The Zero Hour

by Ryan Schow

  The man’s veneer is steadily cracking.

  Under any other conditions, the network would probably cut to commercial. But these are different times and dreadful conditions.

  He takes a deep breath, clears his throat, then says: “The President remains in critical condition this morning following emergency surgery yesterday. Sources close to the commander in chief say his prognosis is unknown, yet they remain pessimistically optimistic. Vice President Sloan has taken charge of the military in the President’s stead, but according to General Redman, we are facing the might of an enemy like no other. Certainly one we never planned for. According to Silicon Valley insiders, rogue Artificial Intelligence has taken control of the nation’s entire fleet of drones and is now carrying out its own anti-human agenda. Although skeptics scoffed at early speculations of a tech conspiracy, we’ve since been flooded with video and imagery from citizen journalists on the ground. It seems the skeptics are now retracting their earlier statements. Ladies and gentleman, we are officially under attack by an hostile, uncontrollable force we may not be able to stop. May God help us all.”

  Struggling to breathe, feeling extra clammy and overrun by an awful, helpless emotion, I shut off the television, grab the phone and curl into a ball.

  I try my dad; I try my mom.

  Nothing.

  So I was wrong about this being aliens. I wasn’t far off though. All those black dots hovering in the smoky skies, according to the boob tube, they’re drones controlled by AI with an anti-human agenda. Good Lord, how do I even process this?

  Are the machines really killing us?

  On the landline, I try mom again. All circuits are still down. I try dad and to my utter frustration, I get the same result. I sit up and see myself pitching the phone across the room in frustration, but I won’t be so impulsive, so out of control.

  I set it down instead.

  “Screw it,” I mutter, wiping my eyes. Dragging myself off the couch, I tell myself it’s time. Time to collect my gear and head in for a closer look.

  I grab the Glock, check the chamber and stuff it in the waistband of my black jeans, right in the small of my back. I pack a spare magazine (just in case) and slip that into my back pocket. My compound bow goes over my shoulder. Same with a full quiver of arrows.

  Out back, it looks like a heavy fog has settled into the yard. I step into it only to realize this isn’t wet or clean air, and it’s certainly not fog. This is smoke. The sharp tinge of it stings my eyes and nostrils. The once blue sky is now a harsh, leaden color. Very dry and ashy. Suddenly I’m squinting, rubbing my eyes, and hustling to the garage for cover.

  Inside the garage, I climb into the Olds, jam the key in the ignition and fire up the engine. I wait for the garage door to open, then back out into Dirt Alley. Slinking out in a steady rumble, driving past homes that look eerily vacant, this doesn’t feel right. None of this feels right. Now I can’t stop thinking about the talking head on TV, how scared he looked.

  May God help us all…

  On Judah, I take a right and it’s all concrete, flat faced homes and an ugly, overhead network of tram lines. There are cars parked on the sides of the road, but less cars than normal. A few other people like me are driving, but this is nowhere near the normal traffic you’d expect for this time of morning. One car ahead looks charred, like it was attacked while driving. It looks like it just coasted to the side of the road and burned to the ground where it stood. I slow down as I pass by it, a vision of the sedan engulfed in flames popping into my head.

  I swing a left on 19th Avenue and that’s where things change.

  There are a few mature trees lining this six lane thoroughfare, but much of the street is packed with abandoned cars. The smoke is still billowing here, fresh from a nearby house. It’s more dense than I’d like, but passable, if I’m careful.

  To my right, the 19th Avenue Baptist church—a bone colored clapboard structure—stands unharmed. Several homes on that side of the street didn’t fare as well. Their frames are sagging from fire damage and collapse, and in some places, full sections of these houses are still on fire.

  Slowly navigating through the boneyard of cars leaves me with a sinking feeling. Half of them are shot up, the other half are smoldering wrecks. Even worse, in some of these cars, to my absolute shock, are the remains of dead drivers. Shot-to-death drivers.

  Up ahead, a pair of survivors are ransacking the cars. Confiscating the material remains. These scavengers are wearing beanies on their heads, they have scarves wrapped around their mouths and noses, and their eyes are hidden behind steampunk-like glasses.

