by Schow, Ryan
“I want them two boys to be undead, but you kilt ‘em.”
“Sure did,” Maria said. Lightening quick, she fired a shot, hit the next man—the one she deemed the biggest threat, next to the girl—and he crumpled over.
Maria said, “You shoot, I shoot. Then we both lose.”
The girl was still in shock, looking down at the third dead guy. She was already angry two of her friends were dead, but the one Maria just put down was somehow special to her. She spun the rifle just a hair and fired. Six went down hard, her little body blasted backwards. Maria froze for a second, lost in the moment and completely astonished.
What’s this? she thought.
Just then gunfire rat-a-tat-tatted through the air. The girl with the light fifty and her two dumbass friends shook to death under a barrage of gunfire. They were literally torn to ribbons inside of a few seconds. As instructed, the kids all lady-bugged down to the ground while Maria stood there, still in shock over Six. Two men and a woman emerged from wherever they were hiding, watching, and they went to the child. They had guns with barrels that were still smoking from the attack.
Whatever it was running through her body was damn near debilitating. She fell to her knees in front of the fallen child, while the other children stood around the body, crying.
“Stop it,” she hissed as the three shooters approached.
She wasn’t speaking to the kids as much as she was speaking to her body. For awhile now she’d grown used to the biological parts of her, and the emotions that came with having a heart and a brain, but this was something else.
Gigantic, debilitating tears rose to swollen eyes, like pinpricks, but full and nearly bursting. When the first tear rolled over her eyelid and drifted down her cheek, she tried to be there in the pain, to fully understand it. Her hand reached out to the dead child’s hand. She took it, gave it a light squeeze.
“Six?” she said, her voice choked, her heart trembling, her main core collecting so much data it seemed impossible to process it all.
The woman and one of the two men she was with were suddenly on their knees before the girl as well, holding back emotions of their own.
“How do you do that?” she asked, her voice strangled now, her body absolutely enslaved by this thing she registered as pain, as loss, as an impossible agony.
“Do what?” the man asked.
“Not…hurt?” she asked. It was a strange question to them, and they traded looks, but by the look of them, they’d seen their fair share of abuse.
“We hurt,” the young woman who intervened said, “but we keep it inside as fuel.”
“This is not fuel,” she said, her hands shaking. One came beside her, put her hand in Maria’s hand and for some reason the human connection warmed her.
“This isn’t possible,” she said, looking at One.
“It’s okay, Miss Maria,” she said. She brushed her hair out of her face, and there wasn’t an ounce of looking-away in the child.
“It’s not okay. She was with us, under my care,” Maria said, her face impossibly tight, her entire body now trembling.
A third person joined them, a bigger man with a beard and a somewhat unkempt look about him. His gait was stern, stiff, rigid, and his eyes were cold, lifeless even as they appraised her. Maria had taken a beautiful woman’s body, but her beauty had no effect on this man. On either of them. She didn’t understand.
“Do you want to bury her?” the bearded man asked.
“Should we?” Maria said, looking up at them, eyes blurry and wet, the original Maria’s heart damn near broken at the sight of this sweet, dead child.
“It’s the best way to honor her,” the kneeling woman said. She was a beauty in her own right, but her skin looked sallow, her cheekbones slightly protruding, her lips chapped and split open from what looked like dehydration, and possibly neglect.
“Where did you come from?” she asked, looking up at the bearded one.
“Hwy 92. I’m Marcus, this is Nick and Bailey. We’re sorry about what happened here, about the child.”
As he was saying this, she saw how hard he worked not to look at the child. Then he did and she saw something pass through his eyes. A tortured spirit, the kind of ruthless force of heart ache. Then he looked away and it was gone. His eyes were as cold as stone. He didn’t care about anything right then. At least, that was the impression he was exuding.
Looking back at the men, she said, “Are they all dead?”
“Yes,” Marcus said.
She got up, walked over to the Gremlin. The dead girl was draped half out the homemade sunroof, the M107 on the dusty asphalt at her feet. She kicked it aside, stepped up to the girl’s dangling head, grabbed a handful of hair and lifted the face. She looked at it a long time, wondering what it would take for one normal human being to do that to a child.
Then she raised up her pistol and shot the dead girl square in the forehead, holding it up as blood leaked everywhere. The blowback was a warm speckling on her face, but the feeling was satisfaction. It would not bring Six back, but if the little girl’s soul was watching, if there were such a thing—as religious doctrine would suggest—then Six would know what she’d done and she’d get to take that with her to eternity, or whatever was next.
When she went back to the strangers, to her kids, her eyes were dry and her body was once again under control.
“Why did you do that?” she asked the big man.
“Shoot them?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Because you lost a child,” Bailey said. “A dead child is where we intervene.”
“I had it under control.”
“No you didn’t,” Nick said. Then: “We should have shot sooner.”
“But we didn’t,” Bailey said. “We need to bury her.”
“We’ll lose time,” Maria said.
