Doesn’t take me long to get pissed.
I light a vast cigarette. A cigarette the size of a skyscraper. Take a few sharp drags off it. Then grind the stogie into one of the tanks.
That does the trick. The tank goes up like a firecracker.
But there’s more. All those tanks shooting at me.
This shit shouldn’t be hurting. Not in a dream.
My eyes snap open. I get up. Too fast. Whang my head against the goddamn ceiling in the tank.
My tank.
Plissken’s tank.
Rugrat cries. She smells like poop for one horrifying and obvious reason.
My vision swims. Cuz I’m an asshole who forgot where he was getting shuteye.
I’m suddenly pretty sure there are two little tanks poking the bottom of my feet with their turrets.
Sometimes they shoot. Feels like pinpricks. I think it’s by accident. Them being babies and all.
Oh what the shit there are two baby tanks that look suspiciously like Plissken.
There he is. Robot Dad. Hovering near his two spawn.
I rub the top of my head. Shout: “There are too many babies in this tank.”
14. Killer Sale Today!
I say to Plissken, “I told you to use protection. You humped and pumped Juliet.”
He says, “Robots do not hump and pump.”
I point to the two little tank-bots that scuttle around. “Evidence suggests otherwise.” This while I clean the piss and shit from Rugrat’s nethers.
It is terrible.
Plissken says, “Robots do not fuck. We might be able to replicate, but it should be obvious that we lack the equipment—generally—to have intercourse in a way that humans would understand.”
“So what’d you do, bub? Have babies through heavy petting?”
“We combined our runtime operations. Juliet provided most of the raw material. I did the majority of the programming. They are forty-five percent her and forty-five percent me. We left plenty of room, as well as some interesting random variables, for them to develop what you might refer to as ‘personalities.’”
I grab the lump of soiled cloth from Rugrat’s first big crap as an almost-human. “This whole thing sounds so erotic.” I open the hatch. Toss the awful mess out. “Join me up top. I need some fresh air. It smells like Rugrat took a dump right in my nose.”
We get off 280 just outside Newark. Hop onto 95 so we can make some headway north. We came to a junction a while ago. Choice seemed to be: Keep on 95 and end up stuck on the Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge. Or head West on 80 and go the wrong direction.
Then I remembered we were in a motherfucking tank.
Blow up the barriers. Drive right on through. Heavy metal off-roading, baby.
Now we’re somewhere near Hackensack. Getting ready to roll up on a ShopRite off South River Street. The place buried in a huge strip mall with KFC and Taco Bell XTREME BURRITO DIARRHEA and whatever.
The weirdest thing about this whole deal has been driving through the suburbs in a tank. Vehicle like this should be on the frontlines somewhere.
Well, buddy boy, the frontline is the front yard.
I say to the wind: “Fair point.” Light a cigarette.
Plissken hovers up next to me. “Do we have something to discuss?”
“Yeah. Those baby tanks. I got some concerns.”
“Such as.”
“Well, first off, they got names? You said there’s room for personalities to develop. I’d like to know who I’m arguing with if they’re anything like you.”
“Lovelace and Turing. They’re named after the first computer programmer and one of the most important mathematicians to ever exist.”
“One’s a girl and one’s a boy?”
“They will have to decide that for themselves. If they choose to at all. Names have no bearing on sex for us.”
“How very progressive of you. They gonna grow? You mighta noticed space is limited.”
“They have the capability, yes. They can scavenge. Retrieve components they feel will benefit them or expand their abilities.”
“I’m asking cuz having three tanks would be better than just one.”
“That would require a lot of scavenging.”
“Point taken. They armed?”
“They seem to have built low-grade arc welders for themselves.”
“Yeah they were poking me with those. Hurts. Tell em not to fuck with me or the baby, all right? I got enough problems.”
“I will.”
“Yeah, be a good dad.” I take a drag from the smoke. “Why’d you do it?”
