The Age of Embers

by Ryan Schow

  When he stood back up, Eliana shined the light on his face. He winced, then smacked the light out of her hand. It rolled across the floor, casting an eerie glow on them.

  “Watch yourself, Eliana.”

  “I’m watching you,” she said. “You don’t look like you.”

  “Who do I look like?”

  “A ghost.”

  “If you’re watching me, who’s watching the kid?”

  He bent down and snatched the light back before returning to the room. Once in the room, he turned on the lights, which worked fine, then nearly collapsed. The kid was a lump under the comforter. A huge splotch of red was spreading out on the fabric.

  Eliana hurried to the bed, tore back the comforter and cried out. She took two steps backwards, her legs giving out. Ice caught her, helped her sit down on his bed.

  The boy’s eyes were lifeless, a small red hole in his temple.

  Everything tough and resilient in Eliana broke down right there. He watched it and it was the most painful thing he’d seen in just about forever. She got up and went to the boy. He stepped back, bumped into the intruder’s dead body, but caught himself from falling over.

  Eliana was sobbing on the bed, holding the dead boy.

  Ice bent down and picked up the intruder’s ankles. He wrestled open the hotel room’s door and dragged the corpse first out into the hallway, then into the stairwell. He lifted the shooter onto the railing, then shoved him over the edge. The body smacked the railing on the way down, landing on the ground floor with a dull thud.

  The hammering in Isadoro’s chest felt like a heart attack. Flashes of his past split his skull, staggering him. Fortunately Eliana couldn’t see him faltering. She was going through it on her own. He went back to the room, opened the door, stepped inside and shut it behind him.

  Seeing Eliana like this broke Ice’s heart. She was an open wound, completely raw, in a state no one might ever see her in again in her lifetime. Isadoro liked the kid, and in that moment he was suffering a host of horrifying memories of his own.

  His head was flashing back and forth between this moment and his past. He sat down on his bed, across from Eliana. He didn’t know what to do for her. He didn’t know what to do with himself. How was he supposed to be?

  How do I do this again?

  The ruthless killer inside him said to suck it up, to bury it down, to keep moving. The part of him that learned how not to hurt violently ridiculed him for feeling. Ice nearly took his own life two years ago when he let emotions like these take over. They held him hostage day and night, pumped him full of so much rage that every day became his worst day. He was a sadist back then, a closet masochist.

  The hatred he felt was deep space for a destroyed heart; it turned him into what he had become in Juarez—a slayer of the worst kind, a murderer for hire hell bent on righting an impossible wrong body after body after body.

  Eliana roused him from that fog.

  Now this.

  He listened to her cry. She had no idea he’d cried similar tears. That the tender part of him—the father in him—had all but turned to granite over such an incident in his own life.

  “You didn’t know him,” he finally said, his voice sounding cruel.

  He didn’t want her to feel the same thing he felt, or suffer as he had. He wasn’t thinking straight though. The hardened part of him was taking charge. She looked up at him with wet eyes soaked in pain and guilt.

  “You don’t have to know a child to know a dead child is a horrible thing, pendejo!”

  “I’ve seen too many horrible things,” he mumbled.

  “Probably done your fair share of them too, sicario,” she hissed.

  “No arguing that.”

  “What are we going to do about this?” she asked, her shirt and body streaked with the kid’s blood. “What are we going to do…about him?”

  “Wrap him in the sheet and lay him in the bathtub,” he said, so tired he hurt, “and I’ll handle the degenerates in the hallway. After that we need to switch rooms.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we don’t need Sheriff what’s-his-face, Owsley or whatever, knocking on our door prepared to investigate a damn massacre with a fake DEA agent and an illegal alien with blood all over her shirt.”

  “Fine,” she said, wiping her eyes.

  He could see her trying to pull herself together. He could see how much she hated this. But she couldn’t see how much he hated it, too. How much he loathed all of this.

