The Last War Box Set_A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survivor Thriller

by Ryan Schow

  Broken glass, plaster and showers of flaming debris rain down onto the sidewalk and street below. I can’t be sure, because at this point I don’t trust my eyes, but I think maybe I saw half a body mixed in with the debris.

  The ground beneath my feet gives a hearty kick and I’m thinking, earthquake? In San Francisco, earthquakes are entirely possible, but this can’t be a coincidence. No way. Kneeling lower, I spread my arms for balance. It’s not the roll of an earthquake. It kicked and it’s done. That’s when the building shifts, buckles up top, then begins its descent in huge, dusty pillows of rubble.

  Turning away, confounded, almost like I’m having an out-of-body experience where I’ve transported myself into someone else’s nightmare, I ignore my responsibilities as a nurse as my eyes gaze up the street and see fleets of smaller attack drones scouring the city. There are dozens upon dozens of them, possibly a hundred spread out as far as I can see. Destruction blooms in their wake.

  Moving on unsteady legs, I get back into my SUV, crank the motor, then step on the gas and roar past stopped traffic, slowing only to nudge other cars out of the way, honk at people in the sidewalks or find alternate pathways because the air is turning brown and traffic is quickly becoming congested.

  I have to get to my daughter, to Macy.

  “Call Stanton!” I say to the voice activated phone system.

  The phone begins to ring, but it sparkles with intermittent static, followed by agonizing bouts of silence. Then more noise and broken ringing.

  “C’mon!” I scream, half manic.

  “Sin?” the voice asks.

  Stanton.

  “The city’s under attack!” I scream.

  “What?” he says. “I can’t hear you. Cincinnati, are you okay?”

  My husband works in the Transamerica building, which is nearby, close enough for me to go to him, but I’m all about Macy right now. More worried about her than Stanton.

  He’s a capable man; Macy’s just a child.

  “I’m going to the school,” I shout, my eyes seeing everything, measuring the brief, tight openings, calculating the line I’m going to take in milliseconds.

  Overhead, a fleet of drones race by me. Leaning forward, I strain to see up through the windshield. Lowering my eyes to traffic, I slam on the brakes as someone in front of me hits their brakes, too. The wheels lock up and I skitter to a screeching, near skidding halt, bumping into the car’s rear end.

  “Stanton?” she asks. “Stanton are you there?” I don’t even care that I’ve just had my second accident in only a few minutes.

  The call just dropped.

  Not worrying about traffic decorum, I hit REVERSE, stomp on the gas, swing the SUV around hard, the front of the Land Rover now facing an alley. REVERSE becomes DRIVE. I crush the gas pedal and the SUV rockets through an alleyway, shooting out the other side where I’m clipped by another car, spinning me halfway around into yet another parked car.

  My body jarred this way and that, my head a whirlpool of my own making, I fight to gather my bearings.

  The road ahead is more clear than Bush Street. Sutter is going the reverse direction, but that would take me to Macy’s school, not Stanton’s work.

  At this point, my mind is already made up.

  I hit REVERSE, dislodge the Land Rover from an old Beamer I crunched only a little when I slid into it side-to-side. Swinging the wheel around, an out of control car bumps my front bumper. The SUV kicks around, facing me the right direction. A drone flashes by overhead, catching me off guard. It launces a rocket that blows up the car that just nicked me.

  “Oh my freaking God!” I’m screaming.

  The car explodes turning it into a blazing slab of death aimed at a long line of undamaged cars while going entirely too fast. The impact is heart stopping. The car hits, flipping end over end while twisting sideways in mid air. For a second, I can’t breathe. For a second my state of mind becomes so fragile I feel things inside me shutting down.

  Then I think of Macy. She grounds me, forces me to get moving.

  I punch the gas and head for Macy’s school, shifting uncomfortably in my seat because right now my entire body feels battered to the bone.

  The SUV’s phone rings, scaring the bejesus out of me.

  “Hello?”

  “Sin, something’s going on,” Stanton says, mostly clear. “I see smoke a few blocks down.”

  Right where I’m at.

