The Last War: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survivor Thriller

by Ryan Schow

  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 rearview 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 can’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 beyond 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. Needless to say, 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 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 feels way off and I feel like I’m slogging through a 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 all 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 swoops 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 stick an elbow in someone’s gut who’s army crawling off the bodies below me.

  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,” she says.

  “Well use your eyes and spare us both your stupid questions,” I remark, regretting my tone and my demeanor the instant I speak.

  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 trendy 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 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 very happy to have one, and even more ecstatic to see other people have theirs as well and can shoot straight.

  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 there 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 teenaged 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 riddled 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?

  I prepare myself, but the feeling passes.

  The pain behind my eyes—the sharp sting of it—becomes an agony I can neither suppress nor ignore. I have to keep my head on straight. I have to stay present no matter the fear infecting me on a cellular level, or the deep aching in my bones brought on by this roller coaster ride through hell. It can’t fall apart. Not now. Not with so much at stake.

  Still, I wade through the waters of denial, if anything as a defense mechanism. I refuse to think about Stanton. His fate is a consideration I continue to shove out of my mind, although the toll it’s taking is starting to mount. At some point in time I’ll have to face reality.

  Just not right now.

  “Keep it together, Sin,” I warn myself.

  My thoughts are imbued with a certain panicked frenzy for what I’m seeing, experiencing, and absorbing.

  Yes, this is real. No, there’s no denying it anymore.

  Not only is this situation disturbingly real, the gravity of it is settling in, almost like the fog is lifting and everything has become crystal clear. It’s not just the anxiety surging through me, it’s the stiffness and pain working its way into my ribcage, my elbow and my lower back where I came down hard on someone moments ago.

  Can’t think about that either.

  The buttery whirring of drones permeates the air again, pulling in my focus, sharpening my mind. When I begin to wonder if they’re targeting me, or at least attacking this side of town, I recall the countless drones I saw in the air and realize my thinking is much too small.

  They aren’t targeting me, or this street, or a neighborhood. Could this be an attack on the city?

  Undoubtedly it feels that way.

/>   Dragging my gaze away from the kids sprawled out on the street before me, I force my attention to more fertile endeavors, like crawling out from underneath this car and getting to Macy before the drones do.

  With my ears attuned to the chaos, I’m pulling apart the many layers of sound. Freezing out the cacophony of screaming, the blaring horns, the screeching of competing car alarms. Beneath all the noise, there are the feint crackling sounds of nearby vehicles burning, sounds I must tuck away if I’m going to survive this siege.

  What I’m doing is listening for that one awful sound, that one indicator that I must either stay or run: the sound of my enemies in the air.

  Fortunately I don’t hear them.

  Are they gone?

  After a moment, I’m working my way out from under the car while scanning everywhere for signs of danger. Magically, I feel a resurgence of willpower.

  As I’m getting to my feet, I’ll tell you this: ER nurses learn to keep a level head under even the most harrowing of circumstances. We deal with life or death situations on the daily, many of which we were never taught to handle with grace. We just did. Because that’s what was necessary. Because if not for the level heads, the world would come undone—me, you and everyone else right along with it.

  Seeing the kids though, eating down my pain, I realize there’s a pistol stuffed in my pants and it’s digging into my stomach. I take it out, give it the once over.

  It says Sig Sauer. Not that I know what that means.

  Just that having it by my side makes me feel a bit better. Safer. I don’t know what I’ll do if I need to use it, probably just act like I know what I’m doing when truthfully I don’t. Then again, the attacks aren’t coming from people who can be reasoned with, or made to fear a gun and the whims of a blood soaked madwoman. No. Not at all.

  I mean, really…what’s a drone going to do if I pull the gun on it? Apologize and inch backwards? Quietly calculate an escape plan or come up with a genuine apology? No. Hell no. It would shoot me without a second’s thought, then move on to other targets.