Rotten

by Hardy, Victoria S.

  Mrs. Williams brought him another can while he pushed keys on the laptop, and on the screen built into the case an image of a laboratory appeared. Binks typed in the words, “Wake up, Binkster,” and in the corner of the room we saw a large dog sit up and the view on the laptop became the dogs eyes. He opened another window on the small computer and a waveform appeared. “This is their tone.”

  By this point we had all gathered around Binks and were staring at the screens in amazement. On the big screen we watched the dog walk across the room and on the laptop we saw a bunch of animals from cats and bunnies to turtles and snakes sitting on a shelf and they opened their eyes and looked at the dog. The animals looked as real as any you’d see in nature. The bunnies had tall ears and fur, the snakes had scales, and a large gray cat swished its tail back and forth.

  “Robot animals,” Moonshine whispered.

  “I hate this world,” Princess replied.

  “They are tone generators made to go out in the world where you’d find them naturally. The turtle and snake can swim,” Binks said, proud of his inventions.

  “So they can march their zombies to wherever people may be hiding,” Rotten said.

  Binks looked over at Rotten as though he hadn’t considered that option and the screen on the laptop divided into half a dozen separate images and became the views of the manmade creatures. “This is cool,” he said, with less excitement than before, and turned back his work. “Now I plug the Binkster into the mainframe.” The dog trotted across the room and sat on a metal panel set in the floor. “Okay, we’re in. Now I need to connect all the animals, wirelessly, of course.” He pushed more buttons.

  Another waveform appeared under the first on the screen and Binks pushed more buttons. The waves moved in unison for a moment, matching the up and down flow, but Binks clicked a few more keys and the new wave form changed, going in the opposite direction. He pushed back from the table and finished his beer. “There, that’s it.”

  “Just like that? That easy?” Princess said. “So what happens now?”

  “We wait and see. Could I get one more beer?”

  “You said there were other compounds, other experiments, would this shut them down too?” Rotten still stared at the large screen with the view of the laboratory waiting for some evidence that it was working.

  “You’d have to get access to their mainframes, or I suppose you could disrupt the signal from outside with enough power.” Binks took the beer from Mrs. Williams and popped the top. “Thanks.”

  The ground rumbled and the night outside suddenly lit up as though the sun had rushed to rise. “What the hell? Another earthquake?” Princess backed away, looking through the glass.

  Binks stood up, lifted the beer to his lips, and froze. “I feel …” He laughed and dropped the beer. “Wow, A.I., I should have known,” he said and collapsed.

  “What the…” Moonshine began as the house shook and the glass wall shattered.

  We dropped and ducked under the table as the glass exploded into the room and the house rocked and rumbled. The night outside was as bright as noonday and we heard a deafening metallic grinding noise that had us all covering our ears. “What’s happening?” Sarah screamed.

  The last of the glass fell and the world quit shaking, but the noise grew louder and although it didn’t seem possible, the night outside grew even brighter. We crawled out from under the table and looked out through the opening into the yard.

  “The nest blew up,” Rotten yelled over the mechanical screech. “The light is coming from where the compound was, it worked!”

  “Then why is it still going on?” Moonshine bellowed, his hands over his ears.

  The noise stopped instantly and my ears began to ring. “What the hell is going on?” I said.

  “Look!” Will pointed in the direction of the river and it took me a moment to understand what I was seeing.

  A mountain, a dark rocky mountain as huge as any skyscraper I had ever seen was silently floating above the river. It was upside down and those giant pylons used to distribute electric lines that Rotten and I referred to as Langoliers, pointed down toward the water. As we watched it defying all laws of gravity and physics, it rolled over in slow motion. The light around us pulsed several times, my ears popped, and then it simply vanished into thin air and it was dark again.

  “No. No way,” Moonshine whispered.

  “What did I just see?” Princess rubbed her eyes.

  “Impossible.” Highland shook his head.

  Rotten laughed, and frankly it sounded maniacal. “I guess it really was the aliens,” he said and then sobbed.

  Downstairs we heard the TV blare to life and a couple cell phones chirped. “The power’s back?” Princess said, but none of us moved.

  Rotten wiped his face, snuffling, and still no one moved.

  “Will, would you mind going down and switching everything back to the main and off the generator?” Sully finally managed to say.

  “Okay.” Will ran down the stairs and soon the room filled with light, at least the lamps and fixtures that weren’t broken in the explosion of glass clicked on.

  “What in the hell do we do now?” Moonshine looked down at Binks. “And what the hell happened to him?”

  “A.I. Artificial intelligence, he was a robot. A robot making more robots.” Rotten wiped at the tears still streaming down his face.

  “I knew something was off about him, but I wouldn’t have guessed that.” Princess reached down and touched Binks face. “He feels human.” She ran her hand over his longish hair and shook her head.

