by Harrison, S.
Looking around, I can see that everyone in our little group seems to be intact. No appendages missing, no eyeballs hanging out of faces, no ears or noses sliced off. Ryan pushes up onto his elbows and looks in my direction. I should run; this is my chance to ditch everyone and go it alone, but something won’t let me. Something inside me is making me stay, holding me like a magnet to these people. Despite what I think or what I want to feel, I just can’t deny the intensely uncomfortable fact that . . . I’m beginning to care what happens to them.
“Help me get everyone out of here!” I shout. Ryan seems to get the message through the ringing he’s undoubtedly hearing, because he nods and rolls onto one knee, tugging at the shirt of a groaning Brody who’s lying on his side nearby. I snatch Otto’s glasses from the floor, wipe their dusty lenses on my equally dusty shirt, and slide them onto her nose. “C’mon, Bit,” I say, grabbing her under her arms. “We gotta go.”
Her eyes focus on mine, and she hooks an arm around my shoulder. “Infinity . . . ,” she says croakily, “you called me ‘Bit.’”
“Yeah, well . . . just shut up and move, would ya?”
I hoist her up, and she’s understandably a little shaky on her feet. She absentmindedly slips her slate into her satchel; then, still clearly in a daze, she crouches to retrieve two more slates from the floor. Ryan and Brody are helping the others, and soon Percy is up, the look on his face so serious that it could be a stone carving. The Professor is on all fours, muttering about his glasses as he searches through splinters of desk, and that weird Dean kid just sits there, his blank, twitchy expression from before the explosion completely unchanged.
“What the hell was that?” Brent squeaks as he scrambles to his feet.
“I don’t know,” I reply. “But if it happens again, we had better not be here.”
Ryan moves to look over the top of the desk. “Those three men, the soldiers . . . are they . . . ?”
I slowly shake my head. With little more than a solemn look, he turns away to clear a section of fallen ceiling panel from the chest of a prone, shallow-breathing George, who seems to be more than a little freaked out. I don’t blame him. I bet this is the last thing the mild-mannered technician expected to happen when he pulled on his coveralls this morning. Ryan, on the other hand, seems more jaded than the others. I imagine he’s experienced more actual life outside the golden walls of luxury than the rest of these privileged teenagers, but it’s still disturbing how quickly someone can become accustomed to death.
“Why is this happening to me?” Margaux screeches as she pushes up from the floor, dust-darkened tracks of tears lining her face.
“We need to go!” I shout, pointing at the gaping rectangular hole in the front of the building where the windows used to be.
“Toward the explosion?” asks Brent.
“Do you see any other way out of here?”
Brent looks pissed off, but after a quick scan of the two remaining glass walls, he knows there’s nothing to argue about. He takes Margaux’s hand, and they start toward the breach, but I reach out and hiss at them to stop. “Wait!”
Everyone freezes.
The ringing in my own ears has faded enough to hear the rat-tat-tat of automatic gunfire outside. Soldiers very rarely shoot at nothing, so whoever or whatever caused this must be in somebody’s sights, and it isn’t very long until a strange noise piques my interest. It’s a thudding sound, like heavy footsteps. And it’s heading in this direction.
Frowning with curiosity, I peer over what remains of the top of the desk, waiting to see whatever is making the weird tromping noise. “What is that?” I ask, glancing back at the group.
Dean is standing now, his eyes still vacant, but everyone else, including Otto, is rooted to the spot, staring wide-eyed toward the approaching sound, all of them wearing the same expression, like kittens cowering from a wild dog. It’s then that I realize . . . they all know that sound. It’s a sound that has paralyzed them with fear, a sound that’s getting louder and closer with every weighted thud. It’s so close now that I can feel each pounding beat shuddering through the floor. I turn back toward the gaping hole in the side of the building to see two huge, bulbous, army-green-colored legs step into view outside the empty window frame.
Even though I can only see it from the chest down, I still can’t believe my eyes. It’s a robot, and—oh my—what a robot it is.
