Robopocalypse

  The young men of Gray Horse. They’re strong and angry and orphaned. Having these boys traveling around town in feral packs is like leaving dynamite out in the sun—something mighty useful and powerful turned into an accident waiting to happen.

  Lark shakes his coat, arranging that high black collar behind his head to frame a smirking grin. Looks like he’s starring in a spy movie: black hair greased back, black gloves, and fatigues tucked into polished black boots.

  Not a care in the world.

  If harm comes to this boy, there won’t be enough room in our jail cell to hold the outcome. And yet, if he gets off free, we’re inviting our own slow destruction from the inside out. Leave enough ticks on a dog and pretty soon there ain’t much dog left.

  “What’re you gonna do, Lonnie?” asks Hank. “You gotta punish him. We all depend on this food. We can’t have our own people stealing. Don’t we have enough problems?”

  “I didn’t do nothing,” says Lark. “And I’m fittin’ to walk up out of here. You want to stop me, you gonna have to stop my people, too.”

  Hank raises his gun, but I wave him down. Hank Cotton is a proud man. He won’t stand for being disrespected. Storm clouds are already gathering on Hank’s face as the kid saunters away. I know I better talk to the kid fast, before lightning strikes in the form of a twelve gauge.

  “Let me talk to you a minute outside, Lark.”

  “Dude, I told you I didn’t—”

  I grab Lark by the elbow and pull him in close. “If you don’t let me talk to you, son, that man over there is going to shoot you. It don’t matter what you did or didn’t do. This isn’t about that. This is about whether you’re gonna walk out of here or get carried out.”

  “Fine. Whatever,” says Lark.

  Together, we step out into the night. Lark nods to a group of his buddies, smoking under the naked lightbulb that hangs over the door. I notice there’s new gang signs scrawled all over the little building.

  Can’t talk here. Won’t do any good to have Lark showing off to his fans. We go about fifty yards, over to the stone bluff.

  I look out over the cold empty plains that have kept us safe for so long. The full moon paints the world down there silver. Mottled with the moon shadows of clouds, the tall grass prairie rolls and sways all the way to the horizon, where it kisses the stars.

  Gray Horse is a beautiful place. Empty for so many years and now filled with life. But at this time of night, she goes back to what she is at heart: a ghost town.

  “You bored, Lark? Is that the problem?” I ask.

  He looks at me, thinks about posturing, then gives it up. “Hell, yes. Why?”

  “Because I don’t think you want to hurt anybody. I think you’re young and bored. I understand that. But it isn’t going to work like this anymore, Lark.”

  “Work like what?”

  “All the scrapping and tagging. The stealing. We got bigger fish to fry.”

  “Yeah, right. Nothing happens way out here.”

  “Them machines ain’t forgot about us. Sure, we’re too far out in the boonies for cars and city robots. But the machines have been working on solving that problem.”

  “What’re you talking about? We ain’t seen hardly anything since Zero Hour. And if they want us dead, why don’t the robots just blow us up with missiles?”

  “Not enough missiles in the world. Anyway, my guess is that they already used the big stuff on the big cities. We’re small beans, son.”

  “That’s one way to look at it,” replies Lark with surprising certainty. “But you know what I think? I think they don’t care about us. I think it was just a big onetime mistake. Otherwise they’d have nuked us all by now, wouldn’t they?”

  Kid has thought about this.

  “The machines haven’t nuked us because they’re interested in the natural world. They want to study it, not blow it up.”

  I feel the prairie wind on my face. It would almost be better if the machines didn’t care about our world. Simpler, anyway.

  “You seen all the deer?” I ask. “The buffalo are coming back to the plains. Hell, it’s only been a couple months since Zero Hour and you can almost catch fish with your hands down at the creek. It’s not that the machines are ignoring the animals. They’re protecting them.”

  “So you think the robots are trying to get rid of the termites without blowing up the house? Kill us without killing our world?”

  “It’s the only reason I can think of that they’re coming after us the way they are. And it’s the only way for me to explain … certain recent events, let’s say.”

