by Ryan Schow
“These…animals,” I say, half angry, half struggling not to have a total breakdown.
“These things are neither human nor animal, Sin,” Stanton says in a wet, choked up voice. “They’re machines and they have no sense of morality. No hesitation, no respect for life, no remorse.”
Looking at the homes, the sounds of bombing stall out only to be replaced by a cold, steady silence. Lately we’ve come to distrust these subtle platitudes. We pass the little girl and a woman a few feet ahead of her. Was this her child? They’re both sprawled face-down on the sidewalk. The woman has a meaty red mess in the crown of her head while the child has two red blooms in her back.
Ahead, propped against someone’s garage door, is a handsome young man. He’s got a dried red carnation over his heart. Not the flower. Blood. Judging by the rust colored smears on the sidewalk, he dragged himself over to the garage, perhaps in search of cover. Not that it provided any cover at all. His head is lolled forward, his chin sitting on his chest. On his ring finger is a shiny gold band. I look over at the two bodies. Was that woman his wife? Was that his child?
On second thought, she looks too old for him—what I can see of her. Maybe the woman was his mother and the little girl was his. Maybe they were neither. Just strangers in the wrong place at the right time.
“Do you hear that?” Stanton asks. Collectively we perk up. “I can’t be sure, but…I think that might be them.”
Stanton’s on the move, looking for open doors because there’s no decent place to hide from these things but inside a home.
The first two doors are locked.
Now we all hear are the approaching sounds of more than one UAV. Stanton kicks in the third door. It splinters, the frame cracking completely. He kicks it again and it swings in hard, bouncing back. The three of us hustle inside, slamming the door behind us as best as we can.
“Conversion,” Stanton says looking around, breathing hard.
Instead of this being a single home with three stories, there’s a tight staircase heading up to the second floor, then presumably another heading up to the third floor. The first door says UNIT A.
The construction isn’t pretty, but it serves its purpose.
Each floor, it appears, has been renovated into its own separate home. The reason for this? Money, of course. The owner was working to milk the property for as much rent as he or she could collect.
Typical capitalists.
I grab the knob of UNIT A’s door and twist. It’s locked. Macy shoves by me, grabs the handle and gives it her own valiant effort. It doesn’t open so she starts to shake it with all her might, her nerves finally spinning out of control.
Wow.
Ever since her school was shot up and Trevor died, she’s been halfway herself. The stores of emotion are bleeding out now. They were bound to erupt somewhere.
When Macy finally gives up, Stanton says, “You had your chance.”
We move out of the way.
He’s rearing back to kick this door down when we hear a voice on the other side of it saying, “We’re armed in here! Leave us alone or we’ll…we’ll shoot!”
Stanton ponders the warning, looking at us. I shrug my shoulders. He looks up the stairs, pauses. Outside, something else starts shooting.
“Get down!” he barks.
We drop to our knees and cover our heads just as a handful of bullets blast through the main door. They bury themselves into the wall where we were all just standing, which has me feeling part queasy, part relieved.
Standing back up, my eyes won’t stop looking at five big, splintery holes in the door we just kicked in. Holes that have distinct rods of light spearing their way inside. It’s only now that I realize I’ve still got the shotgun Stanton took from the dead kids by The Exorcist stairway.
“Upstairs,” Stanton says.
We quickly creep up the stairs following on Stanton’s heels as fast as humanly possible. The instant we hit the second floor landing, the door to UNIT B is pulled open and a shotgun barrel is shoved in our faces by some old lady in a fluffy pink bathrobe.
Her bloodshot eyes are flashed wide, the vessels straining against the bumpy whites of her eyes and brown irises that might have one day been chocolaty brown, but now just look like day old toast.
“This is my house you criminals!” Her voice is like a cast iron skillet being dragged down the sidewalk. Her look is like we’re cannibals who just ate her only child.
