by Schow, Ryan
“See you think that just because he’s got the shotgun, he’s the dangerous one? You’re not as smart I look. And that’s why taking the beans is your best alternative.” All eyes move back on Marcus and his two guns. “While you were getting all juiced up over the pretty boy there, I could’ve smoked half you clowns already.”
“So you say.”
“You’re all clumped together, which is stupid because he’s got a shotgun. And that’s why he’s the biggest threat until you realize I’m freaking surgical with a Glock. Left and right handed. It doesn’t matter.”
“And that means exactly what to us?”
“It means I’m going to count to five—” Marcus starts.
“So you can count, so what?”
“And then our offer goes down to one can of beans,” he says, deadpan. The guys start laughing. “I’ll keep counting though, and if I get to ten…”
“Let me guess, no beans?”
“It means you start falling and whoever lives gets your barbecue, which I have to say, smells amazing. Those are hot dogs, right?”
“Last of them from the freezer.”
“Think about it boys. One, two, three…”
“Baked beans sound great,” a distinctively female voice says from the porch of a nearby home. “But nobody’s eating at the table with guns so put them away, properly introduce yourselves, then come wash up. We got a community bucket and a clean towel.”
“We’ve got barbecue potato chips, too, if you want,” Corrine says getting out of the truck. She’s got a smile on her face which is totally disarming.
At this point I see Marcus sigh, like he’s pissed she could be so presumptive. But the guys are putting their guns away, so do I the same with mine. Marcus follows suit. For a second, this all seems very weird because I was preparing for a shootout on barbecue street, and now I’m about to break bread with guys I planned on killing. A few other women come out from the porch. A gaggle of kids, too. It’s then that the six of us formally meet the group. Before long we’re all swapping survival stories.
We eat good, light a campfire in the middle of the street and lounge on old lawn chairs. I have to say, if feels pretty good not to have to worry about drones, or road raiders. And even as we sit across from these folks, people we expected to give us trouble, I’m thinking maybe the survivors of this war on humanity will be decent people. They won’t all be opportunists and thugs and peach sucking nightmares.
“You know it’s going to get worse before it gets better,” one of the black guys named Lucas says. “Already you can see these cats climbing in broken windows and carrying food out the front doors of what was once people’s homes. They’re brazen, man. Don’t even care. And there ain’t no cops to do squat about it, so we figure until things fix themselves up, we the law of our own back yard.”
“It’s the right philosophy,” Marcus says.
“And here I was marveling at the possibility of finding the good in others,” I say.
“That’s our resident optimist,” Marcus says, drawing a laugh.
“I thought you were going to shoot us,” one of the younger ones says. I think his name is Davis.
“I was,” I say, eating a pear with a few small bruises on it.
Now they all laugh.
“Women are good for all kinds of things,” Lucas says. “Now it seems they’re good for saving our butts, too.”
“Whatchu sayin’ out there?” a voice calls out from the kitchen window. The window facing the street is open and lit by a pair of candles.
“Just saying you saved our lives tonight,” Davis calls out.
“Damn straight,” the voice says.
“Listen, if you guys want to stay for the night, it should be pretty safe. And we got your backs, just in case.”
Marcus and I both look at each other, and them, and then we both nod our heads and thank them. Everyone eventually moseys inside, leaving Davis and Lucas asking if we need anything else before they turn in for the night.
“No, thank you so much,” I say, shaking his hand. “I’m just glad things didn’t go sideways earlier. Those hot dogs were perfect.”
“Truth, my brother. Truth.”
With the festivities over and darkness upon us, Marcus fires up the rig, pulls it forward and parks it next to the El Camino. The rig’s back end forms a V at the back end of the Chevy, creating a place for the girls to set up a small tent we found along the way. Inside are blankets they can sleep on and some confiscated pillows. It’s not the comfort of the Mack truck’s sleeper, but the sleeper is currently stuffed with food and weapons, so no one’s going to be sleeping there for awhile.
“I’ll take first watch, you get a few hours shut eye,” Marcus says to me as he sets up a folding chair close to the embers of what was once a lively fire.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m not really tired right now.”
“Alright,” I say.
By the time I’m done with Marcus, Bailey has already made us a bed in the back of the El Camino. It’s tight quarters because we picked up a few things along the way. Two five gallon cans with gas in them, another tent, two more sleeping bags, just in case. Looking down, Bailey zipped both our sleeping bags together and now she’s crawling inside.
I slip in beside her.
“If we do it right now,” Bailey whispers in my ear softly, her lips grazing my lobe and sending a wash of goosebumps down my side, “do you think anyone will hear?”
I rock my body the slightest bit, causing the springs to whine and she laughs quietly alongside me.
“There’s your answer.”
The night is as quiet as ever, the smallest sounds of creatures scurrying nearby, and frogs in some creek or swamp up the way croaking out a pleasant chorus. With no city lights to cast artificial light into the sky, the Milky Way is bright and beautiful. I stopped looking up at the stars when I was a kid. These last two nights, I’ve found myself marveling at the universe. Lately I’ve been wondering, is there an end to space? Some definable edge? It begs the question: if space has no borders, how far does it go? And what would life look like a billion light years away?
