“We can hold out, s’long as we pool our resources.”
“We got some cans,” I said. “You know you’re always welcome to our table.”
“I appreciate that, boy,” Raphael said.
The truth was something different. We did have cans of Blight-free food stashed away. However, I expected a man with Raphael’s resources and guile probably had a lot more. I was being generous to my mentor hoping he’d be reciprocal with the kindness.
“We’re kinda gettin’ down to it, aren’t we?” he said.
“We kinda are.”
“You hear anything from the outside?”
Last I heard, another dome had gone down in a shatter storm up in Artesia. I kept that to myself. I was already scared enough. Talking about it aloud would make the danger feel more real. “No news is all the news we get.”
Raphael grunted as he stood and turned his back to the tracks. “You see that field? Every one of those turbines is sending energy somewhere. Beyond that, the desert goes on for miles of glass, soakin’ up sun and sending electricity on to somewhere else. It’s epic. The same people who made that train shootin’ back and forth from the domes to the City? They owe us. That’s why that train will stop. Deals and what’s owed? That’s sacred.”
I was dubious and couldn’t hide it. “Yeah? So when will the train stop?”
“Soon. I’m sure.”
“It’s been supposed to stop soon for a while, now.”
“True. But it’s also true that we are owed.”
“Yep.”
“So it’s gonna be okay.”
I didn’t say that times had been long south of okay for too long already. In his assurances, Raphael was talking to himself more than he was talking to me, anyhow.
I wondered where the train went and what deliveries were more important than saving what was left of my town. Marfa may as well have been a desert island and the desert may as well have been an unending sea.
“Dante?”
“Yep?”
“This ain’t the end of the world. Not yet.”
“How’d you know?”
“I’m still here, for one. You’re here, for two. They been sayin’ the end of the world is coming for a long time.”
“Does that make it more likely or less?” I asked. “Sounds like you’re saying since it’s been predicted too much it won’t happen. Wouldn’t the math of that mean we’re overdue for the end of the world?”
I shouldn’t have asked. Raphael’s old wrinkled face closed up, all horizontal lines and silent anguish as he folded up his walker. He didn’t want to talk anymore.
“Bobby?” Raphael called. “C’mere.”
The assist bot raised its head and the lights in its eyes came on, as if it had been napping instead of listening to every word while preserving power.
There’s no need for a robot to have a head, of course, but Bobby was designed to look friendly. The thing only had two legs and just two arms so it looked like a kid’s toy that someone had built ridiculously big and tall. Despite its size — like a refrigerator rolling around the house — all assistive tech was made to look friendly. There were bots with more practical designs but those hadn’t sold well to civilians. People liked the drones that mimicked human form.
“How may I be of assistance, sir?” Bobby asked.
“Take my walker and gimme a ride home, will you?” The walker was a detachable part of Bob, designed for Raphael to maneuver in small spaces.
I think it gave the old man the feeling he was still autonomous without the bot following him around everywhere. When I tinkered with the gears of a wind turbine, Raphael would lean on his walker and squint up at me shouting instructions from time to time. He’d already taught me everything he knew. I figured I wouldn’t graduate from apprentice until the old man died, but I was in no hurry.
As the walker snapped into place on Bobby’s left hind leg. Raphael stepped onto the robot’s frame. A saddle slid out of the assist bot’s back, ready to give the old man a piggyback ride. When it was on all fours, Bob reminded me of horses I’d seen in vids. Either way, Raphael would beat me back home.
The old man turned to me. Raphael’s lined, weatherbeaten face looked especially old above Bobby’s smooth white happy face with the lantern eyes. “Dante?”
“Yep?”
“Don’t talk to the others about the train.”
“They already know.” I’d already spotted a few townsfolk down the track. Ready to cheer, they’d come out to watch the train unload. Instead, they’d watched it zip by in the dying light. Then they wandered back toward town in silence.
“Them knowing don’t matter. If you talk about it, you feed the panic,” he said. “If we panic, we might as well all lay down now and be done with it. People get hyped up talking among themselves. Big problems get bigger. Fear is a virus.”
