The Last War

by Ryan Schow

  “Yes,” we say together.

  Our eyes meet and there’s a resolve I trust. Slowly I’m nodding my head (I believe you), and he’s giving me a reassuring smile (I’ll never let anything bad happen to you).

  The thing about Stanton is he works (worked) in the Transamerica pyramid inside the financial district about twenty-seven hours a day and I work (worked) in the ER just as much. We live (lived) an affluent lifestyle, but it’s taken a toll on us both emotionally and physically over the years. Our home is (might be past tense, as in was, but the jury’s still out on that one) gorgeous, worth every penny of the three million we paid for it, but now all that might be gone. All things considered—and I know it won’t be easy—but I’m starting to think we’ve got thick enough skin for this.

  A second thought crawls over the first, but it sounds a lot like a warning: whatever you’re expecting this to be, it’s going to be far worse than even you can imagine.

  “No on the weed,” I say and Macy tosses it back in the truck. “C’mon Macy. We’re going home.”

  “To our home?” she asks.

  “Whatever home we sleep in, shower in, eat in, that’s our home,” I say. “Got it?”

  Stanton suddenly goes very rigid.

  “Shhh,” he hisses.

  He’s listening with an ear to the sky and that’s when three blocks up Masonic a huge pair of drones carpet bomb the six or seven story Public Storage building, a nearby big box retailer and rows upon rows of nearby homes. Public Storage collapses onto Masonic street in a heap of smoke and powder, spilling its bricks and damaged contents out over dozens of abandoned cars.

  “Let’s go!” Stanton says, breaking into a run.

  We follow as fast as we can, cutting down Turk Street, but the earth is shaking beneath us and the bombing raids have anyone caught outside running in doors. Someone’s left a one gallon jug of water on the roof of their car in a panic; I sprint across the street to grab it and keep running.

  “Cincinnati!” Stanton yells over the noise.

  “Water!” I scream.

  By the time I catch up, I’m out of breath and that’s when a fleet of drones appears up the street. Stanton turns us into a stairway leading up a hillside, a stairway that’s fairly well hidden. It’s made of concrete and flanked by two homes and tons of trees and foliage. For whatever reason, I think of the stairway in The Exorcist and this gives me a second’s pause. Did I tell you I hate horror movies? Yeah. I’m a big chicken when it comes to demonic possession, serial killers, inbreeding hill people.

  Sin, the drones…

  I keep moving. As the three of us hustle up the stairs, my legs feel more destroyed than ever and I swear to God, my lungs are on fire. Stopping means dying, though, and this has me pushing hard. The rapid concussion sounds of dozens of bombs being dropped isn’t lost on me.

  The drones zip by and we all heave a collective sigh, but at the top of the stairs are two guys who are looking down past Stanton to get a good look at me and Macy. Macy is in front of me. All I can see are those ugly pants. They aren’t going to save us, though.

  What I’m thinking at this exact moment is that we aren’t unattractive women, not by any measure. I’ve been considering this for the last few hours. Will our slovenly condition mask our good looks, or will guys like these see through them?

  I think I can handle myself, but Macy? I can’t even begin to tell you how much I worry about her innocence.

  Now I’m thinking of my baby girl not from my own perspective, but from a man’s viewpoint. A boy’s viewpoint.

  She’s very cute in the face and at the age where she’s no longer too young for the consideration of older boys and younger twentysomethings. That’s to say she’s got her boobs and her hips are coming in, taking her from boyish straight toward the more curvy look of a woman. Honestly, she’s growing up too fast.

  She’s becoming a woman.

  Considering the lawlessness we’ve seen so far, I’d bet my last breath this terrifies Stanton about as much as it terrifies me. Maybe more. Neither of us have spoken about this, but I can feel it in his soul as much as I’m sure he can feel it in mine.

  “There are two of them,” one of the guys says to the other, his tone betraying his intentions, “and two of us. We just need him out of the way and I think we’ll have a love connection.”

  These guys are about five steps ahead of Stanton with the high ground; the one talking has a shotgun at his side.

