Zero day code, p.25
Zero Day Code, page 25
part #1 of End of Days Series
She checked her watch and cursed.
She was already running two hours late and she had no way of contacting Rick.
Rick was an hour in session with Doctor Cairns. Nomi too, of course. The first thirty minutes he simply unloaded all of the shit he couldn’t possibly dump on somebody else, especially not Mel. Not if he wanted her to stick. For another twenty minutes the two men discussed specific actions Rick could take to deal with his feelings of powerlessness and the occasional terror it inspired. Cairns was a good counsellor. Probably because he’d done two tours of the sandbox as a corpsman, way back in ’03 and ’04, before spending his GI benefits on med school tuition. Rick could talk to him as fellow combat vet, not just a headshrinker. The final ten minutes they discussed Nomi and the support dog program, all while the black Labrador happily wagged her tail at his feet, fully aware that she was the subject of their conversation. Cairns’ office was quiet and enjoyed a view over the gardens that was only slightly marred by the intrusion of a staff parking lot. As always, Rick Boreham left the session feeling like a heavy pack had been quietly lifted from his shoulders while he sat and talked with the psychiatrist.
Outside of Cairns’ office, everything had gone sideways.
“What’s going on?” Cairns asked as Rick paused at the door.
The hallway leading back to Combat Stress Recovery was eerily dark and Rick wondered if he’d somehow lost track of time, until he realised that half the lights were off.
“Not sure,” Rick said. “Looks like a brownout or something.”
Cairns came up behind him and stuck his head out into the corridor.
“Hmm? That’s weird. I’d say we’re running the genny. You’re my last appointment this morning, Rick. I’ll come with you. See what’s what.”
The two men and the dog walked through the CSRC, which was even quieter than before because it was empty. The Combat Stress Recovery Clinic had never been empty on any of Rick’s previous visits. This wing of the facility was always hushed. Tranquilized rather than tranquil, Rick thought, but now it was wholly empty. Even the ghosts had fled.
They could hear voices in the distance, however, and found a heavy crush of visitors and staff in the general admissions area where Rick had earlier seen the old guy in the Iwo Jima hat. Neither the vet nor his young carer were still there, but more than a hundred people were jostling for position around a single television, suspended from the ceiling. Somebody turned the volume up, just as Rick and Doctor Cairns came in, allowing them to hear news of the attack on US Naval facilities over the growing ferment of the gathered onlookers.
“… Casualties are said to be light, but damage to ships and aircraft is extensive according to reports from the scene…”
The room stirred and the ruckus rose to drown out the whatever the news anchor said next. Nomi pushed her head into Rick’s side, sensing his anxiety. Doctor Cairns placed a hand on his shoulder and squeezed.
“It’s a long way from here, Rick. And not your concern anymore. You’ve done your part. Now breathe.”
As if responding to an actor’s cue, Rick performed the breathing exercise Cairns had taught him when they first met. It helped. But he was the only one in the room who calmed down. People started shouting for everyone to shut up, so they could hear the news. The screen cut to vision of what looked like a riot at the White House, or maybe a rout, with Marine One taking off from the lawn and popping countermeasures as it went.
“Holy shit,” Rick muttered. “That’s not good.”
The crowd of vets only got rowdier and he felt Cairns tugging at his elbow.
“Come on, let’s go.”
Rick allowed himself to be led back into the VA facility, where the shrink led him two floors down in a stairwell marked ‘Staff Only’. They emerged in the parking garage. It was just as crowded as earlier, but now everyone was trying to get out rather than in.
“Can’t help with the traffic, Rick,” Cairns said apologetically. “But you’ll get home sooner if you go now. You look after him, girl,” he added for Nomi’s sake, giving her a quick pat and a scratch behind the ear, which she took as being entirely her due.
“Thanks, Doc,” Rick said uncertainly. “What are you gonna do?”
“Go back to work, I guess,” he shrugged. “I can see my schedule filling up fast.”