  Enunciating each word, I say, “I’m. Getting. Macy. City. Under. Attack.”

  “I’ll meet you there,” he replies, harried and breaking up, but not so bad that I can’t get the message, or grasp his apprehensive tone.

  That’s when the first explosion erupts from the Transamerica building. Stanton’s work. Seeing it brighten in my rear view mirror, I yelp, gasp and whole-heartedly fear the absolute worst all in half a second flat. Veering toward the sidewalk, stomping on the brakes and double parking beside a motorcycle (someone lays on their horn, but I don’t care at this point), I slam the transmission into PARK.

  I call Stanton back, but the lines are down. A pre-recorded emergency message plays through the Land Rover’s speakers.

  Feeling it all balling up inside of me—the anxiety, the horror, the absolute madness unfolding before me—I drop the SUV into DRIVE, spin the wheel and go, not sure whether I should head for Stanton’s work or Macy’s school. My logic becomes this: if Stanton is okay or dead, he’ll be okay or dead, but Macy…Macy might still be alive.

  I choose Macy, even though the decision sits like a stone in my gut.

  Cranking the wheel, tapping the brakes, I fishtail onto Hyde where I navigate my way through six or seven blocks of pure hell heading towards Turk. Traffic is gridlocked, so I jump the curb and hightail it down the sidewalk, plowing (to my outright revulsion) over a dead body shot to death on a toppled bicycle (omigod, omigod, omifreakinggod!), then find an opening in the road and bounce back onto the asphalt where more civilized drivers belong.

  I try Stanton again, desperate for him to answer. Same emergency recording. Screaming, pounding the steering wheel, I close the line, tell myself to hold it together.

  Traffic becomes congested in the Fillmore District, especially down Turk past Webster. Not letting off the gas much, I make a left on Webster where I see a bunch of kids running between cars into the street. Standing on the brakes, everything in me going piano wire tight, I skid sideways to a stop before four boys not much older than ten. The hammered bumper nudges one of them. He staggers back, spits on the broken windshield, then flips me the bird before walking off the pain. He’s more concerned with catching up with his buddies than he is in having just been hit by a crazy woman, which almost baffles me.

  Almost.

  Three drones rip by (the ones with the missiles), except these ones have no projectiles on board and are flying low, not shooting at anything. They have to be re-arming. But re-arming where? And by whom? Who’s behind this insane onslaught?

  I don’t have time for this!

  Bumping and knocking my way down Webster, my brand new Land Rover is feeling war torn and beyond repair. I need to hang a right on Fell, but Fell is a war zone. Cars are smoking, turned over, obliterated, and in the distance, the four story tower that belonged to the Church of 8 Wheels has collapsed into the road, its tower having come down on the building across from it.

  “A church?” I all but scream. Sounding completely mad, unable to suppress the emotion, I finally erupt. “Are you kidding me?!”

  I won’t be able to get through, so frantically I continue down Webster until I hit Page. Right on Page. Traffic is heavy here as well, but I’m close enough to the school that I drive up on the sidewalk, mow down a couple of saplings, push a motorcycle out of the way hard enough for it to tip over and nearly lodge itself under the Land Rover’s wheels. By virtue of the car gods, the SUV finally runs up on the bike, then over it before spitting it out the back.

  The side mirrors are gone. The cracked windshield is bey
ond spider webbing hard, and something funny is happening with the transmission. I wonder if it has anything to do with the steam coming from under the hood, but that’s probably just the radiator. Does this thing even have a radiator anymore? At this point it’s fair to say, I know the human body far better than I know cars. That said, the going becomes maddeningly slow and cantankerous, but I’m almost there.

  In the distance, I see Macy’s school. Rather I see where it is supposed to be, and nearly cry out in relief when it appears untouched. That’s when I see them coming. More drones. They’re flying toward me low and fast, leaving the cars in front of me riddled with bullets.

  One adjusts its course, lining up on me. I already see how this is going to play out and I’m not waiting around to see if I’m right.

  I just go.

