breathing.
Outside, something roars by overhead, ripping dark vortices out of the rising smoke. Probably an armed drone. I cower back in my bunk. The dust is starting to clear out now. I spot the keys to my cell across the room. They’re still attached to a broken belt, hanging from a splintered piece of chair. Might as well be on Mars.
No weapons. No armor. No hope.
Then a blood-covered insurgent ducks in through the blasted-out hole in the wall. He catches sight of me, stares wide-eyed. One side of his face is plastered with brown-white alkaline sand and the other side is caked with powdered blood. His nose is broken and his lips are swollen up from the cold. The hair of his black mustache and beard is fine, wiry. He can’t be more than sixteen years old.
The insurgent presses his back against the wall and closes his eyes. It looks like he’s praying. Dirt-caked hands pressed flat against the blasted concrete wall. At least he has an old-fashioned revolver hanging on his hip. He’s scared but operational.
I can’t make out his prayer, but I can tell it isn’t for his own life. He’s praying for the souls of his buddies. Whatever’s happening out there sure ain’t pretty.
Better hit the road.
“The keys are on the floor, friend,” I urge. “Please, I can help you. I can help you stay alive.”
He looks at me, stops praying.
“The avtomata have come for us all,” he says. “We thought the avto were rising up against you. But they are thirsty for all our blood.”
“What’s your name?”
He eyes me suspiciously.
“Jabar,” he says.
“Okay, Jabar. You’re going to survive this. Free me. I’m unarmed. But I know these, uh, avtomata. I know how to kill them.”
Jabar picks up the keys, flinching as something big and black barrels down the street outside. He picks his way over the rubble to my cell.
“You are in prison.”
“Yeah, that’s right. See? We’re on the same side.”
Jabar thinks about it.
“If they have put you in prison, it is my duty to free you,” he says. “But if you attack me, I will kill you.”
“Sounds fair,” I say, never taking my eyes off the key.
The key thunks into the lock, and I yank the door open and dart out. Jabar tackles me to the ground, eyes wide with fear. I think he’s afraid of me, but I’m wrong.
He’s afraid of what’s outside.
“Do not pass before the windows. The avtomata can sense your heat. They will find us.”
“Infrared heat sensing?” I ask. “That’s only on the automated sentry turrets, man. ASTs. They’re at the front gate. Aimed
Blanket over my shoulders, I step out of the hole in the wall and into the frigid confusion of dust and smoke in the alley outside. Jabar crouches and follows, pistol drawn.
It’s god’s own raging dust storm out here.
I double over and run for the rear of the base. There’s a phalanx of sentry guns covering the front gate. I want to stay clear of them. Slip out the back and get someplace safe. Figure it out from there.
We round a corner and find a black-blasted crater the size of a building, just smoldering. Not even an autotank has the ordnance to do this. It means the drones aren’t just spotting rabbits up there—they’re launching Brimstone missiles.
When I turn to warn Jabar, I see he is already scanning the skies. A fine layer of dust coats his beard. It makes him look like a wise old man in a young man’s body.
Probably not too far from the truth.
I stretch my blanket out over my head to obscure my silhouette and form a confusing target for anything watching from above. I don’t have to tell Jabar to stay under the overhangs, he already does it by habit.
Abruptly I wonder how long he’s been fighting these same robots. What must he have thought when they began to attack our own troops? Probably thought it was his lucky day.
Finally, we reach the back perimeter. Several of the twelve-foot cement walls have been battered down. Pulverized cement coats the ground, clean rebar jutting through the broken chunks. Jabar and I crouch next to a sagging wall. I peek around the corner.
Nothing.
A cleared area surrounds the whole base, sort of a dusty road wrapping tight around our perimeter. No- man’s-land. A few hundred meters out, there’s a rolling hill with thousands of slate stones sticking up like splinters. Porcupine Hill.
The local graveyard.
I tap Jabar on the shoulder and we run for it. Maybe the robots aren’t patrolling the perimeter today. Maybe they’re too busy killing people for no reason. Jabar sprints past me and I watch his brown robes blur away into the dust. The storm swallows him. I run as hard as I can to keep up.
Then I hear a noise I’ve been dreading.
The high-pitched whine of an electric motor echoes from somewhere around us. It’s a mobile sentry gun. They constantly patrol this narrow strip of no-man’s-land. Apparently, nobody told them to take a break today.
The MSG has four long narrow legs with wheels on the ends. On top, it has an M4 carbine set to auto-fire with an optics package mounted on the barrel and a big rectangular magazine bolted to the side. When the thing gets moving, those legs flutter up and down over rocks and gravel in a blur, while that rifle stays motionless, perfectly level.
And it’s coming after us.
Thank god the terrain is starting to get more rough. It means we’re almost off the graded perimeter strip. The motor whine is getting louder. The MSG uses vision for target acquisition, so the dust should obscure us. I can just see the tail of Jabar’s robe fluttering in the dust storm as he keeps running, fast and steady away from the green zone.
Breathe in. Breathe out. We’re gonna make it.
Then, I hear the stuttering click of a range finder. The MSG is using short-range ultrasonic, bouncing sound through the dust storm to find us. That means it knows we’re here. Bad news. I wonder how many more steps I have left.
One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.
A tombstone emerges from the haze—just a jagged chunk of slate tilting drunkenly out of the ground. Then I see a dozen more looming ahead. I stagger between the tombstones, feeling the cold sweating slabs under my palms as I grab them for balance.
The clicking is almost a steady hum now.
“Down!” I shout to Jabar. He leaps forward and disappears over a rut in the ground. A burst of automatic weapons fire roars out of the storm. Shards of a tombstone explode across my right arm. I stumble and fall on my stomach, then try to drag myself behind a stone.
Strong hands grab hold of my hurt arm. I stifle a shout as Jabar pulls me over the hillock. We’re in a small ditch, surrounded by knee-high shards of rock embedded in sandy ground. The graves are placed haphazardly between occasional clumps of mossy weeds. Most of the tombstones are unmarked, but a couple have been spray- painted with symbols. Some others are ornately carved marble. I can see a few have steel cages built around them, peaked roofs the only ornamentation.
The ultrasonic grows fainter. Crouched against Jabar, I take a second to inspect my wound. Part of my upper right arm is shredded, totally messing up my flag of Oklahoma tat. Half the damn eagle feathers that hang from the
