No you shouldn’t, Martin thought. You’re old and out of shape, and you can’t carry your own pack. Besides which, you don’t even know the way. But he didn’t say that. The secret of Dad’s failings had become a burden he had to be man enough to carry.
“Look, you have to take care of Mom,” he said as they took the bottles back to his other supplies. “You know how to fish and cook, and I don’t.”
At the mention of fishing, the troubled look on Dad’s face eased. “I thought last night’s catch turned out pretty well.”
“It was lovely,” Mom said, and he bent and kissed her. Martin felt better at the sight. After all, it was good that Mom and Dad didn’t hate each other. It would be a lot worse if they did.
“Hey, Mom, I’ve got a present for you,” he said. “Something you can paint pictures of.”
He went to the kitchen and returned with the glass candy in its bowl. The sun coming through the windows lit fire in the hearts of the fanciful disks and sent a jewel-toned scattering of colored lights wavering over the walls and ceiling. Martin handed over his treasure with only a tiny twinge of regret. Probably, even though it was Mom’s now, she’d still let him fool around with it sometimes.
“Martin!” Mom gasped. “Where did you find this?”
“It was the Owner’s,” he said. “But that’s okay. It’s yours now. Since you gotta sit here, at least you’ve got pretty things to look at.” He picked up his knapsack and slung his water bottles over Chip. “I’ll be back in a couple of days.”
Dad followed them out of the house and stood on the steps to watch them leave. “Be careful!” he called.
Martin and Chip hurried up the road. Houses grew sparse, and the divided roadway dwindled to chunks of cracked and pitted asphalt. Where it crossed a dry streambed, segments of it had fallen in like folding leaves on a table, and green clumps of field grasses grew out of what remained. Then it made a long bend and began to rise. Martin put his head down and started to pant as the grade steepened. Chip quit bounding ahead.
After fifteen minutes, Martin paused to rest. He hadn’t realized they’d climbed so high. Mom and Dad’s new suburb was just a patch of forest behind him now, with a few dark squares of old houses poking through the leaves. Several miles farther off, back the way they had come, the steel dome of BNBRX created a white shimmer in the distance.
“We’ll have to leave the road,” he said. “We need to go straight this way, to the edge of those hills. That’s where we’ll find the dumps. I think I can just barely see them. And I think that might be the sawed-off cliff that’s in front of the packet yard. If it is, we don’t have too far to go.”
After an afternoon of steady hiking, they reached the vast yard in the early evening. Packet cars of all descriptions sat silent on the wide fan of steel tracks. At the back, below the face of the steep cliff, the row of cinder-block sheds squatted in the sunshine. Chip wandered back and forth across the dusty ground and engaged in an orgy of sniffing.
“Hey, Theo left the shed with the tunnel unlocked,” Martin said. “I know we locked it when we left.”
They came through the long, boring tunnel and crossed the narrow valley dotted with fir trees. No children were playing outside. Martin located the shallow cave that led into the maze of classrooms. Its steel door was propped open with a metal wastebasket, and trash blew out under the trees.
“That’s weird,” Martin said.
School papers littered the corridor and rustled in small drifts against the wall. A plastic chair lay upended in a doorway. Water dripped in a hollow cadence somewhere nearby. It only served to accentuate the silence.
Chip sniffed the air and whined.
Martin walked down the hall, pushing open doors: empty classrooms, their desks tossed every which way; empty offices, their handhelds smashed, their stacks of papers flung down and stepped on. “No,” Martin whispered. Then he ran. Up the stairs, to where Cassie lived. Where all the little children lived.
The dorm rooms were a chaotic jumble of broken bed frames and splintered nightstands. Mattresses straddled the wreckage, their pale stuffing spilling through long gashes. Drawers lay where they had been dumped out, and closet doors tilted from their runners. Chip pawed through the heaps of clothing and found a small brown object. He sniffed it all over, whimpering, and then dropped it at Martin’s feet.
It was Cassie’s stuffed bunny.
Martin stood rooted to the spot. Why hadn’t he noticed the mud tracks in the tunnel, the crushed weeds outside? How could he be so blind? Strolling in here, expecting people to be ready to save the day—what a moron he’d turned out to be.
