30

Arturo Vargas peeked out the damaged front door of his apartment building near the corner of N Street and Vermont Avenue in Washington, DC. The crazy sounds—explosions and roaring helicopters and buzzing spaceships and screaming and the thump-thump of machine guns—were getting closer and he had decided it was time to get his family out. He cursed himself for having ignored the evacuation requests and convincing his wife to stay. None of it had seemed real. He’d hunkered down to watch the news, and now the news had come to him.

There didn’t seem to be any immediate danger on the street outside their apartment, although the mishmash of cars jammed and crashed at every angle made it hard to see very far. And smoke was starting to drift through their neighborhood from the north.

“Is Mrs. Salinas coming?” he hissed at his wife, Nona, who hovered over their two young children, Miguel and Esmeralda.

The old woman was a nuisance, always yelling at his kids to pipe down. Her hearing was apparently her only bodily function that hadn’t broken down over the four years they’d shared a building. Vargas had lugged oxygen tanks, a wheelchair, a motorized hospital bed, and other equipment up her stairs at various times. She was as surly as a Teamster whenever Vargas finished these sweaty expeditions, complaining that he’d banged the wall too many times. Who was gonna clean those scuff marks? Vargas patiently assured her he’d do it, and tried to keep his mumbled curses to a minimum after she retreated back into her apartment.

“I tried. She says it’s safer here. She says that’s what you told her yesterday.”

“I know. But I was wrong. Did you tell her that?”

“Yes, but she won’t budge.”

He opened his mouth to yell up the stairway to the second floor where the old woman lived. Just then an explosion, the closest yet, ripped through the night. The children screamed.

“Jesus, that sounded like just the next block over,” he said to his wife. “If she’s not coming, we can’t wait. Go!”

They’d mapped out a zigzagging route to the White House, trying to stay on the side streets. That would be safer, right? His brother, a congressional aide, had said on the phone 20 minutes ago (before the lines went dead) that there was apparently a civilian evacuation zone there, with buses ferrying people out of the city. Better than trying to make it on their own. He and his wife had hastily scribbled out their route on a pair of paper maps, along with backup meeting spots, in case they got separated. Each of their cell phones was fully charged, but neither could get a signal. The cell towers were either destroyed or simply overwhelmed with traffic. Probably both.

One last look around, and he led his family out in a tight cluster. The thick smoke was getting closer, like a giant gray worm swallowing the block. They were no more than 20 feet down the street when a high-pitched, almost hysterical voice called out.

“Arturo! Wait! Take me with you. Arturoooooo!” The wail pierced even the battlefield din that was rapidly approaching.

He looked back and Mrs. Salinas was leaning out her second-floor window, oxygen tubes dangling around her neck. Even at the short distance, she was clouded in haze. He was tempted to turn away and keep moving, but his wife looked at him with pleading eyes.

He turned with a sigh and yelled, “Okay, Mrs. Salinas, hold on, I’m . . .”

The building erupted outward, as if kicked in by a giant. The fireball swallowed Mrs. Salinas, and the shockwave knocked the Vargas family backward and drove them into the ground. Arturo cried out as his shoulder slammed into the edge of the concrete curb. He staggered to his feet, clutching his arm, and looked for his family. They had been blown into a thick hedge and seemed scratched and dirty but otherwise unharmed. He rushed over and knelt down to check on the kids, who were looking around, stunned.

Arturo was about to speak when his wife went rigid, looking back at the smoldering wreckage of their apartment building. He turned around just in time to see an armor-plated robot with red glowing eyes stomp through the rubble. It looked up and down the street, raising its rifle the moment it spotted the battered family. Arturo, overwhelmed, could do no more than raise his one good arm to try to shield his children. He knew it was pointless and cursed himself again for having waited so long to leave.

The barrel of the robot’s rifle began to light up when a blur of something rushed in from Arturo’s left. The robot paused and swiveled its rifle to track the object. Suddenly the blur was a man—well, it looked like a man—rolling in a somersault and coming up with a weapon, still moving.

The robot and man fired at the same time. The beam from the robot’s rifle snapped through the air and vaporized a dusty red Chevy Impala and the corner of a florist shop. Arturo gaped as brilliant rhododendrons, chrysanthemums, tulips, and roses sprayed out of Fanny’s Flowers through the gray smoke. The moving man’s blast was more accurate. The left half of the robot was fried away. It hopped for a moment on its one remaining leg and then fell over. The man was nowhere to be seen. The machine sat up and raised its rifle again and strafed the street. The staccato yellow beam cut through the building in a horizontal line toward Arturo and his family, still huddled near the mangled bushes. At the last moment, the blur leaped from the top of the building behind Arturo. He only knew that was what had happened because the robot looked up and tried to raise its rifle. Before it could, a single explosive round burrowed into the robot’s chest and exploded, transforming the machine into a ticker tape parade of glittering metal shards.

The blurred man landed lightly on his feet, no longer a blur. Arturo staggered to his feet, wiping dirt and sweat from his face, holding his damaged arm against his side. The man’s gray skin glistened in the firelight.

“You folks okay?”

Arturo struggled to speak, just nodding.

Esmeralda, only eight years old, was the first to speak.

“Are you the one on the news? The Army man?”

The man laughed.

“I guess so. But I’m a lieutenant. In the Navy. You all seem to be in one piece, from what I can tell. Your baby is fine, too, ma’am,” he said, pointing at Nona’s flat belly.

Now Arturo found his voice and turned to his wife.

“What? You’re . . . what?”

The gray-skinned man laughed again. His skin seemed to match the tone of this now drab and pulverized world. His laugh, though, filled the air and somehow seemed stronger than the gloom.

“I’ll leave you folks to sort this out. But I very strongly suggest moving south as fast you can. That one”—the gray man pointed to small crater where the last remnants of the robot were scattered—“was a bit ahead of the rest of the mrill force, but more are coming. I’ve got to get back. And you need to get out of here.”

Without another word, the man became a blur again and disappeared back into the storm of smoke and fire.

Arturo pulled his son to his feet and looked at his wife. He tried to think of something to say, then just wrapped her in a hug. She squeezed back for a moment, then broke the embrace.

“I love you. But we’ve got to go. Now.”

He nodded and got his family moving.

“You know,” he said as they hustled off, “I forgot to thank him.”

“I bet you aren’t the only one,” his wife said.

As they walked off, Arturo scooped up a white carnation that had somehow emerged unscathed from the flower shop. He tucked it behind his daughter’s ear. She smiled, and they kept moving.