Robopocalypse

That grin always gave me a good feeling. It let me know that my big brother had it under control.

Now, the grin makes me afraid. Cobwebs in my gears.

Jack finally disappears over the top of the hill. I scramble up with Carl. From behind the cover of the snowbank we watch my brother crawling toward Tiberius. The ground is muddy and wet, churned up by our dash over the hill for cover. Jack belly-crawls mechanically, elbows jutting out left and right, filthy boots shoving at the snowy dirt for purchase.

In a blink he’s there.

“Status?” I ask Carl. The engineer has his visor down over his eyes and his head cocked, helmet-mounted antennae carefully oriented. He looks like a space-age Helen Keller, but he’s seeing the world the way a robot does and that’s my best chance at keeping my brother alive.

“Nominal,” he says. “Nothing showing up.”

“Could be over the horizon,” I say.

“Wait. Something’s coming.”

“Get down!” I bark, and Jack drops to the ground, frantically wrapping a rope around Ty’s unmoving foot.

I’m sure that some kind of horrible trap has sprung. A geyser of rock and snow kicks up a few meters away. Then I hear a crack rip through the swirling snow and, what with the speed of sound being a crawl, I know that whatever has happened is pretty much already over.

Why did I let him do this?

A golden sphere pops like a firecracker and bounces five meters into the air. Spinning there for a split second, the sphere sprays the area with dull red light before bouncing back to the ground, dead. For an instant, each dancing snowflake is paused in the air, outlined in red. It’s just a disco sensor.

“Eyes!” shouts Carl. “They’ve got eyes on us!”

I exhale. Jack is still alive and scrapping. He has looped a rope around Tiberius’s foot and is up on two legs dragging him back toward us. Jack’s face is twisted into a snarl from the effort of hauling all that dead weight. Tiberius isn’t moving.

The frozen landscape is quiet except for Jack’s grunting and the howling wind, but in my gut I can feel the crosshairs trained on my brother. The part of my brain that tells me I’m in danger has gone delirious.

“Move it!” I scream to Jack. He’s halfway back, but, depending on what’s coming for us out of the whiteout, the hill might not matter anymore. I shout down to the squad, “Get on the high ready and lock and load! Rob’s coming.”

Like they didn’t already know.

“Inbound from the south,” says Carl. “Pluggers.” The lanky Southerner is already scrambling down the hillside, Adam’s apple bobbing. His visor is up and he pants audibly. He joins the team at the bottom of the hill, each member pulling out weapons and finding cover.

Just then, a half-dozen more cracks detonate in staccato. Whale-spray plumes of ice and mud erupt all around Jack, cratering the permafrost. He keeps staggering forward, unhurt. His eyes, wide and round and blue, connect with mine. A plugger swarm is now buried in the snow all around him.

It’s a death sentence and we both know it.

I don’t think; I react. My action is divorced from all emotion and logic. It isn’t human or inhuman—it just is. I believe that choices like these, made in absolute crisis, come from our True Selves, bypassing all experience and thought. These kinds of choices are the closest thing to fate that human beings will ever experience.

I dive over the hill to help my brother, grabbing the frozen rope with one hand and drawing my sidearm with the other.

The pluggers—fist-sized chunks of metal—are already clawing their way to the surface of their impact craters. One by one, they blossom behind us, blasting leg anchors into the ground and aiming plugs at our backs. We almost make it to the hill when the first plugger launches and buries itself into Jack’s left calf. When he makes that terrible croaking scream I know it’s over.

I aim the gun behind me without looking and blast the snow. By sheer dumb luck, I hit a plugger and this starts a chain reaction. The pluggers self-detonate the instant their hulls are compromised. A hail of icy shrapnel embeds itself in my armor and the back of my helmet. I can feel a warm wetness on the backs of my thighs and neck as Jack and I drag Ty’s limp body over the snowbank and to safety.

Jack falls against the hillside, moaning hoarsely, and clutches his calf. Inside him, the plugger is chewing up the meat of his leg and orienting itself with his blood flow. With a drill-like proboscis, the plugger will follow Jack’s femoral artery to his heart. This process requires forty-five seconds on average.

I grab Jack by the shoulders and savagely throw him down the hill.

“Calf!” I shout down to the squad. “Left calf!”

The instant Jack lands in a sprawling heap at the bottom of the hill, Leo crushes my brother’s left leg just above the knee with one steel exoskeleton boot. I hear the femur crack from up the hill. Leo mashes his boot down as Cherrah saws back and forth across the top of Jack’s knee with a serrated bayonet.

They are amputating my brother’s leg and hopefully the plugger with it.

Jack is beyond screaming now. The cords of his neck stand out and his face is pale with blood loss. Hurt and anger and disbelief flash over his face. I think that the human face was never designed to convey the amount of pain that my brother is in right now.

I reach Jack a second later, dropping to my knees by his side. My body is stinging from a thousand tiny wounds, but I don’t have to check to know that I’m basically okay. Being hit by a plugger is like having a flat tire. If you’re wondering whether you’ve got one, then you don’t.

But Jack isn’t okay.

“Oh you dumb stupid asshole,” I tell him. He grins up at me. Cherrah and Leo do horrible things just out of sight. From the corner of my eye, I see Cherrah’s arm flickering back and forth, repetitively and with purpose, like she is sawing a two-by-four.

“I’m sorry, Mac,” he says. I notice there is blood in his mouth, a bad sign.

“Oh no, man,” I say. “The plugger is—”

“No,” he says. “Too late. Just listen. You’re the one, man. I knew it. You’re the one. Keep my bayonet, okay? No pawnshops.”

“No pawnshops,” I whisper. “Just be still, Jack.”

My throat is closing up and making it hard to breathe. Something tickles my cheek and I rub it and my hand comes away wet. I can’t quite think of why that is. I glance over my shoulder to Cherrah. “Help him,” I say. “How can we?”

She holds up the bloody bayonet, flecked with bits of bone and muscle, and shakes her head. Standing above me, big Leo sadly exhales a cloud of frosty breath. The rest of my squad is waiting, aware even now of the terrible monsters that will soon roar out of the blizzard.

Jack grabs my hand. “You’re going to save us, Cormac.”

“Okay, Jack. Okay,” I say.

My brother is dying in my arms and I am trying to memorize his face because I know that this is really important but I can’t stop wondering if any of the pluggers on the hill are burrowing toward my squad right now.

Jack squeezes his eyes closed tight, then they fly open. A hollow thud rocks his body as the plugger reaches his heart and detonates. Jack’s body bounces off the ground in a massive convulsion. His blue eyes are suddenly injected with dark red blood. The blast is trapped inside his body armor. Now, it’s the only thing holding his body together. But his face. He looks the same as the kid I grew up with. I smooth the hair off his forehead and close his blood-filled eyes with my palm.

My brother Jack is gone forever.

“Tiberius is dead,” says Carl.

“No shit,” says Cherrah. “He was dead the whole time.” She puts a mittened hand on my shoulder. “Jack should have listened to you, Cormac.”

Cherrah is trying to make me feel better—and I can see in her studying eyes that she’s worried for me—but I just feel hollow, not guilty.

“He couldn’t leave Tiberius,” I say. “It’s the way he is.”