Robopocalypse

by Daniel H. Wilson

  That fleeting expression of hurt and horror on her face sticks with me for a long, long time. I don’t even know what she heard.

  A second later the television signal blinks out. A second after that the electricity is gone.

  I hear sirens from the street outside.

  Outside my window, hundreds of people are filtering out onto 135th Street. They’re talking to one another and holding up cell phones that don’t work. I think it’s odd that a lot of them are looking skyward, faces turned up. There’s nothing up there, I think. Look around you instead. I can’t put my finger on it, but I’m afraid for those people. They look small down there. Part of me wants to shout, Get out of sight. Hide.

  Something’s coming. But what?

  A speeding car jumps the curb and the screaming starts.

  Dawn marches in from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel, looking at me with a question in her eyes. I shrug my shoulders. I can’t come up with any words. I try to stop her from walking to the window but she pushes me away. She leans over the back of the couch and peeks out.

  God only knows what she sees down there.

  I choose not to look.

  But I can hear the confusion. Screams. Explosions. Engines. A couple of times I hear gunfire. People in our building move through the hallway outside, arguing.

  Dawn starts a breathless commentary from the window. “The cars, Marcus. The cars are hunting people and there’s nobody in them and, oh my god. Run. No. Please,” she murmurs, half to me and half to herself.

  She says the smart cars have come alive. Other vehicles, too. They’re on autopilot and killing people.

  Thousands of people.

  All of a sudden, Dawn dives away from the window. Our living room shakes and rumbles. A high-pitched whine rips through the air, then trails away. There is a flash of light and a massive thundering noise from outside. Dishes fly off the kitchen counter. Pictures drop from the walls and shatter.

  No car alarms go off.

  Dawn is my foreman and my girl and tough as liquid nails. Now she sits with her lanky arms wrapped around her knees, tears rolling down her expressionless face. An eighty-seat commuter plane has just streaked over our block and gone down in the neighborhood about a mile down the street near Central Park. The flames now cast a dull reddish light on our living room walls. Outside, black smoke pours into the air.

  People aren’t gossiping in the street anymore.

  There isn’t another big explosion. It’s a miracle that planes aren’t raining down on the city, considering how many must be lurking up there.

  The phones don’t work. The electricity is out. Battery-powered radio just plays static.

  Nobody tells us what to do.

  I fill the bathtub and sinks and anything I can find with water. I unplug appliances. I duct-tape tinfoil to the windows and pull the shades.

  Dawn peels back a corner of the foil and peeks out. As the hours crawl by, she sticks to the couch like a fungus. A red shaft of setting sunlight paints her hazel eyes.

  She is staring into hell and I’m not brave enough to join her.

  Instead, I decide to check the hallway; there were voices out there earlier. I step out and immediately see Mrs. Henderson from down the hall walk into an open elevator shaft.

  It happens quick and silent. I can’t believe it. Not even a scream. The old lady is just there one second and gone the next. It’s got to be a trick or a joke or a misunderstanding.

  I run to the elevator, brace my hands, and lean over to make sure of what I just saw. Then I double over and puke on the beige hallway carpet. Tears spill from my eyes. I wipe my mouth on my sleeve and squeeze my eyes shut.

  These things don’t seem real. Cars and planes and elevators don’t kill people; they’re just machines. But a small, wise part of me doesn’t give a shit whether this is real or not. It just reacts. I break a sconce off the wall and lay it reverently in front of the yawning gap where the elevator doors should be. It’s my little warning for the next person. My little memorial to Mrs. Henderson.

  There are six apartments on my floor. I knock on every door: no answers. I stand in the hallway quietly for fifteen minutes. I hear no voices and no movement.

  The place is deserted except for Dawn and me.

  The next morning I’m sitting in my easy chair, pretending to sleep and thinking about raiding Mrs. Henderson’s apartment for canned goods when Dawn snaps out of it and finally speaks to me.

  The morning light traces two rectangles on the walls where the tape is holding tinfoil against the windows. A brilliant shaft of light from the folded-down corner penetrates the room. It illuminates Dawn’s face: hard and lined and serious.

  “We have to leave, Marcus,” she says. “I’ve been thinking about it. We have to go to the country where they can’t use their wheels and the domestics can’t walk. Don’t you see? They’re not designed for the country.”

  “Who?” I ask, even though I know damn well.

