Shadow Knight's Mate by Jay Brandon

bothered to call them away. Many of the kids didn’t have parents there, anyway. They were neighborhood playgrounds, a block or two from home, within the sound of a parent’s call. And some of the children were young teens, sitting on swings and talking and feeling vaguely nostalgic for their childhoods, so few years past.
    When the robots’ tops opened the children were startled, then delighted as the little cylinders spewed out their cargo, spraying them in a high arc where they fell clattering among the children.
    Cell phones.
    They came in pink and silver and bright metallic green, and everyone grabbed for them. These were nine and ten-year-olds, just below the age of owning their own cell phones, but old enough to crave them. Even the young teenagers who already had cell phones wanted these newer models. They shoved younger kids out of the way to lunge for them. Everyone got one. A few started making calls right away. “Guess what I just got!” The cell phones were already activated. Kids played with them happily, punching buttons to find out their numbers and calling each other, making call lists, playing games. They knew how to work these devices as instinctively as their grandparents had spun tops and picked up jacks.
    Most of them didn’t even notice the tiny warm slitheryfeeling as something was injected from the phones into their ear canals. Certainly no one displayed symptoms in that first golden hour of twilight. The most susceptible grew dizzy walking home. But by early evening they all had fevers. When news began to break about what these cylinders were doing across the country, a few cautious parents took their sick children to emergency rooms. One alarmed ER doctor even ordered a CT scan, and thereby located the tiny radioactive seed that had worked its way down the child’s blood vessels into his lungs, where it was poisoning him with growing rapidity. But finding the seed didn’t solve anything. There was no antidote.
    By midnight the parents and caregivers and medical personnel had the “illness” too. The poisoning elements spread with amazing speed. Hundreds were infected before morning, and the infection like wildfire as emergency workers tried to contain it. Whole portions of the three cities were quarantined, but to no avail.
    Cell phones lay on the floor of children’s bedrooms and hospital rooms.
    The culmination of the evening was a small nuclear explosion in the Nevada desert, close in fact to the area where nuclear testing had been conducted for decades. This one, though, was close enough for Las Vegans to see the mushroom cloud. The desert winds were unpredictable, no one was willing to guess whether they would blow the radioactive dust toward the city or away from it. Evacuation began haphazardly at first, then with slightly more organization, but emptying America’s fastest-growing city in only a few hours’ time was impossible. There weren’t enough ways out. As in Houston when Hurricane Rita had approached a decade earlier, the city turned into one giant gridlock, and stayed that way for hours. No one died of radiation poisoning, but several were killed in car wrecks, and looting was widespread. Even fabled casino security broke down, as guards began helping themselves to cash along with the customers. A few kept playing the slots, deep into the night.
    The Next Morning
    The President went on the air at 5:30 a.m., Eastern Time. It was still dark all across the country, and many people hadn’t yet heard of the attacks. Nevertheless, President Witt had an audience of eighty million viewers, which increased when the tape was replayed on all the morning news shows.
    â€œMy fellow Americans,” he began. “Some of you have heard of the mysterious attacks across this country in the last few hours. This is not a time to panic. Emergency personnel are responding. The victims are being treated and the threats ended. There have been