“This isn’t happening!” he shouted. “Do you hear me? It’s not happening!”
A distant voice sobbed out an answer. “Martin? Is that you?”
“Sim! Where are you? Where are you?”
Martin snatched up a baseball bat, staggered through the mounds of clothes, and threw himself down the stairs three steps at a time. Chip galloped beside him.
They found Sim lying hunched over against the wall of the cafeteria, his gray robes blending into the gray of the vinyl floor. A strange sound rose from his shaking lips, like the mewing of a cat.
“Martin!” cried the old bot, and he jerked up his face to look at them. Tears flowed down his wrinkled cheeks, but his eyes didn’t look quite human. Their black pupils spun and flickered from diamond to point to round. Martin drew back and gripped the baseball bat tighter.
“Sim, are you okay?” he asked. “What happened? Where is everybody?”
“I don’t remember,” Sim sobbed. “Martin, I don’t feel good.” He’d begun to perspire, and his skin was pasty. “Something’s happening to me. I can’t stand up. I don’t feel good.”
“It’s all right,” Martin said. “You’ll be okay.” But all the same, he took a step back.
“Talking to you . . . it’s done something,” Sim gasped. He was sweating bullets now. “Martin!” he wailed. “I don’t feel good!”
Big silver jelly drops rolled down Sim’s face and slithered across his gray robes. Big silver jelly slugs wriggled from folds in his clothing and crawled onto the floor. One almost touched Martin’s foot.
“Yeagh!” Martin screamed, and he brought down the baseball bat to smash it.
The slug exploded into a tassel of waving wires with a noise like an enraged Slinky. Quicker than Martin could think, the wires jerked their way up the baseball bat, pulling the tassel toward him like a spider. Other slugs nearby erupted into flailing bundles of wires, hissing and coiling.
Martin gave a yell, dropped the bat, and jumped onto the nearest table. The floor seethed with squirming silver things now, and the bat disappeared beneath wires.
“Martin!”
Pale eyes still stared out from the ruin of Sim’s melting face. An odd gap of a mouth worked itself open, and sound blared out again.
“Martin! Get away! Run!”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
But Martin couldn’t run. The slugs covered the floor nearby and trapped him on the cafeteria table. He turned around to locate an exit, and the slippery table rolled sideways, nearly flinging him off. A dozen slugs exploded with angry hisses, propelling their tasseled forms up the table’s wheels and legs.
Fifteen feet away, Chip danced and barked at the edge of the widening tide. He ran up and down in front of the slugs’ advance, trying to find a way back to his master.
“Hold on, Chip! Stay there. I’ll come to you.”
Martin tossed his knapsack onto a nearby table. It hit the center, slid along its sterile white length, and dropped off the opposite end. From its unseen location came a dozen pops and the furious sound of entangling wires. “Oh, crap!” he muttered. “That was a stupid move.”
The wire monsters had surmounted the legs and benches of the table Martin was on. Silver wires were grappling the edges of the tabletop. He jumped and landed heavily on a nearby table. It rolled forward through a buzz of springing wires. How many slug t
raps could Sim melt into? Several hundred? A thousand?
The slug army continued to advance, wriggling outward in a wide circle. If the squirmy things got to the door before he did, his escape would be cut off. Martin flung himself onto another table and skinned his elbow. He almost slipped over the edge. Then he lay there for a few seconds, listening to his heartbeat and peeking at the writhing uproar below him.
Chip’s barks changed into howls.
The German shepherd danced at the edge of the fray, still beyond the reach of the slugs, but in his anxiety over Martin, he had forgotten his own safety. He had let the spreading tide trap him on the side of the cafeteria that didn’t have a door.
“Get onto a table!” Martin yelled.
But Chip wasn’t near a table. The nearest row of tables was at least twelve feet away. If Chip had been thinking like a bot, he could have walked straight up the wall. But, panicked and threatened, separated from his master, Chip’s thinking was all dog. He crouched down, collected himself, and sprang.
He almost made it.
