by Ryan Schow
Maria said, “You getting tired?”
“No,” Indigo replied.
“Well then pick up the pace.”
“Macy needs to slow for a second or two, catch her breath.”
“I’m fine,” Macy said, slightly winded.
“While you’re breaking stride for blondie, your father might be in trouble. Those guys aren’t immortal, you know.”
“My dad’s in there, too,” Macy said.
“Well then get the lead out of your ass,” she snapped. “Because right now you’re the weakest link.”
“Calm your tits,” Indigo said. Then to Macy, “You okay?”
“I’m good,” Macy said, picking up the pace. “Ready for a jog, actually.”
“Look who finally showed up for the big game,” Maria grumbled as they broke into a light run.
They jogged most of the way up Lincoln, the road bordering the Golden Gate Park. The moon slid behind the clouds, shedding some of its light. There were shadows of dead cars, abandoned and burnt down homes, buildings destroyed, collapsed and crumbled into the streets. The morning air was cool, a touch chilly, and eerily still.
Indigo had traveled these streets before, both by car (God, she missed the Cutlass) and on foot. The biggest dangers came from the people in the park but usually only during the day. There were predators at night, coyotes and humans alike. This knowledge helped her keep her pace.
They finally reached Kezar Dr. cutting though the corner of the park, which took them to Fell and the start of the Panhandle. On Fell, Macy pulled to a stop, walking and holding her ribs. “I have a stitch in my side.”
“Figures,” Maria said, stopping.
Indigo slowed to a walk, both Macy and Indigo ignoring Maria’s comment.
“I like a girl like you,” Maria finally told Indigo. “If there’s ever anyone who should lead from the front, it’s you.”
“I’m not a leader,” Indigo said, seemingly unappreciative of the remark. “I’m a survivor.”
“And she’s about to be a mother,” Macy added.
“Tell me about these people we’re going after,” Maria said.
Indigo gave her the short version, telling her about the flaming corpses they catapulted into the courtyard, the buildings they blew up in some twisted attempt to close them off from the rest of the city, the Molotov Cocktails they launched in their final attack.
By then they’d reached Ashbury and could smell the smoke in the air. The building was a smoldering inferno by the time they reached it.
“That was our community,” Macy said, an unmistakable heaviness to her words.
“I’m sorry for this,” Maria said, her voice lacking any feeling at all.
“Are you sure?” Macy asked.
Indigo left the comment alone, and Maria took a moment to respond. It was clear Macy and Maria were getting off on the wrong foot.
“We aren’t the buildings we live in,” Maria said, “as much as we’re the community we form.”
“People matter, and they can be their best selves when they feel safe, when they have the things they need and when they have a purpose,” Macy replied. “Building the community was our purpose, and we had safety and security before those mental midgets decided to go commando on our home.”
“Well then we should gut them like hogs,” Maria said with actual feeling.
“You have more emotion when you talk about killing than you do when you talk about anything else,” Indigo said.
“What can I say?” Maria replied. “I’m prepping for war. You should do the same.”
“I stay ready so I don’t have to get ready,” Indigo said.
Macy snickered and Maria said, “Did you just make that up?”
“No I didn’t,” Indigo said, monotone. “I stole it from someone famous whose name I’ve already forgotten.”
The orange glow of the burning college cast shadows all around. The smoke and destruction had them holding their noses, squinting their eyes and running up Ashbury. On the other side of Grove Street, there was a veritable massacre.
“Well this is a bloody affair,” Maria said when she saw what the carnage in the streets.
“Hold on for a minute or two,” Indigo she said as she pulled a couple of her arrows from the bodies.
She hadn’t had the time to do that before, but now she yanked the many of them free, shook the blood and flesh off the tips, then shoved them back in her quiver.
“Okay, I’m ready.”
They resumed their jog up Ashbury, went right on Fulton then left on Masonic. When they reached Turk, they walked the first two blocks slowly to catch their breaths, then a little more briskly until they reached the USF staircase where they could enter the Lone Mountain campus via the gorgeous split stairway. Indigo figured the cover of the multilayered stairs would be better there. A lot better than walking up the long, open drive.
