by Dick Wybrow
"What is it?" Sally asked.
"Dah fuck!" I said, nearly jumping out of my socks. "Jesus, how'd you sneak up on me so fast?"
She smiled. "I'm wily."
"Right," I said and put my hand on my chest to stop my heart from coming out of my rib cage. Then I half jumped again when the rolling machine behind me bumped into my foot. It stopped, moved a few inches back, made a perpendicular slide to the left, and moved forward over the hill.
Sally said, "You're a jittery thing, ain't ya?" She pointed to the swollen creek. "What are they doing?"
Once again, focused on the horror, the crime those little "innocent" robots were carrying out, I could barely speak the word. "Littering."
We both watched as the tiny pucks made their way to the creek's edge, rose on tiny, spindly legs, each with a wheel at its end, tipped, and dumped their contents into the creek. Dust, paper scraps, apple peels, bits of wire, all of it going into the bubbling water.
"Ah," she said. "They ain't doing no harm."
"They are dumping crap into the beautiful stream," I said and turned back to the big building with its gleaming tower. I shook my fist and shouted, "Fucking monsters!”
Sally's hand came out of nowhere, slapping my upside the head.
"Ow!"
"You trying to get busted, you idgit?" she asked and pointed a finger in my face. "Don't yell at the building lest somebody comes out here and then you get a bullet in ya brain!"
"Ah, I doubt they've got armed guards."
"That bullet," Sally said, "will not be from them."
I nodded and gave her a salute.
We both watched as the little whirring demons of filth made their way back and forth to the creekside.
Sally asked, "What the hell are they?"
I shook my head. "Something like a Roomba, I think."
"What the hell's that?"
"Motorized vacuum cleaner. But they're not like any Roombas I've ever seen," I said, spitting the words. "They are evil Roombas."
"Whatever," she said. "I think I hear the plane. Let's get back to the tree line."
I turned to follow her, but then, in a fit of inspiration, I grabbed a rock and threw it at one of the approaching Roombas. I muttered, "Fuckers."
The rock bounced within a foot of the motorized over-sized puck, but when it did bounce, the robot vacuum it had nearly hit stopped. It then lifted up on its eight spindly legs and turned its blue light toward me.
The blue light turned red.
Chapter Thirty-One
"What ya go and spook it for?" Sally asked, huffing and puffing as she ran up the tiny hill behind me. In truth, I didn't really have an answer.
How was I supposed to know the Killer Roombas would go into battle mode?
At the top, I turned to see if we'd lost them. We hadn't.
"Jesus," I said. "They look like an army of black ants. On spider legs."
"Keep runnin'," she said then saw me standing there. "We get far enough, huh, they'll lose in'erest."
For a moment, I could only stare. There were dozens of them advancing on us, but it wasn't just the number. It was the way they kept perfectly level despite the terrain beneath them, their spindly legs adjusting in height as they marched quickly toward us.
"Shit!"
I turned and saw Sally bent over, breathing heavily, standing in front of the bend in the creek ahead of us. Unless we wanted to cross the water and get soaked, we were heading into the trees. At least the terrain would slow them down. I hoped.
Then Sally took off into a run again but not into the woods.
"Dadblamit, this water is cold," she said, splashing, soaked up to her chest.
Aw, fuck. "Why—come on, why don't we head the other way? Into the trees."
She called back, "Because I don't know if those whirly stones back there might have bigger mechanical cousins out there making reams of paper outta protected foliage or something!"
She had a point.
I wasn't afraid of water except for when it went above my head, but getting wet while I still had my clothes on just felt all kinds of wrong. But there was no time to slip off my sneakers and jeans, so I followed.
On the opposite bank, Sally plunked to one knee, rolled into a squat, then sat. If there were Olympic competitions for sitting down, she would have gotten a 9.7.
Behind me, I could hear the whirring and grinding growing louder, which only pushed me to get it over with.
