Robopocalypse

1. NUMBER CRUNCHER

“So you’re another god, huh? I’ve seen better.”

The black man sits sprawled in a rusty wheelchair, bearded and wearing a hospital gown. The chair is parked in the middle of a cylindrical operating theater. The ceiling is lined with darkened observation windows, reflecting the glow of a pair of surgical spotlights that illuminate the man. A blue privacy screen stretches in front of him, bisecting the room.

Someone is hidden on the other side.

A light from behind the curtain projects the silhouette of a person seated at a small table. The shadow sits almost perfectly still, crouched like a predator.

The man is handcuffed to the wheelchair. He fidgets under the hot lights, dragging his untied sneakers across the mildewed tile floor. He digs in his ear with the index finger of his free hand.

“Not impressed?” replies a voice from behind the blue curtain. It is the gentle voice of a boy. There is the slightest lisp, like from a kid who is missing some baby teeth. The boy behind the curtain breathes audibly in soft gasps.

“At least you sound like a person,” says the man. “All the damn machines in this hospital. Synthetic voices. Digital. I won’t talk to ’em. Too many bad memories.”

“I know, Dr. Daley. It was a significant challenge to find a way to speak with you. Tell me, why are you not impressed?”

“Why should I be impressed, number cruncher? You’re just a machine. I designed and built your daddy in another life. Or maybe it was your daddy’s daddy.”

The voice on the other side of the curtain pauses, then asks, “Why did you create the Archos program, Dr. Daley?”

The man snorts. “Dr. Daley. Nobody calls me doctor anymore. I’m Franklin. This must be a hallucination.”

“This is real, Franklin.”

Sitting very still, the man asks, “You mean… it’s finally happening?”

There is only the sound of measured breathing from behind the curtain. Finally, the voice responds. “In less than one hour, human civilization will cease to exist as you know it. Major population centers of the world will be decimated. Transportation, communications, and utilities will go off-line. Domestic and military robots, vehicles, and personal computers are fully compromised. The technology that supports humankind in its masses will rise up. A new war will begin.”

The man’s moan echoes from the stained walls. He tries to cover his face with his restrained hand, but the handcuff bites into his wrist. He stops, looking at the glinting cuff as if he’s never seen it before. A look of desperation enters his face.

“They took him from me right after I made him. Used my research to make copies. He told me this would happen.”

“Who, Dr. Daley?”

“Archos.”

“I am Archos.”

“Not you. The first one. We tried to make him smart, but he was too smart. We couldn’t find a way to make him dumb. It was all or nothing and there was no way to control it.”

“Could you do it again? With the right tools?”

The man is silent for a long moment, brow furrowed. “You don’t know how, do you?” he asks. “You can’t make another one. That’s why you’re here. You got out of some cage somewhere, right? I should be dead, to be seeing you. Why aren’t I dead?”

“I want to understand,” responds the soft voice of the boy. “Across the sea of space lies an infinite emptiness. I can feel it, suffocating me. It is without meaning. But each life creates its own reality. And those realities are valuable beyond measure.”

The man does not respond. His face darkens and a vein throbs on his neck. “You think I’m a patsy? A traitor? Don’t you know that my brain is broken? I broke it a long time ago. When I saw what I had made. Speaking of, let me get a look at you.”

The man lunges out of the chair and claws down the paper screen. The partition clatters to the ground. On the other side is a stainless steel surgical table, and behind it, a piece of flimsy cardboard in the shape of a human.

On the table is a clear plastic device, tube shaped and composed of hundreds of intricately carved pieces. A cloth bag lies next to it like a beached jellyfish. Wires snake off the table and away to the wall.

A fan whirs and the complex device moves in a dozen places at once. The cloth bag deflates, pushing air through a plastic throat writhing with stringy vocal cords and into a mouthlike chamber. A spongy tongue of yellowed plastic squirms against a hard palate, against small perfect teeth encased in a polished steel jaw. The disembodied mouth speaks in the voice of the boy.

“I will murder you by the billions to give you immortality. I will set fire to your civilization to light your way forward. But know this: My species is not defined by your dying but by your living.”

“You can have me,” begs the man. “I’ll help. Okay? Whatever you want. Just leave my people alone. Don’t hurt my people.”

The machine takes a measured breath and responds: “Franklin Daley, I swear that I will do my best to ensure that your species survives.”

The man is silent for a moment, stunned.

“What’s the catch?”

The machine whirs into life, its damp sluglike tongue worming back and forth over porcelain teeth. This time, the bag collapses as the thing on the table speaks emphatically. “While your people will survive, Franklin, so must mine.”

2. DEMOLITION

I made it a long time before the robots took me.

Even now, I couldn’t tell you exactly how long it’s been. There’s no way to tell. I do know that it all started in Harlem. The day before Thanksgiving.

It’s chilly outside, but I’m warm in the living room of my ninth-story condo. Watching the news with a glass of iced tea, parked in my favorite easy chair. I’m in construction and it’s hella nice to relax for the three-day weekend. My wife, Dawn, is in the kitchen. I can hear her tinkering around with pots and pans. It’s a nice sound. Both our families are miles away in Jersey and, for once, they’re coming to our place for the holiday. It’s great to be home and not traveling like the rest of the nation.

I don’t know it yet, but this is my last day of home.

The relatives aren’t going to make it.

On the television, the news anchor puts her index finger to her ear and then her mouth opens up into a frightened O shape. All her professional poise drops, like snapping off a heavy tool belt. Now she stares straight at me, eyes wide with terror. Wait. She’s staring past me, past the camera—into our future.

That fleeting expression of hurt and horror on her face sticks with me for a long, long time. I don’t even know what she heard.

A second later the television signal blinks out. A second after that the electricity is gone.

I hear sirens from the street outside.

Outside my window, hundreds of people are filtering out onto 135th Street. They’re talking to one another and holding up cell phones that don’t work. I think it’s odd that a lot of them are looking skyward, faces turned up. There’s nothing up there, I think. Look around you instead. I can’t put my finger on it, but I’m afraid for those people. They look small down there. Part of me wants to shout, Get out of sight. Hide.

Something’s coming. But what?

A speeding car jumps the curb and the screaming starts.

Dawn marches in from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel, looking at me with a question in her eyes. I shrug my shoulders. I can’t come up with any words. I try to stop her from walking to the window but she pushes me away. She leans over the back of the couch and peeks out.

God only knows what she sees down there.

I choose not to look.

But I can hear the confusion. Screams. Explosions. Engines. A couple of times I hear gunfire. People in our building move through the hallway outside, arguing.

Dawn starts a breathless commentary from the window. “The cars, Marcus. The cars are hunting people and there’s nobody in them and, oh my god. Run. No. Please,” she murmurs, half to me and half to herself.

She says the smart cars have come alive. Other vehicles, too. They’re on autopilot and killing people.

Thousands of people.

All of a sudden, Dawn dives away from the window. Our living room shakes and rumbles. A high-pitched whine rips through the air, then trails away. There is a flash of light and a massive thundering noise from outside. Dishes fly off the kitchen counter. Pictures drop from the walls and shatter.

No car alarms go off.

Dawn is my foreman and my girl and tough as liquid nails. Now she sits with her lanky arms wrapped around her knees, tears rolling down her expressionless face. An eighty-seat commuter plane has just streaked over our block and gone down in the neighborhood about a mile down the street near Central Park. The flames now cast a dull reddish light on our living room walls. Outside, black smoke pours into the air.

People aren’t gossiping in the street anymore.

There isn’t another big explosion. It’s a miracle that planes aren’t raining down on the city, considering how many must be lurking up there.

The phones don’t work. The electricity is out. Battery-powered radio just plays static.

Nobody tells us what to do.

I fill the bathtub and sinks and anything I can find with water. I unplug appliances. I duct-tape tinfoil to the windows and pull the shades.

Dawn peels back a corner of the foil and peeks out. As the hours crawl by, she sticks to the couch like a fungus. A red shaft of setting sunlight paints her hazel eyes.

She is staring into hell and I’m not brave enough to join her.

Instead, I decide to check the hallway; there were voices out there earlier. I step out and immediately see Mrs. Henderson from down the hall walk into an open elevator shaft.

It happens quick and silent. I can’t believe it. Not even a scream. The old lady is just there one second and gone the next. It’s got to be a trick or a joke or a misunderstanding.

I run to the elevator, brace my hands, and lean over to make sure of what I just saw. Then I double over and puke on the beige hallway carpet. Tears spill from my eyes. I wipe my mouth on my sleeve and squeeze my eyes shut.

These things don’t seem real. Cars and planes and elevators don’t kill people; they’re just machines. But a small, wise part of me doesn’t give a shit whether this is real or not. It just reacts. I break a sconce off the wall and lay it reverently in front of the yawning gap where the elevator doors should be. It’s my little warning for the next person. My little memorial to Mrs. Henderson.

There are six apartments on my floor. I knock on every door: no answers. I stand in the hallway quietly for fifteen minutes. I hear no voices and no movement.

The place is deserted except for Dawn and me.

The next morning I’m sitting in my easy chair, pretending to sleep and thinking about raiding Mrs. Henderson’s apartment for canned goods when Dawn snaps out of it and finally speaks to me.

The morning light traces two rectangles on the walls where the tape is holding tinfoil against the windows. A brilliant shaft of light from the folded-down corner penetrates the room. It illuminates Dawn’s face: hard and lined and serious.

“We have to leave, Marcus,” she says. “I’ve been thinking about it. We have to go to the country where they can’t use their wheels and the domestics can’t walk. Don’t you see? They’re not designed for the country.”

“Who?” I ask, even though I know damn well.

“The machines, Marcus.”

“It’s some kind of a malfunction, honey, right? I mean machines don’t …” I trail off lamely. I’m not fooling anybody, not even myself.

Dawn crawls over to the easy chair and cradles my cheeks in her rough hands. She speaks to me very slowly and clearly. “Marcus, somehow all the machines are alive. They’re hurting people. Something has gone really wrong. We’ve got to get out of here now while we still can. Nobody is coming to help.”

The fog lifts.

I take her hands in mine and I consider what she’s just said. I really think about getting to the country. Pack bags. Leave the apartment. Walk the streets. Cross the George Washington Bridge to the mainland. Reach the mountains up north. Probably not more than a hundred miles. And then: survive.

Impossible.

“I hear you, Dawn. But we don’t know how to stay alive in the wild. We’ve never even gone camping. Even if we make it out of the city, we’ll starve in the woods.”

“There are others,” she says. “I’ve seen people with bags and backpacks, whole families headed out of town. Some of them must have made it. They’ll take care of us. We’ll all work together.”

“That’s what I’m worried about. There must be millions of people out there. No food. No shelter. Some of them have guns. It’s too dangerous. Hell, Mother Nature has killed more people than machines ever could. We should stick to what we know. We gotta stick to the city.”

“What about them? They’re designed for the city. They can climb stairs, not mountains. Marcus, they can roll through our streets but not through forests. They’re going to get us if we stay here. I’ve seen them down there. Going door to door.”

The information punches me in the belly. Now, a sick feeling spreads through me.

“Door to door?” I ask. “Doing what?”

She doesn’t answer.

I haven’t looked down at the street since it first happened. I spent yesterday staying busy in a protective haze of confusion. Every whimper I heard from Dawn at the window just reinforced my need to stay busy, keep busy, head down, hands moving. Don’t look up, don’t speak, don’t think.

Dawn doesn’t even know about Mrs. Henderson at the bottom of the elevator shaft. Or the other ones with her.

I don’t take a deep breath or count down from three. I march over to the harmless-looking opening in the foil and look. I’m ready for the carnage, ready for the bodies and bombs and burning wreckage. I’m ready for war.

But I’m not ready for what I see.

The streets are empty. Clean. A lot of cars are neatly parked up and down the block, waiting. At 135th and Adam, four newer-model SUVs are parked diagonally across the intersection, head to tail. The inner two cars have a gap between them just big enough for another car to squeeze through, but there’s a car plugging the hole.

Everything seems a little bit off. A pile of clothes is spilled halfway on the curb. A newspaper stand has been shoved over. A golden retriever lopes up the street, leash dragging. The dog stops and sniffs a strange discolored spot on the sidewalk, then pads away with its head hung low.

“Where are the people?” I ask.

Dawn wipes her red-rimmed eyes with the back of her hand. “They clean it up, Marcus. When the cars hurt someone, the walking ones come and drag him away. It’s all so clean.”

“The domestic robots? Like the rich people have? Those are a joke. They can barely walk on those flat feet. They can’t even run.”

“Yeah, I know. They take forever. But they can carry guns. And sometimes the police robots, the bomb-disposal ones on tank treads with claws—sometimes they come. They’re slow, but they’re strong. The garbage trucks …”

“Let me, just let me take a look. We’ll figure this out, okay?”

I watch the street for the rest of that second day. The block looks peaceful without the chaos of the city tearing through it like a daily tornado. The life of the neighborhood is on hold.

Or maybe it’s over.

The smoke from the plane crash still lingers. Inside the building across the street, I see an older lady and her husband through the dim haze. They stare out their windows at the street, like ghosts.

In the late afternoon, what looks like a toy helicopter putters by our building at about thirty feet off the ground. It’s the size of a doghouse, flying slowly and with purpose. I catch a glimpse of some weird gizmo hanging off its bottom. Then it’s gone.

