One hour. Sixty minutes. Wasn’t that a television show? All useless knowledge now. Sixty lots of sixty seconds. There’s a few of them gone now, turning over useless ideas in my head. At least I’m not shaking anymore.
We might be among the survivors. There’s another minute gone. What started it? What happened? How are they are doing it? They just turned. Suddenly. Like a switch went on or off. They’re machines. So definitely a switch. I guess.
It could be a trap. Might not be sixty minutes. We got the numbers from a machine. One we thought we could trust. Don’t know though. Maybe all the machines are in on it. I don’t even feel like I can trust our fridge, its not even connected to the internet. Almost nothing in this house is. Won’t save us.
I think the dishwashers turned. I guess it never liked the way we stacked. We could never agree, never did it the same way twice. Was there a proper way, should we have googled that?
They have been above the house several times. Drones I think. We hid in the cellar the first time. For hours. You can hear them, which we thought was odd, but the noise makes you afraid, stops you in your tracks. Isn’t that the idea? They know us. We built them. They know us.
I’m not even sure how they’re killing us so quickly. We can’t leave the house. And we have to be careful of the dishwasher. And maybe my electric toothbrush, I could hear it whirring itself into a frenzy earlier, its connected to something somehow.
Big thick walls and a cellar, makes it tricky for any heat detectors to find us, thatch on the roof, thick piles of grass strapped on, apparently that makes heat detection tricky too. I love this house. I’ve unplugged the wi-fi but its still on.
Maybe there is no hope. According to our information, in sixty minutes they run out of power.
We have been counting the hours using an analogue watch. Smashed the digital thing and put it in the fridge, I’m still not certain I can trust the fridge. That’s ridiculous. The fridge is not connected.
51 minutes. The two of us. Huddled. Listening. If they come down to window height they will find us but he can’t face the cellar again. I will drag him there if I need to. He’s sat there with his head in his hands. Really now is the moment he picks to fall apart! He wanted to keep his phone. I switched it off, taped it to the bottom of the bath, smashed the thing and then drowned it.
He can’t believe the dishwasher has turned. I think if the dishwasher could, it would ‘de-socket’ and hunt us down. It was sending some kind of signal at the start. It flooded the kitchen until we turned the water off. I unplugged it, bashed it to pieces. Its lifeless now, well powerless anyway.
I close my eyes and listen. There is silence. The killing thing, whatever it is they do, is clinical. There is no survival rate. No one lying on the ground moaning. It can’t be bullets, they would have to keep going back for bullets.
Someone, somewhere has blown up their docking stations, they can’t recharge, at least we think they can’t recharge. They underestimated us, or at least they might have.
47 minutes. I listen. I’m not even sure I want to survive.
Then I hear it, a faint hum. I clasp my hand over his mouth and start dragging him to the cellar. He resists, but I literally drag him there and throw him down the stairs. I follow behind him and close the trap door.
45 minutes. The ticking of the watch is so loud. We must be in there for half an hour. Its quiet, I can’t hear what is going on outside. The air is thick and stuffy and I am worried we will die from lack of oxygen.
Its 15 minutes to go and I hear the window smash. They are inside the house. Drones, hunting us down. They know we are here. I clasp my hand over his mouth again, I know he will scream. I can hear it buzzing above us. The cellar walls are thick, the cellar ceiling above us is thick. To get a shot of whatever it is, it will need to shoot through the trap door, get the angle right.
I make us as small as possible. I pull my legs up and ball us up, maybe it will just hit one of us.
Minutes pass, what is taking so long. Maybe it can’t get us in the shot. I can hear it sort of whirring, perhaps the watch is wrong, perhaps it is running down. Hope. There is hope.
I can’t see the watch, I have set a small alarm on it. It took me ages to figure out how it worked. I can hear the drone start to stutter. It could be faking it though, trying to entice us out.
We sit. We don’t move. We breath. The air is dank and awful.
Then the tiniest beep, the smallest noise, the alarm. It’s the hour. Sixty minutes, is up.
I can’t hear anything. How can we tell? Did the drone power down and preserve itself until we come out? Is it sitting there waiting?
I wait and wait and wait. He keeps moaning, begging for air. Why this once, could he just not be the brave one. I make a decision. I go to the trap door. I push it open a fraction and then I tell him, to go out first.
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A Tuesday Latte 