I splashed and sloshed and kicked up enough water to drown a blue whale, but after a half minute, I was at the other side. My legs were spent, jeans soaked, but when I tried to go down on one knee and turn it into a sit, like Sally, I miscalculated. Instead, it was more like I belly flopped onto the muddy bank.
"One way to do it," she mumbled, dumping water from her cowboy boot.
In my head, I saw three judges holding up threes and fours—except the Canadian judge, who'd given my landing a seven because she felt bad for me.
I flipped over on my back as the sound of the approaching machines strangely turned into a mid-pitched whine that sounded more like an engine than anything else.
* * *
"How big a problem is only having half-landing gear?" Anza asked, her face still splotchy and red, as she stared down at the gleaming white building with its giant tower in the middle. "Is crash-level problem?"
Uncle Jerry rubbed his eyes. "Well, no. And, um, yes."
"Useless answer," the Actor said, his speech slurred. Next to him was a small pile of empty travel bottles.
"Okay," their pilot said. "So, we can land without the right landing gear, but one way or another, it's gonna be a crash."
"I don't want to crash," the Actor said, eyes closed again. "Can I vote for 'not crashing'?"
Uncle Jerry checked the altitude gauge, which if he had to admit it, was of course unnecessary. He could see the ground below him just as well as the rest of them.
Once it read "zero," they would be down. He just wasn't sure what state the plane might be in when that happened.
"It might be better if we didn't have any landing gear," he suggested. "Then we could just belly flop onto a field and glide, theoretically."
"Can you releasing it?" Anza asked, pressing her face against the window next to her, trying to look down.
"No, there ain't no release. Bolted to the frame."
Anza stood up and went into the cabin. Her eyes passed over the chair where Angel had once been sitting. The two damp, bloodied rags held his place. She clenched her fists to focus.
The Actor tipped a tiny green bottle into his mouth and dramatically tapped it with a free finger. Next to his feet were tiny brown bottles, tiny clear bottles, and a few tiny blue ones.
From the cockpit threshold, Anza asked him, "Is there something you can do?"
"Sure," the Actor said. "I think I've got enough left to make us all a Long Island iced tea." He frowned for a moment. "But I think I got sick on teas once."
Anza growled then turned back to the pilot.
Uncle Jerry banked the plane hard, and Anza had to throw a hand up to keep her balance.
The Actor flipped out of his seat and fell to the floor. "Hey," he said. "Looks like a brown one rolled under the cabinet!"
Anza jumped back into the copilot's seat and looked down. "You have a plan?"
"I have a plan."
"Is a good plan?"
Uncle Jerry's eyebrows looked like they were briefly considering a battle. He sighed, banked the plane the other direction, then nodded and shook his head at the same time. "I sort of have a plan."
Down below, Anza saw something that brought a weak smile to her face, at least at first. "Raz is down there! With Shooter Sally."
Uncle Jerry grinned and held up his hand to get a high five, but his copilot didn't give him one. He leaned forward to get a better look. "What the hell are they doing?"
"Running," Anza said. " I think."
"From what?"
"It… they are hunted by
hockey pucks."
* * *
It was stupid, but I began to smile at the thought of those homicidal next-gen robots being trumped by something as simple as a little water.
They kept coming. The dozen or so at the waterline were each extending tiny attachments that looked like forks with only two tines.
"That must be the bit they plug into the wall to recharge," I said, still grinning. "Neat."
Then I saw sparks fly from one of the plugs, reaching toward us like long, thin blue-white fingers.
Sally grunted again. She did that a lot, it seemed. "Yeah, neat."
"But the water—wait…" I said when something came to mind that I should have thought of before. "Why do we think they'll stop at the water?"
"Game always does," she said, slowly catching her breath. "Mostly. Bears won't, mind you. Wolves'll chase ya. The alpha'll send out a few dogs to test the waters. But you know, deer, squirrels, rabid badgers, they all shore up."
