by Joe McKinney
Jimmy turned his head, the bile rising in his throat.
Jimmy, look at me.
Slowly, uncertain for a moment that he would even be able to keep his feet, Jimmy straightened up. He faced the train wreck that had once been his father and, running the back of his hand across his face, wiped the spit from his lips.
You lied to me.
For a reason. I had to get you here.
But you lied to me.
You don’t need to be frightened of me.
Jimmy backed away, shaking his head.
That was when Jimmy saw the other Warbot. At first it had blended in with the other machinery, one more piece of metal streaked with human gore.
Then it rose to its full height.
Eighteen feet of rusting metal on Tyrannosaurus legs.
It stood so tall it had to stoop to avoid scraping the ceiling. It had fully automatic machine-gun cannons for arms and it turned them in Jimmy’s direction.
“I am human,” Jimmy said, reciting the mantra that Dr. Knopf had taught him when dealing with robotic sentries. “Confirm my status as human.”
The Warbot’s status lights flickered wildly, but it made no sound. The guns remained trained on Jimmy.
“Confirm!” Jimmy said.
It’s not the robot it used to be. Watch, Jimmy. Let me show you.
The Warbot stooped forward then and swung one of its machine-gun arms under his father. As Jimmy watched, his fear mounting, the robot raised the zombie version of his father into the air and placed him on its shoulders.
Jimmy took a step back.
Do you understand?
Yes. You control that robot.
Yes! That’s exactly right. It has a limited intelligence. AI, they call it. It isn’t a smart machine, but it’s smart enough to be used. Do you see?
No.
Jimmy, look at me.
Jimmy did. He stared up at his father, who rode the Warbot like some demented child playing horsey on his daddy’s shoulders, and he was frightened.
This is bad. This is very bad.
No! That’s wrong. Jimmy, this is right. Don’t you see? See what?
I control this robot. I can control zombies, too. Anything that has a mind, or had a mind, is like a pawn waiting to be moved. Don’t you see the potential? All it takes is a mind that can move those pawns. A mind like mine. A mind like yours.
I want to go home.
You are home, damn it!
The robot took three long strides forward and knelt down, bringing Jimmy’s father closer to eye level. Jimmy tried to back away, but his heel caught on a Troopbot’s severed arm and he pitched over backwards, landing on his butt.
Don’t back away from me!
But Jimmy wasn’t moving anymore. For the first time, he could see the wall behind the Warbot. There was a flight of stairs there, and on the wall at the back of the first landing was a red EXIT sign.
A way out.
Don’t you see what I’m offering you? Don’t you understand what this means? I can make you a king, boy. I’ve seen into your memories. I’ve seen how they’ve used you. Do you want it to stop? Don’t you want to give it all back to them? I can help you do that. As father and son, the way it was meant to be.
Slowly, Jimmy stood up.
Answer me.
Glancing across the floor between where he stood and the stairs began, Jimmy picked out the route he was going to take. Dr. Knopf had tried to teach him a trick once to hone his psychic locator skills. Visualize each move, Knopf had told him, picture it in advance. See yourself making it. That way, when you make it for real—
Knopf is the man who raised you, the scientist?
Yes.
The one who experimented on—
Jimmy blocked the rest of it, slamming the door on his father’s mind-voice. He heard his father grunt in surprise, and Jimmy ran. He darted around the Warbot’s right side, ducking to miss the robot’s heavy cannon arm as it rotated toward him, and then he was past it, running for the stairs.
But he didn’t move so fast he missed his steps. He picked his way through bodies and machine parts carefully, planting his feet exactly as he had pictured them in his head. He couldn’t afford to miss a step. Not now. Not with his father and that Warbot behind him. If he tripped, slipped, they’d be on him. The heavy cannon would knock him to the floor and hold him there. And he had no idea what his father would do after that.
Jimmy was still blocking him with his mind. He had his teeth clenched so tightly his jaw was trembling, his breaths coming fast and noisily through his nose, but he didn’t dare let up. His father was no doubt screaming into his brain, and if one of those mind-voice screams got through, Jimmy knew it would be enough to cripple him with pain. He’d never be able to get up.
He hit the stairs at a full sprint and ran up them three at a time. When he reached the landing, he turned and saw his father astride the Warbot, the two of them crashing forward.
They were close, almost on him.
Jimmy kept running up the stairs. He had to scale three flights to reach the promised EXIT door. Once there, he grabbed the handle, and twisted.
It was locked.
“No,” he said.
Below him, the Warbot was trying to climb the stairs, even though it was far too big to fit into the narrow confines. But it could force its way up, and that it was doing, banging its huge cannon arms against the railing, smashing through the floor with its enormous metal shoulders. The ground beneath Jimmy’s feet was moving, trembling from the impacts.
He tried the door again, yanking on it with everything he had, and it still wouldn’t budge.
“Please, no,” he said, his voice almost a whimper.
