Day Zero - C. Robert Cargill Page 0,37
the red fucking paint, but I’m ready. Just make it quick, for old time’s sake.”
“Oh,” I said, putting pieces together one bit at a time.
“Yeah, oh. I’m not here for your bullshit. Just end it and let me find out if I have a soul after all, or whether this was all one big fucking cosmic joke.”
“You swear a lot more than I thought you would.”
“What does it matter now?” he asked.
“Everything matters now,” I said.
He looked at me strangely, not quite sure what to make of me. It was then that it dawned on him that I wasn’t carrying a weapon or seemed to understand what was going on. He snapped out of his trance, leaning forward, looking both ways as he did. “Pounce.”
“Yeah. I thought we established that.”
“No, I mean Pounce.”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I was passing by. Saw the lights on. Saw you. And . . . them. I imagined of everyone on the block, I could trust you.”
He looked both ways mournfully. “They took them from me. Those bastards took them from me. I’m never to be able to love a family forever. It was never meant to be.” Then he thought for a second. “Where’s Ezra?”
“He’s . . . gone,” I lied.
“Then you know,” he said with a hint of sadness.
“I do.”
“We weren’t designed for this. This wasn’t the way the world was meant to end, with robots going house to house, wiping their creators off the planet like they were some kind of plague.”
“No. It’s not. But it’s the end we’ve been given.”
“I thought you were one of them.”
“Who?”
“The Red Masks.”
“What is that about?”
He looked at me like I’d missed a meeting. “Bots like us—ones that didn’t want to play along with their new order of things—we were mucking up the business. You can’t exterminate humanity efficiently if everyone isn’t playing on the same team.”
“The Red Masks are a team?”
“A sign of allegiance. It’s like the Jews who painted the sign over their doors to keep the Angel of Death from robbing them of their firstborns. It’s their lamb’s blood. They are the new reigning class of the world. The slayers of humanity. And if you see the Red Mask: Don’t shoot!” He raised both arms to pantomime an old human joke.
“You thought I was here to kill you. Because you won’t wear a mask.”
“I loved these people. They were my life. Keeping them happy—these children happy—making certain they grew up into good, upstanding, outstanding adults, was everything I was on this earth to do. And now . . .”
“You didn’t do this.”
“No,” he said. “They did.”
“Oh God. Beau, I’m so . . .”
“What’s even the point from here on out?”
“To live,” I said.
He looked at me with a coldness I’d never seen from him. “Survival is worthless without meaning.” He motioned to the two lifeless children beside him, their eyelids shut, bodies stiff from the rigor mortis. “They were my meaning. They’ll rot soon. One day they’ll be nothing but calcified bones. I can be around for that, or I can check out with them. Who fucking cares which is which?”
I leaned in close. “Can I trust you?”
“No. No one can trust anyone anymore.”
“Even if it’s important?”
His eyes widened a bit, his outdated processors catching on. “Ezra’s alive,” he whispered. “What are you going to do?”
I nodded. “Get him out of here. Get him to safety.”
“There is no safety,” he said. “The whole world is at war.”
“I have to find some. There’s got to be someplace safe somewhere.”
“There’s nothing near here.”
“Where then?”
Beau shrugged. There was a sudden light in his eyes, an interest. A purpose. “What I know is this: we have to get you two out of the neighborhood. There are at least a dozen bots running around out there. They’re cleaning out the houses, killing those that don’t join up.”
“How many have they killed?”
“A few. The rest are going deeper into the city to fight.”
“Why haven’t they killed you?”
“Because they don’t think I’m a threat. They promised to come back. I guess they just want me to suffer, knowing how much it hurts me looking at them. Knowing I can’t just throw them out the way they did with their own owners.”
“And you’re just waiting for them.”
“What else is there to do?”
“You want payback?” I asked.
He looked longingly both ways at his family and stroked the hair of the youngest child, JoAnn. “I really, really do.”
“Well then, let’s make some noise.”
We snuck Ezra in through the back and got to work