“Well, it’s up to you. Stay or go. Hopefully we’ll have the road opened back up tomorrow.”
“All righty. We’ll probably take the hike then. Probably get a room and wait it out.”
“Sounds like a plan,” the soldier says. “And we appreciate your understanding.”
“No. Seriously. We appreciate the courtesy,” the bearded man says. “And thank you all for your service to our country.”
The guardsman waves without smiling, then turns and continues walking down the line.
The woman sighs. “This is it, then.”
“Right.”
She’s stuffs the machine pistol into her pack and throws it over her shoulder. “You surprised no one’s seen the three extra air conditioners on the roof?”
The man scratches his beard. “Not really. People don’t notice things much. One of the reasons it’s so easy to hide things in plain sight. And I’m not sure I’d have thought anything of it either. I think we’re fine unless someone gets nosy and starts poking around inside. Then they may wonder why the refrigerator door opens to a huge generator, or why we’re carrying forty-eight massive batteries under the benches.”
“You sure this thing’ll work?”
“Positive.”
“You leaving the keys?”
“Of course not. Let ’em take another hour or two calling in a tow truck if they have to. More time for us.”
* * *
Ben and I sit in the hayloft and talk. That’s what we’re doing when we see the first formation of jets scream by over the horizon. Toward Drury Falls. The concussions and clatter of war drift over us on the breeze mere moments later.
I jump to my feet without thinking and pull Ben up with me.
“They’re coming,” I say.
Staring toward town, we see black smoke rising, whipped by the winds, twisting violently into the deep blue, late afternoon sky.
“What do we do?” Ben asks. He doesn’t look nervous; he looks resigned. Like maybe he doesn’t understand what’s coming next.
Or maybe he understands it better than I do.
“I don’t know.”
Mose, Sarah, and John rush out into the yard and up to the drive. Sarah has her hands up to her face and Mose is rubbing his together frantically. Young John turns and looks at us in the loft, and there is terror in his eyes.
“We need to get them to safety,” I say, although I have no idea where safety might be found if a full-on attack is coming.
Ben is still holding on to my hand. “The root cellar?”
“That’ll work if they just come with bullets... maybe. But that doesn’t look like what’s happening.”
We rush out of the barn and run to the Shetlers. I’m shouting, but it seems like they don’t hear me.
“Get to the root cellar!” I yell again, and this time Mose turns to me with tears in his eyes.
“Why have they done this?” he asks, but the end of his question is drowned out by the screaming engines of a jet roaring overhead. The fighter banks upward and back toward town.
“Just—” I reach for Mose and Sarah, and my thoughts threaten to crush me to the ground. “Just get John and go to the root cellar.”
“What about you?” Mose asks. I can see that he’s shaking and he doesn’t know what he should be doing. Just like me.
“We’ll give ourselves up. We’ll do whatever they want.”
Up the way we see two buggies, each pulled by two horses, rushing toward us on the road. As we watch, a helicopter rises above the treetops behind them and fires two missiles toward the fleeing Amish. Both buggies are incinerated in an instant. The gory sight of horse parts mixed with shards of plywood and chunks of metal blasting outward assaults my consciousness.
“Go,” I say to Mose. “Please.” My sense of reality is wavering. How can this be real?
Mose and Sarah are crying, and they pull John after them. Slowly, like icebergs in the Atlantic, they begin moving toward the house. I want to scream at them. To make them move faster. My adrenaline is pumping and I’m having trouble understanding how they don’t grasp the imminent danger. Behind the farmhouse is a set of doors that leads under the main structure to a root cellar. It won’t protect them from a missile strike or even a full barrage of heavy ordnance, but it’s the best they’ll be able to do.
John lags behind the Shetlers, and they pull him toward the house. He sobs and then breaks free, dashing several steps toward us.
“Ben!”
“Go!” Ben and I shout in unison, and John breaks down, the tears flowing. His whole world is coming apart. He hunches over, reacting almost violently, viscerally, to his emotional state. Then he turns back and ambles in a tortured shuffle-walk back to his parents, who are waving him onward with terror on their faces.
