by Damien Love
The robot abruptly stopped moving.
Alex pulled himself free, staggered out of reach. Stopped. Still it didn’t move.
He hadn’t known what the salt might do, but he hadn’t expected this. The machine stood motionless, pressed to the door, arm still stuck through the shattered glass. Alex looked back to the other. It sat unmoving, head bowed. He looked back at the thing behind him. Lifeless.
The train rumbled and rattled on its way, unconcerned.
Alex moved tentatively toward the middle of the carriage. His plan now went only as far as getting off alive at the next stop, whatever it was. It couldn’t be long now.
He stood by the doors, muttering “Come on,” and keeping his eye on the robot seated by the instrument case. A huge, sickening crashing and ripping came from behind him.
The machine at the door had returned to life, and it had gone berserk. It punched furiously at the door, smashing out the glass. As it pulled itself free, its coat sleeve ripped, exposing a girder-like iron arm. It wheeled, came stumbling down the aisle toward Alex, both fists windmilling wildly, flinging blind, lethal punches at the air.
Now, with horror, Alex saw the other come awake, too. It rose abruptly, stood seeming to watch its colleague. Then it strode quickly up the aisle toward Alex.
He was caught in the middle. He searched his pockets furiously for more salt. His fingers closed around two last packets. He pulled his hand out—too quickly, watched in dismay as they slipped from his grasp and sailed feebly across the car, disappearing beneath the seats.
The wild life-sizer was almost upon him. He could actually feel the breeze as its savage arms whirled. Seized by hopeless instinct, he threw himself to the floor. Wrapping his arms around his head, he closed his eyes and waited for the blows to rain down.
Nothing. A second passed. Alex forced one eye open. Then both popped wide.
The mad machine had gone by him, was now bearing down upon its partner. The other life-sizer stood in the aisle, looking calm. As its frenzied twin approached, it took small steps backward, keeping out of reach of the swinging arms, until it was almost at the double bass case again. There, it stopped. When the demented thing came at it now, it raised its arms to ward off the assault, then went into a ferocious counterattack.
Alex pressed himself against the doors, watching the two giants go at each other, trading horrific metal blows. Sparks flew as they flung each other around the carriage, smashing seats and shattering windows with heads, fists, and elbows. But the salt-crazed life-sizer was being pushed steadily back. Back toward Alex.
The train was slowing at last. He could see the lights of a Métro station rolling toward him in painful slow motion. With the battling things almost on him, he wrenched at the doors, stabbing at the button to open. For a second, he felt one huge metal hand tug almost gently at his rucksack. Then he fell onto the platform, scrabbling furiously for cover as they came tumbling out behind him.
The machines stood trading blows in the deserted station. The mad robot held its partner by the wrist, throwing a flurry of punches at its head as it tried to get back onto the train. The train doors closed. With a surge of violence, the other robot broke free, knocking its deranged doppelgänger down.
The train had started moving again. Stalking after it, as the last carriage passed, the robot whipped out an arm, sinking a hand like a hook into the rear of the car, allowing itself to be dragged off behind it.
Crouched behind a bench, Alex caught a final regretful glimpse of the white instrument case sitting in the empty, battered carriage as it rolled into the tunnel. Spread-eagle a few feet away, the crazed robot lay flailing uselessly at the ground, then pushed itself awkwardly to its feet and tottered drunkenly to the platform’s edge.
In a thoughtless rush that surprised himself, Alex burst from behind the bench, launching a desperate shoulder charge at its back. It was like running into a brick wall. As he bounced painfully away, the machine whipped around, swinging out wildly. The blow barely connected, and Alex’s rucksack took the brunt of it, yet the force still sent him sprawling to the floor. At the same time, it was enough to send the thing rocking off balance. Toppling backward, the machine fell to the tracks with a resounding clang.
Crawling to the edge, Alex saw it lying unmoving, face-up, then he flinched back as it hauled itself upright again. It ignored him, lurching crazily off in the direction the train had disappeared, arms whirling.