“Then I’ve got a fever.”
“Don’t talk too much is all I’m saying.”
“Very well, Raphael. I promise I will not contribute to the panic that is already, inevitably, spreading across town at this moment.”
“Cool.”
I watched him run back toward downtown under Bobby’s power. I did as Raphael said and didn’t talk about the train. Somebody panicked, anyway.
Sheriff Johns found the body at dawn the next day. It would not have happened if that damn train had stopped. The problem of surviving the apocalypse in Marfa, Texas got harder after that.
The corpse was Travis Chinto, the owner of the town’s last supermarket. He got himself killed trying to protect his stock. What complicated matters was that it sure looked like a bot killed Travis. It wasn’t quite that simple, of course. It never is. As my father says, “Complications ensued.”
Before the world became non-organics versus organics — machines against humans — we had fought among ourselves forever. The fight had been in us from the very beginning. Fighting is what evolution is. Then people made bots so much that the bots made each other. Long about then, somebody got the grand idea to go deeper and bless us with the Next Intelligence. The smarter we all got, bot and humans both, the less war there’d be. That was the theory. Maybe that’s so, but we never got so smart we could stop fighting.
2
The old man wasn’t the only one who had a bot, of course. What with the wind turbines and solar panels as far as the eye could see, we had juice to spare for the non-organics. It was food and water we were running low on, not electricity.
Sheriff Hubbard “Hubby” Johns found Travis at the back of his store at the loading dock. Hubby told Raphael, “Travis’s guts was near to crushed. It was like he was a tube of toothpaste, pinched too hard in the middle, like.”
Hubby was a cop who couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He’d tell anybody anything with nothing more but eye contact for encouragement.
Hubby’s style of policing might have been a deficit in a larger place but was just right for a small town. With an incurable gossip for sheriff, you didn’t drive drunk if you didn’t want whispers to follow you around forever. You kept the fistfights beyond the tracks and after midnight so it was out of Hubby’s jurisdiction and beyond his bedtime.
In Marfa, the rule used to be: behave or move out. Poor Travis was our first homicide in quite some time.
Hubby said the last homicide was Terri Fellows shooting her husband, Brad Fellows, a couple of years back. Brad had a drinking problem and Terri was of a mind to solve the couple’s ensuing domestic abuse issues in her own way.
Hubby had found Brad in his truck, bent over the steering wheel with his skull hollowed out. Since the corpse was still stinking of gin and juice, Hubby deduced old Brad had gone light on the juice.
Brad’s face was intact but his head had caved in from a bullet from Terri’s rifle. As soon as the sheriff rolled up, Terri came out of her trailer with her gun. She handed it over before Hubby could haul himself out of his cruiser.
She gave Hubby a nod and said, “I done it. Brad was drink
ing and I seen what’s coming. No use waiting for him to come at me. Mine was a pre-emptive strike. I’m righteous.”
Hubby grinned, telling the story of how he’d solved that homicide. “I asked Terri why she done it after all these years. ‘You’re both pert near eighty. Why not ride it out to the end and meet Jesus clean?’”
Hubby puffed up his chest and laughed when he reported that old Terri had looked him in the eye and said, “I just couldn’t take no more. Wouldn’t be human to try.”
At trial, Terri Fellows pleaded, “not guilty for insanity.” She claimed mental abuse (which few who knew her husband would doubt). Terri told the court that the impulse had come on her “alla sudden.”
The prosecutor asked Terri if she was a good shot. Terri said she was. He asked how good and she reported brightly, “Split a match at two-hundred paces. It t’weren’t nothin’ to shoot Brad, bedroom window to the driveway. ’Specially since I set my rifle on a sandbag in the window frame.”
“So it wasn’t, ‘alla sudden?’” the prosecutor pressed.
“Well, the beatings back and forth had been goin’ on for years but I figured on it no more than a week.” Terri Fellows laughed so hard she had to be excused from the witness stand to compose herself.
