Then the Humvee rolls to a stop just past the hill. It moves away from us, jerking forward in starts and stops like a blind man feeling his way down a path.
We did it. For now.
A massive arm settles down over my neck, squeezes tight enough to grind my shoulder blades together. “It is blind,” says Tiberius. “You have the eyes of a hawk, Cormac Wallace.”
“There’ll be more. What now?” asks Carl.
“We stay here and protect these people,” says Jack, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
“How’s that, Jack?” I say. “They might not want our protection. Plus, we’re sitting next to the biggest arsenal in the state. We’ve got to head for the hills, man. Camp out.”
Cherrah snorts.
“You got a better idea?” I ask her.
“Camping is a short-term solution. Where’d you rather be? In a cave somewhere, hunting for food every day and hoping you find it? Or in a place where there will be other people to depend on?”
“And riots and looting,” I add.
“I’m talking about a smaller community. A safe place. Gray Horse,” she says.
“How big?” asks Jack.
“Probably a few thousand, mostly Osage. Like me.”
“An Indian reservation,” I groan. “Mass starvation. Disease. Death. Sorry, I just don’t see it.”
“That’s because you’re full of shit,” says Cherrah. “Gray Horse is organized. Always has been. Functioning government. Farmers. Welders. Doctors.”
“Well,” I say. “As long as there are welders.”
She looks at me pointedly. “Jails. If we need ’em.”
“Specialization,” says Jack. “She’s right. We need to reach a place to regroup. Plan a counterattack. Where is it?”
“Oklahoma.”
I groan out loud again. “That’s like a million miles away.”
“I grew up there. I know the way.”
“How do you know they’re still alive?”
“A refugee I met heard about it on shortwave. There’s a camp there. And an army.” Cherrah snorts at Carl. “A real army.”
I clap my hands. “I’m not hiking across America on the whim of some chick we just met. We’re better off on our own.”
Cherrah grabs me by the shirt and yanks me close. My rifle clatters to the ground. She’s wiry, but her slender arms are strong as tree branches. “Teaming with your brother is my best bet at survival,” she says. “Unlike you, he knows what he’s doing and he’s good at it. So why don’t you just shut the fuck up and think it through? You’re both bright boys. You want to survive. This isn’t a hard choice to make.”
Cherrah’s scowling face is inches away. A bit of ash from the scattered fires lands in her inky black hair and she ignores it. Her black eyes are trained on mine. This small woman is absolutely intent on remaining alive, and it’s clear that she will do anything to stay that way.
She’s a born survivor.
I can’t help but smile. “Survive?” I ask. “Now you’re talking my language. In fact, I don’t think I want to be more than five feet away from you ever again. I just, I don’t know … I feel safe in your arms.”
She lets go and gives me a shove.
“You wish, bright boy,” she snorts.
A thundering laugh startles all of us. Tiberius, looking like a huge shadow, throws on his backpack. Firelight gleams from his teeth as he speaks.
“Then it is settled,” he says. “The five of us make a good team. We have defeated the Humvee and saved these people. Now, we will journey together until we reach this place, this Gray Horse.”
The five of us became the heart of Brightboy squad. On that night, we began a long journey through the wilderness to Gray Horse. We were not yet well armed or well trained, but we were lucky—during the months after Zero Hour, Rob was busy processing the roughly four billion human beings living in major population centers of the world.
It would be the better part of a year before we emerged from the woods, battle scarred and weary. While we were gone, however, momentous events were taking place that would alter the landscape of the New War.
—CORMAC WALLACE, MIL#GHA217
4. CHAPERONE DUTY
If this kid is gonna leave me to die,
I want him to remember my face.
MARCUS JOHNSON
NEW WAR + 7 MONTHS
As we hiked across the United States, Brightboy squad was unaware that most large cities worldwide were being emptied out by increasingly weaponized robots. Chinese survivors later reported that at this time it was possible to cross the Yangtze River on foot, the waters were so choked with corpses washing out to the East China Sea.
