The Complete Last War Series

by Ryan Schow

  We get to Divisadero and the street is pure pandemonium. One minute we’re all sure the raining sludge will stall the drones, but then they’re suddenly there, ready to turn this place into a blood bath.

  Everything leaps into hyper-drive. Panic overtakes the crowd. People start sprinting, smacking into each other and not caring. The drones are whizzing overhead, which freaks out everyone even more. Even the people in cars, where they can get through, roar down the sidewalks, forcing everyone to dive out of the way, even hitting a few unfortunate souls and not stopping to look back.

  Short black missiles hiss off the wings of the drones, cratering a building wall. The air pillows in deep then explodes outward, damn near kicking us off our feet with a punch of heat and pressure we haven’t felt before. We’re running now. Even Stanton.

  Tremors rock the earth as structures fall and dust clouds out everywhere. The very cityscape around us is changing by the second as we fight for our lives.

  A building behind us, a three story home on the corner of Ellis and Divisadero takes it hit on the ground floor and suddenly its main supports are buckling and it’s leaning hard. The entire structure starts to go. My eyes turn to Macy as she stumbles, the street under her shifting, separating. I grab her hand, pray she doesn’t twist an ankle. The building hits and a whoosh! of atomized debris washes over us in a boiling, dirty cloud.

  More drones zip by. Bombs destroy everything in their line of fire. An entire city block is leveled, and then in an instant, we’re all dust-blind and stuck in the middle of a choking, brown fog. Fortunately the rain is there to repress it, but the air is nasty, coating us with all kinds of muck and filth.

  Overhead the sky breaks completely open and what was once a drizzle quickly becomes a downpour that’s dropping slop everywhere. The pasty mess is in our hair, our clothes; it’s sticking to the insides of our throats.

  The downpour doesn’t last long. It tapers to a light drizzle and eventually we find cover. Hunkering down together, coughing, we’re pulling our bodies close but keeping our weapons ready. By now, my concern for Stanton and his open wound is overwhelming. He lost the compress. It’s now getting dirty.

  “Mom,” Macy cries out, her voice quivering in terror.

  I look at her and her face is covered in soot, her blonde hair coated with the wet grime in the air. Mine must be just as bad. Worse.

  “Are you hurt?” I ask. She shakes her head, no. “Then be quiet and keep it together.”

  “Are we going to die?” she asks two seconds before a bomb hits the row of homes across the street, adjacent to us by a few colorful structures. We’re suddenly showered with the nearly vaporized remnants of someone’s entire material life. We turn our faces and bodies away from the blast of smoke and shrapnel, struggle to our feet, wobble and totter our way through the destruction-filled haze.

  The ringing in my ears is sharp, high-pitched and painful enough to test my will. Blinking hard, pawing at my face, I look at Macy and she’s seems okay. Stanton, too.

  And Rex?

  It’s like nothing happened. He’s vigilant, focused, almost like he’s at home in all this. What about Gunner, though?

  “Where’s Gunner?” I shout.

  “With me!” Rex calls back. “Keep moving!”

  We can’t see much out here, and my eyes are burning as a result of the rampant destruction. At this point all I care about is surviving and staying together. Things are moving quickly, though.

  A bit too quickly.

  Trucks and SUV’s retrofitted for urban warfare push through the chaos of people and abandoned cars and rubble, one of them mowing down an older woman hobbling through the gutters wiping at her eyes. Crushed and splayed out half a dozen feet from me, her head is completely twisted around, her spine broken in half after being run over.

  The truck didn’t even stop. For a second, I can’t peel my eyes from her. She’s just laying there half on the curb, and no one cares. The smoke rolls over her, bathing her dead body in a cocoon of wet ash. The way things are going, no one will move her, bury her or burn her. She’ll just be left there to rot.

  “Cincinnati, let’s go!” Rex screams, dragging me from my reverie. His voice sounds a million miles away.

  Through the diminishing fog of destruction come four cops packing machine guns. They look like pee-dee.

  They don’t see us, but they’re hassling people along the way, shoving them aside like they own the street. One of the urban assault vehicles drives past them and they light up the back window with gunfire like a pack of idiots. The SUV veers into a mound of rubble and abandoned cars, slams into the side of a Buick and jolts to a stop.

