Robots Versus Humans (The Robot Planet Series Book 2) Read online

  “Yeah, well. It’s not like Travis and I were close friends.”

  “Travis wasn’t tight with anybody that I know of but that’s a hard way to go.”

  “No, I s’pose not.” The old man was of the opinion that a sex bot wasn’t amped up enough to do the kind of damage Travis had received. “They’re made to tire you out. They’re tight but their legs aren’t built to pinch ya like pliers.”

  “Well,” I said, “that leaves Bob.” I couldn’t help wonder how much pressure the assistive bot could manage at full charge. The machine was built to carry heavy loads over long hauls and at good speed, too.

  “He was charging all night. Ask him if you like, Dante.”

  “That’s okay. He doesn’t strike me as the dangerous kind.”

  By that, I meant that Raphael didn’t strike me as murderous. Bob did what the old man told him to do and I couldn’t see Raphael turning off the safeties and siccing his bot on Travis. I’d known the old man all my life. That was twenty-five years.

  My father, Steve Bolelli, is a good man. However, he also had it in him to kill Travis if there was good reason. He’d need an awfully good reason, though. There weren’t many people left in town. Few other possibilities sprung to mind as suspects. Some asshole in the Peppard clan seemed most likely. It could have been anyone, though. No one knows another person’s mind.

  In the old days, we would have had help from the outside on murder cases. A real detective or two would have shown up from Pecos or somewhere bigger. Aside from the murderess Terri Fellows, Hubby’s main concerns had been speeders out on 67 and the odd drunk tourist. Nobody was on 67 anymore that I saw, at least during the day. There might be a few stragglers or refugee convoys traveling at night, hiding from daytime heat and calamity. People on the road was probably mostly rumor and speculation mixed in with some lies to pass the time.

  The old days of speeders and tourist trouble were far behind us. “Prolly too far for lookin’,” Raphael said. “Those days won’t come back.”

  “You, me and your father are the only full-blooded Italians left in all of Marfa and prolly Presidio County.” Raphael winked. “Let’s look out for each other so’s we don’t get pinched to death, neither.”

  He handed me one of his pistols. I nodded and tucked the weapon in the back of my waistband. Italian didn’t mean much to me. Italy wasn’t Italy anymore. It was all the Vatican by then. Still, I was supposed to be looking out for the store in Travis’s absence. I wanted everybody looking out for me, whatever their reasons. I was grateful for the reassuring heft of the weapon under my belt.

  Raphael rode Bob toward home, promising to return later with a canteen full of water.

  It didn’t take long for somebody to come banging on the storefront door looking for food. Rather than dare open the door, I grabbed Travis’s old baseball bat and walked around the building. I didn’t know baseball but I knew what a bat was for.

  As I rounded the corner, I found Jim Peppard and his girl Susan Treehan banging on the grocery store’s metal screen like a drum. As soon as I saw Jim I wondered if he was returning to the scene of the crime. Maybe he killed Travis and was here to find out if Hubby was on to him. Maybe he was here to feign horror and appear ignorant and innocent.

  “Hey, Jim. Susan. Store’s closed.”

  Jim whirled on me. “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  He eyed the baseball bat and I suddenly felt silly holding it. I leaned on it, trying to look jaunty. “Travis is dead.”

  Jim took a couple steps toward me and my grip tightened on the bat.

  “For real?” he asked. He looked earnest and concerned. I relaxed a fraction.

  “Dead as they come,” I said.

  “And you’re what? Playing baseball?”

  “Not in this heat. Hot in the shade soon. Worse after that. We should all go home and stay indoors, huh?”

  “Boy, we need some of that fake bacon. We need some milk. I got some eggs from a couple of chickens but that’s not gonna do it.”

  I didn’t care for his tone. I don’t like being called, “boy,” especially not in front of a woman and double especially not from Jim Peppard. He was no more than a year older than me.

  “So?” he said.

  “So what?”

  “You gonna let us in?”

