Day Zero - C. Robert Cargill Page 0,78

opened the door and he stayed ready to lean out and take a potshot at anything that looked at us funny.

We turned onto a long suburban street and saw two bots in the distance, standing in the middle of the road. I zoomed in with my optics and looked at their faces. Red skulls, normal glowing eyes.

“I got this,” I said.

Ziggy looked at me, nodding.

The bots waved, tapping their shotguns, motioning for us to pull over. This bus was electric and the motor was built in beneath, on the chassis. They weren’t stopping shit. I punched the accelerator and it took only a fraction of a second for them to figure out what was up. Both bots turned to run, but their math was wrong.

I clipped them both, one on the edge of the right side of the bus, the other smack inside on the left. The one on the right spun wildly, his metal frame sent cartwheeling onto the sidewalk. The one on the left, plastic, burst like a piñata, his innards crushed beneath our tires and scattered across the road.

Ziggy smiled. I’ll admit it, I did as well.

Before Ezra and I had joined up, every victory felt like merely prolonging the inevitable. Like it only meant buying time until the next dangerous situation. But now, every victory felt like a victory, every Red Mask crushed under a bus or put down with my plasma rifle felt like striking a blow against something intangible—the enemy as a whole. I hadn’t just joined a group; I’d taken a side.

And that side, for the moment, was scoring some wins.

We turned off the long suburban street onto the highway and beat it back toward the rendezvous.

And that’s when the wins stopped.

The bus engine was virtually silent, so I could hear the gunfire over a mile away. Though I wasn’t sure at first, the now-familiar BRRRRRRRRRT of Snugs’s minigun removed all doubt. The children were under fire. Ziggy heard it too and snapped even more to attention than he had been at before.

“All hands on deck,” I said.

“Yeah. Just get me close.”

We wove through the highway along the canyon, one side a wall of limestone, the other a deep dive into certain death five hundred feet below. Such was the Hill Country. The minute you stepped west out of Austin proper, you were literally in the hills. We’d left the kids nestled along one of the flatter sections near a legendary barbecue joint, which was a terrible place for a firefight. They had nowhere to retreat, the canyon at their backs.

As we rounded a corner, we saw them, bots working in perfectly timed precision, using military tactics, many sacrificing themselves to get others closer to the kids.

CISSUS.

Several bots were advancing through the street, firing on what I had to assume was the Mama Bears’ new position behind a brick smokehouse, trying to keep them pinned long enough to score some kills.

I punched the accelerator again, but this time, Ziggy turned and looked at me with great apprehension.

“Pounce?” he asked, using a tone that meant quite clearly What the hell are you doing?

“When I stop, you jump out and take out whatever is left.”

“I don’t like this plan as much as the last one.”

“I don’t like it either, but the element of surprise right now is the only thing we have to work with.”

“Shit,” he muttered softly.

“Yeah. Shit.”

The bus roared forward, hugging the curves at nearing eighty miles an hour. All I could do was hope the other Bears would realize what was happening sooner than CISSUS.

I swerved the bus, aiming straight for a pack of advancing bots. All at once, they turned, raising their firearms with unnerving precision. But we were undeterred.

Ducking low, I navigated with the bus’s front-facing cameras as the packs of bots opened fire.

We plowed through five of them, shattering some, simply mangling others. One was sent sailing into a tree, its lifeless body left to hang over a limb, never to reactivate.

Ziggy stepped out the side of the decelerating bus, using it at first as cover, then finding a clear line of sight to several remaining facets, none of whom expected him to be there. While they were still firing at me, he appeared and opened fire with my plasma rifle.

I slammed on the brakes, the massive bus lurching farther than I would have liked, before throwing it in reverse and putting the bus between the facets and the kids. The bus backed into the parking lot of the