Robopocalypse

’em, huddle together in little clumps. They’re hurt and afraid and hopeful.

As soon as I get there, I hear a hoarse, frightened holler from near the fire.

Hank Cotton’s got a young fella, twenty if he’s a day, by the scruff of his neck and he’s shaking him like a rag doll. “Git!” he shouts. Hank is over six foot tall easy, and husky as a black bear. As an ex–football player, and a good one, people out here put more stock in Hank than they would in Will Rogers himself, if he popped out of the grave with a lasso in his hand and a twinkle in his eye.

The kid just hangs there limp, like a kitten in its momma’s mouth. The people surrounding Hank are quiet, afraid to speak up. I can tell this is something I’m going to have to deal with. Keeper of the peace and all.

“What’s going on, Hank?” I ask.

Hank looks down his nose at me, then lets go of the kid.

“He’s a damn Cherokee, Lonnie, and he don’t belong.”

Hank gives the kid a light shove that nearly sends him sprawling. “Why don’t you go back to your own tribe, boy?”

The kid pats down his ripped shirt. He’s tall and lanky and wears his hair long, nigh on the opposite to the barrel-shaped Osage men who loom around him.

“Settle down now, Hank,” I say. “We’re in the middle of an emergency. You know damn well this kid ain’t gonna make it out of here on his own.”

The kid speaks up. “My girlfriend is Osage,” he says.

“Your girlfriend is dead,” spits Hank, voice cracking. “Even if she wasn’t, we ain’t the same people.”

Hank turns to me, huge in the firelight. “And you’re right, Lonnie Wayne, this is an emergency. That’s why we need to stick with our people. We cain’t start letting outsiders in here or we might not survive.”

He kicks the dirt and the kid flinches. “Git, wets’a!”

After a deep breath, I step between Hank and the kid. As expected, Hank don’t appreciate the intrusion. He pokes a big ol’ finger into my chest. “You don’t wanna do that, Lonnie. I’m serious now.”

Before this ends badly, the drumkeeper speaks. John Tenkiller is a rail-thin little fella with dark, wrinkled skin and clear blue eyes. Been around forever, but some kind of magic keeps Tenkiller spry as a willow branch.

“Enough,” says John Tenkiller. “Hank. You and Lonnie Wayne are eldest sons and you have my respect. But them headrights of yours don’t give you free license.”

“John,” says Hank, “you ain’t seen what’s happened down there in town. It’s a massacre. The world’s coming apart at the seams. Our tribe is in danger. And if you ain’t in the tribe, you’re a threat to it. We’ve got to do whatever it takes to survive.”

John lets Hank finish, then he looks at me.

“With all respect, John, this ain’t about one tribe ’gainst another. It ain’t even about white, brown, black, or yellow. There sure as shit is a threat, but it don’t come from other people. It comes from outside.”

“Demons,” murmurs the elder.

A little stir goes through the crowd on that.

“Machines,” I say. “Don’t go talking monsters and demons on me, John. They’s just a bunch of silly old machines and we can kill ’em. But the robots ain’t playing favorites among the races of man. They’re comin’ for all of us. Human beings. We’re all together in this.”

Hank can’t contain himself. “We never let any outsider into this drum circle. It’s a closed circle,” he says.

“This is true,” says John. “Gray Horse is sacred.”

The kid chooses a bad moment to freak out. “C’mon, man! I cain’t go back down there. It’s a fuckin’ death trap. Everybody down there is fuckin’ dead. My name is Lark Iron Cloud. You hear? I’m as Indian as anybody. And y’all wanna kill me just cuz I ain’t Osage?”

I put my hand on Lark’s shoulder and he simmers down. It’s real quiet now with just the crackling of the fire and the field crickets. I see a ring of Osage faces blank as stone bluffs.

“Let’s dance on it, John Tenkiller,” I say. “This here is big. Bigger than us. And my heart tells me we got to pick our place in history. So let’s dance on it first.”

The drumkeeper bows his head. We all sit still, waiting on him. Manners dictate we’d wait on him until morning if we had to. But we don’t have to. John raises his wise face and cuts us with those diamond eyes of his.

“We will dance, and wait for a sign.”

* * *

The women help the dancers suit up for the ceremony. When they finish adjusting our costumes, John Tenkiller pulls out a bulging leather pouch. With two fingers, the drumkeeper reaches in and pulls out a wet lump of ocher clay. Then he walks down the row of about a dozen of us dancers and wipes the red earth across our foreheads.

I feel the cold stripe of mud across my face—the fire of tsi-zhu. It dries fast and when it does, it looks like a streak of old blood. A vision, maybe, of what’s to come.

In the middle of the clearing, the massive drum is set up. John sits on his haunches and beats a steady thom, thom, thom that fills the night. Shadows flicker. The dark eyes of the audience are upon us. One by one, we—the eldest sons—stand and ease into our dance around the drum circle.

Ten minutes ago we were cops and lawyers and truckers, but now we’re warriors. Dressed in the old style —otter hides, feathers, bead-work and ribbon work—we fall right into a tradition that has no place in history.

The transformation is sudden and it jars me. I think to myself that this war dance is like a scene trapped in amber, indistinguishable from its brothers and sisters in time.

As the dance begins, I imagine the lunatic world of man changing and evolving just past the flickering edge of firelight. This outside world lurches ever onward, drunk and out of control. But the face of the Osage people stays the same, rooted in this place, in the warmth of this fire.

So we dance. The sounds of the drum and the movements of the men are hypnotic. Each of us concentrates on his own self, but we naturally build into a fated harmony. The Osage men are mighty substantial, but we crouch and hop and glide around the fire smooth as snakes. Eyes closed, we move together as one.

Feeling my way around the circle, I register the red flicker of firelight pushing through the veins of my closed eyelids. After a little while, the red-tinged darkness opens up and takes on the feel of a wide vista—as if I’m staring through a knothole into a vast, dark cavern. This is my mind’s eye. I know that soon I will find images of the future painted there—in red.

The rhythms of our bodies push our minds away. My mind’s eye shows me the desperate face of that boy from the ice cream store. The promise I made to him echoes in my ears. I smell the metallic tang of blood pooled on that tile floor. Looking up, I see a figure walking out of the back room of the ice cream shop. I follow. The mysterious figure stops in the darkened doorway and slowly turns to me. I shudder and choke down a scream as I spot the demonic smile painted on the plastic face of my enemy. In its padded gripper, the machine holds something: a little origami crane.

And the drumming stops.

In the space of twenty heartbeats, the dance fades. I crack open my eyes. It’s just me and Hank left. My breath puffs out in white clouds. When I stretch, my joints pop like firecrackers. A sheen of frost lines my tasseled sleeve. My body feels like it just woke up, but my mind never went to sleep.

The eastern sky is now blushing baby pink. The fire still burns something ferocious. My people are collapsed in heaps around the drum circle, asleep. Me and Hank must’ve been dancing for hours, robotically.

Then I notice John Tenkiller. He’s standing stock-still. Real slow, he raises a hand and points toward the dawn.

A white man stands there in the shadows, face bloodied. A crust of broken glass is embedded in his forehead. He sways and the shards glitter in the firelight. His pant legs are wet and stained black with mud and leaves. In the crook of his left arm, he’s got a sleeping toddler, her face buried in his shoulder. A little boy, probably ten, stands in front of his daddy, head down, exhausted. The man has a strong right hand resting on his son’s skinny shoulder.

There’s no sign of a wife or anybody else.