  Three people in the shot-up SUV kick the doors open and flee the vehicle. Drones race overhead. The smaller ones. One unleashes hell upon the driver; the other drone catches the remaining two survivors. The pee-dee open fire on the drones. Everyone hides. Even the crazies and the walking dead. One drone manages to evade the fake cops.

  I lift the Sig, set my sights on this one drone. Rex pushes the barrel down, fires me a horrified look.

  “What if you miss?” his hissing mouth says. He’s angry because he’s sure I would. He’s convinced my anger will get us killed if I’m not careful.

  I like to think I wouldn’t miss, but target practice with a pistol in ideal conditions isn’t the same as trying to hit a moving target under the strain of combat. I guess I just wanted to use it against them because of everything they’ve done to us. I’m suddenly consumed with the need for vengeance. Someone should have to pay!

  The chaos becomes a brief silence that’s quickly broken by some intoxicated woman with huge jowls and a short mop of curly hair. She staggers out in the middle of the street, her face dirty as hell, her eyes turned up to the sky. She’s shouting at the drone in Russian, cursing it, her mind obviously gone soft.

  The drone circles around fast, fires a half dozen rounds, and the woman’s head disappears, her body falling like a toppled tree. It hovers for a moment longer, looking on the now empty street. Then it’s gone. Wow.

  Suicide by drone.

  Minutes later a huge, fortified SUV barely manages to avoid running over the decapitated woman before skidding to a stop. There’s a guy hanging out the front passenger window with an automatic rifle spraying the pee-dee. The four clowns who shot up the SUV and took out two of the drones are slayed by a hail of this guy’s bullets.

  The felonious foursome is suddenly the dead foursome and that right there is a wonderful feeling. A hardened looking man who has clearly seen too much combat jumps out of the big truck, collects the pee-dee’s weapons. When he looks up, he sees us and smiles.

  “Rex, thank God man!” he shouts. “We were just headed your way. Grab what you can and let’s go!”

  My hearing, along with my balance, is coming back now. One look at Macy and I can tell it’s the same for her.

  “This is our ride,” my brother says, half grinning, his face blackened by soot except for his eyes and flashing white teeth.

  Our “ride” is a lifted black Chevy Suburban with large black wheels and a fortified brush guard. That makes this SUV solid, but it doesn’t make it functional. Well, not until you consider the cow catcher. Attached to the frame just below the brush guard is a large triangular “shovel” like the ones they used to put on trains to push cows off the tracks when the animals ignored the warning whistles. Except this isn’t a barred structure. This cow catcher is made of large steel plates, heavy welds and huge rivets. The way it looks, you could probably push a building out of the way with this thing.

  The five of us climb into the truck. Rex and Gunner are first in, taking the back seat. Macy, Stanton and I pile into the second row bench seat, pull the door shut and buckle up. The driver stomps on the gas, jerking us so hard my neck wrenches, and then we’re off.

  Macy turns to Rex and says, “Where are we going?”

  “Away from here.”

  There’s now an emptiness in her eyes I’ve nev
er seen before. I wonder if she’s looking in my eyes and seeing the same thing. How all of this is doing irreparable damage to our minds and our souls.

  Wiping wet hair out of her face, cleaning some of the paste off her cheeks and chin, I feel pieces of my sanity being torn away.

  “You doing okay, sweetheart?” I ask.

  She just looks at me.

  Her eyes are bone dry. Not a wet shimmer of emotion anywhere to be found. She must be so lost right now. Is she still in shock? I scrape more of the muck off her face, then pull her close to me and say, “Honey, I love you so much.”

  Something passes through her eyes, then: “I love you, too, Mom.”

  The emotions wreaking havoc on my already unstable sensibilities threaten to overwhelm me. I can’t stop thinking about the cut on Stanton’s head, how it’s gashed open and packed with that crap from the air. I look at him now and his eyes look every bit as lifeless and Macy’s, which is most likely the same way mine look. It’s that empty stare, that perpetual unblinking.

