Robots Versus Humans (The Robot Planet Series Book 2) (6 page)

“What happened then?”

“Whaddayathink? A good old-fashioned fistfight. I heard the blow-by-blow. Epic! Your father doesn’t just win a fight. He makes sure it stays won after he’s walked away. Classic Steve.”

I’d been afraid that my father’s intervention on my behalf would lead to terrible retributions that would go on forever, or at least until Jim or his father killed me. I asked Raphael how to win a fight so it stays won.

The old man laughed. “You beat ’em until they’re more scared of you than they are angry. It takes a lot of beating to get that far, generally. Long as the anger’s taller than the fear, you’re safe.”

“And the sheriff never said anything?”

“Dale didn’t file no charges. Steve made sure Mr. Peppard knew that, if arrested, I’d be bailing your father out before the trial. That’s a threat that’s somethin’ powerful. If Steve got bailed out, Dale Peppard knew he’d get a beating worse than the first one. Probably end in a murder charge. Law of the jungle.”

“What’s a jungle?”

“Where most of the oxygen used to come from,” Raphael said.

Until the night of the bot invasion, the Peppard family’s fear of hurting me was taller than their anger. Big Jim Peppard came out of his house and ran up to Emma and me to explain that had changed. When a civilization collapses, some people tend to pick that time to settle old scores.

Jim Peppard made that clear when he pointed a shotgun at my head.
 

10

W
ith her enhanced vision, Emma saw Peppard coming and let out a cry of surprise. He came up behind us before she had a chance to warn me, though. I didn’t blame her. Under the circumstances, she was probably happy it wasn’t a sec bot rolling up behind us. She didn’t know the crazy danger Jim Peppard posed.
 

He hit me across the back of the head before he said a word. I cursed as I dropped to my hands and knees.
 

Then he flicked on a flashlight and saw that it was me. “Well, if it isn’t the shop boy!”

He kicked me in the ass and I went face down in the street, just like when I was seven. He was on top of me immediately, pulling Raphael’s pistol out of the back of my pants. “How you doing now, shop boy?”

I grunted. My forehead stung with road rash. I would have chucked the can of apple juice at his head but it had rolled away. “What do you want, Jim?”

“What you got? Besides the pistola and the pretty lady? Did ya get a lot out of the store? Don’t hold back now.”

“The store’s gone, Jim. The bots were wrecking everything downtown last I saw.”

“Uh-huh.” He shone his light in Emma’s eyes. “And who’s this?”

“I’m the woman who is going to save your life. Turn off that light.”

Jim laughed. “How do you figure?”

“There are sec bots in town. They have a sniper range of three kilometers at least. They aren’t fussy about who they target these days. Waving that light around could attract their attention.”

“Seems unlikely.”

“The sniper tech in those bots is basically the same as it was a few generations ago. They were first used in Korea to guard the border in the
last
century. What makes you think they can’t kill you now? Or are you thinking at all?”

“Shut up.” He pointed the pistol at her head.

Emma didn’t miss a beat. “Have you ever seen the domes or pictures of the domes?”

“Sure.”

“You know why you don’t see piles of bodies all along the perimeter? It’s because sec bots kill the people trying to get through the fence way out in the desert before they even get close. It wouldn’t look good to have all that rotting meat just outside the fence. And now those same bots are in your town killing people.”

I think she had more to say but Peppard turned off his flashlight.

“We’ve got to get off the street,” I said. “A flashlight beam might attract attention but those things can see in the dark just fine.”

“That so?” Peppard sounded uncertain. Then he sounded almost friendly. “You’re right, Dante. We should get off the street. What say I go get Sue and we go to your Dad’s house? Between him and Raphael, I bet they got ideas about how to get out of here with our heads still screwed on straight.”

His silhouette was clear enough in the moonlight. He turned to Emma to explain, “Raphael’s the richest man in town, even if he does live in a shitty house next to shop boy’s dad.”

I stood slowly, feeling along my scalp. It hurt, but he hadn’t broken the skin. “Where is Susan?”

“Down in the basement with my parents praying for deliverance. I told them deliverance would arrive shortly but I figured I better go find it in case it didn’t come to us in a timely manner. And here you are. Everything worked out.”

