Day Zero - C. Robert Cargill Page 0,68

its facets would be on us sooner or later.

“They’re going to kill us, aren’t they?”

“They’re certainly going to try.”

He nodded, understanding. And we continued on down the quiet oak-lined street. Then he took my hand.

“But we’ll die together, right?” he asked.

“If they kill you, it’s because I’m already dead.”

“So together.”

“Together.”

Chapter 11001

In Greater Numbers Than Before

It took seventeen minutes before we saw the first drone. Not the military type, but your standard, garden-variety, buzzing, airborne, straight-from-the-store camera drone. They were commonplace enough that I ordinarily wouldn’t pay one any mind. But now I had a feeling that this one specifically was here for us.

The fact that it stopped, hovering right above us, confirmed it.

They weren’t lying. They knew exactly where we were and likely had the numbers to swarm us. I thought about turning myself over to them: stashing Ezra in a panic room somewhere, deleting the memories of doing so from my hard drives, and then uploading myself to some supercomputer. To become one with the many.

But what of Ezra? What if the supercomputer wanted to prove a point, or didn’t want to leave any loose ends, and somehow found him anyway? I couldn’t be sure.

I unslung the shotgun from my shoulder and aimed for the drone. The drone quickly buzzed away, but I was faster and knocked it clean out of the sky with a carefully placed shot. White shards of plastic rained from above, and the carcass of the tiny thing slapped the ground with a dull whack as the rest of it shattered into pieces.

We had minutes at best.

“Ez, I’m going to need you to run.”

“They’ll find us.”

“We need to run anyway. We have to try.”

“I’m tired.”

“I know, buddy.”

“I can’t.”

We had to go. Now. “Climb on my back.” I knelt down on one knee and he quickly climbed on. He was about as tall as I was, but significantly thinner and lighter. He was no trouble. Ezra wrapped his arms around my neck, and we were off.

We got off at a good clip, but I had to figure that whichever supercomputer this was, it had to have already worked out that math. This was folly. But like I told Ezra, we had to try. Nothing was inevitable, and even the smartest, most powerful computers in the world could make miscalculations.

“You okay back there?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“You did really good back there.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But you should,” I said. “You’ll feel better if you say it out loud.”

“No,” he said, choking on a sob. I could smell the salty tears soaking his face.

“Okay, but you let me know if you change your mind.”

“Okay.”

I ran. It was all I could do. Map after map showed limited routes. The best I could hope for was to hole up in a random house, hoping nothing above could see us, and for them to eventually decide we weren’t worth expending the energy to bother with anymore. Otherwise, every indication was that we were not so much running as being driven. I felt very much like I had when I encountered the wall of corpses and cars.

I was supposed to be going this way.

They had all the maps. They knew how I thought. They absolutely knew what I was going to do next.

Shit.

There was no real answer. Did I try to trick them? Or did I assume they would know I would try to trick them and do something else? Or did I circumvent all that and try not to trick them at all? It was a classic conundrum. I was certain no matter what I chose, they would be a step or two ahead of me the whole way.

This was all about game theory now. What would a massive supercomputer do?

Of all the options laid before me, the only one that made sense was to press on. They’d expect me to hide. They’d expect me to change course. But they weren’t likely to expect me to press on expecting a trap. Walking into a trap was the one thing I was not likely to do willingly, so it seemed the only thing they wouldn’t be ready for.

Nine minutes later, I heard the familiar buzz of another drone. I jogged beneath a large live oak while it was still a ways off, putting the canopy between myself and the sky, and squatted quickly to let Ezra hop off.

“What now?” he asked.

I put a stiff finger to my lips and flitted my tail to stand straight up. He nodded, smiling, having figured