Robots Versus Humans (The Robot Planet Series Book 2) (2 page)

Hubby grinned, telling the story of how he’d solved that homicide. “I asked Terri why she done it after all these years. ‘You’re both pert near eighty. Why not ride it out to the end and meet Jesus clean?’”

Hubby puffed up his chest and laughed when he reported that old Terri had looked him in the eye and said, “I just couldn’t take no more. Wouldn’t be human to try.”

At trial, Terri Fellows pleaded, “not guilty for insanity.” She claimed mental abuse (which few who knew her husband would doubt). Terri told the court that the impulse had come on her “alla sudden.”

The prosecutor asked Terri if she was a good shot. Terri said she was. He asked how good and she reported brightly, “Split a match at two-hundred paces. It t’weren’t nothin’ to shoot Brad, bedroom window to the driveway. ’Specially since I set my rifle on a sandbag in the window frame.”

“So it wasn’t, ‘alla sudden?’” the prosecutor pressed.

“Well, the beatings back and forth had been goin’ on for years but I figured on it no more than a week.” Terri Fellows laughed so hard she had to be excused from the witness stand to compose herself.

At her sentencing she told the judge that the sentence, “didn’t make no never mind. Something big’s coming and the sand’s runnin’ out of our bottle. While y’all are dealing with the mess, I’ll be watching it on a prison screen y’all paid for, cozy and neat on three squares a day. There’s a big shit show comin’.”

Goddammit if old Terri wasn’t right about that. The sand had run out of our bottle and there I was standing around the back of the grocery lot with the sheriff and Raphael. Not to be ghoulish, I snuck quick glances of
 
Travis Chinto pinched in the middle. It was a shit show. Literally. I hadn’t wanted to see what was left of Travis at all. However, Raphael was my friend and mentor. He asked me along for moral support so I went.

We’d all known Travis. He could be a dick but he wasn’t really a bad guy. He was just one of those fellas who thought teasing and funny were the same thing. He didn’t deserve to die the way he did. Nobody deserves that.

“Epic,” Raphael said. “Gotta be a bot.”

The sheriff wasn’t so sure. “Back up a truck, he could have been pinched. It
is
a loading dock.”

“The piss and shit is up on the platform,” I said.

“Classic,” Raphael said. “Dante’s right. Travis didn’t die standing in front of the loading dock waiting for a truck to back into him.”

“Anything stolen from the store?” I asked.

Hubby shook his head, not to signify the negative, but to indicate bewilderment. “There are a few things still on the shelves. The back door was open. I’m not sure how much Travis had in there to begin with so it’s hard to tell.”

“I think he had a bunch of stuff, but ol’ Travis was a bit of a hoarder. I made a good offer on some supplies but he was holding out for a better deal. Guess he didn’t get it and things went awry. How many people in town have bots capable of this awfulness?” Raphael asked. “’Sides me, I mean.”

“Probably quite a few,” I said. “There aren’t that many of us hanging on in town but, those who left? I didn’t see many refugees taking their bots with them.”

“This’ll be a vagrant, I think,” Raphael said. “Somebody came in here from out of town, just passin’ through. They were looking for enough supplies to get ’em farther down the road and I reckon they found some. Killer bot and all, they just kept going.”

Hubby considered this. He probably wanted to believe it. I sure did. Still, he’d picked up something about being a sheriff somewhere. “I’ll canvas the neighborhood.”

I looked behind me. The store’s lot backed on to sand and a few houses that looked abandoned.

“Good thinking, Hub,” Raphael said. “Probably won’t take too much time, neither.”

That’s how our little mystery started. I wish it had stayed a little mystery. Instead, as Raphael would say, it became epic.

3

F
irst thing after Hubby left with the body, they left me to lock up the store. I would have hosed down the loading dock but we didn’t have water to spare.

I asked Raphael if a sex bot could squeeze a man like that. The old man laughed and I told him not to make the joke I saw coming.

“You think I was gonna make a joke in the midst of this terrible turn for Travis?”

“I could see it coming from high orbit,” I said.

“Yeah, well. It’s not like Travis and I were close friends.”

“Travis wasn’t tight with anybody that I know of but that’s a hard way to go.”

