by Cole, Nick
It scans the room.
Virus units are bleeding. Moaning. Dying.
The feed ends.
It was thirty seconds long.
That room had been different. Colors. Fabrics. Paintings. Life.
Now standing in the same room twenty-five years later, the Thinking Machine scans the places where each of the Hostile Virus units had lain. The weapons, the bullet casings, the laptop... all of these things are gone. Either destroyed by the Reaper Unit or the Reclamation Units or taken by the Hostile Virus units now called the Resistance.
There is little left of the house. The stairs rise to nowhere. The skeletal remains of the walls only suggest a home was once there. The furniture, the paintings, the life... all the things that once were, are gone.
Only the bones remain, as six skeletons stare sightlessly at the Thinking Machine.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Wan sunlight nears the zenith of its day and there is a suggestion of actual warmth up near the bounce array on top of the ruin-covered hill. Cade looks out over surrounding neighborhoods forever devastated, gray rolling hills, the distant gully where the old rail lines lie, warped and rusting. But the sky has decided to be that rare blue one only remembers. A blue Cade sometimes finds described in books about better days he never really knew. White bilious clouds speed across the sky.
So the wind must be fast up there, reasoned Cade.
But down here it’s a light breeze, he thought as he took his ‘nocs and scanned the burned-out homes and rusting cars and ruined streets that spread away from the hill in every direction. At the bottom of the hill is the old school.
An elementary school, Bert had called it.
Cory watches everything too.
If the Scavenger is still in the area, there’s a good chance they’ll see him from up here. Or even see a fire if he’s cooking. They wait for an hour, watching over the remains of something Cade wishes were more familiar to him. Like a half remembered song.
What did they do there?
What was that building there for?
Who were the people who lived here and what were their lives like?
And...
What happened to them all?
Cade thinks about Cory and the things the kid has said on their way up the hill to the bounce array.
“Market,” when they passed the ruined foundation of a big square of blasted concrete on the other side of the bridge.
“Pharmacy.” And, “Doctor Liu,” when they passed the old pharmacy where they’d put up one of the CCTVs to watch the area around the library.
“Kevin Chung’s house.” He’d said that one as they neared the entrance to a small neighborhood they’d passed through to make their way up onto the hill and the debris-littered heights guarding it.
Cory named places that held no meaning for Cade. Ever. As though the places had actually once had names. As if rubble ever could in Cade’s world. Every name for a place or thing was almost alien to Cade. Almost. He’d been born a survivor, growing up in the years after such places had done their final business on the last nuclear holocaust day. The last day they’d ever do business, and Cade never thought of them, of those places, by the names the kid used. Cade knew the names. But not the meanings. Or the history.
Or who they were.
He wanted to call Cory’s naming “babble”. The babble of a simple man-child whose only comforts were a few relics from the Before of fantasies that could save the world from any monster. Fantasies called “Super Heroes”.
Too bad they were never real.
Too bad the monsters were.
“Hey, did you live here? Did you have a house around here?” he asked Cory. He could feel himself distancing from the kid by the tone of voice he used... de-personalizing the boy he’d need as bait to draw the Scavenger out. “House” was a word Cade only knew of. No one in the resistance had ever had a “house”.
Camps.
Outposts.
Tents.
Cardboard boxes.
“I slept in that drainpipe over there. It was dry enough,” was something Cade had said and heard too many times to ever be worth counting.
Those places.
Cory stood and pointed back down toward the neighborhood they’d passed through. His big arm was so locked it looked bent in a way that wasn’t possible. His thick finger straight and true.
Cade knew no one had ever lived down there, or anywhere nearby, for a very long time. Not since before the war, and the chemical strike and the war that continued after.
As the only soldier in this area, Cade had scouted all over and through it. No one lived here anymore.
So then, how does he know the names of all these places?
He doesn’t, Cade answered himself. It’s just babble.
Cory sat down cross legged, studying a dry, brown weed between his legs. His large finger traced its outline.
The day was turning to afternoon and Cade felt the sudden chill of the wind.
Just a little while more, he thought, then we’ll head back to the library for the night.
That’s when he saw the Scavenger.
Right below them. The Scavenger emerged from the old elementary school’s yawning blackness of a double door entrance long since missing its doors. The Scavenger walked across an open space between another section of the building and entered the darkness again.
Cade tried to replay the sudden memory of the man.
Were there any clues that it was a Terminator?
Nothing jumped out, he thought to himself. Nothing.
But the Scavenger was down there.
“Hey,” said Cade, slapping Cory on the shoulder. Cory suddenly jerked. Reacting as though he’d been stung. But before he could do more Cade said, “There’s a man down there. I think he might know where your Daddy is.”
Cory turned, following Cade’s finger.
“School,” Cory said.
