Robopocalypse (21 page)

“To survive, man. To help the resistance.”

“I’m not even—”

He holds up his arm. Tears gleam in his eyes. This is the important part. He’s got to get this. If he doesn’t, he’ll die.

I grab the kid by the shoulders and say it face-to-face: “You were born a human being and you’re gonna die one. No matter what they did to you. Or what they do. Understand?”

It’s quiet down here in the tunnels. And dark. It feels safe.

“Yeah,” he says.

I throw an arm around the kid’s shoulder, wincing at the pain in my leg. “Good,” I say. “Now come on. We got to get home and eat. You wouldn’t guess it to look at me, but I’ve got this beautiful wife. Best looking woman in the world. And I’m telling you, if you ask real nice, she will cook up a stew like you wouldn’t believe.”

I think this kid is gonna be okay. Soon as he meets the others.

People need meaning as much as they need air. Lucky for us, we can give meaning to each other for free. Just by being alive.

In the coming months, more and more modified humans began to filter into the city. No matter what Rob did to these people, all of them were welcomed into the NYC resistance. Without this haven and its lack of prejudice, it is unlikely that the human resistance, including Brightboy squad, would have been able to acquire and take advantage of an incredibly powerful secret weapon: fourteen-year-old Mathilda Perez
.

—
CORMAC
WALLACE,
MIL#GHA217

5. T
ICKLER

Where’s your sister, Nolan? Where’s Mathilda?

L
AURA
P
EREZ

NEW WAR + 10 MONTHS

As our squad continued to travel west toward Gray Horse, we met a wounded soldier named Leonardo. We nursed Leo back to health, and he told us about hastily built forced-labor camps placed just outside the larger cities. Massively outnumbered from the start, it seems that Big Rob leveraged the threat of death to convince huge numbers of people to enter these camps and stay there
.

Under extreme duress, Laura Perez, former congresswoman, related this story of her experience in one such labor camp. Of the imprisoned millions, a lucky few were bound to escape. Others were forced to
.

—
CORMAC
WALLACE,
MIL#GHA217

I’m standing alone in a wet, muddy field.

I don’t know where I am. I can’t remember how I got here. My arms are scarred and bony. I’m wearing filthy blue coveralls that are close to rags, ripped and stained.

Shivering, I wrap my arms around myself. Panic stabs at me. I know I’m missing something important. I’ve left something behind. I can’t put my finger on it, but it hurts. It feels like there’s a piece of barbwire wrapped around my heart, squeezing.

Then I remember.

“No,” I moan.

A scream rises up from my gut. “No!”

I shout it to the grass. Flecks of spit fly from my mouth and arc away into the morning sunlight. I spin in a circle, but I’m alone. Utterly alone.

Mathilda and Nolan. My babies. My babies are gone.

Something flashes from the tree line. I flinch instinctively. Then I realize it’s only a hand mirror. A camouflaged man steps out from behind a tree and motions to me. In a daze, I stumble toward him through the overgrown field, stopping twenty yards away.

“Hey,” he says. “Where did you come from?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Where am I?”

“Outside New York City. What do you remember?”

“I don’t know.”

“Check your body for lumps.”

“What?”

“Check your body for lumps. Anything new.”

Confused, I run my hands over my body. I’m surprised that I can feel each one of my ribs. Nothing makes sense. I wonder if I’m dreaming or unconscious or dead. Then I feel something. A bump on my upper thigh. Probably the only meaty part left on my body.

“There’s a bump on my leg,” I say.

The man begins to back away into the woods.

“What does that mean? Where are you going?” I ask.

“I’m sorry, lady. Rob’s bugged you. There’s a human work camp a few miles from here. They’re using you as bait. Don’t try to follow me. Sorry.”

He disappears into the shadows of the woods. I shade my face with one hand and look for him. “Wait, wait! Where is the work camp? How do I find it?”

A voice echoes thinly out of the woods. “Scarsdale. Five miles north. Follow the road. Keep the sun to your right. Be careful.”

The man is gone. I’m alone again.

I see my own set of staggering footprints in the muddy grass, tracking north. I realize the clearing is really an overgrown road, on its way back to nature. My stick arms are still wrapped around me. I force myself to let go. I’m weak and hurt. My body wants to shiver. It wants to fall down and give up.

But I won’t let it.

I’m going back for my babies.

The lump moves when I touch it. I find a small slice in my skin from where they must have put it in. But this wound is farther up my leg, close to my hip. I think whatever-it-is is moving. Or at least it can move if it wants to.

Bug. The camouflaged man called it a bug. I let out a snort of laughter, wondering how literally I should take that description.

Pretty literally, as it turns out.

Snatches of memory are coming back to me. Faint pictures of clean-swept pavement, a big metal building. Like an airplane hangar, but filled with lights. Another building with bunk beds stacked to the ceilings. I don’t remember what
they
look like, the jailers. I don’t try too hard to remember, though.

After an hour and a half of steady walking, I spot a cleared-out area in the distance. Smoke is rising in gentle puffs from it. Sunlight glints from a broad metal roof and short chain-link fences. This must be it. The prison camp.

A weird sliding sensation in my leg reminds me that I’m carrying the bug. That man didn’t want to help me because of it. It stands to reason that the bug must be telling the machines where I’m at, so it can catch and kill other people.

Hopefully, the machines didn’t expect me to
come back
.

I watch the pulsing lump under my skin with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. There’s no way I can keep going with the bug under there. I’ve got to do something about this.

