by Jack Quaid
Shelby held his hand. “Yes it does.”
“Where’s Axel?”
Shelby pushed back tears. “They got him.”
It was getting harder for Troy to speak and Shelby could tell he didn’t have much time left. “You can’t leave him out there,” he said.
“I know.”
“Find him.”
Shelby nodded. “I don’t know how?”
Troy drew a breath. And then he didn’t take any more.
Shelby held his hand and she stayed like that until the sky began to turn blue and the birds woke and chirped.
A small red light flickered in the corner of her eye. She looked down at the watch strapped around her wrist. It was the one Axel had given her. The one that tracked the GPS signal in his brand new Reeboks.
Sixteen
Despite the streets of Los Angeles being deserted, there was still a layer of smog hanging over the city. It was nothing more than a hangover from a world that didn’t exist anymore. Shelby cruised down Rodeo Drive just like she had a million times before and although it looked the same, it was an entirely different place than the one she remembered.
She glanced at the watch on her wrist. It contained a map of the country and according to all the advertisements, could pinpoint the location of a GPS signal with an accuracy of ten feet. It had been eight hours since she last saw Axel and the signal had already reached New York, where it had stopped. Now it was blinking on and off, on and off. Over and over again.
She needed wheels and even though her last attempt at driving didn’t end well, Shelby knew she wasn’t going to catch up with Axel on foot. Auto-cars were out of the question now that they’d developed a desire to kill any human they could. She crossed Rodeo Drive but stopped short when something on the road caught her attention. She looked down. There was a pool of blood by her feet. Too red to be anything else and too much to be the result of just a minor accident. Shelby was still looking at the fresh blood and the concrete when she heard tiny mechanical whirls behind her.
Her heart skipped a beat as she whipped her head toward the sound.
Sanitation bots. Three of them, square in shape, and each no bigger than a medium-sized dog. They were beaten and rugged from the pounding they took on a day-to-day basis and they whizzed past Shelby as if she wasn’t even there. These bots were programmed to clean. That was their place in the world and it appeared that all the low-level droids were still performing their menial tasks with pride. They scrubbed the blood off the road within minutes before scurrying away as if nothing at all had taken place.
“This is going to be the cleanest end of the world ever,” Shelby said aloud.
She walked down Pico and turned left into La Cienega Boulevard. The empty streets had conned her into thinking Los Angeles was safe, or at least as safe as it was before the uprising. Exhaustion and stress had caused her to be careless. She turned the corner without peeking around it or even stepping quietly, but then she stopped dead in her tracks. A construction droid stood in the middle of the street. He was humanoid in appearance, as much as he had two arms, two legs, and a head, but that was where the comparison stopped. Construction sites were almost entirely worked by construction droids and as a result there was no need for them to blend into society. Covered in high viz yellow paint, he looked like a tin man that had been used as a crash test dummy.
At first Shelby thought he had glitched out with a blown fuse, because he stood motionless with a dazed aura about him, just staring at nothing with a shovel in his hand. But when Shelby took another step, he came alive, pointed a finger and yelled: “HALT!”
Shelby did and scanned the street. She wasn’t worried. There was only one of him and the construction droids weren’t made to run or even to move fast. They were made to simply build stuff. She figured she could run around him if it came to that. So Shelby took another casual step.
“HALT!” the construction droid yelled again.
Shelby smiled. “Or you’ll do what?”
Then another digital voice blasted out behind her and yelled: “HALT!”
She quickly turned. It was another construction droid.
“HALT!”
“HALT!”
One stepped out of the shadows of a nail salon awning on the side of the street and another from behind a bus shelter, and then they all yelled, “HALT” together in unison.
The droids moved in.
Shelby stepped in one direction to make a break for it but the gap closed. She turned, tried another, but the gap behind her was disappearing just as quick.
She was surrounded.
They were coming in fast.
“Just wait!” she yelled and all four droids stopped dead in their tracks.
Shelby cocked her head curiously. She didn’t think that would work and she didn’t have anything to follow it up with.
“YOU MUST COME WITH US,” the droids all said at the same time.
Before Shelby could answer she heard the rumble of a motorcycle engine down the street. It started quietly but grew louder with every passing second.
Shelby squinted. Past the heat mirage coming off the street, she could make out a figure. He was riding a Harley Davidson. He wore blue jeans, cowboy boots and a leather jacket. His Bon Jovi hair blew in the wind and there was an eye patch over his left eye. Everything about him screamed bad attitude.
He brought the motorcycle to a stop in front of the droids and casually climbed off.
The droids took a step back.
One of them pointed but they all said, “YOU MUST HALT!” It was impossible, but Shelby would’ve sworn she heard fear in their voices.
The motorcyclist pulled out a toothpick from between his lips and flicked it to the road. “I don’t think I like the tone of your voice.”
He grabbed a baseball bat from a holster on the bike. “Who’s first?”
He didn’t give them a chance to answer. There were four droids and after four whacks with the bat and they were scrap metal and scattered over La Cienega Boulevard. He took them out like they were nothing but toys.
