Robopocalypse

  —CORMAC WALLACE, MIL#GHA217

  3. FORT BANDON

  Just let us go. We’re gone, man. We’re gone.

  JACK WALLACE

  NEW WAR + 3 MONTHS

  In the first months after Zero Hour, billions of people around the world began a fight for survival. Many were murdered by the technology they had come to trust: automobiles, domestic robots, and smart buildings. Others were captured and led to the forced-labor camps that sprang up outside major cities. But for the people who ran for the hills to fend for themselves—the refugees—other human beings soon proved to be just as dangerous as Rob. Or more so.

  —CORMAC WALLACE, MIL#GHA217

  Three months. It takes three months to get out of Boston and out of the state. Luckily, my brother has a map and a compass and the ability to use them. Jack and I are scared and on foot, loaded down with military equipment we looted from the National Guard armory.

  But that’s not why it takes so long.

  The cities and towns are in chaos. We go out of our way, but it’s impossible to avoid them all. Cars are running people down, traveling in packs. I watch people fire guns from buildings at marauding vehicles. Sometimes the cars are empty. Sometimes there are people inside. I watch a driverless garbage truck pull up to a steel trash can. Two prongs slide out and the hydraulic lift actuates. I cover my mouth and choke when I see the bodies tumble out in a limp-limbed waterfall.

  Once, Jack and I stop for a breath while we are halfway across an overpass. I press my face against the chain-link fence and see eight lanes of highway, jam-packed with cars, all of them moving at just about thirty-five miles per hour in the same direction. No brake lights. No turn signals. Not like traffic at all. I watch a man wriggle out of a sunroof and roll off the top of his car and right under the car behind. Squinting my eyes, the whole thing just looks like a big metal carpet being slowly pulled away.

  Toward the ocean.

  If you aren’t headed someplace and getting there quick, then you aren’t going to make it long in the cities. And that’s our secret. Me and Jack never stop moving except to sleep.

  People see our uniforms and call to us. Every time this happens my brother says, “Stay put and we’ll be back with help.”

  Knowing Jack, he probably really believes it. But he doesn’t slow down. And that’s good enough for me.

  My brother is determined to reach an army base so we can start helping people. As we cross the towns block by block, Jack keeps talking about how once we meet up with the soldiers, we’ll come back and take out the machines. Says we’ll go house to house and save people, bring them back to a safe zone. Set up patrols to hunt down all the malfunctioning robots.

  “A day or two, Cormac,” he says. “This’ll all be over in a day or two. It’ll be all mopped up.”

  I want to believe him, but I know better. The armory should have been safe, but it was crawling with walking land mines. All military Humvees have autodrive, in case they need to maneuver back home with an incapacitated driver. “What’s a military base going to look like?” I ask. “They’ve got more than mines there. They’ve got tanks. Gunships. Rolling rifles.”

  Jack just keeps walking, head down.

  The mayhem blends together into a haze. Scenes come to me in flashes. I see a struggling old man pulled into a dark doorway by a stern-faced Slow Sue; an empty car drives by, on fire and with a chunk of meat trapped under it, leaving a greasy smear on the street; a man falls from a building, screaming and flailing, with the silhouette of a Big Happy looking down.

  Bam!

  Screams, gunshots, and alarms echo through the streets. But thankfully Jack runs us hard. No time to stop and look around. We dive through the horror like two drowning men clawing to the surface for air.

  Three months.

  It takes us three months to find the fort. Three months for me to muddy my new clothes, to shoot my rifle, and to clean it next to a feeble campfire. Then we cross a bridge over the Hudson River and reach our destination, just outside what used to be Albany.

  Fort Bandon.

  “Get down!”

  “On your fucking knees!”

  “Hands on your heads, motherfuckers!”

  “Toes together!”

  The voices come screaming at us from out of the darkness. A spotlight flickers on from up high. I squint into it and try not to panic. My face is numb with adrenaline and my arms are rubbery and weak. Jack and I crouch on our knees next to each other. I can hear myself breathing, panting. Damn. I’m scared shitless.