Even so, some groups of people simply learned to adapt to the never-ending onslaught. The efforts of these urban tribes, described in the following pages by Marcus and Dawn Johnson of New York City, ultimately proved crucial to human survival worldwide.
—CORMAC WALLACE, MIL#GHA217
The alarm triggers at dawn. It’s no big deal. Just a bunch of tin cans tied together, dragging across the cracked pavement.
I open my eyes and pull down my sleeping bag. It takes a long-ass second to figure out where I’m at. Looking up, I see a car axle, a muffler, tailpipe.
Oh yeah. Right.
I’ve been sleeping in craters under cars every night for a year and I’m still not used to it. Doesn’t matter, though. Whether I get used to it or not, I’m still alive and kicking.
For about three seconds I lie still, listening. Best not to jump out of bed right away. You never know what the hell’s been creeping around in the night. In this last year, most of the robots got smaller. Others got bigger. A lot bigger.
I bang my head pulling off my sleeping bag and folding it up. It’s worth it. This pile of rust is my best friend. There’s so many burned-out cars on the streets of New York City these days that the bastards can’t check under every single one.
I wriggle out from under the car and into gray sunlight. Reaching back underneath, I drag out my dirty pack and shrug it on. I cough and spit a hawker on the ground. Sun’s just up, but it’s cool this early. Summer’s just getting started.
Those cans are still dragging. I drop to a knee and untie the rope before any machine mics can pick up the noise. Topside, it’s important you be quiet, be moving, and be unpredictable.
Otherwise, you’ll be dead.
Chaperone duty. Of the hundreds of thousands of city people who ran away to the woods, about half of them are starving to death about now. They come stumbling into the city, rail-thin and filthy, on the run from wolves and hoping to scavenge.
Most times, the machines eat ’em up fast.
I throw my hood over my head and let my black trench coat billow out behind me to confuse robotic targeting systems, especially the goddamn disposable sentry turrets. Speaking of, I gotta get off the street. I duck into a destroyed building and pick my way over trash and rubble toward the source of the alarm.
After we dynamited half the city, the regular old domestic robots couldn’t balance well enough to get to us. We were safe for a while, long enough to get established underground and inside demolished buildings.
But then a new walker showed up.
We call it a mantis. It’s got four multijointed legs longer than telephone poles and molded out of some kind of carbon fiber honeycomb. Its feet look like upside-down ice axes, slicing into the ground on every step. Up top where the legs meet, it’s got a couple of little arms with two ice axe hands. Those razor arms tear through wood and drywall and brick. Whole thing sort of scurries—all doubled over and hunched down to the size of a small pickup truck. Looks kinda like a praying mantis.
Close enough, anyway.
I’m dodging past empty desks in a collapsed floor of an office building when I feel the telltale vibration in the ground. Something big outside. I freeze in place, then crouch on the trash-strewn floor. Peeking over a water-swollen desk, I watch the windows. A gray s
hadow passes by outside, but I see nothing else.
I hold up for a minute anyway.
Not far from here, a familiar routine is playing out. A survivor has found a suspicious pile of rocks that a machine would never notice. Next to those rocks is a rope that this person pulled. I know that ten minutes ago my survivor was alive. There’s no guarantee for the next ten minutes.
At the collapsed end of the building I crawl over shattered two-by-fours and pulverized brick toward a crescent of morning light. Hood down, I push my face through the hole and scan the street outside.
Our sign is there, undisturbed on a stoop across the street. A man is huddled next to it, arms over his knees and head down. He rocks back and forth on his heels, maybe keeping warm.
The sign works because the machines don’t notice natural stuff, like rocks and trees. It’s a blind spot. A mantis has a good eye for unnatural things like words and drawings—even shit like happy faces. Uncamouflaged trip wires never work. Lines are too straight. Writing directions to a safe house on the wall is a good way to get people deleted. But a pile of rubble is invisible. And a pile of rocks going from big to small is, too.
