by J D Stone
I could while away the hours, conferrin’ with the flowers
Consultin’ with the rain.
And my head I’d be scratchin’ while
my thoughts were busy hatchin’
If I only had a brain.
It sounded like it was coming from an old, phonograph record player. Impossible, he thought. He glanced behind him. Danna and the Stranger were stone-faced, listening to the music and trying to come up with their own guesses.
Stooping low, he hobbled over to his brother.
“Should we check it out?” Cameron whispered.
“Tsk. Music playing in the middle of a swamp? We’re heavily armed. Heck, yeah.”
Ben wasn’t a natural risk taker, but he made exceptions when it involved technology and related mysteries.
Cameron turned around and motioned to Danna and the Stranger to stay put, in spite of their silent, gesticulating protests. Glancing at Ben, he nodded forward, and they stealthily waded into the soft mire and sharp reeds.
After a minute of slogging through the reek, they spotted a clearing up ahead in which Ben could make out the tops of scraggly trees. Dry ground.
Meanwhile, the music played on, softly and sweetly:
When a man’s an empty kettle he should be on his mettle,
And yet I’m torn apart.
Just because I’m presumin’ that I could be kind-a-human,
If I only had heart.
Suddenly Ben’s eyes lit up and his heart skipped a beat. He should’ve told Cameron that they needed to fall back, but he was overtaken by that natural curiosity for technical marvels that had served him well in the past. Or not.
He tugged on his brother’s sleeve and whispered, “Get the rail gun.”
Cameron slowly set his pack down on a patch of dead grass and pulled the electromagnetic rifle out of a large side holster. It was disassembled into two pieces. Aligning the electrode rails with the receivers and the stock, he inserted the rails into the other two parts and pushed gently until he heard a click and a soft beep.
“Let me see it,” Ben said. Taking it from his brother, he examined it admiringly for the tenth time in the last four days. A plasma railgun had never been converted into a handheld weapon before. They must've perfected the mitigation techniques of the coaxial accelerators—
“What are you doing?” Cameron hissed.
Ben flinched. “Checking for the charge,” he whispered. “Three colors — see? Red, orange, and green. It’s a three-step process to charge it. Red means no charge, orange means it’s charging, and green means it’s fully charged. I’d charged it before we left, but we only have three shots; it takes sixty seconds to load each shot.”
“I know how to use it, remember?”
“Yeah, but Dad must’ve charged it for you when he left it in the cache—”
“Stop talking, Ben,” Cameron whispered sharply. “We doing this or not?”
“Lead the way, loser.”
Ben’s heart began to race as they quietly pushed aside reed stalks and moved toward the clearing. As they drew closer, he saw large wooden spears thrust into the ground, and decapitated heads of dead fish were punctured through each spearhead. His stomach twisted in revulsion as he crawled past the reeking head of a large catfish.
He cast a sidelong glance at his brother: Cameron’s face had paled, and he was staring straight ahead.
By this time they had inched up to the edge of the clearing and hid behind a small mangled swamp tree.
A spike of adrenaline hit his stomach, but it quickly grew into a gnawing uneasiness. He rubbed his forehead. Maybe we should turn back . . . .
Ben heard a clinking sound above him. Several ornate dream catchers of various shapes and sizes hung from the tree limbs; each one was adorned with feathers from different birds along with shiny beads fastened to leather straps and shoelaces.
A wave of goosebumps washed over him. Something had moved in the clearing. He dropped to one knee for a clearer view.
Two vagabonds were at the far side of the clearing.
Identical in design, they both wore long, multicolored trench coats and soggy brown boots ripped at the toes. Their blazing neon eyes illuminated their upturned mouths, which were crudely painted red with strokes that swept up to form mischievous, clownish smiles.
One was comfortably reclining on a large, moss-covered rock scrawled with painted pictures of sickly stick figures. It wore a raggedy blonde wig with several dangling pheasant feathers, and on its face were several paint stripes like tribal markings.
