by J. S. Volpe
* * *
In accordance with their plan, the Mosquito, the Brooder, and the Hatcheteer advanced to within a hundred feet of the robot, then stopped and waited.
Across the gulch Daddy Vermin continued creeping toward the robot. Every few steps he had to stop and arm the sweat from his brow. It wasn’t because of the temperature—today was actually a fairly mild, pleasant day—but because being so close to all these rotting, dismembered bodies was freaking him out. Decomposing faces gaped at him from the jumble of blood-spattered rocks on the ground. Bloated torsos lay like giant pupae in the sun. Clouds of flies buzzed around moist pink lumps. At times the stench grew so bad that it took all his willpower to gulp back the bile in his throat and not puke all over himself.
His heart hammering in his chest, every instinct he had telling him to get the fuck out of here immediately, he continued inching forward. A Zombie Hill Boy never let his fear control him.
He was now seventy feet from the robot, and it hadn’t moved a millimeter. Its head still stared at the ground in front of it. Its arms still hung at its sides like dead things. The blades at the ends of its arms remained immobile.
Sixty feet, and still the robot didn’t budge. It crossed Daddy Vermin’s mind that maybe the robot was actually inert, just a rusting pre-Cataclysm relic, and that something else had killed all those people whose remains littered the area. Or maybe it had been damaged in its last battle and didn’t work anymore.
Fifty feet, and nothing. Forty feet, and nothing. Thirty feet, and Daddy Vermin felt a smile flicker on his face. Maybe it was broken. Maybe they would be able to pass right by this creepy tin-man without a single problem.
When he was twenty-five feet away, his foot bumped a rock and sent it clacking down a short slope.
The robot’s response was instantaneous. Its head jerked upright, and a red glow lit up its eye-slits. Its arms moved slightly, repositioning themselves, and at their ends, the buzz-saws whined to life. In less than a second they were spinning so fast they had become silver blurs.
“Fuck,” Daddy Vermin muttered. They wouldn’t get into the building so easily after all. Still, he didn’t have to worry just yet. He was still too far away for the robot to reach him.
Unless, of course, it moved really fast.
He frowned. He hadn’t really thought about that possibility before. Then again, he didn’t know a whole lot about robots. How fast could they move anyway?
Didn’t matter. He had to distract it so the others could get inside to get that gold, even if it killed him. The Zombie Hill Boys as a group were bigger than any one of them individually. As long as the Boys were okay, Daddy Vermin was happy with that.
“Hey, shit-head!” he shouted at the robot, wondering if it could even hear him over the whine of the buzz-saws. “Over here!”
The robot’s head swiveled toward him.
He waved his arms at it, hoping it would move far enough toward him for the rest of the Boys to race past it without risk.
“Yeah, you! Rust-brain!”
The robot stared at him for a long moment, and just when Daddy Vermin grew sure that it wouldn’t move at all, it whirled around like a cyclone and sprang into the air, its buzz-saw arms outstretched, the two bottom strips of its tunic whipping about like propellers.
Damn. It was fast. But maybe the Boys would prove faster: Daddy Vermin noted with satisfaction that the moment the robot took to the air, the Hatcheteer led the Mosquito and the Brooder in a mad dash toward the brown door.
Unfortunately the robot’s speed wasn’t the only thing Daddy Vermin had failed to consider. Another was its telescoping arms. As the robot landed at a point halfway between its previous position and the spot where Daddy Vermin stood, its right buzz-saw shot toward him at the end of its suddenly lengthening Dr. Octopus arm like a yoyo unspooling, and before Daddy Vermin knew what was happening, his head had been neatly severed from his neck. Blood jetted from the neck-stump as the head bounced away across the rocks—whock whock whock—a surprised expression frozen on its face.
“Holy fucking shit,” cried the Mosquito as he and the other two remaining Zombie Hill Boys sprinted toward the door.
“Shut up and keep running!” the Hatcheteer cried. “We’re almost there!”
“Doesn’t matter,” the Brooder sighed. “Here it comes.”
“Shut up!”
The robot’s head swiveled toward them. An instant later, the robot sprang whirling into the air again, its right arm zipping back to its normal length, and streaked toward the three Zombie Hill Boys, who were now only about ten feet from the door and running faster than they had ever run before.
They might as well have been standing still. The robot landed twelve feet from them—very close to where it had been originally standing—while swinging its rapidly telescoping left arm at them with unerring accuracy. The buzz-saw swept through their torsos, one after the other, a fine mist of blood billowing out from each one.
As the buzz-saw arm retracted, leaving a trail of blood-drops in its wake, all three Zombie Hill Boys collapsed to the blood-stained ground, their intestines spilling from the gaping slits in their abdomens. The Hatcheteer and the Mosquito died instantly. The Brooder lived just long enough to scowl at the blue sky high above and sneer, “Fucking hack writers.”