And it’s going to
hurt
.

Two rocks, flat. One long strip of fabric torn from my sleeve. With my left hand I press one rock into my thigh, dimpling the skin just behind the lump. The bug starts to move, but before it can go anywhere I close my eyes and think of Mathilda and Nolan and with all my might, I slam the other rock down. A knot of pain flares in my leg and I hear a crunch. I bring down the rock three more times before I roll over onto the ground, screaming in pain. I lie on my back, chest heaving, looking at blue sky through tears.

It’s maybe five minutes before I can bring myself to check the damage to my leg.

Whatever it is looks like a blunt metal slug with dozens of quivering, barbed feet. It must have cut through my leg on the first hit, because part of its shell has been mashed into the pulped outside layer of my skin. Some kind of liquid is leaking from it onto my leg, mixing with my blood. I wipe my finger in it and bring it to my face. It smells like chemicals. Explosive chemicals, like kerosene or gasoline.

I don’t know why that is, but I think I might have gotten very lucky. It never occurred to me that whatever it is might be a bomb.

I don’t let myself cry.

Forcing myself to look at it, I reach down and gingerly pull the crushed thing out from under my skin. I notice that it has a cylindrical shell on the other side that isn’t broken. I toss the thing on the ground and it lands limp. It looks like two rolls of breath mints with lots of legs and two long wet antennae. I suck my lower lip into my mouth and bite it and try not to cry out as I wrap my leg with the strip of blue fabric.

Then, I get up and hobble closer to the work camp.

Sentry guns. The memory dances back into my head. The work camp is protected by sentry guns. Those gray lumps in the turf will pop up and kill anything that gets within a certain range.

Camp Scar.

From the tree line, I watch the field. Bugs and birds flitter back and forth over a thick carpet of flowers, ignoring the lumps of clothing wrapped in the turf—the bodies of would-be rescuers. The robots don’t try to hide this place. Instead, they use it like a beacon to attract human survivors. Potential liberators, ambushed again and again. Their bodies piling up in this field and turning into dirt. Flower food.

If you work hard and stay in line, the machines feed you and keep you warm and alive. You learn to ignore the sharp crack of the sentry guns. Force yourself to forget what the sound means. You look for the carrot. Stop seeing the stick.

Off to one side of the compound, I see a wavering brown line. People. It’s a line of people being marched here from another place. I don’t hesitate, I just hobble my way around the sentries to reach the line.

Twenty minutes later, I see an armored six-wheeled vehicle jouncing along at maybe four miles per hour. It’s some kind of military job with a turret on top. I walk toward it with my hands out, flinching when the turret spins around and locks onto me.

“Stay in line. Do not stop. Do not approach the vehicle. Comply immediately or you will be shot,” says an automated voice from a loudspeaker mounted on top.

A broken line of refugees staggers alongside the armored car. Some carry suitcases or wear packs, but most just have the clothes on their backs. God knows how long they’ve been marching. Or how many there were in line when they started.

A few weary heads lift up to glance at me.

Keeping my hands up and my eyes on the turret, I join the line of refugees. Five minutes later, a man in a mud-splashed business suit and another guy in a poncho come up and walk on either side of me, slowing together so that we drop back a ways from the military vehicle.

“Where’d you come from?” asks business guy.

I stare straight ahead. “I came from where we’re going,” I say.

“And where’s that?” he asks.

“A work camp.”

“Work camp?” exclaims the kid in the rain poncho. “You mean a concentration camp?”

Poncho boy eyes the field. His eyes dart from the armored vehicle to a nearby clump of tall grass. The business guy puts his hand on his friend’s shoulder.

“Don’t. Remember what happened to Wes.”

That seems to take the wind out of poncho boy’s sails.

“How’d you get out?” the business guy asks me.

I look down at my leg. A dried patch of blood darkens the upper thigh of my coveralls. That says it all, really. He follows my gaze and decides to let it go.

“They seriously need us to
work
?” says poncho boy. “Why? Why not use more machines?”

“We’re cheap,” I say. “Cheaper than building machines.”

“Not really,” says business guy. “We cost resources. Food.”

“There’s plenty of food left over,” I say. “In the cities. With the reduced population, I’m sure they can make our leftovers last for years.”

“Great,” says poncho boy. “This is just fucking great, man.”

I notice the armored car has slowed down. The turret has quietly turned to face us. I shut up. These people are not my goal. My goals are nine and twelve years old and they are waiting for their mother.

I continue walking, alone.

I slip away while the others are being processed. A couple of patched-up Big Happys watch and play prerecorded commands while the line of people ditch their clothes and suitcases in a pile. I remember this: the shower, coveralls, bunk assignment, work assignment. And at the end, we were all marked.

My mark is still with me.

There is a subdermal tag the size of a grain of rice embedded deep in my right shoulder. After we’re inside the camp and everyone has thrown off their belongings, I simply walk away. A Big Happy follows me as I cross the field toward the big metal building. But my mark identifies me as compliant. If I were out of compliance, the machine would crush my windpipe with its bare hands. I’ve seen it happen.

The detectors all over the camp seem to recognize my tag. No alarms are set off. Thank god they didn’t blacklist my number after dumping me off in that field. The Big Happy retreats as I skirt around the camp toward the work barn.

The instant I walk through the door, a light on the wall begins to flash. Shit. I’m not supposed to be here now. My work detail isn’t scheduled for today, or ever.