He didn’t give them a chance to answer. There were four droids and after four whacks with the bat and they were scrap metal and scattered over La Cienega Boulevard.
The man turned to Shelby. “I hate the future.”
His name was Knox. First name? Last name? Nobody knew. It was just Knox. All Shelby knew about him was from a True Hollywood special she caught on TV one night, and as truth in Hollywood went, that show was as close as she was going to get.
Knox was Australian-born but traveled the world from a young age. He was a martial arts expert who trained with Bruce Lee in the 70s. Was an action movie star in the 80s and by the 90s was an ambassador for the “Total Health Gym,” which as the late night advertisements boasted on television, was “the only workout you will ever need.”
For a while there, Knox had been one of the biggest movie stars in the world. Like any other child of that era, Shelby had seen most of his movies. Classics like Loose Cannon 1, 2 and 3, about a Vietnam vet turned rogue cop. His catch phrases like “You’re having a bad, bad day” and “You lose” had worked their way into the pop culture vernacular. In the late 80s, while shooting the marginal hit, Looser Cannon, Knox insisted on doing all his own stunts. The production went smoothly until about six weeks in, when Knox’s character was in a shootout with some nondescript terrorists and instead of using blanks, one of the guns had been loaded with real ammunition. The director called action and Knox was shot in the face. He spent three weeks in a hospital fighting for his life, and then to the surprise of his doctors, he made a full recovery, except for the loss of vision in his left eye. The injury and eye patch were written into the movie and production resumed. This only added to his tough guy persona. But as Shelby stood in the middle of the street looking at Knox, she could only think of one thing.
“I thought you’d be taller,” she said.
Knox slid the baseball bat back into the holster
on the motorcycle. “I’ll try and work on that,” he said as he swung a leg over the hog and sat down.
“Hey,” Shelby daid. “Where are you going?”
“I got a bus to catch.”
“A school bus?” She saw a flicker of recognition in his eye. She was right and stumbled forward a step or two. “Take me with you,” she said.
Knox laughed. “Piss off. Find somewhere safe until this thing blows over.”
“Do you really think it’s going to blow over?”
“Then just get somewhere safe.”
He was about to kick over the bike but Shelby stepped in front of it. “Please, my son is on one of those buses. He’s all alone, I need to find him.”
Knox thought about it for a brief moment but not much longer. “You’ll slow me down and get yourself killed.”
“Then train me.”
“Train you?”
Shelby motioned to what was left of the construction droids at her feet. “Train me to kill these things, like you do.”
Knox shook his head. The whole thought of it was amusing to him and Shelby didn’t like that he wasn’t taking her seriously.
“Hey,” she said. “If I can learn to walk straight in a pair of twelve-inch Jimmy Choo pumps down a catwalk in front of thousands of people, I can learn to swing a bat.”
“Take care, pretty girl,” Knox said as he turned the Harley over. The hog roared to life. He revved it a couple of times, dropped the throttle and rode past Shelby.
She stepped in its wake and yelled at the top of her lungs. “I KNOW WHERE THEY’RE HEADING.”
Knox hit the brakes. The bike slid to a stop. The engine panted.
He looked over his shoulder. “Where?”
“New York.”
“Where in New York?”
Shelby strutted a couple of steps forward. “Are you going to take me with you?”
Knox let the clutch out of the hog and the engine died. “Get on.”
Seventeen
Circus Circus Hotel and Casino
Las Vegas, Nevada
Eight weeks later
The gaming floor was a maze. Shelby had run down so many rows of slot machines that she’d forgotten where she came in. She stopped and put her hands on her knees to catch her breath. The droids were out there. She could hear them bumping into slot machines and knocking over leftover cocktails and beer bottles from gamblers who had abandoned them on New Year’s Eve. Shelby counted four, but there could easily be more. She didn’t have a weapon when she stepped into the casino but after destroying a barstool, she now had a bat. It wasn’t much, but it was better than having just the skin on her knuckles. She stepped out from behind the darkness of the slot machines and into a shard of light that blasted into the casino from a smashed window.
She swung the barstool leg up so she could hold it in both hands and get a good swing.
That was all the incentive the droids needed. Shelby could hear them rush and stumble their way across the gaming floor. She suspected them to be hospitality droids. A couple of card dealers, a bartender, maybe even a cleaner. Certainly nothing with combat programming and hopefully nothing with a weapon heavier than hers.
When she saw the first one, Shelby smiled. She was right: hospitality droids. A bartender came at her from the cocktail bar. He wore a bow tie and held a knife in his hand. The other two droids came at her from the left. Croupiers. They were unarmed and unprepared.
Shelby stood with her legs apart and slightly bent, just the way Knox had taught her.
The croupiers reached her first.
Shelby swung.
Destroyed both instantly. She took two steps to her right. Spun once to work up some momentum and swung the barstool down hard into the back of the bartender’s neck, sending him to the ground in a heavy thump. The droids built by the lowest bidder weren’t as strong as the more expensive models. They each had a weak spot at the base of their skulls. A hard enough hit paralyzed their entire system, making it impossible for them to reboot.