  “We need to be on the road before nine a.m.,” he said.

  “You really think they’ll do a thorough investigation into this?” Eliana asked.

  “Tentatively they’ll match the bullets in the boy to the weapons of those guys out there. They’ll find a caliber match. Then for the four of them, they’ll run a trace on the rounds from this gun, which is from Mexico, and come up empty, or on a false trail. Who knows? These guns probably came from America anyway.”

  “Who’s Fiyero Dimas?”

  “My brother.”

  “Is he really DEA?”

  “He is.”

  “Don’t you think that was stupid telling the person on the phone your brother’s name?”

  “I hope they try to track him down. He won’t know anything about anything, which is how he’ll be prepped. And if they try to describe me, well, to him I’m not alive.”

  “You’re not alive?”

  That’s when she realized he wasn’t wearing a shirt and that he was badly burned on his back and shoulder. There were also two scar-tissue holes marking his upper torso.

  “To him, no.”

  “What happened to you?”

  “Forgot my sunscreen,” he said, pulling on his shirt. “Time to go. You wrap him and I’ll get him to the bathtub while you get whatever it is you need before we go.”

  After they left the boy in the tub, she leaned down to kiss him, but when Ice said, “No! DNA,” she did it anyway and said, “I’m not in your stupid system.”

  She stood and shoved by him, heading to the bathroom to wash her hands.

  Within a half an hour, they were up on the third floor overlooking the back parking lot. Neither of them fell asleep right away. He never went back to sleep at all. He simply laid there listening to Eliana crying until she stopped and sleep finally swept her into a short reprieve.

  It wasn’t long before she cried out in the night. Shortly after that, the first missile hit the hotel.

  Chapter Twenty

  Carver Gamble tossed and turned all night long. Trapped somewhere between the waking world and a nightmare, he fought the blankets, got tangled in the sheets, couldn’t stop sweating. He might have punched a pillow once or twice. He might have cried out. When he finally woke the next morning, he rolled over, checked the clock, then laid back down and blew out an exhausted sigh.

  He still had thirty minutes before he had to get up.

  Groaning, he dragged himself out of bed, walked downstairs and started a pot of coffee. Almost as an afterthought, he made himself a piece of toast and tried to stop yawning. Talk about an act of futility! He yawned twice more, scratched his head and found himself thinking about the rest of the world.

  Were they still under attack?

  This thought gave his heart the morning start it needed: a stiff jolt, followed by a tunneling sense of dread.

  He went to his computer, turned it on, yawned again, then waited for it to boot up. It was taking forever. When the computer finally presented the home screen, he tried to get online, but to no avail. A message appeared saying servers were down and he should try later.

  Back in the kitchen, he buttered his toast, poured himself some coffee and sat at the table. Staring into the dark street, he saw nothing, felt nothing. He went back to the computer, tried again to get online. Finally the internet came on. Front and center on his Yahoo home page were devastating pictures of the San Diego Convention Center.

  “What the hell?” he said, leaning forward, clearing
his eyes.

  Through the broken glass front of the mammoth Convention Center, it looked as though some Terminator-like beast of a robot was stalking through there, firing a Gatling gun into the crowds of people running for their lives. Panning back, buildings were being hit by drone-fired missiles, traffic was pure and utter mayhem, and the skies were buzzing with what looked like drones spreading out across the smoke-filled horizon.

  “Good God,” he said, sipping his coffee.

  The depth of what was happening truly sunk in when similar scenes of horror were shown in cities all across the nation. On the ground, livestream shots of people getting riddled with bullets sent a chill down his spine. Dead people were everywhere. The news didn’t even bother blurring the gore. It looked like some sort of disaster film.

  Unfortunately this was no film.

  This was real.

  He remembered when 9/11 happened and the news gave a slight disclaimer before running unedited viewer footage with looped reels filled with f-bombs and terror. With everything he was seeing, it felt like that. The horror was so rich, so real, so damn unexpected that to censor it was somehow akin to diminishing the suffering of others, or lessening the calamitous threat to our nation.

