Zero

  ZERØ

  A Novella

  Michael McBride

  ZERØ © 2011 by Michael McBride

  Previously published in the collection Quiet, Keeps to Himself copyright © 2011 by Michael McBride, from Thunderstorm Books

  “The Hands of God” copyright © 2011 by Michael McBride

  Cover art copyright © 2011 by Caniglia

  Excerpt from Vector Borne copyright © 2011 by Michael McBride

  Excerpt from Bloodletting copyright © 2010 by Michael McBride

  All Rights Reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from Michael McBride.

  For more information about the author, please visit his website: www.michaelmcbride.net

  Also by Michael McBride

  NOVELS

  Bloodletting

  Burial Ground

  Innocents Lost

  Predatory Instinct

  Vector Borne

  NOVELLAS

  Blindspot

  Brood XIX

  Remains (from The Mad & The Macabre, with Jeff Strand)

  The Calm Before The Swarm

  Xibalba

  ZERØ

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  ZERØ

  Bonus Material

  The Hands of God

  An Exclusive Short Story

  Excerpt from VECTOR BORNE

  Excerpt from BLOODLETTING

  For My Dad

  Special Thanks to Don Koish, Caniglia, Paul Goblirsch, Leigh Haig, Paul Miller, Robert Mingee, Jack Haringa, my family, and all of my loyal readers, without whom none of this would be possible.

  ZERØ

  “Matter can neither be created nor destroyed.”

  — Antoine Lavoisier, 1785, The Law of Conservation of Matter

  “Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.”

  — Julius Robert Mayer, 1842, The Law of Conservation of Energy

  “The total amount of mass and energy in the universe is constant.”

  — Albert Einstein, 1907, The Law of Conservation of Mass-Energy

  Brian Niemand bolted upright, sheet clinging to his damp torso, comforter bunched around his waist.

  The fading realm of dreams swirled at odds against the waking world in a discordant miasma of shadows. At first, he was unable to rationalize his surroundings, as though waking someplace different than where he remembered falling asleep. Slowly, the wan moonlight parting the blinds drew contrast in shades of gray. He deciphered the rigid outlines of the large boxes stacked in the corner of the room, the empty dresser against the wall beside them where soon their contents would reside. The closet door stood wide, revealing only a barren silver rack lined with hangers. The alarm clock sat on the floor in the corner of the room to his right, blood-red numbers flashing 12:00 over and over as though there had been a power outage.

  Why had he awakened so abruptly?

  A tight feeling of unease gripped him, knotting a fist in his intestines. Had he been having a bad dream? He furrowed his brow and shook his head. No, it hadn’t been that. His bladder didn’t feel, full either. Maybe he had heard something. Maybe—

  A low rumbling sound arose from the doorway to his new bedroom.

  “Buck?” Brian whispered.

  The rumbling sound trailed into a guttural growl that reverberated in the darkness.

  “What is it, boy?”

  Brian slipped his legs from beneath the flannel comforter and planted his bare feet on the cold hardwood floor. Wrapping his arms across his bare chest, goose bumps prickled stiffly, he crept toward the doorway in his boxers. A haze of mote-infested moonlight hung in front of him like a veil before he passed through and once again was swaddled in shadow. He reached down to where he could hear the chocolate Lab growling.

  “You hear something?” Brian asked softly, running his fingers down his dog’s back. Hackles appeared from his shoulders all the way back to his rigid tail.

  Buck had positioned himself firmly in the middle of the threshold, barring whatever lie in wait in the darkened hallway from entering the master bedroom.

  “What is it—?”

  Brian’s voice died at the sound of footsteps from the hallway in front of him.

  His heart skipped a beat, then resumed with a thudding he could hear as well as feel against his ribcage.

  That couldn’t have been the sound of footsteps. Had there been movement directly ahead, surely he would have seen at least some sort of shift in the darkness. The faint hint of light from the rainbow-arc of the window set into the front door flooded the foyer twenty feet ahead. But there wasn’t—

  The floorboards creaked beneath gently-transferred weight directly before him.

  His breath caught in his chest and he clasped a trembling hand over his mouth to stifle a gasp. Eyes flashing back and forth from one side of the blackened hallway to the other, he was suddenly well aware of just how far he was from the front door.

  The floor groaned again, only this time he could feel the board beneath his right foot bow slightly. His breathing came hard and fast through his nose, hissing over his first knuckle. His eyelids drew uncomfortably back into the recesses of their sockets.

  With an explosion of barking, Buck thundered ahead down the hallway toward the front door, nails clattering furiously on the polished maple.

  Brian was helpless but to watch the dog merge with the darkness before reappearing in the slant of light by the door a fraction of a second before slamming head-first into the solid oak with a resounding thud.

  Buck let out a high-pitched whine, raising his nose to sniff the air.

  “Good boy,” Brian whispered, finally finding the strength to force his legs to move. “It’s okay.”

