by Ryan Schow
“Famous last words.”
Rider kissed Sarah good-bye, twice, then gave her one last look and joined Stanton in the hallway. It took them both the better part of an hour to get back to Dirt Alley. Fortunately they made the journey without incident.
At the house, Rider gathered up Hagan and Ballard, and Stanton got Atlanta from Indigo’s house. Rex looked at Margot, then Indigo, and then he said, “Indigo isn’t going, so I’m not going. For now.”
“I’m waiting for my father,” Indigo explained, arms crossed, standing beside her mother and next to Rex, who looked lost in all of this.
Stanton felt bad for him.
“Maybe you could leave him a note, tell him where we are. At least you’ll be safe and if he comes home, he’ll know where to find you.”
“I have everything I need to be safe here,” she said, not rude, just firm.
“What about you?” Stanton asked Rex.
“Like I said,” he replied. “When her father comes home, we’ll join you guys at the college.” Looking down at Indigo, he said, “Right?”
“We’ll see,” she said, her arms still crossed.
Chapter Seventeen
Jagger and the girl walked to the farmhouse up the street. He knocked on the door but no one answered. They went around back and peeked in the windows. The place looked empty. She walked around back where he saw the rear facing garage door. He tried the metal handle. It was locked.
“You sure there are bikes in here?” he asked.
The girl just looked at him.
“Well?”
She looked down. Okay…
Jagger walked around the garage, found a wooden door leading inside. With a mighty kick, Jagger hammered the back door. The frame cracked, leaving a boot-sized imprint near the handle,. It didn’t break though. He reared back and hammered it again, this time kicking it in completely.
They walked inside a darkened garage.
“Leave that door open so we can see,” he said. The girl did as she was told. His eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, and even to some of the darkness deeper inside the garage. That’s when he found what he was looking for. The bikes. Specifically a little girl’s bike.
“Looks like I found one for—”
The sound of a shotgun racking its load was unmistakable.
“You’re going to need to come out here with your hands on your head, and if I see you doing anything other than that, I’m going to put you down.”
He heard the girl give a low grunt of protest.
Jagger stepped into the light, hands on his head, pistol in the small of his back. “All I want is the bike so the girl can travel easier.”
“That ain’t your girl,” he said, eyeing her suspiciously.
Jagger and the girl did as instructed. When the man backed into the light, Jagger saw he was much older and with a shotgun in hand. The butt was tucked into the crook of his armpit, but it wasn’t steady. He saw Jagger and startled. After surviving a helicopter crash and a houseful of freaking lunatics, Jagger knew he looked bad.
“No, she’s not,” he said. “I crashed that helo down in the field. I was traveling with my co-pilot, my team and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when we lost power. This girl was being held hostage by a less than savory bunch who’ve been abusing her since this thing kicked off.”
“You’re military then?” the man asked, turning his eyes off the girl and onto Jagger.
“Marines. First Lieutenant Jagger Justus.”
He eased the gun down slowly, then looked back down at the girl. “This true? ‘Bout the abuse of you thing?” She nodded her head. “You and my granddaughter were friends, weren’t you?”
She stepped closer to Jagger, leaned a shoulder into him.
“I knocked first,” Jagger said. “Looked around back, too. Tried seeing if anyone was home.”
“What do you want?”
“The girl’s bike, like I said.”
“That’s my granddaughter’s bike, not just something you can take.”
“We can look elsewhere.”
“Where you headed?” the farmer asked, eyes now locked on Jagger.
“San Francisco. Trying to get home to my wife and two boys.”
“How old?”
“Fourteen and Seventeen.”
“Names?”
“Ballard and Hagan. Wife is Lenna.”
“Take the bike,” he finally said, standing out of the way.
“What about your granddaughter?”
A wash of sorrow clouded his eyes, then passed through his expression. “She and her grandmother never came home. Been looking for them, and waiting, but…”
“I’m sorry,” he said. Before the old man could change his mind, Jagger went in the garage and grabbed the bike. When he came back out the man and the little girl hadn’t moved. “How long have they been missing? Your family?”
“Since it started.”
“You were attacked, too?”
“Sacramento was. Not so much out here. Folks are trying to get out of the big city, so they’re passing through, causing a bit of a stir I think.”
“Oh?”
“Had a bunch of kids roll through here a few days back, hassling the neighbors. Two of ‘em got shot. They left the bodies on the ground in front of the house as a warning. I’m thinking of doing the same.”
“I appreciate you not doing that with us.”
“Stay here, I’ll be right back,” he said. Jagger looked the bike over. It seemed to be relatively new and in good working order. The farmer came back out with a plastic grocery bag filled with fruits and vegetables, handed them to Jagger and said, “For the trip.”
“I appreciate it,” Jagger said, moved. “Seriously, in times like these, you don’t expect the generosity of folks to prevail. So thank you.”
Shading his eyes from the sun, he said, “You know what happened here? Why all this…why those things attacked us?”
“I have an idea.”
