Only the adults are useful as new recruits. The masters plug them in to fill the gaps. Survivors get the neck cuff, and they’re glad for it. Usually, these new ones refuse to shoot their own friends and family. Usually.
Now people shapes are running toward us, some firing guns. Red targets drop onto them. Our bullets spray and they fall. I step over the bodies. Keep my head up while I reach down and fish through their pockets. The walkers step so careful and slow, but they roll unstoppable like waves. I reach into a dead man’s jacket pocket and yank out a wad of photographs. Children and families. I drop them like confetti on the field. Keep a small flashlight.
You find all kinds of things scavenging.
I found the laser pointer on a battlefield in Ohio. The people there knew we were coming. They had studied our tactics and they used laser pointers to try to confuse the walkers. It worked at first, but not for long. Problem was, the targets didn’t look similar enough to fool us. And the walkers instantly recalled anybody who put bullets in the wrong place.
I kept a laser pointer anyway. Made it part of my latest plan.
Buildings start to appear as we enter the encampment. Someone runs around a corner and goes down as five guns fire at once. The guy is nearly cut in half. Skinny is making high-pitched, breathy screaming sounds.
“I don’t like this,” she says, again and again.
Sherman and I share a look. We step back and keep her ahead of us so we don’t accidentally get shot by her. Somewhere ahead, out in the fog, a walker is kicking down a building. I hear shouting as the people inside run for it. Our walker zeroes in on the sounds. Laser dots and fingers on triggers and invisible bullets zipping past. The muzzle flashes bounce against my eyelids.
I squint into the chaos.
And I see the black humping frame of Felix’s walker. It’s the big one—the long black horse—kicking down tin sheds. He’s riding up top, enjoying himself. I see him pointing at runners. Desperate families who were hiding inside the buildings are doing their best to get out, confused by the fog and by the death and grotesque slave soldiers marching collared out of the mists. Felix is killing them gleefully.
Soon, he’ll be in range.
I hear people crying somewhere in the mist. I do not look at them. I do not raise a finger to my lips. I have made this mistake before. Our master walker is watching and listening. It is very good at finding the ones who hide. And if those people are painted with lasers then I will have to fire on them, and sometimes they are only little kids.
“Farm boy,” whispers Sherman. He is by my side, rifle leveled at his hip. A warm solid silhouette under the spotlight glare. “People there.”
I glance at Sherman, let my eyes speak. We don’t look at them, my friend. We keep walking. We survive.
“Your pointer,” he whispers as red beams cut toward the whimpering sounds. “I know you have one. I saw you take it.”
“It’s for something else,” I say.
Felix is just ahead of us now, almost in range of the laser pointer. I’ve never even been this close to him in the field. My plan is finally coming together.
“It’s gonna see them,” whispers Sherman, urgently.
The whimpering grows louder. Why can’t they just shut up? Our walker is slowing down now, searching for the sounds. It’s going to hear them. It’s going to find them and then I’ll have to raise my gun and—
I clamp down. My mind is my strength.
Lowering my head, I glance sidelong and see a group of maybe ten little kids clustered under a half-collapsed wall. At least three of them have got metal sunk into their eye cavities. Ocular prosthetics, like my sister’s. These kids are sighted. The laser targets are dancing, sweeping over the top of the wall. Any second. Any second and I’m going to have to fire on those quivering faces.
But my plan isn’t ready. Felix is so close.
Sherman is watching me, salt-and-pepper eyebrows sagging over his glasses. His face is asking me, begging me. Please help them.
“C’mon kid,” he says to me. “Come on, now.”
I want to tell Sherman that not all people are good.
Hey You staggers by us like a zombie, eyes wide and glassy, rifle barrel smoking. He sweeps his rifle back and forth, searching for targets.
“Hey,” I whisper. “Hey you.”
Raccoon and Baldy are gone. Empty collars partially retracted and flopping overhead as the walker strides cautiously forward. Skinny is still stumbling along, her fingers pale and white around the barrel of a big gun. Sherman watches me coolly, the only one besides me who is really aware.