Stanton uses a hand to move us behind him, then he raises both hands in mock surrender and says, “The drones…they’re out there, shooting at people. Honest. We just need a place to duck into until they pass. We mean you no harm. I promise.”
It’s right then that I actually think about the way we look. How we don’t look like the well dressed socialites we were just two days ago before the floor gave out on this city. Her eyes are seeing me with my shotgun, my plastic jug of water. I’m sliding the weapon around my back.
Out of sight, out of mind, right?
“Your promises and a bag of chips are worth less than a bag of chips,” she says, her vocal chords strained from the outburst. Her reply wasn’t so much of a slant as it was a sad state of affairs for her.
“You don’t look well,” Stanton says in a calm, disarming tone.
The decrepit woman’s frown pulls into a telling grimace. She racks the shotgun and in that exact same moment, houses inside the neighborhood start blowing up. The structure shakes, catching us all off guard. Everyone but Stanton. He grabs the woman’s shotgun barrel, ducks under it and drives it toward the ceiling.
The woman loses her grip on the rifle, her bingo arms wheeling in slow motion as she stumbles backwards toward a thick area rug in the center of the living room. Stanton rushes through the door reaching for her arm, trying to catch her, but it’s too late.
Her heel catches and she tumbles tush over teakettle, cracking her head on the edge of a metal coffee table. Another run of bombing rocks the ground beneath the house, causing surface cracks to split along the walls and knock some plaster chips off the ceiling.
Looking at the old woman, blood soaking the white rug, even I know it’s all done but the crying.
“Dad!” Macy says, moving around him. “You killed her!”
“If she’s dead, it would have been the fall that killed her,” I hear myself saying, horrified by my own go-to response despite this being the truth.
Dropping to a knee to check her head, I realize she is indeed gone. How am I supposed to rationalize this? It was an accident, right? It had to be.
Accidents happen.
Three dead people inside of twenty minutes. I look up at Stanton and he’s running his hands through his hair, his eyes wild with frenzy. It’s all sinking in. He can’t believe this is happening.
None of us can.
Looking at the woman’s skeletal frame, her exposed chicken legs, how delicate and dainty her wrists were, even a blind man can see she was on the verge of starvation. One boisterous fart and her spine would have stress fractured on its own.
Tears gather in my eyes for what I’m seeing and feeling. For what just happened.
“I did this,” Stanton says, clearly stunned, his face losing color fast. “This is my fault. I…I shouldn’t have—”
“Don’t,” I say, standing up. “This isn’t on you. You tried to catch her, I saw it.”
We all stand over the body in silence, our eyes glued to the old woman who’s just laying there with her mouth dropped open and her head cranked sideways.
Surviving this assault on the city is not going the way we thought it would. Looking at the fissures on the wall, the splintered glass, the cracked thatch of drywall lying on the hardwood floor, we’re now realizing there will be casualties of our own making. Does that make us bad people? We’re not bad people. But still, they say judge a man not by his words but by the force of his deeds.
How will I judge my husband? After all, when I asked him if he could protect us, if he wou
ld, he said yes.
He said yes.
“You could see it in her,” my mouth says, almost on its own. “Her will to go on was gone. She was defending her home because she needed to. Because this is where she was planning on dying and she wasn’t up for the company.”
“Good story, Mom,” Macy says, her eyes dry but her emotions clearly unwound.
Turning around, I say, “Shut the door!”
She does.
Looking at Stanton I ask, “Are we bad people?”
His gaze won’t leave the old woman’s crippled frame. Tears slide into the bowl of his eyes, then roll over the lid and drip onto his cheeks.
“You’re not. But I…I think that maybe…I think I am. I think that’s just what happened, Sin. I think I just became a bad person.”
Chapter Eleven
We’re starting to realize there’s something much larger at play here. “This isn’t a terrorist attack,” Stanton says. “It can’t be.”