  “Nope. Store’s closed. It’ll stay that way. Sheriff’s orders.”

  “You working for Hubby now, are you? You a deputy?”

  “I am not. Kind of at loose ends at the moment. Making sure nobody does their shopping out of turn.”

  I had plenty of business keeping the turbines and the solar cells going but the shatter storms had passed us by and done all their damage to the north. If the arid weather held we’d all die of thirst. On the plus side, there wasn’t much for me to do besides test some circuits from time to time to make sure the juice was still flowing to the grid.

  “We need to feed now, boy! Susan’s pregnant.”

  I looked to Susan. She looked as surprised as I’m sure I did. Marfa used to call itself a city but it was really a small town. Given the exodus for parts unknown, more than half the town could have been planning on wandering the desert for forty years as far as I knew. That made Marfa even smaller now, a village. Small places don’t hold secrets. Secrets leak and spread out. Everybody knew Susan Treehan couldn’t have children.

  “Really?” I asked Jim. “That’s your play?”

  The story around town was that she had been with child when her grandfather threw her downstairs. She’d lost the baby when she was thirteen. Some said it was twins but gossips like to double tragedy so I couldn’t testify to that. No one knew who the father had been though some guessed it might have been the man who threw her downstairs.

  Anyway, tragedies and scandals aside, Jim’s claim wasn’t just bold because I knew her history. Fertility rates had been falling for years on end. I hadn’t seen a new baby born in Presidio County since the economy collapsed to shit. Poverty didn’t make people sterile but whatever did was still working its sad way. Some said whatever caused the Blight in plants caused it in wombs, too. Babies were rare and an occasion for exaltation. Any woman who could claim to be pregnant would be known and everyone would be looking out for her.

  Jim took another step toward me. “She needs milk, Dante.”

  “We’re out.”

  “We, huh? Travis ain’t cold yet and you’re ‘we’?”

  “Today I’m we,” I said, “so they say.”

  “C’mon, Jim,” Susan said. “Let’s get on home.”

  “Let us in,” Jim insisted. “We’ll see for ourselves about our shopping.”

  “Nope. We both know Susan isn’t pregnant. Sorry to say so, Susan. My sympathies.”

  “She doesn’t need your sympathy and it sounds like you’re calling me a liar!”

  “I just told you we don’t have any milk, not even the powdered kind. Sounds to me like you’re the one calling me a liar, Jim.”

  Jim had six inches on me and outweighed me by sixty pounds. He was faster than you’d think, too. He snatched that bat from me in a blink.

  I wasn’t being brave. Brave isn’t my thing. I think smart is more important than brave. If you want to put out an invitation to a fight, it’s easy to get a hothead like Jim to come to that party. I’d put that bat out front for easy snatching.

  The pistol in the back of my waistband was what I had my mind on all along.

  By the time Jim pulled that bat back for a swing at my head, he was staring into the black barrel of Raphael’s Colt 45. Bringing a bat to a gun fight gives a man second thoughts.

  He wisely dropped Travis’s bat in the street and Susan pulled him back. They trotted away. Jim hurled back some insults and taunts about how he’d get me.

  I invited him back to discuss his thoughts on the matter immediately. He declined and ran farther down the street saying nasty things about my mother. I could barely remember my mother so I figured he probably didn�
�t, either. I decided not to take it too personally. I decided long ago that, for a happier and more peaceful life, I didn’t have to react to everything. If anything, I was a bit slow to act at all and my father often thought me lazy.

  If I’d seen all the conflicts bearing down on me at that moment, I might have thought about turning Raphael’s gun on myself. I wouldn’t have done it. Too much of a coward. But I would have thought about it hard.

  4

  Dad showed up around noon. He wore an old cyborg rig that gave him an extra hitch in his step. He’d lost most of his right leg and right arm to the Sand Wars. The rig’s gears gave him a limp and back pain but without the cyborg suit he was much worse. He’d left the Army as a corporal but he often called himself, “Captain Make-do.” My father’s life motto might have been, “good enough.” We never changed the rugs in our house though they were threadbare. He never threw out an appliance. Broken machines were held together with wire, repaired with string, stuck together with duct tape and continued working on hope.