  “It’s all right,” whispers Jack. “Just be quiet.”

  “Shut the fuck up!” shouts a soldier. “Cover!”

  “Cover,” says a calm voice in the darkness.

  I hear the bolt of a rifle being pulled back. As the cartridge clinks into the chamber, I can visualize the brass bullet waiting there in the mouth of a dark, cold barrel. My own rifle and supplies are hidden a half mile away, thirty paces off the road.

  Footsteps scratch across the pavement. A soldier’s silhouette looms in front of us, eclipsing the spotlight with his head.

  “We’re unarmed,” says Jack.

  “On your fucking face,” says the voice. “You, hands on your head. Cover him!”

  I put my hands on my head, blinking into the light. Jack grunts as he is pushed onto his stomach. The soldier pats him down.

  “Number one clear,” he says. “Why are you fuckers wearing uniforms? You kill a soldier?”

  “I’m in the guard,” says Jack. “Check my ID.”

  “Right.”

  I feel a shove between my shoulder blades and fall forward, cheek on the cold, gritty pavement. Two black combat boots appear in my field of view. Hands roughly jab through my pockets, checking for weapons. The spotlight illuminates the pavement before my face in lunar detail, shadows racing through craters. I notice that my cheek is resting in a discolored splotch of oil.

  “Number two clear,” says the soldier. “Gimme the ID.”

  The mud-caked black boots step back into my line of sight. Just beyond the boots, I make out a pile of clothes next to a razor-wire fence. It looks like somebody used this place as a Goodwill drop-off site. It’s freezing out here, but it still smells like a dump.

  “Welcome to Fort Bandon, Sergeant Wallace. Happy to have you. You’re a ways from Boston, huh?”

  Jack starts to sit up, but one of those big boots drops onto his back, shoving him into the ground.

  “Uh-uh-uh. I didn’t say to get up. What about this guy here? Who’s he?”

  “My brother,” grunts Jack.

  “He in the guard, too?”

  “Civilian.”

  “Well, I am sorry, but that is not acceptable, Sergeant. Unfortunately, Fort Bandon is not allowing civilian refugees at this time. So if you want to come inside, say your good-byes now.”

  “I can’t leave him,” says Jack.

  “Yeah, I figured you’d say that. Your alternative is to go down to the river with the rest of the refugees. There’s a few thousand of them squatting down there. Just follow the smell. You’ll probably get knifed for your boots, but maybe not if you two sleep in shifts.”

  The soldier makes a humorless chuckle. His camouflage fatigues are tucked into those filthy black boots. I thought he was standing in a shadow, but now I see that it’s another splotch. There are oil stains all over the concrete.

  “You serious? Civilians aren’t welcome?” asks Jack.

  “Nah,” replies the soldier, “we barely fought off our own goddamn Humvees. Half our autonomous weapons are missing, and the other half we blew up. Most of our command is gone. They all got called to some fucking meeting right before the shit went down. Haven’t seen ’em since. We can’t even get into the repair bays or the refueling depot. Sergeant, this place is fucked up bad enough without throwing in a bunch of looting, thieving scumbag civilians from off the streets.”

  I feel the cool tip of the boot nudge my forehead.

  “No offense t
here, partner.”

  The boot goes away.

  “Gates are closed. Try to come in here, you’ll get a bullet sandwich from my man on the tower. Ain’t that right, Carl?”

  “That’s affirmative,” replies Carl, from somewhere behind the spotlight.

  “Now,” says the soldier, stepping back toward the gate. “Get the fuck out of here. Both of you.”

  The soldier steps behind the light, and I realize it’s not a pile of clothes I’ve been looking at. The outline is visible now. It’s a human body. Bodies. There are mounds of them heaped together like candy wrappers blown against the fence. Frozen by the weather in anguished contortions. The splotches on the ground in front of me—under my face—aren’t oil.

  A whole lot of people died here not long ago.

  “You fucking killed them?” I ask, in disbelief.

