The Complete Last War Series

by Ryan Schow

  “There are kids in that building,” he said, his entire demeanor changing. “So maybe you shouldn’t be thinking so much about me seeing your butt in tights right now.”

  She felt like the wind had been knocked out of her. The other kids were up there, standing in shock, watching the exploded building burning like a four alarm fire.

  “We should do something,” Gracie suggested.

  Someone said, “You know, Gracie, this is the first time you actually sound dumb.”

  She started to cry, trying to prove to people like Macy she still had a heart. Macy couldn’t stop staring at the school, and then something that looked like a miniature fighter plane zipped down the street heading right for them.

  “This is an attack,” she told Trevor.

  It wasn’t so much the child development center next door, but the rising columns of smoke in the distance.

  That’s when the approaching plane opened fire, making her friends dance a minute or two before dropping dead. Seven people just collapsed, including Trevor.

  “No,” she whispered, her hand flying to her mouth, her eyes flooding. She dropped to her knees before him, watched his eyes looking her way, not sure what was happening but totally out of it.

  He coughed up a bit of blood and started gulping for air, almost like a fish out of water. She wanted to turn away, but she couldn’t.

  When she was younger, before they moved to San Francisco, her parents had a travel trailer they towed behind a Chevy Tahoe. Vacationing back then was going to KOA campgrounds all along the west coast. At places like that, there was always a nearby lake or some stocked ponds. Her father taught her to fish from one of those stocked ponds and when she caught her first rainbow trout, she reeled it in, so excited she couldn’t stand still.

  When the fish emerged from the water though, her gaze zoomed in on the small metal hook buried in its mouth. Then those same innocent eyes couldn’t stop seeing the blood on its minuscule, almost non-existent lips. Her heart jumped, but in a bad way. Like her chest hurt at the sight of the poor thing.

  “Daddy?” she said, looking up.

  She must have been five or six years old as she stared down at it, gulping for air, in pain and starving for water.

  “Stanton put the thing out of its misery,” she remembered her mother saying.

  He’d used a pair of needle-nosed pliers to work the hook free. He then took the fish firmly by the tail and swung it around, smashing its head into a nearby pine. She’d never get that thumping sound out of her mind, and for some reason that’s all she could think of as she looked down on Trevor.

  Much to her dismay, he’d become that gulping, panicking, dying fish. He had blood splattered all over his lips and there were holes in his body. How was she supposed to help him out of this misery? She certainly couldn’t save him. Kneeling over him, sobbing, she’d held on to his hand until he was gone. That’s all she could do.

  That’s when it dawned on her.

  Looking up, she realized most of these people were dead. Including Gracie. Poor, poor Gracie, the girl with everything but a pulse.

  Maybe Macy didn’t hate Gracie after all, but she did feel bad for all the times she wished someone would knock the girl off her pedestal. Now it wasn’t someone but something, and it hadn’t taught her a lesson as much as it put a giant hole in her pretty little head.

  Chapter Five

  Parents and teachers and students are pouring out of the child development center as well as Macy’s school. I blaze past a handful of freaked out students all but crashing through the front door, Stanton in tow. I might have knocked into a few of the departing kids, maybe even inadvertently knocked one or two of them down.

  I didn’t stop. I can’t stop.

  My mind keeps replaying the horrors of the day over and over again, which is getting me more and more worked up to the point where if I don’t pull myself together, I swear to Jesus I might stop breathing altogether.

  Stanton is on my heels as we shove our way down a crowded hall leading to the back of the school and out to the quad. Several students are climbing down a tall ladder, bawling, screaming, blood all over them. They’re babbling incoherently and pointing up to the roof, but they just keep walking and wailing.

  “Is Macy McNamara up there?” I hear myself asking frantically. I’m grabbing kids, making them listen to me. Finally one shakes off my grip.

  Maybe that’s why they’re pointing.