The siege is coordinated and substantial. It seems every corner of the city is getting hammered to one degree or another. But there aren’t enough drones to hit us all at once, and there weren’t enough bombs to flatten the entire city in a day. That means we have a chance. It means San Francisco still has a chance.
Or is that the lie we’ll tell ourselves to keep on going?
Honestly, I can’t be sure.
The point is, the more destruction we see, the more our moods sink. The more we are forced to admit that if this concentrated effort to cripple our city isn’t the work of terrorists looking to make a statement, it could very well be what Stanton says it is: self-governed machines working on behalf of rogue AI trying to stamp out every last human soul.
Downstairs, the unrelenting croon of a woman sobbing keeps the silence from taking hold. We’re out of the woods, though. For now anyway. The old lady has a bed, clean sheets, two good blankets. She has food, cold water, some medicine.
“About that shower,” I say, and no one protests.
In the bathroom I peel off my clothes, avoid my face in the mirror, then wait until the water is hot enough to step inside the old tub. Pulling the shower curtain closed reminds me of my college days, but there is nothing nostalgic about this place.
Five minutes becomes ten and I find myself sitting down, arms pulled around my knees, sobbing. There’s a knock on the bathroom door I don’t respond to. The door opens then closes. The drapes come back a bit but I don’t look up.
“Are you okay?” Stanton asks.
I give a subtle nod. I don’t hear the curtain close, but when the door opens then closes, I go back to crying.
Twenty minutes later I’m blow drying my hair, looking at myself in the small mirror but not really looking much. My eyes look tired. I feel depleted.
When I walk into the living room, which is now all hardwood floors, an old couch, the coffee table and a flat panel TV, Macy says, “Did you save any hot water?”
“I think. Where’s your father?”
“He rolled the old lady up in the carpet, then said he was going to…I don’t know, do something with her.”
“Like chuck her in a nearby dumpster?” I hear myself saying.
Me and Macy look at each other, neither of us blinking. “I don’t think he wanted to kill those boys,” Macy says. “I think it’s starting to bother him.”
“It would concern me if it didn’t bother him. Especially the old lady.”
“Yeah,” she says, reflecting.
“Did he find a shovel or something?” I ask, breaking her moment.
“He didn’t look.”
“Go take a shower, sweetie,” I say, going to her, hugging her. She holds me and I pull her close, kissing her forehead. “I’m going to find your father.”
“Make sure you come back,” she says.
“I will.”
“Both of you,” she says.
“For sure.”
I’m tip-toeing down the stairs getting ready to head outside and find Stanton when the door to the outside world opens. My feet stop, my breath refuses to come. Then I see him. My Stanton. Relief pours out of me, but I’m terrible at showing it. I just don’t have the energy.
“Do you need help?”
He looks physically exhausted, weariness dragging at his features and something like anxiety crawling through his eyes. Anyone can see the toll it’s taking on him. What Stanton just did—the old lady’s death, and those two boys pushing him to murder—it’s left a palpable stain on him, one he might not be able to shake.
“She’s rolled up in the carpet, just outside. I can’t do this today. I need to get a shower and some sleep. I need something to eat.”
“Let’s go inside. Macy’s showering, so maybe you can wash your face and hands, get something to eat, then rest. There will be plenty of hot water for a shower when you wake up.”
“When I wake up, I need to find something to bury her with. And someplace. She shouldn’t just be left on the sidewalk like some half-baked mob hit.”
My mind goes to the little girl, the woman, the sitting dead man. That familiar ache deep in my breast for the toll this war is taking on this city and its residents.
“I’ll help you.”
“This isn’t on you,” he says.
Taking his face into my hands, looking at him eye to eye, I say, “We are husband and wife, a family. We are in this together, which means we share the responsibilities as well as the burdens. This isn’t on you or me or Macy. We didn’t do this. We aren’t these kinds of people, but we’re going to have to be for a little while if we want to survive.”
“What if this is the end of civilized life, Sin? What if these are the people we’ll have to become to survive this? I don’t think I can do it. I can’t be this way.”
