Robots Versus Humans (The Robot Planet Series Book 2) (3 page)

“I went from pissing yellow to neon orange,” I said. “Now I don’t piss at all. I’m losing all my moisture in sweat.”

“Yup.”

“What are we gonna do?”

“In the Army they tell you to stay hydrated. When you’re out of water, you don’t stay hydrated.”

That was the extent of his advice. Captain Make-do struck again.

“How many cans of peach juice we have left?” I asked.

“That’s it, son. Then we’re down to shallots packed in water.”

“Oh, God. What are shallots?”

“Dunno. But don’t worry. There’s always some more to scrounge.”

“How do you figure?”

“True in the sand so it’s true here. We’re all in the Army now. Survival’s a war. There’s no shooting but it’s the same.”

“I guess Raphael told you about Travis.”

“Wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t. Hub came around looking for advice, too.”

“Advice?”

“He’s thinking about leaving Marfa. He figures we’re done and he wants to know the best way to go about disappearing.”

“What you tell him?”

“What
did
I tell him?”

“Yessir.”

“You’ve been hanging out with old Raphael too much. You’re a young man and better educated than that. You should use your diction.”

“Yessir.”

“Don’t say it if you don’t mean it.”

I sighed. “What did you tell the sheriff about him leaving?”

“I told him I’d take his tin star from him if he was serious. He shouldn’t be leaving his post, though.”

“He must be taking Travis’s death hard.”

“Travis is why he should stay. I don’t know if he’s really serious about heading out or just kicking tires, testing the idea out on me. He’s got a duty but I’ll bet you the rest of that can of peaches he’s a coward who won’t do what needs to be done. There aren’t many of us left, you know.”

“Do we have a head count?”

“Over the last month or two, a lot of people drifted away in the night. Traveling the desert when the moon’s up makes more sense. I suspect a lot of people are holed up, watching and waiting. People probably put too much stock in that train stopping one of these days. We might have to do something about that.”

I looked up and down the street. A hot breath of wind pushed a bit of trash in circles. Dirt devils kicked up in the distance among heat shimmers. I saw no one and heard no one but I wondered if someone was watching us. “Why would someone kill Travis and not empty the store of everything, Dad?”

“Maybe it wasn’t about the food. Maybe it wasn’t planned or they got away with more than you think they did. And from what Hubby told me, the murderer doesn’t need food.”

“If a bot killed him, a machine’s safeties are off and we need to find out what that’s about and stop it.”

My father squinted up at the sun and shrugged. “There may not be many of us left but a lot of people who took off left their bots behind. Some of those bots…well, I don’t know. Just seems to me we should leave it to the sheriff and you and I should get inside before we get heatstroke. I’ve got some plans to discuss and something to explain.”

“And while we’re in there, we should inventory whatever’s left,” I said.

He smiled. “Sounds like work and our work should be compensated. That might be a problem solved, at least for a while. Do you think there are any peaches left in there?”

“Doubtful.”

“Between what’s left of Travis’s stock…hm. I wonder if we go through all the empty houses in Marfa, do you reckon we could scrounge enough to make our own way out of here
without
depending on that damn train?”

He might have been right. We didn’t get a chance to find out. We heard the people before they came into sight. They were screaming in a way that made me shake as I pulled my pistol out. My father and I both turned in the direction of the screams as if we could see what was coming. We heard no engines but whatever was on its way was coming with Hell close behind. I tried to discern how many voices sang in that terrified choir. Too many to count but, by the sound of their anguish, I guessed there’d be fewer soon.

Through the heat shimmer at the end of the street, a running crowd turned the corner. The leader was a woman in an old dune buggy. She wore goggles over her eyes and her long black curly hair was wild. Behind her came a stampede of people in cy-suits. The tech was of a much newer vintage than the assistive gear my father wore.
 

At first I thought the people in the exoskeletons were chasing the woman in the solar dune buggy. As the mob ran closer, though, I saw their faces. They ran from Death.

“Get inside, Dante,” my father said.

“What’s chasing them?”

“Whatever it is, we don’t want to be here when it arrives.”