  “We haven’t seen machines for months, Lonnie. Shit, man. I wish they would come at us. Nothing’s worse than just sitting around with hardly any electricity and not jack to do.”

  This time I do roll my eyes. Building fences, repairing buildings, planting crops—nothing to do. Lord, what happened to our kids that they expect everything handed to them?

  “You want to fight, huh?” I ask. “You mean that?”

  “Yes. I do mean that. I’m tired of hiding up here on this hill.”

  “Then I need to show you something.”

  “What?”

  “It’s not here. But it’s important. Pack a sleeping bag and meet me in the morning. We’ll be gone a few days.”

  “Hell no, dude. Fuck that.”

  “Are you scared?”

  “No,” he says, smirking. “Scared of what?”

  Out across the plains below, the swaying grass looks for all the world like the sea. It’s calming to watch, but you got to wonder, what monsters might be hidden under those peaceful waves?

  “I’m asking if you’re scared of what’s out there in the dark. I don’t know what it is. It’s the unknown, I guess. If you’re afraid, you can stay here. I won’t bother you. But what’s out there needs to be dealt with. And I hoped you had some bravery in you.”

  Lark straightens up and drops the lopsided smirk. “I’m braver than anyone you know,” he says.

  Shit, he sounds like he means it.

  “You better be, Lark,” I say, watching the grass roll with the prairie wind. “You sure better be.”

  Lark surprises me at dawn. I’m visiting with John Tenkiller, sitting on a log and passing a thermos of coffee back and forth. Tenkiller is talking his riddles to me and I’m half listening, half watching the sun rise over the plains.

  Then Lark Iron Cloud comes around the bend. The kid is packed and ready to go. He’s still dressed like a sci-fi Mafia soldier, but at least he’s wearing sensible boots. He eyes Tenkiller and me with outright suspicion, then walks past us and starts down the trail that leads off the Gray Horse hill.

  “Let’s go if we’re going,” he says.

  I down my coffee, grab my pack, and join the long-legged kid. Just before the two of us go around the first bend, I turn and look at John Tenkiller. The old drumkeeper lifts one hand, his blue eyes flashing in the morning light.

  What I have to do won’t be easy and Tenkiller knows it.

  Me and the kid hike down the hill all morning. After about thirty minutes, I take the lead. He may be brave, but Lark sure don’t know where he’s going. Instead of heading west over the tall grass of the plains, we go east. Straight into the cast-iron woods.

  The name is accurate. Long, narrow post oak trees sprout up from dead leaves, mingled with leafier blackjack oak. Both types of tree are so black and hard that they seem closer to metal than to wood. A year ago, I never could of guessed how useful that would turn out to be.

  Three hours into the hike we get close to where we’re going. Just a little old clearing in the woods. But this is the area where I first found the tracks. A trail of rectangular holes pushed into the mud, each print about the size of a deck of cards. Near as I could tell, it came from something with four legs. Something heavy. No scat anywhere. And I can’t tell one foot from the other.

  My blood ran cold when I figured it out: The robots had grown themselves legs fit for wildernes
s travel—through mud and ice and hard country. No man ever built a machine this fleet-footed.

  Since these were the only prints I could find, I figured they were from some kind of scout sent up here to nose around. Took me three days of tracking to find the thing. Using them electric motors, it moved so quiet. And it sat so still for so long. Tracking a robot in the wild is a lot different from tracking a natural animal or a man. Peculiar, but you get used to it.

  “We’re here,” I say to Lark.

  “About time,” he says, tossing his pack on the ground. He takes a step into the clearing and I grab him by the jacket and yank him backward right off his feet.

  A silver streak whizzes past his face like a sledgehammer, missing by an inch.

  “The fuck?” says Lark, jerking himself out of my hands and craning his neck to look up.

  And there it is, a four-legged robot the size of a prize buck, hanging by its front two feet from my steel cable rope. It had sat there perfectly still until we were within striking range.