  “I think you guys can be each others’ love connection,” Stanton jokes, even though I can tell he’s agitated, not amused.

  “I’m into girls,” the one toting the shotgun says. “Young girls. Blondes especially.”

  “Right now survival is the flavor of the day, fellas,” Stanton says. “In case you hadn’t heard, all that smoke in the air isn’t from guys like you lighting up blunts and listening to Snoop Dogg in your grandmother’s basement or whatever. There’s actual death happening out there.”

  “Yeah?” one says to Stanton in a sick, mocking tone. Then to his buddy, he says, “About to be one more on the dead guy list, don’t you think?”

  Stanton draws the pistol, pulls the trigger and the guy drops. He shoots the other one before he can run, then scampers up the last few stairs in case there are more of them on the other side. Fortunately for all our sakes, there aren’t. Right about now I can’t breathe.

  Is this really happening?

  My eyes watch as my husband drags the second kid off the sidewalk, both of them moaning in pain. He grabs the shotgun, tosses it to me (which I catch on my way up the stairs) and tells Macy to look away. He waits for more bombs to drop, and when they do, he puts a single round into each of their heads.

  10

  Leaning over the boys’ bodies, Stanton goes through their jeans (pocket knife, lighter, three shotgun shells—he crushes and discards half a pack of smokes). Every so often, glancing up at the ground level neighborhood we popped up into, my brave, reckless husband looks perfectly poised.

  This scares the absolute crap out of me.

  He barely even hesitated. Who is this man that I married? He looks at me and I’m scared at what he’s seeing in my eyes. He returns to the bodies.

  “You didn’t even give them a chance,” I all but whisper.

  Without looking up, he says, “You heard what they said, right? Didn’t you see what I saw? How they were looking at you and Macy? And that one idiot saying he likes young girls…that was reason enough.”

  I find myself pacing in a tight line. He just killed them.

  Stopping, looking down at them, I can’t believe they were breathing a moment ago, and now they’re not. How is Stanton not freaking out?

  How am I not freaking out?

  Macy comes up behind me, takes the water jug out of my hand and drinks. “Not too fast,” I say. “Pace yourself.”

  She finishes, burps then says, “Man I needed that.”

  I drink a bit myself, then hand it to Stanton who waves it off because he’s busy. I take another sip, hand it to Macy and tell her to ration it.

  She knows exactly what I mean.

  Looking everywhere else, not even flinching as things explode a few blocks away, I see a neighborhood that looks relatively untouched by the chaos.

  “This is nice,” I hear myself say. “The houses here.”

  I turn around and see Macy looking down at the two boys. Stanton is standing up. He’s got another shotgun shell that he’s stuffing into his pocket. I hand him the water. He drinks, slowly. It’s just several sips while he’s looking around. His eyes are roving—going to windows, cars, potential hiding places.

  After he decides we’re not in imminent danger, he relaxes his eyes, his demeanor. “It is nice,” he says. He adjusts the contraband in his pockets, then: “Let’s see if we can find ourselves a house.”

  “What if there are more of them?” Macy asks.

  “I don’t think there are,” Stanton says. “Otherwise you’d see a lookout
, some other evidence of gang activity.”

  “You think they’re gang members?” I ask.

  Stanton fires me a look. As far as we’re both concerned, if they carry guns and talk about having sex with young girls in front of said girl’s parents…they’re gang bangers. It’s a stereotype, sure, but it’s my stereotype. Frowning, I pull Macy aside.

  It’s not the bullet holes or the blood that tells the story of these two knuckleheads. It’s the tattoos. They’re all skulls and names and numbers. They’re full sleeves. The ink spanning from wrist to earlobe…on both arms. One of them has three tear drops tattooed under his right eye.

  “It’s good you shot them,” Macy says, and this saddens me. Actually this crushes me inside. I thought I raised my child to have more respect for life than this.

  Is she thinking of the Iraq war vet and what he said about the neighborhood gangs? Is Stanton? Perhaps these were the types of kids he was warning us about. Or perhaps we’ll never know.