The woman driving the buggy tried to take a sharp turn at Lincoln street and lost control of her vehicle. The buggy tipped upside down and slid into the Methodist church lot. A red stain trailed the buggy as it ground to a halt in the dirt and dust.

The mob spared her a glance and kept running in long strides. Some of the voices coalesced from nonsense into words. I heard them yelling to each other to find shelter and to hide. My father pushed me back around the corner of the store just as the swarm arrived. I glimpsed the horror of it. I wish I hadn’t.

The people in the exoskeletons ran from a horde of flying drones, most no bigger than a bat. When I squinted, I saw more. I thought it was a cloud of wasps at first. Then I heard their high whine. Insectile drones.

The people at the rear of the mob fell to those drones, picked off one by one. As the relentless bots struck, their victims clawed at their hair, their faces and their eyes to try to swat the small machines away.

As blood ran down the faces of the fallen, people ran past us in a panic. My father kept pushing me down the side of the building. I should have been moving faster but I guess the shock of it all locked me up and froze my brain. With his rig on, Dad was an irresistible force. He pressed me until I could no longer see the attack in the street. My brain thawed a little and I ran for the loading dock.

As I pulled the big door open, it moved stiffly. Meanwhile, at the front of the store, someone had fallen prey to the drones. They slammed into the metal screen, kicking and screaming. Their blows echoed through the little grocery. I felt like I was being tortured in a drum.

I heard the screams of a man and a woman. It was the shrieking of a young child that turned my stomach.

Someone started up Marfa’s civil defense siren. Beneath the siren’s howl, the screams of terror spread like fire. The town was under siege and falling fast.

5

I
almost ran to the front of the store. I stood still and covered my ears, instead. It was too late to save anyone from the carnage in the street.

There was someone to help at the back of the store, however. My father pulled someone into the store behind him. With one heave he rolled the big door shut and threw the bolt. The woman he saved wore exo-stilts. She collapsed, panting on the cool concrete floor. She shuddered and ran her fingers through the long tangles of her jet black hair. She winced and pulled hard. A small clump of hair came free in her gloved fist and she slammed her palm against the floor. When she withdrew her hand, a small metal drone in the form of a large bumblebee lay still. But not for long.

The metal insect’s wings fluttered and, with a buzz, it took flight. I swatted at it with my bare hand.

“Don’t!” the woman yelled.

Too late. A long stinger that had been retracted into the drone’s body extended like a telescope and snapped rigid. The stinger’s sharp point drove through my hand. Once the blade was through, I watched in fascinated horror as a barb extended from the tip with a sharp click.

I was dazed with pain. My father was fast. He reached out, grabbed my wrist and used his metal hand to crush the insect.

“Careful!” the woman warned. “Don’t pull out the stinger the way it went in! The stinger — ”

“Acidic venom,” my father said. “I’ve seen these before.”

He looked at me, steadying me and staring into my eyes. “It’ll hurt but not for long if we do it the right way. When I say so, take a deep breath, Dante. Okay? On three. One…two — ”

He yanked out the stinger on two. I should have seen that coming. He did the same when I stepped on a spike when I was nine and he had to yank the board off of my foot to get the long nail out.

I shrieked.

“Take a deep breath, son.”

I winced and gave that a try but all I could manage were shallow gulps of air.

The woman, still panting, stood and stumbled into the store.

“Where are you going?” my father asked. He didn’t sound angry. He sounded curious.

“Not out there,” she said. She searched the shelves. She didn’t find what she was looking for right away.

“What’s your name?” I called.

“Emma.” After a few moments she extended the legs of the exo-stilts to get a better view of the place. She turned in a slow circle, spotted what she was looking for and made for the back of the little store. She retrieved a first aid kit hanging on the wall by the customer’s chemical toilet and returned to my side in a few long strides. The exo-stilts hissed as Emma returned to close to normal height.

“Those stilts make you quite the runner, don’t they?” my father asked.

“If they didn’t, I wouldn’t be here. Barely made it as it was. You two got names?”

“I’m Steve Bolelli. This is my son, Dante.”