Chip’s forepaws landed on the tabletop. His back paws landed on the bench. One paw slipped off and touched the ground. Martin saw a flash of something silver. With a shriek, Chip bounded into the air and rolled off the table. He almost disappeared beneath a volley of silver wires.
“Chip! No!” Martin screamed.
Chip flailed and kicked under the coating of wires. Martin saw them vanish tassel by tassel, as if they had burrowed beneath the dog’s skin. Chip’s terrified cries abruptly changed into a mechanical screech. His writhing form froze into bizarre poses, as if he were caught in the beam of a strobe light.
“Chip, hold on! I’m coming!”
Martin threw himself blindly from table to table, heedless of the pop and flash of seething wires. The bow wave of gray slugs reached the door and cut off his escape, but he didn’t care anymore. He wasn’t escaping. He was going to save his dog. At the moment, nothing else mattered.
He jumped, misjudged the distance, and slipped. A second later, he found himself sitting on the table’s bench with one leg dangling to the floor. Before he could curl it back, it touched a slug.
Pop!
A small silver buzz saw appeared to erupt from the slug and took aim at his sneaker with a metallic zing. Many short wires whirled through the air and hooked themselves onto his foot. Flinging themselves in arcs, the wires jerked their way up the laces, pulled onto his sock, and grappled for purchase on his pant leg. Then two long wires met around his ankle, and the entire flailing mass followed their lead. Before Martin could blink, they had smoothed into a silver band, as snug as half a set of handcuffs. He sat and stared dumbly at it while the army of slugs passed by him and seized upon the rocking wheels of his table.
As the uproar died down, he heard a desolate whimper. Chip!
“I’m coming,” he said, and climbed to his feet. An electrical jolt flashed through him and left him giddy.
Chip’s whining grew desperate.
“Give me just a minute,” he said as he took another step. This time the world went away. It came back a little later, but it came back as ceiling tiles. Martin discovered that he was lying on his back.
Over the ringing in his ears, he heard a mechanical alarm-clock screech. Cautiously, he turned his head. Chip was blinking in and out—dog, blur, dog, blur—with the dark rectangles of two circuit boards showing through his hazy form like shadows on an X-ray.
Martin’s teeth hurt, and his whole body felt tired, as if he’d been flinging giant boulders around. A straggler slug slipped past his shoulder, and he shuddered involuntarily. It burst like a cascaron and jerked itself into a band around his arm.
“Don’t move, Chip,” he muttered. “They zap you if you move. They won’t let us go anywhere. Just do what I do. Take a little nap. Close your eyes for a while.”
When he opened his eyes again, the room was silent, and he was stiff from lying so long. The slug army was gone. He stared at the ceiling tiles for a few minutes. How long have I been here? he thought. He was afraid to lift his hand to check his watch.
Chip was a normal dog again. He lay on his haunches a few feet away, dolefully licking a foot. When he saw Martin glance toward him, he dropped his big head onto his forepaws and gave a breathy little whine.
“Hey, buddy,” Martin whispered back. “I’m right here. We’re gonna do this together.” He closed his eyes again.
After eons, they heard firm footsteps in the hall, and Chip’s ears swiveled forward. “Shh,” Martin said before the dog could bark. He turned his head toward the doorway, laying his cheek against the cool floor. A saltines packet and the end of a bitten carrot stick lay a couple of feet away.
The steps grew louder, and someone came into the room. Tabletops blocked Martin’s view of all but the person’s olive-gray lace-up boots. Then the boots came around the end of the nearest table, and their owner came into view.
It was a military police bot. Martin had seen them in governmental parades on the nightly news. Battalions of these gray-faced bots marched by the cameras in their uniforms of dusty green. Martin remembered the Great Battery Panic that had occurred when he was five, when faulty rechargeables had shut down the cookers and custodial bots and trash had piled up for weeks. The news had shown packet cars full of military police bots deployed to the worst-hit suburbs, hand-delivering sacks of trash to the loading bays, vacuuming school rooms, and restoring order. Martin hadn’t forgiven Dad for organizing citizen’s brigades to haul off their own garbage because it kept the military police from coming to help.
