I didn’t even know they could cry. But that severed head can cry all night—I don’t care. As far as I’m concerned, Hu-Bot tears are just another upgrade to trick us into trusting them.
The tears slide out of her eyes and make a small puddle on the rocky floor.
She really does look hurt. Sorry. Sad.
“Get over it,” I mumble.
And then I turn away, because I feel weird watching her get so upset.
“I prefer to be silent now,” the Hu-Bot cop says finally. Her voice is calm, but there’s an almost undetectable quiver in it.
“Yeah, well, great, because I prefer for you to be silent,” I snap. And then I throw my old shirt over her face to cover it up.
I should have left her by the river.
CHAPTER 46
“WHOA, LOOK WHO it is—it’s Sixie!” The too-loud whisper hisses into my dreams, and my eyes snap open.
Dubs’s flushed, round face is floating over me. I blink in confusion—is hunger making me see things?
But then Dubs slaps the sides of my face with his broad palms and cackles maniacally, and I know he’s for real. He’s got two black eyes—I guess the Hu-Bot punches took their toll—but otherwise he’s looking just like himself: a little bit crazy.
“You have no idea how glad I am to see you,” I gasp, sitting up.
“You’ll be glad to see this.” Dubs grins. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a can of beer.
I think: Beer? Really? How about food? I decide not to offend him, though. “But I mean—I thought you might be dead.”
“Yeah, I thought you might be, too.” His face goes serious for a minute, then he takes a swig of beer.
I wonder where he found it—some abandoned hunter’s camp? If so, that can’s ten years old, at least. “How’d you find me?”
He grins again. “Persistence, little lady,” he says. “I’ve been looking everywhere.”
I rest my head for a second on his shoulder. “Thanks for not giving up on me.”
His smile gets even wider, and I realize his eyes are all black and are pinwheeling around. “Are you—” I’m about to say high, but then Dubs holds a paper bag in front of my nose, and I smell the acrid scent of shoe glue.
“Want a sniff of Happy?” he asks.
My eyes dart to the Hu-Bot cop—I wonder if she’s paying attention to this. If she’s reflecting on our base human nature. But her eyes are closed, and her face is blank. “I’d rather have food.”
Double Eight shakes his head, his lips pursed apologetically. “Didn’t find any of that.”
I put my hands over my empty belly. I can’t even remember the last time I ate. I know that the fumes would kill my hunger for a while. That’s why the poorest families in Tent City give glue to their kids when there’s no food.
But it’d kill my senses, too, and I’m already weak enough.
Then Dubs lets out a low whistle. “What the hell is this?” he says. His eyes bug out in delight: he’s finally noticed the Hu-Bot head.
“Look closer. I think you’ll recognize her.”
Dubs leans in. “Holy shit, it’s the Hu-Bot bitch!” He picks up the head. “Well, hello, sweetheart!” Then he tosses it in the air and knocks it against the rocky ceiling. He giggles like a madman.
“Don’t do that, you idiot,” the Hu-Bot scolds.
Dubs drops her like a hot coal, and she lands facedown on the ground. “It talks?” he yelps.
“Yeah,” I say flatly. “It talks.”
He kicks it with his foot.
“Don’t,” I say—without even thinking.
Dubs turns to me. “Why not? You guys besties now? You been having heart-to-hearts in here?”
“Yeah, right,” I snort.
“We’re not friends,” the Hu-Bot confirms.
“No, you sure as hell aren’t!” Dubs yells. “Because Sixie’s my friend, and she isn’t gonna be besties with no talking tin can.”
“Talking tin can?” the Hu-Bot sniffs. “My IQ is twice yours.”
Dubs laughs. “Fat lot of good your IQ’s gonna do when you need to walk somewhere.”
The Hu-Bot’s about to retort when a shout rings through the air. A shout coming from outside.
I freeze. “Dubs,” I whisper. “Did you cover your tracks?”
He just stares at me with wide, spinning eyes. I guess that means no.
I motion to him to move farther back into the cave. I tell myself that maybe, just maybe, whoever’s out there will just keep on walking.