  With a fist-sized rock, one of them is breaking windows while the other is rifling through center consoles, glove boxes, back seats and trunks. I pull out the Glock, draw back the slide, then set it on my lap when I’m satisfied there’s a round in the chamber.

  Driving past these deviants, they stop what they’re doing and look up at me. I look away and press on, unconcerned. The two of them go back to looting the cars.

  “Jesus Christ,” I mutter to myself.

  As I’m heading toward Golden Gate Park, the hard, stone surfaces are softened by the ever growing presence of trees. I hang a right on Lincoln where the road is not as narrow as others, and the smoke not as thick. There are still a number of cars sitting in the street, deserted, but I can get through here. I roll down the window, try to let some of the smoky air that collected in the Olds back out into the world.

  To my left is Golden Gate Park, with all its lush foliage and mature trees; to the right are more boxed homes—three, four and five story houses with metal fire-escape stairs and concrete stoops with iron hand railings. It’s like everything else you’d see in San Francisco, but with scattered reminders that something else is out there, destroying this city block by block.

  Pushing forward, forced to drive up on the sidewalks here and there, I avoid people mulling about, dazed, talking to themselves, talking to people who aren’t there. Most of these poor souls are alone. Others travel in groups. A few times, as I’m making my way through the debris, palms slap the flat surfaces of my car and angry voices curse at me. At first, this has me on edge, my nerves jostled. Most of the offending people seem harmless, a touch deranged, perhaps even jealous that I’ve got a car and they’ve got nothing. I feel bad for them. I want to help them, but what can I do?

  Pray I don’t get mobbed, for starters.

  Back on Lincoln, navigating cautiously through a maze of stopped cars and people, I rumble up on three men beating someone to death on the sidewalk. My breath hitches in my throat and my heart begins to hammer to a terrified beat. Everything in me cinches tight, goes rigid. The violence unfolding is like nothing I’ve ever seen in real life. The movies, sure. But real life? No way.

  My car isn’t quiet, so I know they hear the deep rumble of me approaching. This gives me pause. No, this gives me cause for concern.

  If they consider me a witness to their crime…

  Just then one of the attackers stops, turns and pins me down with a look. His face is pumped full of rage, but in stark contrast, his eyes are as dead as I’ve ever seen. A body-rocking chill shoots through me. The two other men continue kicking the downed victim while this freak just stares at me. My eyes flick from him to the attack. It’s ruthless, unrelenting. By the time the freak with the staring problem returns to the fight, one of his pals is already stomping on the man’s head.

  Fear and anxiety leave me with a knot of sickness low in my gut. I want to do something, to help, but the truth is I’m scared. I’m scared and I can’t breathe. I pick up the gun, think about shooting them just to make them stop. Can I do that? Is there such thing as a citizen’s shooting? An act of violence to stop the violence? It’s not like the cops are going to come after me when the entire block is a crime scene…

  Am I actually hyperventilating?!

  Setting the gun back down in my lap, thoroughly disgusted with myself for feeling so dang helpless in this situation
—for failing to help the man being beaten—my foot lets up on the brake, which I’ve been riding. It takes a minute or more for my chest to loosen, for my breathing to return to semi-normal, but that doesn’t mean I’m still not thinking of going back and intervening.

  Turning my rear view mirror back to the beating, I watch the three guys finish the job. The violence finally reaches an end. I’m now at a complete stop, mesmerized, unable to tear my eyes away from them. Then again, I’m also ready to haul balls if they come after me.

  But they don’t.

  The victim just lays there, unmoving, his arms splayed out, his head turned to the side, streaked red. One of the attackers leans against a nearby building, exhausted. The other two go through the dead guy’s pockets looking for…whatever. Cash, drugs, keys?

  Who knows.

  Part of me wants to hit the gas, crank the wheel and head back and shoot them. I can’t do that, though. Do I even have that in me? I don’t know. Probably not. What I do know is that the most prudent response to murder can’t be more murder. You never undo a body count by adding to it. But by killing them, am I saving others from the same fate, or is this an isolated incident? I’ll never know. So how can I even begin to decide the fate of their lives?

