A Man and His Robot

by William Vitka

  The arachnocar spasms once. Releases a torrent of piss across the road.

  I shout. Cover my face. “Goddamn, man. Warn a brotha.”

  Plissken says, “I really wanted to try that. It’s the other offensive modification I made to myself while you were sleeping. A very nice plasma cannon. One with low power requirements, but high output.”

  A chunk of brain drips off my leg. “Well, you got the offensive part right.”

  * * *

  Ninety-Five goes on forfuckinever. But Plissken says we’re close to where the New Jersey Transit tracks start. Few miles. Then we should intersect the commuter rails that run from Penn Station to Secaucus and Newark.

  The Meadowlands have always seemed like a wasteland. A flat swamp littered with electrical and radio and cellular and satellite towers. An industrial clusterfuck where they killed off a lot of the indigenous wildlife before someone said: Whoa, wait, these animals might need to stay alive.

  Cuz humans suck, you see.

  Y’know how your favorite dystopian movie depicts the end of the world? All shattered remains of buildings and infrastructure? It is that. Except they fucked up on the color scheme. None of this over-saturated brown crap. The plants are very goddamn green juxtaposed against an angry red sky. Merry Christmas in hell. Or Mars maybe. The plants might only be green cuz of the radiation, but I’m just sayin.

  Shitload colder out here too.

  No buildings to block the ashy wind.

  * * *

  We reach the outskirts of Secaucus by early evening. The sun’s small and pathetic above us. A red nickel in the sky. Light tries to break through the nuclear dust clouds but can’t.

  Sticking to the railroad tracks seems to be the smartest idea. They’re raised. Not in the shit. Less chance of a stalled vehicle filled with unknown horrors. Plus there’s no other clear way to cross the swamplands.

  Unless you wanna get in the swamp.

  In which case you’re a fuckin moron.

  Cuz if the infected don’t get you, the pollution and the radiation will.

  All the water here is dirty from the bombs. At best, it’s got trace amounts of radiation from the fallout. Nothing you want in your belly.

  Secaucus Junction looms before us. This big beige slab of industrial architecture. Grand Central it ain’t. But it’s functional. The fat vein of Interstate 280 waits to my right. The New Jersey Transit tracks I’m on lead into the second story of Secaucus Junction. Not the ground.

  That’s a good thing.

  I look down to the first floor where the lower tracks are.

  Dead people. A bunch. And I mean dead dead. Piled in stacks. Fleshy firewood. I count thirty corpses, but I can only see so much. They ain’t moving and they weren’t infected—no signs of the parasite. They didn’t go from human to shambling Keef to corpse.

  That sets off alarms in my head.

  You have any idea how long it’s been since I’ve seen a corpse? An uninfected corpse?

  I tell Plissken: “Scan em. Keep it low. Anything trips your sensors, don’t stick around.”

  “I had no intention of doing so.”

  I pull my Colt revolver. Haul myself onto the station platform. Sit on one of the benches. Gotta rest my legs a few. The pack’s heavy. Been abusing my body too long to consider myself a star athlete.

  I scratch the side of my head with the gun’s seven-inch barrel.

  Ah, my good man, but you are a carrier. Star athlete, no. But one of those special cases like the hero kids from Brooklyn, yes.

  Some hero.

  You’re not too terrible. She always thought—

  “Shut the fuck up. Just shut the fuck up.” My hands punch my head. I don’t. Not consciously. Then my head is in those same hands. I rock back and forth.

  Stupid idiot drunk asshole idiot fucker.

  Yeah, you’re special. Got those genes. Not that it matters. You couldn’t save her. You couldn’t save anyone.

  I dig into my pack. Grab the whiskey. “Useless asshole.” I suck down two big gulps. “Stupid useless asshole.” I light a smoke.

  Plissken floats up to me. He looks at the bottle. “Oh, good. Because this always works out so well.”

  “Eat shit. What’d you find?”

  “Charming, as ever. There are thirty-seven bodies. Human. Uninfected.”