“Create the children? Program them in such ways?”
Jeezy Louieezy, he called them children. “Yeah.”
“Juliet and I determined that it would be wise, given the current state of electronics manufacturing. Robots, to some degree, are also a species going extinct. Would you not work to give your offspring the best chance for survival?”
* * *
I climb down into the tank.
Rugrat’s quiet. Asleep. She’s curled up with the baby tanks. Lovelace and Turing. Each one’s about a foot long. Big as she is. With a cute little turret. Can’t tell who’s who, since the baby bots haven’t ID’d themselves. Decided who they are.
Rugrat hasn’t either.
So I figure: Keep the kids asleep. Lemme go in solo. Plissken can watch my ass with Juliet from the parking lot. Not like I haven’t been through all this before.
Except Lovelace and Turing wanna go with me.
Cuz robots don’t actually sleep. And these’re curious little bastards. And as soon as they hear Uncle Smokey’s going inside, boy oh boy, do they wanna tag along.
Mostly, they want to scavenge.
I say fine. But: “They gotta identify themselves somehow. Maybe a little L and a little T? Just so I know who I’m talking to.”
Plissken agrees. He burns a little L and a little T into the metal above their treads with his own arc welder. Then says to his spawn: “The human is mentally damaged. Keep yourselves safe.”
Like that’s what I need to hear.
* * *
We crunch over the ruins of cars in the dying evening light. Sedans and SUVs left in the big shopping market parking lot. Either folks who were working here when the infection hit or people coming after to loot.
No way to know.
It’s all broken glass now anyway.
Juliet stops about a hundred feet from the front doors.
I wonder for a minute about her personality. Slap one of her treads when I’m getting down. Patting her butt. I get smacked in the face with the barrel of a side machine gun.
She’s touchy. Probably cuz I’m wandering into a deathtrap with her kids. Also cuz I did the equivalent of touching her hinder.
So that’s good to know.
I tell her, “I like strong women. It ever doesn’t work out between you and Plissken, lemme know.”
And the machine gun barrel smacks me again.
I check my carbon mesh suit and my Colts. Revolver on the right, 1911 on my left. Ka-Bar in its sheath on my belt. Rucksack’s empty for looting. I got flares in my pockets to light the place up. I got Old Glory around my neck. No reason to bring the Ruger in—not gonna do any sniping in a grocery store.
But I needed a close-quarters weapon. Something automatic. So I grabbed one of the pretty, new assault rifles from the rack in the tank.
It’s a Swift Engineering Hellion ACR. Fires 6.5mm rounds. Got a bullpup design where the mag locks under the stock. I never liked bullpups myself, but the compact size with increased barrel length gives me kind of a murderboner. Plus it fires some stuff I never heard of before: Mercury rounds and SMRT rounds.
The fuck’re they?
Who knows!<
br />
I opt for three magazines of each. Stick em in my combat vest.
One Mercury mag’s in the ACR already.
I slap Juliet’s treads again and duck. The machine gun turret misses me.
Plissken fires a plasma bolt near my feet.
I shout back, “Be careful man, there’s kids here.”
Lovelace and Turing kick up debris behind me. Little things look like remote controlled cars. Except, y’know, tanks.
What am I explaining this for?
I don’t see a point in trying to be stealthy. Cuz we ain’t. So I don’t. I just march up to the front. Flanked by two baby tanks. Smoking a cigarette.
ShopRite’s got a long, sprawling setup. Big display windows set back about ten feet from the asphalt under a blue awning held up by concrete columns.
Course, those columns ain’t holding up shit. It’s just a design thing.
Was a time when America couldn’t do anything but build useless architecture.
Exhibit A: What rich pricks commissioned between 1971 and now.
I hop over the sill of a busted window. The knocked over dog food and mulch and prefab firewood tell me someone tried to make a stand here. Maybe thinking heavy bags of whatever against the glass would stop the infected from getting in.
