corner between a rack and a range grill. Dale was right: these things learned fast.
“Cindy! Get this friggin’ thing off me!”
He didn’t hear anything save for the incessant ticking, high-pitched whine of the ‘bot’s servos, and the loud clang of his cart ramming it again. A chocolate cake toppled off the wagon and was immediately pulverized by the cook’s wheels. He had the wild, hopeless hope that the icing would somehow screw it up, make it lose traction...
“Cindy..!” Damn it, had she abandoned him?
All at once, the robot’s turret did a one-eighty turn, its lenses snapping away from him as its motion detectors picked up movement from somewhere behind it. In that instant, Cindy dashed out of the darkness, something raised in both hands above her head. The robot started to swivel around, then a cast iron skillet came down on its turret and smashed its lenses.
Nice shot. Although the robot could still hear them, it was effectively blinded. While its claw lashed back and forth, trying to connect with one of them, Cindy beat on it with the skillet while Harold continued to slam it with the dessert cart.
“Hit it, hit it!”
“Get the claws!”
“Go for the top, the top!”
So forth and so on, until one last blow from Cindy’s skillet managed to skrag the CPU just beneath the upper turret. The LEDs went dark and the cook halted. The ticking stopped.
When Harold was sure that the cook was good and dead, he came out from behind the cart. Cindy was leaning against an island, breathing hard, skillet still clutched in her hand. She stared at him for a moment, then dropped the skillet. It hit the floor with a loud bang that echoed off the stainless steel surfaces around them.
“Thanks.” Harold sagged against a counter. “Tough, ain’t it?”
“Built to last.” Her cotton tank-top was damp with sweat, the nipples of her twenty-two-year old breasts standing out. “You okay?”
“I’m good.” Harold couldn’t stop staring at her. “You?”
Cindy slowly nodded. She brushed back her damp hair, then looked up at him. Even in the wan glow of the dropped flashlight, she must have seen something in his eyes that she didn’t like it at all.
“Fine. Just great.” She turned away from him. “C’mon. Let’s get out of here.”
Harold let out his breath. Looked like he wasn’t going to get laid after all, even if it was the end of the world.
*
Cindy tried to hide her irritation, but she was still quietly fuming when she and the other guy – what was his name? Harold? – returned to the atrium. She’d noticed the way he’d been watching her for the last couple of days, of course; men had been checking her out since she was fifteen, so she’d developed good radar for sexual attraction. Given the situation everyone was in, though, you’d think he’d have the common sense to put his impulses on hold. But for God’s sake, they barely escape being killed, and what’s the first thing he does? Stare at her tits.
Enough. Cindy had heard his dejected sigh as she picked up the carton of single-serving cereal boxes she’d found and left the kitchen. She could have cared less. It was times like these when she wondered whether she wouldn’t be better off being a lesbian.
By the time they reached the pool, though, she’d almost forgotten the incident. As soon as she and what’s-his-name walked in, the kids were all over them, jumping up and down in their excitement to see what she’d found. Cindy couldn’t help but smile as she carried the carton to the poolside terrace and put it down on a table. There were a half-dozen children among the refugees, the youngest a four-year-old boy and the oldest a twelve-year-old girl, and none of them seemed to mind that they didn’t have any milk to go with the Cheerios and Frosted Flakes she handed out. Even kids can get tired of Spam and candy bars if that’s all they’ve had to eat for three days.
Once they’d all received a box of cereal, Cindy took the rest to the cabana room she was sharing with Officer McCoy. She’d never thought that she’d welcome having a cop as a roommate, but Sharon was pretty cool; besides, sleeping in the same room as a police officer assured that she wouldn’t be bothered by any horny middle-aged guys who’d holed up in the Wyatt-Centrum.
Sharon was dozing on one of the twin beds when Cindy came in. She’d taken off her uniform shirt and was sleeping in her sports bra, her belt with its holstered gun, taser, and baton at her side. She opened her eyes and watched as Cindy carefully closed the door behind her, making sure that she didn’t accidentally knock aside the pillow they’d been using as a doorstop. With the power out and even the emergency generator offline, there was nothing to prevent the guest room doors from automatically locking if they closed all the way.
“Find some food?” Sharon asked.
“A little. Ready for dinner?”
Sharon sat up to peer into the carton put down beside her. “That all? Couldn’t you find something else?”
“Sorry. Didn’t have a chance to look.” Cindy told her about the cook. Sharon’s expression didn’t change, but Cindy figured that cops were usually poker-faced when it came to that sort of thing. And she left out the part about what’s-his-name. No point in complaining about that; they had worse things to worry about.
“Well … anyway, I’m glad you made it back alive.” Sharon selected a box of Cheerios, but didn’t immediately open it. One of the hand-held radios the cops had borrowed from the hotel lay on the desk; their own cell radios no longer worked, forcing them to use the older kind. Sharon picked it up and thumbed the Talk button. “Charlie Baker Two, Charlie Baker One. How’s everything looking?”
A couple of seconds went by, then Officer Overby’s voice came over. “Charlie Baker Two. 10-24, all clear.”
“Ten-four. Will relieve you in fifteen minutes. Out.” Sharon put down the radio, then nodded to the smartphone that lay on the dresser. “What’s happening there? Any change?”
Cindy picked up her phone, ran her finger down its screen. The phone would become silent once the charge ran down, but there was still a little bit of red on the battery icon. She pressed the volume control, and once again they heard the only sound it made:
Tick … tick-tick … tick-tick-tick-tick … tick … tick-tick…
Like a cheap stopwatch that skipped seconds. That wasn’t what she immediately noticed, though, but instead the mysterious number that appeared on its screen: 4,576,036,057, a figure that decreased by one with each tick.
For the last three days, Cindy’s phone had done nothing else but tick irregularly and display a ten-digit number that changed every second or so. What these things signified, she had no clue, but everyone else’s phones, pads, and laptops had been doing the same thing ever since the blackout.
It started the moment she was standing on the curb outside the airport, flagging down a cab while at same time calling her friend in St. Paul to tell her that she’d arrived. That was when the phone suddenly went dead. Thinking that her call had been dropped, she’d pulled the phone from her ear, glanced at the screen … and heard the first weird ticks coming from it.
She
