An alarm blared in short, piercing tones.
Nio sat stirring the lukewarm coffee and peering out the windows of the dim office for the Agent Quinn, who was no doubt rushing to her location. Next to the door was a decade-old public service poster urging everyone to get their annual vaccine. It dated from the early days of the contagion and was full of implicit threats. Unlike comparable posters from a century before, which urged discretion—Loose Lips Sink Ships!—this announcement suggested it was better to report on the neighbors:
SILENCE SPREADS DISEASE
REPORT ALL CASES TO YOUR
MINNESOTA CMC OFFICE
The door at the back of the motel office opened and an Indian man appeared.
“What the hell?” he yelled at Nio.
“Nice underwear,” she said, taking a sip.
“You think it’s funny? I thought the building was on fire!”
He strode around the counter to berate her as Quinn burst through the front door, half asleep. He wore nothing but a T-shirt and boxers. Both his legs were missing below the knee. In place of bare feet were a pair of studded rubberlike soles, each attached to a 3D titanium lattice in the rounded shape of a human foreleg. The interior was completely empty. His phone was in his hand. It also emitted an alarm, similar to that from the bracelet but out of phase with it, and the two together were quadruply annoying. He turned them off with a few quick taps.
“Thank you, sir,” Quinn said to the manager. “I’ll take it from here. I apologize for the inconvenience.”
The man looked back and forth between them. He was furious, but Quinn’s height was putting a damper on it. “You’re going to let her get away with this?”
“I apologize,” Quinn repeated softly. “Everything’s under control. Thank you.”
The man looked flummoxed. He wanted to argue, but Quinn’s size was a clear deterrent, and he disappeared through the back door, grumbling.
Agent Quinn collapsed into a chair and rubbed his face. He yawned. “Jesus,” he mouthed in the middle of it. “What the hell?”
“I get headaches. I couldn’t sleep.”
“So you wanted to make sure no one else could?”
“I wanted to see the case files.”
“So knock.”
“I did.”
“So you woke up the entire motel?”
She shrugged, glancing involuntarily at his prostheses.
Quinn followed her out the door. “Go ahead,” he said as they climbed the stairs.
“Go ahead, what?”
“Ask.”
“It’s your business,” she said. “Can I get it or not?”
Quinn unlocked his room. The box was on the table. A fancy folding suitcase hung from the bathroom door. Nio didn’t have a key, so she had propped her door open with the security latch. Quinn handed her the box and she walked back.
“Thanks.”
He slammed the door.
Nio sat cross-legged on the bed and opened the remnants of a life. The FBI had talked to a few of Sol’s colleagues and graduate students, but for the most part they had relied on the data scrape. To their credit, it was comprehensive. It even included his reading list from the Institute’s library, as well as from nearby Princeton University Library. Most of it made sense. There were seminal papers on quantum field theory, graduate texts on gauge theory, even a transcript of a symposium titled Ion Qubit Exchange Under Asynchronous Correspondence. Scattered randomly among the arcane treatises on high-energy physics and advanced geometry was the odd outlier. It was as if Sol had suddenly become obsessed with conspiracies: Project Montauk, Project Looking Glass, MK-Ultra, HAARP, Area 51, the Mandela Effect. There were also several funny-sounding papers by an obscure Danish social psychologist named Viktor Bruno. Although she could see the titles—one was called The Oscillations of Reality—none of the texts had been included. She turned on the TV and searched the internet.
“This is ridiculous,” she breathed, tabbing slowly with the arrow buttons.
Bruno had stopped publishing several decades ago. All but one of his papers were behind a paywall, a 30-year-old monograph on the mathematics of distributed networks. According to the abstract, Bruno had shown that a theory of information exchange from computer science was broadly applicable, including to models of human society. The example he used for illustration was—
“Belief in ghosts,” Nio said aloud.
She skimmed the paper, but it was mathematically dense. She could follow the equations, but she wasn’t familiar with the underlying theories and she gave up on page eight. She shut the files and leaned over on her elbow.
A loud knock woke her promptly at 7 a.m. the next morning. It was followed by the clicks of the key card in the lock. She’d been dreaming, or so it seemed. Sol had been talking to her through the static in the television. She opened one eye. The TV was off. Nio suddenly felt a deep, almost overpowering sense of deja vu, as if she were starting a video game over from the beginning of the level—and not for the first time.
The door opened and the morning sun broke over her face. She squinted and pulled the pillow over her head. It smelled like cheap detergent, same as the comforter. The files were still open around her, and Agent Quinn began packing them.