“Give me my gun back.”

“Let’s talk about who gives and gets what at your place, shop boy.”

“My father is not going to let you into his house. Raphael won’t, either.”

“Times change.”

“People don’t,” I said.

“You’re going to need an alpha man who’s handy with a gun,” he said. “If I were a bot you’d both be dead right now. Well, you’d be dead, Dante. For you, honey? Well, you’re too pretty to die. Never did catch your name and I ain’t never seen you around town. I would have remembered. What is your name, darlin’?”

“Emma.”

“Emma. I like that. That’s kind of an old-fashioned name. Domer, I take it? Bunch of ’em ran through here earlier, chased by metal insects. You don’t see that every day.”

“Jim, do you get what’s happening? The whole town is under attack. I don’t even know if my father is still alive!”

“Calm down, shop boy. I’m talking to Emma.”

“What do you want?” she asked.

“Nice stilts, girl. You can go pretty far and fast on those, I bet.”

“They got me this far.”

I could see the white of his toothy grin in the moonlight. “How about you slip those off and go along with Dante under your own power. I know my way around here. I’ll scout the area and see what I can find.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Emma said.

I heard the click of the hammer on the pistol. I didn’t need to see every detail in the dark like Emma. I knew Jim Peppard was pointing my weapon at me.

“Shit,” I said.

“So?” Jim asked. “If I have to shoot him, that’s kind of on you, isn’t it, Emma? How do you want to handle it? I can be a friend or I can be scary. You want the scary guy on your side, trust me.”

“That’s the problem,” Emma said. “You can never trust a scary guy.”

“I’m just trying to survive,” Peppard said. “There’s no rules anymore. None but what we make ourselves. To my mind, that’s is as should be. If the old rules worked, we wouldn’t be in this predicament, would we?”

“Don’t do this,” Emma said.

“C’mon now. I’m the scary guy. Don’t make me be the bad guy. I’ve known Dante all my life. We never got along but I never quite figured on killing him, neither. I’ve never killed anybody…but, like I said, the rules have changed. They’re still changing. Every second you say no, it’s getting easier and easier for me to do what I want just because I got the guns and you’re starting to piss me off. This is already over. You just haven’t admitted it to yourself yet.”

He took a step my way. I held my hands up in front of me, turned my head and squeezed my eyes tight. It wouldn’t stop him from blowing my brains out. I was pretty sure he was going to shoot me but I pleaded with Emma, “Just give it to him. Please!”

“Hear that, Emma? Shop boy says, ‘please.’ It’s all up to you.”

He took another step closer and Emma shouted, “Okay! Don’t shoot!”

“That’s more like it,” Peppard said.

“Stop pointing the gun at Dante,” she said. “You’ll need your flashlight. If you’re going to operate my exo-stilts properly, get over here and pay attention. I don’t want you damaging my equipment.”

Peppard laughed. “That’s just fine, Emma. I knew you’d listen to reason. Siddown, Dante.”

He stalked back toward her and, by the beam of his little flashlight, I watched Emma sit down in the street.

I wished a sec bot’s sniper bullet would dig through Jim Peppard’s head. I could almost see it happening in my mind’s eye. My father had described pink mist and cavitation so often, it was easy to picture Jim’s skull getting blown apart. The expensive ammunition any military bot uses would explode and split into barbs. The bots would shred his useless brain and I wouldn’t shed a tear.

“This is the sensory harness,” Emma explained. “This readout shows you how much battery life is left. This little lever here extends the legs for longer strides. The gyros automatically compensate for rough terrain. It takes some getting used to but you probably won’t have balance issues for long. These clips here are for hauling heavy loads.”

“Yeah, yeah. Let’s go.”

“Wait,” Emma said. “This is the most important function key here. See this?” She pointed at a recessed button on her harness as she lifted one leg.

“Yeah. What’s that do?” Peppard asked.

The exoskeleton’s metal foot pointed, almost daintily. Jim Peppard’s laugh was cut short as the rail of the exoskeleton’s leg shot out and punched through the center of his chest with a wet crunch. He flew backward like a man-sized doll, boneless and useless.