  He crept down the hallway, conscious of the moaning protests of the floor beneath him like cracking knuckles.

  “Good boy.”

  Brian’s right hand traced the smooth plaster wall, feeling the slight indentation where at one point there had been a window.

  Buck looked back over his shoulder and whined impatiently, eyes reflecting like those of a deer.

  The wall to the left ended abruptly, opening into the expanse of the living room where the lone window against the back wall was hidden behind the overgrowth of the needle-riddled mass of junipers out back. A stack of boxes was haphazardly piled in front of a threadbare couch in the otherwise barren room. The impregnable darkness of the kitchen crept through the archway carved into the wall between the rooms, metered by beveled wooden rails like prison bars.

  He turned quickly away before his imagination could concoct spectral shapes from the shadows, and shuffled softly behind Buck.

  “You did good, boy,” he whispered, quickly scratching the top of his dog’s head before snatching the deadbolt.

  It was still firmly in place. As was the lock on the doorknob.

  Buck leaned into his leg and whined up at him.

  “You need to go outside? Hmm, boy?” he asked, but before he had even finished the question, Buck was on his feet and dancing side to side anxiously, nails clacking.

  Brian pawed at the wall to the right until he found the lights, and toggled all four of the switches.

  The porch light stained the yard with an orange glow.

  With a thud, Brian disengaged the deadbolt, unlocked the door, and drew it inward.

  Buck nearly knocked him over in his hurry to sprint out into the night, thundering across the porch and to the middle of the lawn. He stop
ped and looked back over his shoulder, encouraging his master to join him with his wide eyes.

  The dog raced to the wide trunk of a cottonwood, hitched a leg and took care of his business. He trotted three paces away, kicked some of the dying grass behind him as though trying to cover his trail, then raced to the picket fence lining the sidewalk where he paced back and forth territorially.

  Brian sighed.

  “Footsteps,” he chuckled, shaking his head and rubbing at the stubble on his cheeks.

  He turned and looked back to the living room, where there was nothing but an old couch and a stack of boxes that he knew would take him forever to unpack.

  Grabbing the handle, he opened the door and allowed Buck to race the chilly night breeze past him into the hallway.

  “You’re losing your mind, Niemand,” he said, though he carefully made sure that the deadbolt was firmly engaged and the door was locked. A sharp tug proved that it wasn’t going to budge.

  Buck lapped lustily at his water bowl in the kitchen.

  “Come on, boy,” Brian called, jerking on the door one last time for good measure. He turned, and with a single swipe, flicked off all of the light switches. “Let’s go to—”

  From the corner of his eye he caught a reflection in the window.

  A woman’s face stared back at him over his shoulder.

  He whirled and swung a fist into the darkness, slicing through thin air.

  “Christ!” he gasped, slapping the lights on behind him.

  The entire entryway blossomed with fluorescence.

  There was no one there.

  He stared quizzically into the living room for a moment, trying to remember the face he had seen – if it had even been a face – then walked quickly back down the hallway to his bedroom.

  Brian slammed the bedroom door on the lighted hallway.

  With a loud click, he locked the door.

  Ø Ø Ø

  Brian stood on the porch in the rose-hued dawn, wearing an old T-shirt, sweats, and a pair of slippers that looked as though they had wronged the dog.

  Buck pranced leisurely around his new yard, investigating every new smell, then replacing it with his own. Apartment life had been fine when he was a puppy, but now that he was full grown and close to sixty-five pounds, he really needed a yard. The timing of the University’s offer had been perfect.

  Granted, Brian probably could have made more delivering pizzas, as he had done to put himself through graduate school, but this gave him the opportunity to get his foot in the door.

  Apparently, Professor Grant Connell had hand selected him for the project after his long-time colleague, Professor Doughall Leod, resigned from the research. Dr. Leod had taught the superconductivity class Brian had taken as a post-grad, which he narrowly escaped with a low B. There had been numerous instances where he had thought the man was a few pickled peppers shy of a peck, so Leod’s sudden departure probably hadn’t been as surprising as it should have been. Besides, Dr. Leod had always called Brian “Zero,” based on the Germanic translations of his last name, Niemand, which apparently meant “no one” or “nobody.” Leave it to a mathematician to insult him numerically.

  Dr. Connell, on the other hand, was one of those amazing people who could only be described as brilliant. Not only was he published in every academic journal even remotely pertaining to theoretical physics, but he was one of the few whose speculative theories were treated as law the moment he committed them to paper.

  Brian’s position on the research team was anything but glamorous. During the morning, he’d pick up teaching a couple of the professor’s 100-level physics courses and T.A. for his upper-level courses. In the afternoon and evening, though, he’d be shoulder to shoulder with some of the finest academic minds to ever postulate the anomalies of the universe since Einstein formulated his groundbreaking atomic theories.