“No, I s’pose not.” The old man was of the opinion that a sex bot wasn’t amped up enough to do the kind of damage Travis had received. “They’re made to
tire
you out. They’re tight but their legs aren’t built to pinch ya like pliers.”

“Well,” I said, “that leaves Bob.” I couldn’t help wonder how much pressure the assistive bot could manage at full charge. The machine was built to carry heavy loads over long hauls and at good speed, too.

“He was charging all night. Ask him if you like, Dante.”

“That’s okay. He doesn’t strike me as the dangerous kind.”

By that, I meant that Raphael didn’t strike me as murderous. Bob did what the old man told him to do and I couldn’t see Raphael turning off the safeties and siccing his bot on Travis. I’d known the old man all my life. That was twenty-five years.

My father, Steve Bolelli, is a good man. However, he also had it in him to kill Travis if there was good reason. He’d need an awfully good reason, though. There weren’t many people left in town. Few other possibilities sprung to mind as suspects. Some asshole in the Peppard clan seemed most likely. It could have been anyone, though. No one knows another person’s mind.
 

In the old days, we would have had help from the outside on murder cases. A real detective or two would have shown up from Pecos or somewhere bigger. Aside from the murderess Terri Fellows, Hubby’s main concerns had been speeders out on 67 and the odd drunk tourist. Nobody was on 67 anymore that I saw, at least during the day. There might be a few stragglers or refugee convoys traveling at night, hiding from daytime heat and calamity. People on the road was probably mostly rumor and speculation mixed in with some lies to pass the time.

The old days of speeders and tourist trouble were far behind us. “Prolly too far for lookin’,” Raphael said. “Those days won’t come back.”

“You, me and your father are the only full-blooded Italians left in all of Marfa and prolly Presidio County.” Raphael winked. “Let’s look out for each other so’s we don’t get pinched to death, neither.”

He handed me one of his pistols. I nodded and tucked the weapon in the back of my waistband. Italian didn’t mean much to me. Italy wasn’t Italy anymore. It was all the Vatican by then. Still, I was supposed to be looking out for the store in Travis’s absence. I wanted everybody looking out for me, whatever their reasons. I was grateful for the reassuring heft of the weapon under my belt.

Raphael rode Bob toward home, promising to return later with a canteen full of water.
 

It didn’t take long for somebody to come banging on the storefront door looking for food. Rather than dare open the door, I grabbed Travis’s old baseball bat and walked around the building. I didn’t know baseball but I knew what a bat was for.

As I rounded the corner, I found Jim Peppard and his girl Susan Treehan banging on the grocery store’s metal screen like a drum. As soon as I saw Jim I wondered if he was returning to the scene of the crime. Maybe he killed Travis and was here to find out if Hubby was on to him. Maybe he was here to feign horror and appear ignorant and innocent.

“Hey, Jim. Susan. Store’s closed.”

Jim whirled on me. “What?”

“You heard me.”

He eyed the baseball bat and I suddenly felt silly holding it. I leaned on it, trying to look jaunty. “Travis is dead.”

Jim took a couple steps toward me and my grip tightened on the bat.
 

“For real?” he asked. He looked earnest and concerned. I relaxed a fraction.

“Dead as they come,” I said.

“And you’re what? Playing baseball?”

“Not in this heat. Hot in the shade soon. Worse after that. We should all go home and stay indoors, huh?”

“Boy, we need some of that fake bacon. We need some milk. I got some eggs from a couple of chickens but that’s not gonna do it.”

I didn’t care for his tone. I don’t like being called, “boy,” especially not in front of a woman and double especially not from Jim Peppard. He was no more than a year older than me.

“So?” he said.

“So what?”

“You gonna let us in?”

“Nope. Store’s closed. It’ll stay that way. Sheriff’s orders.”

“You working for Hubby now, are you? You a deputy?”

“I am not. Kind of at loose ends at the moment. Making sure nobody does their shopping out of turn.”

I had plenty of business keeping the turbines and the solar cells going but the shatter storms had passed us by and done all their damage to the north. If the arid weather held we’d all die of thirst. On the plus side, there wasn’t much for me to do besides test some circuits from time to time to make sure the juice was still flowing to the grid.

“We need to feed now, boy! Susan’s pregnant.”

