Robopocalypse (14 page)

Twenty-two seconds.

I turn to Yubin-kun. Mikiko lies sprawled on top of the beige box, her black hair splayed out. I look down into her gently smiling face. She is so beautiful and pure. In her slumber, she dreams of me. She waits for me to break this evil spell and wake her. Someday, she will arise and become my queen.

If only I had more time.

The dry, menacing click of the elevator gauge breaks my reverie. I am a helpless old man and I am out of ideas. I take Mikiko’s limp hand in mine and turn to face the elevator doors.

“I am so sorry, Mikiko,” I whisper. “I tried, my darling. But now there is nowhere else—
Ay!
”

I hop backward and rub my foot where Yubin-kun has run it over. The machine’s intention light blinks at me frantically. On the wall, the red dot reaches my floor. My time is up.

Bing
.

A burst of cool air blows from the service elevator across the hall from the main elevator bank. Its door panel slides out of the way and I see a steel box inside, just a little bigger than the mailbot. On its sticky wheels, Yubin-kun slides into the cramped space with Mikiko still lying on top.

There is just enough room for me to squeeze inside, too.

As I enter, I hear the main elevator doors open across the hall. I look up just in time to see the plastic grin of the Big Happy domestic robot standing inside the blood-coated elevator. Streaks of red liquid bead on its casing. Its head twists back and forth, scanning.

The head stops, its lifeless purple camera eyes locked onto me.

Then, the door of my service elevator slides closed. Just before the floor drops out from under me, I squeeze out a few words to my new comrade. “Thank you, Yubin-kun,” I say. “I am in your debt, my friend.”

Yubin-kun was the first of Takeo’s comrades in arms. In the harrowing months following Zero Hour, Takeo would find many more friends willing to help his cause
.

—
CORMAC
WALLACE,
MIL#GHA217

6. A
VTOMAT

My day is going kind of nice
.

S
PC
. P
AUL
B
LANTON

ZERO HOUR

In the wake of the congressional hearing regarding the SAP incident, Paul Blanton was charged with dereliction of duty and scheduled to be court-martialed. During Zero Hour, Paul found himself locked up on a base in Afghanistan. This unusual circumstance placed the young soldier in a unique position to make an invaluable contribution to the human resistance—and to survive
.

—
CORMAC
WALLACE,
MIL#GHA217

Back in Oklahoma, my dad used to tell me that if I didn’t straighten up and act like a man, I’d end up dead or in jail. Lonnie Wayne was right about that, which is why I ended up enlisted. But still. Thank god I was in lockup for Zero Hour.

I’m laying on my cell bunk, back against the cinder block wall and my combat boots propped up on the steel toilet. Got a rag over my face to keep the dust out of my nostrils. I’ve been incarcerated ever since my SAP unit lost its mind and started wasting people.

C’est la vie
. That’s what my cell mate, Jason Lee, says. He’s a portly Asian kid with glasses, doing sit-ups on the cement floor. Says he does it to stay warm.

I’m not the exercising type. For me, these six months have meant a lot of magazines to read. Staying warm means growing a beard.

Boring, sure, but all the same, my day is going kind of nice. I’m perusing a four-month-old issue of some stateside celebrity rag. Learning all about how “movie stars are just like us.” They like to eat at restaurants, go shopping, take their kids to the park—shit like that.

Just like us. Yeah. By us, I don’t think they mean me.

It’s an educated guess, but I doubt that movie stars care about repairing militarized humanoid robots that are designed to subdue and pacify a murderously angry population in an occupied country. Or being thrown into a thirteen-by-seven-foot cell with one tiny window just for performing your glamorous job.

“Bruce Lee?” I ask. He hates it when I call him that. “Did you know movie stars are just like us? Who knew, man?”

Jason Lee stops doing sit-ups. He looks up at me where I’m leaning back into the corner of our cell. “Quiet,” he says. “Do you hear that?”

“Hear wha—”

And then a tank round discharges through the wall across the room. A blazing shower of rebar and cement shreds my cell mate into big flabby chunks of flesh wrapped in what’s left of dust-colored army fatigues. Jason was here and now he’s gone. Like a magic trick. I can’t even process this.

I’m huddled in the corner—miraculously uninjured. Through the bars, I see the duty officer is no longer at his desk. There isn’t any desk anymore. Just chunks of rubble. For a split second, I can see through the new hole that’s been blasted in the wall across the room.

There are, as I suspected, tanks on the other side of it.

A cloud of frigid dust rolls into the room, and I start to shiver. Jason Lee was correct: It’s a cold motherfucker out there. It registers that despite the new renovation across the room, the bars of my cell are just as strong and steady as before.