“Today’s a work day,” he said. “They’re waiting for us at the office. We got a conference call with New York at noon. On the road in half an hour.”
Nio flipped him off as he walked out. The door swung half shut and she realized her head was throbbing. The headache had come back. No more sleep. She groaned and stumbled to the table where she had dropped her belongings. She lifted her coat, looking for the pills the sheriff had given her, which knocked the small evidence bag to the floor. Her loop metal earrings rattled inside. She found the bottle and swallowed two pills, eying the small local newspaper that stared up at her from the carpet. She read the headline again. It was the Sunday edition. Almost a week old. She may already be too late.
Forty-five minutes later, after briefly falling back asleep and being woken again, Nio was showered and dressed and her skull had stopped throbbing. She walked down the motel steps carrying the evidence box, steel rings back in her ears. The blizzard that had blanketed the north in snow a couple weeks before had been replaced by unseasonably warm temperatures, and puddles of melted snow filled the potholes in the parking lot and reflected the warm sun.
Quinn was waiting by the car in his suit and expensive tie. From the looks of it, he had just been talking on the phone. He watched her approach.
“I said half an hour.”
As she got closer, she could feel the asymmetric fluctuations in his bioelectric field. Something has perturbed him. He was upset and taking it out on her.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Sure. Why?”
“No reason.” She glanced to the phone in his hand.
He raised it like he had forgotten it was there. “Gotta keep the boss up-to-date.”
In the car, Nio put her awful green-and-brown boots on the dash and tried to scratch under the ankle bracelet, but it was tight and flush with her skin. “I hate this thing.”
“You need breakfast?” Quinn asked. “Or are you still full from last night’s meat fest?”
“I’m okay,” she said, pulling her seat belt around her. She noticed the car’s console then. “The Bureau have something against self-driving cars?”
Some people did.
“Rentals don’t have high-speed pursuit modules,” he explained as he backed out of the parking space.
“Ah. And you might have to speed after someone at any moment.”
“Bureau policy is that any non-agency vehicle must have the option to disable safe-driving protocols or else be driven manually. Didn’t take you for a car snob,” he added a moment later.
“Meaning what?”
“Not everyone can afford the insurance on self-driving cars.”
“You can take off the tie,” she told him as they accelerated onto the freeway. “You keep reaching for it. It’s obviously making you uncomfortable.”
“Field agents have a dress code.”
Nio looked around. “I don’t see the boss here.”
Quinn didn’t answer.
“Ahhh.” She nodded to herself with a smile. “I get it. You got in trouble. That’s why you were in South Dakota, and why they gave you to me. You fucked up and now you have to suffer a shit detail and prove that you can follow the rules: wear the tie, keep up with your paperwork, follow procedure.” She looked at his neck. “Shave.”
He rubbed it.
“You had a beard, didn’t you? Until recently. And you cut your hair.”
The caveman look was then very fashionable for men, which suggested that in his off-duty hours, Agent Quinn cared about that kind of thing.
“Your psychic spirits tell you that?”
“The skin of your cheeks is a slightly different color. Lighter. Like it was protected from the sun.”
Quinn grabbed the rear-view mirror and turned it, as if testing whether all of that were really deducible from his dark complexion.
“For what it’s worth,” Nio said, “I think covering your face was a good move.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“You keep rubbing your scalp. That’s new, too, isn’t it? What are those scars from? I notice they’re still a little pink.”
Nio watched the road roll by. She resisted the urge to rub the regularly spaced ovals on her head.
“What’s the matter?” Agent Quinn poked her gently in the shoulder. “You’ve been poke-poke-poking me since we met. Don’t tell me you can’t take it.”
“It’s not that.” She was quiet. She shook her head. “It’s a long story.”
Quinn looked ahead to the highway, which was straight as far as he could see.
“Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but we have lots of time.”
“It’s nothing. Look, I’m sorry I teased you about the beard. And everything else. You’re right. I shouldn’t have if I wasn’t willing to take it in return. I take it back.”
Agent Quinn swallowed the words in his throat. “Fair enough,” was all he said.
They drove in silence.
“We need gas,” he announced tersely later.
They stopped and went to the bathroom. When Agent Quinn walked out, he found Nio studying a paper map. She folded it when she saw him and replaced it on the rack.
“No phone,” she said sheepishly, as if he’d caught her stealing candy. “Just wondered where we were.”
By the time they got back on the highway, the oncoming lanes had jammed. Stationary cars sat bumper-to-bumper as far as either of them could see.
“What do you think happened?” Quinn asked.
“Take the next exit,” she said as they passed a green mileage sign.
