Quey watched the man intently.
It was a difficult shot at this speed, with the condition of the road questionable as it was, but Quey knew with the force and spread of that gun close might be good enough.
His eyes, steel and focused, watched the Once Man in his filthy, jostling side mirror, waiting to see the change in him that said, ‘I’m about to fire,’ and when he saw it he slammed on his breaks. The shotgun roared and leapt in the Once Man’s hands. Pellets crashed into the pavement under the trailer. The truck’s breaks squealed and Quey’s hands gripped the wheel so tight his fingernails dug into his palms as he struggled to keep the rig strait. Last thing he needed to do now was jackknife the fucking thing.
Quey felt every one of the thousands of cracks and chunks missing from the road under his tires as his truck protested the sudden stop.
The two cars racing behind him dodged to either side, kicking up sand along the shoulders of the highway as they flashed past his rig. Quey allowed himself a brief smile that was snatched from his lips when he saw the third car, not quite up to speed yet, screech to a stop beside him.
“Shit,” he said. He hadn’t considered that one.
He ducked as gunfire cracked and metal panged against the side of his truck. He heard a reverberating boom and the shredding of rubber followed by the hiss of air escaping. He felt the left side of the truck sink a centimeter at a time, taking his heart with it.
The glass from the driver’s side window exploded and rained prismatic shards down on the legs of his jeans. He felt a chunk scrape his ankle as it began to work its way into his boot.
Quey took up his gun, an automatic, and counted the pops outside. When he got to six he sat up and emptied his weapon into the rusted heap stopped on the road beside him. The sides of his truck were armored, and he smiled slightly when he saw theirs were not.
The Once Man sitting in the passenger’s seat reloading his revolver didn’t even have time to react to the shot that shattered his skull and sprayed bits of his brain onto the one sitting in the driver’s seat. He just sat grinning as he reloaded the gun one shell at a time and then… nothing.
It took the driver a full pair of ticks to realize that the chunks of wet sticky stuff clinging to his face and the warm fluid slowly trickling down to his chin had been his friend’s head a moment before. He touched his cheek and wiped bits of skull and brain into his hand and peered down at it quizzically as one of Quey’s bullets sunk into his torso, broke through his ribs and popped his right lung.
Ten shots spread between the front and back seats and Quey was empty. He ducked back down, lying flat against the passenger seat and reached into the glove compartment where two more magazines were loaded and waiting.
Outside there was shouting and he heard the other two cars making their way back. Gunfire cracked, shattering the windshield and raining more glass down on him. Covering his head, Quey waited for a break in the shots. He knew he’d hit the guys in the front seat, but the two in back might have scampered out and taken cover.
Bullets rang all around him and he knew the other two cars had turned around and come back. He listened to metal hammer into the truck like dried corn rattling around in a tin can. He could wait out their ammo here in the reinforced cab, and then he could take them.
A louder gun boomed twice from in front of the truck. Bullets punctured the hood and rattled around the engine a bit before the truck sputtered to a stop. That was when Quey’s face went blank. He realized, as he listened to the engine sputter and quit, that he was a dead man. Even if he somehow managed to fend off the Once Men, even if he had enough spare tires in the back, the engine was finished and he didn’t have the water to make it anywhere. Not to mention the wildlife that roamed around out here, and the other Once Men who were likely to hear the scuffle and come to investigate.
There was a part of him, in the back of his head, that denied such a thought. ‘I’ll be alright,’ it told him. ‘I won’t die out here, not like this.’
But his heart knew the truth. He’d been making this run for almost a decade, four of those years on his own, and he’d had a few close calls but nothing like this. He’d been lucky and now luck had tossed him to the Once Men. ‘No,’ that place in the back of his brain insisted, ‘You’ll be just fine. The truck is reinforced. Their shells can’t get through. You’ll take them out and then…’
Quey smiled and laughed at himself. “Then what?” he asked the cab. And he wondered, as he reloaded, if the hundreds of other roaders who’d met this fate had thought the same thing before the Once Men got hold of them. “Not me,” they’d insisted, even as they felt their skin being sliced off, “I’m going to live.”
One of them jumped up onto the side of the truck and stared through the shattered window at Quey lying on the seat. He saw everything in that scarred, colorless and leathery face peering in over the jagged glass teeth jutting up from the driver’s side door. They were as smart as men, had the awareness of men, but they’d lost something and what that was, he suspected, was what made men people.
To Quey’s horror the Once Man snarled at him and he saw its rotting teeth and black, bleeding gums. Chunks of teeth were chipped away and the bits that remained were yellow at best and drifted toward black from there.
Quey cringed as the thing’s yellow brown eyes glared at him and then he let his gun destroy the Once Man’s face with a resonating boom, jerking its head back and sending it tumbling to the pavement. ‘Hopeless or not there was no point in making it easy for them,’ he thought.
They answered his shot with a dozen of their own, all of which cracked uselessly against the truck. When the echo’s faded into the distance he heard them shouting back and forth in their simple language, short sounds that communicated basic thoughts.
“Ka na!”
“Ra ba.”
No words in the Once Men’s language spanned more than a single syllable and he knew this was it. They still had the brains of men and they were using them now. Coordinating their efforts into a single final assault.