  Jack groans softly to himself. The soldier does that dry chuckle again. His boots scratch pavement as he saunters over to me. “Dang, Sergeant. Your brother doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut, does he?”

  “No, he does not,” says Jack.

  “Let me explain it to you, pal,” says the soldier.

  Then I feel a steel-toed boot crunch into my rib cage. I’m too surprised to yell. My breath wheezes out of my lungs mechanically. I’m in the fetal position for the next two or three kicks.

  “He gets it,” shouts Carl, faceless in the night. “I think he gets it, Corporal.”

  I can’t help moaning—it’s the only way I can breathe.

  “Just let us go,” says Jack. “We’re gone, man. We’re gone.”

  The kicking stops. The soldier chuckles one more time. It’s like a nervous tic. I hear the metallic chink of his rifle being cocked.

  Carl speaks up, from the invisible tower. “Sir? There’s been enough of that already, don’t you think? Let’s disengage.”

  Nothing.

  “Corporal, let’s disengage,” says Carl.

  The gun doesn’t fire, but I can feel those faceless boots waiting there. Waiting for me to say something, anything. Curled up and hurting, I focus on trying to force breath in and out of my battered rib cage.

  I don’t have anything left to say.

  The soldier was right—we smell the refugees before we see them.

  We reach the camp just after midnight. Down along the bank of the Hudson we find thousands of people milling around, camping and squatting and searching for information. The long, narrow strip of land has an old iron fence between it and the street, and the terrain is too rough for the domestic robots.

  These are the people who’ve come to Fort Bandon and found no refuge. They’ve brought along their suitcases and backpacks and trash bags filled with clothes. They’ve brought their parents and wives and husbands and children. In their masses, they have built campfires from scavenged furniture and gone to the bathroom by the river and thrown their trash to the wind.

  The temperature hovers just above zero. The refugees sleep, snoozing under piles of blankets, inside freshly looted tents, and on the ground. The refugees fight, scuffling with fists and knives and an occasional gunshot. The refugees are angry and scared and hungry. Some beg, camp to camp. Some steal firewood and trinkets. Some walk away into the city and don’t come back.

  These people are all here to wait. For what, I have no idea. Help, I guess.

  In the darkness, Jack and I meander among the campfires and clusters of refugees. I hold a handkerchief over my face to ward off the smell of too much humanity in too small of a place. I instinctively feel vulnerable around this many people.

  Jack feels it, too.

  He taps my shoulder and points to a small hill covered in brush. High ground. A man and a woman sit next to each other among the tufts of dead grass, a small Coleman lantern between them. We head over.

  And that’s how we meet Tiberius and Cherrah.

  On the hill, a huge black man wearing a Hawaiian shirt over long underwear sits, forearms resting loosely on his knees. Next to him, a small Native American woman squints at us. She has a worn bowie knife in her hand. It looks like she’s used it plenty.

  “Howdy,” I call out.

  “What?” asks the woman. “You army fucks haven’t had enough? Come back for more?”

  Her big-ass knife glints in the lantern light.

  Jack and I look at each other. How to respond to that? Then the big man puts his hand on the woman’s shoulder. In a booming voice, he says, “Manners, Cherrah. These men are not army. Look at the uniforms. Not the same as those others.”

  “Whatever,” she says.

  “Come. Sit with us,” he says. “Take the load off.”

  We sit and listen. Tiberius Abdullah and Cherrah Ridge met while escaping from Albany. He’s a cabdriver who moved here from Eritrea—the Horn of Africa. She’s a mechanic who worked in her father’s body shop with her four brothers. When the shit went down, Tiberius was picking up his cab from the shop. After the first mention, Tiberius doesn’t talk about Cherrah’s brothers or father again.

  As Tiberius shares their story, Cherrah sits quietly. I can’t read her face, but I notice a shrewdness in the way she looks at me and my brother, sizes us up, and then looks away. Gotta keep an eye on that one.

  We’re sharing a nip from Ty’s flask when a pair of headlights wink on in the distance. A hunting rifle seems to just appear in Cherrah’s hands. Tiberius has a pistol, pulled from the waistband of his sweatpants. Jack turns down the lantern. Looks like a killer car jumped the barricades and made it down here.