And for a moment, it seems like the whole world is quiet. Safe. Peaceful.
But then it erupts in gunfire.
CHAPTER 47
CHAOS. AN EARDRUM-BURSTING volley of bullets.
I scramble backward and fling myself to the ground, pressing my body as tight as I can against the rocky wall.
Four Bot-cops fire from the mouth of the cave, their bullets opening craters in the stones. Dust and smoke fill the air.
I’ve made myself as small as possible, hiding behind the Hu-Bot’s headless torso, but I know it’s only a matter of time. Any second now, I’m going to feel one of those bullets ripping through my flesh.
Then Dubs, who was hunched down on the other side of the cave, stands up. Starts lumbering forward.
“What the hell are you doing?” I shout. “Get down!”
He advances on the Bots, barely flinching as the bullets fly. How is it that he’s not getting hit? A rip appears in the arm of his coat, but he doesn’t flinch.
I’ve got to bring him down, or else a bullet will. I jump to my feet and hurl myself toward my friend.
“Halt!” I hear the Hu-Bot head yell, but I don’t know who she’s talking to.
I’m shouting, too—swearing at Dubs, trying to get him down—but suddenly I can’t get my breath. Suddenly it feels like a hand’s squeezing my heart and a fire’s been lit inside my stomach.
I double over, my hands clutching my guts. When I look down, I see blood. A lot of it, bright red and hot.
“I’ve been shot,” I whisper.
Somehow, no matter how bad the circumstances, it’s always a surprise to find out you’re actually going to lose. Like, really lose.
I don’t feel pain at first—not really. Just shock. Then the nausea comes, and I collapse. “Dubs, get down!” I yell from the ground.
“My gun!” the head is shouting.
“What gun?” Dubs yells, finally dropping low.
I can feel the pain now, sharp and terrible. I go fetal, curling up against my wound. I can see the Bots’ dark silhouettes against the sky as they push forward through the narrow opening.
At least it’ll all be over soon.
But now that Double Eight has been jerked out of his daze, he’s pissed. He lunges toward the Hu-Bot’s head, grabs it by the hair, and snarls, “Where’s the gun?”
“My boot,” the Hu-Bot says.
Dubs drops the head. He grabs the Mercy, cocking and aiming it in one smooth motion. Then he faces the mouth of the cave, putting his body solidly between me and the Bots.
“No!” I try to prop myself up to stop him, but Dubs shoves me down.
“Come at me!” he roars at the Bots.
And they do come.
But Dubs doesn’t back down. He drops the first one immediately with a neat hole to its metal forehead. The second takes a shot in the neck. Dubs lets out a psychotic war cry as he fires off round after round from the powerful Mercy. The third and fourth Bot crouch down and keep shooting, but they’re no match for Dubs’s wild, human fury.
I can’t bear to look anymore. I hide my face and wait for the shooting to stop.
When it does, I lift my head to see a pile of shredded metal bodies jamming the entrance. Four dead—excuse me, expired—Bots. And Dubs is still standing over me, breathing hard.
“You did it!” I whoop from the ground, and then wince, regretting it. “I guess that Mercy pistol can shoot to kill even if there’s no heart to find, right, Du
bs?”
But my friend doesn’t answer. From behind, I see him sway a little.
“Dubs?”
Then I notice the holes in the back of his dark jacket.
The spatters of blood on the ground.
“Dubs!” I scream, and my best friend goes down.
CHAPTER 48
I DRAG MYSELF across the cave to where Dubs lies unmoving. A pool of blood darkens the dusty floor. It’s growing larger by the second.
“No no no no,” I whisper.
I slump forward and reach for his shoulder—and my finger pokes right into a bullet hole. I shriek and pull my hand back. It’s covered in even more blood now—mine and his.
“Dubs,” I cry. I slap his cheek hard, the way I did when he passed out in the Killer Film. Now he’s supposed to punch me back with double the strength. Or crack one of those maniacal hyena laughs.
But he just lies there.
Then his eyes flicker open. They’re glassy and unfocused, like he’s looking at something really, really far away. “Hey,” he whispers.
