World War Metal 1

by Jack Quaid

  He put his finger to his lips. “Shh.”

  Shelby looked over the edge of the building and saw one of the legs of the battle spider was right in front of her. She looked up. The rest of it was above them. A sound filtered out from its steel belly. The sound was slightly muffled. It was familiar, but foreign as well.

  “What’s that noise?” Shelby whispered.

  “Screams,” Knox whispered back. “Human screams. It’s collecting.”

  “Collecting what?”

  “Us.”

  A couple of minutes later, the battle spider moved on and Shelby slumped against the edge of the roof and thought about all those poor people in the belly of that steel beast. She couldn’t help but think about Axel in one of them.

  Twenty-One

  Shelby looked over her shoulder and back at Knox. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Look into my eye,” he said as he pointed to his good one. “Do I look like I’m joking?”

  “I really don’t know you all that well,” Shelby said as she turned back to the android.

  They were in the parking lot of a Macy’s somewhere between Salt Lake City and Cheyenne. It was late in the afternoon and apart from a few scattered cars, Shelby, and Knox, the parking lot was empty. Except for the android. Knox had chained him to a pre-auto Ford and his resemblance to Dr. Phil from the hit TV show Dr. Phil was uncanny. The same ugly suit, the same moustache and same southern drawl. He was a mental health droid and his presence in the middle American mall wasn’t uncommon. His type roamed around malls everywhere and for a fee, gave life advice to those who had the time to listen in between their shopping. His advice generally consisted of tacky quotes from his hit TV show.

  “We’re not going to make it to New York unless you can learn to take out one of these things on your own,” Knox said.

  On the table were the weapons Shelby was meant to use. A frying pan, a pool cue and a rock. All of them traditionally useless against androids.

  “We’re not going to get to New York with weapons like these.”

  “Sometimes weapons like these are all you’re going to have. Now stop whinging and get in there,” Knox said as he unchained the Dr. Phil droid from the Ford.

  Shelby picked up the pool cue and circled the machine.

  The Dr. Phil droid gave her a warm and welcoming smile. “What can I do for yer, little lady?”

  He moved in short glittery steps and seemed to be disorientated. Something had gone wrong with his programming. It was like he had robot Tourette’s Syndrome.

  “You’re fat,” Dr. Phil yelled. “Don’t sugar coat it because you’ll eat that as well.”

  Shelby shifted her weight to her back foot and smiled. “Excuse me?”

  “My Dad used to tell me, ‘Boy, don’t ever miss a good chance to shut up.’”

  “I was about to say the same thing,” Shelby said.

  Knox leaned on his hog. “It’s not a toy,” he said. “Kill it. You won’t get any help from me.”

  “My pleasure.” Shelby sprinted as fast as she could toward Dr. Phil. She ran past him to the Ford. Put one foot on the bumper, another on the hood and launched herself into the air. When she had enough height, she spun and swung the pool cue into the base of Dr. Phil’s skull, snapping it to pieces. She hit the ground and dropped to one knee. Pretty pleased with herself, Shelby looked to Knox and smiled.

  Knox pointed behind her. Dr. Phil rose to his feet. Shelby drew a breath, stood and dusted off her hands.

  “We must have open conversation about this,” Dr. Phil said. He picked up the frying pan and took a couple of random swipes in Shelby’s direction.

  She shifted her body into the fighting stance Knox had taught her. “Alright, you son of a bitch. Let’s talk.”

  He swung. Shelby ducked but she was too slow and Dr. Phil was too close. He grabbed hold of her throat. Held the frying pan high in the sky.

  Shelby looked to Knox. He seemed bored and not in a helping mood.

  She closed her eyes and prepared for the impact.

  Then she heard the crack of gunfire.

  Blue static electricity surged through Dr. Phil. His body froze, stiffened and shut down.

  Shelby fell to the concrete and looked around the frozen Dr. Phil bot. Behind it, she saw a young kid who looked as if he had never been laid, wearing a vintage Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle tee-shirt. Which probably explained why he looked like he had never been laid. The kid had a scared look on his face and a smoking shotgun in his hand.