A large black crow was perched on one of its fingers; the bird cocked and tilted its head sharply as if it were swaying to the music that played from the vagabond’s mouth-speaker.
The other vagabond stood next to the rock, trying to attract the bird’s attention. A mohawk of long feathers adorned its filthy and mangled black wig; and three sloppy, faded yellow stripes smeared the sides of its face.
Ben met his brother’s wide-eyed gaze with wonderment.
Cameron gestured at the railgun and mouthed: “Three shots.”
Ben gave him a thumbs-up and crouched back down. He stood up slowly to get an open shot; and as he did so, his head struck one of the dangling dreamcatchers, sounding off a dull clang like a wooden wind chime.
The music stopped.
Cameron froze, and Ben yanked on his brother’s rucksack, telling him to get back down.
At that moment, the crow launched into the air, and with a great fit of cawing, flew directly at them. The bird swooped down on them and landed on the branch above them. Caw! Caw!
Ben and Cameron flattened themselves against the soggy ground. Both vagabonds jerked up and fixed their eyes at their direction.
Ben didn’t know if they had heat sensors; he assumed that they did.
Suddenly the crow lifted off and flew behind them, and Ben felt the whoosh of its flapping wings blow across the back of his neck. He grinned in relief, but his brother dug an elbow in his side.
Ben slowly turned around. Ten feet behind him, a monstrous vagabond stood on a fallen log. The crow was perched on its shoulder.
A foot taller than the other two, the vagabond was draped with a large Navajo blanket; and over its cranium was the skinned head of a massive wild boar. The tusks and snout lay on its metal forehead like a barbarous crown, and the rest of the carcass dangled down its back. Weaved into the boar’s hide was a string of giant fish heads that formed a ridge like dragon spikes along its spine.
The vagabond raised a crude wooden spear in its hand, and its red eyes flashed in the morning murk. Then it charged.
For the first time in his life, Ben saw his brother freeze in shock. He snatched the railgun out of Cameron’s hands, and without aiming, pulled the trigger.
The charger accelerated a toroid of plasma down the two rails; and with an unnerving hum and a sharp, fizzling pop, the weapon fired and hit the vagabond just as it was driving its spear into Cameron’s heart.
The pulse hit the vagabond dead on. Its legs stiffened, and its arms shot straight out from each side. The boar’s head slipped off and fell with a thud as the robot wobbled forward, stumbled a step backward, then finally collapsed in a pile of twitching metal limbs.
Ben dropped the gun and grabbed his brother, holding him up. “Are you all right?” he cried.
Cameron stuck his finger in the hole in his shirt that was pierced by the spear. “Yeah, man,” he replied shakily. “The body armor stopped the blow. Good thing it didn’t go for my neck.”
Ben let out a deep, ragged sigh of relief. Then he remembered the other two vagabonds. He picked up the railgun and aimed toward the clearing.
They were gone.
At that moment the railgun beeped. A blue light flashed. What the—? Ben flipped a small switch next to the safety. Disabled. Stupid thing’s not waterproofed!
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Technical difficulty,” Ben replied shortly. He looked into his brother’s eyes.
“We need to run.”
Jumping to their feet, they turned eastward to get out of the marsh. Within two running steps, the other two vagabonds stepped in their way, spears in hand.
“Quick! Grab some mud!” Ben knelt and scooped up a heaping pile of muck. “Go for the eyes!”
The vagabonds charged them; and just as they were within skewering distance, Ben and Cameron flung the mud in the robots’ faces.
The vagabonds staggered and stepped backward, clutching their faces.
“Run!”
They leaped past the robots and dove and ran — and stumbled — toward the mountains. Within thirty seconds, Danna and the Stranger were at their side.
“You two are idiots; you know that?” Danna barked.
“No time to argue,” Cameron said quickly. “But for the first time I agree with you.”
Suddenly a spear flew from behind them, and with unnatural precision and force, it struck Danna in the back — her rucksack, fortunately — and propelled her face first into the muck.
In one smooth movement, she jumped to her feet, unclipped a smoke grenade from her belt, and threw it in the vagabond’s direction.