“Dubs, you’ve got to hang on,” I say desperately.
“I don’t know, Sixie,” he says. He smiles at me, ever so faintly.
There’s a rattling in his throat. Blood trickles out of his mouth, and I try to wipe it away. “It’s going to be okay,” I tell him.
“Just a scratch, huh?” he gasps.
I nod, trying frantically to smile. Wanting more than anything to reassure him. “Yes! You’ll be fine!”
But then his whole body convulses. His legs kick like he’s having a seizure. I try to hold on to him, but I’m not strong enough.
“Sixie,” he whispers when his body goes still. He tries to smile. “I’ll see you in hell.”
And then his eyes roll back in his head. I wait, my breath caught in my throat. Then I start screaming. I shake his torn-up shoulder. “Don’t you dare die! You said you’d never leave me! We were supposed to take care of each other. See each other through!”
“Is he…?” I hear the Hu-Bot gasp.
I tear off my friend’s jacket with clumsy, desperate movements, and when a seam rips, I think, He’s gonna kill me for that, because Dubs loved that ratty old bomber jacket, even though he could barely stuff his arms into it.
I stop caring about the coat a second later, though, because when I finally get it off him, I see the other wounds.
The Bots had good aim. The bullet holes are all concentrated on his chest, the red blood blooming around them like roses. They must’ve hit him a dozen times.
“Oh, Dubsy…,” I murmur, my voice cracking. He hated it when I called him that, which is why I never did.
“They wanted me!” I yell. “They were coming for me, you bastard, not you!” My breath catches with pain as my stomach contracts around the bullet. Tears burn behind my eyes, clouding my vision.
“He wanted to die,” a voice says. Soft, sympathetic—but the words are cold.
I turn to glare at that pretty, disembodied head. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!” I shout.
On her torso, across the room, her arms lift defensively, as if she thinks I might actually hit her. “That’s why he wanted to see the Killer Film that night, isn’t it?” she asks. “It was part of a deep, self-destructive urge.”
“Shut up,” I growl, but the Hu-Bot can’t take a hint.
“I studied the tapes, Sixie.”
She calls me Sixie? Like we’re freaking friends?
“There’s footage of you two going into the forbidden theater.” She blinks at me. “You looked reluctant. But he wasn’t, was he? And it was his idea to steal the car. I know that.” I can tell she wants to hold my gaze, but I can’t look at her anymore. “Perhaps he… welcomed a path to peace, to end the pain inside him.”
“I said shut it!” I stagger to my feet, wincing as the movement aggravates the gunshot. I press my hand over the wound and feel more blood seeping between my fingers. “You don’t know anything about him!” I stand over the Hu-Bot head with my fists raised threateningly.
But a tiny part of me wonders if she might be right. Hadn’t Dubs always said there was no one he gave a damn about but me, that we were both too good for this pathetic excuse of a life? Didn’t he go on and on about that blaze of glory, the hail of bullets?
Well, he got them, all right.
My knees buckle, and I go down hard. My face slams against a rock because my arms are too weak to stop me. So I lie there on the gritty cave floor and sob.
See you in hell, Dubs had said.
But this is already hell. So how am I gonna know where to look for him?
CHAPTER 49
“YOU HAVE TO get out of here,” the Hu-Bot says. “Now.”
Pain and grief overwhelm me. I can’t seem to do anything but breathe.
“I said, you have to get out of here!” the Hu-Bot repeats.
“Screw you, Hu-Bot,” I manage. “This isn’t the City. I don’t have to do anything you say.” I don’t think I could move if I wanted to.
“My name is Detective MikkyBo,” the Hu-Bot snaps. “And I am trying to help you. Though I do not know why,” she adds.
“Neither do I,” I say. “And it’s not like I give a crap anyway. So don’t bother.”
Her lips tighten into a line, and she gives me the look our old dumb-dumb schoolteacher used to give Dubs and me: disappointed, superior, tight assed.
“Do you have any idea how much time you’re wasting?” she asks. “You’re not even hurt that badly. It’s just a muscle wound. You’ll be fine.”
