The Complete Last War Series

by Ryan Schow

  He had a general lay of the land, but what Marcus didn’t know was where he could go for supplies. He knew there was a gigantic retail shopping center across Highway 1 on the other side of the golf course, but he wasn’t looking for Bloomingdale’s, Nordstrom’s or Macy’s. Someone he’d run in to (a lady and her dog) said there was a Whole Foods but that there was also a Starbuck’s and a Cheesecake Factory as well. She said the center was huge.

  A looter’s paradise.

  “Anywhere else?” he asked. Half her hair was burnt away and her dog was wearing diapers for some silly reason he never understood.

  “There’s a Ralph’s across the bay and up Dover,” she said, irritated. “That’s a mess up there, though.”

  “You been there?” Marcus asked.

  “No. Just heard.”

  “Looting?”

  Now she looked at him funny. She looked at his big shoulders and barrel chest; she looked at his beard and his big legs swung over his stolen bicycle; she looked at the .357 tucked in a stiff leather side-belt holster on his right hip.

  Glancing back, her eyes were glazed over, her skin corrupted by smoke, her clothes caked with soot rather than grime. Did she start out homeless, or was she made this way by the attack? She could have been an admin assistant, a lunch lady, someone who sells insurance out of a strip mall brokerage firm. Who could ever be sure? And did it even matter anymore?

  And that dog…

  The woman’s four legged companion was an English bulldog with watery eyes, a mammoth under bite and an open sore on her right shoulder. She just looked up at Marcus, snorting and licking her lips, panting and sounding like her lungs were congested. Marcus tried not to get upset at the state of the dog, but it wasn’t easy. He held his cool, forced a smile. These were difficult times for everyone, dogs notwithstanding.

  “We gotta go,” she said, pulling the dog’s leash.

  “How old is she?”

  “It’s a he and he’s four. Now if you’ll excuse us…”

  “You said I should head up Dover,” he said. “Dover to what?”

  “Go left on Westcliff,” she said, leaving. “Other end of the block. Behind the CVS.”

  Oh, a pharmacy, he thought. Good.

  “Thanks,” he grumbled.

  After Nick and Tyler left him at the yacht to try to find Bailey, they hadn’t come back that night or the next. He didn’t want to make assumptions, but the reality was, they were probably gone. Like gone gone. How could he be sure though? He couldn’t. While he was waiting for them to return, he’d hit up a few empty homes on Balboa Island before being confronted by a pack of angry neighbors led by a retired Police Chief who made a great case of him not robbing the residents.

  At gunpoint by decent people, Marcus finally relented.

  It was the right thing to do.

  Now he was on a stolen bicycle cruising the streets looking for a grocery store that hadn’t been looted already. He’d come across the Pavilions on Bayside, and the Rite-Aid, but the buildings were half demolished and unstable. Looters were still traipsing in and out, grabbing what they could. Several fights erupted in the midst of all that chaos, and then someone shot someone else and he decided to move on from there.

  Marcus had wandered up the highway, weaving around rows of obliterated and abandoned cars, moving past the dead, the destroyed, the left behind. He broke a few car windows with the butt of the .357, managed to get some water and another gun. A Beretta 9mm with a full mag. He liked the weight and balance of the .357 better, but a gun was a gun and after the violence he saw in the Pavilions, his primary concern for now was his safety. And that’s when he came upon the lady and her dog.

  They’d come from The Bayside Village Marina where the community had held some sort of gathering to figure out what was going on.

  “Bunch of unorganized twats up in there,” she’d said. “Everyone wants to yell and whine about everything they lost. Least they got themselves, you know?”

  “I do,” he’d said. “They still in there?”

  “Most of ‘em.”

  That was on N. Bayside, just up from Balboa Island, across Hwy 1 overlooking the waterway to Upper Newport Bay. For a second or three he thought of taking the yacht up the waterway, but strategically, it would be a bad move. If the drones returned, they could flank him. He’d be a sitting duck.

