Tomorrow

As she pulled back on the string, Becca took in a deep silent breath, the memory of her father’s voice smooth as molasses in her ear, “Breathe in. Focus. You are one, you, that gun. Breathe out. Let it go, baby.”

Oh, but if she could. Still, as she released the string, she tried to blow out the dragon fire twisting in her gut with the arrow from her bow. It flew, swift and true, through the Bot’s head and it collapsed in a shower of sparks and screeching mechanical limbs. Maybe release only came by gun. Maybe only when her father could pull the hot rage out like tugging on an unraveling sweater.

She slung the bow onto her back, her free hand sneaking to her throat to finger her mother’s heart-shaped locket. The unconscious movement eased some of the tension in her shoulders and she carefully stepped out from her cover behind the overturned, burned-out hulk of what had once been a truck. Her steps made as little noise as possible on the broken pavement, picking her way amongst the wreckage of the World That Was. She’d been a child when the Bots had taken the World, old enough to know what there was to lose, to breathe in the terror of the Coming, adapt, and make it part of her, like all the other children of the World That Is. At least, she assumed so. She hadn’t seen other kids after the Coming. Her parents had taken her and her brother and run, seeking out the deepest, forested hiding places they could, far from the sentient metal slaves turned monsters. That hadn’t lasted long. Her parents weren’t survivalists. There was only so much you could learn from television shows. What you didn’t learn would kill you.

As she always did when she thought of her family, she called up their faces, determined to remember them, though Becca wasn’t sure if the faces she remembered, like the sheen on a bubble, were correct, or restructured Kintsugi pottery, cracks joined with gold. She didn’t suppose it really mattered anymore. They were gone. She was here. She was still here.

She pulled the grey patterned camo jacket closer around her shoulders, making sure the hood was pulled down over her dark hair without blocking her line of sight. She skirted closer to the remains of buildings in varying stages of decay. As she passed a shard of a wall, resolutely stabbing the sky, she picked up the faint but distinct buzzing of a Bot drone. Dashing around the other side of the broken structure, she crouched down, clamping a hand around her mother’s locket to keep it from catching any of the weak rays of sunlight piercing the clouds. Becca made herself as small as she could, trying to control her breathing to a silent, steady intake and release. She didn’t dare look as the drone searched the street, inspecting the fallen Bot soldier she’d downed. It clicked in a decidedly insectoid way, circling the pile of machinery as if it couldn’t quite understand what it saw. Pieces of metal rung off the lingering stubborn bits of pavement as the drone dug through the corpse of its fellow.

Dead silence suddenly, oppressively filled the air, as the drone listened for her listening for it. She suffocated with the need to still her thudding heart, one hand clamped over her mouth and nose, the other over the locket, begging the gods of the World That Was for mercy. She was so very close.

The moment stretched into two, five, hours, a lifetime. The drone clicked again, a raspy, decisive sound like metal grinding over a grate. The pressure in her head threatened to explode her brains all over the rubble. The drone rose into the air again, its metallic hide glinting with an isolated sunbeam, the limp body of the Bot twisting sullenly below the drone as it resumed its flight path up the street. As it rounded the corner a block away onto Twelfth Street, she sobbed, her vision dark with bright spots of light, as blood and airflow returned.

She scuttled to the edge of her cover, careful not to let her bag or her bow bang on the uneven ground, peering after it. A bedraggled and bent street sign obstinately named this to be Maryland Avenue. Becca touched one tired knee to the ground gratefully, leaning her weight on a pile of broken red bricks. Pausing a moment more, she marveled at the air filling her lungs. Then she was up and quickly around the fractured border of the building into what had once been an alley. She carefully quickstepped around chunks of stone and brick the size of cars, twisted chain link, shattered glass, and other debris of the World That Was. She startled, fumbling for her bow when a cat-sized rat broke cover to dash across her path. It paused, hissing at her, then slipped through a hole on the opposite side of the alley. She wiped a shaking hand across her brow, sweat and grime smearing on her temple. Almost there, almost there, echoed in her head, a prayer of hope to any power that would listen.

The building she sought was almost intact, only part of it collapsed under the sagging drunk deadweight of its neighbor. Huffing out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding, she peered at the structure from the safety of the alley across the building’s rear courtyard. No cover. No choice but to run for it. Her hand strayed to the locket again, tracing the design of vines and flowers wrought in gold on its surface with her fingertip. There were so many things that could go wrong. This could be the wrong place. The promised generators might not start. They might draw down the Bots on her.