My hearing starts to return. Visibility is nil, but I identify a trickling sound, like a creek or something. It’s what’s left of Jason Lee, bleeding out.

Also, my magazine seems to have disappeared.

Fuck.

I press my face against the mesh-wire-reinforced window of my cell. Outside, the base has gone FUBAR. I’ve got eyes on the alley leading to the main pavilion of the Kabul green zone. A couple of friendly soldiers are out there, crouched against a mud-brick wall. They look young, confused. They’re in full rig: backpacks, body armor, goggles, knee pads—all that crap.

How safe can safety goggles make a war?

The lead soldier peeks his head around the corner. He hops back, excited. He yanks out a Javelin antitank missile launcher and loads it, fast and smooth. Good training. Just then, an American tank cruises past the alleyway and spits a shell without stopping. It lobs over the base and away from us. I feel the building quake as the shell impacts somewhere.

Through the window, I watch the antitank soldier step out of the alley, sit down cross-legged with that log on his shoulder, and get filleted by incoming antipersonnel tank fire. It’s an automated tank protection system that targets certain silhouettes—like “guy holding antitank weapon”—within a certain radius.

Any insurgent would have known better.

I frown, forehead pressed against the thick window. My hands are jammed in my armpits to stay warm. I got no idea why that American tank just erased a friendly soldier, but I have a feeling that it has something to do with SAP One committing suicide.

The remaining soldier in the alley watches his buddy go down in pieces, turns, and runs back toward me. Just then, a billowing black cloth blocks my view. It’s a robe. A bad guy just crossed in front of my window. I hear small arms fire, close.

Bad guys
and
nutso equipment? Fuck, man. When it rains it pours.

The robe flutters away and the whole alley just disappears, replaced by black smoke. The glass of my window buckles and fractures, slicing my forehead open. I hear the hollow concussion a split second later. I fall back onto my bunk, grab the blanket, and pull it over my shoulders. Check my face. My fingers come away bloody. When I look back out the fractured window, there are only dust-covered lumps in the alley. Bodies of soldiers, locals, and insurgents.

The tanks are killing
everybody
.

It is becoming very clear to me that I’ve got to find a way out of this cell if I want my future to include breathing.

Outside, something roars by overhead, ripping dark vortices out of the rising smoke. Probably an armed drone. I cower back in my bunk. The dust is starting to clear out now. I spot the keys to my cell across the room. They’re still attached to a broken belt, hanging from a splintered piece of chair. Might as well be on Mars.

No weapons. No armor. No hope.

Then a blood-covered insurgent ducks in through the blasted-out hole in the wall. He catches sight of me, stares wide-eyed. One side of his face is plastered with brown-white alkaline sand and the other side is caked with powdered blood. His nose is broken and his lips are swollen up from the cold. The hair of his black mustache and beard is fine, wiry. He can’t be more than sixteen years old.

“Let me out, please. I can help you,”
I say in my finest Dari. I pull the rag off my face so he can see my beard. At least he’ll know I’m not active duty.

The insurgent presses his back against the wall and closes his eyes. It looks like he’s praying. Dirt-caked hands pressed flat against the blasted concrete wall. At least he has an old-fashioned revolver hanging on his hip. He’s scared but operational.

I can’t make out his prayer, but I can tell it isn’t for his own life. He’s praying for the souls of his buddies. Whatever’s happening out there sure ain’t pretty.

Better hit the road.

“The keys are on the floor, friend,” I urge. “Please, I can help you. I can help you stay alive.”

He looks at me, stops praying.

“The avtomata have come for us all,” he says. “We thought the avto were rising up against you. But they are thirsty for all our blood.”

“What’s your name?”

He eyes me suspiciously.

“Jabar,” he says.

“Okay, Jabar. You’re going to survive this. Free me. I’m unarmed. But I know these, uh, avtomata. I know how to kill them.”

Jabar picks up the keys, flinching as something big and black barrels down the street outside. He picks his way over the rubble to my cell.

“You are in prison.”

“Yeah, that’s right. See? We’re on the same side.”

Jabar thinks about it.

“If they have put you in prison, it is my duty to free you,” he says. “But if you attack me, I will kill you.”

“Sounds fair,” I say, never taking my eyes off the key.

The key thunks into the lock, and I yank the door open and dart out. Jabar tackles me to the ground, eyes wide with fear. I think he’s afraid of me, but I’m wrong.

He’s afraid of what’s outside.

“Do not pass before the windows. The avtomata can sense your heat. They will find us.”

“Infrared heat sensing?” I ask. “That’s only on the automated sentry turrets, man. ASTs. They’re at the front gate. Aimed
away
from the base, toward the desert. C’mon, we need to go out the back.”