Ben grimaced as the grenade plopped into a puddle of slime and fizzled out. “Good idea though,” he said, panting.
“Faster, guys,” the Stranger said calmly.
Ben glanced over his shoulder. The vagabonds were twenty feet behind, struggling through the muck. Up ahead was a dense bracket of tall grass.
“There!” he said, pointing. “Follow me!”
He led them into the grass, which grew in dense clusters on mounds surrounded by mud flats.
“These robots definitely have thermal imaging trackers,” Ben said, dropping to his knees. “We need to mask out heat.”
Taking off his pack, he plopped into the mud and rolled around, smearing a heaping scoop of sludge across his face. “Do it, now!”
Danna, Cameron, and the Stranger fell to the ground and covered themselves with muck. They forced themselves as deep as they could into the mud until only the whites of their eyes could be seen.
“Don’t move,” Ben gagged as mud seeped into his mouth. “The slightest motion of warm skin will give you away.”
The sloshing suck of the vagabonds’ boots grew louder as they hunted their prey.
A cloud of gnats buzzed around Ben’s face and tickled and tormented his nose. Trying not to sneeze, he concentrated on watching the little air bubbles float to the top of the mud and pop.
He could hear Cameron’s rapid breathing next to him, and his heart was hammering in his chest like it wanted to betray him.
The vagabonds stopped. Ben guessed they were ten feet away.
Silence.
The sloshing steps began again and moved further away until Ben could hear them no more.
They waited another ten minutes in the cold mud. Then he thought of leeches. He hated leeches more than anything on earth.
“I think we’re good,” he said, rising perhaps too swiftly. “But we need to get outta here — now. We actually might have a chance.”
Cameron threw up his hands. “Might have a chance?”
“Complex environments swamp a robot’s computations (no pun intended), which bogs (again, no pun intended) down their decision-making and increases their probability of error. This swamp? Complex environment. We need to keep them in here as long as possible.”
“How are we going to do that?” the Stranger asked.
“Let’s split up, stay within each other’s eyesight, and zig zag as we all head east.”
“It confuses their tracking,” Danna said, nodding. “Got it.”
They left in four directions, all facing east, and disappeared into the reek.
Danna was the first to spot a vagabond. Or Danna was the first that the vagabond spotted. It had crept up upon her left flank and was now within a stone’s throw. She picked up her pace, but the muck fought her every step.
The vagabond was less than ten feet away when Ben crossed ten feet in front of it, heading in the opposite direction from Danna.
The robot stopped and shifted its head back and forth. Its eyes blinked twice, and it started after Ben.
Danna pumped her fist and moved east again.
Ben was running out of breath. His pack was over seventy-five pounds, and his soaked clothing weighed him down even more. He could hear the robot struggling to pursue him.
Naturally, he had to glance behind him, and suddenly he was face-first in the mud. He later concluded that tripping over that slimy log was a stroke of luck.
As he stood back up, he grabbed another pile of muck and waited until the robot was within five feet — then hurled it at his face.
But this time the vagabond dodged it — it adapted! — and raised its spear to strike.
At that moment, the Stranger popped up from behind the vagabond with a handful of mud; and half-leaping on the robot’s back, he smeared the muck into the robot’s eye cavities.
The robot froze, and the Stranger used that split-second to take two steps back and charge into it shoulder-first.
Ben raised his hand to tell him to stop, but it was too late: The Stranger rammed into the robot and at once fell backward, wincing in pain and grabbing his shoulder. The vagabond barely moved from the impact and turned to face the human. But then it froze again.
Ben had to act quickly. He ripped the wig off the robot’s head, reached around the back of its skull, and curling his fingers upward, he felt around for a pressure button. The vagabond flinched.
C’mon, where is it! He pulled his fingers out of the skull and wiped the mud off of them, then he tried again. There you are. He pressed the button, and with a violent jerk, the robot slumped forward.
“Now you can try ramming into him,” Ben said, letting out a deep breath.
