Zero day code, p.30
Zero Day Code, page 30
part #1 of End of Days Series
“We have to go.”
The foggy tendrils of sleep started to drift apart. Was that Ellie she could hear through them?
“Babe, I’m sorry, but we have to go.”
It was. It was Ellie. She was home. For the briefest time Jody enjoyed the warm comfort of knowing everything was right in her world. And then the jagged edges of the day just gone pierced that moment and everything fell apart.
“What?” she said. “Where?”
Ellie sat down on the bed next to her. She was holding her phone, using it as a torch. Ellie had it pointed down at the floor, but enough of the beam leaked up to light the curves of her face.
“Baby, we’re going to go to Damo’s boat. You’ve been there before. At the yacht club. Things are a bit crazy and we’re going to get away for a couple of days. Until they calm down.”
Jody eased herself up. The painkillers she’d taken earlier had backed off the headache and a lot of the muscle and joint pain from her mugging that morning.
Or was it yesterday? Wait. What?
She was mugged!
How could she forget that? And then everything she’d forgotten came back in a rush.
“Omigod, Ellie! That guy. Troy. We… he…”
“Karl shot him, yes. He’s dead, Jody. He had to,”
“And Chad, what happened to Chad?”
Ellie looked almost annoyed to be asked. She got that line between her eyes. The one Jody called her ‘Fuck you’ line when she was in a mood to tease her.
“Chad ran away,” Ellie said. “He’s fine. Or, you know, as good as it ever gets for Chad. But we need to go, Jodes.”
Jody whispered, worried about waking Maxy. Especially to hear this.
“Because Mister Valentine shot Troy?”
“No. Because Mister Valentine’s gonna have to shoot a lot of other people if we don’t go now. It’s serious, babe. We’ve been talking about it for hours. Damo’s here. He’s been checking the radio in his car. It’s the only news we can get. There’s riots and everything.”
Jody started to shake her head but stopped at the spike of pain that caused. She breathed in carefully.
“There’s riots cos of Troy?”
She was having real trouble following this. Her thoughts went around in circles like the little paper planes on the mobile she’d made for Max and hung over his bed.
“No,” Ellie said, forcing herself to be patient. Jody recognised the tone of voice. “The city is fucked up. The radio said there’s going to be a military curfew tomorrow. Like for reals. They’ll shoot people for breaking it. We’ve gotta get out now, while we can.”
None of it made sense. Jody squeezed her eyes shut for a second. Everything was the same when she opened them. Her camera bag had been stolen.
No. Those cops got it back.
She hurt all over, but not as much.
The paper planes still turned in the dark over Maxy’s bed.
“Shouldn’t we just stay here then?” she said, thinking it sounded like the smartest thing she’d heard all week.
“Jodes, we’ve got almost no food in the house. The grocery stores are going to be empty by tomorrow. For sure. There’s like food restrictions and rationing already. And people are just ignoring them. Fucking motorcycle gangs have been robbing 7-Elevens and shit. But for groceries, not money. We gotta go. It’s just for a while. Until shit calms down.”
Ellie played her winning card then.
“It’ll be safer for Max on the boat. If Chad comes here, he’ll have that fucking shotgun with him and he’ll be full of ‘roids. And probably waving that stupid sword around.”
That did it.
“I need to pack,” Jody said.
“You don’t. I did it all while you were sleeping. Maxy’s stuff and yours. We just need to go. Damo and Karl are in the car. His car. It can go cross country if needed.”
“Cross country?”
“Parks and shit. Come on. I can take Maxy. He’s too heavy for you. You’re hurt.”
Jody conceded that at least. She didn’t know how long she’d been out of it. Hours, it felt like. And the sleep had helped. Having Maxy had helped. But she was still hurting and she didn’t trust herself to carry the little boy anywhere. Ellie gave her the phone to hold and scooped Maxy up without waking him. She was very strong. Jody had once seen her carry a whole side of beef.
Jody led the way because she had the phone with the torchlight.