“Then we lose time!” Marcus barked, startling everyone. Finally he turned and started back to where he came from. A moment later, a big diesel truck rolled up to a stop in front of an impassable pile up of cars and several downed drones. He jumped out with a camping shovel and went to the side of the road and started digging.
“Try not to piss him off,” Nick said to Maria. “It’s been a bad two months.”
“Tell me about it.”
Chapter Seventy
Marcus went to work on the grave, digging relentlessly, barely even stopping to catch his breath, let alone check his hands for blisters. The worst part was he was also refusing help. Almost to the point where no one even wanted to ask. They just sat there, looking at him like he was some anomaly that defied logic, wanting to help, needing to help, but unable to ask.
Finally Nick walked over to him and said, “You know this wasn’t your fault.”
“I should’ve shot first.”
“You’re going to go insane if you take on every death this war has to offer as your own personal cross to bear.”
“Did you see that child?” he barked.
“Of course, I did. Don’t be so loud. You’ve got other children over there who might get scared listening to one of your tantrums.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he rumbled, sweat pouring down his face, a light dusting of dirt on his forearms.
“I’m not the one brooding and digging like I’m trying to get to China tomorrow. Why don’t you let me help?” When he didn’t say anything, when it looked like nothing Nick said would have any effect, he heaved a heavy, angry sigh, then said, “Why don’t you share some of the burden with your friends, you dumb son of a bitch?”
Now he stopped and looked at Nick. Nick refused to flinch. He just stood there, like a friend, knowing the question was not only reasonable but needing to be said.
Shaking his head, Marcus got out of the pit and said, “Maybe you’re right.”
“I know I am.”
Walking right next to him, getting in his personal space, he handed Nick the shovel who took it and looked back, unafraid. Marcus moved on, heading back to th
e Mack truck for water, or maybe a ten minute break. Nick resumed the digging.
When Marcus was done brooding, he went to the beautiful Hispanic woman and said, “Where are you headed?”
“Into the city.”
“You should be trying to get out, yet you’re trying to get in, why?”
Maria watched Marcus and Bailey looking at the kids. It was easy for Nick to see his friends trying to process the numbers written on their foreheads in permanent ink. He didn’t understand it himself.
“Before you ask,” Maria said, “they’re not my personal kids, and I’m not good with names.”
“You don’t think giving them numbers is a bit dehumanizing?” Bailey asked.
“Miss Maria is good to us,” the little girl with the number one on her forehead said. Nick was digging, and listening, but he wasn’t being obvious about it either.
Then a boy with the number three on his head said, “She saved us when our teacher killed herself.”
A curly headed blonde girl said, “We were out of food and water when she came, and now she’s getting us to safety.”
“Safety isn’t in the city,” Marcus said.
“Is that where you came from?” Maria asked. “The city?”
“No, that’s where we’re headed,” Bailey answered. “Picking up Nick’s kid then we’re getting the hell out.”
“We’re going to stay,” one of the kids said.
Maria looked at her and she fell silent.
“These kids are One through Eight,” she said. Then her face grew heavy and she said, “Minus Six.”
The kids stood there, just looking at Marcus and Bailey. Nick saw all these cute little faces, but what he really saw was a lot of dead parents, and a lot of kids who would later be severely screwed up. But then he saw Maria, and he realized that as capable as she was, as fearless as she appeared to be, the woman was a saint for taking the kids under her charge.
Nick couldn’t imagine what she was feeling in the moment, having lost a child. She had to be devastated.
“Do you know how to scavenge for things like food and water?” Bailey asked.
“Of course.”
“Clean water?”
“I know how to purify water heater water, and toilet water.”
“What about sea water?” Marcus asked.
“Yeah,” Maria said. “But it takes more time and more patience, and you have to hump it in from the coast, of course, which is no small journey, depending on where you drop your roots.”
“And what happens when you run out of canned food, and dried food? What happens when you get tired of hauling in water, or sleeping in the freezing cold weather?”
“Hopefully by that time, we’ll have a community and we can go somewhere with them.”
“Like where?” Bailey asked.
“A homestead. Or maybe we find no one we like, or trust, and we leave the city and find our own place in this world.”
“So you’re looking for people?” Nick asked, taking a break long enough to mop the sweat from his brow and dab it from his eyes with the front of his shirt.
“Good people,” Maria said.
“Well we don’t know what we’re going to find in the city, but you’re welcome to tag along.”
“We’re not all going to fit in that truck of yours,” Maria said.
“Does it look like we can get through here?” he asked. The multiple overpasses sitting over the 101 had all but collapsed, making passage virtually impossible. And the highway leading into the city was hit early and hard, clogging the roadway with cars for miles ahead.
“Not really.”
“We tried to the Bay Bridge, but that thing looks like it’ll collapse just walking over it, let alone driving that big beast over it. So we came the long way, hoping the roads were cleared some, and voilà, here we are.”
“That must be discouraging,” she said knowing the gamble wasn’t worth the setback.
“It is,” Bailey said. “But it seems we were meant to be here.”
Nick got out of the pit, which Marcus had all but dug, then went over and said, “Have you been to San Francisco in the last year?”