  While my mouth is asking questions, my eyes are registering the blood spatter that seems to be on all of them. It could be their blood. Or like me, it could be they’re wearing someone else’s blood.

  I don’t care at this point. I only want to find my daughter.

  “They’re all shot!” a blubbering girl is saying to me on the way by, making matters worse for me. I’m thirty-three years old and about to go into cardiac arrest.

  Just go.

  I head for the ladder, grab the rails and start climbing.

  “Sin, don’t!” Stanton says.

  He’s trying to protect me from whatever it is I’ll find. He also knows me well enough to know that all of hell and the Devil himself can’t stop me from going after her, no matter her condition.

  At the top of the ladder, I see her, sitting down in front of a dead boy (is that Trevor?), bawling.

  “Macy!” I cry.

  She turns.

  “Mom?” She sees it’s me and says, “He’s dead, Mom!”

  Hunkering down low, Stanton’s on the ladder behind me saying I should grab her, get her down from there quick before they come back.

  “They” meaning the drones.

  I’m already on it, though. I’m already saying, “Macy, we have to go. It’s not safe with those things out there!”

  “Is that blood all over your face?” she asks through a hiccupping/crying jag.

  “Yeah, but it’s not mine. Seriously sweetheart, we need to go, now!”

  Looking over my shoulder, seeing her father, she says, “Dad?”

  “C’mon sweetheart, take your mom’s hand.”

  “But Trevor—”

  “I know, baby,” I hear myself saying. “But please. The whole city is under attack. We need to get someplace less…out in the open.”

  She gives a bumpy, awkward nod, wipes her eyes, then leaves her friend behind and thankfully follows me toward the ladder.

  “You go first,” I say. Then I see her skirt and say, “No I’ll go, just follow me.”

  She does as she’s told for once in her life.

  Stanton is already down the ladder talking to a teacher who is looking mortified either by the situation unfolding or by the layers of soot and ash all over Stanton’s face and clothes (nothing compliments a classic three-piece suit like the apocalypse). She’s a nice looking woman, but she’s on the verge of going to pieces. My eyes meet hers as I’m almost down the ladder. There’s a youth and incompetence in her eyes, something you’d expect of a younger teacher who hasn’t really seen the world and all the devastation it can produce.

  My feet touch solid ground and Macy follows me, giving me the kind of fierce hug only something truly horrendous and life changing can beget.

  Her body is shaking out more tears, and she’s surely replaying the events of her own nightmare. Stepping back, she realizes her stomach has been pressing into the Sig Sauer stuffed into the waistband of my jeans.

  “Is that a gun?” Macy asks a bit too loud.

  The teacher flashes me a look, almost like the three letter word (gun) has elicited far more emotions from her than dead kids or a city under siege.

  Strange.

  “I took it off a dead cop,” I tell her.

  “You can’t have a gun on campus,” the teacher says, suddenly switching into disciplinarian mode.

  Stanton’s eyes meet mine, then we both look back at the woman as if to say, really?

  “You have a handful of dead students on that roof, lady,” I remind her, “so get off my ass about the onl
y protection I have from those…things…out there and go do something useful.”

  Stanton and Macy just stare at me. It’s like they don’t recognize me. Then again, I hardly recognize myself. I suppose I’m genial for the most part, and pretty level headed, but after today that me is officially on hiatus.

  “Go!” I shout at her, shaking her from her autocratic stance.

  To her I must look unhinged. With the blood all over my face, I must look like a serial killer who escaped the mental ward and went on a killing spree getting here. Using all the brainpower she has, she complies with only a touch of hesitation.

  “These freaking people,” I hear myself say.

  “That’s Miss Titus, Mom,” Macy says. “She’s nice. One of the good ones.”

  Am I being scolded?

  “Well after today, I think she should change her name to Miss Uptitus.”

  The joke went off like a boulder dropped in water. My attempt at gallows humor (for no reason other than I am clearly out of sorts) is not funny, even to me.