Blanket over my shoulders, I step out of the hole in the wall and into the frigid confusion of dust and smoke in the alley outside. Jabar crouches and follows, pistol drawn.

It’s god’s own raging dust storm out here.

I double over and run for the rear of the base. There’s a phalanx of sentry guns covering the front gate. I want to stay clear of them. Slip out the back and get someplace safe. Figure it out from there.

We round a corner and find a black-blasted crater the size of a building, just smoldering. Not even an autotank has the ordnance to do this. It means the drones aren’t just spotting rabbits up there—they’re launching Brimstone missiles.

When I turn to warn Jabar, I see he is already scanning the skies. A fine layer of dust coats his beard. It makes him look like a wise old man in a young man’s body.

Probably not too far from the truth.

I stretch my blanket out over my head to obscure my silhouette and form a confusing target for anything watching from above. I don’t have to tell Jabar to stay under the overhangs, he already does it by habit.

Abruptly I wonder how long he’s been fighting these same robots. What must he have thought when they began to attack our own troops? Probably thought it was his lucky day.

Finally, we reach the back perimeter. Several of the twelve-foot cement walls have been battered down. Pulverized cement coats the ground, clean rebar jutting through the broken chunks. Jabar and I crouch next to a sagging wall. I peek around the corner.

Nothing.

A cleared area surrounds the whole base, sort of a dusty road wrapping tight around our perimeter. No-man’s-land. A few hundred meters out, there’s a rolling hill with thousands of slate stones sticking up like splinters. Porcupine Hill.

The local graveyard.

I tap Jabar on the shoulder and we run for it. Maybe the robots aren’t patrolling the perimeter today. Maybe they’re too busy killing people for no reason. Jabar sprints past me and I watch his brown robes blur away into the dust. The storm swallows him. I run as hard as I can to keep up.

Then I hear a noise I’ve been dreading.

The high-pitched whine of an electric motor echoes from somewhere around us. It’s a mobile sentry gun. They constantly patrol this narrow strip of no-man’s-land. Apparently, nobody told them to take a break today.

The MSG has four long narrow legs with wheels on the ends. On top, it has an M4 carbine set to auto-fire with an optics package mounted on the barrel and a big rectangular magazine bolted to the side. When the thing gets moving, those legs flutter up and down over rocks and gravel in a blur, while that rifle stays motionless, perfectly level.

And it’s coming after us.

Thank god the terrain is starting to get more rough. It means we’re almost off the graded perimeter strip. The motor whine is getting louder. The MSG uses vision for target acquisition, so the dust should obscure us. I can just see the tail of Jabar’s robe fluttering in the dust storm as he keeps running, fast and steady away from the green zone.

Breathe in. Breathe out. We’re gonna make it.

Then, I hear the stuttering click of a range finder. The MSG is using short-range ultrasonic, bouncing sound through the dust storm to find us. That means it knows we’re here. Bad news. I wonder how many more steps I have left.

One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.

A tombstone emerges from the haze—just a jagged chunk of slate tilting drunkenly out of the ground. Then I see a dozen more looming ahead. I stagger between the tombstones, feeling the cold sweating slabs under my palms as I grab them for balance.

The clicking is almost a steady hum now.

“Down!” I shout to Jabar. He leaps forward and disappears over a rut in the ground. A burst of automatic weapons fire roars out of the storm. Shards of a tombstone explode across my right arm. I stumble and fall on my stomach, then try to drag myself behind a stone.

Clickclickclick
.

Strong hands grab hold of my hurt arm. I stifle a shout as Jabar pulls me over the hillock. We’re in a small ditch, surrounded by knee-high shards of rock embedded in sandy ground. The graves are placed haphazardly between occasional clumps of mossy weeds. Most of the tombstones are unmarked, but a couple have been spray-painted with symbols. Some others are ornately carved marble. I can see a few have steel cages built around them, peaked roofs the only ornamentation.

Click, click, click
.

The ultrasonic grows fainter. Crouched against Jabar, I take a second to inspect my wound. Part of my upper right arm is shredded, totally messing up my flag of Oklahoma tat. Half the damn eagle feathers that hang from the bottom of the Osage battle shield are grated off by slivers of black rock. I show my arm to Jabar.

“Look what the fuckers did to my tattoo, Jabar buddy.”

He shakes his head at me. He’s got one elbow covering his mouth, breathing through the fabric. There might be a smile under that arm right now. Who knows? Maybe we’re both going to make it out of this alive.

And then, just like that, the dust clears.

The storm passes by overhead. We watch the huge mass of swirling dust tear across the perimeter strip, engulf the green zone, and move on. Now the sun is beaming down bright and cold from a clear blue sky. There’s hardly any atmosphere in these mountains, and the harsh sunlight casts shadows like spilled tar. I can see my breath now.