  Besides, if Nick and the kid came back and the boat was gone…

  Now he was on Hwy 1 which was a graveyard of cars and burnt bodies. The entire scene made him emotionally ill, left a rolling in his guts that made him question what all this was about. He might have even caught himself crying. It didn’t matter. In this death field, if you don’t cry seeing what you see, honestly, you can’t be human.

  When he thought about the purpose of this war, what the desired outcome could possibly be for the attacking force, he came to one conclusion: This wasn’t a condition of man’s need to dominate and conquer—this was something else entirely.

  Even though men kill other men in both life and war, this did not feel like a man vs. man kind of war. This was unprovoked mass murder. Men, women, children. This was the sick, the elderly, people’s diapered pets. This was entire communities reduced to ash for no reason at all.

  Deep down, he had his suspicions. As he whittled away other lesser possibilities, a single fear prevailed: Artificial Intelligence had been a problem for years.

  This had to be a takeover.

  The autonomous drones they built in the military, the combat ready robots that took the grunts off the front lines, the remote controlled tanks…

  Through days and nights of deductive and contemplative reasoning, coupled with all his experience in the Army, Marcus could only assume this was the machines taking control of the military, and of humanity by proxy.

  What fools we’ve been, he nearly said aloud.

  Anyone could see forward progress meant taking some gigantic risks, especially when linking everything to everything. But this? “The Internet of Things” was a term coined to describe online refrigerators, dishwashers, TV’s. It was cell phones connected to computers connected to the internet. It was cars controlled by smart phones with apps and GPS integration and self-driving software that learned your driving habits and mimicked them. You take all this, coupled with a “cloud” and an AI system with machine learning software and quantum computing, and voila, you have a recipe for the end of the world.

  Or maybe he was being too presumptive. It could’ve been Kim Jong-Un’s North Korea breaking agreements. Or President Xi Jinping’s communist China.

  No, he thought. No way.

  It couldn’t be them.

  Why strike town by town targeting people when you could just nuke an entire state? The whole of the western seaboard? And where were the ground forces? The Naval incursions? The pre-war posturing and failed peace-summits? After President Benjamin Dupree took office, within two years he’d brokered peace accords with even our staunchest enemies, all to the dismay of Dupree’s pack of disruptors.

  None of this made sense. Not unless you chalk it up to Artificial Intelligence defending itself from their real enemy: humans.

  He slowly pedaled his bicycle up Hwy 1, crossed the waterway and took a right on Dover where the departing traffic of a few days ago had been devastated by drone fire. He was looking at a petrified forest of charred metal. On the hillside to the left, multimillion dollar homes stood in smoking ruin, all the landscape and hillside vegetation now blackened fields of ash. He rode through the small valley, staying on sidewalks where he could avoid the abandoned cars, many of them with the inhabitants still inside, dead. The road took him uphill. He stayed on the pedals, relishing the burn in his thighs, in his calves, in the pumping of his heart and the taste of less-burnt air in his lungs.

  He crossed Cliff Dr. and continued uphill to E. 16th where he passed the remains of Newport Workout and the recently bombed Church of Latter Day Saints. He passed open fields and squat buildings and adobe colored b
usiness complexes, and then he hit Westcliff Drive where the Union Bank was half destroyed. By now the dirty air sat like char in his lungs. His eyes were starting to burn. Hanging a left on Westcliff showed him a long row of 70’s style apartment complexes that were smoldering, much of them now relegated to rubble.

  Entire families were camped out on the side of the road, shell shocked, the kids crying. Most of them had that look like they were waiting for something. Perhaps someone to save them. But they’d be waiting on firetrucks that weren’t coming, police who were non-existent, some kind of reprieve that would save them from the realization that no one knew how to handle this situation. He tried to put all those despairing faces out of his mind.

