Day Zero

hear the rest. He was too busy going face-first over the handlebars into the gravel. The idiot who’d collided with him slammed into a parked car and bounced onto the street. The man was older, lean and hollow-looking, like a strong wind would send him sailing out over the Thames.
“Watch where the fuck you’re going,” the man growled, clambering to his feet. Spitting gravel, Olly rolled to his feet, ready to fight.
“You’re the one who ran into me, mate.”
“Fuck you, I–”
The sound was like a hammer striking an apple. There was a whisper of air, and a wet crunch. The man jerked and spun as if he’d been struck. Something hot and red caught Olly on the cheek as the man tumbled down onto the pavement with boneless finality.
The world slowed and finally stuttered to a halt as Olly stared down, in shock. His first instinct was to try and staunch the wound in the man’s chest. He’d seen it on television and in films a thousand times. You reached out and pressed your hands to the wound and it stopped pumping. Only it didn’t. The blood just kept coming, and it was on his hands and his trousers and in his nose and – oh God, it was everywhere.
“Bagley – call an ambulance, or divert one or something – this guy, I think he’s been shot, Jesus, oh Jesus, somebody shot him…”
Even as he babbled, a part of his mind was analysing what he’d seen. The shot had come from out of nowhere – a sniper? Was there some lunatic on a roof somewhere? That sort of thing didn’t happen in London – in the UK. It wasn’t America. The local crazies used Stanley knives and screwdrivers, not rifles.
The scene replayed in his head over and over again. The man climbing to his feet, cursing him out, then jerking around, falling. The blood…
Oliver.
Bagley’s voice was cool in his ear. He ignored the AI. Why was there so much blood? He looked at his hands. Completely red. His thoughts stuttered to a halt. It was so red. Why was it so red? Wasn’t there some reason – arterial blood, maybe… his mind began to wander through fields of trivia until Bagley brought him back.
Oliver. You need to leave. Lincoln’s security detail is closing in on you.
Olly shook his head. “I can’t, I can’t, he’s–”
Dead. Flatlined. Function terminated. I can’t help him, but I can help you. Get up.
Olly looked down. The man looked like a wax dummy, all slack and shrunken. As if everything that had been him had been yanked out, leaving only an empty husk behind. He sat back on his heels, trying to think. People were screaming. Running. Human instinct was to get as far away from trouble as possible – at least initially. But not all of them. Plainclothes security people, probably plods in civvies, were hurrying towards him, fighting through the crowd. They did not look friendly.
His Optik hummed, alerting him to nearby recording devices. News-drones, Optik-cameras, all of them zeroing in on him. Worse, the sound of sirens, drawing nearer, pierced the fog of panic.
“Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
I couldn’t have put it better myself. Get thee hence, young Oliver.
“Going,” he said, hoarsely. He stumbled to his feet, blood-stained finger tapping at his Optik even as he wrenched his bike upright. His mind was moving faster than his body, isolating the problems and solving them one by one. An old girlfriend training to be a psych nurse had called it reflexive compartmentalization, whatever that meant.
First, the news-drones. All the agencies used the same network these days – everyone used the same network these days – hack one drone, hack ’em all. So he did, initiating a feed wipe of five minutes. The Optiks were next. They were easier. DedSec had perfected the art of making Optiks see what they wanted them to see. The facial recognition software wouldn’t get a match, or, rather too many matches. He was the next best thing to invisible – one more pasty yob in a ratty hoodie and tracksuit bottoms.
Officers en route from Bethnal Green. Eight seconds.
The police would be a different matter. They wouldn’t be so easy to fool. He had to move. Get to Limehouse. Hide out until he could do a full scrub of the local feeds. A different sort of panic settled on him now – not blind, but urgent.
You have six seconds until the police arrive. Make them count.
Limehouse. He was on his bike a moment later, and gone three seconds after that. By the time the first police car arrived, Olly was on the other side of the estate, heading east as fast as he could pedal.
“What was that?” he hissed, as he took a sharp corner. “What happened back there?”
Unknown. I’ve piggybacked onto the scrambled feeds – quick work, by the way – and I’m analysing the data as we speak. There was something odd about the shot.
“What does that mean?”
Nothing yet. Keep moving. Let me worry about it.
“Gladly.”
Oh – you still have the package, don’t you?
A tremor ran through him, and he desperately swatted at his jacket. He found the shape of the envelope and what it contained. He sighed in relief. “Still got it,” he said. At least he hadn’t screwed that up.
Good man. Pick up the pace, Oliver. Things are popping.
Sarah Lincoln was three minutes into a tight five minute speech on the need for unity and the proud, if somewhat chequered, history of the Vallance Road community when she heard the screams. Unruffled, she managed another thirty seconds before all hell broke loose and her carefully orchestrated public gathering devolved into chaos.
The sound didn’t register at first. She thought it was a car backfiring. Only when she saw a man at the edge of the crowd twist and spin and fall did she realize what had happened. Or at least what she thought had happened. Someone bent over him – had they shot him? Impossible to tell