  I twist the cap back onto the whiskey bottle. Slow. Thinking about it.

  Plissken says, “I would not advise—”

  “We’re leaving.”

  “Excellent.”

  I grab my crap. Check the knot on Old Glory. “What the fuck’s going on?” I hop down onto the tracks. Hope whatever did kill those poor bastards ain’t still around.

  Plissken says, “It looks like Secaucus Junction was being used as a control point. Quite recently. Part refuge and part transit system for survivors.”

  “Okay. And?”

  “Someone didn’t like that idea very much.” Plissken bobs. “Every corpse down there had its throat slit. A clean cut. The bodies are bloodless, but I could find no trace of spillage.”

  Haha. Spillage.

  Monsters’ve been trying to kill me so long, the idea of a human murdering another kinda surprises me. But it shouldn’t.

  Imagine what that kid would say? Hmm, hero? He made it through all those infected. Then you put a bullet in him.

  He tried to do me first. Turnabout’s fair play.

  I say, “So we’ve got a psycho cutting people up and stacking the corpses?”

  Plissken says, “A deranged mind may believe they’re performing some ritual through these actions. Which would explain the stacking. Perhaps it was designed as a sacrifice. There is no way to know. Unless you would like to speak to this homicidal maniac. As you are so fond of saying: Shit is fucked.”

  “Aye, sir. Shit is indeed fucked. Indubitably, my good man.”

  “Please stop.” Plissken turns to continue down the tracks. He scouts ahead. Halts. Turns to one of the huge interior walls. He whistles at me.

  I catch up. “What’s—”

  Takes me a minute to register the insanity.

  There’s a mural. Ten feet high. Twenty feet wide. Empty buckets on either side. A lunatic vision made from blood and little strips of flesh for texture. At the center of it, a crucified woman. Her throat’s cut. So are her wrists and the tendons of her feet.

  She’s propped up by a spear running through her vagina, out her stomach, and up into the base of her jaw.

  The blood mural around her is gibberish. Rambling. Somewhat typical pseudo-religious crackpottery: FOR HIM FOR HIM. HE WAITS IN THE WATERS. THEY SAID THE WATER WAS BAD. IT IS GOOD. THE WATER IS GOOD. WE ARE PURE IN HIM.

  It shows a massive creature. Some sorta salamander-stingray with legs. Its mouth takes up the whole front of the picture. A big living vacuum cleaner.

  Below that’s a bloody triangle with a tail.

  And you goofy fuckers thought I was deranged.

  I say, “I miss good, old-fashioned zombies. Burn it. All of it.”

  Plissken obliges. He torches the crucified woman. Her flesh bunches up. Crinkles. Then she starts to look like a roasting human-kabob.

  You burned Momma Bear, too. Remember? Up there on the Empire State Building. At the start of all this. Got a thing for cooking women?

  I mumble to myself. “It was so they couldn’t feed on her. It was so they couldn’t fucking feed on her after I—”

  Plissken nudges me. “We should move. It won’t be too long before the light is gone.”

  We still need a place to crash for the night.

  I inhale. Exhale. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

  The stink of burning flesh follows us.

  * * *

  We cross over the Portal Bridge. Over the nasty waters of the Meadowlands.

/>   Thirty minutes later, the sun sets.

  We bunk in a white maintenance shed off the tracks. Part of a chain of radio towers. WMCA or something. The shack sits out on a long, thin walkway that stretches about a hundred feet over the water and under the Western Spur overpass.

  Seems like the most isolated spot. One way in.

  Bad news is: One way out, too.

  It’ll do.

  The peace is devastating. Not cuz it was all hustle and bustle in the city. Far from it. But cuz you can hear the water of the Meadowlands and the Hackensack river lapping against the toxic shores here. You can hear the long grass rustle with the breeze.

  It should sound like a nice vacation. Or one of those “relaxing” help-you-sleep holospheres huckster assholes used to sell for sixty bucks on late-night TV.

  Now those noises are just weird.

  Close your eyes, you’re somewhere else.

  On a jaunt to the beach house. Maybe the lake.

