by Max Carver
“If you found the entrance to a clinic,” Diego continued, “Why'd you come back empty-handed? Why didn't you stuff your pockets with pills?”
“Because the... the entrance is blocked,” Scabs said. “Kind of.”
“Blocked?” Colt whispered. They were all accustomed to skulking around in shadows, never speaking too loud. They'd been doing it all their lives. “You didn't mention that, Scabs. We didn't bring shovels.”
“No, I mean... inside the door. There was a metalhead.”
The group stopped. Colt, Hope, and Diego stared at Scabs.
“You didn't think that was worth mentioning before?” Hope snapped, her voice a low hiss. Her hand was on the butt of her pistol, and she looked like she wanted to draw it and whip the scarred-up drug addict with it.
“We should turn back,” Diego said.
“No, no, it wasn't moving,” Scabs said. “It was kind of... old. And keeled over. Not patrolling. I just didn't want to walk near it by myself. Bad luck, you know?”
“Could be a ruse,” Colt said.
“It wasn't a reaper,” Scabs said, a desperate edge creeping into his voice. “I think it was an old-time metalhead. From before the war. Please, we're almost there. Let's not give up now.” Scabs licked his lips, his addiction hungry.
Colt weighed their options. They were, as always, desperate for any medical supplies. The ever-collapsing heap of broken high-rises sometimes shifted, either by gravity or as a side effect of battles between humans and machines. Sometimes this shifting and collapsing revealed things that had been hidden, like sources of food, weapons, or other critical supplies.
“We'll check it out,” Colt said. “Mother Braden needs insulin.” She's going to die soon without it, he didn't have to add out loud. Everyone knew that, and everyone cared. Except maybe Scabs.
Colt motioned for silence, then led the way, trying to pick out the best path through the unstable rubble. With concrete and metal debris everywhere, there was no sure footing, just lots of places to trip and fall with a crash loud enough to attract the metalheads. The heavy object strapped onto Colt's back and the antiquated automatic rifle in his hands didn't make the going any easier.
All four members of their raiding party wore night vision goggles, invaluable treasures that let them move in the dark without flashlights, which would have given them away from a distance. Many of the goggles had simply been children's toys in the old world, if the plastic orange tiger ears on top of Colt's pair were any indication.
The city ruins were like a vast graveyard. They passed through the twisted remnants of a fighter plane that had been shot down and crashed into an elevated rail line about two decades earlier. The blackened hulk of an industrial fire truck huddled next to a burned-out factory. Skeletons lay in the street, bodies left from the war. One was clad in rotten green, maybe a soldier who'd died fighting for Earth or trying to evacuate civilians from the war-torn city.
That would have been a useless task, Colt thought. Nowhere on Earth was safe from the machines. His sister believed they might be safe if only they could make it to a remote jungle or island somewhere. Colt doubted it, but he didn't argue with Hope about it. He wanted her to have any room for optimism she could manage.
Scabs grabbed Colt's elbow and pointed.
Colt zoomed in with his goggles, toggling the left plastic tiger ear.
There it was, up ahead, the clinic entrance between enormous and unstable heaps of debris, amid what looked like a recently shifted pile of twisted steel girders. A fallen billboard offered Quick Loans Now! Bad Credit Good! Colt could have read the words aloud—Mother Braden had taught them all to read—but he had no comprehension of what the sign actually meant. It was old-world talk, for things that didn't matter anymore.
A portion of a badly cracked cinderblock wall had been revealed by the shifting rubble. It displayed a couple of broken, unlit signs with logos he understood very well: an equal-armed cross and an image of two snakes coiled around a stick.
Those symbols both meant “medicine.”
Under the signs, a dark double doorway stood partially open. The sliding doors were hard plastic filled with security mesh; even before the war, the clinic had needed protection against robbery. Maybe there had been desperate addicts like Scabs even then.
One door had been slid halfway open, its lock busted. They could walk right in, but clearly someone had been here before, other scavengers or maybe clankers—humans who served the metalheads in exchange for weapons, gear, and not getting killed or shipped off to the work prisons where the prisoners served the machines, strip-mining the last of Earth's dwindling resources to feed Carthage and its allies.