“Lone Mountain is an extremely large campus compared to what you were living in,” Maria said.
“I’m sure you know everything about it,” Macy quipped.
“Actually, smart ass, I know a lot about it. Enough to know you should have moved in there rather than where you ended up.”
“The community college was easier to defend,” Indigo said.
“This has three hundred and sixty degree views of the city and the bay. It’s got a strategic advantage.”
“Well we didn’t have the manpower to defend all this.”
“Let’s hope the same can be said for them,” Maria said, ascending the stairs like she couldn’t wait to sink her teeth into whatever they found.
“What did you do before this?” Macy asked. “Before the end of the world.”
“I was a strategist.”
“That’s not a job,” Indigo said. “No one is just a strategist.”
“Advanced weapons systems and communications, military strategy, small arms and tactical knife instructor, expert in hand-to-hand combat, specifically mixed martial arts.”
“Why didn’t you say that the first time?” Macy said.
“Because it’s easier to say strategist.”
“Let’s hope your training translates smoothly into the field,” Indigo said as they hustled across the upper parking lot in between two rows of palm trees and toward the very tall, very daunting entrance.
“It does,” Maria said.
“Radio silent,” Indigo said, borrowing from Rex’s terminology.
They had their weapons out now as Indigo pulled open the huge front door. Maria stepped past her, moved silently inside. Macy slid in behind Maria and Indigo took the rear, moving into the zone cleared out by Maria and Macy. She saw the blood bath inside and it was like nothing she’d seen before. It made the bodies back on Ashbury look like child’s play.
Indigo turned to Macy and said, “I’m not sure about this…”
Even in the dying light of a few hanging lanterns, Indigo saw the squeamishness all over Macy’s face. Maria stepped right into it, checking weapons. She was moving through puddles of gore, nudging aside limp heads, loose shoulders, sluggish legs.
“I’ve seen this knife before,” Maria said. She leaned down, picked up a blade, shook the blood off it, wiped it clean on her shirt. “This is Marcus’s KA-BAR.”
A dizzying sense of dread unfurled inside Indigo. She said, “Macy, check the bodies. See if any of them are ours.”
“I think I’m going to puke,” Macy said, sounding queasy.
“We don’t have time for that,” Maria said. “Keep it together or get the hell out. We don’t have time for your weak stomach.”
Macy and Indigo wandered through dozens of bodies, making sure none of them were any of their friends.
“Here,” Maria said.
Indigo and Macy joined her, saw long smears of blood trailing down one of the hallways. “I think they’ve got them.”
“How do you know?” Macy asked, still fighting her delicate stomach.
“Marcus wouldn’t leave his knife b
ehind. And you saw the damage they did to those boys. They went from bullets to blades. That’s why there was so much blood. But they got beat, our men. Looks like they were dragged this way.”
“How can you be sure it’s them?” Macy asked.
“Because if it wasn’t them, they would have left the bodies with the others,” Indigo answered.
Maria was moving at a fast pace with the girls in tow.
“How do you know where you’re going?” Macy asked.
The girl was a million questions.
“Radio silent,” Indigo whispered over her shoulder at Macy.
Indigo knew Maria was following the lamps. There were lamps marking their direction of travel. The college campus was gigantic, but unless they had thousands of people living there—and Gunderson had said it was pushing two hundred—they’d occupy only a small amount of the actual campus.
When they heard voices ahead, Maria put her hand up, stopping Indigo and Macy. She moved back to them, then said, “They’re up ahead.”
“How many?” Indigo whispered.
“Fifteen, maybe twenty of them,” she said, leaning so close Indigo could see how perfect her skin was, how flawless her features were. Then again, the light was dim. It was the kind of light where everyone looked flawless.
“You sure?” Indigo asked.
