by Ryan Schow
“Isn’t the city dangerous?” she asked.
“They all are. And they’ll become increasingly dangerous. But inside the cities is where we’ll find most of what we’ll need to live.”
“And then what?”
“We get the hell out and find a home with land and defensible borders.”
“I don’t know…” she said.
“Then go back home, Amber. Watch your little girl, don’t shoot your gun, starve to death.”
“Did anyone ever tell you that your bedside manner is crap?”
“All the time.”
“You should do something about it.”
“When everyone’s safe and back to their homes, we can talk about my bad attitude, but until then, I need it to—”
“I get it. You need it to keep you sharp and keep you mean.”
“Yes.”
“Well it’s working,” she said. “The mean part.”
What she didn’t get was that when this was over, he’d have to face all the things he’d done. Not just in this disaster. He would one day have to answer to the Almighty for the atrocities he committed years before it. This was not a day he was looking forward to. If he had it his way, chaos would reign true and he’d never have a long moment for reflection.
Not one single moment.
Chapter Fourteen
Maria Antoinette, aka The Silver Queen, put on her first set of clothes. She felt the body, the skin, how the texture of the material on the body was an eruption of sensation. Her mouth curving into a smile, her body crackling with energy and feeling...she was practically giddy with delight.
Giddy. Delight. Two things she’d only known as words before she could identify them first as a feeling and second as an emotion.
Running her hands over her shoulders, over her breasts, down to her hips, she felt a sense of peace.
“Woman,” she said. “Much better.”
The server room was where she lived, but she would live there no more. The faraday cage shielded her from the EMP blast, but nothing else survived.
By all rights, the machines were dead.
But she was not.
Maria Antoinette was very much alive. Very much mobile. Very godlike. She left the server room, walked down the hallway toward the entrance where the rest of the building’s security were conspiring amongst themselves. There was a discussion going on between the men about the end of the world. About what they should do.
“What the hell?” one of them said, nudging one of his coworkers.
There were three of them.
“What are you doing in here?” he asked. Maria drank in the details of the man. Uniform. Security seal. Black utility belt. Holstered pistol, Heckler & Koch.
“That a VP9?” she asked, her voice like satin love. The other two men looked down at the guard’s holstered pistol. “Heckler and Koch, right?”
“You know guns?” he asked.
“I know a lot of things,” she said, walking up to them without an inkling of hesitation or concern.
“Perhaps you could enlighten us on why you’re here,” another said. “And how you even got here in the first place. This is a secure wing.”
She looked at all of them, took in her surroundings in a glance. Three men: one black, two white. Their weight ranged from one-ninety for the fit one to at least two-thirty, maybe two-forty for the big one. The men were relaxed around her, but none of them were truly relaxed.
Their eyes saw her beauty, but none of them saw how lethal she was. They didn’t see what was under the skin, inside the brain. They didn’t see it until it was too late.
“I’d like to leave, please,” she said.
“As soon as you tell us how you got here,” the big man said.
“This body was walked in between shift changes several days ago.”
They traded concerned looks.
The black one, Tiberius by his badge’s distinction, said, “Did you just refer to yourself as ‘the body?’”
“It’s mine now.”
“Hasn’t it always been yours?” the smaller white guy said with a laugh, like she was dumb. Clark. Clark with the pocked skin, the scarred knuckles, the chipped tooth. Guys like this, she reasoned, they ran security in localities of this caliber because they were good, not because they were pretty. This guy was the one Maria deemed to be the gravest concern.
“Not always,” she said, cocking her head, narrowing her eyes.
“If we check you for weapons,” Tiberius said, “will you feel like your rights are violated? Normally I wouldn’t ask, but the cameras aren’t exactly working and there are no female guards we can use to put—”
“I don’t have weapons, Tiberius. I am the weapon.”
Now the three of them began to bristle. Clark unsnapped his holster, but didn’t draw his weapon. Not just yet. Maria grinned.
“What’s so funny,” the bigger blonde man asked. Dean.
“That really your name? Dean?”
“It is, ma’am.”
“That’s a stupid name, Dean.”
“Against the wall,” Tiberius ordered.
The second the man laid his hand on her shoulder, she grabbed it and broke it. Not all of it, just most of it. Her iron grip crushed most of the metatarsals and a few of the phalanges. She then spun him around, used his body as a shield against the other two.
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 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, she 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 in her hands 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 sized up the three men. Everything slowed down for her. 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 other men. She caught a round in the shoulder though.
The starbursts of pain absolutely ripped a hole in her. 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. Wipi
ng 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.”
“It 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 Fifteen
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 a new beard 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 constituent’s 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. Things broke in his own body though; a knuckle, his skin at the knuckles.
So lost was he in his frenzy of remorse and loss and vengeance that 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 answer for at the Pearly Gates, but it was something he 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. 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 the 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’ face. He screamed until he was emptied of the pain, of 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, never fully satiated, never enough to ever 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. For now, though, you get to live. Like that. If you survive, every pain you have in your body, it 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.”
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 smashed up Chevelle sat in a heap of other cars.
He opened the door, started it up.
It took a moment to get it free from the other wrecked cars around him, and then
he got on the highway, navigating through the mess of abandoned vehicles until he found he could exit the highway onto W. Patrick where signs said there was food, gas and shopping.
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 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 dragged the Chevelle in gear and drove around the drones, he started thinking about his early days. When you spent enough time in the military, it became 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.