Those earlier robbers had probably already taken anything valuable. Or there might be people waiting inside, ready to ambush and rob anyone stupid enough to walk into their trap. Rival bands of scavengers could be dangerous, even if they weren't allied with the machines. Some were cannibals. Food was scarce in the ruins, especially fresh meat.
“What do you think?” Diego whispered.
“The ground in front of the clinic looks pretty clear,” Colt said. “We'll send in the Snack-O-Vend.”
They unstrapped the machine from Colt's back. It was a relief to set the thing on the ground at last. They'd hiked a couple of hours from their current home to check out Scabs's report of finding an old clinic, and Colt had carried the antique machine most of the way.
“This better be worth it, Scabs,” Hope said.
“Like I said, I didn't go too far inside,” Scabs said, picking nervously at his face.
“Quiet,” Colt said. With hand gestures, he told Hope and Diego to watch the ruins on either side of them and Scabs to watch their back.
Everyone knew to watch the dark sky above. No one needed to be told that.
He activated the Snack-O-Vend.
The machine was shorter than him, with a big-eyed cartoonish plastic head on top of a boxy rectangular body mounted on three small tires. Colt wasn't sure what the big weird yellow head was supposed to be—it wasn't exactly a person or a realistic animal, but it had two big eyes, strange stubby round horns, and a circular megaphone mouth. In its previous life, the Snack-O-Vend robot had wandered among city crowds, touting canned drinks and packaged snacks.
Colt and his friends had disabled the Snack-O-Vend's megaphone and speakers, and of course the snacks and drinks were long gone. Its CPU had been ripped out, too, leaving it a dumb mechanical shell. Nobody trusted a metalhead, not even an old one designed to sell cookies and chips.
Its eyes and wheels were still functional, though.
Colt peeled away the duct tape that held the tablet to the vending bot's back. The tablet wasn't an original part of the robot; Diego had spliced it into the bot's wiring with a thick spool of ribbon cable. Wireless signals were out of the question; those would be like shooting flares into the sky, inviting the attention of every metalhead in the area.
Using the tablet, Colt sent the snack-bot rolling forward, unspooling its cable as it wobbled over the debris. Its round yellow head, with its huge stupid round horns, swiveled slowly back and forth, scanning the area around it.
Colt lifted the night vision goggles so he could watch the bot's video feed on the tablet screen, which he'd dimmed so much it was barely visible.
He steered the robot as best he could over the debris, around an uprooted streetlamp, skirting an open manhole.
The Snack-O-Vend approached the open door to the old clinic. Nothing had attacked the vending machine so far, but that only meant the way was clear of motion detectors and pressure-activated devices. Any number of smarter machines could be watching, waiting for the humans behind the advance Snack-O-Vend scout. Perhaps they even felt some pity for their poor lobotomized fellow machine.
Not possible, Colt thought. Metalheads don't feel pity.
On the screen, he watched through the Snack-O-Vend's camera eyes as it entered the clinic.
The clinic's interior was in disarray
, with overturned chairs and rotten carpet, mildew on the walls. Still, the place hadn't been obviously ransacked or ripped to pieces. They might find some necessities in there.
He directed the snack machine to rotate its head a full three-sixty. The head swiveled slowly, taking its time; the Snack-O-Vend had been built for focusing on potential customers and cajoling them into buying candy bars, so it wasn't exactly a military-grade device. Not like the steel monsters that hunted the scavengers day and night.
Colt stiffened up when a human-shaped form came into view, lying crumpled on the floor. He paused and zoomed in.
He poked Scabs and pointed at the screen, his gesture an obvious question: Is that the old metalhead you saw?
Scabs nodded and thumbs-upped.
Hope and Diego leaned in for a look.
The thing on the floor was definitely not alive, never had been. It was shaped like a young woman in a starchy white uniform marked with more of the red medicine crosses. It had pink fingernails, long blond hair, sky-blue eyes, and a metallic skull face where most of the artificial skin had been ripped away.
