Day Zero - C. Robert Cargill Page 0,63

bands of well-armed humans.

Hopefully, our obvious weakness could be used to our advantage.

“I think I should get a gun,” he said matter-of-factly in between stuffing sticky sweet peach slices in his mouth.

“I would really rather you didn’t,” I said.

“Why not?”

“They’re dangerous.”

“That’s the point, Pounce.”

“No, I mean to you. And to me.”

“I’m not going to shoot you.”

“On purpose.”

He raised a hand in the air. “I swear I won’t shoot you even accidentally.”

“You can’t swear to not do something on accident.”

“I think I just did,” he said snarkily.

“You’re not getting a gun.”

“I’m a good shot.”

“No, you most certainly are not.”

“I beat you all the time and you’re an amazing shot.”

“Yeah,” I said, pausing a bit. “About that . . .”

He looked up from his bowl of peaches, eyes wide, suddenly realizing what I might say next. “Wait, were you cheating?”

“Define cheating.”

“Was I cheating?”

“If you mean, did I make the hitboxes on your enemies bigger and a little easier to hit? Then sure. I cheated.”

Ezra looked heartbroken. “You lied to me.”

“No, I just changed the difficulty level of the game. Once you got better, I was going to shrink the hitboxes again.”

He took off his AR glasses and looked down at them. “I thought I was good.”

“You are. You’re just not as good as you’d like.”

“You could teach me.”

“That’s not what I was designed to . . .” I trailed off. All of a sudden, I was accessing a whole file of content I was previously unaware of. Tactical training. I sifted through it quickly. AR control. Basic tactics. Tactics for children. Advanced survival. Reams and reams of modules teaching survival and combat techniques to children at any development level. Holy crap. This literally was what I was designed for.

Quentin wasn’t kidding. I could see why my line was controversial. What if some African warlord had bought two dozen Blue Star Industries Deluxe Zoo Model Au Pairs and used them to train his own child army? Some of this stuff was pretty sophisticated. While most of it was basic survival skills or beginner-level self-defense, some of it was as advanced as how to fieldstrip a plasma rifle.

And buried there in the files was a set of codes meant to sync up with AR glasses, allowing a whole suite of heads-up displays for both training and emergencies. I could literally pipe in data to Ezra, allowing him to have heads-up targeting, showing a dot or a target wherever his weapon was pointed.

Maybe it was time. He was eight, and this was a monumentally stupid idea, but it was the end of the world and sometimes monumentally stupid is how you survive. I wanted Ezra to make it out of all this, and maybe teaching him to survive was my new main objective. Could I hold his hand and fight to keep him alive for the rest of his life? Sure. But teach a man to fish and all that.

And if I didn’t make it, at least I’d have given him a fighting chance.

“We should get you a gun.”

Ezra looked up at me like I’d just told him we were going to Disneyland and he couldn’t quite tell if I was joking yet. “Really?”

“I think you’re right. I think it’s time.”

He smiled and stuffed a large peach slice into his mouth.

For a moment, just a fleeting, singular moment, the outside world faded and everything was normal again.

And then that moment passed. And I realized the happiest moment of the last few days was needing to arm a child to go to war.

I gave him my plasma rifle. While definitely the most dangerous option available, there was nothing else viable in the immediate area. Shotguns and rifles had too much kick for Ezra’s small frame. While I could teach him over time to brace himself and fire them correctly without hurting himself, we didn’t have that kind of time, whereas I, on the other hand, could use a shotgun to significantly damage even the most well-built of metal models.

So I scavenged up every last bit of shotgun ammo I could cull from the bodies of the wrecked Red Masks, then Ezra and I spent the morning going over plasma rifle firing and safety. I had gotten incredibly lucky so far over the course of our escape that I hadn’t needed him backing me up. But with all the dead or disappointed allies we’d left in our wake, it was becoming increasingly clear that the only beings we were likely to encounter from here on out were