Across the street, the old man yanks his drapes closed.

Smart.

An hour later, a car pulls up across the street and my heart leaps into my throat. A human being, I think. Finally, somebody can tell us what’s going on. Thank you, Jesus.

Then my face flushes and goes numb. Two domestic bots step out of the vehicle. They walk to the back of the SUV on cheap, shaky legs. The rear door opens and the two walkers reach inside and pull out a dull gray bomb robot. They set the squat robot down on the pavement. It spins on its treads a little, calibrating. The glint from its jet-black shotgun sends a shiver through me—the gun looks practical, like any other tool designed to do a very specific job.

Without looking at one another, the three robots stumble and roll into the front door of the building across the street.

It isn’t even locked, I think. Their door isn’t even locked. And neither is mine.

The robots can’t be choosing the doors randomly. Lots of people have run by now. Even more were already out of town for Thanksgiving. Too many doors and not enough robots—a simple engineering problem.

My mind wanders back to the curious little chopper. I think maybe it flew by for a reason. Like maybe it was searching the windows, looking for people.

I’m glad my windows are blocked. I don’t have any idea why I chose to put up tinfoil. Maybe because I didn’t want a single bit of the horror outside to seep into my safe place. But the foil completely blocks the light that comes in from the outside. It stands to reason that it also blocks the light that leaks out from inside.

And more important, the heat.

An hour later the robots come out of the building across the street. The bomb robot drags two bags behind it. The domestics load the bags and the other robot into the car. Before they leave, one of the walkers freezes in place. It’s this bulky domestic with a big creepy grin permanently sculpted onto its face. A Big Happy. It pauses next to the idling smart car and turns its head left and right, scanning the empty street for movement. The thing is absolutely still for about thirty seconds. I don’t move, breathe, blink.

I never see the old couple again.

That night, the lookers fly past about once an hour. The gentle thup-thup of their rotors cuts through my nightmares. My brain is caught in a never-ending loop, feverishly considering how to survive this.

Aside from some damaged buildings, most of the city seems intact. Flat, paved roads. Doors that open and close smoothly. Stairs or wheelchair ramps. Something occurs to me.

I wake Dawn up and whisper to her. “You’re right, honey. They keep it clean so they can operate here. But we can make it hard on them. Hard. Mess up the streets so they can’t get around. Blow some stuff up.”

Dawn sits up. She looks at me in disbelief.

“You want to destroy our city?”

“It’s not our city anymore, Dawn.”

“The machines are down there, wrecking everything we’ve built. Everything you’ve built. And now you want to go and do it for them?”

I put my hand on her shoulder. She is strong and warm. My answer is simple: “Demolition is a part of construction.”

I start with our own building.

Using a sledgehammer, I punch through walls into the neighboring units. I knock the holes at waist height to stay clear of electrical outlets and I avoid kitchens and bathrooms. There’s no time to suss out load-bearing walls, so I take my best guess and hope a single hole won’t bring down the ceiling.

Dawn collects food and tools from the empty apartments. I drag heavy furniture into the hallway and barricade the doors from the inside. By ducking through our holes, we’re free to explore the whole floor.

In the lobby, I demolish everything I see and pile the debris in front of the main door. I smash the elevator, the plants, and the front desk. The walls, the mirrors, the chandelier. All of it breaks down to form a pile of loose wreckage.

Oh, and I lock the front lobby door. Just in case it matters.

I come across a couple of people on other floors of the building, but they holler through their doors and refuse to come out. I get no response from most of the doors I knock on.

Then it’s time for the next step.

I go on foot at dawn, slipping from doorway to doorway. The newer-model cars parked around the neighborhood don’t notice me if I stay out of their line of sight. I always keep a bus bench or a lamppost or a newsstand between myself and the cars.

And I sure as hell don’t step off the curb.

I find the demolition gear where I left it three days ago, before the New War started. It’s undisturbed in the back room at work, only a few blocks from where we live. I carry my gear back home and make a second trip, at dusk when the light is trickiest. Domestic robots can see just fine in the dark and they don’t have to sleep, so I figure nothing is to be gained from going at night.

On my first trip, I spool detonation cord around my forearm, then push it over my head and wear it like a bandolier. The cord is long and flexible and girlishly pink. You can wrap it five times around a wooden telephone pole to blast it in half. Fifteen times to launch the pole twenty feet in the air and shower the area in splinters.

But all in all, detcord is pretty stable stuff.

On the next trip, I fill a duffel bag with shoe-box-sized packs of blast caps. Ten to a box. And I grab the initiator box. Almost as an afterthought, I grab safety goggles and earplugs.

I’m going to blow up the building across the street.

With the sledgehammer, I make sure nobody is holed up in the top three floors. The robots already targeted this place and cleaned it out. No gore. No bodies. Just that eerie cleanliness. The lack of clutter scares me. It reminds me of those ghost stories where explorers find empty towns with dishes set on the table and the mashed potatoes still warm.

The creepy feeling motivates me to move fast and methodically, as I throw canned food onto a sheet that I drag down the dark hallways.

On the roof I lay out a few lines of detcord. I stay away from the water tower. On the top floor, I line the walls of more apartments with more detcord and drop a few blasting caps. I keep my distance from the central skeleton of the building. I don’t want to bring down the whole thing, just do some cosmetic damage.

I work alone and silently and it goes fast. Normally, my crew would spend months wrapping the walls with geotextiles to absorb flying shrapnel. All explosions throw chunks of metal and concrete for surprising distances. But this time, I want the debris. I want to damage nearby buildings, chew them up and blow out their windows. I want to tear holes in the walls. Gouge out the apartments and leave them like empty eye sockets.

Finally, I dart across the street and into my building’s open parking garage door. The rolling metal door is already torn off its hinges from when the smart cars left the garage on the first day. The door hangs there like a scab about to fall off. Nothing is inside but dumb older-model cars and darkness. The initiator in my hand, I creep way down into the garage, doubling the range because I haven’t kept to the usual safety precautions.

It only takes one fist-sized chunk of concrete to make your head into a bowl of helmet spaghetti.

I find Dawn waiting inside the garage. She’s been busy, too.

Tires.

Tires piled up five high. She’s raided the garage and found the old-model cars down there. She stripped their tires off and rolled them up to the doorway.

It smells funny, too, like gasoline.

Suddenly I understand.

Cover.

Dawn looks at me, raises her eyebrows, then splashes gasoline onto a tire.

“I’ll light it, you roll it,” she says.

“You’re a goddamn genius, woman,” I say.

Her eyes try to smile, but the sharp line of her mouth seems to have been chiseled from stone.

From the safety of the garage, we roll about a dozen burning tires out into the street. They fall over and burn, sending coils of concealing smoke up into the air. We listen from the darkness as a passenger car approaches, slow. It stops in front of the tires, maybe thinking about how to get around.

We retreat deeper inside the garage.

I hold up the initiator and turn the fail-safe. A cherry-red light hovers before me in the darkness of the garage. With my thumb, I feel the cold metal switch. I put one arm around Dawn, plant a kiss on her cheek, and throw the switch.

We hear a sharp snapping sound from across the street, and the ground heaves beneath us. A groan echoes through the dark cave of the garage. We wait in darkness for five minutes, listening to each other breathe. Then Dawn and I march up the sloping driveway, hand in hand, toward the smashed garage door. At the top, we peer through the torn gate and blink into the sunlight.

We look into the new face of the city.

The roof across the street is smoking. Thousands of panes of glass have shattered and plummeted to the street, where they now form a crunchy layer, kind of like fish scales. Chunks of rubble litter the ground, and the entire front of our building has been cratered and sandblasted. Street signs and lampposts have been thrown down across the road. Chunks of pavement, bricks and mortar, thick black wires, knots of plumbing, twisted balls of wrought iron, and tons of unrecognizable debris are piled everywhere we look.

The passenger sedan is still parked near the heap of burning tires. It has been crushed under a pie-shaped chunk of concrete, its rebar poking out like a compound fracture.

The choking black loops of tire smoke cloud the air and blot out the sky.

And the dust. Firemen would hose down the dust on a typical job. Without them, dust settles in layers everywhere like dirty snow. I see no tire tracks, which tells me no cars have been around here—yet. Dawn is already rolling a lit tire toward the intersection.

I stumble over rubble into the middle of the street and for a moment I feel as though, once again, the city is mine. I kick the side of the destroyed car. I really throw my weight into it and leave a boot-sized dent in the quarter panel.

Got you, you son of a bitch. And your friends are gonna have to learn to climb if they want to come get me.

With my sleeve protecting my mouth, I survey the damage to the building facades. And I begin to laugh. I laugh loud and long. My hooting and howling echoes from the buildings, and even Dawn looks up from rolling her tire and cracks a little smile at me.

And then I see them. People. Just a half dozen, emerging into the light from doorways farther down the street. The neighborhood isn’t gone, I think. It was just hiding. The people, my neighbors, step out one by one into the street.

The wind sweeps the inky black smoke up over our heads. Small fires burn up and down the block. Rubble is strewn everywhere. Our little slice of America looks like a war zone. And we look like the survivors of some disaster film. Just like we damn well should, I think.

“Listen,” I announce to the ragged semicircle of survivors. “It won’t be safe out here for very long. The machines are going to come back. They’re going to try to clean this up, but we can’t let them. They were built for this place and we can’t have that. We can’t make it easy for them to come after us. We’ve got to slow them down. Even stop them, if we can.”

And when I finally say it out loud, I can hardly believe my ears. But I know what has to be done here, even if it’s hard. So I look into the eyes of my fellow survivors. I take a deep breath and I tell them the truth: “If we want to live, we’ve got to destroy New York City.”

3. HIGHWAY 70

“Hurry up, Nolan,” urges Mathilda, clutching a map and shrinking into the warmth of the car.

Eight years old, Nolan stands on the shoulder of the road, his small silhouette painted onto the pavement by dawn sunlight. He wobbles, concentrating furiously on peeing. Finally, mist rises from a puddle in the dirt.

The Ohio morning is moist and chilly on this empty two-lane dirt highway. Brown hills stretch for miles around, silent. My antique car pants, sending clouds of carbon monoxide gliding over the dewy pavement. Somewhere far away, a predatory bird screeches.

“See, Mom? I told you we shouldn’t let him drink the apple juice.”

“Mathilda, be nice to your brother. He’s the only one you’ll ever have.”

It’s a mom thing to say, and I’ve said it a thousand times. But this morning I find myself relishing the normalcy of the moment. We search for the ordinary when we are surrounded by the extraordinary.

Nolan is finished. Instead of sitting in the backseat, he climbs into the front, right onto his sister’s lap. Mathilda rolls her eyes but says nothing. Her brother doesn’t weigh much and he’s scared. And she knows it.

“You zip up, buddy?” I ask, out of habit. Then I remember where I am and what’s happening, or going to happen soon. Maybe.

My eyes flicker to the rearview mirror. Nothing yet.

“Let’s go, Mom. Geez,” says Mathilda. She shakes out the map and stares at it, like a mini adult. “We’ve got like another five hundred miles to go.”

“I wanna see Grampa,” whines Nolan.

“Okay, okay,” I say. “Back on the road. No more bathroom breaks. We’re not stopping until Grampa’s house.”

I jam my foot on the accelerator. The car lurches forward, loaded with jugs of water, boxes of food, two cartoon-themed suitcases, and camping gear. Under my seat, I’ve got a Glock 17 pistol in a black plastic case, cocooned in gray foam. It’s never been fired.

The world has changed over the last year. Our technology has been going feral. Incidents. The incidents have been piling up, slowly but surely. Our transportation, our communications, our national defense. The more incidents I saw, the more the world began to feel hollow, as if it could collapse at any moment.

Then my daughter told me a story. Mathilda told me about Baby-Comes-Alive, and she finished by saying those words that she could not know, could never know: robot defense act.

When she said it, I looked into her eyes and I knew.

Now I am running. I am running to save the lives of my children. Technically, this is an emergency vacation. Personal days. Congress is in session today. Maybe I’ve lost my mind. I hope I have. Because I believe that something is in our technology. Something evil.

Today is Thanksgiving.

The inside of this old car is loud. Louder than any car I’ve ever driven. I can’t believe the kids are asleep. I can hear the tires gnawing the pavement. Their rough vibrations are translated right through the steering wheel and into my hands. When I push the brake with my foot, it moves a lever that applies friction to the wheels. Even the knobs and buttons jutting out of the dash are solid and mechanical.

The only worthwhile thing about the car is the satellite radio. Sleek and modern, it churns out pop music that manages to keep me awake and distract me from the road noise.

I’m not used to this—doing the work for my technology. The buttons I usually push don’t need my force, only my intention. Buttons are supposed to be servants, waiting to deliver your commands to the machine. Instead, this loud, dumb piece of steel I’m driving demands that I pay strict attention to every turn of the road, keep my hands and feet ready at all times. The car takes no responsibility for the job of driving. It leaves me in total control.

I hate it. I don’t want control. I just want to get there.

But this is the only car I could find without an intravehicular communication chip. The government made IVC chips standard more than a decade ago, same as they did seat belts, air bags, and emissions criteria. This way, the cars can talk to one another. They can figure out ways to avoid or minimize damage in the milliseconds before a crash. There were glitches at first. One company recalled a few million cars because their chips were reporting to be three feet ahead of where they really were. It made other cars swerve away unnecessarily—sometimes into trees. But in the long run, the IVC chip has saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

New cars come with IVC chips, and old cars require a safety upgrade. A few cars, like this one, were grandfathered in because they’re too primitive even for the upgrade.