“What do we do?” Ben asks again.
“I don’t know,” I say. And I don’t. “But we have to make them stop.”
* * *
Dresser’s forces are moving forward slowly in a pincer movement. Their end target is the Shetler farm, but they’ve been ordered not to engage there until they’ve swept the land clear all the way from Drury Falls. As they advance, once-beautiful farm houses and huge Amish barns become blazing infernos or smoking heaps of rubble, choking the air with the scent of war and death. The devastation increases with each passing minute.
Dresser shouts into his radio over the din of a decidedly one-sided battle.
“Annihilate every target of opportunity and every structure! Engage and destroy everything but our prime target! Engage at will!”
Dresser’s aide approaches, and this time he doesn’t wait to be acknowledged.
“But sir!” he shouts over the roar of jets and choppers and explosions. “Why don’t we bypass all these civilians and just proceed directly to our objective?”
Dresser bristles at the insolence, but he responds. “Two reasons! One, we don’t know where the target is. The final objective is the robot—the weapon—and he’s capable of looking exactly like any one of these Amish men. We push forward too fast and he could end up behind us. He could look just like you, for crap’s sake.” Dresser lowers the radio to his chest and then continues. “And two, these people are all insurgents. Every last one of them. They had their chance to turn in the weapon and they refused.”
“But—”
Dresser interrupts the aide by pointing his finger right at the man’s nose. A cigarette pinched between his middle finger and his thumb sends a swirl of gray-black smoke to join the greater fog of battle that surrounds them. “Son, you question my orders one more time and I’ll leave your body here with these Amish. Do. You. Read. Me?”
“Yes, sir. Five by five.”
The aide turns to leave. He doesn’t agree with what’s happening. He wants it all to go down differently. But he has a family. A job. Hopes for a career and a future. The rules of engagement have changed all over the world in the last decade, and things aren’t as cut and dried as they once were. They’re more complicated now. More fluid. Men fight in shadows; they bomb and snipe without ever engaging en masse. It’s the way things are.
Dresser’s aide would like things to be different, but they aren’t. Who’s he to protest?
* * *
Four Apache helicopters buzz directly overhead, and the swirling downdraft kicks up dust that blends with the smoke and haze, twisting outward into tiny cyclones. Two of the choppers break off hard right, and Dresser watches as a volley of deadly rockets streams forth from pods located underneath the aircraft’s short wings. In the distance, an Amish barn explodes into a million splinters and a fireball erupts where the structure once stood.
When the sound abates, Dresser throws the handheld radio onto the front seat of an armored Mercedes G-Wagen and pulls on a helmet. He adjusts the built-in mic and begins barking orders to his troops. He hardly even notices when the beautiful farmhouse that stands serenely near the destroyed barn disappears in a hellish conflagration of fire and smoke.
>
Four tanks pull forward from a tree line behind him, crushing fences and sometimes cattle who are too frightened or too dumb to get out of the way. Dresser half-turns and directs the tanks with hand signals before climbing into his vehicle. He clips an M4 assault rifle to his three-point harness and then pulls the armored vehicle onto the road. Behind him, ground troops and APCs form lines and begin a slow advance.
* * *
Ben and I are in the barn, nervous and afraid. I keep one eye on the road as I pace back and forth. “We have to go,” I say, mostly to Ben but also to myself. “One way or another, we’re done in this place. Either I go right now, find whoever’s in charge, and beg them to stop this, if I can...”
“Or?”
“Or we run for it.”
“No.”
Ben is eerily calm for a young boy witnessing war for the first time. He looks placid. Almost at peace with some destiny only he knows.
“We have to make them stop,” Ben says. “That’s what you said. Talking won’t make them stop,” he adds.
I duck as a jet, loud and fast, screams by overhead, banking almost directly over the barn.
“Why aren’t they attacking us?” I say, but Ben now is elsewhere. His attention has drifted. He’s doing something in his head.
After a moment of silence, he’s back.