I thought I had studied them all, but right now, I’m at a loss for words. I have no idea what kind of machine that is. I can hear the spacking sound of bullets hitting it all over, but for all the damage they’re doing, the soldiers might as well be firing peashooters. It could be a R.A.M., I suppose, but . . . they don’t make them that big. Do they?
Almost as if it were a choreographed maneuver, everyone except me and that Dean kid jerks at the knees, ducking down behind the desk at the same time. Percy tugs the weirdly dazed boy down by his sleeve and bats at the air, signaling me to drop out of sight, too. Wary, and yet still intrigued, I slowly lower behind the desk and peek out through a small hole in its base. I’ve ducked just in the nick of time; a laser beam suddenly streams into the room, spreading into a bright-green fan through the floating particles of dust. It’s projecting from the center of the robot’s chest, flitting over the debris as if it’s searching for something. Is the robot looking for us? Maybe it’s scanning for Otto’s slate? That power spike was heading straight for us, after all. If it fires another grenade or missile into this room, we’re done for . . . it’s over. And there’s nothing I can do except keep quiet and hope like hell that doesn’t happen.
Through the hole, I nervously watch the laser as it moves across the floor and over the body of a fallen soldier. It travels up the legs of his tattered uniform and over his hips, dipping into the gouges torn into the sunken curve of his blast-bared stomach. It sweeps across his blood-soaked chest and head, then switches direction and roves along his arm. The soldier’s corpse is apparently no more important to the robot’s scanner than the meaningless debris strewn around him. Suddenly the green fan of light snaps to a halt and begins to close, shrinking down and changing color from green to yellow before finally tightening into a bright-red beam, right in the center of the wide silver band wrapped around the dead soldier’s wrist.
His command module. The robot has found what it’s looking for.
The laser cuts off, and all of a sudden, there’s a new sound, horrible and unlike anything I’ve ever heard before. It’s a high-pitched squeal at first, but elevates quickly. Even with my palms pressed hard against my ears, the noise becomes so loud that it drills into my skull, filling my head and the whole room with a wailing scream. All around me everyone is doing the same, holding the sides of their heads as if they’re going to explode. Even Dean is wincing. The scream begins to crackle, and I can smell the ozone tang of electricity burning the air. Then, with a violently powerful, droning roar, the remaining glass walls of the room come alive with reflected light as an astonishing eruption of power is unleashed from the robot’s arm.
It takes everything I have to keep my eyes glued to the hole in the desk as I witness the soldier’s entire body being shredded into oblivion by the incredible force of the robot’s weapon. Pieces of the floor shatter and fly as his body is transformed from a human corpse into nothing more than a thick smear of human ingredients.
The brutal storm of gunfire thankfully ends, and I can hear my adrenalized heart pulsing in the depths of my ears. My breaths have become quick snorts, and my wide eyes are mirrored on the faces of everyone in the group. All of us are still grinding our hands into our ears.
That’s when I see it out of the corner of my eye: the glint of silver that makes my stomach tighten and lurch.
Wrapped around the tour guide’s left wrist . . . is another command module.
I hear the robot’s laser snap on, and I quickly peer through the hole in the desk. There, flitting across the
floor, is an eerie green line of light . . . and it’s headed directly for us.
“Your wristband! Take it off!” I hiss. Percy’s hands drop from his ears, and his brow furrows in confusion.
“The robot is tracking the command modules!” I whisper-shout, jabbing my finger at his wrist. “Get rid of it! Now!”
Percy looks down at the silver band, and his eyes widen.
I quickly turn back and spy through the hole. The laser is now shining directly on the other side of the desk. I look over at Percy and growl at him through gritted teeth. “Hurry!” He immediately presses his thumb to the black stone on the band and whispers the word “Disconnect.” The wristband detaches and drops into his palm.
“George!” rasps Otto. “George has a module, too!”
I look over at George. He’s still lying there with a board resting on his leg, his eyes blinking slowly behind his glasses as he stares at the ceiling. Something obviously isn’t right with him. Otto scrambles across the floor toward him, lifts his hand, and hurriedly begins whispering to the deathly pale man.
