“Okay so a plague or virus,” Nate explained. “Over a hundred thousand people in six weeks dead. From what we have seen, there were no quarantine zones, no cordons. No emergency camps. We didn’t get to the hospital, but there was no indication at all at the urgent care that anything happened. No body bags or garbage cans piling up on the roads. If things shut down, so do essential services.”
“Someone came in,” Finch said, “and cleaned this up. The event happened here.”
“So why no quarantine?” Nate said. “They let everyone die? That many people aren’t all gonna choose to stay in their homes. They’d overflow the hospitals; emergency hospitals would have to be set up.”
Sam said, “We haven’t even checked a quarter of this town. We don’t know that they aren’t out there.”
“Plus, it’s more than that,” Rey added. “I’m not saying people didn’t get sick and die, but something big was happening. We hit one grocery store and it wasn’t the same. Not at all. The shelves were still stocked but…they weren’t organized by product, they were organized by street.”
“Boxes,” Nate added. “Addresses on them, like one big food bank.”
“And the checkout lines were removed. No cash registers,” Rey said.
“Okay, I’m playing devil’s advocate here,” said Finch. “This is after all of us left. How do we know that’s just not the way things were in this future?”
“It wasn’t that far after us, Finch. Not so much that we got rid of grocery workers,” Nate said.
“Why not?” Finch asked. “They got rid of mail carriers after us. If I remember correctly, there were a lot of self-service checkouts in our day. Half, at least.”
“What about food issued to homes instead of letting people shop for what they want?” Nate asked.
“We had a food shortage when we left,” Finch replied. “It was getting bad.”
“Not really,” Sam added. “It was resolving nicely thanks to Tucker. When you guys left, they predicted in twenty years the population could starve. Didn’t happen thanks to him”—he pointed to Tucker—“and I still think there was a plague or sickness. They tried to be proactive. They had a vaccine day.”
Finch nodded. “Could they have been vaccinating for something else?”
“Is there a single scenario you buy?” Nate asked. “You doubt Sam. You doubt us.”
“That’s not it,” Finch said. “I am just being logical. I want the truth just as badly as you do.”
“I get it,” Rey said. “I do. You’re not shooting to be a dick.”
“Um…thanks.”
“It was just strange,” Rey said with a sigh. “The houses got a box each and there was no way to pay. None that we could see. Except four things that looked like bar code scanners. We couldn’t tell for sure without power.” She looked to the table at the sound of something landing on it.
Five of those exercise bracelets were there.
“Those,” Tucker said, “were how people paid. So many of them laying around. That had to be how they did everything. They scanned your bracelet. It’s how you paid, showed ID, everything. Bet me.”
“Now that,” Finch said, “I can buy. Do you have a theory on what happened here?”
“Oh, yeah,” Tucker said with certainty. “Everyone in this town, all hundred and some thousand…was killed. Killed, dumped, burned.”
Everyone responded with a shocked and disbelieving, “What?”
“On purpose,” Tucker said. “In case I didn’t imply that enough.”
“Okay, wait, what?” Sam blurted out with nearly a laugh. “A plague is hard enough to believe, but you think everyone here was killed on purpose.”
“Yep.”
“By whom?” Sam asked. “The government?”
“No.” Tucker reached into his side bag, pulled out an object and placed it on the table.
“What in God’s name?” Nate asked.
It wasn’t big—it was part of an arm. Mid forearm, wrist, and hand. But not human. The top of it was dull gray and the underside was shiny and metal. The fingers weren’t clunky, in fact they looked intricate.
“Robots,” Tucker said.
“You think that belongs to a robot?” Sam asked.
“Yes.”
Sam laughed. “That’s a prosthetic. You and I both know they had robotic prosthetics.”
Tucker shook his head. “I don’t think so, Sam. This is really sophisticated.”
Nate looked up to Finch. “Anything? Waiting for you to tear this down.”
“Oh, I am,” Finch said. “Tuck, yeah it looks sophisticated. And even though robotics has been around since at least the 1930 world fair, they had not progressed to the point that they could be killing machines. I mean, for that much of an advancement, humanoid robots would have had to be around when we were on Earth.”
“I’m telling you…” Tucker said. “From what I saw they were.”
“What did you see?” Sam asked. “Really, what did you see?”
“The bullet holes in the pizza shop,” Tucker said. “No bodies or signs of bodies, just the bracelets. Right? We saw that false wall in the garage with a hole in it. Today…in that convenience store was another false wall, with a huge hole blown in it. That’s where I found this.” He pointed to the arm. “I think it was a trap for the robots. I think some sort of resistance formed and the bracelets were a way for robots to track people and they dropped the bracelets to lure the robots into a trap.”
Sam laughed. “This isn’t Terminator, Tuck.”
Finch quickly looked at Rey when he heard her whisper, “Oh my God.”
“Rey?” Finch called her attention.
“Oh my God,” she said with revelation. “I think he’s right.”
“You too?” Sam asked.
“Yes, me too.” She turned to Nate. “You know it.”
Nate ran his hand down his face and exhaled dropping his shoulders. “He may be right.”
Finch shifted his eyes from Nate to Rey. “What do you two know?”
Whatever happened in Fort Collins had occurred over twenty-five years earlier, but it still didn’t stop Finch from wanting to be cautious. It wasn’t completely dark, yet he set up perimeters and had Sam and Nate stay behind while Rey led the way to the urgent care.
They went twice.
The first time was for Rey to show them what she and Nate had found,
