Day Zero - C. Robert Cargill Page 0,51

is,” she said.

There was nothing about her that seemed to suggest she was lying. We needed the help. And I could most likely kill her before she could do any real damage. She was worth the risk. “All right,” I said. “Let’s go downstairs.”

We climbed down the ladder into the hallway and made our way toward the panic room.

Inside, the whole family waited. Quentin gripped his shotgun tightly. Lizzy Beth’s eyes brightened, and a cautious thousand-watt smile tried to restrain itself behind a cool facade but failed. Eddie brightened but was a little fearful. Bernice glowered. She did not approve. But the Styleses weren’t in charge anymore. I was.

“Hi, everyone,” Maggie said cautiously. She kept her distance, as afraid of her family as some of them now were of her. There was a moment of awkward silence.

Then Fenton lunged at her.

Throwing his arms around her.

Sobbing.

Maggie hugged him back, stroking his thick mop of hair as his tears ran slick over her white plastic.

“So you’re like Pounce?” asked Eddie.

“I’m not sure anyone is like Pounce,” said Maggie.

“But are you good like him?”

“I’m the same Maggie I always was. I’m just here because I want to be rather than because you bought me.”

Eddie and Lizzy Beth rushed her and hugged her as well.

I watched the whole affair smiling, looking happy, but ready to grab my rifle at a second’s notice. I assumed that, regardless of Maggie’s true motives, she knew now that she had to be on her best behavior if she wanted to survive. So I could let her off the leash a bit, as long as she knew full well that there was a leash. I promised Quentin I would help get his family out alive. But Ezra came first, and I couldn’t risk anything that might put him in harm’s way.

At the same time, I needed bodies. Robot bodies, to be specific. Fellow travelers who could zoom in on things at range, adjust the volume of their hearing, and be alert to any and all threats.

So I was just going to have to trust her.

“All right,” I said. “Everyone, grab your kits and anything you’ll miss that you can carry. Odds are good that you’ll never be back this way.”

“Never?” asked Eddie.

Quentin put a hand on his shoulder. “Probably not, Eddie.”

“It’s not our world anymore,” said Fenton.

That’s not what I would have said in the moment, but he wasn’t wrong.

We loaded the family into the car and Maggie and I took our places—me with my plasma rifle, her with a shotgun—in the basket on the back. Opened the garage door through the Wi-Fi and turned on the car.

And with that, we rolled out into the night.

Chapter 10100

The Dark, Bleak Suburbs at the End of the World

The farther out into the suburbs we got, the wilder and more war-torn they became. It was quite clear that our neighborhood had been spared the worst of it; from our vantage point, this war had been nothing but a quiet, polite bit of light genocide. A mere mile or so away, however, we were starting to see the ravages of real, brutal, bloodthirsty conflict.

Houses were burning and many that weren’t were already reduced to smoldering frames, metal boxes of cheap panic rooms within them still erect, probably containing the cooked remains of families who thought they were safe, before locking themselves into what would become inescapable ovens. Bodies lined the streets in much the same way as they had on our own. The wrecks of smashed and smoking robots slumped beneath trees or along the sidewalks where they had expired, while others were piled high and deep in corpse piles like spare parts left over at a factory.

It was clear that, in this part of town, the robots had not been so swiftly successful as they had been in ours.

The now familiar red skull was painted everywhere, a sign that we were still deep in what the Red Masks considered to be occupied territory. On garage doors, on lampposts, across the trunk of a rather large oak tree. We didn’t travel so much as a block without seeing it.

What we didn’t see was life.

No people. No robots.

Everyone who still breathed or ticked stuck to the shadows of the early morning, avoiding contact entirely. If anyone was around, they certainly didn’t want us to know it.

It seemed as if we might make it out to the Hill Country without incident. We wound silently through the shattered section of the suburbs, the only sounds that