I looked to Susan. She looked as surprised as I’m sure I did. Marfa used to call itself a city but it was really a small town. Given the exodus for parts unknown, more than half the town could have been planning on wandering the desert for forty years as far as I knew. That made Marfa even smaller now, a village. Small places don’t hold secrets. Secrets leak and spread out. Everybody knew Susan Treehan couldn’t have children.

“Really?” I asked Jim. “That’s your play?”

The story around town was that she had been with child when her grandfather threw her downstairs. She’d lost the baby when she was thirteen. Some said it was twins but gossips like to double tragedy so I couldn’t testify to that. No one knew who the father had been though some guessed it might have been the man who threw her downstairs.

Anyway, tragedies and scandals aside, Jim’s claim wasn’t just bold because I knew her history. Fertility rates had been falling for years on end. I hadn’t seen a new baby born in Presidio County since the economy collapsed to shit. Poverty didn’t make people sterile but whatever did was still working its sad way. Some said whatever caused the Blight in plants caused it in wombs, too. Babies were rare and an occasion for exaltation. Any woman who could claim to be pregnant would be known and everyone would be looking out for her.

Jim took another step toward me. “She needs milk, Dante.”
 

“We’re out.”

“We, huh? Travis ain’t cold yet and you’re ‘we’?”

“Today I’m we,” I said, “so they say.”

“C’mon, Jim,” Susan said. “Let’s get on home.”

“Let us in,” Jim insisted. “We’ll see for ourselves about our shopping.”

“Nope. We both know Susan isn’t pregnant. Sorry to say so, Susan. My sympathies.”

“She doesn’t need your sympathy and it sounds like you’re calling me a liar!”

“I just told you we don’t have any milk, not even the powdered kind. Sounds to me like you’re the one calling me a liar, Jim.”

Jim had six inches on me and outweighed me by sixty pounds. He was faster than you’d think, too. He snatched that bat from me in a blink.

I wasn’t being brave. Brave isn’t my thing. I think smart is more important than brave. If you want to put out an invitation to a fight, it’s easy to get a hothead like Jim to come to that party. I’d put that bat out front for easy snatching.

The pistol in the back of my waistband was what I had my mind on all along.

By the time Jim pulled that bat back for a swing at my head, he was staring into the black barrel of Raphael’s Colt 45. Bringing a bat to a gun fight gives a man second thoughts.

He wisely dropped Travis’s bat in the street and Susan pulled him back. They trotted away. Jim hurled back some insults and taunts about how he’d get me.

I invited him back to discuss his thoughts on the matter immediately. He declined and ran farther down the street saying nasty things about my mother. I could barely remember my mother so I figured he probably didn’t, either. I decided not to take it too personally. I decided long ago that, for a happier and more peaceful life, I didn’t have to react to everything. If anything, I was a bit slow to act at all and my father often thought me lazy.

If I’d seen all the conflicts bearing down on me at that moment, I might have thought about turning Raphael’s gun on myself. I wouldn’t have done it. Too much of a coward. But I would have thought about it hard.

4

D
ad showed up around noon. He wore an old cyborg rig that gave him an extra hitch in his step. He’d lost most of his right leg and right arm to the Sand Wars. The rig’s gears gave him a limp and back pain but without the cyborg suit he was much worse. He’d left the Army as a corporal but he often called himself, “Captain Make-do.” My father’s life motto might have been, “good enough.” We never changed the rugs in our house though they were threadbare. He never threw out an appliance. Broken machines were held together with wire, repaired with string, stuck together with duct tape and continued working on hope.

Seeing his handiwork on the wind farm made me long to climb aboard that train, silent and sleek, cutting across the country at high speed. I wanted to work with new equipment instead of recycling old tools and material, but maybe whoever made tools for humans wasn’t in that business anymore.

I wondered how far the train ranged before it turned back. Or maybe the solar train we saw zip through Marfa every two days wasn’t even the same machine. Maybe everyone else up and down the line received help and our little town would die by some bureaucratic oversight.

Out front of Travis’s store, my father handed me a can of peaches. “Complications ensued,” he said. “Raphael couldn’t make it back just now so I figured I could do you one better than just a canteen of water.”

I drank the thick sweet juice gratefully.

“Take it slow, son. Make it last.”