  “The machines, Marcus.”

  “It’s some kind of a malfunction, honey, right? I mean machines don’t …” I trail off lamely. I’m not fooling anybody, not even myself.

  Dawn crawls over to the easy chair and cradles my cheeks in her rough hands. She speaks to me very slowly and clearly. “Marcus, somehow all the machines are alive. They’re hurting people. Something has gone really wrong. We’ve got to get out of here now while we still can. Nobody is coming to help.”

  The fog lifts.

  I take her hands in mine and I consider what she’s just said. I really think about getting to the country. Pack bags. Leave the apartment. Walk the streets. Cross the George Washington Bridge to the mainland. Reach the mountains up north. Probably not more than a hundred miles. And then: survive.

  Impossible.

  “I hear you, Dawn. But we don’t know how to stay alive in the wild. We’ve never even gone camping. Even if we make it out of the city, we’ll starve in the woods.”

  “There are others,” she says. “I’ve seen people with bags and backpacks, whole families headed out of town. Some of them must have made it. They’ll take care of us. We’ll all work together.”

  “That’s what I’m worried about. There must be millions of people out there. No food. No shelter. Some of them have guns. It’s too dangerous. Hell, Mother Nature has killed more people than machines ever could. We should stick to what we know. We gotta stick to the city.”

  “What about them? They’re designed for the city. They can climb stairs, not mountains. Marcus, they can roll through our streets but not through forests. They’re going to get us if we stay here. I’ve seen them down there. Going door to door.”

  The information punches me in the belly. Now, a sick feeling spreads through me.

  “Door to door?” I ask. “Doing what?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  I haven’t looked down at the street since it first happened. I spent yesterday staying busy in a protective haze of confusion. Every whimper I heard from Dawn at the window just reinforced my need to stay busy, keep busy, head down, hands moving. Don’t look up, don’t speak, don’t think.

  Dawn doesn’t even know about Mrs. Henderson at the bottom of the elevator shaft. Or the other ones with her.

  I don’t take a deep breath or count down from three. I march over to the harmless-looking opening in the foil and look. I’m ready for the carnage, ready for the bodies and bombs and burning wreckage. I’m ready for war.

  But I’m not ready for what I see.

  The streets are empty. Clean. A lot of cars are neatly parked up and down the block, waiting. At 135th and Adam, four newer-model SUVs are parked diagonally across the intersection, head to tail. The inner two cars have a gap between them just big enough for another car to squeeze through, but there’s a car plugging the hole.

  Everything seems a little bit off. A pile of clothes is spilled halfway on the curb. A newspaper stand has been shoved over. A golden retriever lopes up the street, leash drag
ging. The dog stops and sniffs a strange discolored spot on the sidewalk, then pads away with its head hung low.

  “Where are the people?” I ask.

  Dawn wipes her red-rimmed eyes with the back of her hand. “They clean it up, Marcus. When the cars hurt someone, the walking ones come and drag him away. It’s all so clean.”

  “The domestic robots? Like the rich people have? Those are a joke. They can barely walk on those flat feet. They can’t even run.”

  “Yeah, I know. They take forever. But they can carry guns. And sometimes the police robots, the bomb-disposal ones on tank treads with claws—sometimes they come. They’re slow, but they’re strong. The garbage trucks …”

  “Let me, just let me take a look. We’ll figure this out, okay?”

  I watch the street for the rest of that second day. The block looks peaceful without the chaos of the city tearing through it like a daily tornado. The life of the neighborhood is on hold.

  Or maybe it’s over.

  The smoke from the plane crash still lingers. Inside the building across the street, I see an older lady and her husband through the dim haze. They stare out their windows at the street, like ghosts.

  In the late afternoon, what looks like a toy helicopter putters by our building at about thirty feet off the ground. It’s the size of a doghouse, flying slowly and with purpose. I catch a glimpse of some weird gizmo hanging off its bottom. Then it’s gone.

  Across the street, the old man yanks his drapes closed.

  Smart.

  An hour later, a car pulls up across the street and my heart leaps into my throat. A human being, I think. Finally, somebody can tell us what’s going on. Thank you, Jesus.

  Then my face flushes and goes numb. Two domestic bots step out of the vehicle. They walk to the back of the SUV on cheap, shaky legs. The rear door opens and the two walkers reach inside and pull out a dull gray bomb robot. They set the squat robot down on the pavement. It spins on its treads a little, calibrating. The glint from its jet-black shotgun sends a shiver through me—the gun looks practical, like any other tool designed to do a very specific job.