  The details of the project were sketchy at best, but from the way it sounded, he was going to be working with some sort of artificial machination that attempted to translate electrical impulses into chemical and biological energy. He imagined his job would be “clipboard-holder” or “coffee-boy,” but even a small contribution would get his name published alongside Dr. Connell’s.

  It was a million times better than the job he was preparing to take teaching high school biology at his old alma mater, after finding slim pickings at higher academic posts. So when the call had come, he had jumped on it without a moment’s hesitation.

  So they were only offering him nineteen grand. Big deal. It was just he and Buck anyway. And it’s amazing how much further that paltry sum can stretch when the University covers the housing expense.

  2416 Portico Lane wasn’t the newest house on campus, nor was it anything that could be even laughingly confused with modern. It was half a block from the upperclassmen’s dorms and another half block from the coffee shop, on a small street eternally littered with deciduous leaves and flyers torn from kiosks advertising everything from local bands performing around campus to assorted “Have You Seen Me?” posters. Cottonwoods loomed over the street, roots breaking up through the sidewalk in jagged sections, interspersed with tall spruces dominating lawns brown with neglect. Most of the turn-of-the-century bungalows were in dire need of paint as their weathered and peeling façades would attest from behind faded shutters, askew screen doors, and windows covered from within by sheets and blankets rather than curtains.

  It wasn’t the overgrown rosebushes climbing the trellises to either side of the doorway or the faded white picket fence on the otherwise unfenced street that made 2416 stand out. What immediately drew the eye to the rather unremarkable house were the statues adorning both the front and rear lawn. They weren’t statues in the traditional sense. There was nothing resembling form or life in any respect, but rather they were towers stolen from futuristic paintings that might have graced the pages of Asimov’s Magazine. There was one on each of the four corners of the property, standing as tall as the roof of the house like bronzed flagpoles. A spherical node capped each shaft like a copper sun staked atop a pole, from which four veins originated, swirling around and down the poles within like metallic stripes on a candy cane. The bronze was tarnished to such a degree that it appeared rusted like the wheel wells of his old Scout.

  Surely, some modern art professor or other must have lived there once upon a time, but Brian was a man of science. As much as he tried to appreciate the creativity and imagination involved with the process of birthing art, the whole concept baffled and confused him. His life’s work was creating order from chaos, law from theory. To Brian, structure lacking function offended his very nature.

  Of course, free rent appealed far more to his baser sensibilities. They could have sculpted eight-foot phalluses and he still would have contentedly signed the lease with a beaming smile on his face.

  Tilting his head back, he drained the last few drops from the coffee mug.

  “Come on, boy,” he called. “Let’s go get some breakfast.”

  He turned and walked into the house, holding the door wide.

  Nothing.

  “Come on.”

  He looked across the yard to the front fence and debated whether or not Buck could clear it.

  “Buck!”

  The dog raced around the rose hedge and scampered past him into the house, leaving a trail of dirty footprints on the hardwood in his wake.

  Brian sighed and shook his head, following the tracks to where the dog stood in the middle of the living room with dirt matted in his fur on all four legs, a mask of it covering his nose and snout. Buck’s tongue lolled out playfully.

  “You’re going to be the death of me, boy,” Brian said, shuffling past his dog into the kitchen.

  Ø Ø Ø

  After allowing the muffin and latté from The Buzz Stop to satisfactorily work their way through his system while he perused the newspaper on the old couch, Brian summoned forth all of the energy he could muster and prepared to embark upon the daunting task
of unpacking the boxes. It wasn’t like he had that many possessions. After all, this house was barely a step up from the one-bedroom apartment they had rented across town; but no matter how little stuff he had, it was going to take him forever to figure out where things were going to go, and then even longer to remember where he had put them.

  Buck was curled up blissfully by the front doorway in a slant of sunlight.

  Brian stared at the window momentarily, trying to conjure the image of the face he had seen in it the night before, but couldn’t recall any details. By now, last night’s events had metamorphosed like something from a dream, a figment he could easily rationalize as his subconscious playing tricks on him in the new house. As soon as he got used to all of the creaks and groans this old place made, he wouldn’t even hear them any more, let alone allow them to wake him up. Buck, too. That Lab was about as docile as a puppy. He couldn’t think of a time before last night that he had heard the old boy bark like that, let alone bare his teeth and growl.

  Brian arose from the cushions, his reflection mimicking him from the enormous mirror covering the wall behind the couch. It appeared to be a remnant from the Seventies, with gold veins etched into the reflective surface in intricately designed patterns more reminiscent of electrical schematics than anything as decorative as ivy. There was no frame as one might have expected with a creation so elaborately crafted, but rather it was fastened to the wall with small plastic clips with screws drilled through the center every foot or so. It looked as though he could slide the mirror all the way to the side without removing the clips, to get in and out of a wall safe like in one of those spy movies.