Robopocalypse

don’t care about us. I think it was just a big onetime mistake. Otherwise they’d have nuked us all by now, wouldn’t they?”

Kid has thought about this.

“The machines haven’t nuked us because they’re interested in the natural world. They want to study it, not blow it up.”

I feel the prairie wind on my face. It would almost be better if the machines didn’t care about our world. Simpler, anyway.

“You seen all the deer?” I ask. “The buffalo are coming back to the plains. Hell, it’s only been a couple months since Zero Hour and you can almost catch fish with your hands down at the creek. It’s not that the machines are ignoring the animals. They’re protecting them.”

“So you think the robots are trying to get rid of the termites without blowing up the house? Kill us without killing our world?”

“It’s the only reason I can think of that they’re coming after us the way they are. And it’s the only way for me to explain… certain recent events, let’s say.”

“We haven’t seen machines for months, Lonnie. Shit, man. I wish they would come at us. Nothing’s worse than just sitting around with hardly any electricity and not jack to do.”

This time I do roll my eyes. Building fences, repairing buildings, planting crops—nothing to do. Lord, what happened to our kids that they expect everything handed to them?

“You want to fight, huh?” I ask. “You mean that?”

“Yes. I do mean that. I’m tired of hiding up here on this hill.”

“Then I need to show you something.”

“What?”

“It’s not here. But it’s important. Pack a sleeping bag and meet me in the morning. We’ll be gone a few days.”

“Hell no, dude. Fuck that.”

“Are you scared?”

“No,” he says, smirking. “Scared of what?”

Out across the plains below, the swaying grass looks for all the world like the sea. It’s calming to watch, but you got to wonder, what monsters might be hidden under those peaceful waves?

“I’m asking if you’re scared of what’s out there in the dark. I don’t know what it is. It’s the unknown, I guess. If you’re afraid, you can stay here. I won’t bother you. But what’s out there needs to be dealt with. And I hoped you had some bravery in you.”

Lark straightens up and drops the lopsided smirk. “I’m braver than anyone you know,” he says.

Shit, he sounds like he means it.

“You better be, Lark,” I say, watching the grass roll with the prairie wind. “You sure better be.”

* * *

Lark surprises me at dawn. I’m visiting with John Tenkiller, sitting on a log and passing a thermos of coffee back and forth. Tenkiller is talking his riddles to me and I’m half listening, half watching the sun rise over the plains.

Then Lark Iron Cloud comes around the bend. The kid is packed and ready to go. He’s still dressed like a sci- fi Mafia soldier, but at least he’s wearing sensible boots. He eyes Tenkiller and me with outright suspicion, then walks past us and starts down the trail that leads off the Gray Horse hill.

“Let’s go if we’re going,” he says.

I down my coffee, grab my pack, and join the long-legged kid. Just before the two of us go around the first bend, I turn and look at John Tenkiller. The old drumkeeper lifts one hand, his blue eyes flashing in the morning light.

What I have to do won’t be easy and Tenkiller knows it.

Me and the kid hike down the hill all morning. After about thirty minutes, I take the lead. He may be brave, but Lark sure don’t know where he’s going. Instead of heading west over the tall grass of the plains, we go east. Straight into the cast-iron woods.

The name is accurate. Long, narrow post oak trees sprout up from dead leaves, mingled with leafier blackjack oak. Both types of tree are so black and hard that they seem closer to metal than to wood. A year ago, I never could of guessed how useful that would turn out to be.

Three hours into the hike we get close to where we’re going. Just a little old clearing in the woods. But this is the area where I first found the tracks. A trail of rectangular holes pushed into the mud, each print about the size of a deck of cards. Near as I could tell, it came from something with four legs. Something heavy. No scat anywhere. And I can’t tell one foot from the other.

My blood ran cold when I figured it out: The robots had grown themselves legs fit for wilderness travel— through mud and ice and hard country. No man ever built a machine this fleet-footed.

Since these were the only prints I could find, I figured they were from some kind of scout sent up here to nose around. Took me three days of tracking to find the thing. Using them electric motors, it moved so quiet. And it sat so still for so long. Tracking a robot in the wild is a lot different from tracking a natural animal or a man. Peculiar, but you get used to it.

“We’re here,” I say to Lark.

“About time,” he says, tossing his pack on the ground. He takes a step into the clearing and I grab him by the jacket and yank him backward right off his feet.

A silver streak whizzes past his face like a sledgehammer, missing by an inch.

“The fuck?” says Lark, jerking himself out of my hands and craning his neck to look up.

And there it is, a four-legged robot the size of a prize buck, hanging by its front two feet from my steel cable rope. It had sat there perfectly still until we were within striking range.

I can hear heavy motors whine as it struggles to get free, swinging about four feet off the ground. It’s just eerie. The thing moves as naturally as any animal of the forest, writhing around in the air. But unlike any living animal, the machine’s legs are jet-black and made of a bunch of layers of what looks like tubing. It has these little metal hooves, flat on the bottom and covered in mud. There’s dirt and leaves and bark caked on it.

Unlike a deer, this machine don’t exactly have a head.

The legs meet in the middle at a trunk with humps on it for the powerful joint motors. Then, mounted underneath the body, there’s a narrow cylinder with what looks like a camera lens in it. About the size of a can of pop. This little eye rotates back and forth while the machine tries to figure out how to get out of this.

“Uh, what is that?” asks Lark.

“I set this snare a week ago. Judging from the gashes in the tree bark from the steel cable, this guy got caught here pretty soon after that.”

Lucky for me, these trees are strong as cast-iron.

“At least it was alone,” says Lark.

“How so?”

“If there were others, it would have called them here to help.”

“How? I don’t see a mouth on it.”

“For real? See the antenna? Radio. This thing can communicate over the radio with other machines.”

Lark walks a bit closer to the machine and watches it close. For the first time, he drops the tough guy act. He looks as curious as a four-year-old.

“This thing is simple,” says Lark. “It’s a modified military supply carrier. Probably using it to map terrain. Nothing extra. Just legs and eyes. That lump behind the shoulder blades, that’s probably the brain. Figures out what it’s seeing. It’s there because that’s the most protected place on the machine. Take that part off and this thing’ll be lobotomized. Ooh, ouch. Look at its feet. See the retractable claws tucked under there? Good thing it can’t reach the cable with those.”

Well, I’ll be goddamned. This kid has a good eye for machines. I watch him staring at the thing, taking it all in. Then, I notice the other tracks on the ground around him, all over the clearing.

Goose bumps buzz up the backs of my thighs and over my arms. We’re not alone here. This thing did call for help. How could I have missed it?

“Wonder what it’d be like to ride one of these?” muses Lark.