Most people think only an idiot would drive such an old car, especially with children on board. It’s a thought I try to ignore as I focus on the road, imagining how people used to do this.

As I drive, a feeling of unease creeps over me and settles into a knot in the middle of my back. I’m tensed up, waiting. For what? Something has changed. Something is different and it’s scaring me.

I can’t put my finger on it. The road is empty. Scrubby bushes cluster on either side of the dusty two-lane highway. My kids are asleep. The car sounds the same.

The radio.

I’ve heard this song before. They played it maybe twenty minutes ago. Hands on the steering wheel, I stare straight ahead and drive. The next song is the same. And the next. After fifteen minutes, the first song plays again. The satellite radio station is looping the last quarter hour of music. I switch the radio off, not looking, punching at the buttons blindly with my fingers.

Silence.

Coincidence. I’m sure it’s a coincidence. In another few hours, we’ll reach my dad’s house in the country. He lives twenty miles outside Macon, Missouri. The man is a technophobe. Never owned a cell phone or a car made within the last twenty years. He’s got radios, lots of radios, and that’s all. He used to build them from kits. The place where I grew up is wide-open and empty and safe.

My cell phone rings.

I scoop it out of my purse, scan the number. Speak of the devil. It’s my dad.

“Dad?”

“Laura, this is your father. Bad things are happening. I can’t talk. Meet me at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Gotta go.”

And the phone cuts off. What?

“Was that Grampa?” asks Mathilda, yawning.

“Yes.”

“What’d he say?”

“There’s been a change of plans. He wants us to meet him in a different place, now.”

“Where?”

“Indianapolis.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, honey.”

Something flickers in the rearview mirror.

For the first time in a long time, there is another vehicle on the highway. I feel relieved. Another person is out here. The rest of the world is still fine. Still sane. It’s a truck. People have trucks out here in the country.

But as the truck accelerates and grows closer, I begin to feel scared. Mathilda sees my pale cheeks, my worried frown. She can feel my fright. “Where are we?” she asks.

“Not far now,” I say, watching the rearview.

“Who’s behind us?”

Mathilda sits up and cranes to look back.

“Sit still, Mathilda. Tighten your seat belt.”

The newish brown pickup truck grows rapidly in the mirror. It moves smoothly but too fast.

“Why’s it coming so fast?” asks Mathilda.

“Mommy?” asks Nolan, rubbing his eyes.

“Quiet, you two. I need to concentrate.”

Dread rises in my throat as I watch the rearview. I ease the accelerator down to the floor, but the brown truck is flying now. Sucking up the pavement. I can’t take my eyes off the mirror.

“Mommy,” exclaims Mathilda.

My eyes dart back to where the road is supposed to be and I swerve to negotiate a bend. Nolan and Mathilda hold each other tight. I get the car under control, veer back to my lane. Then, just as we come around the bend to a long straightaway, I see another car in the oncoming lane. It is black and new and now there is no place for us to go.

“Get in the backseat, Nolan,” I say. “Get buckled in. Mathilda, help him.”

Mathilda scrambles to push her brother off her lap and into the backseat. Nolan looks at me, stricken. Big tears are welling in his eyes. He sniffles and reaches for me.

“It’s okay, baby. Just let your sister help you. Everything’s going to be fine.”

I make a steady stream of baby talk while I focus on the road. My eyes alternate between the black car in front and the brown truck behind. Both are closing fast.

“Okay, we’re buckled in, Mommy,” reports Mathilda from the backseat. My little soldier. Before my mother passed away, she used to say that Mathilda was an old soul. It was in her eyes, she said. You could see the wisdom in her beautiful green eyes.

I hold my breath and squeeze the wheel. The hood of the brown truck fills the entire rearview mirror, then disappears. I look to my left in wide-eyed wonder as the rattling brown truck swerves into the oncoming lane. A woman is looking back at me through the passenger window. Her face is warped by terror. Tears stream down her cheeks and her mouth is open and I realize that she’s screaming and pounding her fists—

And then she’s gone, obliterated in a head-on collision with the black car. Like matter and antimatter. It’s as if they’ve erased each other from existence.

Only the awful mechanical grinding crunch of metal collapsing into metal echoes in my ears. In the rearview, a dark lump of metal rolls off the road, throwing smoke and chunks of debris.

It’s gone. Maybe it never happened. Maybe I imagined it.

Slowing the car, I pull off the road. I put my forehead on the cool plastic of the steering wheel. I close my eyes and try to breathe, but my ears are ringing and that woman’s face is on the backs of my eyelids. My hands are shaking. I reach under my thighs and pull tight to steady myself. The questions start from the backseat but I can’t answer them.

“Is that lady okay, Mommy?”

“Why did those cars do that?”

“What if more cars come?”

A few minutes pass. My breath squeezes painfully in and out of my clenched diaphragm. I strain out the sobs, choke down on my emotions to keep the kids calm.

“It’s going to be okay,” I say. “We’re going to be okay, you guys.”

But my voice rings hollow even in my own ears.

Ten minutes down the road, I come across the first accident.

Smoke pours from twisted wreckage, like a black snake writhing through shattered windows, escaping into the air. The car is half on its side next to the road. A guardrail zigzags out into the road from where it was bashed into during the accident. There are flames coming from the rear of the car.

Then, I see movement—people motions.

In a flash, I imagine myself stepping on the accelerator and speeding past. But I’m not that person. Not yet, anyway. I guess people don’t change that fast, even in the apocalypse.

I pull over a few yards down the road from the wrecked car. It’s a white four door with Ohio plates.

“Stay in the car, kids.”

The hood of the wrecked car is crumpled up like a tissue. The bumper lies on the ground, cracked in half and covered in mud. A mess of engine parts are visible, and the tires point in different directions. I gasp when I notice that one end of the guardrail is going into the passenger-side door.

“Hello?” I call, peering into the driver’s side window. “Anybody need help?”

The door creaks open and a young, overweight guy spills out onto the road shoulder. He rolls over onto all fours, blood running down his face. He coughs uncontrollably. I kneel and help him away from the car, feeling the gravel shoulder gouging my knees through my panty hose.

I force myself to check inside the car.

There is blood on the steering wheel, and the guardrail juts incongruously through the passenger window, but there is no one else inside. Nobody skewered by that errant rail, thank god.

My hair hangs in my face as I pull the young fat guy away from the wreck. It flutters back and forth with each breath I take. At first, the young man helps. But after a few feet, he collapses onto his stomach. He stops coughing. Looking back toward the car, I see there’s a trail of glistening droplets on the pavement. In the front seat, there is a pool of black liquid.

I shove the man over onto his back. His neck rolls loosely. His blue eyes are open. I see some black soot around his mouth, but he is not breathing. I look down and then glance away. A large chunk of flesh from his side has been torn out by the guardrail. The ragged hole gapes there like an anatomy lesson.

For a moment, I hear only the rush of the flames licking the breeze. What can I do? Only one thing comes to mind: I move my body to block my kids’ sight of the dead man.

Then, a cell phone rings. It comes from the man’s shirt pocket. With bloodstained fingers, I reach for his phone. When I slide it out of his pocket and hold it to my ear, I hear something that crushes the small flicker of hope that was still somewhere deep inside me.

“Kevin,” says the phone. “This is your father. Bad things are happening. I can’t talk. Meet me at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Gotta go.”

Aside from the name, it’s the exact same message. Another incident. Piling up.

I drop the phone onto the man’s chest and stand up. I get back inside my ancient car and hold the steering wheel until my hands stop shaking. I don’t remember seeing or hearing anything for the next few minutes.

Then, I put the car in gear.

“We’re going to Grampa’s house, kids.”

“What about Indianapolis?” asks Mathilda.

“Don’t worry about that.”

“But Grampa said—”

“That wasn’t your grandfather. I don’t know who that was. We’re going to Grampa’s.”

“Is that man okay?” asks Nolan.

Mathilda answers for me.

“No,” she says. “That man is dead, Nolan.”

I don’t chastise her. I don’t have the luxury.

It’s dark by the time our tires crunch over my dad’s worn gravel driveway.

Finally, thankfully, the old car heaves to a stop. Exhausted, I allow the engine to die. The silence afterward feels like the vacuum of space.

“Home again, home again, jiggity-jog,” I whisper.

In the passenger seat, Nolan is asleep on Mathilda’s lap, his head resting on her bony shoulder. Mathilda’s eyes are open and her face is set. She looks strong, a tough angel under a mop of dark hair. Her eyes scan back and forth across the yard in a way that worries me.

The details emerge for me, too. There are tire marks on the lawn. The screen door yawns open in the breeze, slapping the house. The cars are gone from the garage. No lights are on inside the house. Part of the wooden fence has been knocked down.

Then, the front door begins to swing open. There is only blackness on the other side. I reach over and take Mathilda’s small hand in mine.

“Be brave, honey,” I say.

Mathilda does as she is told. She clenches the fear between her teeth and holds it there tight so that it can’t move. She squeezes my hand and hugs Nolan’s small body with her other arm. As the splintered wooden door creaks open, Mathilda does not look away or close her eyes or so much as blink. I know that my baby will be brave for me.

No matter what comes out of that door.

4. GRAY HORSE

Them machines been on the back of my mind ever since I interviewed this kid about a thing that happened to him and a buddy of his in an ice cream shop. Gruesome deal.

Course, I never believed a man should keep a ponytail. But I sure did keep my peepers peeped after that fiasco.

Nine months later, the cars over in town went haywire. Me and Bud Cosby were sitting in the Acorn diner. Bud’s telling me about his granddaughter winning some kind of “presti-jicus international prize,” as he calls it, when people start hollerin’ outside. I hold my ground, wary. Bud trots over to the window. He rubs the dirty glass and leans over, resting his old gouty hands on his knees. Just then, Bud’s Cadillac bashes in through the front window of the diner like a deer leaping through your windshield at ninety miles an hour on a dark highway. Glass and metal spray everywhere. There’s a ringing in my ears and after a second I realize it’s Rhonda, the waitress, holding a pitcher of water and bawling her damn fool head off.

Through the new hole in the wall, I watch an ambulance tear by down the middle of the street, hit a fella trying to flag it down, and keep going. Bud’s blood is pooling out fast from under the stalled Caddy.

I light out fast through the back. Take me a walk through the woods. During my walk, it’s like nothing happened. The woods feel safe, like always. They aren’t safe for long. But they’re safe long enough for a fifty-five-year-old man in blood-soaked cowboy boots to scramble his way home.

My house is off the turnpike a hitch, headed toward Pawnee. After I step through the front door, I pour me a cup of cold coffee off the stove and set down on the porch. Through my binoculars, I see traffic on the pike is pretty much dried up. Then a convoy flies by. Ten cars driving inches from each other in single file, top speed. Nobody behind the wheel. Just them robots getting from one place to the next, fast as can be.

Past the highway, a grain combine sits in my neighbor’s north forty. Nobody’s in it, but waves of heat are rising from its idling engine.

I can’t raise a soul on my portable cop radio, the house phone ain’t cooperating, and the embers in my woodstove are the only thing keeping the chill out of my living room; the electricity has officially up and vacated the premises. The next-door neighbor is a mile off, and I’m feeling mighty lonesome.

My porch feels about as safe as a chocolate donut on an anthill.

So I don’t tarry. In the kitchen, I pack a sack lunch: bologna sandwich, cold pickle, a thermos of sweet iced tea. Then I head to the garage to see about my son’s dirt bike. It’s a 350 Honda I ain’t touched for two years. Been sittin’ in the garage gathering dust since the kid joined the army. Now, my boy Paul ain’t out there getting shot at. He’s a translator. Flaps his gums instead. Smart kid. Not like his pa.

Things the way they are, I’m feeling glad my boy is gone. This is the first time I ever felt that way. He’s my only blood, see? And it ain’t smart to put all your eggs in one basket. I just hope he has his gun on him, wherever he is. I know he can shoot it, because I taught him to.

It’s a good long minute before I get the motorbike running. Once I do, I almost forfeit my life on account of not paying proper attention to the biggest machine I own.

Yep, that ungrateful old bitch of a police cruiser tries to run me down in the garage, and she damn near does it, too. It’s a blessing that I blew the extra hundred on a solid steel Tradesman toolbox. Mine’s ruint now, with the nose of a 250-horsepower police cruiser buried in it. I find myself standing in the two-foot gap between the wall and a galdarned murderous vehicle.

The cruiser’s tryin’ to put herself into reverse, tires screeching on the concrete like the whinny of a scared horse. I draw my revolver, walk around to the driver’s side window and put a couple rounds into the little old computer inside.

I killed my own patrol car. Ain’t that the damndest thing you ever heard?

I’m the police and I got no way of helping people. It appears to me that the United States government, to whom I pay regular taxes and who in return provides me with a little thing called civilization, has screwed the almighty pooch in my time of need.

Lucky for me, I’m a member of another country, one that don’t ask me to pay no taxes. It’s got a police force, a jail, a hospital, a wind farm, and churches. Plus park rangers, lawyers, engineers, bureaucrats, and one very large casino that I’ve never had the pleasure of visiting. My country—the other one—is called the Osage Nation. And it lives about twenty miles from my house in a place called Gray Horse, the true home of all Osage people.

