Robopocalypse (11 page)

I never see the old couple again.

That night, the lookers fly past about once an hour. The gentle
thup-thup
of their rotors cuts through my nightmares. My brain is caught in a never-ending loop, feverishly considering how to survive this.

Aside from some damaged buildings, most of the city seems intact. Flat, paved roads. Doors that open and close smoothly. Stairs or wheelchair ramps. Something occurs to me.

I wake Dawn up and whisper to her. “You’re right, honey. They keep it clean so they can operate here. But we can make it hard on them.
Hard
. Mess up the streets so they can’t get around. Blow some stuff up.”

Dawn sits up. She looks at me in disbelief.

“You want to destroy our city?”

“It’s not our city anymore, Dawn.”

“The machines are down there, wrecking everything we’ve built. Everything
you’ve
built. And now you want to go and do it for them?”

I put my hand on her shoulder. She is strong and warm. My answer is simple: “Demolition is a part of construction.”

I start with our own building.

Using a sledgehammer, I punch through walls into the neighboring units. I knock the holes at waist height to stay clear of electrical outlets and I avoid kitchens and bathrooms. There’s no time to suss out load-bearing walls, so I take my best guess and hope a single hole won’t bring down the ceiling.

Dawn collects food and tools from the empty apartments. I drag heavy furniture into the hallway and barricade the doors from the inside. By ducking through our holes, we’re free to explore the whole floor.

In the lobby, I demolish everything I see and pile the debris in front of the main door. I smash the elevator, the plants, and the front desk. The walls, the mirrors, the chandelier. All of it breaks down to form a pile of loose wreckage.

Oh, and I lock the front lobby door. Just in case it matters.

I come across a couple of people on other floors of the building, but they holler through their doors and refuse to come out. I get no response from most of the doors I knock on.

Then it’s time for the next step.

I go on foot at dawn, slipping from doorway to doorway. The newer-model cars parked around the neighborhood don’t notice me if I stay out of their line of sight. I always keep a bus bench or a lamppost or a newsstand between myself and the cars.

And I sure as hell don’t step off the curb.

I find the demolition gear where I left it three days ago, before the New War started. It’s undisturbed in the back room at work, only a few blocks from where we live. I carry my gear back home and make a second trip, at dusk when the light is trickiest. Domestic robots can see just fine in the dark and they don’t have to sleep, so I figure nothing is to be gained from going at night.

On my first trip, I spool detonation cord around my forearm, then push it over my head and wear it like a bandolier. The cord is long and flexible and girlishly pink. You can wrap it five times around a wooden telephone pole to blast it in half. Fifteen times to launch the pole twenty feet in the air and shower the area in splinters.

But all in all, detcord is pretty stable stuff.

On the next trip, I fill a duffel bag with shoe-box-sized packs of blast caps. Ten to a box. And I grab the initiator box. Almost as an afterthought, I grab safety goggles and earplugs.

I’m going to blow up the building across the street.

With the sledgehammer, I make sure nobody is holed up in the top three floors. The robots already targeted this place and cleaned it out. No gore. No bodies. Just that eerie cleanliness. The lack of clutter scares me. It reminds me of those ghost stories where explorers find empty towns with dishes set on the table and the mashed potatoes still warm.

The creepy feeling motivates me to move fast and methodically, as I throw canned food onto a sheet that I drag down the dark hallways.

On the roof I lay out a few lines of detcord. I stay away from the water tower. On the top floor, I line the walls of more apartments with more detcord and drop a few blasting caps. I keep my distance from the central skeleton of the building. I don’t want to bring down the whole thing, just do some cosmetic damage.

I work alone and silently and it goes fast. Normally, my crew would spend months wrapping the walls with geotextiles to absorb flying shrapnel. All explosions throw chunks of metal and concrete for surprising distances. But this time, I
want
the debris. I want to damage nearby buildings, chew them up and blow out their windows. I want to tear holes in the walls. Gouge out the apartments and leave them like empty eye sockets.

Finally, I dart across the street and into my building’s open parking garage door. The rolling metal door is already torn off its hinges from when the smart cars left the garage on the first day. The door hangs there like a scab about to fall off. Nothing is inside but dumb older-model cars and darkness. The initiator in my hand, I creep way down into the garage, doubling the range because I haven’t kept to the usual safety precautions.

It only takes one fist-sized chunk of concrete to make your head into a bowl of helmet spaghetti.

I find Dawn waiting inside the garage. She’s been busy, too.

Tires.

Tires piled up five high. She’s raided the garage and found the old-model cars down there. She stripped their tires off and rolled them up to the doorway.

It smells funny, too, like gasoline.

Suddenly I understand.

Cover.

Dawn looks at me, raises her eyebrows, then splashes gasoline onto a tire.