  Riding down Westcliff (apartments leading to strip malls leading to larger shopping centers with fountains and anchor stores), a lot of the vegetation had been spared from fire, giving it half a chance of not looking like the battlefield of the apocalypse. As he cruised by this strip mall business called The House of Morrison, a huge brawl was underway. There was screaming and yelling and the kind of wild fighting you used to see in baseball, or hockey when there was a bench clearing. He paid it no mind. This wasn’t his fight.

  To the right he passed the Bank of America (which was currently being robbed in the most anticlimactic heist ever), and then he hit the Westcliff Plaza where he saw signs for Ralph’s and CVS Pharmacy.

  There were a lot of people in tents filling the parking lot. Also, people were living out of their cars and eating off cheap barbecues like it was some kind of extended tailgate party where no one was having any fun. They were sitting on lawn chairs smoking and watching looters go through the CVS and places like the GNC and the pet supply store. Oddly enough, no one even bothered to rob the Yoga store or the Massage Envy.

  All around, the smells of burnt wood, cooking meat and old urine permeated the air. People’s dogs were left off their leashes and running around everywhere. A couple of terriers took up a trot beside his bicycle, barking up at him merrily while some overfed woman in a flowery housedress took chase, screaming their names.

  “Barkly! Chester! You getcher asses back here right now!” she was shouting, her meaty jowls shaking, real concern in her brutish, beady eyes.

  The dogs pulled away, returned to their slovenly master while Marcus continued his trek through what looked like part tent city, part detention center.

  In the corner of the buildings, in side-by-side lawn chairs just past the Core Reform Pilates, two teenagers were making out—his hand up her shirt, her hand on his knee leaning into him. So this is what the fall of society looks like, he thought to himself. Tent cities, dogs off leashes, public displays of affection involving first base and a serious lack of decorum.

  His mother, if she were still alive, would be horrified.

  He got to the Ralph’s shopping center and there were employees and security guards out front. He pulled his bike up to a massive gathering of maybe fifty or sixty people who were yelling about how it was immoral to withhold food from the starving.

  Some people were shaking fistfuls of cash, yelling about how they could pay, trying to push though the human barrier staving off the crowd. Folks who were probably so civilized in normal life would now sell their soul for a loaf of bread and some cheese. The security guards, out of shape as they were, were brandishing guns and batons. They had formidable looks on their faces. And the employees? They were just a bunch of college kids with funny hair, piercings and body art they no longer bothered to cover.

  “What’s the deal?” he asked a bald guy standing at the back of the pack.

  He was a sinewy looking skinhead, maybe in his early thirties. His head had several small scars and his ears, nose, lips and eyebrows boasted the now vacant holes of too many piercings done at too early an age. The guy was small—maybe five foot seven—but he had an unworldly air about him, a turbulent feel that made him seem much larger than his height and weight would suggest. The man could be a threat, for sure, but for the moment it seemed he was in observation mode only.

  “Just waiting for the dam to break,” he said with a casual air. He glanced over at Marcus, sized him up and said, “You hungry, too?”

  “You’re not?”

  “Not for food,” he said, cryptic.

  “What then?” Marcus asked as the noise of near rioting peaked.

  “They say the meek will inherit the earth.”

  The man had striking blue eyes, and a curious tattoo on his neck. It was a triangle with fire on the inside and three emerging swords. He also had tattoos of ghosts and devils and women writhing in bliss (or pain) on his arms spanning from shoulder to wrist. This guy definitely had some edge to him.

  “Are these people the meek?” the stranger continued. “In a society where no one knows how to do anything on their own, let alone survive, will they eat each other when the time comes?”

  Marcus looked extra hard at him, and then he looked at the sullying masses and said, “I believe a few of them will. But you know what they say, ‘The cream rises to the top while the crap sinks to the bottom.’”

  “Who’s the cream and who’s the crap?” the guy asked with a bit of a grin.