They shook hands, and Cairns told him again to just go home and chill out.
“Don’t watch the news. Don’t be checking Facebook or anything. See if that new girlfriend of yours wants to binge-watch Netflix.”
Rick tried to smile, but he was already worrying about Mel.
It took him fifteen minutes to clear the underground car lot, and as soon as they made the open road, he checked his phone.
He had one bar of AT&T and that dropped out as soon as he tried to call her.
Damn.
Rick stopped himself reaching for the button to turn on the radio.
Cairns was right. There was nothing to be gained by plugging into rolling news coverage of whatever had happened or was happening right now. It would only aggravate him and fuel his anxiety which had come roaring back.
Instead, he popped a CD in the player—his truck was that old—and let Kenny Wayne Shepherd soothe his ragged nerves. Thunderheads were slowly piling up on the horizon, big purple suckers tinged with green, but the sky above the road was still a hard cerulean blue. He tried calling Mel again.
No luck.
“Okay girl,” he said to Nomi, who sat in her harness on the passenger seat up front next to him. She panted happily as the black ribbon spooled beneath their wheels. “The doc is right. Right? This changes nothing. There’s always some shit in the news and it’s never good. That’s what makes it the news. I say we grab Melissa and go get us some quiet time by a lake somewhere. That sound good to you?”
She seemed to smile wider.
“Me too, then. Let’s go.”
He fed some boot leather to the accelerator, hoping to get ahead of the storm.
He had Mel’s address in his phone and written down in the notebook he carried with him because his memory had not always been reliable after getting mortared in Anbar province. He would drive to Mel’s place. Pick her up as arranged. And if the traffic meant driving to the lake without stopping in at home to grab his own bags then so be it. He would bathe in the lake and get around the cabin buck naked.
It was warm enough, and after this morning he didn’t think Mel would object.
25
A Killing In The Outer Mission
“All of it?” Ellie asked. “No fucking way.”
“I think so,” Jody said, and it felt strangely like a confession.
Karl was driving. He wore his baseball cap and his zip up jacket. Ellie insisted Jody sit up front next to him. Her neck and back were so sore she could barely turn around to talk with her girlfriend in the back of the Honda, and when she did, Ellie waved at her to turn back and face forward. Ellie had climbed in behind Karl on the driver’s side to let Jody push her seat all the way back.
“It sounded like the bank lost their money,” Jody explained.
“Sounds like the banks lost everyone’s money,” Karl put in. Late afternoon traffic on Alemany was slow, but at least it was moving, unlike the solid ribbon of rubber and steel seized up both ways on the 280. Karl had no trouble turning his head to address Ellie. At that moment they were stopped outside the Shell on the corner of Alemany and Geneva. They hadn’t moved in three minutes.
Still better than the 280, though.
“Maybe we should pull in and get some gas,” Jody said. Her thoughts had been flitting around like that, like the path of a butterfly through an open field, except that rather than dancing from buttercup to daffodil, her imagination ran from a violent rape in some metalhead’s torture basement to wild, runaway fears of Chad driving off with Maxy and disappearing forever.
“I’m gonna call, Damo,” Ellie said. “You might be right about gas. We’ve been stuck in this traffic for three hours. We’re gonna empty the tank just running the AC.”
“On it,” Karl said, and without waiting for further instructions he pulled the wheel over and eased them out of the near frozen traffic and onto the tarmac of the filling station. “Er, how will I pay?” he asked as they pulled up at the pump, but Ellie had already passed a twenty dollar note over the back of the driver’s seat. She also ignored all of the warning signs about using cell phones while fuelling up, and Karl said nothing about it.
Karl was a professional driver, Jody thought. If Karl thinks it’s okay to use the phone here, it must be. And then her butterfly mind lit on the giant red and yellow logo for Shell and she remembered the time they had taken Maxy hunting for seashells at the beach and she imagined Chad walking into the ocean with Max and walking and…
“Jodes! You good?”