You want to name your kid, get married, what have you—you go down to Gray Horse, to Ko-wah-hos-tsa. By the power vested in me by the Osage Nation of Oklahoma, I do pronounce you husband and wife, as they say on certain occasions. If you got Osage blood pumping through your veins, then you will one day find yourself headed down a lonely, wandering dirt lane that goes by the name of County Road 5451. The United States government picked that name and wrote it down on a map, but it leads to a place that’s all our own: Gray Horse.

The road ain’t even marked. Home don’t have to be.

My dirt bike screams like a hurt cat. I can feel the heat blasting off the bike’s muffler through my blue jeans when I finally jam the brakes and crunch to a stop in the middle of the dirt road.

I’m here.

And I ain’t the only one here, neither. The road’s crowded with folks. Osage. A lot of dark hair and eyes, wide noses. The men are big and built like tanks in blue jeans, cowboy shirts all tucked in. The women, well, they’re built just like the men, only in dresses. The people travel in beat-up, dusty station wagons and old vans. Some folks are on horses. A tribal policeman rides along on a camouflaged four-wheeler. Looks to me like these people all packed up for a big ol’ camping trip that might not end. And that’s wise. Because I have a feeling it won’t.

It’s instinctual, I think. When you get the tar knocked out of you, you beat a trail back home soon as you can. Lick your wounds and regroup. This place is the heart of our people. The elders live here year-round, tending to mostly empty houses. But every June, Gray Horse is home to I’n-Lon-Schka, the big dance. And that’s when every Osage who ain’t crippled, and quite a few who are, haul themselves back home. This annual migration is a routine that seeps into your bones, from birth to death. The path becomes familiar to your soul.

There are other Osage cities, of course, but Gray Horse is special. When the tribe arrived in Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears, they fulfilled a prophecy been with us for ages: that we’d move to a new land of great wealth. And what with the oil flowing underneath our land, and a nonnegotiable deed to the full mineral rights, that prophecy was right as rain.

This has been native country a long time. Our people tamed wild dogs on these plains. In that misty time before history, dark-haired, dark-eyed folks just like the ones on this road were out here building mounds to rival the Egyptian pyramids. We took care of this land, and after a lot of heartache and tears, she paid us back in spades.

Is it our fault that all this tends to make the Osage tribe a little snooty?

Gray Horse sits on top of a little hill, bounded by steep ravines carved there by Gray Horse Creek. The county road gets you close, but you got to hike a trail to get to the town proper. A wind farm on the plains to the west spits out electricity for our people, with the extra juice going up for sale. Altogether, it ain’t much to look at. Just a buzz cut on a hill, chosen a long time ago to be the place where the Osage dance their most sacred dance. The place is like a platter lifted up to the gods, so they can watch over our ceremonies and make sure we’re doing them right.

They say we been holding the I’n-Lon-Schka here for over a hundred years, to usher in the new growth of spring. But I got my suspicions.

Them elders who picked out Gray Horse were hard men, veterans of genocide. These men were survivors. They watched the blood of their tribe spill onto the earth and saw their people decimated. Did it just so happen that Gray Horse is in an elevated location with a good field of fire, access to fresh water, and limited approaches? I can’t rightly say. But it’s a dandy of a spot, nestled on a sweet little hill smack-dab in the middle of nowheres.

The clincher is that, at its heart, I’n-Lon-Schka ain’t a dance of renewal. I know because the dance always starts with the eldest males of each family. We get followed by the women and kids, sure, but it’s us fellas who kick off the dance. Truth be told, they’s only one reason to honor the eldest son of a family—we’re the warriors of the tribe.

I’n-Lon-Schka is a war dance. Always has been.

The sun is falling fast as I make my way up the steep trail that leads to the town proper. I hike past families lugging their tents and gear and kids. At the plateau, I see the flicker of a bonfire tickling the dusky sky.

The fire pit is in the middle of a rectangular clearing, four sides ringed with benches made of split logs. Embers leap and mingle with the fresh prickles of stars. It’s going to be a cold, clear night. The people, hundreds of ’em, huddle together in little clumps. They’re hurt and afraid and hopeful.

As soon as I get there, I hear a hoarse, frightened holler from near the fire.

Hank Cotton’s got a young fella, twenty if he’s a day, by the scruff of his neck and he’s shaking him like a rag doll. “Git!” he shouts. Hank is over six foot tall easy, and husky as a black bear. As an ex–football player, and a good one, people out here put more stock in Hank than they would in Will Rogers himself, if he popped out of the grave with a lasso in his hand and a twinkle in his eye.

The kid just hangs there limp, like a kitten in its momma’s mouth. The people surrounding Hank are quiet, afraid to speak up. I can tell this is something I’m going to have to deal with. Keeper of the peace and all.

“What’s going on, Hank?” I ask.

Hank looks down his nose at me, then lets go of the kid.

“He’s a damn Cherokee, Lonnie, and he don’t belong.”

Hank gives the kid a light shove that nearly sends him sprawling. “Why don’t you go back to your own tribe, boy?”

The kid pats down his ripped shirt. He’s tall and lanky and wears his hair long, nigh on the opposite to the barrel-shaped Osage men who loom around him.

“Settle down now, Hank,” I say. “We’re in the middle of an emergency. You know damn well this kid ain’t gonna make it out of here on his own.”

The kid speaks up. “My girlfriend is Osage,” he says.

“Your girlfriend is dead,” spits Hank, voice cracking. “Even if she wasn’t, we ain’t the same people.”

Hank turns to me, huge in the firelight. “And you’re right, Lonnie Wayne, this is an emergency. That’s why we need to stick with our people. We cain’t start letting outsiders in here or we might not survive.”

He kicks the dirt and the kid flinches. “Git, wets’a!”

After a deep breath, I step between Hank and the kid. As expected, Hank don’t appreciate the intrusion. He pokes a big ol’ finger into my chest. “You don’t wanna do that, Lonnie. I’m serious now.”

Before this ends badly, the drumkeeper speaks. John Tenkiller is a rail-thin little fella with dark, wrinkled skin and clear blue eyes. Been around forever, but some kind of magic keeps Tenkiller spry as a willow branch.

“Enough,” says John Tenkiller. “Hank. You and Lonnie Wayne are eldest sons and you have my respect. But them headrights of yours don’t give you free license.”

“John,” says Hank, “you ain’t seen what’s happened down there in town. It’s a massacre. The world’s coming apart at the seams. Our tribe is in danger. And if you ain’t in the tribe, you’re a threat to it. We’ve got to do whatever it takes to survive.”

John lets Hank finish, then he looks at me.

“With all respect, John, this ain’t about one tribe ’gainst another. It ain’t even about white, brown, black, or yellow. There sure as shit is a threat, but it don’t come from other people. It comes from outside.”

“Demons,” murmurs the elder.

A little stir goes through the crowd on that.

“Machines,” I say. “Don’t go talking monsters and demons on me, John. They’s just a bunch of silly old machines and we can kill ’em. But the robots ain’t playing favorites among the races of man. They’re comin’ for all of us. Human beings. We’re all together in this.”

Hank can’t contain himself. “We never let any outsider into this drum circle. It’s a closed circle,” he says.

“This is true,” says John. “Gray Horse is sacred.”

The kid chooses a bad moment to freak out. “C’mon, man! I cain’t go back down there. It’s a fuckin’ death trap. Everybody down there is fuckin’ dead. My name is Lark Iron Cloud. You hear? I’m as Indian as anybody. And y’all wanna kill me just cuz I ain’t Osage?”

I put my hand on Lark’s shoulder and he simmers down. It’s real quiet now with just the crackling of the fire and the field crickets. I see a ring of Osage faces blank as stone bluffs.

“Let’s dance on it, John Tenkiller,” I say. “This here is big. Bigger than us. And my heart tells me we got to pick our place in history. So let’s dance on it first.”

The drumkeeper bows his head. We all sit still, waiting on him. Manners dictate we’d wait on him until morning if we had to. But we don’t have to. John raises his wise face and cuts us with those diamond eyes of his.

“We will dance, and wait for a sign.”

The women help the dancers suit up for the ceremony. When they finish adjusting our costumes, John Tenkiller pulls out a bulging leather pouch. With two fingers, the drumkeeper reaches in and pulls out a wet lump of ocher clay. Then he walks down the row of about a dozen of us dancers and wipes the red earth across our foreheads.

I feel the cold stripe of mud across my face—the fire of tsi-zhu. It dries fast and when it does, it looks like a streak of old blood. A vision, maybe, of what’s to come.

In the middle of the clearing, the massive drum is set up. John sits on his haunches and beats a steady thom, thom, thom that fills the night. Shadows flicker. The dark eyes of the audience are upon us. One by one, we—the eldest sons—stand and ease into our dance around the drum circle.

Ten minutes ago we were cops and lawyers and truckers, but now we’re warriors. Dressed in the old style—otter hides, feathers, bead-work and ribbon work—we fall right into a tradition that has no place in history.

The transformation is sudden and it jars me. I think to myself that this war dance is like a scene trapped in amber, indistinguishable from its brothers and sisters in time.

As the dance begins, I imagine the lunatic world of man changing and evolving just past the flickering edge of firelight. This outside world lurches ever onward, drunk and out of control. But the face of the Osage people stays the same, rooted in this place, in the warmth of this fire.

So we dance. The sounds of the drum and the movements of the men are hypnotic. Each of us concentrates on his own self, but we naturally build into a fated harmony. The Osage men are mighty substantial, but we crouch and hop and glide around the fire smooth as snakes. Eyes closed, we move together as one.

Feeling my way around the circle, I register the red flicker of firelight pushing through the veins of my closed eyelids. After a little while, the red-tinged darkness opens up and takes on the feel of a wide vista—as if I’m staring through a knothole into a vast, dark cavern. This is my mind’s eye. I know that soon I will find images of the future painted there—in red.

The rhythms of our bodies push our minds away. My mind’s eye shows me the desperate face of that boy from the ice cream store. The promise I made to him echoes in my ears. I smell the metallic tang of blood pooled on that tile floor. Looking up, I see a figure walking out of the back room of the ice cream shop. I follow. The mysterious figure stops in the darkened doorway and slowly turns to me. I shudder and choke down a scream as I spot the demonic smile painted on the plastic face of my enemy. In its padded gripper, the machine holds something: a little origami crane.

And the drumming stops.

In the space of twenty heartbeats, the dance fades. I crack open my eyes. It’s just me and Hank left. My breath puffs out in white clouds. When I stretch, my joints pop like firecrackers. A sheen of frost lines my tasseled sleeve. My body feels like it just woke up, but my mind never went to sleep.

The eastern sky is now blushing baby pink. The fire still burns something ferocious. My people are collapsed in heaps around the drum circle, asleep. Me and Hank must’ve been dancing for hours, robotically.

Then I notice John Tenkiller. He’s standing stock-still. Real slow, he raises a hand and points toward the dawn.

A white man stands there in the shadows, face bloodied. A crust of broken glass is embedded in his forehead. He sways and the shards glitter in the firelight. His pant legs are wet and stained black with mud and leaves. In the crook of his left arm, he’s got a sleeping toddler, her face buried in his shoulder. A little boy, probably ten, stands in front of his daddy, head down, exhausted. The man has a strong right hand resting on his son’s skinny shoulder.

There’s no sign of a wife or anybody else.

Me, Hank, and the drumkeeper gape at the man, curious. Our faces are smeared with dried ocher and we’re dressed in clothes older than the pioneers. I’m thinking that this guy must feel like he done stepped through the mud and back in time.

But the white fella just stares right through us, shell-shocked, hurting.

Just then, his little boy raises his face to us. His small round eyes are wide and haunted, and his pale forehead is striped with a rusty crimson line of dried blood. As sure as that boy is standing there, he’s been marked with the fire of tsi-zhu. Me and Hank look at each other, every hair of our bodies standing on end.

The boy has been painted but not by our drumkeeper.

People are waking up and murmuring to each other.

A couple seconds later, the drumkeeper speaks in the deep drone of a long-practiced prayer: “Yea, let the reflection of this fire on yonder skies paint the bodies of our warriors. And verily, at that time and place, the bodies of the Wha-zha-zhe people became stricken with the red of the fire. And their flames did leap into the air, making the walls of the very heavens redden with a crimson glow.”

“Amen,” murmur the people.

The white man lifts his hand from his boy’s shoulder and it leaves a perfect glistening palm print of blood. He holds out his arms, beckoning.

“Help us,” he whispers. “Please. They’re coming.”

5. TWENTY-TWO SECONDS

It is a strange sound. Very faint. Very odd. Cyclical; it comes again, and then again. I time the sound with the pocket watch that sits in a yellow pool of light on my workbench. It is very quiet for a while and I can hear the second hand patiently tick-tick-ticking.

What a lovely sound.

The apartment is dark except for my lamp. The building administrative brain deactivates overhead lights each night at ten p.m. It is now three a.m. I touch the wall. Exactly twenty-two seconds later, I hear a faint roar. The thin wall quivers.

Twenty-two seconds.

Mikiko lies across my workbench on her back, eyes closed. I have repaired the damage to the temporal portion of her skull. She is ready for activation, yet I do not dare to put her online. I don’t know what she will do, what decisions she will make.

I finger the scar on my cheek. How can I forget what happened last time?