  “God bless him, he sure helped us out.” Mrs. Williams stared down at Binks.

  “Why would he help us? If he was one of them, why would he help?” Moonshine said.

  “He didn’t know he was one of them, to him he had been recruited out of college weeks ago and he didn’t like what he saw happening. He didn’t know, he thought he was one of us. He thought he was human.” Highland said.

  “That’s so sad,” Sarah said, tears filling her eyes. “Poor Binks.”

  Day Eleven

  Sunday

  December 21, 2014

  We pulled out of the driveway in a convoy shortly after sunrise. We traveled in the three black Jeeps the henchmen had left beside the driveway and one of the sedans, leaving the stink mobile behind with the bodies of the major, Binks, and the scattered pieces of what was once the men in black. The bodies of the zombies had disintegrated into piles of white dust and only the clothes and shoes scattered on the lawn and in the woods testified to their existence.

  We didn’t pack much, just a change of clothes each, all of the weapons we had gathered over the week, and slid the crate with Ginger in the backseat between the girls. The chickens were left to fend for themselves, and we placed the opened fifty-pound bags of feed in the shed with the door secured in the slightly open position. Rebekah assured Sarah, and us, that the birds would be fine. “They have all the bugs they can eat, all the water they can drink, and a way to get out of the weather and away from predators. If we ever come back here we’ll probably find hundreds of chickens.”

  We pulled out on the highway and it is hard to describe the way we felt, mainly we were exhausted, but it was exhaustion laced with terror and disbelief, and peppered with disturbing and recurring images that we could never erase. I want to use the word shell shocked, and it’s true, but it’s not big enough to encompass the hit our spirits had endured. We were still standing, we were physically unharmed, but the damage to our minds could never be repaired, at least it didn’t feel like it. Our trust and faith in everything we had ever known had been shaken and we didn’t know what the truth was anymore.

  We passed Sarah and Rebekah’s house and then came to the junction, turning onto a state road headed east. The first town we passed through was mostly deserted; we saw a couple pick-ups and several police officers standing around cruisers in the parking lot of a diner and they watched us drive past, but there were no other
cars and no people on the street. Pulling out of town, we saw a helicopter headed in the direction of Arlington and then the traffic picked up. It was shocking to our senses to see people moving as though everything was normal, as though they were not in the middle of the apocalypse, and as though a giant alien spaceship hadn’t unearthed itself from the ground and disappeared into thin air just hours earlier.

  It seemed inconceivable to me that less than fifty miles away from where we’d been running for our lives and chopping the heads off zombies, people were busily preparing for Christmas and going on with life as through evil undead alien gods and freakishly real human robots didn’t exist. The buildings were decorated with lights and wreaths and all I saw was how unprepared every one was standing out in the open and shopping without protection. I now knew that zombies could appear at any time and that was something I couldn’t forget.

  Beth was in the lead sedan and kept it steady just over the speed limit and traffic seemed to part to let us through, for the time we had become the intimidating men in black. Highland rode with her with his computer and arranged a rental on the beach. “It’s amazing what can be done with enough money,” he said later.

  We pulled up to the beach house a little after noon and stood on the porch staring out over the ocean, the salty cold wind in our faces. “Good job, bro,” Moonshine said.

  The house was two stories and sat high above the dunes, away from the neighboring houses, and there was a wooden walkway leading off the porch and down to the beach. We unloaded our few belonging and pulled two of the Jeeps into the garage, the two with the most guns and Binks’s case in the back, and then showered. It seemed like I hadn’t bathed in weeks and no matter how much soap I used I could still smell the rot of the undead on my skin. I think the others felt the same way because our taking turns in the showers took hours. Highland ordered a dozen pizzas that were quickly delivered and we ate and then wandered off to find a place to sleep.

  Day Twelve

  Monday

  December 22, 2014

  I slept about sixteen hours, what before this whole experience I would have called the sleep of the dead, but no longer will, and woke to the smell of coffee. It seemed the others slept about as much and were all just waking up. We gathered with our coffee, staring out another glass wall at a different view, and clicked on the TV.

  Rotten flipped through the channels until he found a national twenty-four-news station and he dropped the remote. The plastic looking people on the screen no longer seemed real to us, as though the newscasters were just more robots, maybe an advanced model, and it was hard to believe that we were supposed to accept their words as truth or news. A man and two women sat on a couch together and discussed the wardrobe malfunction at the memorial as though it was important and repeated over again how upsetting it had been, but it was clear they didn’t find it upsetting at all, at least it was clear to me, to us.

  “Let’s look at this upsetting offensive clip again,” Rotten said. And on the screen two women in high heels pulled hair and tore clothes and those magic black bars appeared across their breasts.

  “Shameful,” one of the plastic women said with a stern expression. “And at a memorial.” She crossed her legs, which seemed to glisten under the lights, and her short skirt shifted higher. “Just shameful.”