He’d always thought the reason the bots appeared to have no expressions under their green helmets was because that the cameras were too far away to catch them. Now he learned the true reason: the bots had no faces. This soldier had nothing but a sketchy suggestion of features on its iron gray head. It had a prominent chin and straight nose, but no mouth to speak of; a serious slant to its brows, but no eyes. Its gray hands grasped a heavy assault rifle.
“Your name and place of origin,” it barked.
Martin was afraid to sit up. If the slugs shocked him and he went into a fit, the soldier might decide to shoot him. He lay on his back and held out his hands in what he hoped was a nonthreatening gesture. “I don’t know what ‘origin’ is,” he said.
Chip vibrated out a message in bot-to-bot protocol. A change came over the soldier at once.
“Sir!” the soldier said. Dark blue dye swept across its green uniform like a cloud blotting out the sun. Bright ribbons sprouted across its chest in a colorful row, gold braid rolled down its trouser legs, and its helmet engaged in some serious origami. Within seconds, the soldier stood at attention in a dark blue service cap and full dress uniform, a drill rifle with a rubbed walnut stock by its side.
“It is an honor, sir!” the soldier said. “I apologize for your detention. We had no warning Central was sending a delegation to this site. I’ll have you out of those traps in no time.”
Martin glanced from the soldier to his dog. Chip’s tail whapped against the floor. Martin felt a movement at his shoulder, and the bundle of wires there fell to the floor with a plop. In another second, the wires at his ankle did the same. Chip stood up and shook, and silver tassels flew in all directions. They skidded along benches and landed in limp little piles.
“Please allow me to assist you to your feet, sir,” the soldier said. He extended a gray hand.
“Um . . . sure, thanks,” Martin said. The hand didn’t feel like he thought it would. It was cool and smooth, like a plastic milk jug.
“Lieutenant, you found one!”
A man in a gray suit stepped into the cafeteria. A second gray-suited man followed him. “No, he’s not a Wonder Baby,” the second man said. “He’s too old.”
“It’s the A and Z guys!” Martin cried. There was no mistaking the watery eyes, snub noses, and fish-mouth frowns.
“How does he know our names, Zeb?” the first agent asked uneasily.
> Agent Zebulon ignored him.
“Your name and place of origin,” he snapped to Martin. “And— Great glory! Lieutenant, why are you in dress blues?”
The soldier bot’s posture was stiff with reproach. “Agent, you failed to notify my task force that we would be encountering privileged personnel. This boy represents a delegation from Central.”
The two agents turned their frowns on Martin. They looked like playground bullies, fighters who would do anything to win, even if they had to cheat. “Central’s sending out kids now?” Zebulon said. “We’ll just see about that.”
Before Martin could react, the agents seized his arms, and the two of them frog-marched him over to a table. They twisted him around so that the bench caught him behind the knees, and he sat down hard. A bright light flashed in his eyes, and he cupped his hands over them, blinking.
“Take a look at that,” Zebulon murmured, holding a small handheld out to Abel.
“‘Martin Revere Glass,’” Abel read from its screen. “The . . . the one with the bot! The bot in the plot!”
“That’s enough, Abel. You sound like an idiot.”
“The plot against the Secretary of—”
“Shut up!”
“Let go of me!” Martin yelled, thrashing. “Chip, over here! Help!”
But for the first time, Chip didn’t come to his aid. The German shepherd didn’t seem to know what to do. He barked ferociously and snapped at the agents, but his teeth didn’t make contact. When one of the agents turned and tried to grab him, he yelped and slipped out of reach.
“Stop squirming, kid.” Zebulon delivered a quick blow to Martin’s chest, and Martin gasped for breath. “And you, bot, stop that barking!” Chip’s howls turned to breathy whines.
Meanwhile, the soldier had been keeping up a steady stream of indignant protests. “In accordance with Battlefield Directive 182-dash-34, Central personnel are never to be—”
Abel interrupted him. “Soldier, this boy is a fugitive. He tricked you. You’re malfunctioning. Shut down and perform diagnostics.”