"Okay," I said as my smile faded. "So why do we think these machines are more like rabid badgers than bears?"
She shrugged. "I'm hopin' 'cause I'm done running," she said and pulled out her pistols, aiming both at the mechanical death cleaners.
I suddenly felt very naked. "Uh, you got another one of those?"
"No," she said, not taking her eyes off the advancing robot army. They were within fifteen feet of the opposite bank. "Even if I did, I wouldn'ta given it to ya. You'd more likely shoot off a toe than hit one of them varmints."
I winced. "Did you just say varmints, Yosemite Sam?"
"That ain't my name!"
I used my butt to scooch back behind her.
We could only watch as they got closer, their electric engines roaring at us. It was uncanny. There must have been fifty or sixty of them. Once they got to the creek's edge, they did indeed, stop.
"Ha!"
Briefly.
The first one put one of its metallic chopstick legs into the water then another. It whirred and spun, its red light at the front disappearing around back then returning again.
That was when they all started to advance.
"Oh, shit!"
Sally cocked both pistols, working out which ones she would target first. Me, I searched around for the best path out of there because the only way we were living was to keep running.
However, the gunslinger was done running. This was her Alamo. And as much as I did not like her—since she'd tried for days to kill me and my friend, so points against her for that—I wasn't enough of a dick to leave her to die.
I found a couple of stones as big as my hands, grabbed them, and turned to face the oncoming horde. "Here we go!"
But just as we were ready to start our volley, the deadly dustbusters just twenty feet away with sparky prongs extended, they suddenly stopped, twisted slightly, turned, and began to flee.
"Ah! Ah-ha!" Sally said, punching the air. "See, I told ya—" Her eyes got as big as the stones I was holding for a moment as she looked upstream.
Before I could ask why, I slowly turned and saw it, something that wasn't supposed to be there. But it was coming, and like the robots, we needed to get the fuck out of the way.
As Sally struggled to her feet, holstering her pistols as she did, I reached out and offered a hand. With a frown, she took my arm, lifting herself from the ground, and we both ran as fast as we could in the opposite direction the robots had taken.
I took only a moment to glance back and said, huffing as I ran, "Does he really think he can land that on a creek?"
* * *
"Do you really think you can land this on a creek?" the Actor shouted, standing woozily in the doorway of the cockpit, his eyes as big as river rocks.
"Don't have much choice," Uncle Jerry said as his hands flew across the controls. "We ain't got but one landing gear, and if we put that down on a hard surface, we'll go end over end and smash to bits."
Anza was struggling to get into the life jacket she found under her seat. "So, this is safer?"
"Well, it's, uh, different," their pilot said. "And different from a guaranteed crash is the best we got at the moment."
The Actor leapt back to his own seat and strapped in. Then he grabbed all the pillows he could find, at least those within reach, and piled them on top of his lap.
Uncle Jerry yelled, "Hold on to your favorite part of ya!"
The Actor scrunched his eyes together as the cabin rocked with an earth-shattering crash. They bounced, briefly turned sideways, bounced again, and the entire cabin filled with the sounds of scraping, like two giant steel claws scratching their way down a chalkboard the size of Mount Rushmore.
There was a bang and an explosion of metal off to one side of the plane.
The man covered in pillows said, "There goes the left wing."
Then another bounce, slam, and the scraping started again. Another burst of twisted metal flew past the windows.
"There goes the right wing," the Actor said, pushed a hand out between the pillows, and tossed a tiny empty bottle somewhere behind him.
None could be sure if they were still rocketing forward because of the momentum of the craft or if they had been caught up in the swollen creek's current.
Strapped into the copilot seat, Anza pressed both palms to her ears and shouted over the din, "When do it stop?"
Then, as if the plane heard her, it bucked, tipped up on its nose, hung in the air for what felt like a lifetime, and came crashing back down. It rolled once or twice and came to stop.
They were quiet for a moment. Then the only sound was Uncle Jerry giggling.