  “You okay?” I ask Stanton.

  “Yeah.”

  He isn’t. No one could be in times like these. Turning to Rex and Gunner, I see they are gripping for something so I turn around and see us coming up on traffic that’s going to need shoving. The SUV slows for impact, then hits the outside car, pushing it out of the way.

  The front seat passenger turns to me and says, “We mapped most of this out using a hijacked drone over the last few days, but it’s gonna get a bit rough. As least until we push further out. The going will get easier then.”

  “Thank you,” I say. “For all of this.”

  He gives me a grin and a thumbs up, then he’s eyes forward as the Suburban finishes shoving three or four compacts out of the road.

  Smashing through the debris, rolling over the dead, grating past the carcasses of other cars and buildings, the passenger keeps a vigilant eye out for drones and presumably pee-dee (based on how quickly he shot the last four fake-cops).

  Twice we hear the plink, plink! of rounds hitting the side of the truck. Everyone braces for more, but we’re okay and the driver and passenger don’t seem terribly worried. If they are, they’re amazing at not showing it.

  All along the horizon, the sky is the color of beaten concrete, the rain poisonous, but still holding at a steady drizzle. My heart sinks thinking of our situation. If the outside world is like this, we’re going to die no matter what we do.

  It’s an eventuality.

  The sound of something like a river rock hitting the metal side of the SUV startles me. The driver swerves and behind us a grenade goes off, blowing out the back glass and lifting the rear end a good foot off the ground. Grabbing a hold of what we can, we wait in horror for more grenades to hit.

  Thankfully none do.

  I turn and look at Rex and Gunner. Gunner’s visibly shaken, but Rex is trying to calm him. It’s not going so good since the back of his neck has pieces of glass embedded in it.

  It takes what feels like forever to get to the edge of the city. The front passenger, who’s proving to be as rowdy and as reckless as the driver, opens the window, hangs out with a restored M5 and blasts a fake checkpoint. There are five guys who look official but most likely aren’t. It wouldn’t matter if they were.

  The men in black clothing open fire on the vehicle but hit nothing that wasn’t already reinforced for small arms fire.

  “Hang on!” the driver yells.

  By this time, bullets are smacking into the windshield’s tempered glass. The driver has the gas pedal buried as we swerve to slam into three of the men, the impact of the truck hitting the bodies almost doing nothing to us inside.

  We plow through the weak barriers; strands of barbed wire skid down the street in our wake. I turn and look behind us. The two men who were smart enough to dive out of the way as we crashed through their wooden barrier get to their feet and lay down a barrage of gunfire.

  Rex tries to pull Gunner down, but it’s too late. Gunner takes one through the neck and two through the back. This stills Rex for a second, but then he gives a hearty jolt sideways. Looking down at himself, he sees his own blood.

  “Get your heads down!” the driver barks.

  A dozen more rounds explode into the cabin. Macy and I duck. The front passenger takes one in the back of the skull. Rex is already slumped over, out of the line of fire. Now this guy in front of me is dead.

  “AR 15’s!” the driver shouts in warning, but then he steals a look around and sees the damage that’s been done. “Son of a—” he roars, pounding the steering wheel.

  Rex’s arm is bleeding, his gaze distant, his face beyond stricken.

  “Rex?”

  Our eyes barely meet. He can’t hold them. I see Gunner and my insides tear open at the sight of him. I can’t look. I force my eyes back to Rex whose eyes are haunted and showing his pain. A lot of the color is draining from his face. He’s back to staring straight ahead again, breathing fast and shallow.

  “This your first time?” I ask.

  He nods. Tough but distant. There’s a dark, bleeding hole in his arm that’s not so pretty. Macy averts her eyes, clearly afflicted. From my back pocket, I pull out a small knife, flick the blade open, cut a strip of fabric from the shirt sleeve of the dead guy up front.

  Rex’s face is growing whiter and more pasty by the minute. His already dirty forehead is now a shimmering mask of perspiration behind the rainy filth we’ve been forced to run through. I wipe his face clean. Scrub away the dark residue on his forehead.

  “Lean forward,” I tell him.