  I can hear heavy motors whine as it struggles to get free, swinging about four feet off the ground. It’s just eerie. The thing moves as naturally as any animal of the forest, writhing around in the air. But unlike any living animal, the machine’s legs are jet-black and made of a bunch of layers of what looks like tubing. It has these little metal hooves, flat on the bottom and covered in mud. There’s dirt and leaves and bark caked on it.

  Unlike a deer, this machine don’t exactly have a head.

  The legs meet in the middle at a trunk with humps on it for the powerful joint motors. Then, mounted underneath the body, there’s a narrow cylinder with what looks like a camera lens in it. About the size of a can of pop. This little eye rotates back and forth while the machine tries to figure out how to get out of this.

  “Uh, what is that?” asks Lark.

  “I set this snare a week ago. Judging from the gashes in the tree bark from the steel cable, this guy got caught here pretty soon after that.”

  Lucky for me, these trees are strong as cast-iron.

  “At least it was alone,” says Lark.

  “How so?”

  “If there were others, it would have called them here to help.”

  “How? I don’t see a mouth on it.”

  “For real? See the antenna? Radio. This thing can communicate over the radio with other machines.”

  Lark walks a bit closer to the machine and watches it close. For the first time, he drops the tough guy act. He looks as curious as a four-year-old.

  “This thing is simple,” says Lark. “It’s a modified military supply carrier. Probably using it to map terrain. Nothing extra. Just legs and eyes. That lump behind the shoulder blades, that’s probably the brain. Figures out what it’s seeing. It’s there because that’s the most protected place on the machine. Take that part off and this thing’ll be lobotomized. Ooh, ouch. Look at its feet. See the retractable claws tucked under there? Good thing it can’t reach the cable with those.”

  Well, I’ll be goddamned. This kid has a good eye for machines. I watch him staring at the thing, taking it all in. Then, I notice the other tracks on the ground around him, all over the clearing.

  Goose bumps buzz up the backs of my thighs and over my arms. We’re not alone here. This thing did call for help. How could I have missed it?

  “Wonder what it’d be like to ride one of these?” muses Lark.

  “Get your bag,” I say. “We got to move. Now.”

  Lark looks where I’m looking, sees the fresh marks in the ground, and realizes there’s another one of these things loose. He grabs his pack without a word. Together, we hustle away into the woods. Behind us, the walker hangs there with its camera watching us go. Never blinking.

  Our little run for freedom becomes a march, and then a miles-long hike.

  We make camp as the sun sets. I set up a little campfire, making sure the smoke is baffled through the leaves of a nearby tree. We sit down on our packs around the fire, feeling hungry and tired as the cold sets in.

  Like it or not, it’s time to get started on the real reason I’m here.

  “Why do it?” I ask. “Why try to be a gangster?”

  “We’re not gangsters. We’re warriors.”

  “But a warrior fights the enemy, you know? Y’all end up hurting your own people. Only a man can be a warrior. When a boy tries to act like a warrior, well, you get a gangster. A gangster has no purpose.”

  “We’ve got a purpose.”

  “You reckon?”

  “Brotherhood. We look out for each other.”

  “Against who?”

  “Anybody. Everybody. You.”

  “I’m not your brother? We’re both native, ain’t we?”

  “I know that. And I keep that culture inside me. That’s me. That’s always gonna be me. That’s my roots. But everybody’s fighting everybody up there. Everybody’s got a gun.”

  “You’ve got a point,” I say.

  The fire crackles, methodically eating up a log.

  “Lonnie?” asks Lark. “What’s this really about? Just come out and say it, old man.”

  This is probably not going to go over well. But the kid is forcing my hand and I’m not going to lie to him.

  “You seen what we’re up against out here, right?”

  Lark nods.

  “I need you to ally your Gray Horse Army with the Light Horse tribal police.”

  “Team up with the police?”

  “Y’all call yourselves an army. But we need a real army. The machines are changing. Soon enough, they’ll come to kill us. All of us. So if you’re interested in protecting your brothers, you’d better start thinking about all your brothers. And your sisters, too.”

  “How do you know this for sure?”