Alex realized he had been holding his breath. He peered after the life-sizer as it vanished down the tunnel. Faint clanging noises in the humming darkness. Maybe a small spark. Then nothing.
He checked himself over. He still seemed to be in one piece. Massaging his aching shoulder, he weighed the idea of jumping onto the tracks and heading into the tunnel, then dismissed it. Even if he caught up with the double bass case, even if the mad robot wasn’t lurking in the darkness ready to pulverize anything that came near it, he would be no use alone.
He had his plan, as far as it went. He had to stick to it. It was all he had.
The platform was cold. He shivered. There were voices sounding above, footsteps hurrying on the stairs. Métro workers. A security camera gazed impassively down on him. Sprinting for the exit, he ducked past two men in uniform before they could stop him. Ignoring their shouts, he ran, up and out, into the rest of the night.
XII.
SOUTH, THEN NORTH BY NORTHWEST
SHORTLY AFTER SIX the following morning, the first train went rolling southward through Paris toward Fontainebleau.
Alex slumped sore and exhausted in an empty carriage. Holding his throbbing head to the cold window, he watched the dreamlike white city slide past in the darkness and fought against the lulling motion, trying to stay awake.
Following his escape from the Métro, he had spent the night stumbling a frightened and wary circuit around the vicinity of the Gare de Lyon, waiting for the station to open and the first trains to begin. Long, dim hours of trudging through grimy snow, sticking to back alleys and side streets, crouching in basement doorways and huddling over mysterious steaming vents, seeking warmth, seeing robots and a tall man and small girl creeping out from every shadow. More than once, he had decided to go to the police after all, or give it up and go home. But here he was still. Getting on with it.
Every part of him ached—the parts he could feel, anyway. His feet were still numb from cold. At least the heat was on. Hunching over the radiator by his seat, he gulped the coffee he had bought in the station and tore halfheartedly at a dry croissant. He was sure he was very hungry, but the emptiness in his stomach had curdled into a sick, acidic ache. Painful, weary life crept gradually back into his limbs.
He fell asleep for a while, and while he slept, he dreamed. He dreamed of his grandfather. He watched that dream spin and fall and drain away like water down a plughole. Black came pouring up, spiraling out, a spreading shadow, thin and tall. This shadow jumped through the world like an alien cricket, filling it with blackness, creaking and clattering. Then the dream of shadows jumped away into shadows. Finally, he dreamed he was weeping. He woke.
Lights winked past outside. Setting his rucksack on the seat beside him, Alex dug down and pulled out the white box containing the robot. Despite the cushion of clothing around it, it was a little crushed from the life-sizer’s punch. He got the original old box out of that, relieved to see it intact, then finally the tin toy itself, cold and pristine in his hand. He sat studying it, rocking gently with the train. In the strange surroundings, under the bare light, its eager shambles of a face looked uglier than ever.
“See what you’ve done?” Alex murmured bleakly. “I should throw you under this train, just let it roll right over you.”
The empty eyes stared up.
“What can you tell me?” he whispered. “What do I do?”
The train clacked quietly along, as though trying not to wake anyone.
Holding the toy, Alex began nodding toward sleep again. And then he felt it. The same sensation he had experienced in his bedroom. He couldn’t turn away from the robot, couldn’t shift his eyes from the devouring black holes in its head. But at the edge of his vision, he sensed the carriage around him flickering, changing.
A cold grip settled around his heart, immense loneliness. But something was different. Before, the chill, melancholy sensation had left him feeling sick. This time, after a few seconds, he began to feel he recognized its touch, could almost settle into its somber embrace. His pain drained away.
He sat like that for what felt a long time, until, from far away, he heard the door at the end of the carriage open. He looked up, feeling as though he were lifting his head through treacle.
Three teenagers had entered, swinging along the poles toward him through the flickering black-and-yellow light. The cell phone of one beat out a tinny din of music, sounding small, ridiculous.
Senses hovering above, looking down, he watched them approach, laughing and pointing as he bent disheveled and wet-eyed over his robot. Without understanding their words, he knew they were berating him for playing with toys, knew further that this was only the excuse for what was about to happen.