Emma took a deep breath and held it a second before letting it out slowly through clenched teeth. “Jump mode, asshole.”

11

E
mma skidded backward on her bum a little when the blow was delivered. That wasn’t why she was crying when she stood up. Jim made bubbling sounds from his mouth and each shuddering breath was thin and wet.

The flashlight had spun away and I dashed to retrieve it. Once I had that, I rushed back to check on Jim. I wasn’t thinking. I was just moving, working on automatic. If he’d still had my pistol in his fist, I would have tried to kill him. Instead, I found him on his back, disarmed and spitting blood.

I picked up his shotgun. He’d never need it again.

Jim’s breath came and went in short pants, shallower by the moment. One eye was rolled back. The other might have been looking at me but his stare had that blank, uncomprehending look. The big bloody hole in his chest told me my worries about big Jim Peppard were over.

I retrieved the pistol and considered putting Jim out of his misery. I wasn’t the guy for that job, though. Besides, a gunshot might invite the sort of attention we didn’t want from Jim’s father or from sec bots.

Emma joined me. She took the flashlight to turn it off. “I wasn’t kidding about the sec bots in sniper mode. Let’s go.”

“He’s still alive.”

“Not for long.”

“No. I s’pose not.” I looked down at my first enemy dying in the moonlight. Jim had been the only enemy I’d ever had. I had thought I wouldn’t feel anything if he was erased from the Earth. I did, though. It was a strange mixture of satisfaction and pity. I guess my satisfaction at his defeat was a little taller than my pity.

Emma was not stone. She wept but, looking back on it now, I think she cried for what he made her do. “Should we say something?” she asked.

“You mean, like…words over the body? He’s not dead yet.”

“Any moment now.”

“Maybe we should say something while he can still hear us.” I knelt beside him and whispered. “You were right, Jim. Everything worked out.”

That was a bit mean but it was the only eulogy I had in me. I’m ashamed of that now.

“Should we stay with him until he’s gone? Or tell his family?” Emma suggested.

“I don’t think the Peppards would take that well. No sense borrowing trouble. We got plenty on hand.”

I stood. “Past time we went. Sorry I wasn’t more help when the shit hit the turbine.”

“There was nothing you could do that wouldn’t leave you dead.”

“I was taught there is always a way and all you have to do is find it.”

“Always? That’s stupid. Who taught you that? There was nothing you could do. Period.”

“Still. Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Just show me where we’re hiding tonight. I’m exhausted.”

That sounded cold but I concluded Emma was a logical thinker. Logical thinkers are what every disaster needs. If we had a few more like her, we wouldn’t be in this apocalypse in the first place.
 

I left the man I’d known as a boy to die in the dark in the street between his house and mine. I’d passed that place who knows how many times. When something monumental happened somewhere, people used to put up monuments and plaques and crosses. Now that something bad was happening everywhere, there weren’t enough people left to put up monuments. The ratio of the dead to the survivors had flipped in a bad way. Not that Jim Peppard was worth a statue or anything. He could have lived a thousand years and never earned so much as a thank you note for his good works.

When I look back on the first day the bots came to Marfa, there are certain things that stand out above the others: the crane bot rummaging under the City Hall’s roof, that old man’s decapitated head held high in a bot’s claw and the children screaming along with their mothers and fathers. There weren’t many kids around anymore so their loss was somehow even worse.

Chief among these memories, I think I will remember best the feeling of a gun pointed at my head. I was sure I was about to die and, despite everything that had happened that day, I still wanted to live.

That’s a mystery for the ages. Old people can get tired of living and, on their deathbeds, they’ll ask earnestly why they should bother about seeing another sunrise. Surviving the apocalypse is for the young and stupid, I think. We still have the will to keep going when a wiser person would give up, lay down and relax into oblivion.

Down the street, a smaller mystery was solved easily. Steve Bolelli, resourceful and determined as ever, had survived another day of war. My father had not hugged me since I was little but he did that day.

“I don’t think I managed to draw any drone away from downtown,” he said. “Makes sense. They want maximum casualties so they stuck where the largest population density was. To get up here, I went to the edge of town and took the long way.”

“We did the same,” I said.

“I knew you would, son. You got my brains and your mother’s ass.”