  “I don’t know it for sure. Nobody knows nothing for sure. If they say they do, they’re either a preacher or selling something. Deal is—I have a bad feeling in my gut. Too many coincidences piling up. It reminds me of before all this happened.”

  “Whatever happened with the machines already happened. They’re out here, studying the woods. But if we leave them alone, they’ll leave us alone. It’s people we need to worry about.”

  “The world is a mysterious place, Lark. We’re real small, here on this rock. We can build our fires, but it’s nighttime out there in the universe. A warrior’s duty is to face the night and protect his people.”

  “I look out for my boys. But no matter what your gut says—don’t expect the GHA to come to your rescue.”

  I snort. This ain’t working like I hoped. Of course, it is working like I predicted.

  “Where’s the food?” asks Lark.

  “I brought none.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “Hunger is good. It will make you patient.”

  “Shit. This is just great. No food. And we’re being hunted by some kind of damn backcountry robot.”

  I pull out a bough of sage from my backpack and toss it onto the fire. The sweet scent of the burning leaves rises into the air around us. This is the first step of the ritual of transformation. When Tenkiller and I planned this, I didn’t think I’d be so afraid for Lark.

  “And you’re lost,” I mention.

  “What? You don’t know the way back?”

  “I do.”

  “Well?”

  “You’ve got to find your own way. Learn to depend on yourself. This is what it means to become a man. To provide for your people, instead of being provided for.”

  “I don’t like where this is going, Lonnie.”

  I stand up.

  “You’re strong, Lark. I believe in you. And I know I will see you again.”

  “Hold up, old man. Where you going?”

  “Home, Lark. I’m going home to our people. I’ll meet you there.”

  Then I turn and walk away into the darkness. Lark jumps up, but he only follows me to where the firelight ends. Beyond that is darkness, the unknown.

  This is wher
e Lark has to go, into the unknown. We all have to do it, at some point. When we grow up.

  “Hey! What the fuck?” he shouts to the cast-iron trees. “You can’t leave me here!”

  I keep walking until the coldness of the woods swallows me up. If I walk for most of the night, I should be home by dawn. My hope is that Lark will survive long enough to make it home, too.

  The last time I did something like this, it made my son into a man. He hated me for it, but I understood. No matter how much kids beg to be treated like adults, nobody likes to let go of their childhood. You wish for it and dream of it and the second you have it, you wonder what you’ve done. You wonder what it is you’ve become.

  But war is coming, and only a man can lead Gray Horse Army.

  Three days later, my world is on the verge of blowing up. The gangbangers from Gray Horse Army started accusing me of murdering Lark Iron Cloud the day before. There’s no way to prove anything different. Now they’re screaming for my blood in front of the council.

  Everybody is assembled at the bleachers by the clearing where we hold the drum circle. Old John Tenkiller don’t say a thing, just soaks up abuse from Lark’s boys. Hank Cotton stands next to him, big hands clenched into fists. The Light Horse tribal police stand in clumps, tense as they stare a full-on civil war straight in the eye.

  I’m thinking maybe this whole gamble was a mistake.

  But before we can all get busy killing each other, a bruised and bloody Lark Iron Cloud staggers up the hill and into camp. Everybody gasps to see what he brung with him: a four-legged walking machine on a steel cable leash tied to Lark’s pack. We’re all stunned speechless, but John Tenkiller just stands up and walks over like Lark had arrived right on cue.

  “Lark Iron Cloud,” says the old drumkeeper. “You left Gray Horse as a boy. You return as a man. We sorrowed when you left, but we rejoice at your return, new and different. Welcome home, Lark Iron Cloud. Through you, our people will live.”

  The true Gray Horse Army was born. Lark and Lonnie soon combined the tribal police and the GHA into a single force. Word of this human army spread across the United States, especially as they began a policy of capturing and domesticating as many of the Rob walker scouts as possible. The largest of these captured walkers formed the basis for a crucial human weapon of the New War, a device so startling that upon hearing about it, I assumed it to be only a wild rumor: the spider tank.