“I’ll light it, you roll it,” she says.

“You’re a goddamn genius, woman,” I say.

Her eyes try to smile, but the sharp line of her mouth seems to have been chiseled from stone.

From the safety of the garage, we roll about a dozen burning tires out into the street. They fall over and burn, sending coils of concealing smoke up into the air. We listen from the darkness as a passenger car approaches, slow. It stops in front of the tires, maybe thinking about how to get around.

We retreat deeper inside the garage.

I hold up the initiator and turn the fail-safe. A cherry-red light hovers before me in the darkness of the garage. With my thumb, I feel the cold metal switch. I put one arm around Dawn, plant a kiss on her cheek, and throw the switch.

We hear a sharp snapping sound from across the street, and the ground heaves beneath us. A groan echoes through the dark cave of the garage. We wait in darkness for five minutes, listening to each other breathe. Then Dawn and I march up the sloping driveway, hand in hand, toward the smashed garage door. At the top, we peer through the torn gate and blink into the sunlight.

We look into the new face of the city.

The roof across the street is smoking. Thousands of panes of glass have shattered and plummeted to the street, where they now form a crunchy layer, kind of like fish scales. Chunks of rubble litter the ground, and the entire front of our building has been cratered and sandblasted. Street signs and lampposts have been thrown down across the road. Chunks of pavement, bricks and mortar, thick black wires, knots of plumbing, twisted balls of wrought iron, and tons of unrecognizable debris are piled everywhere we look.

The passenger sedan is still parked near the heap of burning tires. It has been crushed under a pie-shaped chunk of concrete, its rebar poking out like a compound fracture.

The choking black loops of tire smoke cloud the air and blot out the sky.

And the dust. Firemen would hose down the dust on a typical job. Without them, dust settles in layers everywhere like dirty snow. I see no tire tracks, which tells me no cars have been around here—yet. Dawn is already rolling a lit tire toward the intersection.

I stumble over rubble into the middle of the street and for a moment I feel as though, once again, the city is
mine
. I kick the side of the destroyed car. I really throw my weight into it and leave a boot-sized dent in the quarter panel.

Got you, you son of a bitch. And your friends are gonna have to learn to climb if they want to come get
me.

With my sleeve protecting my mouth, I survey the damage to the building facades. And I begin to laugh. I laugh loud and long. My hooting and howling echoes from the buildings, and even Dawn looks up from rolling her tire and cracks a little smile at me.

And then I see them. People. Just a half dozen, emerging into the light from doorways farther down the street. The neighborhood isn’t gone, I think. It was just hiding. The people, my neighbors, step out one by one into the street.

The wind sweeps the inky black smoke up over our heads. Small fires burn up and down the block. Rubble is strewn everywhere. Our little slice of America looks like a war zone. And we look like the survivors of some disaster film.
Just like we damn well should,
I think.

“Listen,” I announce to the ragged semicircle of survivors. “It won’t be safe out here for very long. The machines are going to come back. They’re going to try to clean this up, but we can’t let them. They were
built
for this place and we can’t have that. We can’t make it easy for them to come after us. We’ve got to slow them down. Even stop them, if we can.”

And when I finally say it out loud, I can hardly believe my ears. But I know what has to be done here, even if it’s hard. So I look into the eyes of my fellow survivors. I take a deep breath and I tell them the truth: “If we want to live, we’ve got to
destroy New York City.
”

The demolition methods pioneered in New York City by Marcus Johnson and his wife, Dawn, were replicated throughout the world over the next several years. By sacrificing the infrastructure of entire cities, urban survivors were able to dig in, stay alive, and fight back from the very beginning. These dogged city dwellers formed the heart of the early human resistance. Meanwhile, millions of human refugees were still fleeing to the country, where Rob had not yet evolved to operate. He soon would
.

—
CORMAC
WALLACE,
MIL#GHA217

3. H
IGHWAY
70

Laura, this is your father. Bad things are happening.
I can’t talk. Meet me at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Gotta go.

M
ARCELO
P
EREZ

ZERO HOUR

This account was pieced together from conversations overheard in a forced-labor camp, roadside surveillance footage, and the sentiments expressed by a former congresswoman to her fellow prisoners. Laura Perez, mother of Mathilda and Nolan Perez, had no idea of the instrumental role that her family would play in the imminent conflict—or that in just under three years her daughter would save my life and the lives of my squad mates
.

—
CORMAC
WALLACE,
MIL#GHA217

“Hurry up, Nolan,” urges Mathilda, clutching a map and shrinking into the warmth of the car.

Eight years old, Nolan stands on the shoulder of the road, his small silhouette painted onto the pavement by dawn sunlight. He wobbles, concentrating furiously on peeing. Finally, mist rises from a puddle in the dirt.