It felt wrong, sneaking out of the house like this, but she couldn’t be here if Chad came around. Thinking of her ex-husband meant thinking about the moment his roommate’s brains had splashed all over the street. Jody turned away from those thoughts.
Instead, she wondered at the fireworks she saw as they left the house. And then she realised it wasn’t fireworks. It was an actual fire. A big one, nearby, sending great orange tongues of sparks into the night sky.
The sky over the city was a dense and vivid black, seemingly darker than normal but also lit with stars that were luminous diamond hard points of brilliance. It took her a moment, but she realised that she could see so much more of the night sky because the city was largely blacked out, except for those fires.
Now they were out of the house, she could make out at least five separate blazes.
Ellie closed the front door and gently steered her down the path towards Damo’s car. There were fewer cars parked in the street tonight and she wondered briefly why. Had they left town too?
Karl appeared from around the other side of Damo’s Lexus and opened the rear door. He was such a lovely man, she thought.
And her mind’s eye filled again with the image of Troy’s brains exploding out the back of his head.
She shivered.
Max stirred in Ellie’s arms as she lifted him into the middle seat in the rear of the SUV. Karl climbed back into the front next to Damo. He had the radio on but turned down low.
“Hey Jodes,” he said. “Long day, mate.”
“Very long,” she agreed, taking her place next to Max. Ellie took a seat in the back, on the other side of the car. They pulled the doors closed and Damo drove away.
“I’m gonna steer clear of the main routes,” he said. “We can take residential streets most of the way there.”
And they could, but they still had to cross a dozen or more major roads as Damo slowly hauled north towards the Golden Gate. Every time they hit a major crossroad, they struck cars piled up bumper to bumper. Damo waited for ten minutes at the first intersection, where Jules crossed Ocean near the Target they sometimes shopped at. Finally, muttering lots of Australian curse words, he simply pushed into the traffic, flashing his head lamps and leaning into the horn, which woke Maxy, but not for long. He burrowed his face deep into Jody’s arm and went back to sleep.
Damo scraped against another car as he forced his way through the tangle, and Jody flinched, expecting him to start shouting. But he just ploughed on, reaching the other side and the relative quiet of a dead-end street. Jody wondered if they were stopping or picking somebody else up, but no. Damo drove to the end of the street, turned left, mounted the gutter and smashed through a small picket fence. Karl chuckled. Ellie swore quietly. And Damo drove through another fence a few seconds later before emerging onto a very quiet street lined with dark, expensive-looking townhouses.
Jody saw a few torch beams and candles through the windows, but no flickering TV screens or other lights. They were deep inside a very wealthy looking suburb, and over the next few minutes Damo followed Karl’s directions as they wound through curving avenues and avoided cul de sacs and swerved around some cars which had simply been abandoned in the middle of the road. There were very few people out here, not like there had been in the afternoon, and Jody wondered if they had left or simply shut themselves inside their homes.
It would normally take about twenty minutes to drive from their home to the Golden Gate. Maybe another four or five to get to the marina where Damo kept his boat. Three hours after leaving Oceanview, they finally pulled into the parking lot at the yacht club. Two men in uniform stopped them at the front gate, but Damo showed them a membership card and they waved him through.
“Were they soldiers?” Jody asked.
“Nope. Private security,” Damo replied. “Looks like we weren’t the only ones with this idea. I’ll bet those blokes are earning triple time and cash in hand.”
The parking lot was full of cars just like his. Big and expensive. Most were locked up, but a few people here and there unloaded boxes and coolers from their vehicles, carrying them down to where the boats were moored. Jody had no idea how many yachts and cruisers normally stayed here. This was not her world. But she could see that two thirds of the berths were empty. The marina’s offices were lit up and staff worked inside. She’d bet that didn’t normally happen. They’d be people like her. Normal people, not rich. Nobody was going to pay them to work at four in the morning. Not normally.
But this was not a normal night.
Ellie took Max again. He woke briefly, cried for a while, and went back to sleep, snoring softly against her shoulder.
Karl helped Damo unload half dozen big boxes from the rear of the Lexus.