It was Ellie. She was back and they were moving, but not towards Alemany Boulevard.
“Got a break on Geneva,” Karl explained cryptically. “We can get through to your ex and your little boy quicker this way. I don’t trust the GPS. Reckon the Chinese or the Russians put a big spoon in and given it a stir. They been giving plenty of things a touch up it seems.”
It was scary, Jody thought. All of this craziness. And now people were talking about war. She’d started the day with a nice photographic job to do and Max to look forward to when he came back from his visit to Chad. And now? Everything had turned to shit.
They proceeded down Geneva Avenue at a walking pace and Jody stared at all the people out on the street. It was still ferociously hot outside. That’s why they were running the air in the car so cold, and even so it was struggling with the three of them in there. It was lucky she’d met Karl, she thought, because she couldn’t drive after…
“Shit.”
Jody Sarjanen cursed herself for being so weak minded. She couldn’t hold a thought for more than a second. Maybe she shouldn’t have had those bubbly wines.
“Why is everyone out in this heat?” she asked.
Karl frowned at the question and she saw him looking for Ellie in the rear-view mirror.
“Busy day, babe,” she said. “For everyone. Let’s just get Maxy and get you home. There’s no work tonight. We’re not open.”
“I know that,” Jody said, a little peeved. “I already told you that.”
She stared out of the window. She couldn’t help but think that all of the people out there, and the guy who’d stolen her cameras, and the trouble at Ellie’s work, that it was all somehow part of the same thing. But she just couldn’t piece it together.
“Oh,” she said. “Did you talk to Damo? Did he find his money?”
Ellie reached forward and squeezed her shoulder as Karl eased the Civic around the corner onto Cayuga Avenue. It looked like a carnival. So many people out on the sidewalk with all of their things. It was like a street party. People had moved furniture and clothes and TVs and everything out there and were piling it into the cars and onto trucks, but Karl was a very good driver and he somehow picked a way through all of them.
“Damo’s gonna come over, babe,” Ellie said. “He’s paid everyone in cash from the safe at work. But he’s coming by our place after that to pay me and talk about some things.”
For some reason that information seemed familiar to Jody.
“Damo’s nice,” Jody said. “He swears a lot. And he shouts. But he’s Australian.”
“Baby I think we need to get you to a doctor.”
“I’m good,” Jody said, as Mister Valentine actually drove up onto the footpath for a little ways to avoid some people who started pushing and shoving each other when some other people dropped a big TV set on the road. Jody heard it crash to the ground and the shattering of the screen and it did not sound good at all. A lot of things were getting broken today.
The Honda bumped down off the gutter on the other side of the argument and Karl was able to speed up for a short distance because so many people were running towards the fight that it actually cleared the road ahead of them.
“I saw a doctor, didn’t I, Karl?”
Mister Valentine shook his head, but not unkindly. Not like he was scolding her for getting it wrong.
“No. That was Mister Burés, Jody,” Karl explained. “He’s a pharmacist, not a doctor.”
“Oh.”
“I think you might have some concussion,” he said. “I seen plenty of that in the war. You got a headache at all? Double vision?”
“A bit,” she admitted.
“Yep. Concussion. I knew you shouldn’t have had them drinks.”
“Did Damo get his money back?”
Karl looked for Ellie in the rear-view mirror again. “What do you want me to do, Miss Ellie?” he asked.
Jody was about to protest that they were going to get Maxy because nothing else mattered, but Ellie went on to say, “We’ll get Max first, and then get Jodes home to rest” and Jody loved her more fiercely in that moment then she ever had before.
“You should just lay back a ways and close your eyes, Miss Jody,” Karl said. “We won’t be long now. Best you not be staring into the sunset anyway. It’ll make your headache worse.”
“Okay,” Jody agreed, and she lay her head back.
She felt Ellie’s hand on her shoulder and she fell asleep.