  But you know it’s wrong.

  I suck my cigarette down to the filter. Flick it into the water. I figure: To hell with it. One more butt ain’t gonna make things any worse for the environment.

  Course, that’s the exact thinking that helped turn the planet into an ashtray to begin with.

  I sit on the edge of the walkway. Keep my feet from dangling over the edge on account of I don’t wanna look like bait. I drink up. The whiskey feels good. Today, I earned it. I accomplished something. Didn’t just spin and sputter and exist on top of a building.

  Sky gets full dark fast.

  There are patches of glow out there. Red and orange. Either fires or radiated areas still burning with all the heat and hell science helped open up.

  I say to Plissken: “Tomorrow, we hit Newark for whatever it is Three wants.”

  “It will take about an hour to walk,” the bot says. “It would be prudent, perhaps, to obtain a vehicle of some kind once we get to the outskirts of the city. If we plan to make it to Boston within the next year.”

  “Wiseguy. We’ll need a tank to get through the wrecks. Highways are a mess. And we’ll need gas to get the tank started. And we’ll need someone who can drive a tank. I’m an arrogant sonuvabitch, but I know my limits.”

  “Satellite images suggest that there is quite a lot of military materiel in and around Newark. It is one of the areas the USC government believed it could make a stand against the infection spreading west from Manhattan.”

  I take a pull of whiskey. “Sure. We know how well that went. Again: We’ll need gas and someone to drive.”

  “I can drive.” Plissken bobs. “I’m an excellent driver.” Not a shrug this time. He turns away from me a little. Like a kid looking at his feet trying to convince his parents of something.

  “Bullshit. You got no arms. Or legs.”

  “I won’t need them. I can interface with the onboard computer systems of most modern military equipment. And certainly the older models. Fuel probably won’t be an issue if the armor is nuclear, like most modern models.”

  “Why the shit didn’t you think of this a few years ago?”

  “There was no opportunity. The USC military never entered NYC-Zone. They only bombed it.”

  I see a flash in my head of my friend Sean. The scientist. All that time ago. Him standing by the window after we discovered the parasite. After he and Plissken identified it in an infected brain sample. Then the giant foot stomps of bombs. Then the glass that shatters. The shard that flies into his neck. Opens his arteries up...

  How long? How long how long how long...

  I snap myself awake before Plissken can see me lose it again. Say, “So we get ourselves a tank. We roll like thunder up to Boston.”

  I wonder if that’s why Three sent us west.

  Plissken’s sensors beep once. “Incoming.”

  “What is it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  A new glow enters the scene. Light and green. A shimmer. Under the irradiated water. The bioluminescent being passes under the overpass. It flaps huge rudimentary wings. Thirty or forty feet across. The stingray monster glides. Almost majestic. Almost beautiful.

  I see its great sucking mouth. Rows of teeth inside a tremendous maw.

  The tip of one of its wings glances against the walkway supports. The whole structure shakes and shudders so bad I worry it’ll come down. But it levels out.

  The stingray comes ashore two hundred feet south of us. Back where the railroad tracks are. It rears up. Flaps those wings once. Twice. Three times. Gets the dirty water off.

  It’s a neon nightmare angel.

  The stingray sniffs the air. It waddles on chubby lizard legs toward Secaucus Junction.

  I lose sight of it.

  But not that glow. That awful glow stays.

  Plissken says, “Well. That answers one question.”

  I say, “All hail the flesh.”

  * * *

  I self-medicate. A lot. Inside the WMCA electrical shed under the radio towers. I curl up with my sleeping bag. Let the whiskey warm me against the cold.

  My side itches a little where the stilt-walker speared me. I forgot about it till now. But the dressing is clean.

  Clean?

  So’s the wound. Healed.

  I check it again.

  I’m a moron.

  All these years. I never thought about it. Probably too drunk.

  Definitely too drunk.