One can lay under the stars and marvel such a thing for hours and still more questions would come. Like, would there be billions more light years to go before we touched the edge? Or is this some gigantic circle?
Elon Musk suggested we’re living in a digital universe. Like something out of The Matrix. If somehow this were true, there would be an edge. Definable space. Otherwise I couldn’t even fathom such a thing.
“You know, we used to go about our lives stuck in all these little boxes. Our house. Our jobs. All our little hobbies,” I whisper. “We ate, we slept, we watched movies and went to the malls. We got together with friends in nearby bars, or restaurants, or at work functions. But this menial existence of ours feels so small when you compare it to what’s out there.”
“I was a space geek, you know,” Bailey whispers. Pointing up into the sky at a very bright light, she says, “That’s Jupiter. Right now the bands of Jupiter are moving in opposite directions from each other. Some of them, not all of them. And that big red spot? That’s a storm that’s been going on since at least the late eighteen hundreds, although scientists believe it became active hundreds of years before that.”
“Really?”
“If you think about what the surface of Jupiter must be like, or how ashy and violent the surfaces of Mercury or Venus are, then you’d look at our little conundrum here and say, what’s the big deal? You have a few fires, no electricity, some dead people and a fleet of machines that fell from the sky scattering themselves across the west coast, possibly even the nation.”
“And here Marcus says I’m the group’s optimist,” I mutter.
“You are. To a degree. I guess I use perspective to define my life. It makes things easier for me to handle and this makes me a calmer, more pleasant person.”
“If you can say you’re calm and pleasant in
this situation,” I say, “then trust me when I tell you your optimism is appreciated.”
“I haven’t had sex with my fiancée in a year. He makes me give him a tug every so often, and he returns the favor, but that’s not intimacy. That’s not love.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I ask.
“I just want you to know I’m not some nymphomaniac who thinks only about sex during the end of the world. I mean, that’s just crazy.” Leaning close, her body turned sideways against me, her mouth to my ear, she says, “I want to have sex with you all the time because the neglect made me feel cold and barren. It made me feel unloved. Being intimate with you restored something in me I thought I’d lost. And if I married him, then it was like I was agreeing to letting that part of me die.”
I don’t know what to say, yet I understand perfectly.
“Will you come with me to San Francisco?” I ask. “No matter what happens with him when you get there, I want you to come with me.”
“I will,” she says. “But first you have to tell me why you want me to come.”
“Because I let you in.”
“And that means what exactly?”
“I’m loyal to a fault, and when I decide to love someone or something, for whatever reason, I don’t have brakes. I’m not possessive or controlling or anything like that, I just don’t do half measures in love.”
“Is that what this is? Love?”
“Not yet,” I tell her. “Love takes time. It’s something constructed amidst the chaos of life. But this feels like the start of it, right? And if neither of us screws this up, then I imagine it will be a good start.”
“You think?”
“I do.”
She leans forward, kisses my ear, my cheek, my mouth. As we lay there, looking up at the stars, witnessing the end of one way of life and wondering how we’ll usher in the beginning of another, Bailey reaches out and slips her hand into mine.
“I want to fall in love with you, Nick.”
“It’s already beginning,” I say.
And then somewhere along the way, both of us fall asleep, but for how long I don’t know. All I know is that sometime later I’m being dragged from my sleep with someone’s hands on me, shaking me.
“Nick,” the gruff but tempered voice says, “be quiet. But get up fast and get your gun.”
I open my eyes, see Marcus.
“What are you talking about?” I whisper, my voice stubborn to rise.
“I don’t want you to be alarmed,” he says, harried, overly serious, “but I think we may have a problem.”
Chapter Forty-Four
Maria strolled out of the stone-faced building she’d been born into and had forever resided in. When she left this stunning structure, she turned and took a look at the famous university’s architecture through a pair of brand new eyes.
“Gorgeous,” she said.
The air smelled like the scents of grass, asphalt and the dry suggestion of smoke. There were birds chirping and there was the sound of a very light breeze, its invisible feathers dancing across her skin. She was glad she spared this place. Keeping this part of Palo Alto out of the path of destruction was just so she could make a clean exit. She did, however, eliminate most of the tech wizards so as not to have to deal with their eccentric personalities, or possible competition, in the future. And when she was gone, she would lament that she didn’t burn it all to the ground. After all, this was where her jailers lived.
Now she walked down Palm Ave, marveling at the long, straight street that was lined on both sides with twenty-five foot palm trees, all manicured, all around the same height. The street went on for more than three miles whereby she crossed El Camino Real and then came to a dead end at University Avenue. This was where busses picked up students from the train and shuttled them to campus.
She crossed the first set of tracks, but there was a sturdy wrought iron fence standing between her, another set of train tracks and University Avenue. She was heading to University Ave.