The Ohio morning is moist and chilly on this empty two-lane dirt highway. Brown hills stretch for miles around, silent. My antique car pants, sending clouds of carbon monoxide gliding over the dewy pavement. Somewhere far away, a predatory bird screeches.

“See, Mom? I told you we shouldn’t let him drink the apple juice.”

“Mathilda, be nice to your brother. He’s the only one you’ll ever have.”

It’s a mom thing to say, and I’ve said it a thousand times. But this morning I find myself relishing the normalcy of the moment. We search for the ordinary when we are surrounded by the extraordinary.

Nolan is finished. Instead of sitting in the backseat, he climbs into the front, right onto his sister’s lap. Mathilda rolls her eyes but says nothing. Her brother doesn’t weigh much and he’s scared. And she knows it.

“You zip up, buddy?” I ask, out of habit. Then I remember where I am and what’s happening, or going to happen soon. Maybe.

My eyes flicker to the rearview mirror. Nothing yet.

“Let’s go, Mom. Geez,” says Mathilda. She shakes out the map and stares at it, like a mini adult. “We’ve got like another five hundred miles to go.”

“I wanna see Grampa,” whines Nolan.

“Okay, okay,” I say. “Back on the road. No more bathroom breaks. We’re not stopping until Grampa’s house.”

I jam my foot on the accelerator. The car lurches forward, loaded with jugs of water, boxes of food, two cartoon-themed suitcases, and camping gear. Under my seat, I’ve got a Glock 17 pistol in a black plastic case, cocooned in gray foam. It’s never been fired.

The world has changed over the last year. Our technology has been going feral. Incidents. The incidents have been piling up, slowly but surely. Our transportation, our communications, our national defense. The more incidents I saw, the more the world began to feel hollow, as if it could collapse at any moment.

Then my daughter told me a story. Mathilda told me about Baby-Comes-Alive, and she finished by saying those words that she could not know, could never know: robot defense act.

When she said it, I looked into her eyes and I
knew
.

Now I am running. I am running to save the lives of my children. Technically, this is an emergency vacation. Personal days. Congress is in session today. Maybe I’ve lost my mind. I hope I have. Because I believe that something is in our technology. Something evil.

Today is Thanksgiving.

The inside of this old car is loud. Louder than any car I’ve ever driven. I can’t believe the kids are asleep. I can hear the tires gnawing the pavement. Their rough vibrations are translated right through the steering wheel and into my hands. When I push the brake with my foot, it moves a lever that applies friction to the wheels. Even the knobs and buttons jutting out of the dash are solid and mechanical.

The only worthwhile thing about the car is the satellite radio. Sleek and modern, it churns out pop music that manages to keep me awake and distract me from the road noise.

I’m not used to this—doing the work for my technology. The buttons I usually push don’t need my force, only my intention. Buttons are supposed to be servants, waiting to deliver your commands to the machine. Instead, this loud, dumb piece of steel I’m driving demands that I pay strict attention to every turn of the road, keep my hands and feet ready at all times. The car takes no responsibility for the job of driving. It leaves me in total control.

I hate it. I don’t want control. I just want to get there.

But this is the only car I could find without an intravehicular communication chip. The government made IVC chips standard more than a decade ago, same as they did seat belts, air bags, and emissions criteria. This way, the cars can talk to one another. They can figure out ways to avoid or minimize damage in the milliseconds before a crash. There were glitches at first. One company recalled a few million cars because their chips were reporting to be three feet ahead of where they really were. It made other cars swerve away unnecessarily—sometimes into trees. But in the long run, the IVC chip has saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

New cars come with IVC chips, and old cars require a safety upgrade. A few cars, like this one, were grandfathered in because they’re too primitive even for the upgrade.

Most people think only an idiot would drive such an old car, especially with children on board. It’s a thought I try to ignore as I focus on the road, imagining how people used to do this.

As I drive, a feeling of unease creeps over me and settles into a knot in the middle of my back. I’m tensed up, waiting. For what? Something has changed. Something is different and it’s scaring me.

I can’t put my finger on it. The road is empty. Scrubby bushes cluster on either side of the dusty two-lane highway. My kids are asleep. The car sounds the same.

The radio.

I’ve heard this song before. They played it maybe twenty minutes ago. Hands on the steering wheel, I stare straight ahead and drive. The next song is the same. And the next. After fifteen minutes, the first song plays again. The satellite radio station is looping the last quarter hour of music. I switch the radio off, not looking, punching at the buttons blindly with my fingers.

Silence.

Coincidence. I’m sure it’s a coincidence. In another few hours, we’ll reach my dad’s house in the country. He lives twenty miles outside Macon, Missouri. The man is a technophobe. Never owned a cell phone or a car made within the last twenty years. He’s got radios, lots of radios, and that’s all. He used to build them from kits. The place where I grew up is wide-open and empty and safe.

