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Day Zero
Day Zero
Day Zero
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Day Zero

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They're here, but not for us...

When an alien race known as the Surge arrives on Earth with deadly force, three high school kids in Philadelphia find themselves fighting for survival in a city tearing itself to pieces in panic. Pursued through the heart of the horror shattering their ordinary world by creatures hell-bent on dragging them away to a fate they can only guess at, the teenagers must deal with their shock and grief at losing everyone they held dear even as they struggle to stay one step ahead of both the invaders and the forces of a wealthy corporation which seems to know more about the assault than it should.

Kyle's dad worked for the company. His last contact with his estranged, rebellious son was to send him a gift which could now prove the key to unlocking the aliens' plans, as well as giving the kids the means to fight them. With his friend Stef, whose own tragic past gives them an unlikely edge against the aliens, and street-smart runaway Alex, they're in a race where there's no prize for coming second.

If the three sixteen-year-olds are going to learn the truth, about themselves as well as the aliens, find out why the Surge came, and maybe determine whether or not humanity has any hope of holding them off, they'll have to trek of a thousand miles across country from the ruins of Philadelphia to the Gulf Coast and Kyle's dad's final posting.

But that's all in the future; right now they can't afford to look that far ahead.

First they have to get out of the city. First they have to survive day zero.


PRAISE FOR JOHN RICKARDS:

"A huge talent" - Steve Mosby (Black Flowers, The 50/50 Killer)

"Breathlessly classy" - The Telegraph

"One of the most talented and original voices out there" - Jason Pinter (The Fury, The Darkness)

"Smart and original" - Allan Guthrie (Two-Way Split, Kiss Her Goodbye)

LanguageEnglish
PublisherJohn Rickards
Release dateMar 27, 2015
ISBN9781507005095
Day Zero

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    Day Zero - John Rickards

    Copyright & Credits

    Copyright John Rickards 2012. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License. You’re free to share this work with others however you want, and to remix or create derivative works from it. Just give an attribution to the author, and don’t use it for commercial purposes. Enjoy!

    Cover image:

    Assets used under cc-by or attribution licenses from Philadelphia’s Skyscrapers’ by Mihai Bojin, ‘Cloud Stock 2’ by MarcelTH

    PROLOGUE

    1.

    Three weeks before the killing began and the world changed forever, two men on coffee break stared down at the choppy black waters of the Gulf of Mexico. They were watching the weekly supply boat undock from the drilling rig and slowly pull out of its shadow. A couple of blasts from its horn and it was away, off on the hours-long voyage back to Gulfport and civilization.

    One of the men hawked and spat into the ocean. Said, Can’t wait to be away from here.

    Not like you to get homesick, Frank. Hal Flint, the second of the two, had been hearing more and more grumbling from Frank and the others over the past couple of weeks. Not that he blamed them; Hal had worked for HV Exploratory for nearly twenty years, most of it on rigs like the Katie One, and this job was the weirdest he’d had.

    I ain’t homesick. I’m just done with all this bull. Hal saw him glance round like he was checking to see if any of the Blackshirts were watching them, even though they’d all be inside, probably clustered down in Recovery. They’d been flown out a week before for reasons Hal didn’t entirely understand. Clearly the rig had found what it was supposed to, and some kind of alert to that effect had passed through HVE to the parent company, ValTech, but why exactly the Katie One needed a bunch of security and high-powered suits who acted like they were Secret Service, no one had seen fit to explain to Hal. This isn’t any gas hydrate operation and you know it, Frank was saying. Everyone on the rig must know it. All these guys been working for the company five years plus. Gas hydrates my ass. You think about that at all? That it’s all long-termers, I mean. Not one new hire, not one guy hasn’t been with HVE since dinosaurs walked the earth. Not on the drilling crew, anyway. Don’t know about the boffins. How many times you seen that, Hal?

    Yeah, I know it, Frank. But what can you do? Company pays the bills, we just work the drills, you know?

    I’ve put a request back to Michaels, asking for a transfer. Buy myself out of this contract if I have to.

    He won’t do it.

    My sister’s got cancer, Hal. Someone’s got to look after her family while she’s in for treatment. Short diagnosis, too. Gotta move fast.

    Is that so?