Quey sat up and fired wildly at the Once Men. The first shot struck one and a red mist burst from his shoulder and sent him spinning to the ground. The others reacted, ducking behind the cars and his shots hit air or metal. When he was empty he lay flat against the seat again and listened to the frantic shouts of their staccato language as he loaded his last magazine into his gun and chambered a round.
There were ten of them out there and ten rounds in his gun, a thought that prickled its way up his spine and through the back of his head. He shunned it. No point in paying it notice as there was nothing he could do to change it.
Still, his mind swam into what felt like a dream. His thoughts blurred and nothing felt real. He took a deep breath and shook the sensation. ‘No time for that,’ he thought, ‘You’ll have all the euphoria you can handle in not too long now.’
He listened to the Once Men’s feet hurry across the pavement as they positioned themselves to execute whatever plan their alpha had formulated. He heard them settle just outside the doors on either side, then he heard the sound of feet pounding on metal far behind him and he knew they were on the roof of his trailer. They were moving up the rig toward the cab and his eyes watered slightly. Shaking, he searched the cab but there was nowhere for him to hide from the storm of bullets that was about to rain in on him.
Cautious and trembling he lifted his head and a shot rang out. A bullet tore a two-inch hole in the seat just above his head as he collapsed back down against the leather. He’d only been up a split but it was enough time to notice the Once Man leaning over the hood of the car in front of his truck. He was aiming a rifle. A really big fucking rifle.
“Ha,” he heard the man behind the car bark and the footsteps slowly moving along the roof of the trailer started up again.
Heart racing he felt the hot breeze swarm over him as it passed through the truck’s shattered windows and the sweat beading over his skin, and soaking through his clo
thes. Quey’s eyes searched for something he hadn’t noticed. Glancing frantically about, his mind churning desperately and seeking a plan for a scenario that ended with him breathing and still alive, he thought about Cal choking on his own blood and suddenly he felt cold despite the heat.
Fully automatic gunfire ripped across the barren wastes. Quey’s brow furrowed. Once Men never used repeaters. Point of fact, there weren’t many people that did these days either, and the last time he’d heard shots ring out like that was the night Cal died.
‘It’s been a good run.’
Quey had never given much thought to Cal’s last words until he expected to be dead himself. Now, lying flat in the front seat of his own rig, he reflected and tried to muster the courage to say them himself. He thought of all the wonderful shine he’d made and all the crates and barrels he’d delivered. He thought of the towns he’d visited, the festivals he’d been responsible for and the people he’d acquainted, and he felt nothing but longing. Where Cal had found gratification Quey found despair.
Cal made shine till the day he died because for him the shine had been enough. For Quey the shine was a way of getting cash enough on hand for someday. What he intended to do when that someday arrived he was never sure of, but he knew it wasn’t making shine. That was why he couldn’t bring himself to say his friend’s words. Instead, as he listened to the rapid gunfire hammer across the highway, he pleaded, “Come on, this can’t be it.”
Then he heard the bang of a body collapsing on the roof above him and the wet, solid smack of one falling to the pavement. Return gunfire originated from the passenger’s side of his truck and there was a soft whirr as something mechanical moved. More automatic fire cracked across the highway and then there was the short shouting of the Once Men, frantic and panicked.
The Once Man waiting outside the passenger side door hurried around the front of the truck. Quey heard his footsteps circle around and then the solid crackle of automatic fire followed by the heavy collapse of a man hitting the ground.
Curiosity got the better of him and since he already figured he was dead, he decided to sit up and take a look. He looked first to the car where the Once Man had been positioned across the hood with a rifle. He was now aiming at something else, something off in the wastes Quey couldn’t see from his current position.
A puff of smoke burst from the rifle. Something mechanical whirred and the car screamed as gunfire ripped through its nose. Three dozen holes flashed into existence under a cluster of sparks and the front of the car sunk on its newly flattened tires. Quey sat up but hunched behind the wheel. There was something on the other side of the car parked beside his rig.
The Once Man opened fire, three quick shots, and Quey ducked, but his eyes kept searching for whatever was on the other side of that car. He heard the whirr again and the subtle clicking of the Once Man reloading. The Once Man ran out from behind the car, aiming his rifle and screaming as he ran toward the mysterious stranger with the repeater. Three quick shots echoed across the wastes and the Once Man dropped, lifeless, into a steadily filling pool of blood.
Quey peered at the front end of the car beside him, anxious and terrified as he waited to see what might come out from behind it. The highway was silent again.
Quey sat back, broken glass crunching noisily under his weight, and sighed.
He decided if who or whatever was on the other side of that car wanted to kill him then it was going to. He could tell by the sound of the gun it was firing that it was heavy enough to get through his truck. Still, his stomach clenched when he called, “Hello?”
Whirr. He leaned closer to the empty window and watched as a small shiny antenna rose slowly from behind the hood of the car. A small box, about the size of a die rested atop the antenna and turned slowly until a lens was facing him. It watched him for a long moment then lowered.