“I hit up the storeroom at work,” he told Ellie, quietly. “Gave all the keys and codes to Sandino and said the staff could take what they needed, too.”
She mulled that over.
“We’re not opening again are we,” Ellie said at last.
“Don’t reckon so, mate. Come on. Let’s get aboard and get moving.”
Nobody asked Jody to carry anything, and she felt a bit useless and left out, but there wasn’t much she could do. Those boxes Damo had loaded were huge and it took both he and Karl working together to hump most of them down the jetty and onto the boat.
Jody had been on this boat once before. At a Christmas party for the restaurant.
To her, it looked huge and ridiculously opulent. There were four bedrooms. More than she and Ellie had at home. The kitchen was bigger than they had too, and the lounge, or the chill-out pit or whatever you called the main living space on a yacht was full of white leather lounges, a room that filled her with dread at the possibility of Max getting loose in here with a Magic Marker.
She put him to bed in the room Damo showed her, the biggest one on the boat.
When Jody objected, he said, “I got nobody to share with, so it makes sense for you guys to take this one. Besides, I’m gonna be driving the boat for a bit, showing Karl how it’s done so I can eventually take a rest.”
Jody didn’t object too hard. There was a massive television and a separate bathroom with a real tub. Ellie appeared at one point with two backpacks. She lowered them to the foot of the bed, smiled at Jody and turned to leave again. She stopped. Turned back, hurried over and threw her arms around Jody, but gently. They hugged even more gently and Ellie kissed the side of her neck.
“I’ve got to help get us out of here, babe,” she said. “But I’ll be back.”
“It’s okay. Go. I’ll look after Max. Make sure he’s down. Do you think I could have a shower?”
“You should totally do that. You smell real bad,” Ellie teased. That ‘Fuck You’ line between her eyes was gone.
Ellie kissed her once more, deeply this time, and hurried back to the upper deck. Jody’s heart swelled again watching her go.
She tucked Max in under the covers and took a shower with the door open so she could keep an eye on him. He didn’t move.
The water was hot and came out of the shower head under pressure. This boat was like the hotel Ellie had sprung for on their first anniversary. Jody wondered if they would ever get to live like this, but it was a silly thought. Damien Maloney did not make his money from the restaurant. That was how he spent his money. Running a restaurant and owning a boat.
She remembered then that all of his money has disappeared and her heart lurched to think of it. She stayed under the shower for another minute, just to calm down. Damo didn’t seem fussed about the problem with his bank anymore, though. Maybe he’d sorted it out. Or maybe he’d found other things to worry about.
She finished showering, towelled off and opened one of the backpacks. She dressed in a pair of cargo pants and a white shirt. Max snored behind her. As she was pulling on the shirt the boat engines started and a minute later, she felt the deck shift under her feet as they backed out into the bay.
Jody couldn’t find the light switch and decided it would be better to leave them on anyway. If Maxy woke up he would need the lights. She didn’t like to leave him alone, but he was deeply, profoundly asleep. He had always been a champion sleeper.
She would risk stepping out of the room for just a moment, she decided. She wanted to see the city as they pulled out. She wished she had her cameras.
All three of the others were in the wheelhouse when she came up, their faces lit by a panel of illuminated dials and screens. Damo was at the wheel, Karl and Ellie on either side of him. He was talking in a low voice as they motored slowly away from the marina.
Damo turned the boat around, affording her a sweeping view of the northern headlands, Sausalito, Alcatraz and Oakland.
She knew then that Ellie had been right to make her leave.
She had seen the city from the water many times before.
But she had never seen it like this.
Burning.
30
A Legion Approaches
Jonas woke early and alone. Tomi Yates, the local hottie who’d cock-teased him so hard in the bar last night, hadn’t circled back around for another stroke. But one of her friends had and she was almost as hot. He’d been tempted. Jonas had been spanking it out for weeks. Figured until yesterday he was for sure gonna get some from one of those sweet-ass Dutch girls who just started at work. Maybe even both.
Because they fucking rocked out to Xurious, man!