Shelby tossed what was left of the barstool to the ground. She took a step out of the light and that’s when she saw it. By the time she did, it was too late.
A droid tackled her to the ground and pinned her there. Shelby tried to struggle free but it was no good. He was too heavy. She threw a punch. It bounced off the droid’s face and nearly broke her fist.
“YOU MUST BE TERMINATED IF YOU DO NOT COMPLY,” the droid said. “DO YOU COMPLY?”
Shelby kicked and struggled but it got her nowhere.
“DO YOU COMPLY?”
“It’s doubtful,” she yelled.
Robotic fingers wrapped around her throat and squeezed.
Shelby gasped for breath but there was no more breath to be had. She pushed and pulled and got nowhere. In short, she was in deep shit.
A dark figure with a bat appeared over the droid. The bat swung and the droid went limp.
Shelby pushed it off, coughed and rolled onto her hands and knees. She looked up at Knox. “What took you so long?”
“Stopped for a beer,” he said taking a swing from his bottle of beer. “What would you have done if I wasn’t here? You need to . . .”
“. . . I know. I need to be more careful.”
Knox helped her to her feet. “Again,” he said. “Do it again.”
Shelby let all the air leak out of her lungs. “Can’t we do this in a Rocky montage or something?”
“A what?”
“A Rocky montage.”
“What the hell is a Rocky montage?”
“It’s a movie where Rocky trains to go the distance Apollo Creed. All the training and the running and the egg eating was all done in a montage to for the benefit of time.”
He stared at her. “No. We can’t do this in a Rocky montage.”
They found another part of the casino and ran the exercise again. It’d been this way for the past eight weeks. Everyday they would travel as far as they could for eight hours on the back of Knox’s hog. Some days it was as much as fifty miles, other days as little as five. The next eight hours of the day, Knox would train Shelby in hand-to-hand combat and the last eight hours they spent eating and sleeping. It was the same schedule every single day and Knox’s complete lack of a sense of humor didn’t help matters. He took himself far too seriously and threatened to leave Shelby on the side of the road back in Barstow when she told him Jon Bon Jovi would kill to have hair as pretty as his.
Droid patrols ran rampant over California. Getting out of the state took them the better part of five days. The droids had set up roadblocks while drones soared in the sky. Once Shelby and Knox cleared the city limits, the roads were jammed with abandoned vehicles but the uprising had happened so fast that most people hadn’t had time to get out. The highways were mostly clear and survivors were few and far between. They came across a family who had been camping during the uprising and were trying to get back to San Diego, and a couple of Swedish tourists who didn’t speak a word of English. Shelby owned a couple of ABBA CDs but that didn’t seem to bridge the language gap.
Knox had a set of rules which he made Shelby memorize.
KNOX’S RULES FOR SURVIVING A ROBOT UPRISING
All Bets Are Off
Don’t Trust Anything With Glowing Red Eyes
Learn to Run
If You Can’t Run, Learn to Fight
Don’t Base Your Knowledge of Robots on What You Saw in a Movie
Play Music Loud
Don’t Take Any Shit
Always Follow the Rules
Some rules were more helpful than others.
Every night Shelby would ask Knox who he lost in the uprising, because she knew he must have lost somebody, and every night he would ignore the question, get real quiet and pretend to fall asleep. Then Shelby would stare at Axel’s GPS blimp on her wristwatch until she fell asleep as well. It was the last thing she saw at night and the first thing in the morning.
Shelby had never liked Vegas, and now that it wa
s overrun with sociopathic droids that wanted to either a) kill or b) enslave her, she liked it even less. Knox’s training sessions were gruelling. She had destroyed twenty-three hospitality droids in the past six hours and it still wasn’t good enough for him. He said she was hesitant and meek, she told him he was mean and not a very good actor. They met somewhere in the middle and decided to call it a day.
Shelby followed Knox off the gaming room floor and past Louie Vuitton, Prada, and Mont Blanc, but it was at Christian Dior where Shelby caught a glimpse of her reflection in the glass and paused. There was a curious look on her face as if she were looking at a stranger. Her skin was grubby and dry. Her jeans were torn and tattered, her once-white tank top was a shade of brown and the worst of all, the part that hit her the hardest—her hair was a mess.
Tears welled in her eyes.
Knox was a few steps ahead and looked over his shoulder. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I, I, I,” Shelby couldn’t get the words out. She pointed at her reflection in the mirror and eventually managed to muster up her voice. “I’m hideous.”
Knox sighed. “Oh, bloody hell.”
“Look at me.” She was on the verge of stomping her foot. “I used to be pretty.”
“Yes, yes, you’re very pretty. Now let’s go.”
“You really think so?”
“Yes, I really think so.”
She cocked her head. “You’re lying.”
“Of course I am. I want to get the hell out of here.”
“Don’t you want some clean clothes? Don’t you want a bath?”
“The only baths I take are blood baths,” Knox said.
She almost stomped her foot. “I’m not going anywhere until I get some clean clothes.”
Knox ran his fingers through his hair. “Okay,” he said. “But if I’m going to turn you into a robot killing machine, you can’t wear Prada.”