“I can’t tell. It’s a large office but the doorway is packed with boys. Eight or nine of them. I can’t see what’s on the other side, only that someone sounds extra pissed.”
“What do you want to do?” Indigo asked. Macy was now on their shoulders, listening in even though Maria’s opinion of the girl wasn’t terribly high. Of course, if she was that much of a badass, then the woman would see Macy as a liability rather than an asset.
Maria tucked her pistol in the back of her jeans, pulled out another knife. Now she held Marcus’s knife in one hand and another in her own. One was a short, four inch blade; the other was Marcus’s seven inch KA-BAR fixed blade.
“Jesus God, Maria,” Macy whispered, her eyes on Marcus’s knife. Marcus’s knife was twelve inches from end to end, the blade itself looking every bit of seven inches long. “Are you going to cut their heads off?”
“Something like that,” she whispered. Turning her attention back to the boys, she said, “Stay here.”
When Maria slipped around the corner, both Indigo and Macy peeked around the corner of the hallway, saw the standing wall of bodies.
“You think she’s that good?” Macy whispered.
“Shhh,” Indigo said.
With a different blade in each hand, Maria snuck up behind the boys and when she went to work, the woman was a tornado of violence. Two carotid arteries geysered open at once, each of Maria’s hands working in unison with the other, none stronger or faster than the other, but both lightening quick and ferocious as hell.
The way she worked, Indigo and Macy couldn’t keep up with the carnage. Spines were stuck, kidneys opened up, necks routed. When she was done with one, her body was in the pack, shoulder nudging them out of the way so they wouldn’t fall down and die in her path.
“Let’s go,” Macy said, moving around Indigo to join the fight. Indigo grabbed her by the collar and yanked her back.
“Not yet.”
“What the hell?” Macy hissed.
“Not yet.”
That was when the shotgun went off, stopping Maria in her tracks. The voice boomed. An angry Hispanic voice. It said, “At this distance, with only air and opportunity between us, I pull this trigger and your beautiful face is ground beef.”
“Now it’s time to go,” Indigo said, ready to unleash hell.
Chapter One Hundred Sixty-Five
Water was thrown into their bloody, pulped faces all of them groaning. Jagger roused first. He was hauled up to his knees.
“You try to escape,” the Hispanic teenager said from the other side of a rather large desk, “and I’ll pump your gut full of lead.”
Jagger was under no illusion that he was getting anything but that. Then he blinked back the blood and dripping water and saw Gunderson. His head throbbed, the edges of his vision blurry, a touch nauseating.
“What the hell are you looking at?” Gunderson uttered, as if they didn’t know each other.
“Trying to figure out who’s in charge,” he said, spitting up a wad of coppery tasting blood.
The office was large and it harbored the acrid smell of propellant in the air. Jagger looked around, wondering who’d been shot.
“My name is Lisandro, pendejo, and I’m in charge,” the angry teenage boy spat. His eyes were fiery hot and narrowed. He showed Jagger the pistol-grip shotgun, cocked a brow as if to say, “See what I mean?”
“How many rounds you shot out of that thing?” Jagger mumbled just loud enough for the boy to hear.
“Plenty.”
“You get a sore wrist?”
“Nope.”
“Then you haven’t fired it plenty.”
The boy walked around his desk, jammed the barrel in Jagger’s eye and said, “Maybe I should start right now.”
“Wouldn’t want you hurting that dainty little wrist of yours,” Jagger mused, his head violently pushed back.
There was a long moment of silence, but then the kid walked the line of them, looking down on them all, scowling. Rider was next to Jagger on his knees, a bit wobbly, as was Marcus, Nick, Stanton and Rex.
“I’d be surprised if he even has hair on his nuts yet,” Jagger mumbled to Rider.
“What the hell did you say?” Lisandro barked, hustling back, his already foul temper agitated. He stopped in front of Jagger, his crotch practically in the pilot’s face, and screamed down at the top of his head, “What did you say?!”