  “Where to now?” I ask Stanton.

  He looks at me like he’s right about to ask the same question. Then: “Do I dare ask about the car?”

  “I’d prefer you didn’t.”

  He runs his hand through his hair, turns around, perplexed.

  “What about your motorcycle?” I ask.

  “Yeah, same,” he says, suddenly stilled by the revelation.

  He’d always wanted a Harley Davidson, and now something bad has happened to it. Something bad has happened to his bike like something bad happened to my brand new SUV. To this otherwise peaceful city. To the children on the school’s rooftop and the children of the child development center next door.

  “I have to get moving before I start crying again,” I tell Stanton.

  “We need to get moving before Miss Uptitus returns and gets herself shot,” he says, though his delivery is less humorous and more matter-of-fact.

  For a second I wonder if he isn’t working in a bit of his own gallows humor and is instead speaking the truth. Does he think I’m just going to shoot someone because I have a gun? After a second, I realize I just might, depending on how bad it gets…

  Chapter Six

  “How can they all just cart their kids off out in the open?” Stanton asks. “Half the city is under fire and these drones…they’re still blowing things up.”

  None of us say anything.

  We follow the crowds of people down Page Street.

  The three of us blend into the crowd making its way around the corner and up the stairs of what will soon be a large urban church. Right now it’s a construction zone inside. Apparently the owner of the building was on site when the attack began, so now he’s insisting the CDC and the school use his mostly gutted building as a triage center.

  “Someone has to care for the injured children,” he tells us when we thank him.

  Like any man or woman of faith, a noble servant of God never has to tell you they are virtuous. You can see it in their actions. You can feel it in their every countenance. Like their charity comes not from an obligation to the church or even a good deed done in God’s name, but from their heart because they find joy in the very act of serving others.

  This is that man.

  We don’t even know his name; then again, names don’t seem to matter much when you’re in this kind of a situation. I step in and help where I can, and it takes my mind off the fear of what’s happening.

  Well, sort of.

  The dying city still rumbles at our feet and parents continue to ask each other and Stanton if they are safe in the church since it is not yet a place of God but a work in progress.

  “Whomever targeted the school and the children’s center for attack isn’t going to care if they blow up a church or kill more kids,” I hear Macy say.

  Okay, so she can sometimes be blunt.

  We work the afternoon away, still fearing we’ll be shot or blown up, but knowing that statistically there are almost nine hundred thousand souls living in this city. How many thousands of lives can a few hundred drones take at once?

  Naturally, being an ER nurse, I’m at home in the midst of the injured. There aren’t as many people to care for compared to having an entire hospital’s worth of patients, but seeing all these hurt kids cuts me to the bone. To think some of them need to be rushed to the nearest hospital, but might not make it, breaks my heart.

  “Who would do such a thing?” someone asks, clearly beside herself.

  No one has an answer. They don’t have answers like this place doesn’t have bathrooms. Twice I head to the porta-potty out front and twice I can say I should’ve held it. Sitting on that hard plastic bowl just knowing what’s marinating below turns my stomach. With my jeans circled around my ankles, I think about all the burgers, the hot dogs, the tacos, the sub sandwiches and the sodas that’ve gone into creating that awful smell, and honestly, when I come out (barely alive) I realize I’ll never look at construction workers the same again.

  As much as I’d never want someone hurt, dealing with blood and pandemonium is worlds easier than suffering another street-side crapper.

  But I’m digressing…

  After hours of taking care of these kids, of watching Stanton and Macy help the building’s owner devote himself fully to the tasks at hand, we’re done. Everyone’s been treated and given water and whatever food can be scraped up and distributed. By now, one would think the attack on the city would have stopped, or at least slowed. They’d be wrong. I can’t even imagine how much damage San Francisco has endured by now.

  I put that thought out of my mind, try compartmentalizing this situation the same way I compartmentalize all the drama at work.