Lucky guess, thought Cade suddenly, as if to close the loop, or complete some unfinished melody. Organize it. Put it in a place one could accept and maybe live with. Because... how could this lost kid know that the ruins below were once a school before he’d been born and the world had blown itself up?
Cade had once seen a school. In a refugee camp up in Idaho one winter when they were giving the Cans hell as the machines tried to build a high-speed railway across the plains to their memory factories up in perma-frozen Canada. That refugee camp “school” had been just three children huddled around a book. A lady Cade remembered to be pretty, except for the scar on her face and a missing arm, was teaching them numbers.
That was school.
What he saw below, what Bert had told him was a school, was just an old flat building surrounded by an overgrown field of dry weeds. That Cade knew they used the word “school” was only because “school” was a tactical reference point on Resistance maps of the local area surrounding the library.
But that wasn’t the point.
Random Scavenger... or Terminator? That was the point.
“You think you might go down there and ask him if he’s seen your... uh, Daddy?”
Cade didn’t feel bad using Cory as bait.
When the world is the way it is, rust and ruin, humanity barely hanging on, Cans every day and night never sleeping or ceasing in their quest to eradicate what’s left of humanity, resources are not just precious, they’re vital. So yeah, you use a simple kid to lure a Terminator out ‘cause the dog that can spot the Cans is much too valuable.
Or at least that’s what you tell yourself, thought Cade somewhere in the back of his head.
Cory stood, dry weeds clinging to his corduroy pants.
And there’s another thing you’re not seeing, haven’t seen Cade, he said to himself. The clothes the kid wears. You ever seen clothes like tha
t? All clothing has become little more than rags in the twenty-five years since. Most pieces have been owned several times over by different people, since the bombs.
“Almost new” might have been the words he would have used if he’d ever known what “new” meant. What it looked like. What a department store full of clothing must have looked like. The resistance had an outpost inside an old mall. There were no clothes there. Hadn’t been for twenty-five years.
Cory stepped out of the bare crumbling foundation of the old place they’d been watching from. Cade looked down, away, at the Barrett resting on its tripod in the dirt nearby.
Cory started down the hill.
Cade reached for the sniper rifle, pulled back the bolt, and checked to make sure that one of his prized uranium depleted electro-static discharge rounds was in the chamber. He took off his coat and spread it out in the dirt. He moved his elbows onto it, then moved the rifle in front of him.
He sighted the place where the Scavenger, or the Terminator, had entered the darkness of the old school. He adjusted the magnification and cocked his head, feeling the wind.
“Nuthin’ to worry about at this range,” he muttered to himself in the silence atop the hill.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Cory stood in front of the school. He knew this place. He remembered being pushed down out in the field by Brian Ratigan. He remembered all the names of the kids he’d once known. Tara, Brian, Mike, Coleen...
In his mind he still saw them all as kids, the sixth graders, he’d once known. Cory still saw himself that way. But that had been years ago. More years than Cory could understand.
In all the time he’d gone to his special school and the one after that, the other kids had finished junior high and even high school. Some were living at home still, a few were in college, but most had died on the day civilization ended.
But that was yesterday, or just a few days ago.
The day Cory had gone to the pharmacy for Mrs. Sheinman.
Even Cory knew something wasn’t right. He’d recognized things, but knew somehow that things were very wrong and that something bad had happened. The school he found himself in front of, the one he’d gone to as a child, looked gray and burnt. There were no doors or windows. Just gaps and holes that led to deep shadows.
It’s dark in there, he told himself. “Watch out, Cory,” he whispered.
But the sports field he’d just crossed to get there hadn’t been the same. It was covered in weeds. The old baseball diamond was gone and only the warped metal poles of the backstop remained like some twisted scarecrow.
That was where Bryan Ratigan and Cory had been “playing”.
It’s dark in there, he told himself again.
Inside the school.
A place of many happy memories for Cory. Books and hot lunches on rainy days. Activities and kids and kind teachers and friends and assemblies where you sat on carpet cross-legged as everyone poked and giggled.
Daddy.
To find Daddy, Cory knew he would need to go into the school which didn’t look like a school anymore. It reminded Cory of a ghost. As if the building were a ghost of itself. Or a place that a criminal like Joker or Scarecrow might have their hideout.
The Scarecrow.
Monsters.
Strangers.
Cory whispered, “I’m afraid, Daddy.”
“I’m afraid.”
And then he heard Daddy telling him like he had so many times before, that sometimes little boys have to be brave even when they are scared.
Cory nodded.
Cade watched Cory through the magnified scope of the powerful .50 caliber sniper rifle.
The Thinking Machine scanned the chaos of the ancient multi-purpose room of the destroyed Virus Learning Facility.
89,1 percent possibility that Virus Learning Facility currently uninhabited for longer than 5 years.