Its eyes seemed to stare, unblinking. Not that it could blink; its eyelids were gone along with the rest of its false human face. Its convincingly human teeth were left exposed in an unsettling nonstop grin.
“Looks like an old skinwalker,” Diego murmured. “From before.”
“With medicine crosses,” Hope said. “That's sick. Who would want medical treatment from one of them?”
“It's not moving.” Colt sent the snack-bot rolling forward to bump the unmoving android a couple of times. “It's probably been there since the war. Is it lying in the same place you saw it, Scabs?”
Scabs nodded quickly. “Yeah. Yeah, it's just a dead metalhead. It's nothing.” He wiped his lips and started toward the hospital. “Come on, we can help ourselves to whatever we want!”
Colt wanted to yell after him to stop, but yelling was never wise. So he motioned to Hope and Diego, and they all hurried after, raising their weapons. He eyed the high ground on either side of the entrance, the heaps of rubble from which metalheads might emerge. They had to break sky cover for a moment, too, and risk getting spotted by drones.
Still, they made it safely inside the clinic's lobby. Scabs had dashed ahead, but now he waited a few paces behind the stopped Snack-O-Vend. He was still clearly afraid of the dead robot nurse on the floor, which blocked the way to the back corridor where drugs and other valuables might be found.
“I think she's kinda hot,” Scabs said. He was pointing an old lead-firing 9mm pistol at the skull-faced blond android. “Why do you think they took her face?”
“Probably so people would know she wasn't human.” Hope approached the fallen android, holding out her old machine pistol. She gave the silent nurse-bot a kick, but it didn't respond. “Someone cut her head halfway off and sliced the cables inside. See? Probably around the time they realized the machines weren't our friends.”
“Let's go,” Colt said. “Keep quiet.”
The corridor included the front doors to a couple of exam rooms full of treasures like fresh bandaging, disinfectant, and mild painkillers. The scavengers stuffed their pockets and backpacks.
Each exam room had a back door that connected to a small warren of labs and offices in the rear of the clinic. In the back lab, Colt couldn't suppress a grin when he saw the enormous steel Total-Freez cabinet. These could safely store organic materials at extremely low temperatures, and they typically had their own fuel cell power source to provide long-term stability. Precious relics of the old world might lie inside, things that could no longer be produced on Earth.
Like insulin, which Mother Braden desperately needed back home. The infrequency of her treatments had already left her almost blind, growing more and more dependent on the young ones she'd originally rescued from the ruins. She had saved Colt's life, and Hope's, and he intended to return the favor.
Colt heard a footstep from back in the lobby where they'd entered, and he motioned for quiet. He pointed; his sister was already turning her pistol in that direction.
He motioned for Diego to follow him and for Hope to stay put with Scabs. Hope gave him the finger and came along instead. Scabs hid in a doctor's office and closed the door.
Colt, Diego, and Hope crept through the first exam room, where Colt looked through the ajar door and into the lobby.
“Hello there, pretty face!” a man's voice bellowed. Before he even stepped into Colt's field of view, Colt knew it would be a clanker, not a scavenger. Not even a violent, murderous scavenger would dare yell that loud, no matter where he was.
The man had one completely robotic hand. Chunky cybernetic implants covered his eyes and most of his shaved head. Spiky armor shielded his torso, and his boots were steel-edged skull-crushers, nasty little bonuses the metalheads gave their loyal pet humans. The boots made the loud clanking sound for which the clankers were known.
The clanker stepped forward and gave the dusty android nurse a kick, sending her clattering away. He looked over the Snack-O-Vend, then smirked and punched his robotic right hand into the snack machine's horned yellow face, shattering the plastic shell and smashing the video equipment inside.
“Where'd they go?” A second clanker entered Colt's view, a shorter, stockier guy. Half his head was covered with mechanical gear, and so was the shoulder on that side. A compact autocannon was mounted on his back, its barrel currently pointing upward. His cybernetic enhancements gave him the strength to carry the massive weapon.