  “Well, in other news,” the camera focused on the face of a man with a wide jaw and unnaturally white teeth, “a sink hole opened last night in a little burg in South Carolina outside of the Blacksport area that had that horrible earthquake two weeks ago.”

  “Yes,” the camera shifted to the other woman, a brunette with a widow’s peak and way too much make-up, “that was so tragic. Was that only two weeks ago? It seems so long ago, so much has happened.”

  “I know what you mean,” the camera moved back to the man, “but yes, it was eleven days ago. An estimated one hundred thousand passed in the disaster. The experts have been warning that the ground isn’t stable there, and just last night they had another earthquake and this sinkhole opened up in a farmer’s field. Just look at that thing.” The footage showed a completely circular hole in the middle of a fenced field, the sides were smooth and it looked like a machine had bored it out, and I guess, given the circumstance of what came out of the hole, some type of machine had bored it. “So law enforcement is warning once again to stay out of the Blacksport and Freemont area.”

  The camera shifted back to the shameful blonde in the short skirt. “Next up is the viral footage of a cat chasing off a bear in an Atlanta neighborhood and we will have some experts really dig into what caused Miranda Yule and Kenston Blair to go at it on the red carpet.”

  “And in the next hour,” the camera shifted to the widow’s peak, “we’ll be cooking and teaching you how to make the perfect Christmas cookie.”

  “Fade and drug commercial,” Rotten said.

  “Do you not feel as young as you used to?” An announcer man said and a sad man appeared on the screen.

  Rotten picked up the remote and clicked it off just as the announcer was telling us to ask our doctor about a new pill. “Same as it ever was.”

  “How are we supposed to live now?” Princess walked over to the glass, stared out at the water for a moment, and then turned to us. “How are we supposed to be normal? I wasn’t normal before this and I’m far from that small balance I used to maintain. How am I supposed to go out in the world never knowing if I am talking to a robot or a zombie might appear at any second? How can we go back to our lives when there are alien undead zombie fucking gods in giant spaceships turning people into monsters? How am I supposed to carry on a conversation with someone about anything when I know it’s all fake and all a lie?”

  “I saw a lady yesterday in one of those towns we passed through and she was walking across a parking lot in high heels and all I could think was, oh my god, she can’t run in those things, she’s going to die,” I said.

  “This whole experience has changed us, there is no doubting that.” Mrs. Williams lifted the coffee cup to her lips and took a sip. “And it’s even hard for me to see the bright side of things. Twice this morning I panicked because I wasn’t wearing my holster.”

  “It’s a mind-fuck, sorry kids, sorry Mrs. Williams, Connie, but I can’t think of a more appropriate word, our minds have been broken.” Moonshine walked to the glass and looked out at the beach. “There’re people out there, just walking like it’s the safest place in the world, and for all we know it may be, the problem is none of us are ever going to feel safe again.”

  “I keep finding myself wondering if it really happened or if it was some group hallucination. I know it happened, mind you, but part of my mind wants to push it all away and forget.” Sully poured a shot of whiskey in his coffee.

  “I know it happened, I shot our parents, that’s not something you can pretend didn’t happen. No disrespect, Sully,” Rebekah said, “but I don’t want to forget, I want to hunt down the men in black and kill them and their alien gods.”

  “Me, too,” Will said. “They lined us up like a bunch of dogs and shot us. It was a miracle I survived and no one will ever know what happened. No one will go to prison for killing my dad or any of those other people, and what’s to stop them from doing it again or coming after us?” Will looked at Rebekah and Sarah sitting beside him on the couch. “We’re all orphans now because of this thing. What are we supposed to do? Go out in the world and turn ourselves over to an orphanage? Let them find us new parents?”

  “That’s not going to happen,” Princess said. “I would never let that happen to you.”

  “She’s right, Will,” Mrs. Williams said. “You’re staying with us, no matter what.”

  “And how are we going to do that in this world? Is Highland going to turn us all into new people and get us new names? I’m with Princess, I don’t know how we’re supposed to live out there like normal people.”

  “Well, we don’t have to make a decision now. I have found when I encounter a
huge problem it is important to focus on the little things and the most immediate needs.” Mrs. William drained the coffee cup, set it on the table, and stood. “We need to go shopping. We need food, we all need clothes, and no matter what else is going on right now, acquiring food and clothes is a necessity. I also think it will be good for us to go back out in the world, be with normal people, doing normal things before we decide we can never be like them. Who would like to help?”

  “I want to go shopping,” Sarah said.

  “I’ll go, sounds like just what we need.” Connie forced a smile.

  “I’ll go.” Rebekah pulled her sister from the couch.

  Princess and I looked at each other. “We’ll go.”

  “Come on, Moon Man, come with us,” she said.

  “Yeah, okay, I’ll go,” he said.