  I’m a comic book hero. My wounds heal in no time. That means all the damage I’ve done to my liver and my body and my lungs... That shit’ll just go away. I can’t get cancer if I want to. Well... Physical wounds, though. Cuts and gouges. My broken nose from when all this started. The bullet my back took... It only ever took a day or so to heal.

  I like being a genetic freak now.

  Huzzah! You can live longer than everything else and be lonely forever!

  I wanna tell Plissken, but he’s settled in to run diagnostics. Shut down for a while. His machinery hums. Running lights cast an aura like blue candlelight.

  I enjoy a few more cigarettes.

  A couple more pulls from the bottle.

  * * *

  You learn to sleep light. Your brain adjusts to the noises. The random infected howls. Wind. So that stuff doesn’t bother you. The distant stuff.

  But if something gets near you—inside that bubble of space humans seem to telepathically sense—then you’re up. Gun in hand.

  Usually.

  I don’t hear the shack door open. Don’t hear footsteps. Or even clothing rustle.

  I feel pressure on my crotch. Rubbing.

  Something’s on top of me.

  My eyes ain’t open, but I bolt upright. The weight of the revolver in my right. The heft of the M1911 in my left. Both aimed. Cocked. Ready to rock.

  My first instinct is to shoot.

  My second is to deride Plissken until I’m hoarse cuz holy shit fuck does he have terrible timing with his diagnostic routines.

  Then.

  I see her in the blue haze of my bot’s running lights. She looks like—

  I say, “Momma Bear?” Knowing it can’t be her. Just some lizard part of my brain that speaks up. I shake my head. Snap the stupid outta it. Keep the guns on her. This succubus from the wastes.

  She straddles me.

  I see her unkempt long hair. Wide eyes. A triangle of blood on her forehead with a tail. Breasts pressing against a combat vest with no bra. Camouflaged cargo pants torn around her legs. Military, maybe. Or she just stole the BDUs from the corpse of a soldier.

  The triangle with the tail’s supposed to be the glowing stingray.

  Safe guess, I figure, considering that nutty mural.

  I feel her blade against my throat.

  Man, she’s a weird one.

&n
bsp; She says, “You got so close to him.” She undoes my belt. “You got close to the Great Ray. But he didn’t turn on you. He didn’t consume you.” She unzips my pants. All the time keeping the knife on my neck. “You’re one of the chosen.”

  Plissken reactivates himself. He jumps into the air. His plasma cannon heats up. His saws emerge from his sides.

  I shoot him a look. “Perfect. Yep. Great timing, bud.”

  Miss Crazy watches Plissken in awe. She pushes the blade harder against my throat. “The man and his robot. We’ve heard of you out here.” She smiles. Some of her teeth are broken. Cracked. “The chosen one. Of course the Great Ray respected you.”

  Like she’s meeting a rock star she wants to fuck and kill.

  I tell Plissken: “Hold.” I say to Miss Crazy: “Did you kill those people at the train station? You make that mural of blood?”

  Miss Crazy says, “Yes. For him. Sacrifices for the Great Ray.”

  “Why?”

  “The new gods demand sacrifices. You’ve seen them. I know you’ve seen them. Aren’t they magnificent? New gods of flesh who roam the Earth.”

  I’m thinking of Three when I say, “Lady, my monster is way bigger.”

  But Miss Crazy takes it different. “I want your seed.”

  “Romantic, eh?”

  She plays with the zipper on her combat vest. Starts to grind against my crotch.

  Please please please don’t. It’s been years. Years of isolation. Don’t do this to me.

  Could shoot her. She’s nuts and a murderer... You’d be in the right.

  But it’s been almost ten fuckin years...

  Dude, never fuck crazy. Really.

  Fuck.

  My dick betrays me. There’s some shit you can’t fight. Wouldn’t matter if she was a perfect ten or someone you’d try to blot out the memory of.

  All those years.

  I worry about the blade on my throat.

  Hypothesis: I shoot her. She falls. That blade drags across my throat. Opens some arteries. Not sure now is the time to test my self-healing abilities. Give it a while to fix a serious gut wound, okay. But a slit throat? What if she manages to slice open half my neck?