  A barrel pushed into the kid’s temple. His eyes looked to the right and followed the barrel to the hand, to the arm, to Knox’s one good eye.

  “Who the hell are you?” Knox said.

  “I’m Sue.”

  “Sue?” Knox said and then he pointed at Sue’s groin. “Is that some kind of sex change thing?.”

  “My old man was a big Johnny Cash fan.”

  Shelby climbed to her feet. “How did you do that?”

  “Do what?” he said with a tremor in his voice.

  Shelby pointed to the frozen Dr. Phil. “How did you stop him.”

  Hesitantly, Sue held out the shotgun for her to take. She did and looked it over.

  “Just looks like a shotgun to me?”

  “More or less it is, you know. In every which way, it’s still a shotgun, nothing special about that. It’s the ammunition that makes all the difference.”

  “What about it?” Knox asked.

  “Each shell contains a small EMP blast. Strong enough to take down any humanoid droid.”

  Knox and Shelby swapped a glance. She pointed at the frozen Dr. Phil. “Is he going to reboot?”

  Sue shook his head. “He’s fried.”

  Knox lowered his weapon and the whole scene chilled.

  “Where did you get this EMP ammunition?” Shelby asked.

  Sue shifted his glance from Shelby to Knox and back again. “Why should I tell you?”

  Shelby swung the shotgun up onto her shoulder. “Because I asked nicely,” she said. “And because we’re the ones with the guns.”

  Sue swallowed hard and conceded. “Before,” he motioned around at the desolate emptiness around them, “all this, I designed weapons for Olympus.”

  “Building droids?” Shelby asked.

  Sue shook his head and then spoke at a hundred miles an hour, like an excited child or a meth head. “I worked on the Analogue Program. The weapons we designed were built to fry droids. Burn all their circuit boards.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “EMP blasts,” he said. “You see, an electromagnetic pulse is kind of like a little lighting bolt that can take out the electricity in a plane or a building. We weaponized that technology and put it in shotgun shells, hand grenades, bombs. Very cool stuff, very, very cool.”

  “One shotgun shell can take out a droid?”

  “No,” Sue said. “One shotgun shell can take out Dr. Phil, a domestic droid. Battle droids take a couple more, and it depends on where you hit them.”

  Shelby tapped the Dr. Phil bot with her foot. “Olympus makes these things. Why would they make a weapon to destroy their own product?”

  “Olympus isn’t the only kid in the playground,” Sue said. “The Ruskies have a line of droids and the Chinese are years ahead of us in terms of tech. They wanted to create a weapon for human soldiers to take into battle against a droid army.” Sue smiled. “They probably didn’t think we’d need to use it against our own army.”

  “Do you have any more of these weapons, princess?” Knox asked.

  Sue looked to the ground and shook his head. “Just that shotgun.”

  Knox swung a leg over his hog. “Well, see you around, princess. Places to go, people to see.”

  Panic gripped Sue. “Take me with you? Please.”

  “Sorry,” Knox said. “We’re on a mission.”

  “I can’t stay out here much longer, I . . .” His whole body slumped forward. “I won’t survive out here by myself.”
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  He was right and Shelby knew it by looking at him. Before the uprising, he would have struggled to find a meal without fast food. She stepped forward. “Maybe we could take him with us to the next town.”

  Knox’s forehead formed a V. “He’s a little girly man. He’ll get himself killed in a couple of hours. Probably us too and I don’t feel like getting killed.”

  “I know where there’s bullets, shotgun shells, grenades. I know where all the EMP ammunition is,” Sue said. It was his last chance and the stress in his voice proved it. “There’s a warehouse thirty miles from here. It has everything we were working on.”

  Knox sized him up for a moment. “Sounds like bullshit to me.”

  Shelby ejected the EMP shell from the shotgun and moved it around the palm of her hand. She looked over at Knox. “What if it’s not.”