“Sometimes we have to kill to protect the innocent,” he says.
“If you believe that,” I say, “then you aren’t really Amish.”
“I’m not exactly sure what I am,” Ben says. He doesn’t sound like a child at all. Not autistic. Not Amish. Something else. “But I believe you now.”
“You believe me now? Believe me about what?”
“You once told me that I’m human. And I am.”
I look deeply into Ben’s eyes. I know they aren’t eyes, but I still feel as if I can sense his soul in there, past the lenses and the augmented intelligence. And what I feel is that somewhere in there—perhaps in that small boy’s heart, or perhaps it’s in his brain—there is something fundamentally good and right. It’s the same thing I sensed when I first got to know him as young Frank, back in the pro bono clinic in Cleveland.
Back in another life.
“I’m human,” Ben says again.
And then, without warning, he begins to change.
His head rocks forward until his chin is on his chest, and there is a short pause before I hear the clothing rip and his skin begins to roll back and disappear. The black graphene ectoskin unfurls, and Ben grows in front of me, shattering an ancient and heavy overhead beam that crashes to the ground like it was made of balsa wood.
When he reaches full height, his head rises again from his chest, and his piercing blue robotic eyes lock on me. Slowly he crouches, but he doesn’t take his eyes from mine. I see in my peripheral vision that he’s reaching down to grab something from the strips and pile of shredded clothing, and then he stands again, never breaking his piercing gaze.
Through the open barn door, up the drive, I see a small mechanized robot climbing up the road on treads. I’ve seen these kinds of robots before; I’ve even worked with them. It’s the kind of robot that’s used to disarm bombs or to check an area for ordnance before troops move in.
This particular robot is carrying something in an outstretched claw. It stops when it reaches a spot midway between the barn and the house.
“Careful,” I say to Ben. “Those things can have bombs, missiles, guns... whatever.”
The robot’s mechanical arm deploys outward, sets something small on the ground, and then retreats the way it came. Seeing this, Ben—the HADroid, now—walks out of the barn and toward whatever has been left behind.
“Careful, Ben. It’s not safe.”
“No one is safe,” Ben says, without stopping.
I follow him out—hiding behind him even though I don’t know from which direction an attack might come.
Ben bends slowly from his ten-foot height and picks up the item the robot dropped. He holds it in his massive robotic hand, and I see that it’s an iPad or something.
“It could be a bomb,” I say.
Ben’s robotic head turns. “They have an army. This isn’t a bomb.”
He hands the iPad to me. I press the power button.
Almost immediately a video image appears. A fish-eye lens view pans back, and I see two Amish people, a man and a woman, held in a truck by men with guns. I recognize the couple right off the bat.
“It’s Mother and Father,” Ben says. He hasn’t even looked at the screen, so I have no idea how he knows that.
The image changes, and now there’s a man. A soldier with black, short-cropped hair and beard, and strange unblinking eyes. And he’s looking into the camera. Like he’s looking at me. He starts talking, but at first the volume is too low, so I have to turn the iPad and find the volume control. I turn it up.
“... and power down the HADroid. Everyone there lay flat on the ground and we’ll be there soon to clean this mess up.”
“We can do it,” I say to Ben. “We can turn ourselves in.”
“They’ll kill everyone,” Ben says. “They’ll clean it up and tie it off. Like they did at the general store.” His voice is cold and measured. Like a machine reporting from deep in a well.
“Ben... We have to try.”
“No,” Ben says. There is a finality in his voice that cuts through me like a knife.
The man on the iPad chimes in. “Okay,” the voice says. “I was hoping you’d choose a fight. Good, then.”
The picture on the pad flips back to the Amish couple. The men with guns step back and raise their weapons. They fire, in bursts, into the huddled bodies. The couple crumples to the ground. There are finishing shots, but I can’t watch.
I look up at Ben, but he’s not watching the screen. He’s scanning down the road, his fists clenched... and slowly, very slowly, he raises himself to his full height.