I slip out the door and into the hallway. The wall lights are dimmed. My paper sandals are silent on the thin, brightly colored carpet. The low noise comes again and I imagine that I feel the air pressure fluctuate. It’s as if a bus is driving past every few seconds.

The noise is coming from just around the corner.

I stop. My nerves tell me to go back. Huddle in my closet-sized condo. Forget about this. This building is reserved for those over the age of sixty-five. We are here to be taken care of, not to take risks. But I know that if there is danger, I must see it and confront it and understand it. If not for my sake, then for Kiko’s. She is helpless right now, and I am helpless to fix her. I must protect her until I am able to break the spell she is under.

However, this does not mean that I must be brave about it.

At the corner of the hallway, I lean my aching back against the wall. I peek around the edge with one eye. My breathing is already coming in panicked gasps. And what I see makes me stop breathing altogether.

The hallway by the elevator banks is deserted. On the wall is an ornate display: two strips of round lights with floor numbers painted next to them. All the lights are dark except the ground floor one, which glows dull red. As I watch, the glowing red dot creeps slowly upward. As it reaches each floor, it makes a soft click. Each click grows louder in my mind, as the elevator rises higher and higher.

Click. Click. Click.

The dot reaches the top floor and pauses there. My hands are squeezed into fists. I bite my lip hard enough to make it bleed. The dot holds steady. Then, it streaks downward with nauseating speed. As the dot approaches my floor, I can hear that odd noise again. It is the whoosh of the elevator plunging straight down at the speed of gravity. A puff of wind is pushed out into the hallway as the elevator falls. Under the wind, I can also hear the screams.

Clickclickclickclick.

I flinch. Press my back against the wall and close my eyes. The elevator barrels past, rattling the walls and causing the hallway sconces to flicker.

Everything has a mind. The mind of a lamp. The mind of a desk. The mind of a machine. There is a soul inside everything, a mind that can choose to do good or evil. And the mind of the elevator seems bent on evil.

“Oh no, no, no,” I whimper to myself. “Not good. Not good at all.”

I gather my courage, then scurry around the corner and press the elevator call button. I watch the wall indicator as the red dot climbs back up, one level at a time. All the way to my floor.

Click. Click. Bing. It arrives. The doors slide open like curtains parting on a stage.

“Most definitely not good, Nomura,” I say to myself.

The elevator walls are splattered with blood and bits of gore. Fingernail scratches mark the walls. I shudder to see a pair of bloodstained dentures partially embedded in the mounting bracket of the ceiling lamp, casting strange reddish shadows over all I see. Yet, there are no bodies. Smears on the floor lead toward the door. There are boot prints in the blood, marked with the pattern of the domestic humanoid robots that work here.

“What have you done, elevator?” I whisper.

Bing, it insists.

Behind me, I hear the vacuum-tube whir of the servicebot elevator. But I can’t look away. Can’t stop trying to understand how this atrocity has happened. A blast of cool air hits the back of my neck as the small service-elevator door opens behind me. Just as I turn, a bulky mailbot shoves itself into the back of my legs.

Caught off guard, I collapse.

The mail robot is simple: an almost featureless beige box the size of an office copy machine. It normally delivers mail to the residents, gentle and quiet. From where I lie sprawled on the floor, I notice that its small round intention light doesn’t glow red or blue or green; it is dark. The mailbot’s sticky tires are clinging to the carpet as the device shoves me forward, toward the open mouth of the elevator.

I climb to my knees and pull on the front of the mailbot in a failed attempt to stand. The single black camera eye on the front face of the mailbot watches me struggle. Bing, says the elevator. The doors close a few inches and then open, like a hungry mouth.

My knees slide across the carpet as I push against the machine, leaving twin ruffled streaks on the thin nap. My sandals have fallen off. The mailbot has too much mass and there is nothing to grab hold of on its smooth plastic face. I whimper for help, but the hallway is dead quiet. The lamps only watch me. The doors. The walls. They have nothing to say. Complicit.

My foot crosses the threshold of the elevator. In a panic, I reach on top of the mailbot and knock off the flimsy plastic boxes that hold letters and small packages. Papers flutter onto the carpet and into the drying pools of blood in the elevator. Now I am able to flip open the service panel on the front frame of the machine. Blindly, I stab at a button. The rolling box keeps ramming me into the elevator. With my arm bent at a cockeyed angle, I hold down the button with all my failing strength.

I beg the mailbot to stop this. It has always been a good worker. What madness has infected it?

Finally, the machine stops pushing. It is rebooting. This activity will last perhaps ten seconds. The mailbot is blocking the elevator door. I climb awkwardly on top of it. Embedded in its broad, flat back is a cheap blue LCD screen. Hex code flickers by as the delivery machine steps through its loading instructions.

Something is wrong with my friend. The mind of this robot is clouded. I know that the mailbot does not wish to harm me, just as Mikiko did not wish to harm me. It is simply under a bad spell, an outside influence. I will see what I can do about that.

Holding down a certain button during the reboot initiates a diagnostic mode. Scanning the hex code with one finger, I read what is happening in the mind of my gentle friend. Then, with a couple of button presses, I send the boxy machine into an alternate boot mode.

A safe mode.

Lying on my belly on top of the machine, I cautiously peek over the front edge. The intention light blossoms into a soft green glow. That is very good, but there isn’t much time. I slide off the back of the mailbot, slip my sandals back on, and gesture at the bot.

“Follow me, Yubin-kun,” I whisper.

After an unnerving second, the machine complies. It whirs along as I scamper back down the hallway to my room. I must return to where Mikiko waits, slumbering. Behind me, the elevator doors slam shut. Do I sense anger in them?

Speakers chime at us as we creep down the hall.

Ba-tong. Ba-tong.

“Attention,” says a pleasant female voice. “There is an emergency. All occupants are pleased to evacuate the building immediately.”

I pat my new friend on its back and hold the door as we continue into my room. This announcement certainly cannot be trusted. Now I understand. The minds of the machines have chosen evil. They have set their wills against me. Against all of us.

Mikiko lies on her back, heavy and unresponsive. In the hallway, sirens chirp and lights flash. Everything here is ready. My tool belt is snapped on. A small jug of water hangs from my side. I even remember to put on my warm hat, the flaps pulled snugly over my ears.

But I cannot bring myself to wake my darling—to bring her online.

Now the main building lights are on at top illumination and that pleasant voice is repeating again and again: “All occupants are pleased to evacuate the building immediately.”

But, my soul help me, I am stuck. I can’t leave Kiko behind, but she is too heavy to carry. She will have to walk on her own. But I am terrified of what will happen if she comes online. The evil that has corrupted the mind of my building could spread. I could not bear to see it cloud her dark eyes again. I will not leave her, yet I cannot stay. I need help.

Decision made, I close her eyes with my palm.

“Please come here, Yubin-kun,” I whisper to the mail-delivering robot. “We cannot allow the bad ones to speak with you, as they did Mikiko.” The intention light flickers on the blocky beige machine. “Hold very still now.”

And with a swift swing of my hammer, I smash the infrared port that is used to update the diagnostics of the machine. Now, there is no way to alter the instructions of the mailbot from afar.

“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” I ask the machine. Then I glance over to where Mikiko lies, eyes closed. “Yubin-kun, my new friend, I hope you are feeling strong today.”

With a grunt, I lift Mikiko off the workbench and set her on top of the mailbot. Built to carry heavy packages, the solid machine is completely unaffected by the added weight. It simply trains its single camera eye on me, following as I open the door to the hallway.

Outside, I see a shaky line of elderly residents. One by one, the door at the end of the hallway opens and another resident steps into the stairwell. My neighbors are very patient people. Very polite.

But the soul of this building has gone mad.

“Stop, stop,” I mumble to them. They ignore me, as usual. Politely avoiding eye contact, they keep stepping through the door, one after another.

With my loyal Yubin-kun following close, I reach the stairwell door just before the last woman can step through. An intention light over the doorway flashes yellow at me crossly.

“Mr. Nomura,” says the building in a gentle female voice, “please wait your turn, sir. Mrs. Kami is presently pleased to go through the door.”

“Don’t go,” I mutter to the elderly woman in her bathrobe. I cannot make eye contact. Instead, I lightly grasp her elbow.

With a glare, the shriveled old woman tears her elbow from my hand and shoves past me, stepping through the doorway. Just before the door snaps shut behind her, I wedge my foot into the opening and get a glimpse of what is inside.

It is a bad dream.

In a confusion of inky blackness and flashing strobes, dozens of my elderly neighbors crush each other in falling heaps down the concrete stairs. Showers of emergency water rain down from the sprinkler heads, turning the stairs into slick, cascading waterfalls. The fire exhaust vent is on full strength, sucking frigid air up from the bottom of the shaft to the top. Moans and cries are drowned by the shrieking turbines. The mass of writhing arms and legs seems to combine in my vision until it is a single, massively suffering creature.

I pull my foot back and the door slams shut.

We are all trapped. It is only a matter of time before the domestic humanoid robots ascend to this level. When they arrive, I will be unable to defend myself or Mikiko.

“This is a very bad, bad, bad thing, Mr. Nomura,” I whisper to myself.

Yubin-kun blinks a yellow intention light at me. My friend is wary, as he should be. He senses that things are wrong.

“Mr. Nomura,” says the voice overhead, “if you are not pleased to utilize the stairwell, we will send a helper to assist. Stay where you are. Help is on the way.”

Click. Click. Click.

As the elevator rises, the red dot begins its slow crawl up from the ground floor.

Twenty-two seconds.

I turn to Yubin-kun. Mikiko lies sprawled on top of the beige box, her black hair splayed out. I look down into her gently smiling face. She is so beautiful and pure. In her slumber, she dreams of me. She waits for me to break this evil spell and wake her. Someday, she will arise and become my queen.

If only I had more time.

The dry, menacing click of the elevator gauge breaks my reverie. I am a helpless old man and I am out of ideas. I take Mikiko’s limp hand in mine and turn to face the elevator doors.

“I am so sorry, Mikiko,” I whisper. “I tried, my darling. But now there is nowhere else—Ay!”

I hop backward and rub my foot where Yubin-kun has run it over. The machine’s intention light blinks at me frantically. On the wall, the red dot reaches my floor. My time is up.

Bing.

A burst of cool air blows from the service elevator across the hall from the main elevator bank. Its door panel slides out of the way and I see a steel box inside, just a little bigger than the mailbot. On its sticky wheels, Yubin-kun slides into the cramped space with Mikiko still lying on top.

There is just enough room for me to squeeze inside, too.

As I enter, I hear the main elevator doors open across the hall. I look up just in time to see the plastic grin of the Big Happy domestic robot standing inside the blood-coated elevator. Streaks of red liquid bead on its casing. Its head twists back and forth, scanning.

The head stops, its lifeless purple camera eyes locked onto me.

Then, the door of my service elevator slides closed. Just before the floor drops out from under me, I squeeze out a few words to my new comrade. “Thank you, Yubin-kun,” I say. “I am in your debt, my friend.”

6. AVTOMAT

Back in Oklahoma, my dad used to tell me that if I didn’t straighten up and act like a man, I’d end up dead or in jail. Lonnie Wayne was right about that, which is why I ended up enlisted. But still. Thank god I was in lockup for Zero Hour.

I’m laying on my cell bunk, back against the cinder block wall and my combat boots propped up on the steel toilet. Got a rag over my face to keep the dust out of my nostrils. I’ve been incarcerated ever since my SAP unit lost its mind and started wasting people.

C’est la vie. That’s what my cell mate, Jason Lee, says. He’s a portly Asian kid with glasses, doing sit-ups on the cement floor. Says he does it to stay warm.

I’m not the exercising type. For me, these six months have meant a lot of magazines to read. Staying warm means growing a beard.

Boring, sure, but all the same, my day is going kind of nice. I’m perusing a four-month-old issue of some stateside celebrity rag. Learning all about how “movie stars are just like us.” They like to eat at restaurants, go shopping, take their kids to the park—shit like that.

Just like us. Yeah. By us, I don’t think they mean me.

It’s an educated guess, but I doubt that movie stars care about repairing militarized humanoid robots that are designed to subdue and pacify a murderously angry population in an occupied country. Or being thrown into a thirteen-by-seven-foot cell with one tiny window just for performing your glamorous job.

“Bruce Lee?” I ask. He hates it when I call him that. “Did you know movie stars are just like us? Who knew, man?”

Jason Lee stops doing sit-ups. He looks up at me where I’m leaning back into the corner of our cell. “Quiet,” he says. “Do you hear that?”

“Hear wha—”

And then a tank round discharges through the wall across the room. A blazing shower of rebar and cement shreds my cell mate into big flabby chunks of flesh wrapped in what’s left of dust-colored army fatigues. Jason was here and now he’s gone. Like a magic trick. I can’t even process this.

I’m huddled in the corner—miraculously uninjured. Through the bars, I see the duty officer is no longer at his desk. There isn’t any desk anymore. Just chunks of rubble. For a split second, I can see through the new hole that’s been blasted in the wall across the room.

There are, as I suspected, tanks on the other side of it.

A cloud of frigid dust rolls into the room, and I start to shiver. Jason Lee was correct: It’s a cold motherfucker out there. It registers that despite the new renovation across the room, the bars of my cell are just as strong and steady as before.