  “He would lick his own privates right now if he thought we’d look after him.”

  “We’re not going to make it to New York with baseball bats and rocks,” Shelby said.

  Knox shifted his gaze from her to Sue.

  “So what do you say, huh?” Sue asked with a smile. “Are we a team?”

  Twenty-Two

  They broke into a Walgreens to stock up on some supplies and work out a plan of attack. Shelby sat near the registers and watched as Sue walked through a model of the Project Analogue industrial complex he had put together out of breakfast cereal boxes.

  “Okay, are we all ready?” Sue asked.

  Shelby and Knox swapped a glance. They had been ready for the past twenty minutes but had spent that time watching Sue set up the elaborate model.

  “I think we’re ready,” Shelby said.

  Sue stepped through the model and spoke as fast as he could. “Project Analogue lives on a five hectare plant. It’s self contained, you see. We can develop, test and put into mass production all matter of EMP weaponry.” He pointed at various cereal boxes. “They have laboratories, training facilities and factories. And all around that they have, not one, but three, fifteen-foot high fences with razor wire and each one of them is twenty feet apart.”

  “The only thing it doesn’t have is a moat,” Shelby said.

  Sue didn’t even slow down. “The good thing is, we should be able to just walk right inside.”

  Knox helped himself to a pack of cigarettes from behind the counter. “Are you taking the piss?”

  Sue shook his head and smiled. “Nah, nah, nah. We had human security guards. It’s the only Olympus site in the country that didn’t have robo security. I guess someone thought it was smart not to have droids guard the building where we built the weapons to destroy the droids, huh?”

  “So there’s no guards?” Shelby asked.

  “If there are any left, they’re human,” Sue said. “And given the current state of things I’m pretty sure they’ll be on our side.”

  Shelby turned to Knox as he lit up a cigarette. “What do you think?”

  “Where are the weapons kept?”

  “In the ammunition warehouse,” Sue said. “The Frosted Flakes.”

  “Which one is the Frosted Flakes?”

  Sue pointed. “That one there.”

  “Which one?”

  He pointed again. “That one.”

  Knox pointed. “That one?”

  “No, that’s Captain Planet.”

  “Who even eats Captain Planet?” Shelby asked.

  “Who cares!” Knox snapped. “Where’s the ammunition warehouse?”

  “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you eat breakfast?” Sue asked.

  Knox flicked his cigarette across the Walgreens. “I eat little shits like you for breakfast.”

  “Alright, alright, alright, breakfast is a touchy subject.” Sue walked over to the box of Frosted Flakes. “This is where the weapons are kept.”

  “Are you sure this is everything?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You haven’t forgotten a box of Rice Krispies or anything?” Shelby asked. “There’s no other buildings that are going to take us by surprise?”

  Sue shook his head. “We’ll walk right in,” he said. “It’ll be a piece of cake.”

  Twenty-Three

  Knox pulled his eyes from the binoculars and turned to Sue. “What kind of cake is this, princess? A shit eating cake?”

  The three of them were belly down on a hill that overlooked the entire complex of Project Analogue.

  Shelby took the binoculars from Knox, pushed them to her face and scanned the darkness. She stopped dead when she saw a battle droid. There were dozens of them and they all stood guard around the ammunition warehouse.

  Shelby lowered the binoculars. “There’s more robots down there than an episode of Transformers.”

  “What?” Sue said and took a look through the binoculars himself.

  “I think Tera Mach had the same idea as us.” He turned toward Knox and Shelby. “They’re not guarding the weapons, they’re taking them.”

  Shelby snatched the binoculars back. Near the warehouse, two battle droids shared the weight of a pallet full of gear and slid it into the back of the truck. As soon as it was loaded on, another droid closed the door and locked it.

  “They’re leaving,” Shelby said.