  I watch the far-off headlights for a few seconds before I realize that Cherrah is pointing her rifle into the darkness behind us.

  Someone is coming, fast. I hear huffing and puffing and boots pounding dirt and then the silhouette of a man appears. He staggers clumsily up the small hill, falling forward and catching himself on his fingertips.

  “Hold it!” shouts Cherrah.

  The man freezes, then stands up and steps forward into the lantern light. It’s a soldier from Fort Bandon. He’s a lanky white guy with a long neck and unruly, straw-colored hair. I’ve never seen him before, but when he speaks I immediately recognize his voice.

  “Oh. Hi, uh, hello,” he says, “I’m Carl Lewandowski.”

  A few hundred yards up the river’s edge, a pall of ragged screams rises up, thin, disappearing into the atmosphere. Blanketed figures dash between dim red campfires. That pair of headlights is dashing directly through the middle of the refugee camp, in our direction.

  “Spotted it from the tower when it went off base,” says Carl, still struggling to catch his breath. “Came to warn people.”

  “How nice of you, Carl,” I mutter, holding my bruised ribs.

  Jack drops to one knee and pulls his battle rifle off his back. He squints across the wide-open space at the confusion. “Humvee,” he says. “Armored. No way for them to stop it.”

  “We can shoot for the tires,” says Cherrah, snapping open the bolt and checking the chamber of her hunting rifle for a cartridge.

  Carl glances at her. “Honeycomb. Tires are bulletproof. I’d go for the headlights first. Then the sensor package on top. Shoot its eyes and ears.”

  “What’s the sensor package look like?” asks Jack.

  Carl pulls out his rifle and checks the magazine as he speaks: “Black sphere. Antenna coming out of it. It’s a standard-issue compact multisensor payload with an electron-multiplied CCD infrared camera mounted on a high-stability gimbal, among other things.”

  We all frown at him. Carl looks around at us.

  “Sorry. I’m an engineer,” he says.

  The Humvee steers itself through the central mass of sleeping people. The headlights jounce up and down in the darkness. The sounds are indescribable. Red-tinted headlights turn our way, growing larger in the night.

  “You heard the man. Fire on the black box if you have a clear shot,” says Jack.

  Soon, bullets begin to crack out in the night. Cherrah’s hands move swift an
d smooth along the length of her bolt-action rifle, spitting bullets accurately at the lurching vehicle.

  Headlights shatter. It swerves, but only to run down nearby refugees. Sparks fly from the black box on top as bullets hit it again and again. Still, it keeps coming.

  “This isn’t right,” says Jack. He grabs Carl by the shirt. “Why isn’t the fucker blind?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know,” whimpers Carl.

  It’s a good question.

  I stop firing and cock my head, trying to dial out all the screams and running shapes and confusion. The shattered campfires and tumbling corpses and roaring engines fade, drowned out by an amnesiac shroud of concentration.

  Why can it still see?

  A sound emerges from the chaos. It’s a gentle thup-thup-thup, like a far-off lawn mower. Now, I notice a blurry spot up above us.

  Some kind of eye in the sky.

  The battered Humvee looms out of the night like a sea monster surfacing from black depths.

  We scatter as it plows into and over our hill.

  “Flying robot. Eleven o’clock. Just over the tree line,” I shout.

  Rifle barrels rise, including my own. The Humvee charges past us and bashes through a campfire a dozen yards away. Embers from the fire cascade over its hood, like a meteor streaking through the atmosphere. It’s coming around for another go.

  Muzzles flash. Hot brass shell casings cascade through the air. Something explodes in the sky, spraying the ground with pulverized bits of plastic.

  “Scatter,” says Jack. The roar of the Humvee drowns out the whining engines of the falling star in the sky. The armored vehicle bulldozes straight over the mound where we stand, shocks bottoming out. In the rush of air as the Humvee passes, I can smell melted plastic and gunpowder and blood.