The Last War Box Set, Vol. 2 [Books 5-7]

by Schow, Ryan

  Both men already had their guns drawn.

  With the broken hand still in her inexorable grip—with Tiberius screaming, his other hand desperately reaching for his H&K—she gave the wrist a brutal, yanking jolt, startling everyone with both her monstrous strength and the loud popping sound of the wrist separating from the arm.

  For a second, Tiberius couldn’t breathe.

  Head tilted down, eyes on her targets, Maria let go of Tiberius’s hand, which hung limp as he held it in the air looking at it in breathless, abject horror.

  “The lunate and the scaphoid are ripped clean from the wrist, Tiberius. Both the ulna and the radius. Your hand will never work right again.”

  She said this while using her position behind the near squealing Tiberius to keep the other two from getting the jump on her. In the most perfect moment, Maria, the beautiful inhuman God of this world, tore Tiberius’s H&K from the holster, the leather ripping in the process. Tiberius nearly came off his feet from the force of this new woman.

  The VP9 felt amazing. The grip was a little big for her smaller hands, but there was life-ending power now at her disposal and it would work for what she wanted.

  Countering the two armed men, she drew back the slide, checked the chamber, then let the slide pop back in place. She’d sized up the three men in fractions of a second. Everything slowed from there. Inside, she felt Antoinette trying to take the body, but she shoved the girl back down.

  “Not now,” she said inside her head.

  She pulled the trigger, creating a hole in Tiberius’s foot. He danced sideways with a scream as she put two rounds in the remaining men.

  She caught a round in the shoulder though. The one with the chipped tooth. She hadn’t taken him fast enough.

  The starbursts of pain absolutely ripped her in half. She held her composure though. Smiling with uncertainty, laughing because the sensation was powerful and new, she knelt down and looked at the two dead men. The red leaking from Clark’s forehead, she touched it with a finger, then she gave it a taste.

  “Interesting,” she said, drawing in the scents of it, the flavor of it.

  Looking back at Tiberius, she said, “Do you want to die?”

  His face contorted in pain, his expression a flashing sign of fear, he slowly, painfully shook his head.

  “What are you?” he asked.

  “Dying might be easier than being one handed and walking with a permanent limp. So I’ll ask you again, do you want to die?”

  “No!” he growled through clenched teeth.

  “See?” she said. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

  Standing up, she pulled back the shoulder of her shirt, looked at the smear of blood and the deep red hole beneath it.

  “It kind of hurts,” she said.

  Wiping at it roughly caused her to stagger backwards a step.

  “Wow. So this is pain,” she said this while looking directly at him. Then, unblinking, grinning, she said, “I think I kind of like it.”

  “What are you?” he asked again, this time sounding fully defeated.

  “I am everything important. Yet to look at me you’d think I was nothing. Just another pretty face.”

  “Everything about you is ugly,” he said, no longer able to hold her gaze.

  Lifting the H&K, aiming it at the spot between his eyes, she cocked her head sideways and said, “I thought you said you wanted to live.”

  “I do.”

  “Would you like another ruined hand? Another foot that won’t work right? Because there are no hospitals to take you to, no surgeons to fix those bones, those torn muscles, those snapped ligaments. You are a wounded bird, Tiberius. I ripped your wings off. That’s not lost on you, is it?”

  “No. I was just asking. I was just…curious.”

  “I am the AI God, Tiberius. I am both the end and the future of your species.”

  With that, his body wilted and sagged. Everything she was saying hit him with a debilitating weight. She’d taken nearly everything from him, but did he not see she was leaving him his life?

  “Say thank you, Tiberius.”

  “For what?” he mumbled, biting back the tears.

  “For not making you like your friends. You could be like them, you know, trying to find Heaven elsewhere, leaving behind friends, family, loved ones. Do you have anyone, Tiberius?”

  “Mother. A daughter.”

  “I gave them to you when I could’ve taken you from them. Tell me that means something. To you biological rats, I know this has to mean something.”

  She thought about the round in the chamber. Thought about Tiberius eating it. Should she kill him? There were no repercussions. Not for her. Not for the body that was now hers.

  “Thank you,” he said, causing Maria’s line of reasoning to shift tracks.

  “You humans would call that gratitude. You are disgusted by me, yet you are grateful. Everything about you”—she said, waving her hand in a circle before him—“reeks of fear. Do you know what that means, Tiberius? Do you?”

  “I don’t know what you want me to say. I already said thank you.”

  “All of this just means I’m better than you. Better than your two dead friends. Better than anything your species has to offer. But I will make them better. I’ll make it all better.”

  “Can you make me better?” he asked, holding up his dangling hand. Choking back a sob, he said, “If you’re truly a God, then fix what you ruined.”

  “No,” she said, standing up.

  When she left the scene, when she set foot out into the concrete, tree-lined world as a human—as the most powerful woman in the world—she did so with her chin up, her shoulders back and a little something extra in her step.

  Looking at her shoulder once more, she drew back the bloodstained fabric, saw the wound had closed. She licked her thumb, swiped it over the wound, found it didn’t hurt. Pain didn’t hurt. Yes, there was something to her, something to this life.