She grimaced. They would certainly draw the Bots down on her. This was suicide. Her father had been so sure, though. She swayed a bit as his voice, nearly tactile in her ear, whispered poisoned honey of the World That Was, stories of fantastic things barely half-remembered, stores and parks and universities, electricity and soft beds with freshly laundered sheets. The abyss of memory threatened to pull her under- her brother’s chubby legs pumping as he struggled to soar higher and higher on the swings. Her mother’s perfume wafting gently through the house as she hurried about getting ready for work. Breakfast cereal with ridiculous mascots grinning cheerfully as she sipped cold, cold milk. Her father scooping her up into his strong arms as he walked in the door, swinging her in the air, round and round, till they were both dizzy and laughing.

But he was gone. And she was here. She was still here. Her heart cracked a piece more and she quickly scooped gold into it with the soft invocation of, “Almost there. Almost there.”

She dashed out across the courtyard, set on the closest door. She ran hard from memory, heedless with the knowledge that an end was near, death or victory. She jerked hard on the door handle, nearly falling back as it swung open easily. Coltishly, she stumbled over her own feet, recovering only by slapping her open hands on the wall to keep her balance. The sound echoed down the dark corridors, coming back to her in ghostly echoes for longer than seemed possible. She stood stock-still, listening hard, but could hear nothing but her own panicked heartbeat and straining gasps for air. Slowly, she edged her bag off her shoulder and fished out a well-worn piece of paper, yellowed with age and dirt, creased from multiple foldings, wrinkled from the many times she had balled it into a wad and thrown it disgustedly away from her, only to retrieve it later. In the faint light drifting in the doorway, she studied the map again, as if it had changed at all in the interim between when her father had first pressed it into her hand and now. The generators were in the basement. The computer banks were on an upper floor, blessedly on the intact end of the building. She refolded the note and tucked it back in her bag, repositioning it and her bow on her back. She started towards the stairs first, deciding that checking on the computers first was quieter. And, besides, if they were destroyed, this was all an exercise in futility.

Three hours later, she found herself in the basement, trying to sort out starting a generator. Her father hadn’t thought to instruct her on a piece of machinery they couldn’t use in the World That Is, and he’d expected to be here with her. There was part of a label with instructions on the side of one of the generators, which she’d only been able to distinguish from the other bowels of the building because they’d once bedded down in a basement of another building and her mother had sighed and wished a useless wish for their power. In the end, she filled it with the foul-smelling liquid from a fuel can sitting in a corner and pressed a button. They sprang to life with a terrifying rumble and racket. She backed away and dashed for the staircase, taking them two and three at a time. With luck, the Bots would investigate the source of the noise first.

She practically fell into the computer room, panting. Immediately falling to the floor, she crawled over discarded paper and office refuse to the window bank. Keeping her body low, she tried to see the street below. Already, the Bots were zeroing in on the noise, filling the street like shiny metal ants and bees. Time was short. She dove for cover as a particularly enterprising drone shot upwards, sweeping the windows, looking for life. Looking for her.

As soon as it passed, she scrambled on unsteady legs and hands for the computers and hurriedly switched on a centrally positioned tower. Shaking, she fished the paper out of her bag again and found the instructions to open the Emergency Alert System. The computer finally sprang to life, and she imputed the passwords, the echoing drone of the generators faint in her ears. She heard, too, doors slamming open and metal feet marching on tile, insectoid clicking, and squealing. Her vision vibrated in time with her heartbeat. Becca reached up and touched her mother’s locket lovingly, then gently removed it from her neck. She laid it safely on a desk next to the humming tower and carefully opened it with fingers numbed by fear.

Clanging footsteps began to echo from the stairwell. They were coming. They were almost here.

She scanned the desk until she saw the sim card reader already plugged into a port on the front of the tower, just as her father had described. She slipped the tiny sim card from her mother’s locket into the reader, touching the framed portrait on her father’s desk for luck. Just as the sim card finished downloading its information into the alert system, the first Bot came through the door into the computer room, screeching in robotic triumph when she whirled to face it. It leveled a long arm equipped with a firing mechanism at her as its compatriots crowded into the room. Blindly, she reached behind her and pressed the enter button, the litany, “Almost there,” on her lips.

A violent cacophony rose from every Bot, as an overwhelming tone wrapped around her paralyzed brain. She fell to the floor, hands over her ears, as they began to crash to the floor, their noise dying out as they shut down, drowned by the alert. Finally, everything was quiet, leaving behind a deafening silence in its wake. She crouched a few minutes longer, listening keenly for any sign of mechanical life.

But they were gone.

And she was here. She was still here.