I gape at her. “I don’t know if your microprocessors can comprehend this, but this is my best friend,” I say, taking one of Dubs’s hands in mine. It’s already cold. “And I’m not leaving him.”
I bow my head, like I’m going to say a prayer or something. But how would I even begin? He fell as a tower falls in the strong encounter… The damn Iliad again.
The Hu-Bot interrupts my thoughts. “Those Bot drones were connected to a slipstream.” She looks over at the pile of them, blocking the entrance. “Their expiration will trigger restock teams. Understand? They’re going to keep coming until their orders have been executed.”
She means until I’ve been executed. Just like my best friend.
“He’s gone,” the Hu-Bot says gently, and a hand pats my shoulder.
I flinch and swat it away. She’s somehow managed to control her severed arm remotely!
“Remember that he died trying to protect you,” she says.
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
But the truth is, Double Six would kick my colon into my throat if he saw me here, just waiting to die next to his shot-up corpse. And that’s what finally gets me moving.
First I wrap some of my old clothes around my wound. I hope the head’s right about the shot missing anything vital.
Then I pick my way out of the cave, climbing over the mangled drones who’ve gone to the great assembly line in the sky. With a machine gun in one hand and the Mercy 72 in the other, I step, blinking, into the light. I’m soaked with sweat and light-headed from blood loss. Body tense, I scan the landscape for the next death squad.
My breath catches when I see the cruiser, parked only a few hundred yards away on the remains of an old logging road.
The dead drones’ Hu-Bot commander?
Then I notice the smashed headlights and the nasty dent in the side, and I realize it’s the Hu-Bot chick’s car, half-wrecked from our car chase.
“Goddamn, Dubs.” I shake my head. I know what happened now: high on glue and searching for me, Dubs stumbled upon the Hu-Bot’s patrol car. The temptation would have been too much. Why not take a little joy ride? he must have thought. I’ll get to Sixie faster that way.
And he led the Bots right to me. To us.
But it’s too late to get mad at him, and at least now I’ve got wheels.
I trudge forward through the snow. When I climb inside the cruiser, an auto
alarm nearly splits my eardrums. “INTRUDER!” it shouts.
But then another, calmer voice says, “Hello, 68675409M,” with such closeness that I shoot a panicked look over my shoulder before throwing myself out of the car and slamming the door.
They know where I am.
And there’s no way I can outrun them on foot.
I hobble back to the cave, where I grab the surprised-looking head and the ever-moving arm, toss both on top of the Elite Force torso, and gather the whole pile of half-naked Hu-Bot up in my arms.
“What are you doing?” she demands, her voice quivering with alarm.
“What does it look like? You’re coming with me.”
“No, I’m not!” she protests. “I’m a liability! I’ll just slow you down!”
“Maybe,” I say. “But you’re the only chance I’ve got.”
I pile a few more of the Bot-cops’ guns on top of the Hu-Bot parts. Then I take one last look at my best friend. “I’ll find you in hell,” I whisper. “And pretty soon, by the looks of it.”
CHAPTER 50
BACK AT THE cruiser, the Hu-Bot is not feeling very compliant. I guess she really did want to get left in the cave.
“Turn off the tracking device, Minnie,” I repeat firmly. “Or I’ll drop-kick your head over the cliff.”
“Mikky!” she corrects me furiously. “Detective. Mikky. Bo. And it was one thing to help you when the Bot-cops came. They killed your Pits friends—they didn’t need to kill you, too. But if you think I’m going to help you steal my own official security vehicle, then you’re sadly mistaken. I am a member of the Elite Force, and—”
“I know someone who can fix you,” I blurt.
Even though I’d planned to dump her once she’d killed the tracking device. Even though taking her where I’m going would be the worst possible thing.
“So do I,” MikkyBo snaps. “My commander will see that I am repaired, directly after he apprehends you. Which should be any minute.”
I hold Mikky’s head in front of my face and let the rest of her parts fall into a heap in the roadside slush. “If you think your commanders are going to waste time putting you back together when they can whip up another droid exactly like you, then you’re the one who’s ‘sadly mistaken.’”
Humans, Bow Down Page 11