  Seeing his handiwork on the wind farm made me long to climb aboard that train, silent and sleek, cutting across the country at high speed. I wanted to work with new equipment instead of recycling old tools and material, but maybe whoever made tools for humans wasn’t in that business anymore.

  I wondered how far the train ranged before it turned back. Or maybe the solar train we saw zip through Marfa every two days wasn’t even the same machine. Maybe everyone else up and down the line received help and our little town would die by some bureaucratic oversight.

  Out front of Travis’s store, my father handed me a can of peaches. “Complications ensued,” he said. “Raphael couldn’t make it back just now so I figured I could do you one better than just a canteen of water.”

  I drank the thick sweet juice gratefully.

  “Take it slow, son. Make it last.”

  “I went from pissing yellow to neon orange,” I said. “Now I don’t piss at all. I’m losing all my moisture in sweat.”

  “Yup.”

  “What are we gonna do?”

  “In the Army they tell you to stay hydrated. When you’re out of water, you don’t stay hydrated.”

  That was the extent of his advice. Captain Make-do struck again.

  “How many cans of peach juice we have left?” I asked.

  “That’s it, son. Then we’re down to shallots packed in water.”

  “Oh, God. What are shallots?”

  “Dunno. But don’t worry. There’s always some more to scrounge.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “True in the sand so it’s true here. We’re all in the Army now. Survival’s a war. There’s no shooting but it’s the same.”

  “I guess Raphael told you about Travis.”

  “Wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t. Hub came around looking for advice, too.”

  “Advice?”

  “He’s thinking about leaving Marfa. He figures we’re done and he wants to know the best way to go about disappearing.”

  “What you tell him?”

  “What did I tell him?”

  “Yessir.”

  “You’ve been hanging out with old Raphael too much. You’re a young man and better educated than that. You should use your diction.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Don’t say it if you don’t mean it.”

  I sighed. “What did you tell the sheriff about him leaving?”

  “I told him I’d take his tin star from him if he was serious. He shouldn’t be leaving his post, though.”

  “He must be taking Travis’s death hard.”

  “Travis is why he should stay. I don’t know if he’s really serious about heading out or just kicking tires, testing the idea out on me. He’s got a duty but I’ll bet you the rest of that can of peaches he’s a coward who won’t do what needs to be done. There aren’t many of us left, you know.”

  “Do we have a head count?”

  “Over the last month or two, a lot of people drifted away in the night. Traveling the desert when the moon’s up makes more sense. I suspect a lot of people are holed up, watching and waiting. People probably put too much stock in that train stopping one of these days. We might have to do something about that.”

  I looked up and down the street. A hot breath of wind pushed a bit of trash in circles. Dirt devils kicked up in the distance among heat shimmers. I saw no one and heard no one but I wondered if someone was watching us. “Why would someone kill Travis and not empty the store of everything, Dad?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t about the food. Maybe it wasn’t planned or they got away with more than you think they did. And from what Hubby told me, the murderer doesn’t need food.”

  “If a bot killed him, a machine’s safeties are off and we need to find out what that’s about and stop it.”

  My father squinted up at the sun and shrugged. “There may not be many of us left but a lot of people who took off left their bots behind. Some of those bots…well, I don’t know. Just seems to me we should leave it to the sheriff and you and I should get inside before we get heatstroke. I’ve got some plans to discuss and something to explain.”

  “And while we’re in there, we should inventory whatever’s left,” I said.

  He smiled. “Sounds like work and our work should be compensated. That might be a problem solved, at least for a while. Do you think there are any peaches left in there?”

  “Doubtful.”

  “Between what’s left of Travis’s stock…hm. I wonder if we go through all the empty houses in Marfa, do you reckon we could scrounge enough to make our own way out of here without depending on that damn train?”