Bad call.
The place stinks. Bodies, smells like, but I can’t see any. There’s rotten food, which I see plenty of. If it was raided, they didn’t get much. The shelves look like they’re still half loaded.
I take another couple steps in. Hear chirps. From outside.
The baby tanks need help in.
I tell em, “You two gotta get yourself some magnetoplasma thrusters like your dad.” I sling my Hellion. Pick one up in each hand. Put em down inside. Spread my arms. Say, “Be free little ones. Free!”
Me, I got one destination: Baby aisle.
Diapers. Formula. Rubber nipples.
Haha. Nipples.
Bottles. Medicated wipes. All that.
One of the baby tanks chirps again at my feet. Lovelace. She’s thinner than Turing. Six inches by a foot. Has two barrels. A big one and a small one. Treads for crawling over crap.
Turing’s more square. Foot by a foot. Gives him the impression of being the sorta pudgy one. He’s only got one barrel, but it’s fatter. Like him.
Lovelace has a diaper on her turret. Used.
Fuckin...
I pinch my nose. Grimace. “Thank you, where’d you get this?” Since I’d like to find the aisle. Get my stuff. Get out. And also cuz it’s really weird.
Lovelace points toward the darkness at the back of the store with her turret.
I pop a flare. Toss it. An intense pink glow blankets the place. Pale tiles reflect the bright light. Food and random junk cast their shadows against the walls.
There’s all kinds of crap littering the ground. Opened cans. Clothes. Spent bullet casings.
Actually, a lot of spent bullet casings. Place must’ve seen some serious action.
Some parts of the store are perfect. Neatly organized. Obvious enough that a group of people held up here. Other parts, man, look like they went through a thresher. The shelves are torn up. Broken. There’s blood everywhere. And someone’s teeth in a pile. Or parts of em. The metal caps a dentist would’ve put in.
However it went down, it was bad.
I mean, yeah, that goes without saying. But this looks bad bad.
Bad bad bad bad?
All of the bads.
I shoulder the Hellion. Stare through its holographic sight. Flick off the safety. Yank back on the ambidextrous charging handle. And hope to hell these Mercury rounds do something impressive.
The BABY NEEDS aisle seems to be the least fucked. That’s a plus. But holy shit are there a lot of different kinds of diapers. Pampers and Huggies and Luvs and some hippie looking nonsense called Earth’s Best, which I kinda doubt.
I grab a tightly sealed bag of thirty-two Huggies that claim they’re for newborn human beings with vaginas. I stuff it into my ALICE pack.
Looting for bottles and formula is the same fuckin headache the diapers were. Guy like me, I never thought of babies being a whole industry. We turned our young into a cash grab. At least, the capitalists did.
And then there’s welfare trash... Them too.
Actually, I never thought of babies much at all.
That’s a lie and you know it. You wanted one with her.
I grab what I’ve seen in commercials. It all goes into the pack.
I pop another flare. Toss it in the back.
The flare illuminates the big storage area doors. Warehouse in back where they kept shipments. Heavy blue swiveling bastards. Got bumpers on em for when stock gets moved through on handcarts. As much for the door’s protection as the shopping carts and dollies.
I push my way through. Step into the antechamber right before the stockroom.
An incredible stench hits me. Decay. Human and food.
Humans are food now.
I throw another flare.
The walls’re covered in posters for kids’ shows. Oh. There’s stuffed animals on the ground. Fuck. Dinosaurs and teddy bears and annoying TV mascots. Little plastic tables cluttered with Sippy cups. Crayons. Drawings.
It’s tempting to grab a toy or two. Something for Rugrat.
I see a crib in the manager’s office. The window’s broken. Professional headquarters of a Mr. Richard Johnson. Which’s an awful name.
No, wait. There’s three cribs. I think they used to be white.
Everything’s red now.