Above us, red lines begin to strafe the mist toward the collapsed wall. Hey You watches, his mouth hanging open in a dark grimace. He shoulders his rifle, tenses to fire. His barrel follows the falling red slice of laser light.
I snap my fingers in his ear.
Hey You turns to me.
“There,” I hiss, pointing up at the master walker.
As Hey You idiotically swivels to look, I bring out my laser pointer. Heart pounding, I drop my thumb onto the button. Things slow down. A red beam of light leaps out of the pointer and shines onto the master walker’s belly.
By reflex, Hey You lifts his rifle and fires. I dive away from him as his rifle spits flashes of light that silhouette his stumped, broken form.
One. Two. Three.
The walker spins its camera eyes away from the collapsed wall, reorients.
A half-dozen targeting lasers flicker onto Hey You. Sherman and I don’t fire, but Skinny turns on her heels and unloads a couple of rounds. The bullets whiff into Hey You’s chest, staggering him.
Snap.
Hey You’s whole body jerks sideways, neck cocked at a ninety-degree angle. His gun fires again into the ground as his flabby body falls. I toss the laser pointer into the darkness. Try to regulate my breathing.
Another murder.
Blood is surging through my head, singing in my ears. I take deep breaths through my nose to keep from fainting. I drop to my knees next to where Hey You has fallen.
“I’m sorry, buddy,” I mutter as I rifle through Hey You’s shit-smelling jacket for ammunition. I’m trying to act normal. It was a malfunction. Maybe they’ll never know what just happened.
“What did you do?” asks Skinny, her voice shrill. “What the fuck did you just do?”
“Shut your mouth,” growls Sherman. “He did what was right.”
I glance back at the broken wall and the kids are gone. They ran for it.
A bright white spotlight hits me and I flinch like I’ve been punched. Trying to block the light with my hand, I can’t see anything. I hear the crunch of boots on the ground. The front line has moved on. Flickers in the clouds ahead of us. But we’re back here in the cold dark, under this bright finger of God.
“Drop your weapons,” calls a voice.
I let my rifle fall to the dirt. Hear Skinny and Sherman do the same.
“Clear,” says the voice, drifting away.
Squinting, I make out two skulls floating out of the mist. Felix’s honor guard. Both men are huge, wearing torn camouflage fatigues and holding light machine guns across their chests. They’ve got war trophies hanging from their necks: ears and fingers. Their faces are tatted up so they look like demons.
“Kneel, hands up,” says the one on the right, teeth flashing.
I put my hands on my head as Felix himself steps out of the gray. He has a long knife in one hand. Part of his head has been shaved. The hair is growing back slow, in patches. He was never fat but he’s lost weight since I saw him last. The folds of his face are sinking into each other. His dark eyes glittering.
“Which one of you—” he begins to ask.
Then he stops. Cocks his head in that Mathilda way. Looks directly at me.
“Farm boy,” he says, walking closer. He pauses, as if listening to something far away. Smiles.
“You make a good point,” he says to nobody.
Felix looks down at me. There is something m
issing in his stare. I get a feeling it has something to do with the stitches and that shaved spot on his head.
In the darkness, something big and black lowers itself out of the sky. Felix’s modded walker, kneeling down to get its golden eyes dialed in on my face. Smaller appendages uncurl from its belly, like little arms. They reach down and cradle my head.
The stiff fingers are cold and hard on my face and chin. Something orange begins to glow around the edges of my vision. In my mind, I can hear snatches of music, sounds. I remember my mother’s face, vivid and close, as she cradled my cheeks and gave me a kiss on the forehead.
Then the metal hands are gone. Felix leans in.
“Your sister is looking for you,” he says.
10. REACHING OUT
Post New War: 10 Months, 7 Days
Thousands of refugees fled after Hank Cotton came to power in Gray Horse. Apparently hoping for mercy, these pathetic outcasts headed toward Freeborn City—the exact target of my armies thundering in from the South and East. The fugitives should have known that the machines would never show compassion. They should have known that they could live longer by running in any other direction, by forcing me to split my forces. It took many thought cycles to understand the mind-set that drove these injured sheep directly into the path of danger. After contemplation, I realized: They did not seek compassion from the freeborn, but to offer military aid. Somehow, they still considered themselves dangerous.