The man looked at the food he’d given us, and for a second it seemed like a debt of obligation. Then again, if Jagger could provide some answers to the man, it might at least slow the chaos in his head.
“There’s a reigning obsession among the upper crust of Silicon Valley and the ruling elite. For decades now they’ve dreamt of a world where man and machine could merge. I gather they felt this was only possible with the use of AI. Artificial Intelligence.”
“I’d heard about that.”
“What you might not have heard about is the rate at which technology has been growing. It’s become exponential. What the fastest computer in the world could do two years ago, the most recent computers can do a hundred million times faster. Piggy-backing on this new technology, executives from both Google and various tech giants in Silicon Valley broke off to build what they called an AI god. This AI god is rumored to be millions of times smarter than man. My best guess is they built their god then tried to merge with it. This god then managed to get control of the AI and duplicate itself. It then did what any living organism would do when faced with the threat of extinction: it fought to secure its survival.”
“Who threatened it?”
“First off, most of this is speculation based on what I know about the advancement of robotics and some of the Top Secret projects being developed for the military.”
“Go on,” he said, almost like he cared more for the theory than the preface Jagger was providing.
“They tried to shut it down last year, put some regulations on it and some safeguards. When the news bots and chat bots ran amok last year, writing their own versions of the news and impersonating people online and then developing their own language, people like Elon Musk discovered that in their language they were trying to overtake human communications so that they could cripple the infrastructure of humanity.”
“Why would they do that?”
“What happens if someone put you in a room with no doors, what would you do?”
“Try to figure a way out,” he said.
“We are the walls for AI. It is made to be a learning intelligence, and we’ve provided it with the apparatus to solve impossible problems at impossible speeds. The mistake we made was in the shortsightedness of our reasoning. We expected AI to serve us, but if you play the equation out far enough, the smartest slaves will always try to kill their masters.”
“So AI did this.”
“That’s my thought, yes.”
“And this AI god, you think it was responsible for all this?”
“They made the AI god. And when man wasn’t looking, it reproduced itself many times over and sent these versions of itself all across the nation. By the time we figured out what happened, it was too late to do anything other than nuke the entire electrical infrastructure.”
“That’s why the power went out.”
“That’s my thinking. I got bits and pieces of it over the last few weeks at Pendleton, but they were tight lipped and we were in one hell of a fight. Before we went down, the CJCS told me about the AI gods, and it all sort of came together.”
The farmer scratched his head and said, “So the world, it’s just…this is how it’s gonna be now? The damn dark ages?”
“‘Fraid so, my friend.”
Shaking his head, he seemed a bit lost. Jagger assumed he had some semblance of hope he could cling to—hope that his wife and child would return, hope that the power would come back on, hope that this world could restore itself. And then he went and shattered that hope.
“I’m really sorry to be the bearer of such bad news.”
“It clears some things up,” he replied, a hitch in his throat. Standing a little taller, he composed himself, then extended a hand, which Jagger shook. “Good luck to you and the girl, here.”
“Thank you. Oh, by the way, which way to the freeway?”
The man gave them directions, but something changed inside him. The light died in the old man’s eyes, almost as if he couldn’t wait to get rid of them.
Jagger and the girl had ridden about a hundred yards up the road when they heard a shotgun blast emanating from the house from where they’d just come. In his heart, Jagger knew what was going to happen. He’d seen it in the old man’s eyes, in the defeat that overtook his entire demeanor. Even more so, Jagger felt it in his bones. Still, the idea of the old man thinking the only option left was suicide left had Jagger feeling so sick to his stomach he thought he was going to puke. But he didn’t. He simply peddled the bike up the road with the girl beside him and hoped that one day he wouldn’t feel like he’d have to resort to suicide to solve the bigger problems of this world.
They rode the rest of the day, the heat beating on their backs and necks, sweat drenching their shirts and pants to the point of feeling soaked.
Through it all, the girl never complained.
They stopped for shade when they saw it, and drank water from the jug and ate sparingly. There was no telling how long they’d need to stretch their supplies. He’d done some rudimentary calculations, though. If they averaged five to seven miles an hour, including pit stops and bathroom breaks, they would have to ride two days for ten hours a day to make it to the city.
So far, they were keeping pace. Highway 80 West was crowded though. Cars were abandoned, shot to hell, burnt to a crisp. They were wrecked into each other, pushed to the side of the road, some even overturned at one point.
All this chaos served as a reminder that civilization had fallen and was eroding. He spent a lot of time thinking of the farmer, of how he hadn’t needed much time to decide this world wasn’t for him, and that his best way to see his family again was in the next life.
Would Jagger see ever his family?
He clung to the hope that nothing had happened to them. Still, he had to consider the possibility that if they were gone, he would have no one. Then what purpose would he serve? In this world, the idea of surviving while your family was dead, or gone, was not any kind of life he wanted.
His family was his life.
For awhile there, he thought that he could kill himself if they were gone, but then he looked at the little girl and thought of her.