  I can’t. I’m not smart enough to make this decision.

  “This is real,” I hear myself say on a shaky breath. My foot comes off the brake, moves to the gas pedal.

  Further up Lincoln, hanging so low in the sky it’s blanketing the top floors of several apartment towers, is a huge cloud of smoke. It’s not so much a static thing as it is a boiling-underneath-with-hot-ash-and-soot kind of thing. There are flickers of orange in the gray. If I was standing outside in the already congested air without the boisterous growl of the Cutlass, I’m sure I’d hear the sounds of things being destroyed. Of buildings crumbling and people dying en masse.

  That’s when I see two drones drop down in the distance and start firing on a pack of people moving down the sidewalk. Four of the group drop dead and everyone else scatters, running for their lives. I draw a sharp breath, freeze. A missile is suddenly loosed and racing through the sky. It whistles past them, slams into the side of a four story structure. The explosion blasts back on the survivors, showering them with clouds of plaster and debris. The way it’s looking, I’m not sure if there are any survivors.

  By now I’m at 14th and Lincoln and practically crapping my pants. I hang a hard right, slamming on the brakes at the same time. The back end slides around to a stop and I’m already jerking the transmission into reverse and goosing it. There’s a block-long apartment complex on 14th and Lincoln with open first-floor car ports, which is why I braked in the first place. Whimpering, on the verge of frenzy, I’m roasting my tires in a lunatic’s attempt to quickly back my car into one of these open ports. I stand on the brakes too late. The rear end smashes into the back wall, jolting my body so hard I feel karate kicked in the spine. But I’m underneath it. Tucked away.

  I cut the engine, practically hold my breath. Did the drone see me?

  God, I hope not!

  It’s not my finest moment behind the wheel, and my dad’s going to be furious when he sees the damage, but I’m fairly well situated here, and hopefully I was able to hide before being seen.

  One of the drones rounds the corner.

  In mid air, it slides to a stop, spinning its back end around to face me. At the same time I’m throwing myself sideways in the seat and praying for the first time in years. Praying to a God who never seemed to hear me before and probably won’t hear me now.

  Twisted, lying on my back across the seats with the Glock in hand, I’m practically panting with fear. This drone—this ugly little hovering thing—it appears over the car and I go completely stiff. It fires a round in through the windshield. I stifle a yelp. Moving only my eyes, I watch the thing easing forward; now I see it and it sees me. Just knowing what it is and why it’s here causes me to wet myself.

  Omigodomigodomigod!

  Pinned down by fear, soaking in my own urine, I force my eyes shut knowing it’s not going to do me any good. It’s in these moments that you think about your life and all the poor decisions you made to get here; it’s in these very moments that you know it’s going to be over before you can even catch that flash of anything good or redeeming you’ve ever done.

  The drone fires another round in through the windshield; it punches into the seat an inch above my belly nearly making me jump. Tears leak from my eyes and I can’t stop the soft whimpering sounds now coming out of my mouth. That’s when the thing turns and zips off.

  I’m halfway skeptical in calling this a divine intervention, but I’m not about to be blasphemous either. I thank God, if this was indeed His doing.

  For a long moment I lay there thinking of the two bullet holes in my windshield and in my seats; I think about the sinister look in that freak’s eye while his friends were beating a man to death; and I think about my father who is either dead or like me, trying to survive. I think of these things while laying here in fits and starts and I can’t stop the rush of tears. My crying becomes the worst kind of hiccuping sob you can imagine. This tough exterior of mine is gone and I feel like a child, just dying to be held, wanting no more than to wake from this nightmare and find my parents asleep in the next room over.

  “Pull yourself together,” I say, wiping my eyes. “Get up.”

  I sit up in my stained pants, the wet warmth a reminder that I shouldn’t be out here, that it was foolish of me and I’m lucky I’m still alive.