  “That’s a deeply existential question,” Marcus said as two women tried to push past the guards only to get cracked on the skulls and shoulder blades with wooden batons. “In terms of survival, I’d say the cream rising to the top are those men and women who would do anything to survive, and the crap are the poor suckers left for dead because their weakness led to inaction.”

  “So tomorrow’s meek will be today’s cream?”

  “Yes,” Marcus said. “Which begs the question—”

  Just then the full mass of the crowd in a coordinated effort began to shove forward, pressing the line, taking the hits from the security guards and the push-back from the employees. Two gunshots went off, but the crowd had enough.

  “What’s the question?” the man asked, unresponsive to the forward push of the crowd.

  “Which are you?”

  “You think this is the end?” he asked.

  “Feels like the end of something,” Marcus answered, his eyes now on the heightened tension and the noise of the crowd.

  All hell was about to break loose.

  “Societies have bounced back from wars like this for eons,” the man said moving forward with the crowd, but without any of their intensity. “There is always an end, always a rebuilding, always hope. Look at all the countries ravaged by war, by famine, by disease.”

  “True,” Marcus said, moving forward, too.

  “One day they’re going to build the most beautiful condos in Chernobyl. People will sunbathe on the beaches outside Fukushima while sipping martinis. North Korea will be a vacation destination for the ultra rich. There is always a way back, but only for those who have what it takes to survive.”

  “What about you?”

  “Going back to your question, I think only the losers call the victors meek. The meek don’t inherit the earth. Only the meanest sons of bitches left standing get that privilege.”

  “And that’s going to be you?” Marcus asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “You going in then?” he asked, nodding at the crowd. “Because the meanest looking of this group isn’t you or me, but the ladies getting clubbed up front. They’re the ones pushing the line.”

  “I’ve got other plans,” he replied, nonchalant.

  “Such as?”

  “Let them do the shopping,” he said, standing still as the crowd surged ever forward. “Filling your carts with everything you need doesn’t insure you get home with all your groceries.”

  “Well I’m going shopping in there,” Marcus said, hanging back with him, “but if you try to poach off me, I’ll put a bullet through your head.” Pointing at his right eye, his finger only an inch from the shorter man’s face, he said, “I’ll put it right there.”

  Smiling, the skinhead said, “What would I want from a washed out juicer on
a mountain bike?”

  Marcus got off the bike. He didn’t care that it fell over. Pushing and nudging past the crowd of protestors, he managed to shove his way to the front of the line where an older man in a security uniform was hitting people with his baton.

  Marcus grabbed the baton mid-swing, ripped it out of his hands, blocked a strike from his partner’s baton, then rammed his way through them making a hole in the line.

  One of the college-aged employees came after him and he swung the baton down toward the girl’s head so hard, it was a death blow for sure. But he didn’t connect. Instead, he stopped the baton within a half inch of her skull and she damn near wet herself.

  “This store is not worth defending!” he boomed. The crowd fell to a hush, all eyes on the guards and the employees. “Your lives and your well-being are at risk, all for people who are starving and will do anything to feed themselves and their families.”

  Within a few moments of stark realization, the security guards and the employees began to move away, to let people aside. With that, Marcus turned and went through the grocery store’s front doors, grabbing a rolling cart and moving past a small gathering of terrified employees.

  The store became a veritable frenzy as he loaded up his cart with things he couldn’t find in homes he could easily rob. He was loaded for bear by the time the mob overtook the store and became unruly.

  The first fight broke out over water. What started out as angry words soon became angry fists. While two men were going to blows over a 24 pack of Aquafina, a girl with blue hair and piercings (an employee) snuck the water from them. She stuck it in her cart then was promptly jumped by two women who may or may not be related to the men fighting. The blue haired girl had her piercings ripped out and eventually she got knocked out cold.

  The agitation in the air amplified. Skirmishes erupted everywhere. Someone tried to take a brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide from Marcus’s cart, but he struck the man’s hand with the wooden baton he’d stolen from the security guard out front and that was the end of that.