  “You shouldn’t feel like that,” I tell her.

  “Yes, she should,” Stanton says, looking up and down the block. “You can’t be this soft, Sin. Not now.”

  “This isn’t the wild west.”

  He turns and snaps at me. “Look around, Cincinnati. It sure as hell is!”

  We step into the neighborhood, round a corner and see a trio of bodies. This is residential, so we expect to see something like this, but nothing prepares you for seeing the body of a small child.

  My eyes focus on the girl.

  She’s wearing a pink dress and one of her white shoes had come off her foot. It has a small silver buckle. The minute I see her white tights—her little foot turned sideways—I turn away, stifle a cry. Something in my soul cracks, breaks. The image is in me now, burned into my brain. She can’t be more than three years old.

  “These…animals,” I say, half angry, half struggling not to have a total breakdown.

  “These things are neither human nor animal, Sin,” Stanton says in a wet, choked up voice. “They’re machines and they have no sense of morality. No hesitation, no respect for life, no remorse.”

  Looking at the homes, the sounds of bombing stall out only to be replaced by a cold, steady silence. Lately we’ve come to distrust these subtle platitudes. We pass the little girl and a woman a few feet ahead of her. Was this her child? They’re both sprawled face-down on the sidewalk. The woman has a meaty red mess in the crown of her head while the child has two red blooms in her back.

  Ahead, propped against someone’s garage door, is a handsome young twentysomething man. He’s got a dried red carnation over his heart. Not the flower. Blood. Judging by the rust colored smears on the sidewalk, he dragged himself over to the garage, perhaps in search of cover. Not that it provided any cover at all. His head lolled forward, his chin at rest on his chest. On his ring finger is a shiny gold band. I look over at the two bodies. Was that woman his wife? Was that his child?

  On second thought, she looks too old for him—what I can see of her. Maybe the woman was his mother and the little girl was his. Maybe they were neither. Just strangers in the wrong place at the right time.

  “Do you hear that?” Stanton asks. Collectively we perk up. “I can’t be sure, but…I think that might be them.”

  Stanton’s on the move, looking for open doors because there’s no decent place to hide from these things but inside a home.

  The first two doors are locked.

  Now we all hear are the approaching sounds of more than one UAV. Stanton kicks in the third door. It splinters, the frame cracking completely. He kicks it again and it swings in hard, bouncing back. The three of us hustle inside, slamming the door behind us as best as we can.

  “Conversion,” Stanton says looking around, breathing hard.

  Instead of this being a single home with three stories, there’s a tight staircase heading up to the second floor, then presumably another heading up to the third floor. The first door says UNIT A.

  The construction isn’t pretty, but it serves its purpose.

  Each floor, it appears, has been renovated into its own separate home. The reason for this? Money, of course. The owner was working to milk the property for as much rent as he or she could collect.

  Typical capitalists.

  I grab the knob of UNIT A’s door and twist. It’s locked. Macy shoves by me, grabs the handle and gives it her own valiant effort. It doesn’t open so she starts to shake it with all her might, her nerves finally spinning out of control.

  Wow.

  Ever since her school was shot up and Trevor died, she’s been halfway herself. The stores of emotion are bleeding out now. They were bound to erupt somewhere.

  When Macy finally gives up, Stanton says, “You had your chance.”

  We move out of the way.

  He’s rearing back to kick this door down when we hear a voice on the other side of it saying, “We’re armed in here! Leave us alone or we’ll…we’ll shoot!”

  Stanton ponders the warning, looking at us. I shrug my shoulders. He looks up the stairs, pauses. Outside, something starts shooting.

  “Get down!” he barks.

  We drop to our knees and cover our heads just as a handful of bullets blast through the main door. They bury themselves into the wall where we were all just standing, which has me feeling part queasy, part relieved.

  Standing back up, my eyes won’t stop looking at five big, splintery holes in the door we just kicked in. Holes that now have distinct rods of light spearing their way inside. It’s only now that I realize I’ve still got the shotgun Stanton took from the dead kids by The Exorcist stairway.