At her sentencing she told the judge that the sentence, “didn’t make no never mind. Something big’s coming and the sand’s runnin’ out of our bottle. While y’all are dealing with the mess, I’ll be watching it on a prison screen y’all paid for, cozy and neat on three squares a day. There’s a big shit show comin’.”
Goddammit if old Terri wasn’t right about that. The sand had run out of our bottle and there I was standing around the back of the grocery lot with the sheriff and Raphael. Not to be ghoulish, I snuck quick glances of Travis Chinto pinched in the middle. It was a shit show. Literally. I hadn’t wanted to see what was left of Travis at all. However, Raphael was my friend and mentor. He asked me along for moral support so I went.
We’d all known Travis. He could be a dick but he wasn’t really a bad guy. He was just one of those fellas who thought teasing and funny were the same thing. He didn’t deserve to die the way he did. Nobody deserves that.
“Epic,” Raphael said. “Gotta be a bot.”
The sheriff wasn’t so sure. “Back up a truck, he could have been pinched. It is a loading dock.”
“The piss and shit is up on the platform,” I said.
“Classic,” Raphael said. “Dante’s right. Travis didn’t die standing in front of the loading dock waiting for a truck to back into him.”
“Anything stolen from the store?” I asked.
Hubby shook his head, not to signify the negative, but to indicate bewilderment. “There are a few things still on the shelves. The back door was open. I’m not sure how much Travis had in there to begin with so it’s hard to tell.”
“I think he had a bunch of stuff, but ol’ Travis was a bit of a hoarder. I made a good offer on some supplies but he was holding out for a better deal. Guess he didn’t get it and things went awry. How many people in town have bots capable of this awfulness?” Raphael asked. “’Sides me, I mean.”
“Probably quite a few,” I said. “There aren’t that many of us hanging on in town but, those who left? I didn’t see many refugees taking their bots with them.”
“This’ll be a vagrant, I think,” Raphael said. “Somebody came in here from out of town, just passin’ through. They were looking for enough supplies to get ’em farther down the road and I reckon they found some. Killer bot and all, they just kept going.”
Hubby considered this. He probably wanted to believe it. I sure did. Still, he’d picked up something about being a sheriff somewhere. “I’ll canvas the neighborhood.”
I looked behind me. The store’s lot backed on to sand and a few houses that looked abandoned.
“Good thinking, Hub,” Raphael said. “Probably won’t take too much time, neither.”
That’s how our little mystery started. I wish it had stayed a little mystery. Instead, as Raphael would say, it became epic.
3
First thing after Hubby left with the body, they left me to lock up the store. I would have hosed down the loading dock but we didn’t have water to spare.
I asked Raphael if a sex bot could squeeze a man like that. The old man laughed and I told him not to make the joke I saw coming.
“You think I was gonna make a joke in the midst of this terrible turn for Travis?”
“I could see it coming from high orbit,” I said.
“Yeah, well. It’s not like Travis and I were close friends.”
“Travis wasn’t tight with anybody that I know of but that’s a hard way to go.”
“No, I s’pose not.” The old man was of the opinion that a sex bot wasn’t amped up enough to do the kind of damage Travis had received. “They’re made to tire you out. They’re tight but their legs aren’t built to pinch ya like pliers.”
“Well,” I said, “that leaves Bob.” I couldn’t help wonder how much pressure the assistive bot could manage at full charge. The machine was built to carry heavy loads over long hauls and at good speed, too.
“He was charging all night. Ask him if you like, Dante.”
“That’s okay. He doesn’t strike me as the dangerous kind.”
By that, I meant that Raphael didn’t strike me as murderous. Bob did what the old man told him to do and I couldn’t see Raphael turning off the safeties and siccing his bot on Travis. I’d known the old man all my life. That was twenty-five years.
My father, Steve Bolelli, is a good man. However, he also had it in him to kill Travis if there was good reason. He’d need an awfully good reason, though. There weren’t many people left in town. Few other possibilities sprung to mind as suspects. Some asshole in the Peppard clan seemed most likely. It could have been anyone, though. No one knows another person’s mind.