I wriggle out of the hole and reach my guy before he even looks up. “Hey,” I whisper, nudging his elbow.
He looks up at me, startled. He’s a young Latino guy, in his twenties. I can see that he’s been crying. God knows what he went through to get here.
“It’s okay, buddy,” I reassure him. “We’ll get you safe. Come with me.”
He nods, saying nothing. Leaning against the building, he stands up. He has one arm wrapped in a dirty towel and he’s cradling it with his other hand. I figure it must be messed up pretty bad if he’s afraid to let anybody see it.
“We’ll get your arm looked at real soon, man.”
He flinches a little when I say that. Not what I was expecting. Strange how being hurt can be embarrassing. Like it’s your fault that an eye or hand or foot isn’t working right. Course, being hurt isn’t half as embarrassing as being dead.
I lead him back toward the collapsed ruin across the street. The mantis won’t be a problem once we get inside. My people are mostly in the subway tunnels with the main entrances blocked off. We’ll go building to building all the way home.
“What’s your name, man?” I ask.
The guy doesn’t respond, just puts his head down.
“Fair enough. Follow me.”
I head back into the safety of the collapsed building. The kid with no name hobbles along behind me. Together, we roam through destroyed buildings, scrabbling over mounds of blasted rubble and crawling under half-collapsed walls. Once we make it far enough, I take us out onto a pretty safe street. The silence between us grows the farther we travel.
I get the creeps walking down that empty street and I realize that I’m scared of the dead eyes on the kid shuffling along behind me, saying nothing.
How much change can a person absorb before everything loses meaning? Living for its own sake isn’t life. People need meaning as much as they need air.
Thank god I’ve still got Dawn.
I’m picturing her hazel eyes in my head when I notice the gray-green telephone pole slanting cockeyed at the end of the street. The pole bends in the middle and shifts and I realize it’s a leg. We’re going to die inside thirty seconds if we stay out here.
“Get inside,” I hiss, shoving the kid toward a broken-out window.
On its four crouched legs, a hunched-over mantis scuttles into view. Its featureless, bullet-shaped head rotates quickly, stops. Long antennae quiver. The machine leaps forward and gallops toward us, sharp feet cutting into the dirt and pavement like a rudder through water. Those front claws hang off its belly, up and ready, light glinting from countless barbs.
The kid stares, blank.
I grab him and shove him through the window, then dive in after him. We get on our feet and hustle over moldy carpet. Seconds later, a shadow falls across the rectangle of daylight behind us. A clawed arm shoots through the window frame and rips downward, gouging out part of the wall. Another clawed arm follows. Back and forth, back and forth. It’s like a tornado hitting.
Lucky for us, this is a safe building. I can tell because it’s been hollowed out pretty good. The facade is demolished, but inside it’s passable. We do our homework in NYC. I steer the kid toward a pile of cinder blocks and a hole in the wall that leads into an adjacent building.
“That’s us,” I say, pointing and pushing the kid toward the hole. He stumbles along like a zombie.
Then I hear carpet ripping and the crunch of wooden furniture. The mantis has somehow made it in through the window. Crouched small, it’s squeezing its gray mass through the building, tearing stained ceiling tiles down like confetti. Crouch walking, the thing is all flashing claws and screeching metal.
We dash for the hole in the wall.
I stop and help the kid crawl over the mess of rebar and concrete. The passage is just a black gaping hollow, only a few feet wide, that leads straight through the sandstone foundations of both buildings. I’m praying it’ll slow down the monster behind us.
The kid disappears inside. I climb in behind him. It’s dark, claustrophobic. Kid’s crawling slow, still cradling his hurt hand. Near the entrance, steel rods of rebar jut out like rusty spearheads. I can hear the mantis closing on us, destroying everything it touches.
Then the sound stops.