“They went the same place all the kids go. Wherever the drugs are.” The first one pointed toward Colt, almost as if he could see Colt hiding there in the exam room. “Wherever the drugs are.”
Colt gestured to Diego and Hope, telling them to slip out the back door of the exam room while he remained there alone. Diego nodded and backed out. Hope shook her head, but Colt jabbed her shoulder and insisted she go, with the most emphatic finger-pointing he could muster.
“I saw boobs on the thermal,” a third voice said, high and nasal. “Skimpy, but round. One of them's a girl.”
Hope glanced down at her torso, thickly wrapped against the cold, and scowled before following after Diego.
Colt had been training his automatic rifle on the first clanker, but now he moved it to the tall thin one who was talking about his sister.
Scabs had led them into a trap. Not intentionally, Colt was sure. They'd all been tempted by the hope of desperately needed medical supplies. The group back home was depending on them.
Still, these clankers were careless and loud, maybe even drunk. He hoped so.
“Come on out, girl!” the nasally one called, leading the other two down the hall, his own spiky helmet tucked under his arm like he was clocking out for the day. “It'll be nice to have a warm one for a change.”
Colt, like the others in his group, was low on ammunition. Just as there was never enough food, there was never enough ammo. He only had half a dozen rounds in his automatic rifle. It might have been wise to conserve them.
But he was jittery—getting the drop on an unsuspecting target like this, like an assassin, wasn't something he'd done before. Usually he was shooting back at an attacker, but now he clearly needed to act first.
He emptied all six rounds at the tall nasally guy who wouldn't stop talking about Hope.
They were potent rounds, jacketed in depleted uranium. A couple hit the guy's metallic body armor, but another caught him in the forehead. The back of his head spattered against the wall, and the guy went down without another word. He should have kept that helmet on.
Now it was time to go, because Colt had just given away his position in a big way. Autocannon rounds shredded the front door and walls of the exam room, blasting the suspended exam table to pieces.
Colt ran out through the back and rejoined Diego and Hope in the big lab where the Total-Freez unit hummed quietly to itself in one corner. Diego and Hope had overturned the room's long steel tables to for
m a barricade, dumping a lot of delicate lab equipment on the floor in the process.
Colt took his place alongside Diego and Hope, behind a double layer of steel tabletops.
“I'm out.” Colt set aside his rifle and picked up a homemade explosive cocktail sealed inside a glass bottle. Diego had been carrying it in his backpack.
Colt struck a match. “Get ready—”
The two clankers entered the room, spraying their incendiary rounds everywhere. The shorter one's rotating Gatling-style barrel had folded forward from his back and locked into his place on his shoulder, and he'd used it to shred the exam room. His face on that side was already covered in chunky cybernetic implants, so apparently inflicting deafness wasn't an issue.
The balding guy with his eyes completely hidden by machinery had a similar automatic cannon on a swivel mount on his hip, and he swept the room with fire. His teeth were bared in a smile; most of them had been replaced by shards of steel.
These guys were novice clankers. They were overconfident, relying on the extreme weapons and tech provided them by the machines, thinking nothing could stop them. They laid down a wall of fire, not bothering to conserve or concentrate.
The clankers finally stopped for a moment and looked around, as if in awe of the massive damage they'd dealt to the room. Pieces of glass and tile rained from the ceiling, clinking on the floor.
“Guess we don't get a warm one, after all,” the stockier guy said. “Nobody lived through that—”
Hope and Diego shot at them over the edge of the table, emptying their handful of rounds at the two clankers.
At the same time, Colt flung the glass bottle at them; the burning rag of a wick flared like ball lightning through his night goggles, which tinted themselves so Colt wouldn't go blind.
The bottle exploded, engulfing the clankers in liquid fire just as a few of the carefully aimed rounds hit home. One of the black implants on the bald guy's eyes exploded, and Colt glimpsed a raw red socket beneath it, just before flames from the bottle swept over the guy's face. That had likely been Diego's bullet.
Hope let out an annoyed grunt. She'd emptied her pistol at the stocky guy with the cannon on his shoulder, but he was still running around, hand over the fleshy half of his face as it burned.