“No,” Maria said.
“Well it’s not exactly the best place for kids. I hear it got hit hard, but there are any number of problems we’re bound to encounter, the least of which is a lot of needles, a lot of human feces, and most likely a lot of dead bodies.”
“I hear it was like that before the war,” she said, deadpan.
“Maybe not the dead bodies part,” Nick replied.
“We’ll follow your lead,” she said, her face kind looking, congenial, but also stubborn. This was the woman who held her ground before five men and a heavily armed woman without so much as a tremor in her voice.
Plus she was rock solid with a gun, Nick thought. He made a note to ask her where she learned to shoot, but it wasn’t the time.
“I don’t think you understand what he’s saying,” Marcus said. “Like I said, you can tag along. But he’s right, you might not want to stay.”
“I guess we’ll see when we get there,” she said. “Either way, our best chances of finding survivors is in the city. It’s got population on its side.”
“I don’t like your logic, or even follow your logic,” Marcus said, “but you’re your own woman and these kids obviously trust you.”
“Before we go,” Maria said, “answer me one question.” Marcus just looked at her, as if he needed this crap right now. “Are you safe to be around? Because my kids here—”
“I thought you said they weren’t yours,” Marcus argued, irritated that he was under trial by this woman whom he just saved.
“They didn’t come out of my vagina if that’s what you’re alluding to. But they are in my care now and so I’ve come to think of them as mine. In this world, what we take is ours. I would think you’d see that by now.”
Nick looked at Bailey, smiled, then said, “Yeah, we understand that. And we’re safe.”
“Are you good in a fight?” she asked. “Hand to hand, not just guns?”
“We’re not dead, are we?” Marcus said.
“No,” she said, touching his arm, “indeed you are not.”
The way she smiled at them, Nick felt it was totally disarming. He could tell by everyone’s body language that this group of theirs was now growing once again, this time by seven kids and an adult woman.
Chapter Seventy-One
Gunderson trudged up Masonic Avenue, a truly broken man. He was survivor to a fallen home he both built and destroyed, survivor to a family who died or left him, survivor to an enemy who both saved and banished him.
Where do you go from here? he wondered.
“Hey douchebag,” someone said, prompting him to look up. His face was stoic. Empty. There was nothing in his eyes, not when he saw three young men staring at him, not when he saw their guns pointed at him.
“What can I do for you girls?” he said, not breaking stride.
The trio stepped in front of him, blocking his path. “You can stop walking, maybe act like a bunch of loaded guns mean something to you.”
“They don’t.”
One of them pulled back the slide, chambered a round. “What about now?”
“Nope,” he said.
“So would you prefer we shoot you?”
Now he stopped, looked right at the kid saying it, then walked brazenly up to him, grabbed the gun by the barrel and pulled it up to his own forehead.
“Pull the trigger then,” he said. The guy tried to get the gun back, but Gunderson held it in place. “Pull it!”
“Have you lost your mind?” one of the other boys said.
Gunderson roughly shoved the gun away from his head, his eyes like lasers cutting through this kid’s confidence, this kid’s sense of place. “That’s what I thought, you sackless twit.”
“Who are you?” the kid with the gun and the lack of testicular fortitude asked.
“Gunderson.”
“Is that your first or your last name?” the smallest of the boys asked.
“Both,” he said, sarcastically.
“You live around here?” another said.
“Why?”
“Because if you needed a place to stay, we have a whole college up the street and plenty of room for vagrants like yourself.”
“We’re all vagrants now, son.”
“I’d rather not engage in the philosophizing of whatever it is you want to impress upon me. Do you need a place to stay or what?”
Looking from face to face, he thought, it couldn’t hurt.
“Sure,” he said.
They walked up Turk Street past a long block of two story homes over garages and past places like Sisters of the Presentation and University of San Francisco’s Board of Education. They crossed Tamalpais Terrace and that’s when the campus opened up into an overgrown front lawn and a row of half burnt palm trees. Sitting on top of the hill was a huge Spanish style fortress of buildings.
“What is this place?”
“Higher education doesn’t suit you?” one of them teased.
“Does it look like I had anything to do with higher education?” he asked in a sharp tone.
“Well now higher education might just save your life. Welcome to University of San Francisco’s Lone Mountain campus. We have multiple wings, dining halls, a watch tower, views of the bay, conference rooms, weapons and hand-to-hand combat training halls.”
“How many people do you have here?” Gunderson asked.
“One-seventy and growing by the day.”
“What’s your philosophy?”
“Rape, pillage and conquer the lands,” one of them mused.
Gunderson stopped, looked at him and said, “You’re telling me you little nerds want to rape and pillage?”
Two of them nodded, but the third said, “Well, we don’t rape rape. It’s just an expression. You’d have to know the gaming world.”
“I was too busy living real life to understand a world where you guys sat in front of a TV all day, playing video games and pretending what you did mattered.”
“Yet here we are, survivors of the apocalypse, in the biggest building in San Francisco, living—”
