by Ryan Schow
“Yeah,” I say. “Now you understand.”
Rider, Jagger and Rex mount a counter offensive, meaning they cussed a lot, grabbed their guns and went after the attackers. Later that afternoon, when they returned, Rex told me they couldn’t find the body-hurling device or the idiots operating it.
“We scanned the surrounding neighborhood two blocks out,” Rex says, “but man, when you think of all the places they could be, it starts to get overwhelming.”
“That doesn’t sound like a lot,” I say.
“Maybe you could go out next time and have better luck than us,” he mumbled.
“Sorry,” I say, feeling sheepish. “It’s just…why would they do this to us?”
“I can’t even begin to fathom their reasoning, or their repugnant display of sociopathic creativity.”
That night, after cleaning up the bodies and washing away the gore, we gather together on to discuss our next moves.
Sarah says, “If they got away with this, if we have no breadcrumbs by which to find them, what’s to say they won’t hit us again?”
“They might,” Rider says, holding her hand.
“They probably will,” Rex adds.
The second assault comes days later, just after nightfall. I’m the first to see the flaming body arcing through the night sky, descending upon us. Macy’s smart enough to sound the alarm, which is the frantic sounds of a dinner bell being rung.
With burning bodies raining down around us, Rider, Jagger and Stanton rush in after the guns, charging moments later into the night with Rider in the lead. Catching sight of Rider’s face as he races by sends chills up my arms and trailing down my back. His expression is adrenaline-soaked rage. His look is unadulterated vengeance.
Rex, Indigo and three other retired veterans grab their weapons and stand guard outside the gates. Macy, Sarah and I head to our posts on the roof, making sure we’re not being flanked by these clowns under the cover of the assault.
Only half a dozen flaming bodies came in. A half hour later, Jagger and Rex return.
“Where’s Rider?” I ask.
“We found the catapult,” Jagger says. “I need the matches, Rex is grabbing some gas.”
“Yes, but where’s Rider?”
“With the catapult,” Jagger replies. “I already said that.”
“No you didn’t.”
With their pyromaniac’s starter kit ready to go, our two fearless alphas head back out into the night. Inside of fifteen minutes, the raging inferno sends a soft, bonfire glow into the otherwise pitch black night.
After burning to the ground what Jagger says was most likely a medieval trebuchet—or a heavy duty catapult meant for launching two and three hundred pound stones over castle walls back in the dark ages—Lenna looks at her husband and says, “How do you even know what that thing is? A medieval…whatever?”
“A medieval trebuchet. At work, some days we ran the clock out playing Clash of Clans against guys who were into that sort of thing,” Jagger replies. “These guys, some of them, they took their digital warfare seriously.”
By now about a dozen of us are sitting around the fire pit, drinking a warm victory beer and trying to gather our bearings.
We don’t feel victorious. Or vindicated.
“Who knew PlayStation would prepare the masses of pimply, gangly nerds for the end of civilization?” Indigo mused, not a glint of humor in her eyes.
There’s a fair measure of truth to the statement.
“We can’t discount them,” Margot says, chiming in. “I mean, these kids launched bodies at us. Bodies that were set on fire. Bodies that broke a few of our tables and windows. Bodies that contaminated parts of our garden.”
“Well there will be no more of that,” Rider says, the determination in his voice sharpened to a fine point.
Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Five
As we’re heading in for the night, Indigo pulls me aside and says, “How’s my mother doing?”
“What do you mean?”
“The cancer,” she says.
We let the others head inside. Rex asks if we’re alright and Indigo says we’re fine, that she’ll meet him upstairs in a few minutes.
“She’s actually doing pretty good,” I tell her. “Now that she’s away from Wi-Fi routers and 5G cellular service and 4K everything, she says she’s feeling less headachy.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. And she’s sleeping well. Better than she has in years.”
“Is that really a thing? Electronics fatigue, or something?”
“Technology, especially the blue screens on your cell phones, worked overtime disrupting the brain’s natural signals,” I tell her. “It’s like your body was extra tired while your mind was extra wired. This was a terrible combination for sleep and something a lot of professional people suffered from before the war.”
“That’s not the only reason she’s got cancer though, is it?”
“Who knows? All I know is the symptoms are diminishing. You can even see the light coming back into her eyes,” I assure her. Then: “How does she seem to you?”
Indigo looks like she’s really thinking about this for the first time.
“She’s actually good. I mean, I’ve never really gotten along with her, especially after…after she left us, but with Tad dead and my dad gone, we’re all we have. So we’ve been catching up, actually laughing together again.”
“Things like that have a way of healing a person, sometimes just in their souls, but other times physically.”
“Do you think that’s possible?”
“Miracles happen all over the world,” I tell her, smiling while taking her hand. “The medical community and the news aren’t always Johnny-on-the-spot about reporting these things, but the truths that work against the industry are often the most important and most veiled truths out there.”