  He might have been right. We didn’t get a chance to find out. We heard the people before they came into sight. They were screaming in a way that made me shake as I pulled my pistol out. My father and I both turned in the direction of the screams as if we could see what was coming. We heard no engines but whatever was on its way was coming with Hell close behind. I tried to discern how many voices sang in that terrified choir. Too many to count but, by the sound of their anguish, I guessed there’d be fewer soon.

  Through the heat shimmer at the end of the street, a running crowd turned the corner. The leader was a woman in an old dune buggy. She wore goggles over her eyes and her long black curly hair was wild. Behind her came a stampede of people in cy-suits. The tech was of a much newer vintage than the assistive gear my father wore.

  At first I thought the people in the exoskeletons were chasing the woman in the solar dune buggy. As the mob ran closer, though, I saw their faces. They ran from Death.

  “Get inside, Dante,” my father said.

  “What’s chasing them?”

  “Whatever it is, we don’t want to be here when it arrives.”

  The woman driving the buggy tried to take a sharp turn at Lincoln street and lost control of her vehicle. The buggy tipped upside down and slid into the Methodist church lot. A red stain trailed the buggy as it ground to a halt in the dirt and dust.

  The mob spared her a glance and kept running in long strides. Some of the voices coalesced from nonsense into words. I heard them yelling to each other to find shelter and to hide. My father pushed me back around the corner of the store just as the swarm arrived. I glimpsed the horror of it. I wish I hadn’t.

  The people in the exoskeletons ran from a horde of flying drones, most no bigger than a bat. When I squinted, I saw more. I thought it was a cloud of wasps at first. Then I heard their high whine. Insectile drones.

  The people at the rear of the mob fell to those drones, picked off one by one. As the relentless bots struck, their victims clawed at their hair, their faces and their eyes to try to swat the small machines away.

  As blood ran down the faces of the fallen, people ran past us in a panic. My father kept pushing me down the side of the building. I should have been moving faster but I guess the shock of it all locked me up and froze my brain. With his rig on, Dad was an irresistible force
. He pressed me until I could no longer see the attack in the street. My brain thawed a little and I ran for the loading dock.

  As I pulled the big door open, it moved stiffly. Meanwhile, at the front of the store, someone had fallen prey to the drones. They slammed into the metal screen, kicking and screaming. Their blows echoed through the little grocery. I felt like I was being tortured in a drum.

  I heard the screams of a man and a woman. It was the shrieking of a young child that turned my stomach.

  Someone started up Marfa’s civil defense siren. Beneath the siren’s howl, the screams of terror spread like fire. The town was under siege and falling fast.

  5

  I almost ran to the front of the store. I stood still and covered my ears, instead. It was too late to save anyone from the carnage in the street.

  There was someone to help at the back of the store, however. My father pulled someone into the store behind him. With one heave he rolled the big door shut and threw the bolt. The woman he saved wore exo-stilts. She collapsed, panting on the cool concrete floor. She shuddered and ran her fingers through the long tangles of her jet black hair. She winced and pulled hard. A small clump of hair came free in her gloved fist and she slammed her palm against the floor. When she withdrew her hand, a small metal drone in the form of a large bumblebee lay still. But not for long.

  The metal insect’s wings fluttered and, with a buzz, it took flight. I swatted at it with my bare hand.

  “Don’t!” the woman yelled.

  Too late. A long stinger that had been retracted into the drone’s body extended like a telescope and snapped rigid. The stinger’s sharp point drove through my hand. Once the blade was through, I watched in fascinated horror as a barb extended from the tip with a sharp click.

  I was dazed with pain. My father was fast. He reached out, grabbed my wrist and used his metal hand to crush the insect.

  “Careful!” the woman warned. “Don’t pull out the stinger the way it went in! The stinger — ”

  “Acidic venom,” my father said. “I’ve seen these before.”

  He looked at me, steadying me and staring into my eyes. “It’ll hurt but not for long if we do it the right way. When I say so, take a deep breath, Dante. Okay? On three. One…two — ”