  The battle droids had been spread out, but one by one they retreated back and climbed on board as the faint sound of the engine coming alive floated through the night. The other battle droids climbed onto the truck. There were five on each side, four on the roof, and they all had their weapons drawn. Each side was covered by an awesome amount of firepower and it’d be impossible to get within fifty feet of the vehicle without being cut down. The truck slowly pulled away from the warehouse. As it gained speed, it disappeared around a corner.

  Shelby climbed to her feet. “We’re never going to get to New York without those weapons.”

  “What do you want to do?” Knox said. “Go after it? We don’t even know where it’s heading.”

  Down by the warehouse she saw a movement. She lifted the binoculars to her face. A battle droid stood by the warehouse door.

  Shelby smiled. “But I think I might know who does.”

  Twenty-Four

  “What’s wrong with him?” Shelby asked.

  “He’s in sleep mode,” Sue said.

  “I didn’t know they got sleepy?”

  “They go on standby, to conserve energy.”

  They were inside the Project Analogue complex and crouched behind an auto-car that had been torched and sat in ruins in the middle of the road.

  Shelby scanned the area. “There’s only one.”

  “Were you hoping there’d be more?” Knox said.

  “I was hoping there’d be none.”

  “He won’t snap out of standby mode unless there’s immediate movement close to his proximity,” Sue said.

  “How close?”

  “Thirty feet, give or take.”

  “And then what?”

  “He’ll go from zero to a hundred in about five seconds.”

  “So I have five seconds to move thirty feet.” Shelby gripped the shotgun. “And put one of these EMP rounds into his chest.”

  Sue nodded gravely.

  “And then what?” Knox asked.

  “It’ll take him two minutes to reboot.” Sue dug around in his backpack for a moment and pulled out a laptop. “I’ll hack into him, find out where that truck is going.”

  “And after two minutes?” Knox asked.

  “He’ll be back online,” Sue said.

  Shelby racked the shotgun. “And I put one in his head.”

  “Will that kill it?” Knox asked.

  Sue nodded. “I haven’t seen any droid take more than two shells and keep moving.” He looked at Shelby. “We only have two EMP shells left. You miss and we’re dead.”

  “So no pressure?” Shelby said with a smile. She turned on her heels and took a step toward the warehouse.

  “Hey,” Knox called. “This is a shithouse plan.”
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  Shelby nodded. “I know.”

  “I can do it.”

  “The way you thump around on your feet? He’ll hear you coming a mile away,” Shelby said.

  She stepped off down the street with light footsteps, and with everyone of those steps, her stomach grew tighter and her breath shortened. At one point she stopped altogether, then drew in a long, deep breath and exhaled as slowly as she could. She remembered a yoga lesson from sometime ago where the slow breathing was meant to be calming. It very well may have been in the safety of a yoga studio, but when marching toward a battle droid, the calming effect wasn’t as strong.

  She kept going and then slowed to another stop at what she guessed was close to thirty feet from the battle droid. He stood there motionless like a statue. His torso lean, his arms strong, and his face completely smooth without any features except for the red visor for eyes.

  Shelby wiped her sweaty hands on her pants and gripped the shotgun. Just before she was about to take a step, the battle droid moved. Its body stiffened and crouched at the knees as if it were about to be attacked in a kung fu movie.

  Shelby had been in its range for long enough for it to come back online. The droid’s head tilted slightly as if it was confused about her presence.

  “HALT CITIZEN,” it said. “DROP YOUR WEAPON AND SURRENDER.”

  Shelby threw a quick glance back down the street to Knox and Sue. She couldn’t see their faces but she heard Sue yell: “RUUUUUUUUUUN!”

  Shelby snapped her head back to the droid.

  “CITIZEN. THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING. DROP YOUR WEAPON AND SURRENDER!”

  Shelby gripped the shotgun tighter. “I don’t think so, sweetheart,” she said under her breath. She stepped off and with big lunges ran as fast as she could toward the battle droid.

  It raised its left arm and within seconds the entire thing reassembled and formed a machine gun.

  She was still fifteen feet out when she skidded to a stop.

  She took aim.

  She fired.

  The battle droid moved. The blast went over his shoulder.