Love, Death, Robots, and Zombies

by Tom O'Donnell

  Chapter 15.

  The turret–it can’t be anything else. Yet it was only a quick burst, bam-bam-bam. Maybe it was a false alarm, or it’s meant as a signal for us to hurry. If there were a real threat, it should still be firing–shouldn’t it? Speculation is pointless. We hasten our descent. When we hit the bottom, we race across the sea of grass. A strong breeze makes green waves around us. I’m waiting for more sound or smoke, but nothing comes. We reach the last patch of trees before the camp, and Starbucks holds up a hand. We approach slowly, crouching until the first glimpse of the camp comes into view between the trees. The wagons are there, yes, and there’s the turret. It’s not firing now. All appears well…

  Until it doesn’t.

  The fullness of the scene hits me like a punch in the face. The camp is empty. There’s not a whisper of sound. The big, beautiful horses lie dead with their tethers still attached. The armored mech stands alone by the dirt road on the edge of the campsite, ominously still. During the journey, this mech has never once been unoccupied. The operators take shifts inside, switching out every eight hours. One of them is still inside, but the back of the mech is open, and the operator is slumped over the controls. Another operator lies on the ground a few feet away, cut almost in half by the tell-tale burn of a high-energy beam weapon.

  Where the hell is everyone?

  We emerge into the camp itself. Aside from the dead Redbacks and the mech operators, there are few signs of a struggle. Even the supplies in the third wagon remain, though whoever operated the turret is missing. So much for the “assured destruction” theory.

  What kind of raiders leave the loot behind?

  “Kitra,” Starbucks says.

  Our Plastic Person driver is lying on the other side of the wagon, sitting against a wheel, holding her midriff. Phosphorescent blue liquid pools around her, seeping from her insides, staining the yellow flowers of her ragged summer dress. At the sound of her name, she lifts her head. We run to her. She puts one hand on my shoulder. Her glassy eyes stare at me out of their rubber-flesh enclosure.

  “He took them,” she says.

  “Who?” Starbucks asks.

  “The … The grass came alive.”

  Starbucks stands abruptly, staring down at her in horror.

  “What does that mean? Where are they?” I ask.

  “Taken by the grass-man,” Kitra says.

  Kitra doesn’t have long. That blue liquid means could mean only one thing. Ruptured fuel cells. The Plastic People don’t have to eat or drink, but they have to replace their cells every few years. When Kitra’s cells run out of power, her body will shut down. Like a human brain, the Minkowski-4 needs continuous power to maintain functionality. If it shuts down for longer than ten or fifteen minutes, relationships between the neural pathways will lose coherence. Functionality will become unrecoverable. Kitra will die, in other words.

  “What happened to the turret?” I ask.

  “Sabotage. The magic boy. He stopped the turret.”

  Magic boy…

  “Byron?”

  Mother of Crom. I should’ve buried that axe in his head when I had the chance.

  “Byron, yes. Another magic trick,” Kitra says, shaking her head. “He seemed so nice … Then the grass took them. I tried … I tried to drive the horses, but the grass-man put holes in them. Put holes in me too.”

  “Where’s Byron now?” Starbucks asks.

  “Taken. I heard them talking. Byron wanted to wait and take you too. But the grass-man was angry. The turret killed one of his monsters. He said you’d hear the shots. Said Byron was supposed to keep things quiet. So he put the magic-boy in the sled with the others. Can you–get my book? And my sitar?”

  Kitra gestures vaguely to the wagon behind her. I just want to know where Echo is and how to get her back–who cares about a damn book and a sitar? But Kitra is dying. It’s a last request. I retrieve her things, the instrument and a black leather bible. She thanks me and clutches the items in her lap, then begins reciting a prayer.

  “I thought the Christians don’t accept synthetics into their ranks,” Starbucks says.

  “There’s a parish for the Created down in Boulderfield. Reverend Cold tells us we don’t have to be accepted by man to follow Christ,” Kitra says.