  “Upstairs,” Stanton says.

  We quickly creep up the stairs following on Stanton’s heels as fast as humanly possible for what we’ve been through. The instant we hit the second floor landing, the door to UNIT B is pulled open and a shotgun barrel is shoved in our faces by some old lady in an old pink bathrobe.

  Her bloodshot eyes are flashed wide, the vessels straining against the bumpy whites of her eyes and brown irises that might have one day been chocolaty brown, but now just look like day old toast.

  “This is my house you criminals!” Her voice is like a cast iron skillet being dragged down the sidewalk. Her look is like we’re cannibals who just ate her only child.

  Stanton uses a hand to move us behind him, then he raises both hands in mock surrender and says, “The drones…they’re out there, shooting at people. Honest. We just need a place to duck into until they pass. We mean you no harm. I promise.”

  It’s right then that I actually think about the way we look. How we don’t look like the well dressed socialites we were just two days ago before the floor gave out on this city. Her eyes are seeing me with my shotgun, my plastic jug of water. I’m sliding the weapon around my back.

  Out of sight, out of mind, right?

  “Your promises and a bag of chips are worth less than a bag of chips,” she says, her vocal chords strained from the outburst. Her reply wasn’t so much of a slant as it was a sad state of affairs for her.

  “You don’t look well,” Stanton says in a calm, disarming tone.

  The decrepit woman’s frown pulls into a telling grimace. She racks the shotgun and in that exact same moment, houses inside the neighborhood start blowing up. The structure shakes, catching us all off guard. Everyone but Stanton. He grabs the woman’s shotgun barrel, ducks under it and drives it toward the ceiling.

  The woman loses her grip on the rifle, her bingo arms wheeling in slow motion as she stumbles backwards toward a thick area rug in the center of the living room. Stanton rushes through the door reaching for her arm, trying to catch her, but it’s too late.

  Her heel catches and she tumbles tush over teakettle, cracking her head on the edge of a metal coffee table. Another run of bombing rocks the ground beneath the house, causing surface cracks to snake up the walls and some plaster to drop off the ceiling.

  Looking at the old woman, blood soaking the
fluffy white rug, even I know it’s all done but the crying.

  “Dad!” Macy says, moving around him. “You killed her!”

  “If she’s dead, it would have been the fall that killed her,” I hear myself saying, horrified by my own go-to response despite this being the truth.

  Dropping to a knee to check her head, I realize she is indeed gone. How am I supposed to rationalize this? It was an accident, right? It had to be.

  Accidents happen.

  Three dead people inside of twenty minutes. I look up at Stanton and he’s running his hands through his hair, his eyes wild with frenzy. It’s all sinking in. He can’t believe this is happening.

  None of us can.

  Looking at the woman’s skeletal frame, her exposed chicken legs, how delicate and dainty her wrists were, even a blind man can see she was on the verge of starvation. One boisterous fart and her spine would have stress fractured on its own. Tears gather in my eyes for what I’m seeing and feeling. For what just happened.

  “I did this,” Stanton says, clearly stunned, his face losing color fast. “This is my fault. I…I shouldn’t have—”

  “Don’t,” I say, standing up. “This isn’t on you. You tried to catch her, I saw it.”

  We all stand over the body in silence, our eyes glued to the old woman who’s just laying there with her mouth dropped open and her head cranked sideways.

  Surviving this attack is not going the way we thought it would. Looking at the fissures on the wall, the splintered glass, the cracked thatch of drywall lying on the hardwood floor, we’re now realizing there will be casualties of our own making. Does that make us bad people? We’re not bad people. But still, they say judge a man not by his words but by the force of his deeds.

  How will I judge my husband? After all, when I asked him if he could protect us, if he would, he said yes.

  He said yes.

  “You could see it in her,” my mouth says, almost on its own. “Her will to go on was gone. She was defending her home because she needed to. Because this is where she was planning on dying and she wasn’t up for the company.”