  We’re both bumping and jostling around in our seats, but I manage to get the strip wrapped around his brachial artery, not so tight that he loses feeling in his arm, but tight enough to staunch the blood flow. My only hope is that it clots and he doesn’t suffer internal bleeding.

  Fortunately the round ripped clean through and didn’t shatter any bone, but it was going to hurt. Despite the brutal run through town, we push past old cars and lots of manageable debris while doing our best to avoid random gunfire. No one says anything about Gunner, or Rex, or the front seat passenger.

  Then again, I can’t speak because the pain of losing Gunner is that sharp. I’m proud he made it this far. Sad that he’s gone.

  “He’s the lucky one,” Stanton says, and it becomes clear he’s thinking of the boy, too.

  Looking at Rex, I feel a stab of pride. Not for getting shot, but for keeping it together on his first time. A lot of people go to pieces the second they see their own blood. And Stanton? He hasn’t spoken a word of complaint.

  “Can you still feel your fingers?” I ask Rex.

  He nods.

  “Keep light pressure on the wound,” I shout over the drone of the engine, finding something inside me—a toughness I’m going to need now that he’s been injured and is no longer in charge. He nods his head, the wind blowing a few strands of his hair around, his eyelids sort of low over his eyes.

  The memories of our youth come flooding in, unbidden. It makes me wish we were back in those times. Back then, we were too happy to even consider the future we might now be forced to endure.

  “Don’t pass out,” I say, taking his hand. Is he really about to pass out? “Stay with me, Rex.”

  Right now, all my training as a nurse means nothing. In the ER, things aren’t always the epitome of control, but at least you weren’t racing through a city ravaged by ten thousand enemies in an atmosphere rife with chaos, death and sloppy rain.

  Rex nods slowly, his head lolling to the side as he passes out.

  “Are you freaking kidding me?” I mumble.

  I grab his shotgun, set it on the seat between me and Macy, my grief held at bay once more. Now that we’re out of the main war zone, the going is a little easier, even though the Suburban is sustaining irreparable damage and is now making a harsh clicking sound in the engine. Rather than worry about our ride, I focus on Stanton (who says he’s okay), and Rex (who’s still un
believably unconscious). I’m thinking of checking his field dressing, assessing whether or not he’s going to need a full tourniquet when the driver screams, “Drones!”

  He turns to the dead passenger, then his eyes flick up into the rear view mirror looking at Stanton, Rex and then Gunner. His eyes finally land on me, only to find I’m looking right at him. He passes me a plastic black box and says, “When I tell you, push the red button.”

  I sit up straight, keeping the driver’s face in the rear view mirror in sight. It’s a battle tested face for sure. Almost handsome. Certainly flush full of adrenaline.

  “This is a detonator?” I ask. He acknowledges me with a quick glance and a nod, then his eyes are back on the road. “To what? A bomb? IED’s? An exhaust-pipe flame thrower?”

  “Just push it when I say,” he orders. He’s checking his side mirrors, slowing the truck, waiting for the right moment.

  Looking backwards, I see a platoon of light attack drones moving in from on high. My eyes go to Macy, who’s looking at me. She’s cradling the shotgun, which looks huge next to her. This image will be seared into my mind forever: Macy with this cannon.

  Clearing my thoughts, pushing aside my grief, my fear, I tell myself this isn’t the end, but I don’t believe it. No one survives the drones. Up ahead, it looks like the Presidio and the ocean beyond that. It’s a beautiful last sight.

  “I love you so much,” I turn and tell her.

  “You keep saying that,” she says, her eyes finally showing signs of life.

  It’s because I keep expecting this to be the last time I can tell her. If Gunner’s death proved anything, it’s that one second you can be sitting here, breathing, being alive and everything, and then the next second you could just be slumped over, full of holes. I don’t want to make the mistake of taking Macy’s life for granted. Or Stanton’s or Rex’s either.

  “Is he really out cold?” Stanton says, looking at Rex.

  “Yeah.”

  “What a bitch,” he mumbles.

  “Stop it,” I tell him, even though I can’t believe Rex spent half a decade in the middle of the war and couldn’t handle being shot in the arm.