    Stone tragedy, ain’t it? Frank finished his coffee, swore. Back to it, huh?

    Hal checked his watch, swore too. Yeah.

    He could see two of the Blackshirts now, up on the edge of the helipad, watching the horizon and the fast-disappearing supply vessel, assault rifles held at ease in front of them. The crew had never been told the official reason ValTech’s crack security people were out here; probably some bull along the lines of eco-terrorists or industrial espionage, but no one would’ve believed it anyway.

    The job was getting tight, had been all week. Orders coming down from on high with fewer and fewer explanations. Not that he wasn’t used to a certain amount of that, not with years in the game, but things were definitely getting weird. Like Frank said, there was no one on the drilling crew who hadn’t worked for the company since the year dot, and there wasn’t a man among them didn’t know that what they were doing was nothing you did on exploration work. They’d sent the first of the cages down that morning, and no one knew exactly what was going to come up in them.

    They’d find out in a few minutes, though.

    You should pull the same thing, Hal, Frank said as they left the walkway and climbed back down the stairwell leading into the working modules slung between the legs of the semi-submersible rig. He knew the schematics, and the Katie One had been built with further facilities below the waterline as well, but they were off-limits to him and the rest of the drilling crew. Diving support and ValTech oversight only; that was the rule. I’m telling you, this job’s screwier than hell.

    No kidding.

    So tell Michaels you got a family emergency. Get back onshore, go see your kids.

    His kids. Part of the reason he’d stuck with offshore work for so long in the first place, Hal knew, was that deep down he wasn’t sure how to handle having kids. Hadn’t been, anyway, back when Kyle was born. He’d talked to Mary about transferring to the office in Philly, getting a desk job nice and close, once he’d finished the contract he’d been on. Even tried it for a few uneasy months with a wailing toddler and a tired wife. She’d liked it, but it hadn’t come naturally to him, and when HVE had asked for him specifically on a sub-Arctic survey, he’d told her he had to take it, that they needed the money, and that this would be the last time. He didn’t find out she was pregnant with Rosa until a month later. His own father had screwed up by sticking around when he should’ve gone, and Hal had learned that lesson so well that he’d done the opposite, hating himself for it almost as much as he’d feared the responsibility of being a parent. Thing was, once you’d started running from your kids because they were young and vulnerable and terrifying, it was hard to stop when they were older and you didn’t worry so much. The way he thought of it, if you did, you’d have to admit to them that that’s what you’d been doing, and if you promised to stick with them and couldn’t make it, you’d only screw things up further. Hard thing to feel guilt and regret smother you utterly every time you thought of the two kids you loved, all just because they were yours.

    He could hear the lifting gear from two levels up. The massive winches and the couple of thousand yards of heavy-duty steel cable wound around them rumbling and squealing as the load beneath shifted in the currents. Closer, past the Blackshirt guard standing by the door to the upper moon pool, and into the white noise hiss of seawater streaming from the cable spool to vanish through the gap below, back to the foaming ocean surface. Men were shouting across the cavernous space, a hole open onto the sea fifty feet below ringed by a broad steel floor like an aircraft hangar with the bottom cut out. The air tasted of cold metal and salt.

    You see how much security we got for this? Frank muttered to him as they made their way down to join the rest of the crew.

    A lot.

    Got to be at least a dozen Blackshirts in here, Hal. They’re pulling a full shift for this. Why’d they need to watch us so much if this is just going to be rock we’re bringing up?

    Maybe it’s not us they’re watching. Let’s check in with Norton. Maybe he’ll let something slip.

    That they were bringing up anything at all was weird enough. You didn’t do that in exploration, or any other drilling. Cores on scientific survey work, which was what the company claimed was going on here: unusual shale strata holding gas reserves. But these weren’t cores. They’d gone through a few yards of sediment and then as soon as they’d hit rock all drill work had stopped. They’d pumped water down there at massive overpressure for a few days, then Hal and his people had been switched to maintaining power supply for the ROVs, helping lower diving support equipment — getting ready to use live divers at that kind of depth; what the hell was up with that? — and, mostly, setting up the cages installed on the seabed to be filled, they were told, with rock samples. Now the first batch had almost finished its trip up through a couple of thousand yards of water column and into the upper moon pool for sorting and examination.