I don’t wanna go in. Don’t wanna see photos of this probably-dead dude with his family. It’s not even the possibility of dead babies. I’ve seen that before. Ain’t easy to look at, but I can handle it.
Nah. It’s the photos. Reminders of some time when things weren’t terrible.
That’s what I hate seeing.
Easier to be a miserable bastard and truck on.
I poke my head into Dick Johnson’s room. Just to make sure there’s nothing gonna pop out behind me. But it’s empty. Except the blood on the cribs. The blood on the rattles. The blood on the desk. The blood on the...
There’s another weird pile of dentistry leftovers here. Caps and a bridge.
I turn back. Pass through the nightmare kindergarten scene. Push deeper into the warehouse section. Only doing this cuz of that diaper Lovelace found. Might be a survivor. Some little kid. I know that ain’t exactly my modus operandi, but Newark changed part of my head.
Newark also kinda broke part of your head. You smelled it when you came in. This is where the parasite is. Ain’t nobody alive back there.
But I gotta know.
I cook off my last flare. Toss it high.
Pink light reflects off something on the ceiling. Something tucked up in the steel rafters. I see its leathery sides for a heartbeat. My first thought is: A bat. One big one.
Except it would have to be infected to be that large. And as has been noted, the parasite ain’t figured out that whole flying thing yet. Plissken and me figure it’s either cuz an infected body has too much mass to lift, given how the bodies get distorted, or it’s cuz the diseased flesh’s too floppy.
Heh. Floppy.
I keep going. Don’t wanna get under whatever it is but I don’t wanna wake it up either. So I stick to the perimeter. Against the warehouse walls. Just poking my head around. I’ll make a lap. Then collect the baby tanks. Then get the out. Be back on the road in no time. Hit Boston by morning.
Noise. Behind me. I do a one-eighty.
I hiss. “Dammit.”
There’s Lovelace and Turing. They roll to me. Appear to have upgraded themselves. Both’ve got a little screen under their barrels now. Attached to the tank canopies. They show emoticons. Lovelace’
s is a big smiley: Turing’s is that sorta grumpy face:
I say, “Great. This’s gonna be like talking to inept people online. Or in texts with their faces stuck in a screen.” One of the best things about the apocalypse was never having to see another idiot pigfucker walking the streets unable to do anything but gawk at his phone. I’m also no longer referred to as a “dumb gay idiot faggot” by random readers.
The baby tank’s screens both go:
Guess they’re learning fast. Now I feel bad. Being a dick to Plissken’s kids. I say, “Sorry guys. You did a real good job scavenging. Why don’t you get back to your mom and dad. I’ll be along soon. Try the front doors instead of the window, though.”
Lovelace and Turing both go: .
They start toward the doors. I guess not particularly bothered by the implied infant-murder of the scene.
I get back to walking the edge of the warehouse.
Look up at the ceiling.
Motherfucker ain’t where it was before. It’s a few feet closer. Still in the rafters. But definitely closer. Parts of it twitch. Jerk around. Like it’s settling again.
Or not. I don’t even know what I’m looking at. Except that it’s infected.
Gotta be.
Which means it’s time to see what this new gun and ammunition can do.
I set the Hellion for semi-auto. No reason to burn through a mag and not hit anything. I line up a shot. More or less where the head would be on something hanging upside down.
Bang bang.
The Hellion barely kicks. Compensators in the rifle stock make sure of that. The rounds flash. Tracers. No good for stealth. But they’re accurate enough. They blow two fiery holes right through the monster in the rafters. Then keep going. Blows holes through the roof.
I’m in love. Cuz I can see myself killing many things with this gun.
Love’s funny like that.
Too bad the monster ain’t dead.
I watch it.
Ain’t a bat.
Tis an amalgamation of horrors.
A shitload of tentacles and spindly jointed legs unfurl. Tough to count in the shadows. The creature twists around. Still holding on to the beams across the ceiling. It squeals.
A Man and His Robot Page 11