“I’ll pass,” the Stranger replied dryly.
Ben double checked that he deactivated the robot correctly, then he joined the Stranger and together they stumbled their way through the marsh and out into the open.
Behind them, the vagabond’s eyes blinked, and its fingers twitched.
When Ben and the Stranger cleared the marsh, Cameron was already out, but he was fifty feet north and waving frantically at them to hurry.
“Where’s Danna?” Ben cried, his heart dropping.
Just then she burst through the reeds some twenty feet south. Wiping mud-caked hair out of her face, she hobbled toward them with a dreadful limp.
Ben grabbed the Stranger’s elbow. “Go meet up with my brother; I’ll help Danna.”
The Stranger nodded and trotted toward Cameron, who was jumping up and down with anxiety.
Ben ran as fast as he could and met Danna halfway. “Let me take your bag,” he said breathlessly.
“Thanks, I’m okay” she gasped, waving him off. “I hit my knee on a rock.”
Ben lifted her arm around his shoulder, and together they limped to join the other two. When they were nearly caught up, Cameron waved them to move faster and ran northwards out of their sight.
Ben and Danna picked up their pace; and rounding a large thicket of cattails, they saw Cameron and the Stranger standing next to a dirty old Jeep Wrangler.
Ben blinked twice. What luck!
“C’mon!” his brother yelled impatiently. “The keys were in the ignition!”
They lifted their packs into the back and scrambled in. Ben flung his head back on the seat, wheezing and gasping for air. His teeth ground against the dirt that was still caked in his molars.
Cameron shifted into drive, not before adjusting the mirrors.
“Hey, wait a minute!”
Ben spun around. A hulking, overweight man in hunter’s camouflage tumbled out of the cattails with a large black garbage bag slung over his shoulder.
“That’s my Jeep!” the man hollered.
“Go! Go!” Danna cried, slapping Cameron’s shoulder.
Cameron let off the clutch and stepped on the accelerator.
“No, stop!” Ben shouted. “We can’t leave him here!”
Cameron slammed on the brakes and slapped his hands on the steering wheel.
“We can’t leave him here to die,” Ben insisted. He made eye contact with the Stranger, who was gripping his pistol.
“Ben’s right,” the Stranger said, still trying to catch his wind. “That’d be wrong of us. In fact, I wouldn’t be here right now if he hadn’t picked me up.”
Muttering under his breath, Cameron shifted the Jeep in neutral and pulled the parking brake.
“I’ll handle this,” the Stranger said. He hopped out of the car and walked toward the man, who was trying his best to catch up with them. He held up his pistol and barked: “Hands on your head! Keep walking. Move it!”
The man obeyed the Stranger’s orders; and as he walked toward the Jeep, he closed his eyes and let out a ragged breath.
“Come closer,” the Stranger ordered. Holding the gun up with his right hand, he approached the man and patted him down for weapons, only finding a large Bowie knife.
He was a heavyset man, pasty yet sunburned, with a shiny, round, and flabby face. His nervous, eager eyes were small and blue, his brows thin and arched, all of which accentuated his rotund features. He had large ears and a small mouth set above a clean-shaven double chin.
“What’s in the bag?” the Stranger asked.
“Cattail shoots, sir,” the man answered nervously but plainly. “For cattail soup.”
“Who are you making soup for?”
“Just me, sir,” the man said, trying to keep a blank face.
The Stranger cocked his pistol and aimed it at his head. “Who’s the soup for?”
“I’ve got people, sir. They’re countin’ on me.”
“What people? How many?”
The man paused. He straightened up, suddenly stouthearted. “You’ll have to kill me then, sir. I ain’t givin’ ‘em up.”
The Stranger motioned at the man with his pistol. “Get in.”
“I ain’t takin’ you to ‘em, sir,” the man said, his tone a mix of fear and indignation. “Like I said, you’re gonna have to kill me.”
“Look, sir,” the Stranger said, dropping the gun to his side; “we’re not going to kill you. If we were, you’d already be on the ground.”