“You forget something?”
“US-71,” she explained.
“71?” Quinn scowled. “We got a couple more hours on the interstate.”
“Just take the exit.”
“And where are we going?”
“South. Toward Mankato.”
“What’s in Mankato?”
“There’s someone I need to talk to.”
“In Mankato?”
“Toward Mankato,” she stressed.
“What does this have to do with a guy who died in New York?”
“Look, Agent Quinn, you seem decent enough.”
“Wow, thanks.”
“And I’m sorry that you’re disabled or whatever—”
“Disabled?”
“—but we’re not partners. You’re here to keep me from going off the reservation. I’m here to find out what happened to Sol and get my life back. So, if I wanna talk to someone in Mankato, we go to Mankato. If I wanna talk to someone in, say, a tiny town near Mankato, we go there. Okay?”
“For the record, I’m here to preserve the Bureau’s interests. That includes keeping you on the reservation, but my remit is larger than that.”
“Such as?”
“Such as making sure you don’t commit further crimes while remanded to the United States Department of Justice. Such as making sure we join that conference call with New York in” —he looked at his watch, a Rolex— “three hours.”
“That’s the second time you’ve called me a criminal. Is that all you think I am? Some kind of compulsive offender?”
“I think you’re someone who sees the law as a hindrance, something to be got round when it doesn’t suit you. I think you think the ends justify the means. I think you think you can go around stealing people’s phones and burning their houses down without having to face any consequences because you decided it was justified.”
“I didn’t steal Searan’s phone. I borrowed it.”
“Borrowed implies asking. You lifted it while pretending to care about her dead son. Do you not see how sick that is?”
Nothing.
Quinn snorted. “See? You act like this is all just some ridiculous waste of time, like all these people—the judge, the sheriff, the court clerks, the victims, the attorneys, the Bureau, me—are doing this just to fuck with you. As if all of us have nothing better to do with our lives than make yours difficult.”
“And you always follow the rules, do you?” She poked his bare neck.
He moved away and scowled.
“Sorry,” she said, folding her hands in her lap. “Look, I know you think I’m socially retarded or whatever. But I’m not. I know what I’m supposed to do. I just have different priorities these days.”
“These days?”
“All I’m saying is, I have no intention of embarrassing you in front of your boss, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“You’ll understand if that doesn’t fill me with confidence.”
“But I still need you to head south.”
“Why?” Agent Quinn insisted.
“I told you. There’s someone I need to talk to.”
“Who?”
Nio turned to look at him. She made it clear by her face that she wasn’t going to answer.
“Exit’s coming up.”
Agent Quinn didn’t take his eyes from the freeway, and he didn’t slow down. “Who?” he asked again.
Nio didn’t answer.
“Suit yourself.” He settled into the seat with one hand on the wheel, like it was going to be a long drive.
The exit approached fast.
“Fine,” Nio said. “Then take me back to South Dakota.”
He laughed.
“Give me your phone.” She held out her hand. “I’ll call Special Agent Roger what’s-his-name right now.”
“Why? Because you think it’ll make me look bad that I couldn’t last a day with you and I’ll give in?”
“Hand it over then.”
The car passed the exit. The oncoming lanes were still completely choked with traffic.
Nio clenched her jaw. “I don’t wanna measure dicks, Orlando. If I can’t go where I need to, then there’s no point to this. Are you smart enough to understand that? Then it really is just a waste of everyone’s time. Turn around, please.”
“The agents we’re gonna talk to investigated the case originally. They’re busy people with real crimes to solve, with real victims. We can’t just leave them—”
“Turn around!”
Quinn didn’t move. He gave a little shrug. “Look, I’m sorry you don’t get it.”
“Turn around,” Nio repeated.
Nothing.
She looked at the wheel. She grabbed it with one hand and pulled down. The car veered onto the shoulder and then over the side into a ditch of patchy snow, where it bounced hard, sending everything loose to the roof. The air bags deployed as the vehicle was deflected in an arc through a chain link fence and into a fallow soybean field, where it fishtailed and came to a stop.
Everything was quiet except for the engine, which made a slight rattling noise.
“Fuck!” Quinn hit the steering wheel with his palm. Then he did it again. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
He got out of the car and continued his one-word tirade as he walked in circles in the field. He reached up and yanked at his collar. The button popped off and he pulled the tie loose, nearly falling over in the process, and threw it. It flapped in the stiff breeze and barely traveled a yard before falling on a patch of snow, saved from melting by the shallow depression it occupied.
“For fuck’s sake! What’s wrong with you?” he shouted.