In the old days, we would have had help from the outside on murder cases. A real detective or two would have shown up from Pecos or somewhere bigger. Aside from the murderess Terri Fellows, Hubby’s main concerns had been speeders out on 67 and the odd drunk tourist. Nobody was on 67 anymore that I saw, at least during the day. There might be a few stragglers or refugee convoys traveling at night, hiding from daytime heat and calamity. People on the road was probably mostly rumor and speculation mixed in with some lies to pass the time.
The old days of speeders and tourist trouble were far behind us. “Prolly too far for lookin’,” Raphael said. “Those days won’t come back.”
“You, me and your father are the only full-blooded Italians left in all of Marfa and prolly Presidio County.” Raphael winked. “Let’s look out for each other so’s we don’t get pinched to death, neither.”
He handed me one of his pistols. I nodded and tucked the weapon in the back of my waistband. Italian didn’t mean much to me. Italy wasn’t Italy anymore. It was all the Vatican by then. Still, I was supposed to be looking out for the store in Travis’s absence. I wanted everybody looking out for me, whatever their reasons. I was grateful for the reassuring heft of the weapon under my belt.
Raphael rode Bob toward home, promising to return later with a canteen full of water.
It didn’t take long for somebody to come banging on the storefront door looking for food. Rather than dare open the door, I grabbed Travis’s old baseball bat and walked around the building. I didn’t know baseball but I knew what a bat was for.
As I rounded the corner, I found Jim Peppard and his girl Susan Treehan banging on the grocery store’s metal screen like a drum. As soon as I saw Jim I wondered if he was returning to the scene of the crime. Maybe he killed Travis and was here to find out if Hubby was on to him. Maybe he was here to feign horror and appear ignorant and innocent.
“Hey, Jim. Susan. Store’s closed.”
Jim whirled on me. “What?”
“You heard me.”
He eyed the baseball bat and I suddenly felt silly holding it. I l
eaned on it, trying to look jaunty. “Travis is dead.”
Jim took a couple steps toward me and my grip tightened on the bat.
“For real?” he asked. He looked earnest and concerned. I relaxed a fraction.
“Dead as they come,” I said.
“And you’re what? Playing baseball?”
“Not in this heat. Hot in the shade soon. Worse after that. We should all go home and stay indoors, huh?”
“Boy, we need some of that fake bacon. We need some milk. I got some eggs from a couple of chickens but that’s not gonna do it.”
I didn’t care for his tone. I don’t like being called, “boy,” especially not in front of a woman and double especially not from Jim Peppard. He was no more than a year older than me.
“So?” he said.
“So what?”
“You gonna let us in?”
“Nope. Store’s closed. It’ll stay that way. Sheriff’s orders.”
“You working for Hubby now, are you? You a deputy?”
“I am not. Kind of at loose ends at the moment. Making sure nobody does their shopping out of turn.”
I had plenty of business keeping the turbines and the solar cells going but the shatter storms had passed us by and done all their damage to the north. If the arid weather held we’d all die of thirst. On the plus side, there wasn’t much for me to do besides test some circuits from time to time to make sure the juice was still flowing to the grid.
“We need to feed now, boy! Susan’s pregnant.”
I looked to Susan. She looked as surprised as I’m sure I did. Marfa used to call itself a city but it was really a small town. Given the exodus for parts unknown, more than half the town could have been planning on wandering the desert for forty years as far as I knew. That made Marfa even smaller now, a village. Small places don’t hold secrets. Secrets leak and spread out. Everybody knew Susan Treehan couldn’t have children.
“Really?” I asked Jim. “That’s your play?”
The story around town was that she had been with child when her grandfather threw her downstairs. She’d lost the baby when she was thirteen. Some said it was twins but gossips like to double tragedy so I couldn’t testify to that. No one knew who the father had been though some guessed it might have been the man who threw her downstairs.
Robot Planet, The Complete Series (The Robot Planet Series) Page 12