—ARAYT SHAH
DATABASE ID: NINE OH TWO
Executive process consolidation and repair series interrupted. Peripheral alert triggered. Seismic activity detected. Martial database lookup indicates quadruped walker variety.
Ambient light negligible. Internal clock: 03:56:49.
Thin cloud cover obfuscates the sky. No moon. Only a gentle vibration racing through the ground to indicate that we are under attack. I am already standing. It is too dark in the visible spectrum for me to see my own end effectors. I must rely on internal proprioception to determine my position.
Switching vision to enhanced visible spectrum—the best alternative available. To initiate active infrared illumination would be suicide.
Even with amplified light, I can see only a grainy greenish image of Mathilda. My small movements have startled her awake. She reaches out and touches the strange stag walker that she calls Tiberius. Then she puts another hand on Gracie’s shoulder. The other little girl moves her head slightly, stirring in her mother’s arms.
We saved these two, and only these two. By some survival instinct melded with her modification, Gracie began giving a constant encrypted position transmission as the slavers closed in. In the laser-painted night, the little girl shone like a beacon.
Mathilda and Gracie are both sighted, with bands of metal sunk into the hollow cavities where they used to have eyes. This modification, combined with the trauma of war, has severely compromised the efficacy of interaction paradigms suggested by my child-behavioral databases. The children in the databases are not like these two children, who are even now alert and moving quietly while under attack.
These little girls aren’t afraid of the dark.
Our primary goal has been to rescue Nolan Perez from the slave army that he is marching in. We trailed a platoon of eight walkers and approximately sixty collared soldiers over the countryside as they headed west, on an intercept course for Freeborn City. The Tribe is on its way to attack my home.
We had thought that we were undetected.
Over local radio, I transmit information: “Our location has been identified. Walkers advancing. ETA forty-five seconds.”
Gracie wraps her arms around her mother’s neck. The older woman is crouched, eyes wide. She can’t see anything, can’t do anything besides offer comfort to her daughter by squeezing her tight. My database is incomplete on the subject, but I estimate that Gracie is approximately nine years old. At fourteen, Mathilda is considerably bigger and more formidable.
Mathilda goes to an alert crouch.
“Gracie, it’s time to go,” she whispers.
Gracie moans something incomprehensible.
Mathilda pulls on the stag’s shoulder, orienting it. She nods to me in the darkness. I scoop up mother and daughter, place them both on the back of the quadruped machine. I watch a flutter of communication between Mathilda and the stag. It bows its great head, horns splayed out like small trees. Then it turns and trots away silently. Its flat-paneled black eyes are absorbing all available light. Gracie and her mother cling to the walker’s mossy back as it pushes quietly through the brush with its broad chest.
“Mathilda,” says Gracie, almost crying.
“It will be okay,” she whispers. “We’ll find you.”
Something crashes out in the woods and the stag breaks into a sudden bounding trot. Gracie fades into the black gaps between the trees. A bouncing bundle of rags watching us with pale ivory eyes.
“Mathilda,” I radio. “Suggest flanking maneuver.”
“Acknowledge,” says Mathilda, out loud.
The walker catches us as we progress down a muddy ravine.
In the first streaks of dawn, I execute a visual sedimentary analysis. There was a creek here not long ago. Now it’s almost dried up. This is a spring-runoff flood ravine. Cottonwood trees arch over the empty streambed, hoary roots growing out of the embankments on either side of us.
A spotlight breaks through damp leaves and we have shadows. In an instant, I grab Mathilda and pull her against the embankment. Slam our backs against the wall as the light lingers, then sweeps past.
Auditory and seismic vibrations indicate the platoon of slave walkers is trudging along the lip of the ravine. They’re searching for us, rushing through the tick-infested brush and pushing entire trees crashing over the streambed. Small-arms fire chatters as some animal is flushed out and painted with a targeting laser.
