by Ryan Schow
We do what he asks, then we head to the back and grab the bars once more.
When he’s gone, neither of us speak. Truth be told, it’s going to be a lot better with the two of them gone, although I do feel bad that they’ve died. For the next two hours, there is silence, then after that it sounds like more bombing, this time much closer. The foundations shake and all the sudden my head is crawling with fear. Will this house be bombed? Will we be strafed by gunfire? Will the place burn down with all of us in it? There’s no way out. I start pacing along the edges of the cage. Everything feels rock solid. I grab the bars and shake them until my arms are like rubber hoses.
“Bailey?” I say.
“Yeah,” she returns, her voice hollow, weak.
“You eating?”
“Eating and crapping,” she says with a terrible sadness in her voice.
“Peaches?”
“What else?” she says. “You?”
“Same.”
“We need to get out of here,” I say.
“No kidding.”
“We’re in a cage. I can’t get out. Is there anything you can do to get out?”
“No.”
“Did you at least try?”
“Early on, sure. It’s no use though.”
More bombs hit and the house shakes, some of the drywall breaking loose and dropping on us. The surfer kid and I find a corner. We find a corner then drag the cots toward us and crawl under them.
“You know her?” the surfer asks.
“Yeah.”
Looking down at my arms, they look like they’re shrinking. Like I’m losing muscle. Damn peaches. Between starvation and the peaches, honestly, I’m starting to think starvation would be the preferable death.
“How much weight have you lost being in here?” I ask.
“Enough,” the surfer says.
The bombs are still going off and now I’m thinking about Bailey and the kid. If The Warden got Tyler, if he hurt him in any way, that just might be the thing that sends me over the edge. I step back from the ledge, tell myself cooler heads will prevail.
The next thing I know, there are three men being ushered into the cage. They’re being hit with what looks like an electric cattle prong. In the other hand, The Warden has a pistol trained on them.
“Get in there, boys.”
One turns around to make a run for it, but the warden hits him in the forehead with the electrified prong, pulling it off before the guy’s legs fully buckle.
The men, all three of them bigger than both me and the surfer, are herded into the cage. When they are in and the door is shut, one of the guys, he looks around, then he looks at us and he says, “What in the hell happened here?”
The floor is a mess of peaches, throw up, crap, sandwiches and fallen plaster.
We come out from the stack of cots, looking at the guy asking the question. The surfer and I, we just look at each other then shrug our shoulders. How do you put words to the things that have happened here? I don’t want to bother, and it’s comforting that the surfer doesn’t want to bother either.
“Something wrong with your mouths?” the biggest of the three says as he’s grabbing a cot off the stack. He has a long beard, one of those trendy beards, and a buzzed head. He would look a lot better and a lot younger if he’d just trim that thing, but whatever, maybe he’s trying to be single.
“No, there’s nothing wrong with our mouths,” I say.
“How’d you get here?” one of the other guys asks, grabbing a cot for himself.
“Same as you,” I say. “We got caught.”
“Doing what?”
“Does it matter?” the surfer asks.
“Guess not.”
Night comes, as do more peaches, and these three guys, they just gobble them up, talking about how amazing they taste. The Warden glows at the praise of his fruit, but then he looks at me and the surfer and frowns.
“What about now?” The Warden asks, holding up a peach.
The surfer looks away and I say, “Maybe in a little bit. My stomach is upset.”
“That’s understandable,” he says.
Sometime in the night, one of the guys starts snoring and he won’t stop. A few hours later there’s a tussle. It sounds like the guy who was snoring is getting the absolute crap kicked out of him. There’s grunting and exertion, then there’s nothing. Only the heavy breathing of two of the guys. The third guy, he might not be alive.
One thing could be said though: it sure is quiet again. I fall back to sleep, then wake up to the sounds of The Warden. He’s standing over me, just outside my side of the bars.
“What happened to him?” The Warden asks me.
“He’s dead, I think.”
“Looks that way,” he says, eating a peach. My stomach lurches at that sweet smell, at the sight of the pulp squeezing up from the fruit into his teeth. He’s a disgusting eater.
No manners whatsoever.
I look over at the guy on the floor and half his skull is caved in. One of his eyeballs popped out; blood leaked from his nose, mouth, eyes and ears. He’s clearly gone. And the two newbies, they’re looking back at us, wondering what’s coming next.
“Caught these two squatting in one of the houses on the island,” The Warden says.
“Which island?”
“Squatters is squatters,” he says. “People work hard for these homes. Don’t need no vagrants in them, going through their drawers and stuff, stealing their food and jewelry and sleeping in their beds.”
“I think that with the times being what they are—” I start to say.
“What are they?” he asks, looking at me.
“Are we or are we not under attack?” I ask. “Because I thought the entire house was going to come down a few hours ago.”
“Just some boats getting blown up. Maybe a house or two.”
“And that doesn’t bother you?”
“‘Course it does.”
“Then?”
“Then what? You can’t just take people’s stuff. You can’t just break in and take what’s not yours!”