“Take this thing off, George,” she insists. “You need to do it right now.”
Between shallow breaths he slowly nods, touches the stone, and faintly mumbles into it. With a soft click, it comes away from his wrist, and, in a panic, Otto tosses it to Percy as a thin beam of glowing green shines directly through the hole in the desk. It stops dead center on the two thick silver bands grasped in Percy’s palm and instantly turns bright red. The hellish, high-pitched squeal of the robot’s weapon fills the room again, and Margaux shrieks as Brody, Ryan, and the Professor scramble away from Percy like he has the plague.
“Throw them!” I yell over the noise. “Throw them now!”
Percy quickly stands and thrusts his hand high above his head. He’s panting like a dog on a hot summer’s day, terror contorting the edges of his eyes.
“Throw them!” bellows Ryan as the laser spreads green over the top of the desk and begins moving upward over Percy’s chest. But Percy doesn’t move. He’s frozen, petrified solid as the glowing green line dips in and out of the creases in his face. The sound of the robot’s weapon screeching gets louder as the fan of light narrows into yellow on Percy’s forearm. Like a possum blinded into paralysis by an oncoming car, Percy doesn’t move at all. In a few seconds, the top half of his body is going to be raw hamburger.
“Throw them!” I scream, but even I can’t hear myself over the intensity of the piercing noise.
The laser reaches Percy’s palm and sharpens into a beam as it turns a bright shade of scarlet red.
I have no idea how much time is left before Percy is turned into a bloody heap of remains, but I have to move . . . now. I leap up from the floor and lunge at his hand, and in one fluid movement, I snatch the modules from his palm, spin, and fling them wildly. The modules whip through the air and tumble all the way across the room. Purely by chance, my throw couldn’t be better; they clink against the leg of the robot and clatter on the path at its feet like a hand-delivered sacrifice. I dive at the ground and peer through the hole as the laser thankfully skims back across the floor, finds the modules, and immediately cuts off. The tense muscles in my shoulders grip my bones tightly as the sound of the screaming weapon wanes back into the blissful relative quiet of Percy’s heavy breathing and Margaux’s puppy-dog whimpers. With a surprisingly quick movement for such a massive machine, the robot lifts one of its huge legs and brings its foot pounding down on the wristbands with a loud, ground-shaking thump.
I watch as the seemingly satisfied giant robot slowly trudges off toward the shouts of the soldiers in the courtyard, no doubt drawn to the high number of modules gathered there. I can hear Brody gulp with relief. Percy leans his head back toward the ceiling and lets out a long guttural groan as he buckles onto his knees beside George.
George’s face is ashen. His chest has stopped moving.
I crawl over beside him, lift the board and two cracked computer slates from his leg, and there, sticking out of a blood-soaked rip in his coveralls, is the point of the screwdriver he slipped into his pocket barely twenty minutes ago. It’s skewered right through his leg, and judging by the amount of blood, it must have torn his femoral artery in two. I look into his blank, sunken eyes, and I know that he’s gone. With a wound like that . . . he didn’t stand a chance.
I get to my feet and look toward the breach. “George is dead. Let’s go.”
“Oh my god,” whispers Otto.
“Where do we go to?” asks Ryan.
“Anyplace where we won’t end up like this,” I say, pointing down at George’s body.
“I’m not going out there with that thing!” squawks Margaux.
“It’s heading away from us,” I reply. “If we hurry, it won’t even see us.”
Ryan steps forward. “I’m with you,” he says. “We can’t stay here, and . . . most of the time, it kinda seems like you know what you’re doing.”
I don’t really know what to make of that backhanded compliment, so I just decide to ignore it.
“I’m afraid I must agree,” the Professor says shakily as he adjusts his glasses on his nose. “We must at least attempt to get out of harm’s way.”