Mathilda is pressed against the muddy wall, clinging to a dirty root and sending her mind out into the satellites. Next to her, I unsling my rifle and train my full passive sensory package on pinpointing the walkers. Mathilda’s forehead is furrowed as she thinks, and then her mouth curves into a wide smile. She pushes her hair off her face.
“He’s near,” she says.
“It’s an ambush,” I transmit in reply.
“I know,” she says.
A black leg spears out of the darkness over our heads and into the trickle of creek water at our feet. We both hold position and watch as the jointed claw settles into the mud, talons spreading under the blinding glare of a belly-mounted spotlight. It doesn’t know we are here. The front line of slave walkers is crossing the creek.
“Run south,” I transmit to Mathilda in audible Robspeak.
I drop into a crouch, and then push up into a corkscrewing leap. My gun, forgotten, clatters to the ground under me. Faintly, I hear the shouts of surprised soldiers collared to the walker. The belly of the walker looms overhead. I wrap my hands around its sensor package. Grab hold and wrap my legs around its torso. The heat of the spotlight singes my Kevlar vest. I’m clawing, twisting at the cameras and lights and targeting laser. A shrill scream rings out and I feel the familiar thump of bullets ripping through my layers of fabric armor.
This one is blinded, staggering away, but more walkers are coming.
I drop to my knees in the cool mud and retrieve my rifle as the machine jerks and writhes above me. The spotlight is broken, cocked to the side, illuminating the wooded trail that runs along the embankment. Black legs twist around me, stamping holes in the ground. The soldiers are holding their own collar cords, panicked, dirty faces pointed at the bucking machine as they maneuver to avoid decapitation.
“Mathilda? Location?” I transmit.
A sudden perfect mental image of Mathilda’s position in three-dimensional space relative to me appears in my mind’s eye. It’s as if her body is an extension of my body. I sprint up the ravine, leap toward her position as the shadow of a leg sweeps by. It crunches into m
y torso and I tumble across the gully, smashing into the muddy wall and collapsing.
Offline / Online
I roll myself off the ground, ripping roots off my arms, trying to reach my feet to find Mathilda.
“Nolan!” she shouts.
And there he is.
Collared to a walker, the lanky boy is climbing over the embankment. Two of his comrades have already made it over the lip. For a moment, Nolan is frozen with his eyes wide on his sister. Mathilda is smiling, waving one arm frantically. In her excitement, she has forgotten that this is a trap.
She cannot see the targeting lasers flashing over her chest.
Threat analysis priority thread: Targets. Female soldier, white, emaciated, reloading. Male soldier, black, wearing glasses, staggering over a tree root. Another male soldier, white, overweight, with rifle shouldered and aimed at Mathilda’s face. Finger closing on trigger.
“No!” shouts Nolan.
Negligible probability of effectuating an intercept trajectory. I leap for her anyway. As I relay power to my legs, Nolan shoulders the butt of his gun. Somehow raises the muzzle and squeezes the trigger in a single motion. Faster than I can sense.
Impossibly fast.
The front of the overweight man’s face distends as Nolan’s bullet punches through the side of his skull. His body pitches forward into the ravine toward me, reflexively firing its weapon into the dirt. It bounces past, twitching.
As I catch hold of the ledge, the walker’s laser targeting sweeps back to Nolan. He is the source of the erroneous shot, the primary target. There is no mercy from the slave walker or its allies. The leash shudders, preparing to retract even as red targeting dots appear on the boy’s chest.
The skinny woman and the black man only watch, not even raising their weapons. Mathilda is screaming now, reaching for Nolan, but there is no more time. The walker has registered a direct violation from Nolan’s gun. It staggers on hyperextended legs, turning to point camera buds at the boy.
Nolan’s eyes are open wide and smoke is curling from the barrel of his gun. His lower lip is pushed out in a sad-little-boy expression.
“Mathilda,” he says.
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