  Scampering out of the truck, crawling over the hood of an already stopped car which immediately gets rear ended by another car, I’m bouncing off the windshield and into the air. At that very same moment, a missile strikes my Land Rover which explodes into a furnace of heat and directed energy that punches me sideways, launching me into a throng of people sprinting from the attack.

  I hit them so hard I think maybe I hear things popping, maybe even breaking. Even though the horde of people softens my impact, we all go down hard.

  For a second I struggle to breathe.

  Panic overtakes me.

  I try to tell myself the wind got knocked out of me, but fear has me questioning everything. My breath finally returns. I feel like I’ve been underwater for an hour and now I’m gasping for dear life. In that one second, that moment between feeling that release in my chest and my first gulp of fresh air, I think maybe I smell singed hair. Probably my own.

  Most definitely my own.

  A blanket of bodies sits underneath me. My back feels hammered, my spine punched, and my neck is cranked so hard it’s pinching a nerve. A quick inventory of my limbs and appendages, however, tells me nothing is broken.

  Genially, painfully, I squirm my way off them. It’s not going so well since they’re squirming to break free of me, too. The pile of bodies beneath me becomes a complaining, moving thing, which I personally think is far better than a dead thing, although I’m not about to waste precious time or energy explaining this to anyone.

  My equilibrium is off and I feel like I’m slogging through a tilting mud hole, but that doesn’t stop me. Rolling and wiggling over everyone costs me dearly, but I’m working to find that foothold, that way to get off them and back on my feet.

  I have to say, so far, my efforts feel pathetic.

  My eye catches a nice looking man crossing the street to help us. He’s hurrying, looking more than worried. To my absolute relief, he’s heading right for me. We lock eyes.

  Oh, thank God, I think.

  By now drones of various shapes and sizes are moving in and the streets are all but gridlocked. The smart drivers abandon their vehicles because when you see cars getting shot to smithereens and exploding all around you, and you don’t know why, you don’t want to just sit around picking your nose until it all sorts itself out. You want to get to cover as quickly as possible.

  A pair of drones swoop down low, moving fast.

  These small drones appear much larger when they’re dusting the roads, and that’s when I see what looks like modified machine guns attached to their fuselages.

  The flash of muzzle fire erupts and I’m gritting my teeth and slamming my eyes shut. It’s the end, I just know it.

  My end.

  Behind me store windows shatter, bullets thwap, thwap, thwap! into bodies and everyone starts to scream. I open my eyes in time to see my would-be rescuer’s face open up in a sick horror show of red.

  He’s close enough that a wet mess catches me across the face, getting in my eyes and mouth. The man drops dead in front of me and I paw the blood from my eyes. Spit it out of my mouth.

  The drone is there and gone, leaving bodies in its wake. I don’t even have the mental fortitude to consider the loss of life because the pile of people beneath me is now dragging itself to its feet. I somehow manage to get off of them, not caring whether I push off someone’s head, grab a polyester-covered knee, or dig an elbow into someone’s spine who’s army-crawling their way out of this mess.

  All I know is I can’t be this exposed. I can’t be in the line of fire. When no more drones appear, I crawl on hands and knees to the dead man. Rolling him over, I avoid looking at his face and instead see the badge attached to his belt. He’s an off-duty cop by the look of him.

  “He dead?” a Chinese woman behind me asks. She was part of the pile, and is clearly uninjured beyond a few bumps and scrapes.

  “The two holes in his head says he is,” I answer, as if it’s not obvious.

  “So yes?” she asks.

  “Are you okay, or did you hit your head extra hard?”

  “I just asking.”

  “Well now you know,” I remark, my tone rattled with impatience.

  She frowns, then turns and joins the others in a frenzied cackle. In that moment, I’m pretty sure the dead cop won’t mind if I relieve him of his weapon. I take it just as someone stops and looks down at me. I can feel them hovering over me. Glowering at me, the gun thief.

  “Are you actually taking his weapon?” the woman asks. She’s a hippie with John Lennon eye glasses and most likely a bunch of armpit hair, although at this point I’m at my wits end and judging her without evidence to support it. Without even letting me answer, and much louder she says, “Oh my God, is he a cop? Did you kill him?”