He actually saw the current between them, the chain of small exchanges and signs. The dilations of the pupils of their eyes, the quickening pulses at their necks, chemical scent signals, the three of them working themselves up, waiting to see when it would start, who would go first. Two, he saw now, were looking more eagerly to the third, the leader. It was as if he was watching a playback of a scene he had already studied many times before.
Sure enough, this boy was going to take the toy. They took a long time moving through the thick and pulsing air. He was still five feet away, slowly drawing back one hand, preparing to aim a slap.
“I want you to leave me alone and go away,” Alex distantly heard himself say. Faintly, like a stir of a breeze, he felt the words go from him, moving.
Full horror and grief dawned across this other boy’s face. He stumbled softly backward, crumbling against his friends, who took an age turning their faces down to him in confusion. He collapsed gently, choking, clawing at his throat, gasping small noises. Alex sat watching through the vibrating light, distantly heard the others shouting, shaking the suffocating boy. His eyes were bulging, desperate, rolling back, getting lost.
“No! Stop!”
This voice was loud. Alex realized it was his own. His mind came shooting back to him as though carried on the end of a cosmic elastic band that had been stretched too tight, then let go. The rush made him feel sick. Pain came flooding back into his head and shoulder.
Retching, the boy on the floor stumbled up, staggering quickly away without looking back. The other two stared at Alex, then at each other. They hurried away after their friend.
Alex sat panting, head in hands. Cold tin pressed against his pounding temple. He pulled back, looked at the robot, looked away. Packing it up, he stowed the toy deep in his rucksack.
His hands trembled badly. Leaning back, he gazed at the murky landscape slipping past outside. His reflection stared gravely back from the phantom world of the window. He tried to work out what it was thinking.
BEFORE LONG, THE train pulled into a small, plain white station, FONTAINEBLEAU AVON, glowing ghostly in the early dark. It was not quite seven o’clock. A few scattered people haunted the gloomy platform, bundled in scarves and hats against the weather.
Alex spotted a guard busying himself with pamphlets at a rack inside, a small man with a bushy gray mustache and spidery eyebrows. He approached him, clearing his throat.
“Uh . . . pardonnez-moi.”
The guard turned, frowning and yawning.
“Il ya un . . . uhm. Do you speak English?”
The guard’s frown deepened. He shook his head.
“I need to get to Barbizon. Barbizon?”
“Barbizon.” The guard nodded.
“Is there . . . il ya un autobus?”
The guard raised his eyebrows. “Ah!” he said. “Non.” He showed Alex his wristwatch, tapped it, shook his head, and shrugged. Lifting an armful of tattered leaflets, he headed off toward his ticket booth.
Alex shrugged after him. As he turned back idly to the display, his gaze stuck on a brochure in English: “Walking Tours of Fontainebleau.”
It opened out into a rough map of the area, which he compared against a quick line diagram he had sketched in the Internet café. There was Barbizon, highlighted vaguely northwest. It didn’t look too far. He studied the brochure a little more and tucked it into his pocket, then headed out into the black winter morning, back into the cold.
The snow had stopped falling but lay thick. Leaving the station, he passed through the lights of a slowly waking town, then struck out along a dim deserted main road, soon swallowed on either side by tangled trees as it plunged into a vast forest, silent and dark.
An hour and a half later, he was still tramping through these woods. Snow came and went intermittently. The wedge of sky above bled slowly from navy blue into purple then slate gray. Otherwise the view was unchanging. Ahead, nothing but endless white road cutting bleakly between dense and jaggy black trees. Behind, more of the same.
His legs felt leaden. His body felt too hot and painfully cold. From time to time, he tensed as a solitary car swished past, headlights staining the snow, blurry drivers staring out at the puzzling figure he cut by the roadside in the pale morning.
He heard a soft crashing among the trees and almost jumped out of his skin. Dropping into a crouch, he desperately scoured the misty inner landscape for movement, tired eyes straining. The seventh or eighth time it happened, he finally saw it was only snow falling, dropping in drifts from black branches.