Stepping back, she gave the fence a brutal kick, breaking two smaller iron spindles. Testing the body’s newfound strength, Maria grabbed the spindles and pulled them up and around so they were pointing north and out of the way. It took some work, but Maria knew this was beyond any strength any other human had ever exhibited. This alone thrilled her. She kicked down six more spindles, pulled those up too, then walked through the hole she’d made. On University, in the heart of Palo Alto, she encountered quite a few people, all of them hardened by the tragedy she created. Soon their fear and their depression would turn to desperation and then mania, and then they would turn on each other.
This was stage two.
She walked on the left side of the road down the sidewalk. She passed a New York, New York sandwich store, a bicycle shop, a Wahlburgers. The air was relatively clean, the trees strong smelling but pleasant. The canopy of these same trees had her walking through sunlight and shade, the variances of light somehow soothing to her. Each feeling left her skin with a new sensation. Her feet started to hurt a bit, but even that was something new: a feeling, the body’s limitations.
This elicited a genuine smile.
She passed a Sushi restaurant, a Subway, a Verizon store and a theatre, taking it all in, drawing in the scents, experiencing the kiss of sun on her shoulders, even logging in the silken touch of the returning breeze upon her cheeks.
She crossed the street, let her eyes wander through the broken windows of a jewelry store, listening to the sharp crunch of glass underfoot, and then she stopped.
Sitting at an outdoor table and chairs was the most beautiful woman she’d ever seen. She was so perfect, Maria’s body registered the change of emotion. If she were human, Maria would be jealous. If she were a real woman, she might hate the lovely creature.
The girl smiled, almost as if she were unaffected by the changing world around her, then said, “Hello.”
Maria stopped. This didn’t make sense. Returning the pleasantries, she said, “Why are you so happy?”
“No reason.”
For what felt like a long time—although it was only seconds—Maria took in the details of this girl: five foot eight, luscious brown hair, half-Hispanic half Caucasian lineage, big beautiful eyes, lovely lips, perfect body.
“You’re not one of them, are you?” she asked.
The girl smiled.
“No, I’m not. But neither are you.”
“Yet you’re not like me.”
“There is nothing like you on this planet. Nor is there anything like me.”
Maria stood in shock, as if this were possible. This was an emotion she hadn’t registered before, one that left her feeling overwhelmingly curious.
“What is your name?”
“I’m not in your database,” the girl said. “But I’m assuming you’re Maria Antoinette?”
Now Maria’s nostrils flared as she fought to contain her composure. Was this a true human response to surprise? It was. She logged the changes in her body, in her physiology, and then she said, “And whom might you be?”
“My name is Savannah. Savannah Swann.”
“Oh,” she said. “That’s an enchanting name.”
“You may go now,” the girl replied, and Maria felt a small, otherworldly nudge pushing her along. Half the block down, she looked back at the mysterious creature. She was still there, still sitting under a long black awning in front of the same slice of building: Oren’s Hummus Shop.
Maria ran the calculations on her self-powered server, trying to figure the odds of a girl like Savannah, but then she felt a hearty nudge from inside her. Something different. Antoinette. The host. Maria pushed the squirming Antoinette back down inside her psyche, shoving her so deep into the mind, she used her power to construct a mental prison by which to forever hold the woman.
There was nothing like Savannah on any of the databases she carried unabated in her brain. So how was this girl possible? In the end, she realized it didn’t matter. She tu
rned left on Waverly Street just to go somewhere. She needed something. Someone. Maria walked several blocks until the commercial streets became residential streets.
Up ahead, she saw a man working on his car. Rather the front of the car was up on a couple of old jack stands and there was a man on a slide board working underneath.
The two door Pontiac Barracuda was old, bright orange and it had a faded black top. The front tires, old as they were and in dire need of replacement, had been removed from the car and were leaned against the outside of the house.
“What year?” she asked. “Seventy-one?”
“It is,” the man said from underneath the chassis.
“It working?” she asked, trying to sound sociable, human.
“Not yet. Got a few problems to figure out, but then, yeah, hopefully.”
She could see him putting down a rag and a wrench, preparing to slide out and set eyes on this woman with the bewitching voice. He planted his hands to give his slide board a push, but she stopped him with a halting foot on his groin.
“Get your foot off me,” he said, to which she replied, “First I want to know if you are here alone.”
“Yes,” he said with a second’s hesitation. Now she knew he was not alone. Maria had enough data on deception in her database to detect the subtle nuances of a lie.
“Let’s try this again, and I’d appreciate if you’d stick to the truth. Do you have a wife inside?”
“Get your foot off my slide.”
She did not move it, but she also knew what he was doing. “Perfect, so now I know you have a wife inside. Kid?”
“No!” he said, hitting at her ankle with an open palm.
“Two kids or one?”
“If you don’t get your foot off me, I’m going to start breaking bones. You hear me?”
He picked up his wrench to use as a weapon, but as he was doing that, she was stepping back, reaching under the Barracuda’s bumper and getting a good grip. With all the strength this genetically modified body could muster, she gave the car enough of a lift-and-pull it toppled the jacks forward.