Day Zero - C. Robert Cargill Page 0,34

temperature and nature took its toll on their corpses. Soon, they would be bloated, rotting messes where once two beautiful, wonderful people lay.

He needed to remember them as they were and say his goodbyes, or else not doing so was likely to haunt him forever. And he couldn’t see them tangled as they were, bodies broken and bloodied on the floor.

This. This right here was the hardest part of being a nanny. Having to choose one childhood trauma for your ward over inflicting a long-term adult one. The Band-Aid was almost always easier. And that’s what this was.

I picked each of the Reinharts up off the ground, cleaned the blood and dried spittle from their faces, and set their cold corpses on the couch together. When I was done, they looked exactly as they had a dozen times before when Ezra would wake up to find them passed out together on the couch. They were stone cold, pale, and there wasn’t an ounce of their vibrance left in them, but they looked natural enough. They looked dead, but not so dead as to scar a child.

It would have to do.

I went back to the room to retrieve Ezra. He sat cross-legged on the floor, eyes on the ground, silently waiting for what he knew was coming.

“Are you ready?” I asked.

He nodded without looking up.

I offered him my hand and helped him to his feet. Then I slung the two large bags over my shoulder as we solemnly made our way back out into the living room. Ezra stopped at the edge of the wall before he could see the couch. He knew they were there. For a moment, he just seemed to be wishing everything were normal, if only a little bit longer. Like he’d find them watching TV or finishing off the last of a bottle of wine.

Then he stepped out and looked at them.

Stiff. Unmoving. The light of their eyes snuffed out.

For a moment, he just stared, marveling quietly at how little death seemed to be different from life. If he squinted, they looked drunk and happy, cuddled together in the blissful slumber of a night happily spent. But Ezra didn’t squint; he didn’t seem lost in his imagination. He took in the uncomfortable reality of it, then took my hand, looked me square in the eye, and said, “I’m ready to go now.”

I nodded, and we did.

We walked out that door, knowing we’d never return.

I don’t know what I was expecting to find outside. I’d imagined a whole host of horrors and dangers, each followed by a plan of how best to handle them. What I wasn’t expecting was the unrelenting silence of a neighborhood devoid of life.

It was as dead as the Reinharts. It still looked alive, but it was too quiet and still to actually be.

I looked both ways out the front door. Night had fallen and the city lights lit up the tree-lined street. It was peaceful, tranquil. All the reasons you move to a community like this. Nothing felt like there was a war going on—it felt as if someone could jog by with a golden retriever at any moment, giving a hi, neighbor wave, before trotting on down toward the park for some off-leash Frisbee play.

It didn’t feel off that the neighborhood was quiet, just that it was quiet today. The lights were off in so many of the houses, and as we approached the street, Ezra’s grip on my hand tightened. There was no traffic from either direction. Usually, the half hour after sunset was a flurry of cars arriving home, but not tonight. Probably never again.

I wondered for a moment if we were the last two people in the neighborhood before catching myself and realizing that this distinction actually belonged to Ezra alone.

“Is everyone gone?” he asked.

“I think so.”

“So what now?”

“Now I think we go to your grandmother’s.”

“Why Grandma’s?”

“She’s your family.”

“What if she’s gone too?”

“Well, I imagine we’ll try to find a bunch of other people who are all staying safe together.”

“Okay. Are we going to walk all the way to Grandma’s?”

“We might have to.”

“Why not take the car?” he asked pointedly.

“The car has a navigation system. A system that hooks up to a massive supercomputer. If those computers are tracking those cars—”

“The bad robots can find us?”

“Exactomundo, buddy. Here.” I handed him his AR glasses.

“We shouldn’t be playing at a time like this.” He sounded just like his mother for a second. It was uncanny.

“No. We have to be