  He found himself thinking of The Silver Queen. He set down his toast, his appetite gone. Even the coffee upset his stomach, and that was the best coffee ever. He tried calling Draven again. All circuits were down. These drones were eviscerating San Francisco as well. Would they come here? Would Palo Alto get hit, too?

  Upstairs he showered, readied himself for the day, then drove to work, stopping first at Café Venetia on University Avenue. The upscale coffee house was busy, but he had a little time to kill and a need to fill. He was out of coffee beans and who knew when all the stores in town would shut down?

  He grabbed a one pound bag of beans—the “Brazile” flavor. On second thought, he grabbed another bag, too. This literally was the best coffee. Light body, sweet aroma, a nutty aftertaste.

  It sometimes felt like this coffee was his only reason for living.

  There was a girl in line in front of him, a startlingly beautiful girl. Her perfume literally transformed him. Took him somewhere else, an existence far from here, a place much happier than this. He was in love with it already.

  Suddenly the girl turned and said, “It’s Flowerbomb by Viktor and Rolf.”

  “I’m sorry?” he said, startled.

  “You were smelling my perfume?” she replied.

  He drew a deep breath, fell hopelessly in love with her eyes, then blinked his way out of her hypnotic charm only to become fully upended by her intuition, or sixth sense, or whatever.

  Smiling he said, “I was.” Then: “Do we know each other?”

  “You know we don’t,” she said with a smirk.

  “I’m Carver,” he replied, suddenly nervous and awake again, but now for an entirely new reason.

  “Of course you are.”

  “And you are?”

  “Savannah Swann.”

  She reached out and shook his hand.

  “Pleased to meet you,” he replied. “Are you hearing about San Francisco?”

  “I am,” she said, moving forward with the line.

  “Do you think it will reach us? I mean, do you think it will be bad for us? For California?”

  “It’s going to be bad everywhere, Carver.”

  “You think?”

  “I know.”

  “You know?” he said, still mesmerized by her looks. His heart now thundering in his chest, he said, “You are the most perfect looking girl I’ve ever seen. I’m not trying to hit on you…”

  “I know, Carver. You’re concerned about world events, but then you came for coffee beans and I literally took you by surprise—”

  “You did.”

  The line moved forward again. He couldn’t stop smelling her. And he couldn’t stop drawing comparisons to her and Ophelia. The robot was perfect, too. A seductress. Something so perfect, yet so terrifying.

  “Do you go to Stanford?” he asked.

  “I’m done with school,” she replied. “On to bigger and better things.”

  “Such as?”

  The line moved again. She was up.

  “It was nice talking with you, Carver,” she said. “Be safe out there.”

  “Will I ever see you again?”

  “After today, no.”

  She walked to the counter, ordered a hot chocolate, then smiled at him one last time and went to wait for her order. He paid for the beans, then pulled out a business card and handed it to her on his way out.

  “My number’s on the back, in case you ever want to just…whatever. Grab some beans together, talk about this and that…”

  She took it then said, “There won’t be time for that, Carver.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everything’s changing,” she said, this mystery of a woman. “Can’t you feel it?”

  “You mean the attacks?”

  “Yes.”

  “We may not get hit here,” he said, wondering if she was blowing him off.

  “I’m not blowing you off, Carver,” she said, echoing his thoughts perfectly. “But if you don’t leave, you’re going to be late for work. Lots of surprises today.”

  Stunned, entranced by her gaze, her beauty provoked a sort of magnetic pull that—when drawn into the gravity of it—seemed to pale in comparison to the sheer weight of a much larger presence. He had never been so sure of a person in his life. For Carver, just being around her felt like a dream made real, like the universe had turned inside out for this girl who couldn’t help but gush with a confidence that was not arrogance, but was instead some measure of otherworldly magnetism that left him feeling ten years old again. At that moment, if asked, he might not even be able to recite his own name. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t calm under pressure. He was as cool as a cucumber in even the worst of times.

