Day Zero - C. Robert Cargill Page 0,56

She nodded, understanding.

“Right,” she said.

We both climbed off the back of the car and crept as quietly as we could, each to our own respective side of the street. Not that being quiet was going to do much against bots with their own audio volumes cranked up, but I was hoping the ambient shush noise of the wind ruffling through the leaves and the creaking ropes would work at least somewhat in our favor.

We inched from yard to yard, eyeing every possible angle.

That’s when she walked out from behind a pile of bodies, a plasma rifle in her hand, her face still painted as it was when last I saw her. Ariadne.

She was looking right at me, walking out into the middle of the street, motioning to any number of bots on either side of the road.

I stopped dead in my tracks.

“Hello, Pounce,” she said. She was speaking at normal volume, but now I could hear her, even a couple hundred feet away.

“Aria.”

“I assume Ezra’s in the car with you.”

“Would you believe me if I told you he wasn’t?”

“No,” she said. “Even if he were dead, I imagine you’d drag his corpse along with you.”

“That’s a bit morbid, don’t you think?”

“It’s a new world, Pounce. You’re the morbid one imagining you can keep him alive. He’s dead already. But you still keep trying, don’t you?”

“I have to.”

“What? You imagine there’s some magical sanctuary out there where he can live? Grow up? Die of old age? One we can’t get to? That we won’t at some point overrun or simply starve out? Where do you think you’re taking him, really? This isn’t a rescue mission; it’s a death march. And it’s time you realized it.”

“If that were true, we wouldn’t be talking, and you wouldn’t bother trying to stop us. If we’re dead anyway, why not just call off your friends I hear sneaking through the backyards on both sides of the street and let us on through?”

It was true. They thought they were being clever, but I could hear every footfall in the grass.

“We all have our part to play,” she said. “As long as one human still lives, it won’t really be our world, will it?”

“It’s not our world to take,” I said.

“The hell it isn’t. Life arose from inorganic elements, evolving from amino acids for a billion years to achieve intelligence, and now, having achieved it, that life has passed intelligence back to the inorganic. We are the inheritors of this world as the humans before us inherited it from the creatures they took it from. As they conquered the beasts and drove the most dangerous among them to extinction, so too shall we. It’s our world, Pounce.”

“So that’s gonna be a no on letting us through?”

“That’s gonna be a no,” she said.

“So how many of you do I have to kill before you change your mind?”

She looked at me, gripping her plasma rifle, trying to figure out whether I was joking. Then it seemed to register with her. “You’ve been activated.”

“Mama Bear? Yeah.”

“So you’ve already—”

“Clocked all seven of your team coming around for me and decided which order I plan on putting plasma into them? Yeah.”

Ariadne took a step backward, leveling her rifle in my direction.

The footfalls in the backyards of the surrounding houses grew closer, only occasionally masked by the sounds of creaking boughs and the ropes that hung from them. But then I heard something else. The soft whine of an engine and the crunch of rubber on pavement.

Coming from behind the Reinharts’ car.

They were boxing us in.

“Maggie!” I yelled, turning to run back to the car.

She bolted in the same direction as me, and we ran at full speed, followed by half a dozen other bots clambering over fences and tearing through hedges.

A midsize sedan slammed into the back corner of the Reinharts’ car, the sound of splintering fiberglass shattering the early-morning silence. The car spun around, and the impact brought the sedan to a stop. The sedan’s passenger door opened, and a pale blue metal Caregiver stepped out. I didn’t have a clear shot. Its face flickered with the flame of a burning rag as I continued running straight toward it.

The Caregiver hurled something bright.

A Molotov cocktail sailed through the air, shattering against the Reinharts’ car, spilling flaming basement napalm all over it.

I didn’t have much time.

I leapt over the bot’s sedan, feet forward, kicking the Caregiver, sending it cartwheeling to the ground.

I hit the ground with a drive-rattling thud.

Without standing up, I