There isn’t enough room to turn my head and see what’s happening behind me. I just see the bottoms of the kid’s shoes as he crawls. Breathe in, breathe out. Concentrate. Something slams into the mouth of the hole hard enough to rip off a chunk of solid rock, by the sound of it. It’s followed by another bone-jarring slam. The mantis is scrabbling frantically, chewing through the concrete wall and into sandstone. The noise is deafening.
Everything around me turns to screaming and darkness and dust. “Go, go, go!” I shout.
A second later the kid is gone; he found the other end of the tunnel. Grinning, I turn on the juice. Moving full speed, I tumble out of the hole and fall a few feet and then scream in surprised agony.
A finger of rebar has pierced the meat of my right calf.
I’m on my back, propping myself up on my elbows. My leg is caught on the mouth of the hole. The rebar sticks out like a crooked tooth, sunk into my leg. The kid stands a few feet away, that blank expression still on his face. I take a shuddering breath and let out with another animal scream of pain.
It seems to get the kid’s attention.
“Fuck, get me off this thing!” I shout.
The kid blinks at me. Some life is coming back into those dead brown eyes of his.
“Hurry,” I say. “Mantis is coming.”
I try to lift my body up, but I’m too weak and the pain is too much. Elbows digging painfully into the dirt, I manage to raise my head. I try to explain to the kid. “You gotta pull my leg off the rebar. Or get the rebar out of the wall. One or the other, man. But do it fast.”
The kid stands there, lip quivering. He looks like he’s about to cry. Just my fucking luck.
From the tunnel, I can hear the pock, pock as each jab from the mantis dislodges more stone. A cloud of dust pours out of the disintegrating hole. Every blow from the mantis sends a throbbing vibration through the rock and into the rebar skewering my calf.
“C’mon man, I need you. I need you to help me.”
And for the first time, the kid speaks. “I’m sorry,” he says to me.
Fuck. It’s over. I want to scream at this kid, this coward. I want to hurt him somehow, but I’m too weak. So with everything I’ve got in me, I focus on keeping my face raised to his. My neck muscles strain to keep my head up, trembling. If this kid is gonna leave me to die, I want him to remember my face.
Eyes locked on mine, the kid holds his injured arm up. He starts to unwrap the towel that covers it.
“What are you—”
I stop cold. The kid’s hand isn’t hurt—he doesn’t
have one.
Instead, the meat of his forearm ends with a mess of wires leading to a greasy hunk of metal with two blades sticking out. It looks like a pair of industrial-sized scissors. The tool is fused directly into his arm. As I watch, a tendon flexes in his forearm and the oiled blades begin to spread apart.
“I’m a freak,” he says. “Rob did this to me in the labor camps.”
I don’t know what to think. There’s just no more strength in me. I lower my head and stare at the ceiling.
Snip.
My leg is free. A piece of rebar is stuck in it, snipped and shiny on one end. But I’m free.
The kid helps me up. He puts his good arm around me. We hobble away without looking back at the hole. Five minutes later, we find the camouflaged entrance to the subway tunnels. And then we’re gone, struggling as best we can down the abandoned tracks.
We leave the mantis behind.
“How?” I ask, nodding at his bad arm.
“Labor camp. People go into surgery, come out different. I was one of the first. Mine’s simple. Just my arm. Other people, though. They come back from the autodoc even worse. No eyes. No legs. Rob messes with your skin, your muscles, your brain.”
“You on your own?” I ask.
“I met some others, but they didn’t want …” He looks at his mutilated hand, face empty. “I’m like them now.”
That hand hasn’t made him any friends. I wonder how many times he’s been rejected, how long he’s been on his own.
It’s almost over for this kid. I can see it in the slump of his shoulders. How every breath seems like a struggle. I’ve seen it before. The kid’s not hurt—he’s beaten.
“Being alone is tough,” I say. “You start to wonder what the point is. You know?”
He says nothing.
“But there’s other people here. The resistance. You’re not alone now. You got a purpose.”
“What’s that?” he asks.
“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.