The Actor stood up, went to the door of the aircraft, and popped it open. Outside, they could see a grassy field.
He said, "Please be sure your seats and tray tables are in the upright and locked position before exiting the aircraft." Then he took one step and disappeared from sight. There was a thud, some light cursing, and he called back, "There's a drop when you step out, FYI."
Anza laughed and wiped tears from her eyes. She clicked away her restraint and hugged Uncle Jerry. "I think he did that on purpose."
"Always the performer," he said and hugged her back. "Let's go find Razzie."
Chapter Thirty-Two
Anza eyeballed the front lobby of the impressive, if horrifying, building in front of them.
The massive headquarters of FriendBook appeared to be circular, looking more like the exterior of a giant twenty-second-century US football stadium.
"Looks like a big donut," Uncle Jerry said, leaning back to take in the structure from top to bottom. "With a bit ol' spike in the middle of it."
"That ain't a spike," the gunslinger said. "That's Hood's tower. He runs the joint."
"Uh-huh," Anza said, frowning as she looked again at the small Welcome Center booth. Beyond that high-tech shack—which appeared to have been designed to look not high-tech—lay a walking bridge, the span of which was, indeed, over water. A moat.
"Some guy named Hood runs this place?"
"Uncle Jerry, some folks would say he runs more than that," Sally said. "Got his little clammy fingers in all sortsa pies, if you know what I mean."
The old pilot looked at the woman dressed head to toe in cowboy gear. He said, "I have an unpleasant image in my mind but not likely the one you intended."
"So, how are we doing to get inside?"
"What?" the gunslinger asked, raising her bushy eyebrows. "I ain't stepping anywhere in there unless I hafta, like when I kill the Actor."
"Can we put this killing on hold, please?" Anza asked.
"I've given you that," Sally said. "But I got obligations. Clock strikes five and he's still under contract, he gets two slugs. One in the chest, one in the melon."
Anza pointed at her. "Not until then," she said. "But even then, don't shoot him. He's a friend."
"I ain't got no friends."
Uncle Jerry said, "You might if you stopped shooting people."
"Okay, okay." Anza waved her hands in front
of them like she was trying to wash all their words away. "So how do me and the Actor get in the donut building?"
Sally pointed to the Welcome Center. "From what I know of it, you gotta be on the list, and they let you through."
Anza asked, "Will they let us in if we are not on their list?"
"Not my problem," Sally said, pointing her finger at the Actor like a gun and dropping her thumb. "I got other plans." Then she looked down to the building's moat.
Once they'd regrouped, hugs all around—except Sally, of course—Anza said it was best to once again split up. Better chance of getting inside.
Anza traced Sally's gaze and caught sight of her other two friends as they crept along the flattened grassy trail used earlier by the weird little robots. In the distance, Raz looked up and threw her a wave. She cut her eyes to the tiny building next to the bridge and fought the urge to wave back.
Two minutes later, Anza and Uncle Jerry were standing before FriendBook's Welcome Center. The Actor had thought it looked like one of those pillboxes the Germans fired from in Saving Private Ryan.
"Hello in there. We are hoping you can helping us," Anza said.
The smoked glass slid open. The pair of attendees inside wore too-large smiles, each of them tickling unseen keyboards beneath a white counter. Behind them, a gleaming three-spouted espresso machine was steaming slightly.
They looked at their screens, and one said, "I'm Ruby. This is Jimmy. Hello."
"Hel—"
"We don't see any bookings for you, Anza Stinnett," said Jimmy. Neither had asked for their IDs.
"Nor you… Lou Stool," said the one called Ruby.
Anza started to speak, her teeth gritted, "How did you—"
The young woman held up her hand and spun the screen toward them.
"Ah, sure," Anza said. "You are doing facial match through our FriendBook pages."
The male attendant frowned as he read his screen. "Mr. Stool, your profile is slated to be turned into an in memoriam page. Are you not dead?"