  People come and go, looking for a place to hide from the drones. A few remain, but they won’t last long. Like us, they’ll try to get home. What is beautiful in this tragedy, however, is how the owner never wavers in his devotion to the community. He provides food and water, offers shelter to the survivors, blesses more than a few poor souls when what they seemed to need most are the kind words of a stranger.

  As the last of the parents disappear on foot, the three of us stand at the top of the concrete steps overlooking the carnage wondering if these people have any idea what’s in store for them.

  Hopefully the attacks will end soon.

  Judging by the thick pall of smoke and the concussion bursts still hitting deeper in the city, I wonder if there’s even an end in sight.

  “Who do you think is doing this?” the owner of the building asks. None of us heard him arrive. Fortunately, we’re all too tired to startle.

  Stanton turns and says, “Hard to say. I know some people who might know what’s going on, but I can’t seem to hold a decent signal, and no one I know is answering their phones when my calls manage to ring through.”

  “My internet is down, too,” he says. “I have friends all over town and they say the same thing. UAV’s, but no idea who’s controlling them.”

  “UAV’s?” I ask.

  “Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Drones. And lots of them. They seem to be ranging anywhere from the size of a normal drone like you’d get at Best Buy to ones almost the size of a small fighter jet.”

  “Does anyone know anything?” Macy asks.

  Some of the color has come back to her face, but it’s only temporary. There are moments when she thinks about her friends and what happened to Trevor and she gets very quiet and teary eyed. Other moments, like these, she almost seems ignorant to it. I’d tell her it’s okay to cry, but I think if I said that, I might break down first, and I can’t do that.

  Perhaps she’s like Stanton and me, old enough and wise enough to tell herself to wait for safety before coming apart.

  “Do you have somewhere to go?” the man asks us.

  “Home,” Stanton says. He doesn’t even think about it. The answer just comes out and I like where his head’s at.

  “I hope it’s still standing after today,”
the saint replies. Offering his hand to Stanton, the men shake hands. Turning to me, he says, “You are a gift from God, young lady.” He gives me a hug and what I feel from him is a graciousness and an appreciation you just don’t get from normal people.

  “And you are a good Christian,” I tell him with a warm smile. “Thank you so much for all you’ve done, for who you are.”

  It’s time to go.

  When we leave, as we start in the direction of home, I wonder what Stanton’s plans are for us getting there safely.

  “So the Land Rover,” he says, a desperate look in his eye, “you alluded to it earlier. Is it even drivable?”

  My heart sinks. I hope that’s not his plan.

  “The Land Rover was blown up by one of those things.”

  “What?” Macy asks.

  “What about your motorcycle?” I ask.

  “One of those UAV’s—”

  “Drones,” Macy interjects.

  “One of those drones,” Stanton says, not skipping a beat, “blew up a twenty story apartment building that nearly came down on me. The dust ruined my suit, my eyes and my lungs. Somehow in the process of being dust-blind, I managed to hit a car. So no, at this point, it’s not drivable.”

  “So what was your big plan for getting us home then?” I ask, trying not to sound manic and neurotic at the same time. I’m tired though, so I can’t really help it.

  “My big plan was to ask you about your big plan,” he says, totally serious.

  “You’re no help at all,” I grumble.

  All the aches and pains of playing Smashup Derby are coming back at a relentless pace. Without a distraction, without the life-and-death situations earlier to subjugate my mind, I’m starting to realize how dire our situation really is. Well, for the moment. I don’t want to sound like a drama queen or anything, but the idea of not being in my own bed tonight is beyond tragic.

  “Can’t we just catch a cab?” Macy asks.

  Me and Stanton forgive her of her ignorance. She’s just fifteen. Her friend died in her lap and we’ve been treating a bunch of injured kids. She’s seen third degree burns, lacerated faces and limbs, crushed bones. No one really goes through that without residual effects.