    Under guard.

    Hey, Hal, Norton said, yelling to be heard over the machine racket. Your guys all set?

    Should be. How do you want us to sort this stuff? By hand, I guess, but what are we looking for?

    Separate by geology, then structure. We’ve got two strata coming up; some light igneous stuff, the shale-type formation underneath. Norton didn’t so much as twitch at what they all either knew or assumed was a lie. You’ll have three hoppers. Igneous in one, cutting shards and fragments with no obvious shape or morphology in another, intact crystalline or regular-shaped material in the last.

    Crystals? They can’t be hydrates though, can they; they’d evaporate at atmospheric pressure.

    I guess maybe it’s a different kind of structure. I’m not a geologist, Hal. I just pass on the orders. That all sound good to you?

    Sure, Nort. He heard the seawater suck and hiss below the rig as the first cage pulled free of the surface. We’ve got a lot of Blackshirts in here today. They got some kind of drill on?

    Yeah, some kind of drill, Norton said.

    2.

    The deck surrounding the lifting gear was a wall of noise as the cage finished its ascent and swung slowly towards where Hal’s team were waiting to receive it. The call-return of orders to Fer, working the crane, the blare of the warning klaxon and the ongoing rainstorm patter of seawater on steel. The men waited around the central workspace for the cage to discharge. There were two sets of hoppers for the separated results. The cage, fresh steel with an almost solid bottom pierced only by the bare minimum number of drainage holes, was still streaming as it halted in front of them. Inside Hal could see a jumble of rock, mostly pieces smaller than his fist. Some were black like obsidian, the rest were a rusty blood red.

    None of them bothered to ask him why they’d been picked for this sort of work; they might be skilled drilling engineers by trade, but labour was in short supply on the rig and you had to pitch in. Company paid, company ordered. That was the way it went and always had.

    Hal reached over and slid open the bolts holding the bottom of the cage closed. The base of it dropped in two and the jumble of rock inside sheeted across the workbench. He saw that while some of the blood red stones were splintered chunks like, as Norton had suggested, slate, other smaller pieces had angular, irregular shapes that looked almost deliberate. Faint veins of darker crystalline material spiderwebbed through them, glimmering and linear.

    His drill team started reaching for pieces, separating them out. Let’s get this done, guys, he said. Gonna be another cage before long.

    Why are they even bringing this stuff up, chief? Bryce said. He had his eyes on the haul, but his voice was low enough not to travel to the Blackshirts. Norton say anything to you?

    Nope. Nothing worth believing anyway. Just told us to split this stuff out.

    "We looking for anything special? I mean… rock… y’know?"

    He shrugged. Glanced at Norton. I guess we’ve gotta be, but they didn’t drop any hints.

    They carried on separating out the material in silence for a while. Eventually, Frank said, Like hunting for bargains at Christmas for the kids, right, Hal?

    I wouldn’t know.

    Mary had gone easy on him in the end. The divorce papers had arrived when Kyle was four. She’d made him promise to write to them, to see them when he could. And that was how it was. He knew he hadn’t been a real father to them, that he was little more than a stranger in their lives, but he tried.

    Frank’s offhand comment and earlier griping had put him in no mood to work; he felt properly goddamn miserable thinking about the kids, same as always. He shook his head and grabbed the next hunk of stone in line, and part of it squirmed free under his grip.

    The shard that had detached from a crack in a palm-sized oblong rock was small, half the size of a credit card and about as thin, shaped like a leaf. Pretty, too; up close, the crystal veins mapped out fine lines and angular swirls created by some geological process that was beyond Hal. As he brushed its surface with his thumb, deep sea phosphorescence flickered in its wake, a momentary blue glow along a tiny complex street map of whatever bottom-dwelling bacteria, now surely dying, clung there. Pretty. The team were busy with their own jobs. The Blackshirts weren’t paying him any attention; they seemed to be more at ease now the cage was empty. Before he’d thought much about it, Hal had slipped the little slice of strange deep sea rock into his pocket as he tossed the larger chunk it had come from into the hopper.

    Bargains for the kids.

    3.

