by Ryan Schow
“Almost ready,” the Marilyn hologram said.
The women were forced to watch Bruce’s emotional response to the surgery, forced under the threat of swift and lethal reprisal, and so they absolutely paid attention. Not that it would matter. At the rate things were going, Bruce wouldn’t survive. Still, the remaining women watched in distaste as the glass covering was fitted perfectly over the opened portion of the back of Bruce’s head.
The entire process from first cut to a hardline connection took just over forty minutes. When the glass covering was installed, the dark ring around Nasby’s eyes vanished and renewed fear bled into those once defeated spheres.
A heavy coil of wiring snaked across the floor toward Nasby. It moved like a python, but instead of moving on its own the way a snake moves, the coil of wiring had the help of thousands of tiny skittering legs. More machines. Tiny little workers. All beholden to The Silver Queen. The chord was pulled up the front of the man, then affixed to the brand new port in Nasby’s head.
An explosion of life entered Bruce’s face in the form of a surprised, delighted expression. The Marilyn apparition simply stood there, smiling an empty smile, its eyes now as bottomless, as black and as empty as its mouth. It stood there, coldly assessing the situation.
“Can you see?” the demonic Marilyn asked.
“It’s wonderful,” Bruce said, delighted. Two voices seemed to speak through the same mouth at the same time, but not in a perfect harmony.
“And what do you see?” the hologram asked.
His eyes became too wide, too dilated, his expression overly animated. Then one of the eyes began to water and shake, and the look of enchantment vanished from half his face. His teeth started to snap and click together and his nostrils ran with thick red streams. Then the shaking eye popped and the man’s head slumped forward.
The Marilyn specter made a frown, paused to look at the dead man, then turned and laid its black eyes on the remaining women.
With Nasby now dead, one of them was next.
Chapter One Hundred Three
The drones are out in force now. I’m pretty sure I can’t get out to the boat without giving up my life in the process, so I break a window and hide out in a car on the side of the road. It’s a white Nissan Rogue, one so clean it smells new inside. All I can do at this point is wait.
The activity in the skies rages on and I stay low in the back seat, the rear bench seat reclining. An hour later, I push open the side door, lean out and dry heave four or five times. It’s the thought of all this, of losing Bailey, of wondering if I’ll ever get back to the city, wondering how the hell we’re going to survive this. Not just the four of us, but Indigo, too.
This, of course, has me wondering about the future of this world.
When I look up, there’s a young boy standing a few feet away. He can’t be more than six years old.
“What are you doing outside?” I ask him, aghast. “You need to get inside.”
“Are you okay?” he asks, nervous.
“No,” I say, realizing he’s probably looking at my face. All the blood and wet retching eyes. “But you won’t be either if you don’t get inside.”
He just stands there.
“How old are you?” I ask him.
“Seven.”
“Where are your parents?”
“Not home.”
“Did they go out?” He nods as something closer to the highway explodes. Multiple explosions follow, the deep booming sounds resonating in my bones. “How long ago?”
“They went to work,” the kid says, unfazed by the sounds coming from over the hillside of the cream colored condominiums.
“Yesterday or today?” I ask, knowing they wouldn’t be going to work today, not after the assault on the city. The assault that sounds like it’s getting closer and closer to us.
“Yesterday.”
His parents were probably dead already. Or trapped and unable to get home.
“Go wait in your house.”
“It’s locked.”
“You’ve been outside this whole time?” He nods. “Jesus kid, why don’t you get inside the car before you get both of us killed.”
“That’s not my car.”
“Who cares? It’s not mine either.”
He gets in and together we sit and wait out the sudden burst of violence. I debate leaving or staying, but if they’re targeting random cars, we might just be sitting in our own coffin.
“What’s your name?”
“Tyler.”
“Tyler what?”
“Tyler Bateman.”
“I’m Nick Platt,” he says. “Wish I was pleased to meet you.”
“Are we strangers still?”
“Yes.”
“My mom says—”
“Never to talk to strangers, I know. But in times like this,” I all but mumble, thinking about Marcus, Quentin and Bailey, “strangers might be our only salvation.”
As the sun sets and dusk puts on an incredible light show of brilliant pastels, Tyler and I get out of the car and head to Bayside, walking the street I biked up chasing after Bailey. I still can’t believe she’s gone. I shudder to even think of what that degenerate is doing to her right now.
Only think about those things you can control, I tell myself. Everything else is just a waste of time.
But Bailey was not a waste of time.
She is not a waste of time!
As we pass through the smoldering fire that took what looks like half a dozen lives, I cover Tyler’s eyes. He walks close to me, trying to push off my hands, but I try to keep them in place. He finally shoves away from me and stops, seeing the tangle of cars.
He stares at one in particular. A Porsche Cayenne.
“That’s my mom’s car,” he says.
I walk up to it, climb over a twisted Land Rover and stare at the blackened windshield. With my heel, I kick in the glass. It breaks easily and slumped over in the driver’s seat is a woman with blonde hair that’s now matted red.