Everyone stands, cautiously eyeing our exit point. I stride over the debris, sidle through an access gap in the broken desk, and begin scanning the floor for the soldiers’ rifles. Two of them are intact, but the other has been rendered in half by the robot’s weapon, its barrel lying beside a furrow filled with the unrecognizable remains of that unfortunate soldier. When this is over, his family will probably be presented with a Ziploc bag instead of a coffin.
I pick up one of the rifles, check its magazine and chamber, then sling it onto my back.
“Ah, Miss Brogan?” says the Professor. “That is a dangerous weapon; perhaps it would best be left alone.”
It takes me a second to realize that he’s talking to me. Miss Brogan? Really? Major Brogan gave Finn his last name? Figures, I guess. The few memories of hers that I saw showed that he loved her like a daughter, while I was only ever treated as a killer. Just like before, I feel the hate boiling my guts. I take a deep breath and try to calm the fire.
“It’s OK, old man . . . ,” I say as I walk to the second rifle and kick it up into my palm. “I’ve had lots of training.” I look over at Ryan. “How’s the shoulder?”
“It’s a little tender, but it’s OK,” he says, flexing and rolling his arm. I throw the rifle at him, and he catches it with one hand.
“Do you know how to use that thing?” I ask.
“I’ve been kicked out of nine military schools,” he says as he checks the weapon with practiced movements. “I can dismantle it blindfolded, if you like.”
“This is unacceptable,” trumpets the Professor. “I can’t have students walking around with loaded guns!”
“School’s out,” I say, staring at the thin, gray-haired, tweed-jacket-wearing old nuisance. “And if you try to take this rifle away from me, I’ll shoot you myself.”
Of course, I don’t mean it; he’s a harmless old man, but judging by his incredulous expression, the Professor is more than slightly taken aback. “I see a good many detentions in your future, young lady,” he huffs.
“Well, let’s make sure you live long enough to punish me, then, shall we?”
With a flick of my head, I signal Ryan to join me as I approach the blasted-out window.
“What’s the plan?” he whispers.
“All I need you to do is point and shoot if you have to.”
“I can do that. Not that it’ll do any good against that not-so-jolly green giant.”
“No. But you could probably take out a Combat Drone if you hit it in the face mask a few times.” He gives me a serious nod, and it feels good to have a battle comrade again. It reminds me of all the missions I’ve been on in the past with my a
ctual mission partner, except, unlike him, Ryan actually speaks and doesn’t have a creepy combat mask permanently fixed to his face all the ti—
BOOM!
Another explosion, more shouting, and more bursts from the robot’s hellish weapon, all coming from the direction of the courtyard. I look back at the rest of the group. They stand in a nervous pack a few meters behind us.
“Go to the right,” I tell Ryan. “Take them with you. I’ll stay here until you’re safely around the side of that white building on the corner.”
“Then what?” he asks.
“We know that the robot is scanning for wristbands, and it’s heading for the soldiers’ power signals in the central courtyard. We can use that distraction to go around the outside of Dome One to your school bus. I’m assuming there’s a bus?”
“Of course there’s a bus,” Ryan says, giving me a strange look. “You really don’t remember anything about this morning, do you?”
“Keep your mind on the task,” I hiss.
Ryan frowns. “Fine, I’ll lead the others to the corner, but then we have to find a way to warn the soldiers about the command modules.”
“No, we don’t.”
Ryan’s eyes narrow into a look of deep disapproval.
“This is what those men out there signed up for,” I whisper. “It’s their job to protect the citizens of the United Alliance. Now take those citizens . . . ,” I say, pointing at the group, “and help the soldiers fulfill their duty. Get them around that corner. If that robot comes back this way, I’ll distract it until you’re out of sight; then I’ll catch up with you.”
“It’s a good plan. I can help lead the way out,” Percy says from behind us.
Ryan glances back at the bunch of bedraggled people, then leans out of the breach, squinting toward the screeching foghorn of the robot’s weapon emanating from the courtyard. “Percy can take them, and I can—”
I cut Ryan off before he can finish his stupid thought. “Don’t run out there to warn them . . . Heroes die.”