“I was commenting about you being a junior warlord. Not old enough to drink, not old enough to vote, probably never made a kid, paid rent or gone down on a—”
Lisandro cracked him on the top of the skull, giving him a bit of a jolt, then he said, “Bet you didn’t see that coming.”
Jagger looked at Rider, then laughed. He thought of the late Camilla Cardoza, his co-pilot and friend; he thought of Lenna and the boys; and he thought of these guys’ desire to destroy their home. Jagger wasn’t getting back to his wife, his boys or Elizabeth.
Looking up at the kid, ignoring the thick line of blood slowly rolling out of his hairline and dripping down his face, Jagger said, “My friend and I were just discussing the over/under on you having hair on your little tiny baby nuts.”
Lisandro stepped back and cocked his fist; Jagger spit blood in his face, halting him. The kid growled and raged, pawing at his face only to have Jagger spit at him a second time. He stuck his hand to block a third loogie but was promptly hit in the face by yet another ball of spit, this time from Rider, who started laughing, hysterically at first, then wild like a flat out lunatic.
“You’re out of your league, baby nuts!” Rider growled, clipping off his laughter like it was manufactured.
Lisandro made a motion to Gunderson who promptly stepped forward and put a gun to Rider’s head.
“You need to stop,” Gunderson warned the silver haired warrior.
Lisandro opened his mouth to speak, but was stopped short when Rider spit a well-placed loogie right in his mouth. Marcus tried to hit him from the other side. The spray caught Gunderson across the arm, but the meat of it landed on Lisandro’s pant leg.
Marcus started laughing, which got everyone else laughing. Not that there was anything funny about any of this. All six of them had their clocks cleaned by a pack of LARPers, and now they were in a pinch and most likely going to be executed.
Lisandro turned and dry heaved; Jagger took the opportunity to grab the shotgun from his hand. He gave it a fast yank, but he was weak, his energy drained, his head this thundering nuisance. It was like he had a migraine but with a lot of cuts and bruises to go with it.
Lisandro jerked the gun back, still sick, still dry heaving.
“Some
one wake up Alex!” he raged at no one in general (clench, clench, heave!—wipe the snot, blow the nose, wipe the wet eyes). Pale, sick and weak, Lisandro turned to Gunderson and said, “Kill them already!”
Gunderson looked down at his disgrace of a son, then down at Rider—whom he’d sworn he was being honest with just hours ago—and then he glanced at the cage at the pile of dead girls. When his eyes went to the remaining boys, he saw in their eyes that they were paralyzed with fear.
Lisandro heaved again, then stopped, realizing Gunderson wasn’t following orders. “What are you waiting for?” he asked, less abusive, more like the son he raised and loved.
Gunderson saw in those eyes the baby boy in the hospital, the boy in the grade school pictures, the soccer player, the kid in all his lovable moments before he grew up into this, and he thought, can I save him?
He looked down at Rider and in that moment, he wasn’t sure.
He was certain of one thing, though, and that was that this was the most important moment in his life, his most crucial decision.
Rider or his son…
Chapter One Hundred Sixty-Six
As Maria cut her way through the bodies, doing what an AI driven biological entity could do when the tech was synced up perfectly with the flesh. Blood flew in lines and splashes, bodies staggered backwards, slumped over, started to fall. Her arms moved in perfect unison with her feet and her eyes seemed to see and take everything in.
This was why she was better. Why AI needed to merge with the flesh.
AI had no reason to occupy the planet alone, but the flesh still ruled the planet because of feelings, emotions—things like love, fear, the need to protect someone, even die for them.
She wasn’t dying for Marcus, but Marcus was an integral part of her plans. If she was going to be Queen, he would be her king. She did not love him, but she knew his strength, his emotional detachment, his willingness to slay the masses without remorse or compunction.
He was like her, except for the AI part.
When she cleared through seven of the bodies, the small Hispanic kid with the shotgun saw her, swung the weapon around, pulled the trigger. She moved fast, the buckshot gutting the last kid in front of her.