garage. With my thumb, I feel the cold metal switch. I put one arm around Dawn, plant a kiss on her cheek, and throw the switch.
We hear a sharp snapping sound from across the street, and the ground heaves beneath us. A groan echoes through the dark cave of the garage. We wait in darkness for five minutes, listening to each other breathe. Then Dawn and I march up the sloping driveway, hand in hand, toward the smashed garage door. At the top, we peer through the torn gate and blink into the sunlight.
We look into the new face of the city.
The roof across the street is smoking. Thousands of panes of glass have shattered and plummeted to the street, where they now form a crunchy layer, kind of like fish scales. Chunks of rubble litter the ground, and the entire front of our building has been cratered and sandblasted. Street signs and lampposts have been thrown down across the road. Chunks of pavement, bricks and mortar, thick black wires, knots of plumbing, twisted balls of wrought iron, and tons of unrecognizable debris are piled everywhere we look.
The passenger sedan is still parked near the heap of burning tires. It has been crushed under a pie-shaped chunk of concrete, its rebar poking out like a compound fracture.
The choking black loops of tire smoke cloud the air and blot out the sky.
And the dust. Firemen would hose down the dust on a typical job. Without them, dust settles in layers everywhere like dirty snow. I see no tire tracks, which tells me no cars have been around here—yet. Dawn is already rolling a lit tire toward the intersection.
I stumble over rubble into the middle of the street and for a moment I feel as though, once again, the city is
With my sleeve protecting my mouth, I survey the damage to the building facades. And I begin to laugh. I laugh loud and long. My hooting and howling echoes from the buildings, and even Dawn looks up from rolling her tire and cracks a little smile at me.
And then I see them. People. Just a half dozen, emerging into the light from doorways farther down the street. The neighborhood isn’t gone, I think. It was just hiding. The people, my neighbors, step out one by one into the street.
The wind sweeps the inky black smoke up over our heads. Small fires burn up and down the block. Rubble is strewn everywhere. Our little slice of America looks like a war zone. And we look like the survivors of some disaster film.
“Listen,” I announce to the ragged semicircle of survivors. “It won’t be safe out here for very long. The machines are going to come back. They’re going to try to clean this up, but we can’t let them. They were
And when I finally say it out loud, I can hardly believe my ears. But I know what has to be done here, even if it’s hard. So I look into the eyes of my fellow survivors. I take a deep breath and I tell them the truth: “If we want to live, we’ve got to
The demolition methods pioneered in New York City by Marcus Johnson and his wife, Dawn, were replicated throughout the world over the next several years. By sacrificing the infrastructure of entire cities, urban survivors were able to dig in, stay alive, and fight back from the very beginning. These dogged city dwellers formed the heart of the early human resistance. Meanwhile, millions of human refugees were still fleeing to the country, where Rob had not yet evolved to operate. He soon would.
3. HIGHWAY 70
Laura, this is your father. Bad things are happening. I can’t talk. Meet me at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Gotta go.
This account was pieced together from conversations overheard in a forced-labor camp, roadside surveillance footage, and the sentiments expressed by a former congresswoman to her fellow prisoners. Laura Perez, mother of Mathilda and Nolan Perez, had no idea of the instrumental role that her family would play in the imminent conflict—or that in just under three years her daughter would save my life and the lives of my squad mates.
“Hurry up, Nolan,” urges Mathilda, clutching a map and shrinking into the warmth of the car.
Eight years old, Nolan stands on the shoulder of the road, his small silhouette painted onto the pavement by dawn sunlight. He wobbles, concentrating furiously on peeing. Finally, mist rises from a puddle in the dirt.
The Ohio morning is moist and chilly on this empty two-lane dirt highway. Brown hills stretch for miles around, silent. My antique car pants, sending clouds of carbon monoxide gliding over the dewy pavement. Somewhere far away, a predatory bird screeches.
“See, Mom? I told you we shouldn’t let him drink the apple juice.”
“Mathilda, be nice to your brother. He’s the only one you’ll ever have.”
It’s a mom thing to say, and I’ve said it a thousand times. But this morning I find myself relishing the normalcy of the moment. We search for the ordinary when we are surrounded by the extraordinary.
Nolan is finished. Instead of sitting in the backseat, he climbs into the front, right onto his sister’s lap. Mathilda rolls her eyes but says nothing. Her brother doesn’t weigh much and he’s scared. And she knows it.
“You zip up, buddy?” I ask, out of habit. Then I remember where I am and what’s happening, or going to happen soon. Maybe.
My eyes flicker to the rearview mirror. Nothing yet.
“Let’s go, Mom. Geez,” says Mathilda. She shakes out the map and stares at it, like a mini adult. “We’ve got like another five hundred miles to go.”
“I wanna see Grampa,” whines Nolan.
“Okay, okay,” I say. “Back on the road. No more bathroom breaks. We’re not stopping until Grampa’s house.”
I jam my foot on the accelerator. The car lurches forward, loaded with jugs of water, boxes of food, two cartoon-themed suitcases, and camping gear. Under my seat, I’ve got a Glock 17 pistol in a black plastic case, cocooned in gray foam. It’s never been fired.
The world has changed over the last year. Our technology has been going feral. Incidents. The incidents have been piling up, slowly but surely. Our transportation, our communications, our national defense. The more incidents I saw, the more the world began to feel hollow, as if it could collapse at any moment.
Then my daughter told me a story. Mathilda told me about Baby-Comes-Alive, and she finished by saying those words that she could not know, could never know: robot defense act.
When she said it, I looked into her eyes and I
Now I am running. I am running to save the lives of my children. Technically, this is an emergency vacation. Personal days. Congress is in session today. Maybe I’ve lost my mind. I hope I have. Because I believe that something is in our technology. Something evil.