I reach out with my foot, press it against her head to get a better look at her face. It’s a dried waterfall of blood. I turn away. In the passenger seat, a man is half burnt to a crisp, his seatbelt still on. Suddenly the boy is next to me, looking in.
“That them?” I ask.
He starts to cry and I know it is.
“You want to come with me or stay with them?” I ask. It’s an adult question being asked to a kid, but at this point, I’m not even sure if my own kid is alive.
In the middle of a war, no one really stops to consider the feelings of others. This is no different, I tell myself. The kid’s either going to make it or he isn’t.
“Suit yourself,” I say and navigate my way through the wreck. I head up Bayside by myself, turning to look behind me, to check the skies—which have been relatively quiet—and that’s when I see him. The sun is below the horizon now and night is falling fast. He’s coming though, so I wait for him to catch up. He’s still crying, but he’s got no other choice but to come with me and he knows it.
The night descends into darkness, the temperature dropping fast. A chilly breeze whips off the coastal waters, causing both of us to shiver. He finally asks where we’re going through snapping little teeth and I say, “To a yacht, which is just a really big boat.”
When we get there, the lights are off.
“Marcus?”
“Nick?” he asks from above. He’s got one of the heavy coats on and his gun drawn.
“Yeah. Did Quentin...”
I can’t make myself even say the words.
“He bled out by the time I got back with medical supplies.”
“Where is he?”
“Same place. Back on the island.”
“You just left him there?”
“We can bury him, if you want,” he said, like I was somehow acting like tomorrow would be normal and we could hold a nice service.
“It’s not that.”
“Well then, what is it
? Because I’m gathering Bailey is gone, too.”
“It’s just…somehow this has become a world that’s going to have a lot of dead people just left to rot in the streets, in their cars, in their homes.”
“Yeah? Well welcome to hell. Oh, and if you’re wondering, I’m not going to say ‘I told you so.’ Even though I did.”
The next morning Tyler and I head into town to look for Bailey while Marcus heads back to the island to round up more food and supplies. “Food and supplies for two and a half,” Marcus said with an uncharacteristic smile. He said this while looking down at the brown haired little guy. The look on Marcus’s face was the same look I had. We’re now the boy’s guardians.
“And here I thought you were already dead inside,” I say to Marcus.
It just comes out.
I don’t even mean it like that, it’s just…two of our friends are gone. One murdered, one kidnapped. He doesn’t really respond. Then a kid comes along and suddenly the hard casing around his emotions cracks.
When I said that, the smile vanished and he looked at me. “This is war, Nick,” he said. “If you let yourself feel, it’s like taking off your armor. If there’s one piece of advice I can give you, it’s that you must lose yourself. Act like you’re dead anyway because odds are, we’ll all be dead before this thing is over.”
“I don’t buy that.”
“It’s the lie you tell yourself to save yourself.”
“That’s sad.”
“It’s a condition of combat. Which I’m sure you’ve never really experienced. So from the mouth of a solider who’s weathered the highs and lows of a living battlefield, trust me when I tell you to kill yourself inside before the battle.”
This was his big speech. The last thing he said before leaving.
With a few bottles of water and the shotgun, Tyler and I left the yacht behind and went out in search of Bailey. I didn’t know how I hoped to find her, but here I am, looking anyway.
We’re going door to door, our search grid somewhere between Aloha Drive and Pacific Coast Highway. It seems the most logical approach. Then again, even in the midst of total genius, logic runs the chance of failing. Will it fail me now?
Not to sound too much like a pessimist, but probably.
We left the island on foot, headed up Bayside the way we came yesterday, then navigated around the pileup with all the burnt drivers. Tyler said nothing. Now his face is starting to look red, but maybe it was red from sitting out in the sun yesterday and I’m just beginning to notice it.
“You alright?” I ask.
He nods, his hair hanging in his face.
“I’m sorry about your parents,” I tell him. When he says nothing, I say, “I’m sorry about all of this.”
He still says nothing.
Closer to Aloha, a chop-top, mid-century Cadillac full of four guys cruises past us, all of them looking like surfers with deep tans, long hair and the wild eyes of adrenaline junkies. They’re all Caucasian, but the car has that distinct Cuban flavor, one I’d imagine is extremely popular in today’s beach scene. When I hear the brakes shriek and the car turn around, I realize we should be running right now. I have a shotgun though, and a kid, so maybe they’ll have brains enough to steer clear of me.
Sadly, they don’t.
Pulling up beside me the driver says, “Whatcha doin?”
I look up at him, think of the hell we’ve just survived, the hell that’s still written on my face in the form of cuts, scraped skin and bruising, and I honestly can’t decide if these guys are making me nervous or starting to piss me off.
“Out for a stroll,” I say, keeping my pace. Tyler sidles up next to me, matching my pace as well.
“It’s not safe out here,” the one in the back driver’s side seat says. They all have that sneering look like they’re going to be nice right up to the time they decide they’re not going to be nice.
The driver says, “You heard him tell you it wasn’t safe, but we didn’t hear you say thank you.”