My hearing starts to return. Visibility is nil, but I identify a trickling sound, like a creek or something. It’s what’s left of Jason Lee, bleeding out.

Also, my magazine seems to have disappeared.

Fuck.

I press my face against the mesh-wire-reinforced window of my cell. Outside, the base has gone FUBAR. I’ve got eyes on the alley leading to the main pavilion of the Kabul green zone. A couple of friendly soldiers are out there, crouched against a mud-brick wall. They look young, confused. They’re in full rig: backpacks, body armor, goggles, knee pads—all that crap.

How safe can safety goggles make a war?

The lead soldier peeks his head around the corner. He hops back, excited. He yanks out a Javelin antitank missile launcher and loads it, fast and smooth. Good training. Just then, an American tank cruises past the alleyway and spits a shell without stopping. It lobs over the base and away from us. I feel the building quake as the shell impacts somewhere.

Through the window, I watch the antitank soldier step out of the alley, sit down cross-legged with that log on his shoulder, and get filleted by incoming antipersonnel tank fire. It’s an automated tank protection system that targets certain silhouettes—like “guy holding antitank weapon”—within a certain radius.

Any insurgent would have known better.

I frown, forehead pressed against the thick window. My hands are jammed in my armpits to stay warm. I got no idea why that American tank just erased a friendly soldier, but I have a feeling that it has something to do with SAP One committing suicide.

The remaining soldier in the alley watches his buddy go down in pieces, turns, and runs back toward me. Just then, a billowing black cloth blocks my view. It’s a robe. A bad guy just crossed in front of my window. I hear small arms fire, close.

Bad guys and nutso equipment? Fuck, man. When it rains it pours.

The robe flutters away and the whole alley just disappears, replaced by black smoke. The glass of my window buckles and fractures, slicing my forehead open. I hear the hollow concussion a split second later. I fall back onto my bunk, grab the blanket, and pull it over my shoulders. Check my face. My fingers come away bloody. When I look back out the fractured window, there are only dust-covered lumps in the alley. Bodies of soldiers, locals, and insurgents.

The tanks are killing everybody.

It is becoming very clear to me that I’ve got to find a way out of this cell if I want my future to include breathing.

Outside, something roars by overhead, ripping dark vortices out of the rising smoke. Probably an armed drone. I cower back in my bunk. The dust is starting to clear out now. I spot the keys to my cell across the room. They’re still attached to a broken belt, hanging from a splintered piece of chair. Might as well be on Mars.

No weapons. No armor. No hope.

Then a blood-covered insurgent ducks in through the blasted-out hole in the wall. He catches sight of me, stares wide-eyed. One side of his face is plastered with brown-white alkaline sand and the other side is caked with powdered blood. His nose is broken and his lips are swollen up from the cold. The hair of his black mustache and beard is fine, wiry. He can’t be more than sixteen years old.

“Let me out, please. I can help you,” I say in my finest Dari. I pull the rag off my face so he can see my beard. At least he’ll know I’m not active duty.

The insurgent presses his back against the wall and closes his eyes. It looks like he’s praying. Dirt-caked hands pressed flat against the blasted concrete wall. At least he has an old-fashioned revolver hanging on his hip. He’s scared but operational.

I can’t make out his prayer, but I can tell it isn’t for his own life. He’s praying for the souls of his buddies. Whatever’s happening out there sure ain’t pretty.

Better hit the road.

“The keys are on the floor, friend,” I urge. “Please, I can help you. I can help you stay alive.”

He looks at me, stops praying.

“The avtomata have come for us all,” he says. “We thought the avto were rising up against you. But they are thirsty for all our blood.”

“What’s your name?”

He eyes me suspiciously.

“Jabar,” he says.

“Okay, Jabar. You’re going to survive this. Free me. I’m unarmed. But I know these, uh, avtomata. I know how to kill them.”

Jabar picks up the keys, flinching as something big and black barrels down the street outside. He picks his way over the rubble to my cell.

“You are in prison.”

“Yeah, that’s right. See? We’re on the same side.”

Jabar thinks about it.

“If they have put you in prison, it is my duty to free you,” he says. “But if you attack me, I will kill you.”

“Sounds fair,” I say, never taking my eyes off the key.

The key thunks into the lock, and I yank the door open and dart out. Jabar tackles me to the ground, eyes wide with fear. I think he’s afraid of me, but I’m wrong.

He’s afraid of what’s outside.

“Do not pass before the windows. The avtomata can sense your heat. They will find us.”

“Infrared heat sensing?” I ask. “That’s only on the automated sentry turrets, man. ASTs. They’re at the front gate. Aimed away from the base, toward the desert. C’mon, we need to go out the back.”

Blanket over my shoulders, I step out of the hole in the wall and into the frigid confusion of dust and smoke in the alley outside. Jabar crouches and follows, pistol drawn.

It’s god’s own raging dust storm out here.

I double over and run for the rear of the base. There’s a phalanx of sentry guns covering the front gate. I want to stay clear of them. Slip out the back and get someplace safe. Figure it out from there.

We round a corner and find a black-blasted crater the size of a building, just smoldering. Not even an autotank has the ordnance to do this. It means the drones aren’t just spotting rabbits up there—they’re launching Brimstone missiles.

When I turn to warn Jabar, I see he is already scanning the skies. A fine layer of dust coats his beard. It makes him look like a wise old man in a young man’s body.

Probably not too far from the truth.

I stretch my blanket out over my head to obscure my silhouette and form a confusing target for anything watching from above. I don’t have to tell Jabar to stay under the overhangs, he already does it by habit.

Abruptly I wonder how long he’s been fighting these same robots. What must he have thought when they began to attack our own troops? Probably thought it was his lucky day.

Finally, we reach the back perimeter. Several of the twelve-foot cement walls have been battered down. Pulverized cement coats the ground, clean rebar jutting through the broken chunks. Jabar and I crouch next to a sagging wall. I peek around the corner.

Nothing.

A cleared area surrounds the whole base, sort of a dusty road wrapping tight around our perimeter. No-man’s-land. A few hundred meters out, there’s a rolling hill with thousands of slate stones sticking up like splinters. Porcupine Hill.

The local graveyard.

I tap Jabar on the shoulder and we run for it. Maybe the robots aren’t patrolling the perimeter today. Maybe they’re too busy killing people for no reason. Jabar sprints past me and I watch his brown robes blur away into the dust. The storm swallows him. I run as hard as I can to keep up.

Then I hear a noise I’ve been dreading.

The high-pitched whine of an electric motor echoes from somewhere around us. It’s a mobile sentry gun. They constantly patrol this narrow strip of no-man’s-land. Apparently, nobody told them to take a break today.

The MSG has four long narrow legs with wheels on the ends. On top, it has an M4 carbine set to auto-fire with an optics package mounted on the barrel and a big rectangular magazine bolted to the side. When the thing gets moving, those legs flutter up and down over rocks and gravel in a blur, while that rifle stays motionless, perfectly level.

And it’s coming after us.

Thank god the terrain is starting to get more rough. It means we’re almost off the graded perimeter strip. The motor whine is getting louder. The MSG uses vision for target acquisition, so the dust should obscure us. I can just see the tail of Jabar’s robe fluttering in the dust storm as he keeps running, fast and steady away from the green zone.

Breathe in. Breathe out. We’re gonna make it.

Then, I hear the stuttering click of a range finder. The MSG is using short-range ultrasonic, bouncing sound through the dust storm to find us. That means it knows we’re here. Bad news. I wonder how many more steps I have left.

One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.

A tombstone emerges from the haze—just a jagged chunk of slate tilting drunkenly out of the ground. Then I see a dozen more looming ahead. I stagger between the tombstones, feeling the cold sweating slabs under my palms as I grab them for balance.

The clicking is almost a steady hum now.

“Down!” I shout to Jabar. He leaps forward and disappears over a rut in the ground. A burst of automatic weapons fire roars out of the storm. Shards of a tombstone explode across my right arm. I stumble and fall on my stomach, then try to drag myself behind a stone.

Clickclickclick.

Strong hands grab hold of my hurt arm. I stifle a shout as Jabar pulls me over the hillock. We’re in a small ditch, surrounded by knee-high shards of rock embedded in sandy ground. The graves are placed haphazardly between occasional clumps of mossy weeds. Most of the tombstones are unmarked, but a couple have been spray-painted with symbols. Some others are ornately carved marble. I can see a few have steel cages built around them, peaked roofs the only ornamentation.

Click, click, click.

The ultrasonic grows fainter. Crouched against Jabar, I take a second to inspect my wound. Part of my upper right arm is shredded, totally messing up my flag of Oklahoma tat. Half the damn eagle feathers that hang from the bottom of the Osage battle shield are grated off by slivers of black rock. I show my arm to Jabar.

“Look what the fuckers did to my tattoo, Jabar buddy.”

He shakes his head at me. He’s got one elbow covering his mouth, breathing through the fabric. There might be a smile under that arm right now. Who knows? Maybe we’re both going to make it out of this alive.

And then, just like that, the dust clears.

The storm passes by overhead. We watch the huge mass of swirling dust tear across the perimeter strip, engulf the green zone, and move on. Now the sun is beaming down bright and cold from a clear blue sky. There’s hardly any atmosphere in these mountains, and the harsh sunlight casts shadows like spilled tar. I can see my breath now.

And, I figure, so can the robots.

We run hard, staying low and darting between the larger tombs that are protected by blue or green steel cages. I don’t know where we’re going now. I just hope that Jabar has a plan and that it involves me staying alive.

After a couple minutes, I catch a flash out of the corner of my eye. It’s the mobile sentry gun, cruising over a rough path in the middle of the graveyard, swinging its rifle head back and forth. Sunlight glints from the low-slung optics module bulging from the top of the gun. The bowed legs tremble over the bumpy earth, but the rifle barrel is motionless as a barn owl.

I dive behind a tombstone and lie flat on my belly. Jabar has also found cover, a few feet away. He motions to me with one finger, brown eyes urgent beneath dust-frosted eyebrows.

Following his gaze, I see a partially dug grave. It was going to be a nice resting place for some Afghani—a brand-new steel cage rests partially over it. Whoever was working on this got the hell out of here fast, without bolting down the cage.

Keeping still, I crane my neck to look around. The mobile sentry gun is nowhere to be seen. Faintly, I hear the lawn mower thup-thup-thup of a low-flying drone. It sounds like a death sentence. Somewhere out there, the sentry gun is scanning row after row of tombstones for humanlike silhouettes or some trace movement.

Inching forward, I crawl until I reach the open grave. Jabar already lies inside, his face striped with shadows from the slatted bars of the steel cage. Holding my hurt arm, I roll inside.

Me and Jabar lie there next to each other on our backs in the half-dug grave, trying to wait out the sentries. The ground is frozen. The gravelly dirt feels harder than the floor of my cement cell. I can sense the warmth seeping away from my body.

“It’s okay, Jabar,” I whisper. “The drones are following standard operating procedure. Looking for squirters. People running away. There should be a twenty-minute scan-and-hold routine, max.”

Jabar wrinkles his brow at me.

“I already know this.”

“Oh, right. Sorry.”

We huddle together, teeth chattering.

“Hey,” says Jabar.

“Yeah?”

“Are you really an American soldier?”

“Course. Why else would I be on base?”

“I never saw one. Not in person.”

“Seriously?”

Jabar shrugs.

“We only see the metal ones,” he says. “When the avtomata attacked, we joined. Now, my friends are dead. So are yours, I feel.”

“Where do we go, Jabar?”

“The caves. My people.”

“Is it safe there?”

“Safe for me. Not safe for you.”

I notice that Jabar holds his pistol tight across his chest. He is young, but I cannot forget that he’s been at this a very long time.

“So,” I say, “am I your prisoner?”

“I think so, yes.”

Looking up through the metal slats, I can see that the blank blue sky is stained with black smoke rising from the green zone. Besides the soldiers in the alley, I haven’t seen another living American since the attack began. I think of all those tanks and drones and sentry guns that must be out there, stalking survivors.

Jabar’s arm feels warm against me, and I remember that I don’t have any clothes or food or weapons. I’m not even sure the U.S. Army would allow me to have a weapon.

“Jabar, my man,” I say. “I can work with that.”

7. MEMENTO MORI

“Lurker, you going to answer that?”

I look at Arrtrad with disgust. Here he is, a thirty-five-year-old man and he hasn’t a clue. The world is ending. Doomsday is upon us. And Arrtrad, as he calls himself on the chat lines, stands across from me, Adam’s apple bobbing under his weak chin, asking me if I’m going to answer that?

“Do you know what this means, Arrtrad?”

“No, boss. Uh, not really, I mean.”

“Nobody calls this phone, you tosser. Nobody except him. The reason we’ve run. The devil in the machine.”

“You mean, that’s who’s calling?”

Not a doubt in my mind.

“Yeah, it’s Archos. There’s nobody else who’s ever traced this bloody number. My number.”

“Does this mean he’s coming for us?”

I look at the phone, vibrating on our small wooden dinner table. It’s surrounded by a mess of papers and pencils. All my schemes. This phone and me had a lot of fun together in the old days. Pulled a lot of capers. But now it makes me flinch to see it. Keeps me up at night, wondering what’s on the other end of it.

There’s a scream of motors and the table lurches. A pencil rolls away, drops to the floor with a tap.

