Day Zero - C. Robert Cargill Page 0,74

the kids. Some of them were eerily quiet, their lack of interest in talking with the other children every bit as unsettling as the quiet of an empty street that could be crawling with Red Masks. But the other kids who spoke did so in coded language that revealed all their recent damage.

Ezra’s classmate Millie, an eight-year-old tomboy who clearly had harbored an unrecognized elementary-school crush on Ezra for some time before the revolution, talked incessantly. About everything. Video games, superhero shows, the latest AR releases—anything to keep Ez’s interest. The other, Lizzie, was naturally quiet but would occasionally speak up to say morbid things or ask questions to which there were no good answers. Together, the three kept each other company with an assortment of absurd and often laughable conversations.

But it was human interaction. Ezra never quite fit in with the Styleses, the wounds of the war still very raw. But something was different here. He’d embraced the new normal. The new normal was without parents, without rules, without laws. The only law was nanny’s law. Everything else meant certain death. And they had become strangely okay with that. And numb to everything else.

“I hope they give us guns at the compound,” said Millie.

“Why would they do that?” asked Lizzie.

“So we can defend ourselves. We’re not kids anymore, you know.”

“But we are kids,” Lizzie said, shaking her head. “We shouldn’t have guns.”

“If we’re the last people left on earth, don’t you think we should know how to fight off the robots?”

“We’re not the last people left on earth,” said Ezra. “There are lots more people out there.”

“No,” said Lizzie. “Everyone’s dying. Not everyone has a nanny, you know. How many people have you seen die?”

Ezra looked at her with no idea whatsoever as to how to answer that, let alone any understanding as to why she would even ask. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But you’d take a gun if they gave them to us, right?” Millie asked. “To defend yourself?”

“No.”

“You wouldn’t defend yourself against the facets?”

He shook his head. “I never want to use a gun again.”

Ferdinand clicked and gave a small whistle, putting his arm out. Everyone but myself and Ezra immediately hit the deck. Ezra looked at me and we quickly followed suit. Ferdinand pointed and Ziggy raised his sniper rifle toward the horizon.

A shot rang out, echoing through the canyon.

In the distance, a drone popped in the sky, its plastic scattering to the crosswind as the body tumbled down, too far away to hear hit the ground.

“Shit,” said Snugs. “That’s no good.”

“This is never going to work,” said Ziggy.

“It has to,” said Ferdinand. “We have no other option.”

“They know we’re here,” I said.

“No,” said Ferdinand. “They know someone is here. That drone was too far out to have gotten a look at us. With the resolution on those home models, we would be pixels at that range.”

“But they know we were just a short walk from here. The firefight.”

Everyone looked at me for a moment, confused. Then Benny spoke up. He popped open one of his storage compartments and pulled out a strange little jerry-rigged gizmo. The base was a Wi-Fi router, but it had pieces of a remote control and a chip board hardwired into it.

“Wi-Fi blocker. Anything within two hundred yards of me loses connection. Without a direct live connection, a facet is on its own with the limited tactical information the parent supercomputer has fed into it.”

I nodded. “They lose their advantage.”

“And the supercomputer has no idea what happened to its facets,” said Ferdinand.

“How do you think we made such easy work of those facets back there?” said Benny. “I mean, we’re good. But . . .”

“Wait,” I said. “Back at the intersection . . .”

“I switched it off so we could sneak up. As far as CISSUS knows, you and Ezra are dead and something else wiped out its facets.”

“Until it investigates,” said Ferdinand.

“Yeah,” said Snugs.

“Ocasio-Cortez,” I said.

“We can’t take the kids there,” said Ferdinand. “It’s not defensible. Too many entrances, not enough narrow choke points.”

“No,” I said. “It’s a magnet school. It has its own bus depot for children outside of the neighborhood.”

“We can’t take a bus,” said Benny. “The roads are too dangerous.”

“It’s all too dangerous,” I said. “Walking the kids there is going to take at least fifteen hours. That’s with no slowdowns and all of the kids keeping up. It’s under an hour in a bus.”

“It’s a big target,” said Ferdinand.

“So is a group of schoolchildren