“Drones killed this kid’s parents yesterday,” I say leveling with him, although I’m still not sure if drones did that or if it was just an unfortunate smashup. “And my friend was kidnapped by some fat guy in a panel van who thought beating her over the head with a gun was cute in a forced compliance kind of way. That was just before he shot my other friend twice in the chest. So if you don’t mind, I’d appreciate you guys just be on your way and let us go about our business.”
“That thing got any shells in it?” the driver asks, looking down at the shotgun. I see the front seat passenger give the subtlest of nods to his friend in the back seat who then starts to reach around to the small of his back.
Already dead…
I swing the rifle around, smash the butt of it into the driver’s forehead with all my might. His head snaps back, a hearty gash opening up. Flipping the rifle around, I then aim it at the guy in the backseat who has his own weapon out. But the weapon he has is mace and he’s now spraying a steady stream of it in my face.
Everything happens so fast from there.
The burn that lights my eyes and skin on fire is beyond incapacitating. The beating that follows is nothing compared to the mace in my eyes. I feel feet kicking me, fists punching me, shoes stomping on me. For whatever reason, I can take this. Maybe it’s punishment for losing Bailey. I should be punished. Then I hear the kid screaming and suddenly something submissive in me startles awake.
“Shut him up,” someone growls.
There’s a scuffle, the sound of someone getting popped, then the kid stops screaming and suddenly the sunlight beating down upon me becomes a stillness of gathering shadows.
Frustrated, in pain, I want to roar out all this frenzied emotion because, dammit, this is the worst thing I’ve ever felt! But I don’t. I can’t. Not with all four of them standing over me.
“The world is on its ass, you pretty boy bitch. There’s no more civility. No laws or cops. No judges or juries. The judge is everyone, the jury is a gun, and I now have your gun. Which is to say, it’s judgement time. How do you feel about that?”
“Splendid,” I growl, the pain on my face damn near catastrophic.
Truthfully, I only care about what happened to Tyler. I can’t see him, but I can’t see much of anything since the pepper spray made a fiery inferno of my eyes. The barrel of the gun is suddenly pressed to my temple, pushing me back down, driving my cheek into the dry, gritty pavement.
“The days of the solitary hero are over, bro. Mob mentality is the new rule. Got that?”
“Got it,” I say.
“I should shoot you in the leg as a reminder,” the driver says. “Kneecap you for hitting me the way you did.” The guy speaking, now I know he’s the driver, the one I hit with the gun in the first place.
“I’d rather you shoot me in the face,” I tell him.
“Would you?”
“Times like this?” I say, coughing, my hands like claws against the nearly unbearable stinging in my face. “You’d be doing me a solid.”
“Well you won’t be so lucky. But I will give you a freebie. I won’t shoot you today, but if I see you here tomorrow or the next day, or really ever again, I’ll put two rounds in your dome just because I can. It’s judge and jury, son. Judge and jury.”
I lay back down as the shadows of the four surfers part ways.
Sitting up, my eyes and my skin won’t stop burning. The four idiots are gone, though, and at this point all I want is to make sure Tyler is alive. I’m sure he is. If they won’t kill me, they sure as hell won’t kill a kid.
“Tyler?”
I hear sniffling. A small shadow is now over me. I can’t open my eyes into the sun, but I shade them, try to pry back my stinging lids and see about the child. Bad idea. The sting is still there, worse than ever.
“You okay?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“They hurt you?”
“Yes.”
“You got any bones broken, any cuts, a
nything like that?”
“No.”
“Then you’re not hurt.”
He waits a long time, then: “Okay.”
I lay back down, my face shaking with pain, my teeth clenched to the point of cracking. All of this in the hope that the burn will subside. It doesn’t. Tyler sits down beside me in the road, quiet but vigilant. A few cars go by, none stopping. Families leaving the island, I’m sure. One guy rolls down his window and says to Tyler, “Is he dead?”
“No.”
“Well then get out of the road!” he says before roaring off.
What a genuine freaking sweetheart.
After an hour or so, I get up, manage to get half my wits about me, then start walking toward the highway. The way I figure, if it burns, it’ll burn whether I go back to the yacht or look for Bailey. So we look for Bailey.
We get to Harbor Island Drive and start there. We fall into a routine. Knock on the front door, see if anyone’s home. If not, go around the back, kick in the closest door, search the garage for the panel van.
That works for awhile, but then someone opens the door. A younger woman. A girl just a few years older than Indigo.
She tries to shut the door when she sees me, but I stuff my foot in the doorjamb at the last minute, stopping it from closing. She starts to protest, so I speak quickly before things turn bad.
“My friend was kidnapped by a man with a white van. She’s not much older than you. Her name is Bailey James. This van has no windows on the side and two fresh bullet holes in the back.”
The door doesn’t open back up, but she’s now intrigued.
“Why would this person take your friend?” she asks.
“I don’t know. All I know is he looks like he’s mid-thirties maybe, thinning hair, somewhat overweight. And he’s not afraid to be violent. He killed my other friend. Shot him in the street and left him for dead.”
“Jesus,” she says.
“Like I said, he’s driving a white panel van.”