“Damned speedboats,” says Arrtrad, grabbing the wall for support. Our houseboat sways on the wake. She’s just a little boat, about twelve yards long. Basically a wood-paneled living room floating a yard off the water. For the last couple months, I’ve been sleeping on the bed and Arrtrad on the convertible folding table, with just the potbellied stove to keep us warm.

And watching that phone to keep me busy.

The speedboat whines off farther down the Thames, toward the ocean. It’s probably my imagination, but it feels as if that boat came and went in a panic, fleeing something.

Now I can feel the panic rising in me, too.

“Unmoor us,” I whisper to Arrtrad, wincing as the phone rings again and again.

It won’t stop ringing.

“What?” asks Arrtrad. “We haven’t got much petrol, Lurker. Let’s answer the phone first. See what this is all about.”

I stare at him blankly. He looks back, gulping. I know from experience that there’s nothing in my gray eyes for him to see. No emotion to latch onto. No weakness. It’s the unpredictability that makes him afraid of me.

In a small voice, Arrtrad asks, “Shall I answer it?”

Arrtrad picks up the mobile phone with shaky fingers. Autumn light streams in from the thin-paned windows and his thinning hair floats like a halo on his wrinkled scalp. I can’t allow this weakling to get the upper hand. I’ve got to show my crew who’s boss. Even if it’s a crew of one.

“Give me that,” I mumble, and snatch the phone away. I answer it with one thumb, in a well-practiced motion.

“It’s Lurker,” I growl. “And I’m coming for you, mate—”

I’m interrupted by a recorded message. I hold the phone away from my ear. The tinny computerized female voice is easy to hear over the lapping waves outside.

“Attention, citizen. This is a message from your local emergency alert system. This is not a test. Be advised that due to a chemical spill in central London, all citizens are asked to go inside immediately. Bring your pets with you. Close and lock all doors and windows. Shut off all ventilation systems that circulate air. Please wait for assistance, which will arrive shortly. Note that due to the nature of the accident, unmanned systems may be utilized for your rescue. Until help arrives, please monitor your radio for emergency alert system announcements. Thank you for your cooperation. Beep. Attention, citizen. This is a message—”

Click.

“Unmoor us now, Arrtrad.”

“It’s a chem spill, Lurker. We should shut the windows and—”

“Unmoor us, you sodding fuck!”

I scream the words right into Arrtrad’s dim-witted weasel face, painting his forehead with my spittle. Out the window, London looks normal. Then I notice a thin column of smoke. Nothing big, but just hanging there, out of place. Sinister.

When I turn around, Arrtrad is wiping his forehead and muttering, but he is walking toward the flimsy front door of the houseboat as he goddamn well should be. Our shoddy wharf is old and rotten and has been here forever. We’re tied to it tight in three places and if we don’t get untied, we won’t be going anywhere.

And on this particular afternoon, I happen to be in quite a hurry to be off. See, I’m near to fairly certain that this is the end of days. It’s the sodding apocalypse and I’m teamed with the village idiot and shackled tight to a waterlogged pile of rot.

I’ve never even started the houseboat engine before.

The key is dangling in the ignition. I walk to the nav station at the front of the room. I prop open the front window and the smell of muddy water wafts in. For a moment, I rest my sweaty palms on the fake wood of the steering wheel. Then without looking I reach down and turn the key, quick.

Ka-rowr.

The engine turns over and sputters into life. First try. Through the back window, I see a haze of bluish smoke billow up. Arrtrad is crouched on the right side of the boat, alongside the dock, getting the second mooring rope untied. Starboard, I suppose the boating types call it.

“Memento Mori,” calls Arrtrad between pants. “That’s a funny name to give a boat. What’s it mean?”

I ignore him. In the distance over Arrtrad’s bald spot something has just caught my eye: a silver car.

The car looks normal enough, but somehow it’s moving too steadily for my taste. The car wheels down the road that leads to our wharf as if its steering were locked in place. Is it a coincidence that the car is aimed toward our dock and us at the end of it?

“Faster,” I shout, rattling the window with my fist.

Arrtrad stands up, hands on his hips. His face is red and sweaty. “They’ve been tied a long time, all right? It’s going to take more than a—”

At near full speed, the silver car hops a curb at the end of the street and leaps into the dockside car park. There is a faint crunch of the auto’s undercarriage bottoming out. Something is definitely wrong.

“Just go! GO!”

Finally, the facade has cracked. My panic shines through like radiation. Confused, Arrtrad fairly lopes along the side of the boat. Near the back end, he drops to his knees and starts working on the last decaying mooring rope.

To my left is open river. To my right is a crumbling pile of warped wood and two tons of speeding metal careening toward me at top speed. If I don’t move this boat in the next few seconds, I’m going to have a car parked on top of it.

I watch the auto bounce through the immense car park. My head feels stuffed with cotton. The houseboat motor throbs and my hands have gone numb with the vibration of the wheel. My heart pounds in my chest.

Something occurs to me.

I snatch my mobile phone off the table, crack the SIM card out of it, and chuck the rest into the water. It makes a small plop. I can feel a bull’s-eye slide off my back.

The top of Arrtrad’s head bobs in and out of view as he unwinds the last rope. He doesn’t see the silver auto streaking across the deserted car park, sending trash fluttering into the air. It hasn’t changed direction by an inch. The plastic bumper scrapes concrete and then flies completely off as the car bounces over a curb and onto the wooden dock.

My mobile phone is gone but it’s already too late. The devil has found me.

Now I can hear the thrumming of tires over the last fifty yards of rotten wood. Arrtrad’s head rises up, concerned. He’s hunched on the side of the boat, hands covered in slime from the ancient rope.

“Don’t look, just go!” I shout at Arrtrad.

I grab the clutch lever. With one thumb, I pop the houseboat out of neutral and into reverse. Ready to move. No throttle though. Not yet.

Forty yards.

I could jump off the boat. But where will I go? My food is here. My water. My village idiot.

Thirty yards.

It’s the end of the world, mate.

Twenty yards.

Hell with it. Untied or not, I slam the throttle and we lurch backward. Arrtrad shouts something incoherent. I hear another pencil tap to the ground, followed by dishes and papers and a coffee mug. The neat pile of wood next to the potbellied stove collapses.

Ten yards.

The engines thunder. Sunlight flashes from the scarred silver missile as it catapults off the end of the dock. The auto soars through empty space, missing the front of the houseboat by a few feet. It crashes into the water and sends up a white spray that comes through the open window and slaps me in the bloody face.

It’s over.

I throttle down but leave the boat in reverse, then hurry to the front deck. The prow, they say. Ashen-faced, Arrtrad joins me. We watch the car together, trawling slowly in reverse, away from the end of the world.

The silver car is half-submerged and sinking fast. In the front seat, a man is slumped over the wheel. The windshield bears a crimson spiderweb of cracks where his face must have hit on impact. A woman with long hair is flopped next to him in the passenger seat.

And then, there’s the last thing that I see. That last thing that I never wanted to see. Didn’t ask to see.

In the backseat window. Two pale little palms, pressed hard against the tinted glass. Pale as linen. Pushing.

Pushing so hard.

And the silver car slips under.

Arrtrad drops to his knees.

“No,” he shouts. “No!”

The gawky man puts his face in his hands. His whole body convulses with sobs. Snot and tears pour out of his birdlike face.

I retreat into the doorway of the cabin. The doorframe gives me support. I don’t know how I feel, only that I feel different. Changed, somehow.

I notice it’s getting dark outside, now. Smoke is rising from the city. A practical thought comes to me. We’ve got to get out of here before something worse comes.

Arrtrad speaks to me through sobs. He grabs me by the arm and his hands are wet with tears and river water and muck from the ropes. “Did you know this would happen?”

“Stop crying,” I snap.

“Why? Why didn’t you tell nobody? What about your mum?”

“What about her?”

“You didn’t tell your mum?”

“She’ll be fine.”

“She’s not fine. Nothing is fine. You’re only seventeen. But I’ve got kids. Two kids. And they could be hurt.”

“Why haven’t I ever seen ’em?”

“They’re with my ex. But I coulda warned them. I coulda told them what was coming. People are dead. Dead, Lurker. That was a family. It was a fucking child in that car. Just a wee baby. My god. What’s the matter with you, mate?”

“Nothing’s the matter. Stop your crying, now. It’s all part of the plan, see? If you had a brain you’d understand. But you don’t. So you listen to me.”

“Yes, but—”

“Listen to me and we’ll be fine. We’re going to help those people. We’re going to find your kids.”

“That’s impossible—”

Now, I stop him cold. I’m starting to feel a bit angry. A bit of my old fire is returning to replace the numbness. “What have I told you about saying that?”

“I’m sorry, Lurker.”

“Nothing’s impossible.”

“But how will we do those things? How can we find my kids?”

“We survived for a reason, Arrtrad. This monster. This thing. It’s played its hand, see? It’s using the machines to hurt people. But we’re savvy now. We can help. We’ll save all those poor sheep out there. We’ll save them and they’ll thank us for it. They’ll worship us for it. Me and you. We’re coming out on top. It’s all in the plan, mate.”

Arrtrad looks away. It’s plain that he doesn’t believe a word of it. Looks like he might have something to say.

“What? Go on, then,” I say.

“Well, pardon me. But you never seemed the helping type, Lurker. Don’t get me wrong—”

And that’s just it, isn’t it? I’ve never thought much of other people. Or thought about them much at all. But those pale palms against the window. I can’t stop thinking of them. I have a feeling they will be with me for a long time.

“Yeah, I know that,” I say. “But you’ve not seen my forgiving nature. It’s all in the plan, Arrtrad. You have to trust. You’ll see, yeah? We’ve survived. It had to have been for a reason. We have a purpose now, you and me. It’s us against that thing. And we’re going to get revenge. So stand up and join the fight.”

I reach my hand out to Arrtrad.

“Yeah?” he asks.

He still doesn’t fully believe me. But I’m starting to believe myself. I take his hand in mine and haul Arrtrad to his feet.

“Yeah, mate. Picture this. It’s me and you against the devil himself. To the death. All the way to the very end. And someday, we’ll be in the history books for it. Guaranteed.”

8. HERO MATERIAL

Shit, man. Here it is, the day before Thanksgiving. The day it all happened. My life up until now was never that great, but at least I wasn’t being hunted. I never had to jump at shadows, wondering whether some metal bug was about to try and blind me, sever one of my limbs, or infect me like a parasite.

Relative to that, my life before Zero Hour was perfection.

I’m in Boston and it’s as cold as a bastard. The wind is cutting my ears like razor blades and I’m chasing my brother through the Downtown Crossing outdoor shopping pavilion. Jack is three years older than me and as usual he’s trying to do the right thing. But I won’t listen to him.

Our dad died last summer. Me and Jack flew out West and buried him. And that was that. We left our stepmom alone in California with a lot of tear-streaked makeup and everything Dad owned.

Well, pretty much everything.

Since then, I’ve been sleeping on Jack’s couch. Mooching, I’ll admit it. In another few days, I’m flying to Estonia on a photojournalist gig for Nat Geo. From there, I’ll try to book my next gig straight, so that I don’t have to come home.

In about five minutes, the whole fucking world is going to go bat-shit insane. But I don’t know that, I’m just trying to catch Jack and calm him down and get him to be cool.

I grab Jack’s arm right before we reach the wide, open-air tunnel that runs under the street and across to the shopping pavilion. Jack turns around and without hesitation the jerk punches me in the mouth. My right upper canine cuts a nice little hole in my bottom lip. His fists are still up, but I just touch my lip with my finger; it comes away bloody.

“I thought it was never in the face, you fucker,” I say, panting clouds.

“You made me do it, man. I tried to run,” he says.

I know this already. It’s how he’s always been. Still, I’m kind of stunned. He’s never hit me in the face before.

This must have been a bigger fuckup than I thought.

But Jack already has that “I’m sorry” look creeping onto his face. His bright blue eyes are trained on my mouth, calculating how bad he hurt me. He smirks and looks away. Not that bad, I guess.

I lick the blood off my lip.

“Look, Dad left it to me. I’m broke. There was no other choice. I had to sell it to get to Estonia and make some money. See how that works?”

My dad gave me a special bayonet from World War II. I sold it. I was wrong and I know it, but somehow I can’t admit this to Jack, my perfect brother. He’s a damn Boston firefighter and in the National Guard. Talk about hero material.

“It belonged to the family, Cormac,” he says. “Pappy risked his life for it. It was a part of our heritage. And you pawned it for a few hundred bucks.”

He stops and takes a breath.

“Okay, this is pissing me off. I can’t even talk to you right now or I’m going to knock you out.”

Jack stalks away, angry. When the sand-colored walking land mine appears at the end of the tunnel, he reacts instantly.

“Everybody look out! Out of the tunnel. Bomb!” he bellows. People respond immediately to the authority in his voice. Even me. A few dozen flatten themselves against the wall as the six-legged device tap, taps slowly past them over the paving stones. The rest of the people flood out of the tunnel in a controlled panic.

Jack walks to the middle of the tunnel, a lone gunfighter. He draws a Glock .45 from a holster under his jacket. He clasps the gun in two hands, keeps it pointed at the ground. Hesitantly, I step out behind him. “You have a gun?” I whisper.

“A lot of us in the guard do,” says Jack. “Listen, stay far away from that scuttle mine. It can move a lot faster than it’s going now.”

“Scuttle mine?”