My cell phone rings.

I scoop it out of my purse, scan the number. Speak of the devil. It’s my dad.

“Dad?”

“Laura, this is your father. Bad things are happening. I can’t talk. Meet me at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Gotta go.”

And the phone cuts off.
What?

“Was that Grampa?” asks Mathilda, yawning.

“Yes.”

“What’d he say?”

“There’s been a change of plans. He wants us to meet him in a different place, now.”

“Where?”

“Indianapolis.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, honey.”

Something flickers in the rearview mirror.

For the first time in a long time, there is another vehicle on the highway. I feel relieved. Another person is out here. The rest of the world is still fine. Still sane. It’s a truck. People have trucks out here in the country.

But as the truck accelerates and grows closer, I begin to feel scared. Mathilda sees my pale cheeks, my worried frown. She can feel my fright. “Where are we?” she asks.

“Not far now,” I say, watching the rearview.

“Who’s behind us?”

Mathilda sits up and cranes to look back.

“Sit still, Mathilda. Tighten your seat belt.”

The newish brown pickup truck grows rapidly in the mirror. It moves smoothly but too fast.

“Why’s it coming so fast?” asks Mathilda.

“Mommy?” asks Nolan, rubbing his eyes.

“Quiet, you two. I need to concentrate.”

Dread rises in my throat as I watch the rearview. I ease the accelerator down to the floor, but the brown truck is flying now. Sucking up the pavement. I can’t take my eyes off the mirror.

“Mommy,” exclaims Mathilda.

My eyes dart back to where the road is supposed to be and I swerve to negotiate a bend. Nolan and Mathilda hold each other tight. I get the car under control, veer back to my lane. Then, just as we come around the bend to a long straightaway, I see another car in the oncoming lane. It is black and new and now there is no place for us to go.

“Get in the backseat, Nolan,” I say. “Get buckled in. Mathilda, help him.”

Mathilda scrambles to push her brother off her lap and into the backseat. Nolan looks at me, stricken. Big tears are welling in his eyes. He sniffles and reaches for me.

“It’s okay, baby. Just let your sister help you. Everything’s going to be fine.”

I make a steady stream of baby talk while I focus on the road. My eyes alternate between the black car in front and the brown truck behind. Both are closing fast.

“Okay, we’re buckled in, Mommy,” reports Mathilda from the backseat. My little soldier. Before my mother passed away, she used to say that Mathilda was an old soul. It was in her eyes, she said. You could see the wisdom in her beautiful green eyes.

I hold my breath and squeeze the wheel. The hood of the brown truck fills the entire rearview mirror, then disappears. I look to my left in wide-eyed wonder as the rattling brown truck swerves into the oncoming lane. A woman is looking back at me through the passenger window. Her face is warped by terror. Tears stream down her cheeks and her mouth is open and I realize that she’s screaming and pounding her fists—

And then she’s gone, obliterated in a head-on collision with the black car. Like matter and antimatter. It’s as if they’ve erased each other from existence.

Only the awful mechanical grinding crunch of metal collapsing into metal echoes in my ears. In the rearview, a dark lump of metal rolls off the road, throwing smoke and chunks of debris.

It’s gone. Maybe it never happened. Maybe I imagined it.

Slowing the car, I pull off the road. I put my forehead on the cool plastic of the steering wheel. I close my eyes and try to breathe, but my ears are ringing and that woman’s face is on the backs of my eyelids. My hands are shaking. I reach under my thighs and pull tight to steady myself. The questions start from the backseat but I can’t answer them.

“Is that lady okay, Mommy?”

“Why did those cars do that?”

“What if more cars come?”

A few minutes pass. My breath squeezes painfully in and out of my clenched diaphragm. I strain out the sobs, choke down on my emotions to keep the kids calm.

“It’s going to be okay,” I say. “We’re going to be okay, you guys.”

But my voice rings hollow even in my own ears.

Ten minutes down the road, I come across the first accident.

Smoke pours from twisted wreckage, like a black snake writhing through shattered windows, escaping into the air. The car is half on its side next to the road. A guardrail zigzags out into the road from where it was bashed into during the accident. There are flames coming from the rear of the car.

Then, I see movement—people motions.

In a flash, I imagine myself stepping on the accelerator and speeding past. But I’m not that person. Not yet, anyway. I guess people don’t change that fast, even in the apocalypse.

I pull over a few yards down the road from the wrecked car. It’s a white four door with Ohio plates.

“Stay in the car, kids.”

The hood of the wrecked car is crumpled up like a tissue. The bumper lies on the ground, cracked in half and covered in mud. A mess of engine parts are visible, and the tires point in different directions. I gasp when I notice that one end of the guardrail is going
into
the passenger-side door.