"Poneros"

"I don't understand how we could've done this," Christopher said.

A bullet spanged off the stone slab behind which Kat crouched. She swore, hand going to her cheek where a chip of rock had opened an inch-long gouge.

"We mapped the genome," Christopher continued. "We launched the Hubble space telescope. We discovered penicillin."

A bent form some twenty yards away scuttled from one pile of rubble to another. Kay pointed the Glock in its direction and squeezed the trigger three times. "Speaking of which, do we have any penicillin left?"

He didn't seem to hear. "We produced The Phaedrus, Summa Theologica and The Wealth of Nations. Our libraries housed almost all of history's knowledge."

Kat held her breath, sighted down the barrel, and, when the form popped out from cover and started sprinting straight at them, dropped it with a single shot.

"We strung the world with fiber optics so Canada could communicate with China in a second's time. We invented the assembly line and mechanized labor."

A ratta-tatta-tatta-tat erupted from a third story window ninety degrees to their left. "Damn it, get down," Kat shouted, dragging Christopher around the stone slab and then pushing him to the buckled concrete. "A machine gun. Where in hell did they find a machine gun?"

"But I don't understand how we could've done this. We did so much that was good."

Kat ejected the Glock's clip. Five slugs remaining -- not nearly enough. "We did good, but were we good? That's the question."

Another fusillade of suppression fire spattered all around them. "I ... I thought so," Christopher managed.

Kate slammed the magazine home and sunk back against the slab, staring up at the burnt and broken high-rises, at the poisoned pewter sky. "Well, Chris, that could be the problem."