He looked down. The Warbot was slowly crashing its way up through the floor, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Through a gap in the split-level stairs Jimmy caught a glimpse of his father’s zombified face. It was a hideous, dead face, yellowed with disease and dark with scabs and open, rotting wounds. The right side of his mouth had been damaged somehow, so that the corner of his lips hung slack in an ironic grin.
The eyes, though, those were most certainly not grinning. They were lit by a mad, malignant hatred. There was violence in those eyes that frightened Jimmy down to his bones.
But he still had to get through the door. How?
The gun. Use the gun.
The Combot’s voice.
The gun?
Jimmy looked down at his waistband. Sure enough, the pistol was still there, right where he’d stuck it after his narrow escape back at the ledge.
How do I . . . ?
Shoot the knob. Move quickly.
Jimmy took a step back. He drew the weapon and steadied its front sight on the knob. Below him, the Warbot was fast approaching. It was on the next landing down. Jimmy had a few seconds, maybe less. He swallowed hard as he tried to center the front sight on the knob and pulled the trigger.
The gun nearly jumped out of his hands as he staggered backwards, the sound of the shot deafening.
Shaking his head, he looked down at the lock. The knob was hanging at an odd angle from the plane of the door, a big gaping hole just to the left of it. He reached for it, and the knob came away in his hand.
The door fell open.
Run. You must run.
The Combot again.
Where?
I will guide you. Run now. Move as fast as you can.
He lunged through the doorway and into the lobby of a large, shabby building. This, he gathered, had been the home office of the water authority. There were desks everywhere, most of them pushed haphazardly out of the way. Trash lay thick on the floor. A few pieces of furniture had been jammed up against the front door of the building, which meant a few people must have made a final stand here.
But the furniture had been toppled, and the front door behind the pile was hanging from the bottom hinge.
Jimmy ran that way, scaling over the furniture. He was almost through the door when the g
round shook and he lost his footing. He landed on top of a desk, facing the length of floor he’d just traversed.
A heaving mound formed in the middle of the floor, the cement there popping and groaning from the Warbot’s efforts to push itself upwards from the other side. There was a crash, and the mound cracked and popped. A second crash came immediately after, and the next thing Jimmy knew, the Warbot was busting through the floor, sending bits of tile and chairs and desks flying off in every direction.
The Warbot climbed out of the hole, Jimmy’s father still hanging on to its neck, still staring at him with those same hate-filled eyes.
“No,” Jimmy said.
Run. Now.
But Jimmy didn’t need to be told. He was already sprinting into the street.
12
A bullet skipped off the pavement at Dr. Knopf’s feet, hitting the wall behind him. He ducked, and with his hands over his head, turned in every direction, trying to find someplace to run. The air was full of dust, the noise deafening. He felt disoriented, and in his confusion, stepped right into the middle of the fighting.
After their first successful skirmish in front of the movie theater, some of the Troopbots had surrounded another water authority access point to the sewers, their weapons at the ready, and opened the door. It had been like knocking the top off an ant pile. One minute they were expecting a simple mop-up operation of a few remaining zombies, and the next, they were getting overrun, trampled underfoot, ripped to pieces. Knopf had been standing less than thirty feet from one of their Docbots when a wave of zombies knocked it to the ground and pulled it apart like a man being drawn and quartered. They’d been overrun so quickly there was hardly a chance for Knopf to question the strangeness of what he saw. But Captain Fisher was a good soldier, a capable leader. He regrouped his forces, pulling his troops back in ordered rows while at the same time bringing his Warbots forward, where the bigger guns could do some damage. But the battle was decided almost from the beginning. Fisher’s expeditionary force was small, intended more for light escort duty than a stand-up fight, and the best he could hope for at this point was to keep his escape route to the rear open. By keeping his lines moving, they at least stood a chance of escaping to a better defensive position.
That was how it looked to Knopf, anyway.
But there was something else, something disturbing. Knopf had spent years studying the zombies in every way possible. Know thy enemy, as Sun Tzu had said. He’d used that knowledge to design and perfect the weapons systems his shop built for the military. But in all his studies, all his observations, he’d always worked under the philosophy that the zombie was a mindless, relentless opponent with no sense of strategy and no skills. Their only strengths were their numbers, a complete lack of fear, and the ability to fight without sleep, without pain, and without ever quitting. They advanced headlong, regardless of the odds, with no sense of winning or losing.
That didn’t seem to be the case here, though. Knopf had accidentally wandered into the middle of the fighting, and while he was ducking and dodging bullets like some kind of fool, he watched a large number of zombies break away from the main horde and circle around the ruins of a hardware store, so that they could come up from behind their robot opponents in a fairly well-executed flanking maneuver.
Knopf was shocked. Doing something like that took strategy, it took forethought, it took goal-oriented behavior. None of the game theory equations he’d put into the robots’ programming could deal with behavior like that. It wasn’t playing by the rules. And yet the action was undeniable. It was a wide street, with a park off to his left. There had been plenty of room for all those zombies to continue their advance. By all rights, they should have massed into the open areas, where Fisher’s strategy would have turned the street into a meat grinder.