“What is your function in the beautiful town of Marfa?” she asked.

“I’m in the demolition business,” my father said. “Once I’m done, Dante lays cable and buries batteries under the ground I blow up.”

She said nothing as she searched the kit. She came up with two small canisters that were stuck together. Each canister fed one nozzle.

I held out my injured hand and held my breath. She aimed the nozzle carefully and sprayed the medicine, first through the palm and then through the back of my hand.

I squeezed my eyes tight against the sting.

“Does it hurt?”

“Nah,” I said. But my teeth were gritted.

“Of course, it hurts,” my father said. “The anti-biotic stings as it cleans. That’s how you know it’s still working.”

“Ouch!” I felt pressure, expanding at the edge of the wound.

“That’s the filling agent,” Dad said. “It’ll pass in a moment once the foam has filled the hole. Just like expanding insulation foam fills the spaces in a wall.”

I winced harder. “You sure?”

My father looked down at his own body. Without his cy-suit, there would be much less of him. “Not my first rodeo.”

“What’s a rodeo?” Emma asked.

“Never mind.”

The pain eased. I gave the woman a grateful nod. “Where did you come from, Emma?”

“Artesia.”

“Domers up that way,” my father said.

Emma nodded as she went through the rest of the items in the first aid kit, apparently evaluating their usefulness. “Yes. We
were
Domers, anyway. The last biodome complex in New Mexico isn’t there anymore. ”

Her sensory vest was all pockets and she dropped what she wanted to keep in a new pocket each time. Neither I nor my father thought to stop her from scavenging. I noted that after she put an item in a pocket, she patted it and said the name of the item aloud to memorize where each thing was stored: “cardio-stim…epi-pen…diarrhea med…burn gel…airway pack…scissors…”

“What happened in Artesia?” Dad asked.

“It started with a shatter storm. Dome 3 went down first. That’s where I was. Tomatoes.”

I’d never been in a shatter storm. I asked what it was like.

“It’s just like a regular storm,” Emma said, “but times twenty. It’s like whoever is in charge decided to park thunder and lightning right over your roof. At first you think it’s so intense it’s got to stop soon. Earthquakes can be intense but they don’t last long. You figure the same for the storm. Instead it gets worse. You feel the thunder rumble through your whole body and the lightning keeps flashing in bolts. Chains and bolts of lightning tore up #3 within the first few minutes. It went on for hours, though. We had twelve domes in Artesia and eight of them went down in one night. We lost every apple and fig orchard.”

My father put his back to the rear wall and slid until he was sitting on the floor. The tiny green lights in the cy-suit at his shoulder and hip flashed orange and then went dim. He was preserving battery life. I wondered how long we’d be trapped in the store.

As the howl of the civil defense sirens rose and fell in the distance, Emma told us what happened in Artesia. The noise almost swallowed the screams of the dying. But not quite.

6

“A
s each dome fell to the storm, we called in the bots to make repairs,” Emma said.

“They didn’t?” I immediately hated myself for speaking without thinking. She was here so of course the bots didn’t do their jobs.

“At first the dome drones said their self-preservation protocols kept them from climbing up and fixing things. Too much lightning. Then they said there was something wrong with the silica mixtures. I didn’t believe it so I went outside to check the tank reserves myself.”

My father barely seemed to be listening. He interrupted her to ask, “You got a lot of rain up in Artesia, did you?” Apparently, he was thinking about the storms and all the water Marfa didn’t receive.
 

“Not as much as I would have expected. There was a torrential downpour at first. Then it was all thunder and lightning. I’ve never seen anything like it. We sluiced a bunch of the captured water into the undamaged domes but they weren’t undamaged for long.”

I cleared my throat and gave Dad a hard look. “You were saying something about checking tanks?”

“Yeah. The short description is we take sand and turn it into tempered dome glass. There are three layers of it: safety, lens and solar. The storms tore through all three quickly. The window of opportunity to maintain containment shrunk pretty fast. When the bots refused to do the repairs, I joined a team of volunteers to go up on the inside of my dome to spray another layer.”