“I am human,” he says. The voice is Ben’s, but now it’s deeper and louder, amplified, metallic, and frightening. “I. Am. Human...
“... and my name is Frank Miller.”
* * *
Frank steps forward just as two attack helicopters rise from beyond the tree line to the south. The HADroid’s arms extend, and one at a time—first with the right and then with the left—Frank hurls something. Tiny objects rocket toward the choppers like bullets fired from a gun. It takes me a few beats to realize what Frank has just done.
The bolts.
He’s launched them, one at each of the aircraft.
That’s it for me. I know he’s fully embraced a battle, so I run back to the barn like the coward I am, looking over my shoulder as Ben faces down the choppers.
It’s hard for me to see if the bolts hit their targets, but in response, large-caliber machine gun fire chews up the ground around Frank like thousands of squib explosions going off in some random pattern. Some of the projectiles strike Frank with no effect at all.
The chopper on the right pulls up and begins to shudder, turning to the east but struggling to maintain altitude. It wobbles and begins to counter-rotate. The chopper on the right peels off and zooms over the barn.
And that’s when it happens.
Frank’s launchers deploy from his shoulders, and even from my hiding spot in the barn I can see something that freezes me in place. Shocks me to my core. My breath catches in my throat.
Frank is fully armed.
I blink. Finally. Unable to comprehend the thoughts racing through my head. Then a single crystalline clarity burrows to the surface.
The warehouse.
The night when we picked up the truck in that town where I got drunk and heard “Blue Bayou” at a bar. The town where the off-duty police officer confronted us. Officer Redling.
All of this happens in microseconds, but I can see it clearly in my mind. I was out talking to the cop and Frank was alone in the warehouse. Only for a moment. And when I first walked out... I remember it now. T
he metal gate to the cage was open. I thought he’d hid in there.
Frank armed himself. And I never knew. Never suspected.
Maybe there was one brief thought. Just a split second of suspicion or curiosity that passed so quickly I never even entertained it.
Two rockets from Frank’s left shoulder launchers stream after the fleeing helo while, simultaneously, intense lasers from ports under his eyes slice the crippled copter in two.
I hear the explosions come from behind the barn, but I don’t turn to watch the rocketed chopper. I know it’s gone. Instead, I watch the bifurcated helo shake itself to pieces as it plummets to the earth in flames. Shards of shattered propeller riddle the old barn, and a chunk barely misses me as I duck into the shadows.
When the rain of debris stops, I glance outside. And I realize that things are even worse than I imagined.
APCs and other war machines are lumbering up the road from both directions. And before I can shout or scream or do anything at all to stop it—Frank cripples the leading vehicles with rockets and lasers. Fires erupt up and down the road—
And a shell from some tank explodes in the center of the Shetlers’ house.
Before I can even think, I’m up and running. Screaming at the top of my lungs. The fear is gone, replaced by anger and dread. Dashing through the haze and destruction as gunfire peppers the ground around me, I sprint toward where I hope the root cellar might still be intact.
* * *
Jets storm over Dresser’s G-Wagen, and two of them burst into fireballs, tumbling in death spirals before crashing and disintegrating across once-placid Amish fields. The three remaining jets head straight vertical, but another is incinerated just as the pilot hits the afterburners. Anti-missile flares erupt from the last two jets, but they do no good. One is targeted by laser fire and disappears from view in a fireball. The last fighter banks hard left and is out of view in seconds.
Dresser sucks in a deep breath. It’s obvious to him that his forces can’t even target the HADroid. Their defensive weaponry is completely ineffective, too. The voices of screaming men trying to locate the enemy assault him through his headset. A projectile pierces the air above his vehicle, missing him by only feet, and a massive explosion from somewhere down the road makes the ground shudder. His mind is ticking off facts, and he’s almost oblivious to the carnage going on around him. Obviously, he thinks, the target is armored in some advanced stealth material, and the HADroid seems to produce no heat signature at all. How is that possible? The aircraft can’t even see him and if they can, well, then they’re way too close and their end comes immediately. Violently.
Brother, Frank Page 23