Quey frowned puzzlement and then his face went pale as something occurred to him. In all the excitement he’d forgotten where he was. Frantically, he scrambled to pull the sheet computer from his dash and when he managed his trembling hands nearly dropped it. He pushed the button on the lower right hand side of the device and it went from pliable as a piece of paper to rigid. Then he tapped the button on the left and waited for it to boot, tapping his foot nervously as he did.
Whirr. The robot rolled out from behind the car, its tiny camera scanning the area. It was a two-foot metal torso sitting on tank treads with four arms and a perfectly round head painted green with a giant orange Mohawk. It was pristine, its entire body painted with an image he couldn’t make out. He squinted and when the robot turned he saw what appeared to be a turtle standing upright on a rock surrounded by lava and a castle in the background. The turtle creature was breathing fire from its yellow mouth. It had sharp white teeth and what seemed to be a Mohawk, just like the robot it was painted on. The robot’s top two arms functioned only as guns while the lower two had hands. Not the pinching hands he’d seen on other bots either; this one had five actual fingers with individual digits of shiny metal.
Quey felt his body tighten and he sighed, “Oh don’t you even…”
The sheet booted and the screen displayed a message, ‘Connecting to Planetary Network.’
Outside the robot rolled slowly over to the body of the Once Man who’d been firing the rifle. Quey could see small white spines on its dark green back and wondered what they were for. It lifted the gun off the pavement with its lower left arm and seemed to inspect the weapon. Another robot rolled out from behind the car. This one was a cube that had been painted gold with a white question mark etched on each side. It rolled behind the first bot and the top of it opened like a lid.
“Connection established,” his device informed him. The robot with the orange Mohawk turned its head and watched him with its lenses made to look like eyes. It stared at him for a brief moment then put the rifle into the question box bot.
Quey accessed the Global Travelers Service and began to zoom in on his location. Outside the waste his screen would show him landmarks documented by other travelers, but where he sat now he knew his chances of finding anything were somewhere down the block between slim and none.
He’d heard stories from the older roaders about the days when you couldn’t trust the ‘you are here’ dot on your screen at all, that’s why they began flagging locations manually. That was years ago, however, and now the dot was at least close if not spot on. Many of the old timers still drove by landmarks though, claiming you never knew when the whole system was going to go to shit again, and new roaders took comfort in their presence. It never hurt to have a means of confirming your location, especially if you found yourself broken down on the side of a highway with a pair of bots rolling around outside and no registered settlement within walking distance.
Quey searched the area around the road, moving the map with a swipe of his finger, until he found what he’d feared. A little over five kilometers to the south of his ‘you are here’ dot was a building marked Robo-tronics Compound. His eyes leapt to the bots slowly rolling from corpse to corpse, scavenging the weapons and ammo they carried and he swallowed hard. This was a bad place to break down.
He shifted his attention back to his sheet and brought up the search screen. He said, “Anything,” to the sheet and a small spiral, about the size of a dime, began to churn in the center of his screen.
Outside there was the soft whirr of the robots and subtle crunching as their treads rolled over small stones and sand.
Sure enough, what Quey suspected had been true, the nearest registered settlement was thirty-six and a quarter kilometers away. In this heat—he checked the temperature on his sheet and saw it was just over 109—and with night on its way he would never make it, not with the small amount of clean water he had stowed in the back of his cab.
“Fuck,” Quey cursed himself. He could have purified gallons of water back in Metratan, but he hadn’t wanted to spend more of his profits than necessary, and you could sometimes get water f
ree if you were clever enough.
Keeping an eye on the robots, he began looking for potential villages. Just because the nearest registered settlement was thirty some kilometers away didn’t mean there weren’t others. Though the thought of trying an unregistered settlement unnerved him. You never knew what you were going to find. They could be normal people who just got fed up with the present state of civilization, plenty of people blamed it for the current state of the planet. Of course they could also be raiders, bandits or worse. They could be Once Men.
Nothing on the map jumped out at him. There was nothing marked, either officially or in the travelers add-ons, but there were a few places he reckoned people might settle into. There were two rivers not far to the north, some people liked to settle along them and set up a purifying station and then build a small village around that. A third river was south that ran too close to the Robo-tronics Compound for him to trust. He didn’t know what was north, but he did know the compound was south, and though he’d thought of himself as a dead man just a few minutes ago those minutes had passed and he was ready to be a living one again. His preference would be to head north, but his newfound life was a lot to gamble on a maybe.
Scanning the sweltering waste around him, he wiped sweat from his brow. “I don’t know,” he said, almost pleading with the world as he tried to decide what to do. He looked at the robots, now going through the Once Men’s car and then back to the map again. He watched the red pin marking the compound and the flag it brought up when tapped.
Beware: Robo-tronics Compound.
His eyes lingered on the words. A traveler’s description was available but he didn’t need it. He’d heard the stories. The building was home to a young woman named Ryla, who was known for being both a brilliant robotics engineer and quite mad.
Reaching behind the seat, Quey grabbed his bottle of fresh, clean water and took a long swallow.
The whole area was patrolled by her bots, and it was said the compound itself was a fortress and home to the most advanced technology since the field was lost after the ‘age of robotics’ turned disastrous.
The Saffron Malformation Page 2