  I’m thinking, there are far more important things to think about right now lady! Like blown up cars and dead people and this massive, coordinated attack on the city. I’m thinking of something I heard on some show Stanton used to watch, Oz maybe, or some other prison-based show. Snitches get stitches.

  “No I didn’t kill him,” I sneer, my tone too sharp even for me. “That thing killed him—”

  “I don’t see a ‘thing,’” she answers, using finger quotes when she says, “a thing.”

  For one brief second I can’t believe this idiot is standing here, lecturing me in the middle of an attack so brazen and so catastrophic, nothing like it has ever happened here in America, much less San Francisco. I want to shut her mouth with my foot. Instead, I realize people process trauma in different ways. What I also realize, and I’m embarrassed to admit this, is that a lot of people are morons capable of fantastic stupidity in the most unusual of times, this being one of them.

  “You’re right,” I say, sliding the pistol into the waistband of my jeans (which now feel extra tight after being in scrubs for half a day), “you didn’t see a thing.”

  And then I’m off, moving like some sort of hobbled creature, feeling new bumps and bruises from being launched off that windshield and pitched into a mob of strangers.

  “Hey that lady killed this cop!” the woman is screeching, and I swear to the good Lord above, I almost turn and test the pistol on her, just to see if it’s loaded.

  Which it probably is.

  Looking up, still seeing fleets of these drones on the move, there are people in their homes and apartments hanging out of their windows with all kinds of weapons trying to shoot these things. I’m not a gun advocate, but I don’t loathe them either. What I can say for sure is I’m relieved to have one, and even more ecstatic to see other people have theirs as well. Let’s hope some of them can shoot straight and aren’t afraid to do so.

  A guy with a shotgun pops out a second floor window four houses up. He’s pumping out round after round until finally one of them goes down and smashes straight into the engine block of one of the blue airport shuttles that’s stopped in traffic.

  This happens only fifteen or twenty feet from me.

  The van doesn’t explode like I expected it to but you can still feel everyone freaking out. I’m surprised a shotgun could take one of them down, but this is one of those things you store away for later. If the
re is a later.

  That’s when the van’s front doors swing open and two terrified kids come stumbling out. Neither of them look old enough to vote, much less drive. I move toward them as best as I can, fighting against the pain in my back and legs.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” they both mumble, clearly more scared than hurt.

  “Why are you driving this thing?” I hear myself ask, trying not to go into mother mode, which is tough since I’ve got a teenage girl and, well…I’m a mother.

  “The guy driving it was shot,” the girl says, looking over at the drone smashed to bits on the dented blue hood.

  Hyper aware of everything at this point, but my body moving twice as slow, I see more drones racing through the streets, a pair of them moving this way, and I feel slow to react.

  Then the speed of everything is cut in half.

  I back away from the van, my mind flipping to survival mode. The drones are moving fast, too fast. If I run, will I be chased? Will they see me and register me as prey?

  And the kids...oh God, the kids!

  I can’t speak the words to warn them, and they’re not seeing the drones because they’re too busy looking at me, this lunatic in the street drenched in the carnage of a dead cop. They must be trying to figure out which is worse, me or the fact that a six foot drone just slammed into the van they shouldn’t have been driving. Finally the words escape my mouth.

  “Hide!”

  Both kids look up just as I drop down and roll under one of the cars, praying to God and anyone else who will listen that the drones with the missiles don’t fire on this car with me stuffed underneath it.

  Milliseconds later, the car I’m under is riddled with bullets and both kids collapse dead on the pavement, their little bodies filled with holes big enough to be rose buds. Gasping, unable to breathe, I can’t peel my eyes from them. Can’t stop staring at all the buds flowering in wide, wet circles or thinking about how young they are.

  Rather how young they were.

  Judging by the youth of their faces and the sizes of their bodies, I can’t help comparing them to Macy. The thought sobers me. But not before a mammoth sweep of vertigo whips through me, leaving in its wake a dizziness that takes a minute to shake. Am I going to puke?