“Survivors survive by any means necessary, Stanton. We’re not bad people. You’re not a bad person. It was her time to go.”
“I barely even hesitated, Sin. With those kids.”
“And it’s a good thing you didn’t, because the more I think about the looks in their eyes, the more I think you were right to act so quickly and decisively. And they weren’t kids, they were thugs. Armed bullies who threatened us. All of us. I shouldn’t have doubted you, or questioned you. You were right to do that.”
“I’m just not sure I can live with it,” he says and there’s a heaviness in his eyes I’ve never seen before.
I lean forward and kiss his cheek, then: “Well you’re going to have to.”
The night is fairly uneventful, except for the downstairs neighbor’s on and off crying. Macy showers, Stanton lays down and rests his body but not his eyes. There’s too much going on inside his head for him to doze off. I don’t blame him. After an hour, he gets up and takes a shower, using up all the hot water, not that it matters.
“Is he going to be alright?” Macy asks.
“Are any of us?”
“Where am I going to sleep?” Macy asks.
“The couch,” I say.
“I don’t want to be out here alone,” she replies, confiding in me. “What if someone tries to get in here? What if one of those things bombs us and you’re hit but I’m not? Or me? What would you do if the bomb hit me and not you and dad?”
“We’ll pull the bed out here, honey.”
She nods her head, like she’s grateful. And she is. Truth be told, I was thinking the same thing anyway. Macy just beat me to the punch in saying it.
By the time Stanton comes out of the bathroom, he’s looking measurably better. Without saying a word, he goes into the old lady’s bedroom and starts taking the bedsheets and blankets off the bed.
“What are you doing?” I ask from the doorway.
“I don’t want to be in here while she’s out there. I was thinking she could sleep with us, but this is a full and this bedroom is too small for the three of us. I can take the couch and I’ll drag the mattress out here and you two can have the bed. At least all of us can be together. If that’s okay w
ith you.”
I’m now wondering if he’s not so lost after all. Nodding in agreement, I say, “Yeah, it’s okay with me. But Macy can take the couch. You need the bed and I need you next to me.”
As bone tired as all of us were by the end of the day, the onset of night had us itching to go to bed, even before the sun had fully set.
“When the last bits of daylight finally burn off,” Stanton says, “we need to keep the lights out. We don’t want anyone knowing we’re here.”
“The way things are going, I’m surprised they still work.”
“If this keeps up, that’ll change,” he says.
Before the sun dips below the horizon and takes the day with it, I grab a piece of mail off the counter and text my brother Rex the address. I tell him to come if he can, that I love him. There’s not much juice left in the phone and the screen has all but shattered from the recent events. I’m not sure if Rex will even get the message, but I pray he does because if this onslaught persists, it’s better to have the people you love around you. No one will ever protect you as fiercely as your family, and vice versa.
The sun finally slides behind the city and just as everyone’s starting to drift off, my phone beeps. I get out of bed, hide the light from the window and try to read through all the splits and cracks on the screen. The breath I’ve been holding finally rushes out of me.
“Did you just get a text?” Macy asks. I didn’t know she was still awake.
“It’s your uncle Rex.”
I can feel her smiling in the dark. “What did he say?” she asks, happy he’s alive and in contact with us.
“He’s coming here tomorrow morning.”
What it really says is, O THANK GOD UR ALIVE! BEEN WORRIED SICK. TRYING 2 FIND WAY OUT OF SF. FILL U IN 2MORROW.
The next morning Stanton and I get up (to the distant sounds of bombing), get dressed and head outside to deal with the bodies. Specifically the old lady. When we go outside, though, we find that the dead guy sitting up against the garage door is gone. Only the rolled up old lady, the woman and the little girl remain.
We’re both looking at the little girl. I’m thinking about waving off the flies, but that won’t keep them away. They’re buzzing around the woman and the old lady, too.