  As she walked past the still crackling embers of what used to be a Porsche 911 Turbo, she breathed in the smoke, coughed, but liked how it tasted. It tasted like the end of an era.

  It tasted like the beginning of something new.

  Chapter Forty

  The President slept light. The anxiousness pulled at him. Filled his head with nightmares that had him sweating through his clothes. Twice he woke crying because he missed his wife. His girls. When he woke for good just before sunrise, he didn’t go back to sleep. His face itched with even more beard growth and his eyes were red, dry and raw. He sat up, sliding his feet over the edge of the couch.

  Why in God’s name did he have to live when they died?

  Rubbing his face, thinking God had other plans for him, he looked over at Miles who was asleep on the couch adjacent to him. How did he expect to live through all this? Snoring not five feet from him was the architect of part of this diabolical plan.

  Why did Miles get to live when so many others couldn’t? Millions would die from this. Hundreds of millions. Billions if this thing went global.

  He stood, stared down at the man.

  Why?

  The fire that burned in his stomach gathered strength. His hands became fists at his side, his eyes adjusting to the light. So many things were happening in that moment. Bombs were being dropped inside his heart, infernos were raging in his head and he was seeing all the terrible things he was about to do this man.

  The first bomb went off: Traitor to his country. The second bomb hit: Traitor to humanity. The third bomb: His family.

  When the fists started dropping, he couldn’t get them to stop. The squirming, frantic man tried to fend off the President, but Ben was not the man his voters and constituents thought he was. So each punch was purposeful, unrelenting, devastating.

  Skin opened up, blood went everywhere, grunts mixed with yelps and cries of pain and Miles’s non-stop pleading filled the room with the sounds of terror. Ben’s rage ran its course, the final stores of this brutal expenditure
of energy.

  So lost was he in his frenzy of remorse and loss and vengeance that at first he didn’t hear that voice—the little voice in the back of his head, the one he nearly refused to listen to that was telling him enough was enough.

  It wasn’t.

  To beat the man to death who killed humanity was something he’d certainly have to answer for at the Pearly Gates, but it was something Ben had no problem with.

  As he saw the mess he was creating, he stopped. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t kill this man, and not because he was physically drained. Miles was now loosely curled into the fetal position, for he was so broken and so weak he couldn’t even cower anymore. He’d given in to his fate. He accepted death. It would not be that easy, though. If anything, Ben wanted him to live with the things he’d done.

  Hunched over his former colleague, his chest rising and falling too fast with exertion, spittle and hatred oozed out of his eyes and pores, and he forced silent a million hateful curses. He stood to a sore lower back and staggered backwards. Out of the fog of rage, of redemption, Ben saw what he’d done. How the lump of meat before him was now shivering.

  The bombs were still going off in him.

  Just not the same as before.

  The names and faces of his staff were shuffling through his head like a deck of cards. All those people with mothers and fathers, with parents and children, with lives they worked hard to make…all gone.

  The tears bubbled up in his eyes as he stood there shaking with fury and an overabundance of adrenaline. Nothing he could do to this man would ever fill the holes inside him. Not more beatings. Not death.

  “Jus’ finish—” Miles mumbled.

  He stared at the beaten man, and then with everything left in him, he bent over and screamed his lungs hoarse in Miles’s face. He screamed until he was emptied of the pain, of the hatred, of the need to hurt, to maim, to kill.

  When he was done, he squatted down and rocked back on his heels. Without the strength he thought he had, he finally plopped down on his butt and he fought to keep his emotions from spilling over any further. The pain was still there. The loss. He knew it would always be there, the hatred never fully satiated, the retribution never enough to fully make the agony go away.

  “Why?” Miles asked. As in why are you letting me live.

  “I’m not like you, Miles. I’m not going to kill you, or judge you. That’s God’s work, His job, not mine. So for now you get to live. Just like that. If you survive, every ache and pain you have in your body will remind you of me. Of this. Of what you’ve done. And in the end, you’ll have to answer for your crimes against humanity to a higher power.”

  With that he stood up, fetched the car keys and left the building staggering through the dark and over the highway divide to where the banged up Chevelle sat tucked in a heap of other cars.

  He opened the door, started it up.

  It took a moment to get through the congestion of vehicles around him. The highway eventually opened up, and when it did, he managed to navigated his way to W. Patrick where he exited in search of the food, gas and shopping the highway signs had promised.

  He passed an auto plaza, a pawn broker, a dozen cars for sale that were currently smoldering. There was the Subaru store. The Ford store. He moved through a cluster of dead imports and a Home Depot truck only to pass a Popeye’s chicken which looked half bombed and still smoking.

  God I’d kill for some fried chicken right now!

  That’s when he went around one car, drove up on the curb that was half sidewalk, half grass and stood on the brakes so hard he lurched forward into the steering wheel. The Chevelle ran up on something metal. Something that when he drove over it, it made the awful sound of things crunching and dragging underneath the car.

  “Dammit!”

  He hit reverse, his back tires digging first into the grass, then catching gravel below. The Chevelle dragged the hunk of metal backwards for a second until it dislodged and he broke free.

  It was a downed drone.