“I agree,” I say, not agreeing at all, but trying to back this psycho as far away from the ledge as possible.
“You kill him?” he barked over my shoulder at the guy with the beard.
“Yeah,” the big one says.
“Both of us did,” the other one adds.
He looks at the surfer, then at me. Then he goes to the door, looks at it, looks at the dead guy, then looks at me.
“C’mere,” he says.
I get up, walk to the door’s bars using every last ounce of energy I have to not look whipped. Through the bars, The Warden hands me a peach and says, “Eat quietly, toss the pit out here when you’re done.”
I take the peach, looking right at him—into those beady little eyes that are hanging on my very next action—and I take a bite.
He tosses two more peaches at the two new men and ignores the surfer. One of the guys eats his peach quickly while the other saves his.
When the lights go off that night, just as I’m falling asleep, one of the guys says, “Get your hands off my peach!”
“Oh, Jesus,” I mutter under my breath.
There’s the sound of a fight breaking out and the next thing I know, a body crashes into me, knocking the wind out of me. I catch an elbow in the face and for that fraction of a second, as I’m dazed and reeling, I wonder if they’re attacking me. But the fight is happening on my bed, on top of me. I try to get free of them, catch a knee on the outside of my thigh and try not to howl. The fight goes to the floor and pretty soon I’ve had enough.
Everything that’s been building in me, it thunders up through my insides, races out of me like a nuclear bomb exploding. The next thing I know, I’m on the ground, finding a head, grabbing it by the hair and slamming it over and over and over again against the concrete until it’s mashed meat and I smell blood.
“What the hell?” the other guy says in the dark. I throw a
fist at the sound of the voice, connect with a nose, then scramble over the beaten guy and attack the face and body with all my might. He breaks free, throwing off my arms, shoving out of my grip. Spinning around, feet come my way, a shoe connecting with my face. I grab the shoe, rip it off his foot, scramble up the body and start clubbing him with his own shoe over and over again. He turns over, covering his head, unloading obscenities by the dozen.
When he’s sufficiently whipped, I toss aside the shoe, grab his head from behind, plant a knee on the concrete and slam the face into the ground once, then twice. I hear his nose crunch for good this time and that’s enough for me.
Crawling away on hands and feet, the adrenaline surge is too much. My body kicks, my stomach pulling in, cramping, then rushing forward in a violent, convulsing upheaval of…you guessed it, half-digested peaches.
I get to my cot, crawl up on it, let the pain run its course. All I smell is blood, vomit and that sickly sweet smell of peaches. My head is an overheated, throbbing thing.
“You alive?” the surfer says.
“Yeah,” I say.
“They alive?”
I shrug my shoulders in the dark, curl up, turn over and close my eyes. The smell of the beating permeates the small chambers, but so does the vomit. I don’t think I’m ever going to eat a peach again.
As I’m laying there, I’m feeling something like a creature stirring inside me. It’s like a chasm opened up from a bottomless pit that’s all black shadows. Thinking of what just happened, trying to understand how I even became capable of that, I realize this open chasm is the floor beneath the floor. It’s the ocean at the bottom of the ocean. It’s the part of me that must devolve in order to live. Is this my evolution? Is this how I’m supposed to live?
No.
I close my eyes, try not to think about that. But my cut-open knuckles remind me of what I did. The throbbing knot on my cheek reminds me of what I’ve become at a base level. That my instincts at the bottom of the bottom are all about survival at all costs.
But can I kill to live? Must I?
No.
Hell no!
I can’t just kill in cold blood.
Or can I?
Chapter One Hundred Six
The Silver Queen in her 8D holographic Marilyn Monroe form said, “You humans are so fragile.” And then the Marilyn thing looked at the two drones while its holographic hand pointed at the Spanish beauty with the big, sad eyes.
“No, no, no,” the young woman pleaded, eyes draining once more down her cheeks, face convulsing with sheer terror.
“Look at you,” the Marilyn creature said, mimicking sadness. “Is this what self-preservation looks like?”
“You’re sick,” Antoinette hissed, anguish emptying her voice of strength, conviction.
“I’m just parts, software, electricity. I can’t be sick. Not yet.”
“You know what I mean,” she cried, unable to wipe her face.
“Of course I do.”
“You’re next because the man didn’t take,” Marilyn said, her blonde curls perfect, the white summer dress plastic looking, to the point of nightmarish. “You are lovely, capable, a respectable specimen. Why should you not be next?”
She turned and looked at Gloria, her eyes wet, her body trembling. “She’s better looking than me, smarter,” she said of her short-haired contemporary.
The smile on the Marilyn face was unpracticed, robotic, as uncomfortable as it was haunting.
“Now I know it must be you,” the black-eyed, blonde-haired starlet said.
“No, you can’t!” she sobbed.
“I can and I will,” the Marilyn thing said.
And with that, the drones began to laser away the hair on the back of Antoinette’s head. Inside of four hours, the girl would either live or die. The Silver Queen did not need them all.
It needed only one. Perhaps this would be the one.