  “If the phones still work when this all blows over,” he said, glancing at his card, “use yours to call mine.”

  She merely smiled.

  The morning started out less than ideal, but the day was looking up. He started feeling hopeful about the world again, and about life in general, but then he got to work and remembered Federica had been stabbed to death in her driveway the night before last, and that the computer he was guarding in the other room just might be the antichrist.

  When he got to work, there was a stern looking man in his office. He was well dressed, impatient and chewing on a piece of upturned skin on his chapped lower lip.

  “Did they find the person who did this to Federica?” Carver asked the man.

  “Have a seat, Mr. Gamble,” Lennie Stewart said. Carver sat down. Then: “When was the last time you saw her?”

  From his chair in the cramped quarters of the command center, Carver looked up at Lennie Stewart. He’d only seen the man once, and that was when Carver did his final interview.

  “We talked the day before yesterday, but that was a work thing,” Carver answered. It wasn’t an outright lie; they did talk. But technically it was an absolute lie—a lie of omission.

  “So nowhere else?” Lennie pried.

  “Nope,” he said. “No where else. She was a good woman. Always nice to me, always fair.”

  “Are you okay?” he asked, looking sideways at Carver.

  Carver hadn’t realized his eyes were extra glassy, and a little moist. He could handle most things thrown his way, but he didn’t do well with death. Even worse, he couldn’t stop thinking about Federica’s dire warning.

  “I don’t feel well.”

  “I can have Tiberius take over for you if you’re not on the up and up. For these types of things, we know people need time to grieve. None of your guys really knew her, right?”

  “They didn’t, not like me.”

  “I would be remiss if I failed to mention the passing of Eric Manchester as well,” Lennie said with a heavy sigh.

  “Eric Manc
hester of QRC?”

  “He is our Eric Manchester,” Lennie said, solemn. This news staggered Carver. Looking at him, Lennie seemed surprised that Carver didn’t already know about QRC.

  “Your checks have our company name on them, but Quantum Robotronics Corporation is our parent company. So yes, he is—was—our Eric Manchester.”

  Eric Manchester was only the youngest, biggest name in AI-based robotics. The man was a Silicon Valley genius, a god amongst the AI elite.

  “I didn’t know that,” Carver said, swallowing hard. “How did he die?”

  “Don’t you watch the news?” he asked.

  Carver was really was getting tired of people asking him this. He took a deep breath, then said, “I’ve taken a break from the news. Too negative.”

  “Isn’t that the truth,” he chuckled. “Regardless, it seems one of his projects, the military based application, malfunctioned.”

  “Here?!”

  “No, in San Diego.”

  Carver remembered seeing the Terminator-like robot laying waste to those people in the Convention Center. The blood drained from his face and he had a hard time swallowing. He leaned forward in his chair and put a hand on the back of his neck. He felt cold, a chill spreading throughout him. A sudden rush of queasiness began to have its way with him.

  “I don’t know much about QRC,” he finally said, “other than Manchester being a person of note in the AI world.”

  “He was not just ‘a person of note,’ he was the person of note in Silicon Valley. He and his team created the Ophelias.”

  “There’s more than one Ophelia?” he asked, sitting up.

  Lennie laughed, but it was a weak, hollow sound—completely disingenuous, almost like Carver was the last person to know something so obvious and it was funny. It wasn’t. “Federica did you no favors keeping you in the dark, did she?”

  “I try not to ask too many questions when my paycheck looks so good.”

  “Your paycheck is the way it is because you’re working for a division of the richest company in the world short of Google and Apple. Well, until now.”

  “I saw pictures of this monstrous robot killing people in San Diego…” he said, leaving the statement to hang. This was his not-so-subtle way of asking a question he didn’t really want to ask, one that his curiosity demanded he ask.