  “You hold with a faith that tells us we have no souls?” Starbucks asks, frowning.

  “It’s not the faith that says so, just people. Reverend Cold says all living things got souls–we’re alive, aren’t we? All my life, I served humans as best I could. Will God not accept me into his Kingdom because my bones are made of metal?”

  Starbucks only scowls. He turns away to examine the rest of the camp. I’m about to stand, but Kitra stops me.

  “Don’t go. Please,” she says, reaching out. Her hand feels almost like real flesh, except firmer and smoother. I crouch there, listening to her pray. Her voice sinks to a whisper. Her chin drops by degrees. Finally, her hand drops too, and the life goes from her body.

  “Tristan,” Starbucks calls. There’s a heaviness to his robotic voice. He’s crouched out in the grass by the side of the road, looking at something. A body.

  Fear fills me. I can’t see it from here, but I know it’s Echo. Who else could it be? Time for disaster. Time for unending sorrow and bitter regrets. I’m waiting for the hammer to drop when I see the brown shoes sticking out of the grass–the shoes of a man.

  Thank God.

  Thank Crom and Ishtar and Set–it’s not Echo after all. A mixture of guilt and sorrow follow: guilt because I am relieved, sorrow because it’s still someone I know.

  Ambrose.

  Octavia’s brother lies dead in the grass. His clothes and bodily features are recognizable–his face is not. His face is a blackened crater. I can hardly believe this thing in the grass was once animate, that it isn’t just a morbid sculpture, that it’s the remnants of an actual person. Ambrose’s ear and parts of his hair are perfectly intact, only inches from the ruin of his face. I remember that day in the forest: Ambrose laughing and running as I chased down Octavia for a kiss. The memory seems to belong to someone else. I can only imagine how Octavia must be feeling right now, wherever she is.

  “Why?” I whisper.

  “The boy had brain damage. The flesh markets have no use for someone like that,” Starbucks says.

  “Flesh markets?” I ask, bewildered.

  “Where they sell slaves, up north. That’s why they were taken. That’s where they’re headed now.”

  Echo in a netted enclosure, heading for captivity; Octavia and the others too, everyone who shared the fire with me, bound for a life of servitude. Byron’s betrayal is unthinkable. Yet Ambrose was harmless. He was no threat to anyone.

  “Couldn’t they have just left him?” I ask.

  “I think they did. He’s further away than the others. Looks like he may have chased the sled. Probably ran after his sister. Grass Man turned back and shot him. Probably didn’t think twice.”

  “Ambrose,” I lament, closing my eyes, rubbing my temples.

  We find only one other body–but it’s not one of ours. It’s an automaton. Programmed, not sentient. Dead now, in any case. The main body is shaped like an elongated egg. Four long legs stick out. If I had to guess, I’d say the legs were modeled after one of the extinct big cats; the cheetah, perhaps. The thing was meant to run. It was also meant to hide. Long tufts of plastic grass cover its hide like mottled green-brown fur. This is the “monster” the turret hit in its one brief moment of glory.

  “The Demon of the Grasses,” Starbucks says. “That’s who Kitra saw. I’ve heard of him in Apolis. This is one of his bots. He’s a robot. And a slavetrader. He’ll be heading north.”

  As we look through the wagons, it becomes clear what happened. The Grass Man, as Kitra called him, hid somewhere out in the fields with a long-range beam rifle. Around dawn, the mech operat
ors changed shifts, and he burned them down while they were vulnerable. Then he sent in the automatons. An EMP device took out the turret. The supply-wagon is hardened to prevent such an attack–but the controls weren’t shielded from inside the wagon. Byron hid a device with his supplies. I know this because we find it. When he saw that the attack had begun, he must’ve triggered it somehow, leaving the wagons defenseless.

  I keep the device. If nothing else, I’ll salvage it for parts. I make sure the batteries are dead first though. It has a transmitter, and I don’t want it sending out a signal. I’m guessing the device acts as a locator in addition to the EMP; with the caravan varying its route and timing, how else could the Grass Man have known exactly where and when to strike?