“Are you all right?” an elderly man with an Amish beard called to them from the shoulder, where he had stopped his narrow, three-wheeled van. Warning lights blinked. The biohazard sign was painted in black on the side. Zombie control. Judging from the red finger-smears on the old man’s hazard suit, he had a bleeder in the back.
Out of a global population of just over nine billion, it was estimated that no more than a few hundred thousand had died from the ranciform encephalopathy or “zombie” virus. A mutant of the bornavirus, it didn’t give its victims a taste for brains, but it did attack the brain, causing swelling and deposition of Alzheimer’s-like plaques that swiftly inhibited cognition. Over the course of a week, sometimes longer, the infected began to act increasingly irrational before eventually succumbing to an irresistible urge to wander, presumably to encourage transmission. Once consumed with wanderlust, their eyes frosted over, limiting their vision, and they quickly became oblivious to their surroundings, including heat, cold, and pain. Cause of death in many cases was not the virus itself but violent trauma. Many were struck by high-speed vehicles while wandering across a busy intersection. Others fell into machinery or drowned.
Nio had been a teenager at the time, and she had lined up with everyone else for the vaccine. There were still hundreds of cases per year—an endemic disease, like measles or chicken pox, rather than an epidemic one—but the common wisdom, right or wrong, was that the remaining afflicted were anti-vaxxer holdouts or crazies who ranted online about it all being a massive conspiracy to convince everyone to be voluntarily injected with mind control serum. What few bleeders appeared, 15 years later, were greeted with annoyance rather than fear, especially by the thousands of stranded commuters waiting helplessly in traffic for a city sanitation worker to come clean up the shattered body hobbling down the highway.
“We’re okay,” Quinn insisted to the elderly man.
“Are you sure?” He walked forward from the vehicle, which looked like a cartoon trash collector. “That was a nasty fall. Should I call the highway patrol? Or Triple A?”
“We’re all right,” Quinn repeated. “It was just an accident. I’m with the FBI. Everything’s fine. There’s no need to call anyone.”
“The FBI?” The man squinted.
“Please go back to your vehicle, sir. Thank you for your concern. It was just an accident. Everything’s under control.”
“Well...” The old man wasn’t sure. “If you say so, officer.”
“Agent,” Nio corrected.
“Thank you, sir,” Quinn repeated with a raised voice. “Thank you for your concern. If you could just move along, we’ll be on our way.”
“Well...”
“Thank you.”
The man turned down the shoulder, looked back once, and climbed into his tiny electric truck. A moment later, he pulled back onto the highway, yellow lights flashing.
Quinn turned to Nio, who stood on the other side of the car. “You coulda killed me with that stunt.”
“That’s what airbags are for.”
He raised his hands. “Is that supposed to be funny? What was the point of this? What is it you think you accomplished?”
“Me? You’re the one who had to be a dick. You couldn’t just go to frickin’ Mankato! It’s not even an hour away.”
“I told you, we have a phone conf—”
“Call your buddy Roger right now.” Nio held out her hand for his phone. “Tell him what happened. Ask him what he thinks.” She waited.
Quinn stood in the field like a suited scarecrow. He took off his coat, picked up his tie, and walked to the car. He tossed his clothes in the back and popped the hood. Whatever he saw satisfied him, and he returned to the driver’s seat and sat in silence for several moments.
“Don’t—ever—”
“Oh, relax. Car’s got Florida plates. It’s a rental. I’m sure the Bureau is insured.”
“It doesn’t work like that. I’m still responsible.”
“Say it was the old guy’s fault. He swerved to pick up a bleeder. I’ll back you up.”
Quinn shut his eyes and sighed. “Not everything in the world is a trick or con. Do you get that? Some things matter.”
“Yes. And the rental car is not one.”
With a noisy engine, Quinn pulled onto the dirt tractor path and the pair made their way to a graded gravel road and then to US-71, which eventually winnowed to a two-lane street. Quinn didn’t speak, and Nio left him alone. They were still several miles from their next turn when they passed a pair of men standing in a field similar to the one they had crashed through. Both had their hands to their foreheads and were staring at the horizon.
“What is that?” Quinn asked. The field was on the passenger’s side, and he leaned over but couldn’t see well. “Is there something out there?”
“Stop the car,” Nio said.
Quinn complied, and the pair got out and stood by the side of the road.
A writhing black mass, like living smoke, moved across the horizon. It had long tendrils that curved out from a central mass, like limbs. It was massive, hundreds of feet high, stretching from trees to clouds and lumbering like an alien giant slowly south.
Toward Mankato.