Shit, man. Here it is, the day before Thanksgiving. The day it all happened. My life up until now was never that great, but at least I wasn’t being hunted. I never had to jump at shadows, wondering whether some metal bug was about to try and blind me, sever one of my limbs, or infect me like a parasite.
Relative to that, my life before Zero Hour was perfection.
I’m in Boston and it’s as cold as a bastard. The wind is cutting my ears like razor blades and I’m chasing my brother through the Downtown Crossing outdoor shopping pavilion. Jack is three years older than me and as usual he’s trying to do the right thing. But I won’t listen to him.
Our dad died last summer. Me and Jack flew out West and buried him. And that was that. We left our stepmom alone in California with a lot of tear-streaked makeup and everything Dad owned.
Well, pretty much everything.
Since then, I’ve been sleeping on Jack’s couch. Mooching, I’ll admit it. In another few days, I’m flying to Estonia on a photojournalist gig for Nat Geo. From there, I’ll try to book my next gig straight, so that I don’t have to come home.
In about five minutes, the whole fucking world is going to go bat-shit insane. But I don’t know that, I’m just trying to catch Jack and calm him down and get him to be cool.
I grab Jack’s arm right before we reach the wide, open-air tunnel that runs under the street and across to the shopping pavilion. Jack turns around and without hesitation the jerk punches me in the mouth. My right upper canine cuts a nice little hole in my bottom lip. His fists are still up, but I just touch my lip with my finger; it comes away bloody.
“I thought it was never in the face, you fucker,” I say, panting clouds.
“You made me do it, man. I tried to run,” he says.
I know this already. It’s how he’s always been. Still, I’m kind of stunned. He’s never hit me in the face before.
This must have been a bigger fuckup than I thought.
But Jack already has that “I’m sorry” look creeping onto his face. His bright blue eyes are trained on my mouth, calculating how bad he hurt me. He smirks and looks away. Not that bad, I guess.
I lick the blood off my lip.
“Look, Dad left it to me. I’m broke. There was no other choice. I had to sell it to get to Estonia and make some money. See how that works?”
My dad gave me a special bayonet from World War II. I sold it. I was wrong and I know it, but somehow I can’t admit this to Jack, my perfect brother. He’s a damn Boston firefighter and in the National Guard. Talk about hero material.
“It belonged to the family, Cormac,” he says. “Pappy risked his life for it. It was a part of our heritage. And you pawned it for a few hundred bucks.”
He stops and takes a breath.
“Okay, this is pissing me off. I can’t even talk to you right now or I’m going to knock you out.”
Jack stalks away, angry. When the sand-colored walking land mine appears at the end of the tunnel, he reacts instantly.
“Everybody look out! Out of the tunnel. Bomb!” he bellows. People respond immediately to the authority in his voice. Even me. A few dozen flatten themselves against the wall as the six-legged device tap, taps slowly past them over the paving stones. The rest of the people flood out of the tunnel in a controlled panic.
Jack walks to the middle of the tunnel, a lone gunfighter. He draws a Glock .45 from a holster under his jacket. He clasps the gun in two hands, keeps it pointed at the ground. Hesitantly, I step out behind him. “You have a gun?” I whisper.
“A lot of us in the guard do,” says Jack. “Listen, stay far away from that scuttle mine. It can move a lot faster than it’s going now.”
“Scuttle mine?”
Jack’s eyes never leave the shoebox-sized machine coming down the middle of the tunnel. United States military ordnance. Its six legs move one by one in sharp mechanical jerks. Some kind of laser on its back paints a red circle on the ground around it.
“What’s it doing here, Jack?”
“I don’t know. It must have come from the National Guard armory. It’s stuck in diagnostic mode. That red circle is there to let a demo man set the trigger range. Go call nine one one.”
Before I can get out my cell phone, the machine stops. It leans back on four legs and raises its front two legs into the air. It looks like an angry crab.
“Okay, you’ll want to back up now. It’s target seeking. I’m going to have to shoot it.”
Jack raises his gun. Already walking backward, I call to my brother, “Won’t that make it blow up?”
Jack assumes a firing stance. “Not if I only shoot its legs. Otherwise, yes.”
“Isn’t that bad?”
Reared back, the scuttle mine paws the air.
“It’s targeting, Cormac. Either we disable it, or it disables one of us.” Jack squints down his gunsight. Then he squeezes the trigger and a deafening boom echoes through the tunnel. My ears are ringing when he fires again.
I wince, but there’s no big explosion.
Over Jack’s shoulder, I see the scuttle mine lying on its back, three remaining legs clawing at the air. Then Jack steps into my line of sight, makes eye contact with me, and speaks slowly. “Cormac. I need you to get help, buddy. I’ll stay here and keep an eye on this thing. You get out of the tunnel and call the police. Tell them to send a bomb squad.”
“Yeah, right,” I say. I can’t seem to look away from the damaged sand-camouflaged crab lying on the ground. It looks so hard and military, out of place here in this shopping square.
I trot back out of the tunnel and directly into Zero Hour—humankind’s new future. For the first second of my new life, I think that what I’m seeing is a joke. How could it not be?
For some crazy reason, I assume that an artist has filled the shopping pavilion with radio-controlled cars as some kind of art installation. Then I see the red circles around each of the crawling devices. Dozens of scuttle mines are stepping across the pavilion, like slow-motion invaders from another planet.
The people have all run away.
Now, a concussive thump detonates a few blocks away. I hear distant screaming. Police cars. The city emergency outdoor warning sirens begin wailing, growing louder and then softer as they rotate.
A few of the scuttle mines seem startled. They rear back on their hind legs, front legs waving.
I feel a hand on my elbow. Jack’s chiseled face looks up at me from the dark tunnel.
“Something’s wrong, Jack,” I say.
He scans the square with hard blue eyes and makes a decision. Just like that. “The armory. We’ve got to get there and fix this. C’mon,” he says, grabbing my elbow with one hand. In the other hand, I see he still has his gun out.
“What about the crabs?”
Jack leads me across the pavilion, delivering information in short, clipped sentences. “Don’t get into their trigger zones, the red circles.”
We climb up onto a picnic table and away from the scuttle mines, leaping between park benches, the central fountain, and concrete walls. “They sense vibration. Don’t walk with a pattern. Hop instead.”
When we do set foot on the ground, we lunge quickly from one position to the next. As we proceed, Jack’s words string together into concrete ideas that penetrate my stunned confusion. “If you see target-seeking behavior, get away. They will swarm. They aren’t moving that fast, but there’s a lot of them.”
Leaping from obstacle to obstacle, we pick our way across the square. About fifteen minutes in, one of the scuttle mines stops against the front door of a clothing store. I hear the tap of its legs on the glass. A woman in a black dress stands in the middle of the store, watching the crab through the door. The red circle shines through the glass, refracted by a few inches. The woman takes a curious step toward it.