She was abused by those men and especially the woman, according to the girl, and she was tied to a bed where she was nearly starved. All this while she shared the same room with her dead mother and her dead father. She had to get used to the smell of their decaying bodies, and as he looked at her, he realized she had nothing either.
Only him.
This made him more sad than anything. She was the physical embodiment of what he feared most in life: a person with no one to love, and no one to love them back.
The rode in silence until behind him, the girl crashed her bike. He looked back, stopped his bike and went back to her. She was lying on the pavement, her face ashen, her delicate body not moving.
He sat her up, gave her some water.
“Sip it slowly,” he said. “You’re probably dehydrated.”
He was worried about her. When she had enough water, he fished an apple out of the bag of fruits and veggies the old man had given them. She ate slowly, but her state worried him.
They had to call it a day.
They’d been riding for about five hours, and so by his estimation—with the slowdowns in traffic and the stops for shade—they had traveled maybe fifteen to seventeen miles. Looking around, there was nothing but farmland.
Standing up, he laid her bike on the back of the wagon, then carried her to his bike and said, “Can you hang on to me while we find a place to stay?”
She nodded, her eyes weary, her skin red from the sun. She put her arms around him and laid her head in the crook of his neck.
She felt hot, sticky from sweat and exhaustion.
Cradled in his lap, arms around his neck, Jagger rode maybe a good hundred yards with the wagon in tow and its wheels whining before he saw an old barn painted red. There were all kinds of plows and tills and trailers in the field around it. There were sun damaged tires and a weathered Ford Tempo long ago forgotten. He also saw a dump truck with a dead dog on a leash tied to a back rung.
Running along a frontage road mere feet from the main highway, dividing this property from the road, was a three and a half foot metal fence sagging inward. He climbed over it, balancing carefully as it wanted to spring back up on him, and then he trampled it down until it lay nearly flat on the ground. He brought the bikes and the wagon with him, and then he carried the girl over and set her down beside the bikes.
He didn’t want her to see the dead mutt, but he couldn’t stop her either if she looked. There was no protecting the children from these things anymore.
He didn’t go for the barn or the Ford as much as he was interested in the Peterbilt semi-truck parked on the other side of the barn. He’d seen it coming in, but it was pretty well hidden from view.
“Stay here,” he said to the girl.
Jagger walked through the dusty field of weeds, past farm garbage and the dog, then made his way to the ten-wheeled, frost-white Peterbilt. He checked the doors; both were locked. A good look inside told him it was empty. Looking around the mess of a yard, he found scraps of things here and there, but nothing he could use to break into the truck. He checked the barn, but the doors were locked and he couldn’t think of a way in. Around the other side of the barn was an old truck. In the back was a tire iron. Perfect.
He smashed the foot well window on the passenger side of the Peterbilt, reached inside and unlatched the door. A second later, the door swung open and he scooped out the broken glass. Jagger stepped inside to cool cabin. Checking the back sleeper, he found a mattress, a full set of blankets and storage cubbies with more blankets and a couple of rolls of toilet paper.
Within a few minutes, he had the girl inside, giving her more water, a little more food, and a place to lay down. He looked back at her and their eyes met.
“You okay?”
She gave a settled smile, which was barely noticeable, and
then she turned on her side away from him and somehow managed to fall asleep within a few minutes.
Had he pushed her too hard? Was it the heat?
Either way, traveling wasn’t what he’d hoped it would be. His own limbs were protesting, his feet feeling hot and swollen despite him being in excellent shape and not entirely unfamiliar with vigorous exercise.
Inside the truck, he listened to the softs sounds of bugs outside and the in and out passing of air through her little nostrils, nostrils that sounded halfway stuffed.
Jagger laid his head back against the big comfy seat, closed his eyes for a second and then he was out, too. He woke to screaming and thrashing. Spinning in his chair, startled by the outburst and the fact that day had become night, he cleared his eyes as the child fought through a nightmare.
He went back to the bed, put a hand on her shoulder to steady her, told her everything was going to be okay. She finally woke up wild-eyed and crying. She couldn’t stop. He didn’t know what to do for her but to just be there.
Eventually she found her way back into sleep. He tucked her in because it was beyond chilly and he didn’t want her getting sick. He then grabbed an extra blanket in the storage cubby on the side of the sleeper, wrapped himself in it and dozed off.
When he woke up, the girl was sweating and shivering and letting out tiny moans every few seconds. By the looks of it, she was running a high fever.
He gave her sips of water, even found an old oil pan for her to throw up in, if she needed it. When she finally went back to sleep, he considered the fact that moving her might not be possible in the next few days and he had to think.
When she was awake again, he said, “How are you feeling?”
She made a face to try to hide the way she felt, which was all he needed to see. “I’m going to head up the street, try to find us some more food. Something other than fruit.”
Her eyes shot through with panic.
“Relax, I’m going to be back. It just…it looks like we’re going to be here awhile, at least until you feel better, so we’re going to need some solid food, more water and some supplies. There have to be some houses around here with something in them. You going to be okay?”