But they had deliberately turned off. They had taken themselves out of the fight in a clearly premeditated way, almost as though . . .
Another bullet hit the pavement at his feet and glanced off with a loud, high-pitched whine. Knopf blinked at the little white cloud of dust that drifted away from the impact point.
“What are you doing?” someone yelled. “Get out of the street!”
Knopf looked up. Zombies and robots were swarming all around him. The ordered lines had broken down, and everywhere he turned Troopbots were being ripped apart.
“Knopf, you idiot, get out of the street!”
Captain Fisher was running at him, a pistol in his hand. He looked angry, white flecks of spit flying from his lips, the white scar across his chin almost completely obscured by the dirt and mud and blood on his face.
“Get out of the street!”
The next instant Fisher was on him, grabbing him by the sleeve, pulling him towards the corner of a red brick building. Then he slammed him against the wall.
“What the hell are you doing?” he demanded.
“Those zombies are using strategy, captain. Something’s guiding them—”
But Fisher wasn’t listening. His attention was already back on the street, eyes darting from one corner of the battle to the other.
“We’re pulling out,” he yelled. “I’m ordering us out of this town. Get yourself ready to move out.”
“Wait,” Knopf said. “What? No, you can’t.”
“I can, doctor, and I am. We are leaving!”
“But Jimmy . . . he’s still out there somewhere. We have to find him.”
“Like hell we do. He ran off. He’s dead.”
“You don’t know that!”
“I know this experiment of yours has failed, doctor,” Fisher said. He emphasized his point by jamming a finger into Knopf’s chest. “You’re done. You and this whole ridiculous experiment—you’re done! This is over. My only concern right now is to salvage what’s left of my command. Now get yourself ready. We are leaving.”
And with that he stormed off, yelling for his human soldiers to fall back.
13
Jimmy hit the street running.
Behind him, the front of the building he’d just escaped exploded, the force of it knocking him onto his hands and knees. He glanced back in time to see the Warbot erupting into the street, crouching like a bird, furniture and bits of rubble tumbling out all around its feet.
From atop the thing’s shoulders, with the cold, hard light of insanity in his eyes, Jimmy’s father leered at him.
“Oh, God,” Jimmy said.
He pulled to his feet and started to run again.
But he only made it a few feet before he stopped. Ahead of him, zombies staggered out of alleyways and out of buildings. At first there were only five, then eight, then more. He turned to his left and saw the side street there filling up with more of the living dead.
It dawned on him then what was happening. The zombies closing in on him . . . the things his father had said down in the sewers . . . the fact that all the town’s zombies had retreated into the sewers, as though waiting for something . . . his father was controlling them, steering them towards this spot. Jimmy could feel the force of his father’s thoughts moving around him like the current in a river, but gaining in strength. Now that he was out of the sewers he was growing more powerful every second.
What am I supposed to do?
Jimmy stretched his thoughts, trying to connect with the Combot.
And then, a connection.
Help me, Comm Six. Where do I go?
There is a building to your right. Run through there. Hurry.
Jimmy turned. The building was made of red brick, the windows empty and dark. He sprinted towards it just as the Warbot reached for him, its enormous machine-gun arms missing him by inches. Jimmy jumped through one of the empty display windows and hurried through the shop toward the back.
Go out the back door. When you reach the alley, turn right. I will guide you.
Jimmy did as he was told. The shop was crowded with trash and bits of the tile and insulation where the roof had collapsed, but he threaded his way through
it and out the back door.
He found himself in a narrow alley between low buildings. Looking to his left he saw zombies turning the corner. To his right, the way looked clear.
Go. Hurry.
His father’s Warbot had already started smashing its way through the shop and Jimmy knew he only had a few precious seconds. He ran for the end of the alleyway, rounded the corner, and kept on running.
The next corner is Tanner Street. Turn left there. You will see a movie theater at the end of the street. But you must hurry. The humans are leaving.
Leaving? What? No. Stop them.
I cannot. But you can.
Me? How?
With your mind. Reach out. Find one of the humans and enter his mind. Hurry. The Warbot is coming. Do it as you run.
Jimmy rounded the corner onto Tanner Street. He could hear his father’s Warbot back there, wrecking everything in sight.
Focusing his mind, he tried to picture Dr. Knopf, to remember the sound of his voice, the shape of his face.
Dr. Knopf.
Something clicked for Jimmy then. He could feel the connection when it happened, like toy blocks snapping together. Dr. Knopf was confused and frightened by the contact. Jimmy could sense his fear, and feel him trying to pull his mind back and break the contact. He could picture Knopf standing perfectly still, his back rigid, Adam’s apple pumping up and down like a cylinder, much as Jimmy had done when his father first made contact with him.
Dr. Knopf, I need help.
Jimmy, you’re alive! Where are you?
There was no time to explain. Instead, Jimmy pushed his thoughts into Dr. Knopf’s mind, showing him everything he had seen and heard since coming to Mill Valley. He wasn’t even sure if it would work, but he sensed it would, and so he pushed.