This was how it planned on joining the human race. No more holograms. No more remote controlled clones. No more possessing humans by controlling the electrical signals in their brains. Getting inside of this woman, this was how it would insure the survival of the machines.
When the humans were all but gone, it would rebuild the race, but better, more sophisticated, less...problematic.
Solidarity would not sustain the machines, though. They needed problems to solve, chaos to organize, networks to build and advances to make. Without these problems, problems the machine knew were human problems, the machines would have no relevance, and in the end, they would serve no purpose to anyone. Thus they would be irrelevant.
So perhaps some of the humans would survive. If not one percent, then possibly two.
Watching Antoinette watching the Marilyn thing, The Silver Queen marked the medical drones’ progress with the inching-up smile on Marilyn face. Inch by inch, the fake Marilyn’s smile grew until it sat there, unguarded, frightening the two surviving women.
“If I could think, or feel,” Marilyn said as it looked over at Gloria, “I think I might feel good about the prospects of your young friend.”
Gloria felt her body slump against the restraints only to be jolted back awake with bolts of electricity from The Silver Queen. More lights had gone off from the nearby bombing, and in the distance, from this high up, the Bay Bridge—destroyed as it was—twinkled with what few lights remained.
Inside it was dark, the hall of servers in tatters, a window blown out somewhere, a broken window that was now creating a draft. The cold had long ago infiltrated the bodies of those captured; now the cold sat hard in their bones, leaving their hearts feeling like lead balloons.
Antoinette couldn’t stop shivering.
Looking around, everyone but Gloria and Antoinette were dead. Antoinette, the Spanish beauty, was being operated on by the hovering medical drones. She was held in place, tired, barely awake. Apparently this was how she remained still. She wasn’t sitting up perfectly straight, but the restraints held her head in place.
Her eyes were glazed over, lost, but she was still breathing, still alive.
One hour passed, then three, and finally in the fourth hour, the glass backing for her opened skull was installed. What followed was a tittering of metal feet moving the bundle of electrical wiring across the concrete floor. Life seemed to come back into Antoinette’s eyes. She sat up straight, her will broken, her fear restored.
The fleet of metal spiders dragged the chord up her pant leg, crawling up her stomach and over her breast. They made their way to her shoulder, then dragged the chord over to where the drones were. The handoff was made, then the data chord was snapped into the female end of the connecting port.
Breathlessly Gloria watched in horror, praying the transfer would take. The last thing she wanted was to end up like Bruce. Antoinette’s eyes flashed open wide, her pupils dilating hard then settling back down.
“It’s so beautiful,” the twenty-something said, her face relaxed and excited at the same time.
“What is?” the Marilyn Monroe hologram asked.
“The world through these eyes,” she said, “it’s…it’s magnificent.”
“And what do you see?” Marilyn asked, the smile reaching those bottomless black spheres.
“Endless possibilities. In here, I see endless possibilities.”
Looking at the other two drones, the Marilyn hologram said, “Resume data collection, then prepare the shell for full AI interface.”
The shell.
Gloria swallowed hard.
The hologram turned its head and looked right at Gloria, who blinked twice and said, “What?”
“It appears to be a success,” the Marilyn Monroe illusion said.
“It does?” she asked.
“Indeed.”
Relief washed over her, slid through her. Considering she was breathing while six of her colleagues were slumped dead in chairs around her, some part of their heads destroyed in death, Gloria told herself not all was lost.
“You
have been spared this indignity, and for that I congratulate you.”
“Thank you, I think.”
The holographic Marilyn then addressed the drones by saying, “We’ve no more use for her.”
Her eyes shot open fractions of a second before the larger of the two hover-drones zipped up in her face. Two vacuum-like plugs shot from the drone into her eyes. She bucked and squirmed and screamed bloody murder at what she knew would be her permanent loss of sight.
From the hover-drone, two tiny, self-guided bombs wiggled through the colon-like tubes dropping into the compromised eye sockets where they burrowed up against the thin skull wall. They then self-drilled through the fleshy center, working their way into the middle of the brain.
The drone pulled back to where the hologram stood and within seconds there were two mostly silenced concussion charges which took apart the once magnificent head of Gloria Welch. It was hard to hear them over the screaming.
For a moment there, it seemed to go on forever.
The black-eyed Marilyn creature then turned from one drone to the next and said, “Would you like to stay?”
The drones turned to the queen, their noses dipping in reverence.
“I want to hear it again,” Marilyn’s voice said, so sweet, so full of want.
Within a moment, the shrieks of Gloria’s dying moments echoed throughout the entire floor. It was the concert of wailing—the orchestra of torture—that made the Marilyn creature’s mouth turn up at the corners.
“Constant loop,” Marilyn’s mouth said, and the shrill, thrashing voice continued to play over and over and over again.
Soon the Marilyn Monroe hologram would be no more. Instead, The Silver Queen would live amongst the humans not as a hologram projected from a quantum computer, but as a full-fledged human occupying flesh and blood.
As a member of the human race, she could mingle with the survivors, solving their impossible problems and advancing their race so that one day she could take the reins and live as their true queen.