When Valentine pulled up outside of Chad Moffat’s place, Ellie thought about letting Jodes sleep through the handover. She was in a bad way and they were going to have to get her to a doctor, which was probably going to cost every fucking dollar that Damo had promised to drop by later that evening, and Ellie was seriously fucking freaked out by where this day was headed.
It had already swirled down the toilet, but the toilet seemed to be hooked up to the cesspits in one of the lower levels of Hell. She’d thought things couldn’t get any worse than the fucked-up ICE raid this morning, and then someone had turned on a radio while cleaning up the kitchen and the bullshit had really piled up. She’d ordered one of the dishpigs to find a music station or throw the fucking radio in the bin. Fucking banks collapsing and war in the Pacific. It was insane. She could understand why people were getting out of the city while they could.
“You want me to come in with you, or stay here and keep an eye on her,” Valentine whispered.
Ellie managed a small, faltering smile for him.
If they were in Hell, they’d picked this guy up as some sort of angelic traveling companion along the way. Jody was like that. Always attracting stray dogs and lost souls. It could be annoying but having spent the better part of the day with Valentine now, Ellie was grateful for his presence.
“Thanks, man,” she said. “I can handle this asshole on my own. She’s had a worse day, and she’s messed up. I don’t want her waking up on her own in the car. And she needs the rest, so maybe if you stay with her for now.”
“Roger that,” Valentine said.
She almost expected him to salute, but he didn’t.
Chad lived in a dead-end street that ran right up against the rail line tracking alongside the freeway that formed the northern boundary of the Outer Mission. The traffic noise was a constant snarl, drowned out every ten minutes by the roar of goods trains. It was a garbage dump for a garbage human and she hated that Jody’s kid had to spend any time here at all. But the law said he did, and so she climbed out of the hatchback, thanked Valentine again for his help and patience, and steeled herself for an encounter with Chad.
There was no doubt the asshole was home.
His stupid van, covered in more Chad than any sane human would ever need or want, was parked outside of the rundown, single story bungalow which he shared with two other ‘health professionals’. Some crazy fucking lap dancer turned ‘tantric therapist’, and a CrossFit mental case who rarely ever got to the Box because of all the injuries he did himself every fucking time he turned up there.
Ellie stalked past the grinning oversized image of Chad on the rear of the van— ‘Nothing tastes as good as Chad feels’— and pushed through the open gate onto the overgrown, weed-choked front yard. She could already hear the thrashing music and automatic gunfire of whatever stupid Xbox game this douchenozzle was playing with Max. It didn’t surprise her at all that, unlike the rest of the city, Chad Moffat wasn’t throwing a change of clothes and bag full of tinned food into his car and heading for somewhere, anywhere, less likely to get nuked by the Chinese.
Most times, Chad barely knew what day of the week it was, and then only because some app told him to “SMASH IT OUT FOR GLUTES DAY BRO!”
He was not a keen student of current affairs.
Ellie marvelled at the noise of so many honking car horns and sirens drifting down from the freeway, loud enough to be heard over the racket from inside Moffat’s place. She climbed the front stairs, a weird one-and-a-half step arrangement that always wrong-footed her. The front porch was so crowded with garbage bags and rusting pieces of gym equipment that there was only room for one person at a time up there. She didn’t bother ringing the doorbell. It didn’t work.
She hammered at the door.
“Moffat!” she yelled. “It’s Elizeh Jabbarah. I’m here for Max.”
Nothing.
She hammered at the door again.
Still nothing.
The late afternoon sun, still murderously hot, slanted in from the west, baking her on the stoop. The garbage bags, some of them untied, some split and spilling their contents, smelled worse than the back alley behind the worst restaurant she’d ever worked in. Thick black clouds of flies buzzed loudly around them.
“Motherfucker,” she muttered.
She was about to take a short weight bar to cut a path through the bushes that grew wild down the side of the house, when the door opened and a small boy looked up and said, “Hi Ellie.”
Max. She barely heard him over the music.