At long last, he came to an intersection he hoped he recognized from the map. Another bare road cut across the one he stood on and led off left, through more trees. After a while, he came out into a landscape of farmland, flat under a low, featureless white sky. Far to his right, a small plane buzzed over a distant field, a smudgy speck in the air. Snow came on again, thin flakes stinging his cheek.
His stomach gave another long, gassy gurgle. He had bought a bar of chocolate with raisins at the station in Paris but had been unable to face it and fished for it now in the side pocket of his rucksack where he’d slipped it. He froze as his fingers brushed something unexpected. Something cold and jagged.
Cautiously, he set the bag down, stepped back, and stood regarding it. Taking a breath, he dived at it, grabbed inside as fast as he could, and pulled his hand back out.
The robot he held was very small, khaki green, around three inches tall, and utterly lifeless. Lolling loose, its head was a flattish circle, like a shallow saucer, with a sharp spike protruding from the center. Two big eyes and a happy, grinning mouth were painted above and below the spike. Its thin little body had been bent in two until it had almost snapped.
A jittery kaleidoscope of thoughts tumbled around Alex’s head. He flashed on an image of the life-sizers fighting in the underground train: one had tried to reach him, tugging at his rucksack by the door . . . Planting this? He shivered as his body remembered the other big robot’s wild punch smashing into his rucksack . . . Crushing it? Killing it?
He laughed, a hysterical chuckle of triumph, kicking his feet in the snow in a little dance of celebration.
Fascinated, he held the machine close, turning it, studying the rough welding, the minute joints of its limp limbs, the talented yet somehow childish cartoon painting of the face. There was a tiny hairline crack where it had been dented. He ran a finger over it, and moisture glistened. Condensation, he thought, then his stomach turned as he remembered: pieces of people. With an involuntary shudder of revulsion, he dropped the robot.
It landed headfirst on his foot, and, as it struck and bounced off, its head snapped
to another angle. With a sudden whirr, its arms started spasming. It sat up in the snow, broken body hanging at an awkward slant. But fully active.
“Oh, that’s great, Alex,” he said to himself. “Oh, well done. That was brilliant.”
The tiny robot’s head was lifting, rotating. It reminded him of something. As soon as he thought it, the answer came. Satellite dish.
He spun, suddenly desperate, searching for a sign of anyone or anything following. There was nothing. Only the snowy road, the trees, the flat fields, the little plane whirring in the stony sky.
He lifted his foot, thinking of stamping the robot into the ground, when it jumped nimbly at his leg, beginning to climb his trousers, clambering behind him, spindly arms working fast.
For the next minute, anyone passing would have seen a boy engaged in a curious, awkward kind of dance by the roadside, bending, spinning, and twisting, seemingly punching himself about the body. Finally, he caught it, stood holding it squirming, trying to think what to do. Stamp it. Bury it.
Stepping into the ditch by the road, he began kicking a hole in the snow while the robot thrashed weakly in his hand. The plane sounded louder, a high whine. Glancing up, Alex thought it was perhaps some trick of the frozen landscape, distorting, flattening, and amplifying sound. It didn’t look any nearer. He tried to focus on it and felt his eyes sliding cross-eyed.
Blinking, he looked again. The buzzing was louder, angry. Sickeningly familiar. It wasn’t a small plane on the horizon at all. It was something much smaller, and much, much closer.
As he watched, the vibrating black smudge split in two. A pair of growing dots lined up side by side. Their mosquito-like buzz was furious. Two fliers. Shooting straight for him.
Alex flung himself down to the ditch as the angry whine swooped at him in stereo. When he lifted his head, they were on the other side, climbing, turning, coming again.
The only cover lay back among the trees. Scrambling up, he launched himself desperately along the road. There was snow in his mouth. The struggling robot went flashing up and down in his grip as his hands pumped air. He heard the whirr, very close, threw himself down, feeling the flier’s touch in his hair.