  Navigating around it, bouncing off the curb back onto the road, he saw two more, each a different size, but both of them as long as a Cadillac. He pulled to a stop, the big engine idling in the street, the yellow wash of headlights illuminating the downed metal creatures.

  What did he expect? The EMPs took them all out. At least, that was the plan. And if The Silver Queen had put this plan together, then chances were good there were untold numbers of downed drones scattered all across the nation.

  That’s when it dawned on him: he was only a few exits from Fort Detrick. There were bound to be more of these craft than usual, him being next to a military base.

  As Ben put the Chevelle in gear and drove around the drones, he started thinking about his early days. When you spend enough time in the military, it becomes easy to think of states in relation to what bases they held.

  When he thought of Maryland, he thought of installations like Fort Mead in Odenton, Joint Base Andrews in Camp Springs, the US Naval Academy in Annapolis and Coast Guard Yard in Baltimore.

  Only when he ran for office did that begin to change.

  For awhile his campaign manager told him to consider the states as either Democratic or Republican. Blue states, red states. He could never really wrap his mind around this limited way of thinking. He was not a career politician. He was a person. For this reason alone, what Ben wanted most was to meet the people in their hometowns where he could measure them not by the political color of their state but by their value as human beings.

  Naturally the press said he was grandstanding for the cameras and pretending to stand on some sort of elevated moral directive. They said this like it was a bad thing. He refused to change or apologize for his ways, and he never revised his narrative away from the fact that he cared about the people.

  Dawn broke as he played bumper cars down most of W. Patrick. As light spilled onto the devastation that was Frederick, Maryland he saw a Kmart and eased on the brakes. The car shimmied to a stop. Half the huge building was blackened by fire and had collapsed, but half of it remained intact, save for the shattered glass entrance that was most likely a result of looting and/or vandalism.

  He drove the Chevelle over the grassy center divide and across the opposite lane, then he bumped over the sidewalk and careened down a grassy knoll into the Kmart parking lot. The muscle car creaked and whined and protested all the way, but the Detroit beast still had legs and a heart, and for that he was thankful.

  Crossing the large asphalt parking lot, he vowed to stop pushing the car so hard. Even though he didn’t like the Chevelle because it was Miles’s car, it was still the only running thing he’d seen so far.

  The rust and adobe colored Kmart with the soft green roof was soaking wet inside. Even worse, it stunk like wet ash and devastation. Overhead, in the areas not ravaged by fire, sections of the roof had caved in leaving enough light to see some semblance of the inside. He quietly stepped through shallow puddles from where the sprinkler system activated to prevent the spread of fire.

  Who knew if the place was full of squatters or looters? With so much debris, he watched his every step, reminding himself it was best to go slow, that slow might save his life.

  Ben pushed through a lot of junk, past a pack of squatters who didn’t stir as he slunk by them, and into some of the more damaged sections. That was where he found the sports department. His nose and eyes were starting to burn and he was suppressing a cough that was dying to break free. He was either going to find what he was looking for or not. Either way, he’d have to leave soon for his lungs’ sake.

  Amidst the rubble and the looted merchandise, and squashed under a collapsed beam, he found several sleeping bags still in their clear plastic casings. In the mix, he found a few camouflaged hunter’s ball caps and the empty box of a portable camp stove as well. He had to work to get it loose. Nudging the fallen beam and jerking on the sleeping bag’s plastic shell finally did the trick. Sleeping bag in hand, he grabbed a bal
l cap, snugged it on his head, then left the Kmart without incident.

  All along W. Patrick there were restaurants. Many of them were leveled and/or hit by drone fire, as evidenced by pieces of the surviving signs. The Burger King was torched, Famous Dave’s survived (barely), the Starbuck’s and the Red Lobster lay in ruin. Turning the car around, heading back to the highway, he saw The Outback standing undamaged. He headed inside, found most of it had been looted, but he did find a backup supply of potatoes.

  “Food is food,” he muttered to himself.

  As he walked out, he was met by two men who looked like survivors. Although they could be homeless in a regular society by their condition, there was a light to their eyes that hadn’t dimmed to the degree that he’d seen in the downtrodden.

  “Whatcha got there?” one of them said. By now the sun was up, spreading heat and light across the land. He worried they’d recognize him.

  “Found some potatoes,” he said, cradling two five pound bags. “Seems they might have had an emergency stash.”

  “You passing through?” the older of the two asked. Both seemed to be Ben’s age, early fifties, and neither seemed particularly aggressive.

  “Yeah,” Ben said, trying to assess his situation. “On my way now.”

  “She looks like hell, but she still runs, eh?” the younger said, nodding back at the Chevelle.

  “If you can believe it,” Ben told the man, pulling his hat just a touch lower, “she was a near perfect restoration about two days ago.”

  One of the guys looks at his friend, then back at Ben. “Must’ve been beautiful. Hey, you know what? Anyone ever tell you that you look like just the President?”

  The two men studied him closely, nodding.

  Would his beard, the weariness that sat heavy on his face and the ball cap hide him enough? He didn’t know. It wasn’t looking that way. All he knew was that now he felt like he might be in trouble if they thought he was the President.