Zero Day

can away, and as if on cue, His Royal Catness appeared through the crack in the broken wooden slats in the window, trotting toward the heavenly smell.
“Have it all.” Again. “Don’t worry about me. I need to lose weight, anyway.”
It was dusk outside. It felt like dusk. But he dared not peek out of the window, as if doing so would hasten his own demise.
Someone would see him.
The elderly grandmother two doors down was the only person who knew he was hiding in this building, only because she had fed him dried pork and leftover pickled vegetables every now and then. And because she allowed him to take a quick shower in her house once a week to conserve water.
Tereza’s heart of gold could get her killed.
I must leave. But where do I go?
No passport. No work visa. No money.
He was now an illegal alien in the Czech Republic, dumped here by rogue Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation agents who had wrestled him out of Aspasia’s hands. They had no use for him any more since MedusaNet was all but shut down. So they dropped him off in Prague to protect themselves from liability.
Yeah, liability.
Those former FSB agents were more like mercenaries, thinking they would earn a whole lot more American dollars freelancing than if they had worked as salaried employees of the Russian government.
Ironically, they hadn’t left him here in the pursuit of money. They had left him here for assassins to find him—if Aspasia didn’t find him first.
Kelvin berated himself repeatedly for not asking those people for at least a fake passport and some koruny české or maybe even euro banknotes.
“I’m all alone. I have to get out of this myself.” Kelvin wrapped his arms around his bended knees and leaned back against the wall, paint peeling off here and there. “Where are you, God? I need a miracle. I need a miracle.”
Why didn’t God stop him from leaving Atlanta eight months before? If he had remained in town, his employers at Binary Systems would have found them.
What choice did he have, honestly? There he was that fateful day in September, walking around the convention floor, snacking and picking up free merchandise, when out of the corner of his eye he spotted Aspasia walking toward the YottaFlops booth that he and his employer, Cayson Yang, had set up.
He wanted to warn Cayson, but he saw the woman spray some sort of liquid in Cayson’s face. Then he watched his boss go down just before she stabbed the side of his head with some sort of device.
Which he later found out to have activated the cybernetic implant in Cayson’s head.
She looked up from the floor and stared straight at Kelvin.
Kelvin remembered dropping the 3D-printed bobblehead doll of himself, and running for his life. It didn’t help that he had worn a bright yellow tee shirt.
Aspasia caught up with him in no time, with those FSB agents not too far behind her.
And here I am.
Well, yeah, by way of Moscow, but that was the part Kelvin didn’t want to think about.
“Meow.”
Looking past the cat, Kelvin saw the empty can on the old wooden floor.
“That’s all I got, buddy.” Kelvin shuffled his way to his makeshift bed at a corner of the room.
His bed was a pile of old, torn blankets he had salvaged from the neighborhood dumpsters. On top of it was a plastic bag he had stuffed with rags. He puffed it up and put his head on it.
Mordecai came over and sat on the blanket with him. He cleaned his gray fur, speckled with white.
“When I leave this place, I’ll take you with me, okay?” Kelvin tapped his head. The cat purred. “That is, if I physically leave. If I die, then I can’t keep my word, you know.”
The gray cat settled down at an edge of Kelvin’s blanket and began to clean his paws.
Kelvin felt thirsty. He stared at the crack in the ceiling. He worried that the ceiling would cave in, though ironically it would usher in a faster death for him.
Was death the only way out?
He wasn’t sure.
He tried to pray, but no words came to his mind or mouth. He had been a churchgoer back in Atlanta, in his younger carefree days when he wanted to do everything right in the eyes of God.
No eventuality like this ever crossed his mind.
No, his goal was to buy his mother a house on the beach on Tybee Island, provide her with a personal chef and housekeeper. She could spend her days reading books on the balcony overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
That had been his goal.
Until her lung cancer worsened, and Kelvin needed money quickly before time ran out. She never went into remission, and three months after the chemotherapy, she asked to be taken off treatment so that she could die in peace at home.
That had been when Aspasia showed up, offering Kelvin a job behind the job. All he had to do was plant backdoors into their network they were constructing for Birmingham Bytes, a British company with international clients.
Kelvin dusted off his hacking skills and joined the covert team. It was a win-win. He could moonlight the project and still keep his day job as a system administrator at Binary Systems.
He would walk away with a cool ten million dollars.
Easy money.
Yeah.
The cat snuggled next to him, and Kelvin closed his eyes.
He saw his mother laughing and smiling, walking at the ocean’s edge on Tybee Island against a backdrop of the five-million-dollar oceanfront home he had bought for her. He still had another five million to splurge on her.
He remembered how his mother kissed him on the forehead in their last days together, just as she had done all his life whenever he had been a good boy. Little did she know that he had sold his soul to buy her the mansion.
And two months later, she passed away.
The beachfront house, paid in cash through an overseas company, became vacant after Mother died. Kelvin