Daniel Wilson - Robopocalypse

“Is that lady okay, Mommy?”

“Why did those cars do that?”

“What if more cars come?”

A few minutes pass. My breath squeezes painfully in and out of my clenched diaphragm. I strain out the sobs, choke down on my emotions to keep the kids calm.

“It’s going to be okay,” I say. “We’re going to be okay, you guys.”

But my voice rings hollow even in my own ears.

Ten minutes down the road, I come across the first accident.

Smoke pours from twisted wreckage, like a black snake writhing through shattered windows, escaping into the air. The car is half on its side next to the road. A guardrail zigzags out into the road from where it was bashed into during the accident. There are flames coming from the rear of the car.

Then, I see movement—people motions.

In a flash, I imagine myself stepping on the accelerator and speeding past. But I’m not that person. Not yet, anyway. I guess people don’t change that fast, even in the apocalypse.

I pull over a few yards down the road from the wrecked car. It’s a white four door with Ohio plates.

“Stay in the car, kids.”

The hood of the wrecked car is crumpled up like a tissue. The bumper lies on the ground, cracked in half and covered in mud. A mess of engine parts are visible, and the tires point in different directions. I gasp when I notice that one end of the guardrail is going into the passenger-side door.

“Hello?” I call, peering into the driver’s side window. “Anybody need help?”

The door creaks open and a young, overweight guy spills out onto the road shoulder. He rolls over onto all fours, blood running down his face. He coughs uncontrollably. I kneel and help him away from the car, feeling the gravel shoulder gouging my knees through my panty hose.

I force myself to check inside the car.

There is blood on the steering wheel, and the guardrail juts incongruously through the passenger window, but there is no one else inside. Nobody skewered by that errant rail, thank god.

My hair hangs in my face as I pull the young fat guy away from the wreck. It flutters back and forth with each breath I take. At first, the young man helps. But after a few feet, he collapses onto his stomach. He stops coughing. Looking back toward the car, I see there’s a trail of glistening droplets on the pavement. In the front seat, there is a pool of black liquid.

I shove the man over onto his back. His neck rolls loosely. His blue eyes are open. I see some black soot around his mouth, but he is not breathing. I look down and then glance away. A large chunk of flesh from his side has been torn out by the guardrail. The ragged hole gapes there like an anatomy lesson.

For a moment, I hear only the rush of the flames licking the breeze. What can I do? Only one thing comes to mind: I move my body to block my kids’ sight of the dead man.

Then, a cell phone rings. It comes from the man’s shirt pocket. With bloodstained fingers, I reach for his phone. When I slide it out of his pocket and hold it to my ear, I hear something that crushes the small flicker of hope that was still somewhere deep inside me.

“Kevin,” says the phone. “This is your father. Bad things are happening. I can’t talk. Meet me at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Gotta go.”

Aside from the name, it’s the exact same message . Another incident. Piling up.

I drop the phone onto the man’s chest and stand up. I get back inside my ancient car and hold the steering wheel until my hands stop shaking. I don’t remember seeing or hearing anything for the next few minutes.

Then, I put the car in gear.

“We’re going to Grampa’s house, kids.”

“What about Indianapolis?” asks Mathilda.

“Don’t worry about that.”

“But Grampa said—”

“That wasn’t your grandfather. I don’t know who that was. We’re going to Grampa’s.”

“Is that man okay?” asks Nolan.

Mathilda answers for me.

“No,” she says. “That man is dead, Nolan.”

I don’t chastise her. I don’t have the luxury.

It’s dark by the time our tires crunch over my dad’s worn gravel driveway.

Finally, thankfully, the old car heaves to a stop. Exhausted, I allow the engine to die. The silence afterward feels like the vacuum of space.

“Home again, home again, jiggity-jog,” I whisper.

In the passenger seat, Nolan is asleep on Mathilda’s lap, his head resting on her bony shoulder. Mathilda’s eyes are open and her face is set. She looks strong, a tough angel under a mop of dark hair. Her eyes scan back and forth across the yard in a way that worries me.

The details emerge for me, too. There are tire marks on the lawn. The screen door yawns open in the breeze, slapping the house. The cars are gone from the garage. No lights are on inside the house. Part of the wooden fence has been knocked down.

Then, the front door begins to swing open. There is only blackness on the other side. I reach over and take Mathilda’s small hand in mine.

“Be brave, honey,” I say.

Mathilda does as she is told. She clenches the fear between her teeth and holds it there tight so that it can’t move. She squeezes my hand and hugs Nolan’s small body with her other arm. As the splintered wooden door creaks open, Mathilda does not look away or close her eyes or so much as blink. I know that my baby will be brave for me.

No matter what comes out of that door.

Laura Perez and her family were not seen or heard from again until almost one year later. They next appear on the record when registered on the rolls of the Scarsdale forced-labor camp, just outside New York City.

Under surveillance, officer Lonnie Wayne Blanton was recorded giving the following description to a young soldier passing through the Osage Nation in central Oklahoma. Without the brave actions of Lonnie Wayne during Zero Hour, the human resistance may never have happened—at least, not in North America.

Them machines been on the back of my mind ever since I interviewed this kid about a thing that happened to him and a buddy of his in an ice cream shop. Gruesome deal.

Course, I never believed a man should keep a ponytail. But I sure did keep my peepers peeped after that fiasco.

Nine months later, the cars over in town went haywire. Me and Bud Cosby were sitting in the Acorn diner. Bud’s telling me about his granddaughter winning some kind of “presti-jicus international prize,” as he calls it, when people start hollerin’ outside. I hold my ground, wary. Bud trots over to the window. He rubs the dirty glass and leans over, resting his old gouty hands on his knees. Just then, Bud’s Cadillac bashes in through the front window of the diner like a deer leaping through your windshield at ninety miles an hour on a dark highway. Glass and metal spray everywhere. There’s a ringing in my ears and after a second I realize it’s Rhonda, the waitress, holding a pitcher of water and bawling her damn fool head off.

Through the new hole in the wall, I watch an ambulance tear by down the middle of the street, hit a fella trying to flag it down, and keep going. Bud’s blood is pooling out fast from under the stalled Caddy.

I light out fast through the back. Take me a walk through the woods. During my walk, it’s like nothing happened. The woods feel safe, like always. They aren’t safe for long. But they’re safe long enough for a fifty-five-year-old man in blood-soaked cowboy boots to scramble his way home.