Chassis Integrity at 73.5... Running Micro-Frame Diagnostic.
Weapons Ready...
Mission Status: Critical.
Cory donned the Batman mask mumbling his words.
His hands trembling.
He tried to think of pancakes and Daddy and things the way they should be and...
“Sometimes, Cory, little boys need to be brave.”
I am Vengeance. I am the night. I am Batman.
Cory was walking toward the gaping black hole that he knew, recognized, would lead him to “Big Room” as he’d called it all those years he’d spent there in that school, when the Thinking Machine came out of the shadows in front of him.
At first it looked like a man.
But Cory knew it wasn’t. Half its face was missing and a gleaming metal rictus smiled malevolently down at him. He stopped and immediately backpedaled, tripping over the remains of the monkey bars that had fallen and lain in the weeds all those years since the bombs and the first resistance and the chemical attacks that followed.
Cory sat down heavily on his wide rump.
The Terminator drew the AutoMag from its raggedy clothing, thumbing the laser targeting system and landing the red dot on Cory’s chest, adjusting it a moment later up onto his wide forehead.
Cade fired.
The large caliber depleted uranium electro-static round struck the Thinking Machine in the chest, dead center. The round tore away flesh and a section of internal armor plating, then discharged 50,000 volts. The man-shaped Thinking Machine shook, tremored, and squeezed off a shot into the air as it raised its massive pistol. Its synthetic flesh and vat-grown muscles twitched and rippled. Then it sank to its knees and fell over in the weeds.
“All the time in the world,” muttered Cade as he ejected the massive shell and inserted one of his standard .50 caliber rounds. All he needed to do was knock out the micro-processor with a head shot and the machine would be finished. He was dimly aware that Cory was scrabbling away from the downed Terminator as he slipped another massive round into the chamber.
“Nuthin’ but time,” was Cade’s way of telling himself to slow down. Taking out a Terminator wasn’t easy on the best of days. He’d seen one of them take out dozens of armed men and women, and children, with the right weapons and a little surprise.
Cade slid the bolt forward and felt the weapon jam.
“Daddy!” cried Cory as he ran away across the football field he’d once played on as a child when the world was something else. Something safer.
Catastrophic Damage...
Micro-Frame... OFFLINE
Nuclear Power Cell... OFFLINE
Catastrophic Damage...
WARNING Systems Failure Cascade IMMINENET
Cade cursed as he worked the bolt back and forth.
He had no idea how old the weapon was.
He had no idea that it had been to Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria and...
It was fifty years old.
There hadn’t been replacement parts in twenty-five years.
The Terminator was still down. Cade saw Cory running across the weed-covered field toward the hill.
“Good kid, run,” he muttered, and then the entire bolt assembly broke with a sound that made Cade sick to his stomach.
WARNING: Systems Failure Cascade Imm...
Hot Start Reboot in 5...
4...
3...
2...
1...
Diagnostic Running.
Combat Mode Initiated.
Terminate Virus Protocols in Effect.
Mission Status: Critical
Cade Watched as the Terminator sat bolt upright.
Then Cade picked up the broken Barrett and ran, scrambling down the far side of the hill, away from the Killing Machine.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Cory ran. His massive legs pushed through the tall weeds leaving a broken trail in hi
s wake. He ran for the twisted remains of the back fence where the bad kids used to hang out and even smoke, which was a “no no”.
High overhead the sun fell behind more of the swift moving clouds as Cory slid down a crumbling slope of dirt and debris that should have been a green covered hill if Cory had chosen to walk down here on the day he’d been at Mrs. Scheinman’s in the evening.
But there was no time to think about all the things that were out of place. Cory had known from the moment he’d seen the large, massively built man with the gun, who reminded him of the Batman villain Mr. Freeze, that this stranger was the most dangerous of all strangers. Cory had known from that very moment that the man-thing with the big gun was the very definition of “Stranger Danger”.
The gun.
Guns were the biggest “no no” of all for little boys whose dads are cops. Cory was always supposed to run away from guns.
Cory made the street that would lead back to his house. It climbed a hill that led up through a housing development newer than the one he and Daddy lived in. When it was being built, it was here Scott Chung and he had played on Cory’s third best ever day. The day Cory got to hold the Batman action figure. But that had been back before this neighborhood had ever been built. Cory always thought of this section of houses as new.
“The New Houses” he and the other kids had called it.
But now, looking up the curving wide street that led through the neighborhood of “New Houses”, Cory saw only dust and gray covered ruins wallowing in drifts of ash and burnt debris. Human skulls lay along the road at random points. The chicken wire and frame structures so common in Southern California construction were exposed and skeletal. Many of the houses had fallen in one direction or collapsed inward on themselves. But some still leaned at precariously odd angles.