  When the turret was out of action, the automatons must’ve chased down anyone who ran, locking their legs around them–they’re designed to trap people that way, Starbucks informs me. Afterwards, the Grass Man came up with his sled and caged everyone, even some of the Plastic People.

  “The further north you go, the less they like humans. Cyberia lies in that direction, and that’s robot-only territory. To them, the Plastic People are even lower than the infected. Traitors to their kind,” Starbucks says.

  I should’ve killed Byron when I’d had the chance. I could’ve prevented all this. The device in the turret means he’d planned it from the start. Someone had given him the tools. Someone working with the Grass Man. What had they paid him? That hidden laughter always playing about Byron’s eyes: this was his great joke all along. Maybe the payment didn’t even matter.

  A good secret is worth keeping.

  That son of a bitch. Thrown in with the others–he hadn’t planned on that!

  “There’s no point staying,” Starbucks says.

  He’s right. We should bury Ambrose, or build a cairn, or do anything but leave him in the grass. Every minute we linger is another minute we fall behind, however. We carry him to one of the wagons and cover with a blanket. We lay Kitra and the turret operators beside him. Maybe whoever finds these wagons and takes the goods will have the decency to bury the dead.

  There’s never any question of what we’ll do. The only question is whether or not to involve Apolis. Starbucks could raise a posse there–but we’d lose the trail and fall further behind, and if that happens we’ll never see our friends again. So we’ll be going after them alone. We need to catch the Grass Man before he gets too deep into hostile territory.

  On the verge of leaving, Starbucks pauses, looking back.

  “The drone. We may need it to cross the z-line,” he says.

  He unhooks Jarvis’s wagon, along with the big robotic tug at the head of the supply wagon. The tug escaped the reach of Byron’s device. He hooks them together. Then he tosses out almost all the treasure to reduce the weight. He keeps the aerial drone, food, and water. We toss in abandoned weapons left by the caravaners as well: a shotgun, Echo’s machine-pistol, two laser rifles. Volume Seven and the electronic components go back in my pack. The black dice go in there too. We leave a fortune in goods behind for some lucky traveler. Finally, we jog north-northwest, followed by the tug and Jarvis’s wagon.

  The trail isn’t hard to follow. The grass has been flattened by the Grass Man’s sled.

  “What would a robot want with human slaves?” I ask along the way.

  “Same thing a human wants with human slaves. Free labor. Reproductive functions. Someone to kick around. Depends on the person. Robots aren’t the only ones who buy from these markets.”

  “Humans too? You said they hated us up north.”

  “The further north you go, yes, but there are still humans close to the z-line. And sin bonds stronger than species. They have a saying in the flesh markets: ‘gold is brighter than carbon.’”

  By nightfall, we’re traversing a series of rolling green hills far west of the road. Small lakes dot the land. I’m dead tired and my legs feel like jelly. We’ve had no sight of our quarry. At least the tug has kept up. I ask Starbucks more about the Grass Man.

  “They say he rides a sled pulled by robots–probably the same kind we saw back at the wagons. Other than that, there’s not much I can tell you. Heard rumors in places, been up near the flesh markets a time or two, but I wasn’t even sure this ‘Demon of the Grasses’ was anything more than smoke until today … Now he has Jarvis,” he finishes quietly.

  “And Echo.”

  And Octavia and her soft, wet lips–but when I lay in the grass with my head on my pack, it’s Echo I miss most. Only a day ago she was here, right here, sleeping next to me. Her absence is pervasive. She’s gone from my eyes, from my ears, from my arms. She’s even gone from my dreams. When I fall asleep, I’m still running with Starbucks, only we can never get anywhere. The Grass Man and Byron are far ahead, forever out of reach.