“Why would people keep things like this from us?” Indigo asks. “Not that it matters now…”
“If you give someone hope, if you tell them miracles are deserved rather than in short supply, then everyone thinks the next miracle will be theirs so they go off their medicine, curse the doctors for differing diagnoses, start talking about how doctors are today’s drug peddlers and that they don’t care about anything other than collecting their checks.”
“Could you blame them?” Indigo says.
“The world before this was rife with corruption on all levels.”
Smiling, Indigo says, “Well those days are behind us, and hopefully my mother will be better. I’m…I’m really enjoying her.”
In the moonlight, I watch Indigo’s eyes take on the shine of tears. I won’t lie, I love the girl almost as much as Macy, and I’ve held her more than once as she cried about her father. I’ve also watched the turmoil shift through her as she’s asked me if there would ever be a reason for me to leave Macy the way Margot left her. But these are not those conversations, not those kinds of tears. These are better times, happier tears.
I pull the girl in my arms, hold her tight and say, “I love you, Indigo. We all do. Your mother especially, she just needed to get out of her own way to see it.”
“I know,” she says, sniffling. “I just needed to feel it, you know?”
“I do.”
“I love you, too, Cincinnati,” Indigo says. “Thank you for being so good to me.”
“You’re welcome. By the way,” I say, letting go of her, taking both her hands in mine and standing face to face with her, “how far along are you?”
Now her jaw drops. Then, swallowing hard, she says, “Did Rex tell you? I told him not to say—”
“You forget I’m a nurse, Indigo.”
“I didn’t forget.”
“How far along?”
She thinks back, then says, “A couple of weeks? I don’t know. The morning sickness has been pretty bad, though. Rex told you, didn’t he? Be honest.”
Smiling, happy thinking my brother has actually been able to keep a secret, I
say, “Actually the new guy you and Rex brought back, Gunther I think his name is—”
“Gunderson.”
“Yeah, Gunderson. He mentioned something to Sarah and Sarah asked me.”
“Yeah, that makes sense,” she says. “He saw me puking and talking about morning sickness when we found him. If you see him, will you ask him to keep it on the DL, just in case, you know…just in case something happens?”
“I will.” Smiling at her, taking her face in my hands, I say, “I’m so proud of you, Indigo.”
“I didn’t do this on my own,” she says.
Laughing, I tell her, “It’s not that. I’m proud of you for everything you’ve done, who you are, how you helped us survive and now for finding forgiveness in your heart for a woman who has done the inexcusable.”
“You don’t like Margot very much, do you?”
“I do, actually. I just don’t understand why she’d ever leave you. You know you’re practically Macy’s and Elizabeth’s hero, right?”
Now she laughs and says, “If only they knew how scared I can get at times…”
“We’re all a little scared, Indy.”
Most of us were still asleep when—the next morning—someone started blowing up the buildings all around us. Stanton and I leap out of bed and hurry first to the window and then into the hallway looking for answers.
The earth-rumbling explosions remind me of how we came to be in this position. How when buildings started coming down in the streets, I instinctively knew to look to the skies for the drones.
The drones are gone, I remind myself. Decommissioned.
“It has to be those same idiots we ran off the other day,” Stanton says. “These kids, man, they never learn.”
“We didn’t do anything to them,” I say as I’m reaching for reason or logic, something to explain such a bold affront. “Why would they just attack us like that? And why the hell are they blowing up buildings?”
“Apparently this is how they played their video games. If Jagger’s right, and he probably is, then they’re probably looking at us like we’re a clan and this is our fortress.”
“So?”
“Well, in that game, and games like it, if you see a fortress, you conquer it and take all their loot, their warriors and their women.”
“Morons,” I grumble.
If this is another war, I’m not ready. The players might be changing and the battlefield is certainly different, but is this going to be the rest of our lives? Us moving from one danger to the next while trying to protect ourselves and safeguard what’s ours?
Naturally I’m not the whimpering, worrying neurotic who first fell into this war; I fully accept this as our reality, but I don’t want it. I hate it. And even though the machines are gone and most of the people in this city have killed themselves and each other, I guess it’s time to get ready for whatever’s next, as serene or as toxic as it is.
Whatever these mental half-wits throw at us, we’ll be ready because we’re strong, we train daily, and this is survival of the fittest.
At least, that’s what I tell myself.
Walking down the hallway with Stanton, I can’t stop thinking about how good of a man he’s become. He’s a great father and protector, and these days he’s become a fine husband in all the ways that matter. He tells me the war against the machines was not the last war, like I don’t know that already, then he’s knocking on Sarah and Rider’s door saying, “The last war will be our struggle to survive, not as people, but as a species.”
“What do you mean?”
I’m pretty sure I get what he’s saying, but I don’t want to miss anything pertinent. Plus this is how Stanton game-plans through tough situations—by talking it out.
“It’s in our DNA to destroy ourselves,” he says, casting a grim look.
I don’t like this thought. But he’s not wrong. Unfortunately, I’m thinking he’s one hundred percent right.
Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Six
It was impossible to say how many days had passed since they were taken and put into this prison. Bailey’s throat scared her. How dry it was. The surface felt gritty, sucked of all moisture. Would she swallow one of these times and that would be it? Would the skin stick together making it impossible to breathe? She’d choke to death.
Death...
What an intoxicating thought.
When she was a child, just a stupid kid not yet smart enough to know the ways of the world, the concept of death never entered her mind. Now that she was imprisoned in this massive iron box, death was all she thought about.
She was afraid of dying. Until she wasn’t. She stopped praying. Cut off all one-way communications with God.
Her perspective had flipped and now death held a certain lure. Like if you wished for it in a moment of weakness, and you imagined it happening to you and the thought didn’t completely roil your stomach, you wouldn’t be upset if it happened and you actually got what you wished for.
Death was no longer that thing she feared as much as she felt it might be her only reprieve from this hell.
The starvation, the nightmares within nightmares, this impossibly hard floor, these weary bones, this filthy toilet...it had become too much.
She was going to die here. In this bathroom-stall-turned-solitary-confinement-cell. She was going to be laying here one moment, then the shutdown would just happen and she’d be gone.
At some point in time, even the weary and the delusional knew when they were beyond salvation. This wasn’t her throwing a tantrum. She truly felt this way in her more lucid moments.
Their captors were starving them. Not cleaning their toilets. Not letting them have any light. Eventually she lost perspective. She didn’t know the day, the week, the year. She’d even stopped talking to either Marcus or Nick.
No one was talking to anyone, it had become that bad.
If she tried to speak, or when she started to cry, or talk in her sleep, her voice was ragged, hoarse. For her, breathing was just dry air scraping over coarse sandpaper. It was a weak gust of wind over the Mojave desert in the hottest days of July.
A meal would come here or there, but it was dark all the time, like a cave, so she didn’t know how long she went between meals. Delusion set in, made worse only by the silence around her. Marcus and Nick had been silent for longer than she could imagine, so much so, that in her state of dementia she imagined them as gone. As if they’d just vanished. When she cried to herself, sobbed even, no one would say anything.
Had they been dragged from their cells when she was asleep? Were they hung in the yard, shot to death in a firing squad, shipped elsewhere like when they took people from Nazi Germany into Poland and put them to work in the labor camps?
It could be that she was there all alone.
But then she’d hear a cough, or a sniffle. Or even worse, one of them using the toilet. That in itself was the greatest indignity.
She’d come to think of it as stacking turds. When she was aching to eat, she thought about how the food would go through her. When she was given food, when it was time to use the toilet, she held on too long, trapping it inside her because being out rather than in would be so much worse. Then it would come and she’d have to wonder what her noises were doing to Marcus and Nick.
It seemed like the only marker between life and death was whether or not someone was taking a dump.
Starved and dehydrated, Bailey was sure her body was going after the fat. First her tits, then her ass, and then her stomach. Pretty soon her body would begin to consume her brain.
It was mostly fat, after all.
She thought maybe she’d learned that somewhere. Were her hallucinations not the most honest thoughts? This wasn’t delirium. Perhaps this wasn’t even delusion.
Could it be that she was finally reaching enlightenment?
One minute she was thinking of all the fibers of life, but then her thoughts were of the ethereal. How the universe connected us all as humans, making us one con
sciousness connected to God. That thought would flip, though, and suddenly she’d be fixated with the toilet. How it was either a beacon of hope or confirmation that she must let go of such foolish thoughts and give herself over to the concept of dying.
Just when she felt herself spinning totally out of control, she’d hear Marcus going to the bathroom. Then Nick would go. She’d breathe a sigh of relief knowing that even though they were all trapped in there together, they were still there with her. They were alive.
Well, as much as they could be, all things considered.
In the beginning, for every ten meals she was fed, she got her toilet cleaned. Two people would enter her cell, slide her out, hold her at gun point until the chore was complete. That meant one guy in a hazmat suit would fill a rubber bucket, almost like ladling a thick lentil soup—if you could stomach such a disgusting thought—while the other stared at her as she sat in the corner saying nothing. After awhile, with her energy gone and her will broken, the gun wasn’t even necessary. But that was after awhile. At first, she used to cover her eyes and plead for them to help her. She learned to stop though.
It did no good.
What little light the bathroom outside the cell offered her only pierced her eyes, forcing her to look down at her hands, her thighs, her knees and ankles. This insubstantial light was a form of torture in itself. It showed her things. Things she didn’t want to see. She was starting to look like those people she’d seen in books and movies about the labor camps in Auschwitz. All those people with their protruding bones and their knobby knees and knuckles, they’d been fed more than her. She came to believe they might have had better living conditions. Like light, fresh air, the company of others. They may not have had hope, but they had exercise and human interaction and that was something she would’ve killed for before she broke.
She had become one of them, she told herself. This is my own private Auschwitz.
Stuck in these lifeless boxes, the oxygen heavy with toilet fumes and desperation, she tried to rationalize time. How do you measure the days in a box with no windows, no clock and nothing to indicate day or night? They brought them less food. Stopped coming in pairs.