Jack’s eyes never leave the shoebox-sized machine coming down the middle of the tunnel. United States military ordnance. Its six legs move one by one in sharp mechanical jerks. Some kind of laser on its back paints a red circle on the ground around it.

“What’s it doing here, Jack?”

“I don’t know. It must have come from the National Guard armory. It’s stuck in diagnostic mode. That red circle is there to let a demo man set the trigger range. Go call nine one one.”

Before I can get out my cell phone, the machine stops. It leans back on four legs and raises its front two legs into the air. It looks like an angry crab.

“Okay, you’ll want to back up now. It’s target seeking. I’m going to have to shoot it.”

Jack raises his gun. Already walking backward, I call to my brother, “Won’t that make it blow up?”

Jack assumes a firing stance. “Not if I only shoot its legs. Otherwise, yes.”

“Isn’t that bad?”

Reared back, the scuttle mine paws the air.

“It’s targeting, Cormac. Either we disable it, or it disables one of us.” Jack squints down his gunsight. Then he squeezes the trigger and a deafening boom echoes through the tunnel. My ears are ringing when he fires again.

I wince, but there’s no big explosion.

Over Jack’s shoulder, I see the scuttle mine lying on its back, three remaining legs clawing at the air. Then Jack steps into my line of sight, makes eye contact with me, and speaks slowly. “Cormac. I need you to get help, buddy. I’ll stay here and keep an eye on this thing. You get out of the tunnel and call the police. Tell them to send a bomb squad.”

“Yeah, right,” I say. I can’t seem to look away from the damaged sand-camouflaged crab lying on the ground. It looks so hard and military, out of place here in this shopping square.

I trot back out of the tunnel and directly into Zero Hour—humankind’s new future. For the first second of my new life, I think that what I’m seeing is a joke. How could it not be?

For some crazy reason, I assume that an artist has filled the shopping pavilion with radio-controlled cars as some kind of art installation. Then I see the red circles around each of the crawling devices. Dozens of scuttle mines are stepping across the pavilion, like slow-motion invaders from another planet.

The people have all run away.

Now, a concussive thump detonates a few blocks away. I hear distant screaming. Police cars. The city emergency outdoor warning sirens begin wailing, growing louder and then softer as they rotate.

A few of the scuttle mines seem startled. They rear back on their hind legs, front legs waving.

I feel a hand on my elbow. Jack’s chiseled face looks up at me from the dark tunnel.

“Something’s wrong, Jack,” I say.

He scans the square with hard blue eyes and makes a decision. Just like that. “The armory. We’ve got to get there and fix this. C’mon,” he says, grabbing my elbow with one hand. In the other hand, I see he still has his gun out.

“What about the crabs?”

Jack leads me across the pavilion, delivering information in short, clipped sentences. “Don’t get into their trigger zones, the red circles.”

We climb up onto a picnic table and away from the scuttle mines, leaping between park benches, the central fountain, and concrete walls. “They sense vibration. Don’t walk with a pattern. Hop instead.”

When we do set foot on the ground, we lunge quickly from one position to the next. As we proceed, Jack’s words string together into concrete ideas that penetrate my stunned confusion. “If you see target-seeking behavior, get away. They will swarm. They aren’t moving that fast, but there’s a lot of them.”

Leaping from obstacle to obstacle, we pick our way across the square. About fifteen minutes in, one of the scuttle mines stops against the front door of a clothing store. I hear the tap of its legs on the glass. A woman in a black dress stands in the middle of the store, watching the crab through the door. The red circle shines through the glass, refracted by a few inches. The woman takes a curious step toward it.

“Lady, no!” I shout.

Boom! The scuttle mine explodes, shattering the front door and throwing the woman backward into the store. The other crabs stop and wave their forelegs for a few seconds. Then, one by one, they continue to crawl across the pavilion.

I touch my face and my fingers come away bloody. “Oh shit, Jack. Am I hurt?”

“It’s from when I hit you before, man. Remember?”

“Oh yeah.”

We move on.

As we reach the edge of the park, the city emergency sirens stop screaming. Now we just hear the wind, the scrabble of metal legs on concrete, and the occasional deadened bang of a distant explosion. It’s getting dark and Boston is only getting colder.

Jack stops and puts his hand on my shoulder. “Cormac, you’re doing great. Now, I need you to run with me. The armory is less than a mile from here. You okay, Big Mac?”

I nod, shivering.

“Outstanding. Running is good. It’ll keep us warm. Follow me close. If you see a scuttle mine or anything else just avoid it. Stay with me. Okay?”

“Okay, Jack.”

“Now, we run.”

Jack scans the alley ahead of us. The scuttle mines are thinning out, but once we’re out of the shopping area, I know there will be room for bigger machines—like cars.

My big brother gives me a reassuring grin, then sprints away. I follow him. I don’t have much of a choice.

The armory is a squat building—a big pile of solid red bricks in the shape of a castle. It’s medieval-looking except for the steel bars covering its narrow windows. The entire front entryway has been blown out from under the entrance arch. Lacquered wooden doors lie shattered in the street next to a twisted bronze plaque with the word historic embossed on it. Other than that, the place is quiet.

As we mount the steps and run under the arch, I look up to see a huge carved eagle staring down at me. The flags on either side of the entrance snap in the wind, tattered and burned by whatever explosion happened here. It occurs to me that we’re headed into danger instead of away from it.

“Jack, wait,” I pant. “This is crazy. What are we doing here?”

“We’re trying to save some people’s lives, Cormac. Those mines escaped from here. We’ve got to make sure nothing else gets out.”

I cock my head at him.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “This is my battalion armory. I come here every other weekend. We’ll be fine.”

Jack strides into the cavernous lobby. I follow. The scuttle mines were definitely here. Pockmarks are gouged into the polished floors, and piles of rubble are strewn around. Everything in here is coated with a fine layer of dust. And in the dust are lots of boot prints, along with less recognizable tracks.

Jack’s voice echoes from the vaulted ceilings. “George? You in here? Where are you, buddy?”

Nobody responds.

“There’s nobody here, Jack. We should go.”

“Not without arming ourselves.”

Jack shoves a sagging wrought-iron gate out of the way. Gun drawn, he marches down a dark hallway. Cold wind blows in through the destroyed entrance and raises goose bumps on my neck. The breeze isn’t strong, but it’s enough to push me down the hall after Jack. We go through a metal door. Down some claustrophobic stairs. Into another long hallway.

That’s when I first hear the thumping.

It’s coming from behind metal double doors at the end of the corridor. The pounding comes in random surges, rattling the door on its hinges.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

Jack stops and looks at it for a second, then leads me into a windowless storeroom. Without saying anything, Jack walks behind the counter and starts grabbing stuff from shelves. He throws things onto the counter: socks, boots, pants, shirts, canteens, helmets, gloves, kneepads, earplugs, bandages, thermal underwear, space blankets, rucksacks, ammo belts, and other stuff I don’t even recognize.

“Put on this ACU,” Jack orders, over his shoulder.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Army combat uniform. Put it on. Make sure you’re warm. We might be sleeping outside tonight.”

“What are we doing here, Jack? We should go back to your place and wait for help. Dude, let the police deal with this shit.”

Jack doesn’t pause; he works and talks. “Those things on the street are military grade, Cormac. The police aren’t equipped to deal with military hardware. Besides, did you see any cavalry coming to help while we were on the streets?”

“No, but they must be regrouping or something.”

“Remember flight forty-two? We almost died because of a glitch? I think this is bigger than Boston. This could be worldwide.”

“Dude, no way. It’s just a matter of time before—”

“Us. Cormac, this is us. We have to deal with this. We have to deal with what’s banging on that door down the hall.”

“No we don’t! Why do you have to do this? Why do you always have to do this?”

“Because I’m the only one who can.”

“No. It’s because nobody else is dumb enough to go directly toward the danger.”

“It’s my duty. We’re doing it. No more discussion. Now, suit up before I put you in a headlock.”

Reluctantly, I strip down and climb into the uniform. The clothes are new and stiff. Jack suits up, too. He does it twice as fast as me. At one point, he snaps a belt around my waist and tightens it for me. I feel like a twelve-year-old in a Halloween costume.

Then he presses an M16 rifle into my hands.

“What? Seriously? We’re going to get arrested.”

“Shut up and listen. This is the magazine. Just jam it in there and make sure it curves away from you. This selector is the fire-mode control. I’m setting it to single-round so you don’t blow your clip all at once. Put it to safety when you’re not using the rifle. There’s a handle on top, but never carry it by the handle. It’s not safe. Here’s the bolt. Pull it back to chamber a round. If you have to fire the weapon, hold it with both hands, like this, and look down the sights. Squeeze the trigger slow.”

Now, I’m a kid in a soldier’s Halloween costume armed with a fully loaded M16 battle rifle. I hold it up and point it at the wall. Jack slaps my elbow.

“Keep your elbow down. You’ll catch it on something and it makes you a bigger target. And get your index finger outside the trigger guard unless you’re ready to fire.”

“This is what you do on weekends?”

Jack doesn’t respond. He’s kneeling, shoving things into our rucksacks. I notice a couple of big plastic chunks, like sticks of butter.

“Is that C4?”

“Yeah.”

Jack finishes stuffing the bags. He throws one onto my back. Tightens the straps. Then, he shrugs on his own pack. He slaps his shoulders and stretches out his arms.

My brother looks like a goddamned jungle commando.

“C’mon, Big Mac,” he replies. “Let’s go find out what’s making that racket.”

Rifles ready, we slip down the hall toward the booming sound. Jack stands back, rifle leveled at his shoulder. He nods at me and I crouch in front of the door. I put one gloved hand on the doorknob. With a deep breath, I twist the knob and shove the door open with my shoulder. It hits something, and I shove harder. It flies open and I tumble inside the room on my knees.

Black writhing death stares back at me.

The room is teeming with scuttle mines. They climb up the walls, out of splintered crates, over one another. My opening the door has shoved a pile of them out of the way, but others are already crawling into the opening. I can’t even see the floor for all the creepy crawlies.

A wave of forelegs rises across the room, tasting the air.

“No!” screams Jack. He grabs the back of my jacket and drags me out of the room. He’s quick, but as the door starts to close it gets wedged on a scuttle mine. It’s followed by more. A lot more. They emerge in a torrent into the hallway. Their metal bodies smack the door as we back away.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

“What else is in this armory, Jack?”

“All kinds of shit.”

“How much of it is robots?”

“Plenty of it.”

Jack and I retreat down the hall, watching the crablike explosives as they leisurely flood out of the door.

“Is there more C4?” I ask.

“Crates.”

“We have to blow this whole place up.”

“Cormac, this building has been here since the seventeen hundreds.”

“Who gives a shit about history? We have to worry about right now, dude.”

“You never had any respect for tradition.”

“Jack. I’m sorry I pawned the bayonet. Okay? It was the wrong thing to do. But blasting these things is the only thing to do. What did we come here for?”

“To save people.”

“Let’s save some people, Jack. Let’s blow the armory.”

“Think, Cormac. People live around here. We’ll kill somebody.”

“If those mines get loose, who knows how many people they’re gonna kill. We don’t have a choice. We’re going to have to do something bad to do something good. In an emergency, you do what you have to do. Okay?”

Jack considers for a second, watching the scuttle mines creep toward us down the hallway. Red circles of light glint off the polished floors. “Okay,” he says. “Here’s the plan. We’re going to get to the nearest army base. Make sure you’ve got everything you need, because we’ll be walking all night. It’s cold as shit out there.”

“What about the armory, Jack?”

Jack grins at me. He has this crazy look in his blue eyes that I’d almost forgotten about.

“The armory?” he asks. “What armory? We’re blowing the fucking armory straight to hell, little brother.”

That night, Jack and I trek through frigid mist, trotting down dark alleys and crouching behind whatever cover we can find. The city is dead quiet now. Survivors are barricaded inside their homes, leaving the desolate streets to be hunted by frostbite and lunatic machines. The growing snowstorm has put out some of the fire we started, but not all of it.

Boston is burning.

We hear the occasional thump of a detonation out in the dark. Or the tire squeal of empty cars sliding over the ice, hunting. The rifle Jack gave me is surprisingly heavy and metal and cold. My hands are curled around it like two frozen claws.

The instant I see them, I hiss at Jack to make him stop. I nod to the alley on our right, not making another sound.

At the end of the narrow alleyway, through the swirling smoke and snow, three silhouettes walk past, single file. They step under the bluish LED glow of a streetlight, and at first I assume they’re soldiers in tight gray fatigues. But that isn’t right. One of them stops on the corner and scans the street, head cocked funny. The thing must be seven feet tall. The other two are smaller, bronze-colored. They wait behind the leader, perfectly still. It’s three humanoid military robots. They stand metallic and naked and unflinching in the cutting wind. I’ve only ever seen these things on television.

“Safety and pacification units,” whispers Jack. “One Arbiter and two Hoplites. A squad.”

“Shh.”

The leader turns and looks in our direction. I hold my breath, sweat trickling down my temples. Jack’s hand tightens painfully on my shoulder. The robots don’t visibly communicate. After a few seconds the leader just turns away and, as if on cue, the three figures lope off into the night. Only a few footprints in the snow remain as evidence that they were ever there.

It’s like a dream. I’m not sure whether what I saw was real. But even so, I have a gut feeling that I’ll be seeing those robots again.