  “Oh, they’re gone now, Tristan. They won’t be back,” Kitra tells me, a deluge of blue liquid spilling from her guts. It keeps coming out, and suddenly it’s everywhere, it’s all over me, I can’t get it off. It fills my mouth and my eyes–and then it’s not Kitra’s blood; it’s Echo’s.

  In the morning, we resume our pursuit. My muscles ache. How long can I carry on like this? Starbucks is pushing hard too. His body is overheating. He has to intake water as a coolant, sucking it in through a tube above his right hip. I just keep thinking of the poem read to us by Franklin the Ferryman.

  It was many and many a year ago,

  In a kingdom by the sea,

  That a maiden there lived whom you may know,

  By the name of Annabel Lee…

  On it goes, over and over again, a litany against fear, against change, against disaster. It distracts me and sustains me.

  As we approach the z-line, the roamers start to show themselves. The first one gets decapitated at a run by one of Starbucks’ sickles. We pass others in the distance. I’m wondering where we’ll sleep.

  Out here, the main body of the z-line is marked not by the ruins of a city or infested suburban sprawl, but by a forest. The roamers are spread thinner too. We could almost run right past them. It’s a deceiving notion, however. We’d have a small horde pursuing us by the time we hit the other side–likely more than we could handle. Starbucks has to kill a dozen stragglers before we even near the main line.

  The Grass Man’s tracks stop near the edge of the forest. They lead toward a bush … which isn’t a bush at all. It’s the vehicle we’ve been following, concealed by shrubs and fallen branches. Empty. The sled is a wide metallic cart, mounted on treads with a big cage in the back. The hull tapers toward the front, where there’s a seat and eight coiled metal cables.

  Leashes.

  He must hook the cables to his bots; they pull the vehicle like dogs. Apparently the Grass Man couldn’t get the sled through the z-line, so he abandoned it, taking the captives with him. But where did he go?

  There are a number of tracks in the area, but they don’t lead anywhere. The whole group may as well have vanished. We can’t figure it out. Dusk is only an hour or two off, and our movements draw occasional zombies from deeper in the forest. We accumulate a small pile of heads from the whirl of Starbucks’ sickles. I’m looking up at the trees, thinking how we’ll have to climb somewhere high to sleep, when dead leaves crunch beneath my boots…

  Something’s different. The ground doesn’t feel like it should. Less solid somehow. I walk around and confirm the feeling. Crouching, I brush away the leaves, twigs, dirt, and hit something artificial. It’s wooden construct, timbers woven into a solid frame, almost like a raft. I call Starbucks. We clear it off and lift the thing. Beneath it is a hole. More precisely, the entrance to a tunnel.

  “You think this goes all the way through?” I ask.

  “Wouldn’t be much use if it didn’t,” Starbucks says.

  The tunnel is too narrow for Jarvis’s cart. We have to leave it behind. We conceal it with underbrush,
just as the Grass Man did. Starbucks climbs down into the holes, takes out his sickles, and ventures into the dark. My flashlight has stayed with me all this way, so I fish it out and flick it on, piercing the gloom ahead.

  It’s eerily quiet. Muted. Like being buried. The walls of the tunnel get so narrow they scrape my sides. Roots stick down from the ceiling. Reaching the far end, we push up another wooden cover.

  We emerge cautiously just north of the forest. A slow-walker comes in from the distance. Starbucks cleaves through its neck. Otherwise, there are few roamers in sight. This side of the z-line, I’m expecting some kind of immediate change–and there is, psychologically; a greater sense of threat hangs invisibly in the air–but the land looks much the same.

  There are more tracks, leading to a dirt road. From there, they intermingle with others, but we can see the general direction of their passage.

  “If I have our location right, the nearest market is only a few miles from here,” Starbucks says.

  “Will the Grass Man stop there?” I ask.

  “Seems likely. He’s a procurer, not a collector. No reason to hold onto cargo unless he’s got a specific buyer in mind.”

  The road curves north. A sign is posted:

  *

  Mudcross–2 mi.