  I start the engine, creep out of the stall, take a right on 14th and an immediate left on Lincoln then head back home, trying to keep my emotions at least halfway in check. I roll down the window and even though the air is smoke smelling and a touch acrid, it’s also cool and not as piss-smelling as the cabin of the Olds is now.

  When I come across the dead guy on the side of the road—the one those three maniacs beat to death earlier—I get so sickened by it that fear transforms into the onset of rage and I begin to obsess about what I should have done, that I should have at least tried to do something.

  But I didn’t. You didn’t.

  He could be alive, I tell myself. I have to stop the car. Pulling the Olds to a stop, I kill the engine, get out and lock the door behind me. Looking left and right, my Glock at the ready, I walk over to the guy, my stomach seizing when I see him.

  “Oh, God…”

  He’s sprawled out on the concrete, face up to the sky, his body a broken mess. His mouth hangs open showing me a broken row of blood stained teeth. He’d been kicked so hard one of his eyes was popped loose and his nose was smashed almost flat. His face was full of lacerations and open gashes. Unable to tear my eyes from him, the sheer horror of it seeping into me, I look down and think, this is my fault, I could have stopped this, but I didn’t.

  I was a coward. I am a coward.

  And now this coward can’t stop seeing the vision of this man’s beating. How I did nothing. Nothing!

  My eyes are wet, but my heart is furious. Looking at what was done to this man, to a human being, how he was killed and just left on the road to die, drags from the deepest wells of anger a sick and terrifying rage.

  I feel…I’ve never felt like this before.

  I stomp back to my car, my teeth gnashing, my grip on the Glock extra tight. In the car I fire up the motor, stomp on the gas, then tell myself to calm down.

  But I can’t.

  The next block up, I see them. All three of them are walking. Something in m pops loose, like the explosive parts of me now have a place to go, a target. The muscles in my back are suddenly gripping my spine and I feel my jaw flicking. As I approach, half of me is knowing exactly what I want to do while the other part of me is telling me to keep going, mind my own business.

  But the gun is coming up and it’s pointing at the men.

  And then it’s firing off two rounds.

  All of this is happening and only half of me can be
lieve it. Two men are ducking for cover while the third staggers, takes two steps left, then falls—one knee buckling first as he crashes over sideways.

  Then smash!

  Everything stops and my body cashes into the steering wheel, both sides of the wheel hitting me in both boobs, my chin slamming down on the top of the wheel.

  Dazed, I look up and see that I’ve hit a parked car.

  The engine’s stalled out. I turn the key but it’s sluggish to catch. Glancing over, panicked and mentally frazzled, I see the two thugs I didn’t hit cutting through the abandoned cars. They’re dropping f-bombs and their faces are quaking with fury. If I said I was anything other than crapping-my-pants terrified, I’d be lying.

  I keep twisting the key, keep working the gas, but the motor won’t catch. All the rage and fury in me has suddenly turned to a blinding fear that’s got me whimpering and praying and probably flooding the car.

  I turn and see them. They’re jogging toward me and the look in the closest one’s eyes attacks me somewhere down low. With no choice left, I start shooting.

  I tell myself it’s okay because this is self-defense, but there’s that hesitant part of me that’s saying I did this—that I shot first.

  No, they did.

  Both men drop because, let’s face it, I like to shoot things and I’m pretty good at it. Target practice isn’t the same as taking a life, though. My grandfather and my father warned me of this on numerous occasions.

  Both men are down.

  I study them in shock. I know they killed that guy, but now I’m having an out of body experience and thinking, I’ve just become them.

  No, it’s not like that.

  One of them moves, lets out a low, guttural moan.

  They’re not dead yet, but they will be if I don’t do something. I’m not sure how I’m going to live with any of this, but I need to do something.

  Can I save them? Should I?

  Kicking open the car door, the smell of propellant wafts into my nose. I’m familiar with the smell from the gun range. I might even like it. But usually I catch this same scent when I’m sighting down a target or emptying out a magazine on the range. Certainly not when I’m looking down at two men writhing in pain and bleeding out on the street.