But that wasn’t gonna happen now. And he had reason to keep everything tidy here in Silverton. Twenty-five thousand reasons. So, he’d been courteous and sociable, and he’d even stood Tomi and her girlfriends a round of shots later in the evening, which he insisted on paying for with his own money. Or Mikey’s money, if you wanted to be an asshole about it. But he’d kept a sober head, and laid no more traps for himself, and a long time before the last customer filed out of Big Al’s, Jonas Murdoch had already retired to his free room and masturbated vigorously in the shower, before crashing out to sleep the sleep of the just, and perhaps the newly wealthy. He still couldn’t get online. Cell reception up here in the mountains was shit, but he knew he had to make some money out of the Pendleton traffic. Even if it was just tee shirt sales at the website. Twenty-five large though. That was a minor fortune, certainly enough for a new start, and at this point in his life he could use one.
Waking sober and hassle free, he thought, was fucking amazing. Seriously, the trouble you could avoid if you took five minutes to jack off instead. As he dressed in a pair of shorts and a tee shirt, pulling on his runners, he resolved to jack off every day he was in this Podunk town until he got his reward money. Or it became obvious he couldn’t get it, without running too great a chance of arrest.
He did resolved to push as hard and as fast as he could to lay hands on it, though. He didn’t want to be here too long. That shit in Seattle yesterday, and all the madness in the news, that couldn’t last. Eventually things would settle down and the cops would be looking for him again.
Because he wouldn’t be riding today, and there was no gym in town as far as he knew, Jonas wanted to take a light run back down the route he’d climbed on the bike yesterday. A couple of miles would do it. His legs were stiff and sore, in dire need of a stretch, and he’d have to keep his cardio up for when he rode out again. After the run, he planned on taking his breakfast at Big Al’s. No sense in turning down hospitality. Then he’d find him some free, anonymised internet somewhere and check in on the pod and the site. And his PayPal account. There had to be some extra in there. He was also gonna polish up his legal research skills. Not to go after Disney and Pendleton this time. He wanted to learn as much as he could about claiming federal reward money. And whether any outstanding warrants for assault and petty larceny might interfere with that.
As he dressed, Jonas cursed his stupidity in not giving the sheriff a false name yesterday, but not for long. That was crazy thinking. Despite having meant to do it for years, he’d never set up a false identity, apart from The Centurion of course, and he was certain the feds would want ID and legitimate bank deets before they’d pay out any reward on Morena.
He took a piss, made sure he had the room key with him, and left the cabin in the pre-dawn cool. It was deeply, almost eerily quiet up here in the national forest. No traffic yet on the one road through town. Assholes down in the city were probably still sitting in that monster fucking pile up. He snorted at that. Even if the cops were chasing him right now, they’d have to do it on foot, huffing and puffing the whole way. Probably stopping for a revitalising donut at every 7-Eleven and gas station they passed too.
Feeling as though his luck had finally broken good, Jonas eased himself into a gentle, almost shuffling run out on to the main street of town. He groaned at the sweet pain of working muscles that he’d pushed to near exhaustion yesterday and allowed himself some quiet pride in the strength and fitness he’d worked so hard to build over the last few years. It had saved him yesterday, escaping Seattle. Repaid the investment of hard training when he’d tackled the beaner. And it was a plain and genuine pleasure to be out in the clean air, feeling his own potency.
He picked up the pace after a minute, the soles of his Nikes—stolen from the warehouse, natch—slapping on the pavement as he jogged past the site of his heroics. The crowds were gone and the cash machine had shut down. Move along citizen. Nothing to see here. He was the only person up at such an hour and he was able to run out in the middle of the road, rather than dodging around street furniture and other obstacles on the sidewalk, which was littered with paper rubbish and food refuse, the detritus of the previous day’s mild anarchy. Jonas didn’t imagine a tourist trap like Silverton would let its public areas run to seed, but he conceded that the day had got out of hand. Preoccupied with his own headlong flight, he hadn’t really turned his mind to what any of it meant. If he was still at home, still hauling boxes for Amazon, he would’ve recorded a piece for The Centurion, riffing on the imminent and inevitable triumph of a real American uprising.
