did the same thing to him.
“This one is fine,” she pronounced of Jonas, “But Al’s a hell of a mess. Concussion for sure, maybe some broken ribs and I really don’t like that swelling in his face. Where’s the other one?”
The sheriff snorted at some joke she’d just made.
“He’s cuffed in back of my cruiser, Doc. Mac is looking him over.”
“Yeah well,” the doctor shot back, “as thorough as I’m sure Deputy McFarland will be, Dave, I’ll thank you to let me do my job with him too. You can hang him later.”
Sheriff Dave didn’t look too happy with that idea. Looked like he wanted to sort out a hanging right now, but he didn’t object, and the woman in the doctor’s coat said she’d be right back. She pushed through the press of people still crowding around the bench, none of them really proving to be of any more help than they’d been during the fight.
Jonas felt a hand squeeze his arm. It was his neighbour on the bench. His grip was weak and shaky.
“Thanks, big fella,” the old guy said, although now that things had calmed down some, and he could get a good look at the dude, Jonas guessed him to be somewhere in his fifties. So not that old. He looked a lot closer to death because he’d just had twenty years punched out of him.
“What the hell was that about?” Jonas asked. He was voice was croaky and he gestured for a drink to a young woman holding a bottle of water. She gave him the bottle and said “You keep it, dude. You were awesome.”
“I was taking my money…” the man on the bench said, but he got no further.
“‘Fraid I’m gonna have to ask you to put a cork in it, Al.”
It was the sheriff. What had that lady doctor called him? Jonas couldn’t remember. He was still buzzing from the fight and his thoughts zipped around crazily, like fireflies in a bottle.
“Fella saved my life, I reckon Dave…”
That was it. Sheriff Dave.
“And you can buy him a steak dinner for his troubles later, Al,” the sheriff went on. “But you all are witnesses now and that asshole that Doc Cornwell’s checking over in my squad car looks like he’s seen the inside of a courtroom before. Let’s not give him a chance to walk out of the next one because you two compared notes.”