    Three weeks after they’d started bringing up material from the sea floor, Hal was on the gantry, watching the dot that was the supply boat vanish over the horizon again. This time he was alone, with just a couple of sea birds and the ever-watchful Blackshirts on the upper levels for company. The boat’s captain was a guy called Harcourt, someone Hal knew from previous jobs in the Gulf. The week after he’d taken the chip of rock, a week it had spent hidden in the sole of one of his spare shoes, he’d snuck Harcourt an envelope containing the stone and a letter for Kyle, and asked him to smuggle it off the rig and mail it when he got to shore. They were under strict instructions not to discuss work on the Katie One in personal correspondence — rumor had it email was checked before sending, and he had no reason to think post in the regular mail bag wasn’t opened by the Blackshirts or someone onshore before it was sent either — but the hell with it. He’d hoped it might impress his son a little, something so strange from so far under the water. Like having your very own piece of moon rock.

    Damn stupid thing to say, he realized now. Like Kyle was still four years old. Jesus.

    No one from the company had challenged him at any point, but he’d waited for the boat the following week, gut tingling, to see if Harcourt was still its captain or if he’d been mysteriously replaced. But there he was, just like always. Tipped Hal the wink and went about his work. The cages stopped returning from the bed a few days after. Norton just said the dive support teams were doing survey work.

    He finished his coffee and went back below to the maintenance bay. Bryce was giving Frank some instructions when he arrived. Two of the cranes were rumbling, swinging metal containers across the chamber, while Fer wheeled welding gear into place.

    Hey, Hal, Bryce said, yelling to make himself heard.

    What’ve we got now?

    Orders from On High. You were on break so I got started without you. This stuff came in on the boat. Got to put together a gas-electric cutting platform they think can hold the pressure at two-kay plus depth, then wire it in and drop it to the bottom.

    Why?

    Bryce just shrugged. Guess that’s it for any more pretend hydrate baloney, Frank said. Can’t torch-cut rock.

    Guess so. But as soon as they started hauling that stuff off the bottom I figured they knew that we knew it’s bull.

    Odds on this being a military contract? What do you want to bet they’re chopping into a downed sub and all that stone was just bottom crud it got buried in? Christ. We’ll be lucky to get off here without being fried by the rads when they start dragging the nukes out of it. Probably why they had us check the rock; maybe they were worried about leaks.

    They could check that by examining the water around it with an ROV. You’re not thinking straight, Frank.

    Yeah, Bryce said. Even if it was, say, some seamount dropped on a boat full of fun toys and we had to dig it out first, what’s to say this is military? You’d think if we were doing this for the government, it’d be government guys with guns working security detail, not company Blackshirts. If they’re taking a sub apart down there, ValTech’s doing it by itself.

    Why?

    None of them had an answer to that. Not a good one. After a long moment watching the cranes work, Hal said, Well, let’s at least pretend like this is a normal job and get back to it, huh?

    Then the whole rig started to shake violently, kicking from side to side hard enough to fling Hal into a wall and send the others flying. Over the crashing of machinery and heavy cargo being tossed around like trash and the sound of men screaming, Hal could hear the emergency sirens blaring, far too late to be of any use. Dazed, he saw Frank thrown onto the sheared steel of one of the upper gantries and hang there with it sticking out of his chest like a spear. He wondered, for a moment, why the roof would have busted downwards like that if there’d been a breach in the lower hull or the buoyancy chambers. Then the rig’s metal shell tore to shreds around him and all he could hear was a roar like a hurricane sea as he was swallowed by the violet-tinged darkness.

    PART ONE

    4.

    Night on Courtland Street, and distant traffic glittered on Market Street Bridge. Kyle Flint pressed back against a wall in the Philadelphia dark, waiting for the rentacop beyond to finish his circuit. In his head he saw the route up and across the rooftops, like climbing a set of giant steps towards his final destination, two blocks and fifteen floors away. Up on to the ledge running above the entrance to the community bank he was crouched by. Up again via the cornicework at the end of the building, then a jump onto the drainpipe. No touching any windows, no setting off any alarms, or else this’d all be over real fast. From there, he could kick off, out and down, over the boundary of the neighboring derelict property and land on the boarded-over shell that covered whatever work had taken place on the grounds before it was abandoned entirely. The former department store had access to its own subway beneath the

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