Project Zero: Evolution Protocol

Zero Survivors

The axe head tore back out of the door and left a hole the size of a fist, bright with daylight from the stairwell.

Cyrus hit the floor on his bad side. Pain lit him up from hip to ankle. He bit down on a scream, "f**k! f**k!", rolled, and came up on his good knee with the filing cabinet shuddering against the door above him.

"Move, move, move!"

He crawled. Then he ran, limping, dragging his left leg like a sack of wet sand. Behind him the axe hit the door again. And again. The cabinet screeched across the tile.

The corridor was forty feet of dark. Doors on both sides. A flickering fluorescent tube. A smell of old blood and burnt coffee.

Halfway down, his foot hit something soft.

A man sat slumped against the wall beside the office door, chin on his chest, legs stretched out. Security uniform. A holster on his hip. A lanyard around his neck with a gold-banded keycard and a plastic name tag.

HARLAN, T.

One hand was still curled around a creased photograph. A kid on a bike, grinning, missing a front tooth.

"Sorry, pal," Cyrus muttered. Then, because he was a decent man or had been once: "Thank you."

He pried the pistol out of the holster, and the raw meat of his palms screamed where the axe haft had skinned them. "Son of a bitch." A standard service sidearm, heavy and cold and perfect. He dropped the magazine, thumbed the rounds with a practiced hand, and slapped it home.

Nine in the mag. One in the chamber.

Ten.

Eleven years in uniform. He had never in his life been so grateful for a goddamn number.

The door behind him gave.

Not a bang. A long, grinding scream of tearing steel, then the filing cabinet toppling over with a crash that echoed down the corridor like a dropped anvil.

Cyrus turned, braced his back against the office door, and raised the gun in both hands.

She stood in the broken doorframe, thirty feet away. The woman in the torn Helix jacket. The axe hung loose from her right hand, the head scraping the tile. Her eyes found him and stayed on him, gray and wet and calm.

[BIOLOGICAL SIGNATURE: CLASS III, PROVISIONAL]

[DISTANCE: 9 M]

[LEARNING: ACTIVE]

"Yeah," Cyrus said. His voice shook. "I know what you are."

She took a step. Then another.

He understood something then, in a rush of cold clarity. She had learned the stairs. She had learned the shield. She had learned the bleach, the door, the weak point of his leg.

But she had never once seen a gun.

"Stay where you are."

She kept coming. Of course she did.

"Last chance, you dead bitch."

She raised the axe.

He fired.

The shot cracked through the corridor like a thunderclap. It hit her high in the chest and spun her half around. She didn't scream. She didn't slow. She turned her head back to him, tilted it, and took another step.

"What the f**k is it going to take?" Cyrus breathed. "Come the f**k on."

He fired again.

The second round took her in the forehead. Her head snapped back. The axe slipped out of her fingers and rang against the floor, and she dropped to her knees, then slowly, almost politely, onto her face.

The echo rolled down the corridor and died.

[PROVISIONAL CLASS III ELIMINATED]

[SAMPLE UNAVAILABLE: TISSUE UNSTABLE]

"Unstable," Cyrus said to the ceiling. "Sure. Fine."

He stood over her for a long moment, gun still raised, until his arms started to shake.

Eight rounds.

The smell of cordite hung in the corridor. Under it, the smell of her. His stomach growled, savage, and he stared at the dead woman's neck with a hunger that made him want to throw up.

"f**k you," he told his own body. "Not today."

He crouched, picked up his axe, and lifted the gold keycard from Harlan's neck. His leg buckled and he caught himself on the wall, breathing hard. The thing in his waistband, wrapped in gauze, was still cold and wet against his stomach.

Fractured, he thought. Functional.

Continue.

The reader beeped. The office door opened.

Inside, the room was small and dark and smelled like cold pizza. A desk. A rolling chair. A bank of dead monitors, except one in the corner that glowed a faint green. On the wall, a weapons rack, empty, its chains hanging loose. Somebody had cleaned it out in a hurry.

"Of course," Cyrus muttered. "Because it'd be a goddamn miracle if anything went right."

On the desk sat a military radio with a single red light blinking.

He locked the door behind him and sank into the chair, and the whole world tilted. He pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes until it steadied.

Then he looked at the radio.

MESSAGE WAITING.

He hit play.

Static. A hiss like wind through dry grass. Then a man's voice, young, tired, with the cracked edge of someone who hadn't slept in days.

"Command, this is Sentinel Two. Perimeter's closed on all roads. Repeat, all roads. We've got civilian convoys at the Gray Mile checkpoint. Forty buses. Two thousand people, asking for transit."

A second voice, flat and cold. "Sentinel Two, Command. Turn them back."

"Say again, Command? Turn them back to where? There's nothing behind them but—"

"Redirect all civilian transports to Staging Area Delta. Lantern Site. Helix security will take custody."

"Command, I've got a woman here with a baby. She says she's been walking since yesterday. Command, the evacuation order said—"

"The evacuation order has been superseded." A pause. "Zero survivors are to cross the cordon. Zero. Acknowledge."

The silence on the line lasted three full seconds. Cyrus could hear the kid breathing.

"...Sentinel Two acknowledges."

Then, quieter, almost a whisper, off the main channel: "Jesus Christ. They're just kids on those buses."

The recording clicked.

A new voice came on. Calm. Patient. Almost fond.

Cyrus knew it before it finished the first word. He had heard it through a wall speaker, ten minutes ago, telling him to take the stairs.

"Staging Area Delta is now fully populated. Phase Two may begin."

The radio fell silent.

Cyrus sat there with his hand over his mouth.

Zero survivors.

Not a failure. Not a collapse. An order. Two thousand people had been told there was a way out, loaded onto buses, and driven straight into the one place in the city where the cure and the plague were being made.

Somebody had planned this. Not a leak, not a lab accident. A cordon, a lie and a parking lot, with a man on the radio reading it out like a bus schedule.

He thought of the briefing room. The Colonel's flat voice saying Lantern like a prayer. Mercer's stupid story. The helicopter.

Had his squad known? Had he?

"You sick f***s," he whispered. "You sick, murdering, motherfucking fucks."

The monitor in the corner buzzed. He had forgotten it.

A camera feed, grainy green. A fenced yard behind the building. Floodlights, dead. And in the dirt, lined up in neat rows, forty buses.

Windows dark. Engines off. Doors shut.

He leaned toward the screen.

The windows weren't dark. They were full.

He zoomed in with a shaking hand. A boy in a school jacket. A woman in a nurse's smock. An old man in a Halvern Hawks cap. All of them gray. All of them packed together, standing, rocking very slightly, as if they were all listening to the same slow music.

Gray faces pressed against every pane. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Row after row after row, packed shoulder to shoulder, silent, swaying, staring straight ahead.

None of them were blinking.

He counted without meaning to. Forty buses. Fifty to a bus, sixty if they'd packed them. Two thousand people.

And the loading dock, the gate, the only way out of Lantern that the map had shown him, ran straight through the middle of that yard.

"Jesus f*****g Christ."

He thought: at least they're not coming. At least they're locked in. At least they're not awake.

Then, somewhere in the building behind him, one of the gunshot echoes finally reached the yard.

On the monitor, every head in every window turned at once.

Two thousand necks. No ripple, no stagger. One single motion, like a field of wheat bending to the wind.

Toward the office.

Toward the camera.

Toward him.