  Without looking at one another, the three robots stumble and roll into the front door of the building across the street.

  It isn’t even locked, I think. Their door isn’t even locked. And neither is mine.

  The robots can’t be choosing the doors randomly. Lots of people have run by now. Even more were already out of town for Thanksgiving. Too many doors and not enough robots—a simple engineering problem.

  My mind wanders back to the curious little chopper. I think maybe it flew by for a reason. Like maybe it was searching the windows, looking for people.

  I’m glad my windows are blocked. I don’t have any idea why I chose to put up tinfoil. Maybe because I didn’t want a single bit of the horror outside to seep into my safe place. But the foil completely blocks the light that comes in from the outside. It stands to reason that it also blocks the light that leaks out from inside.

  And more important, the heat.

  An hour later the robots come out of the building across the street. The bomb robot drags two bags behind it. The domestics load the bags and the other robot into the car. Before they leave, one of the walkers freezes in place. It’s this bulky domestic with a big creepy grin permanently sculpted onto its face. A Big Happy. It pauses next to the idling smart car and turns its head left and right, scanning the empty street for movement. The thing is absolutely still for about thirty seconds. I don’t move, breathe, blink.

  I never see the old couple again.

  That night, the lookers fly past about once an hour. The gentle thup-thup of their rotors cuts through my nightmares. My brain is caught in a never-ending loop, feverishly considering how to survive this.

  Aside from some damaged buildings, most of the city seems intact. Flat, paved roads. Doors that open and close smoothly. Stairs or wheelchair ramps. Something occurs to me.

  I wake Dawn up and whisper to her. “You’re right, honey. They keep it clean so they can operate here. But we can make it hard on them. Hard. Mess up the streets so they can’t get around. Blow some stuff up.”

  Dawn sits up. She looks at me in disbelief.

  “You want to destroy our city?”

  “It’s not our city anymore, Dawn.”

  “The machines are down there, wrecking everything we’ve built. Everything you’ve built. And now you want to go and do it for them?”

  I put my hand on her shoulder. She is strong and warm. My answer is simple: “Demolition is a part of construction.”

  I start with our own building.

  Using a sledgehammer, I punch through walls into the neighboring units. I knock the holes at waist height to stay clear of electrical outlets and I avoid kitchens and bathrooms. There’s no time to suss out load-bearing walls, so I take my best guess and hope a single hole won’t bring down the ceiling.

  Dawn collects food and tools from the empty apartments. I drag heavy furniture into the hallway and barricade the doors from the inside. By ducking through our holes, we’re free to explore the whole floor.

  In the lobby, I demolish everything I see and pile the debris in front of the main door. I smash the elevator, the plants, and the front desk. The walls, the mirrors, the chandelier. All of it breaks down to form a pile of loose wreckage.

  Oh, and I lock the front lobby door. Just in case it matters.

  I come across a couple of people on other floors of the building, but they holler through their doors and refuse to come out. I get no response from most of the doors I knock on.

  Then it’s time for the next step.

  I go on foot at dawn, slipping from doorway to doorway. The newer-model cars parked around the neighborhood don’t notice me if I stay out of their line of sight. I always keep a bus bench or a lamppost or a newsstand between myself and the cars.

  And I sure as hell don’t step off the curb.

  I find the demolition gear where I left it three days ago, before the New War started. It’s undisturbed in the back room at work, only a few blocks from where we live. I carry my gear back home and make a second trip, at dusk when the light is trickiest. Domestic robots can see just fine in the dark and they don’t have to sleep, so I figure nothing is to be gained from going at night.

  On my first trip, I spool detonation cord around my forearm, then push it over my head and wear it like a bandolier. The cord is long and flexible and girlishly pink. You can wrap it five times around a wooden telephone pole to blast it in half. Fifteen times to launch the pole twenty feet in the air and shower the area in splinters.

  But all in all, detcord is pretty stable stuff.

  On the next trip, I fill a duffel bag with shoe-box-sized packs of blast caps. Ten to a box. And I grab the initiator box. Almost as an afterthought, I grab safety goggles and earplugs.

  I’m going to blow up the building across the street.

  With the sledgehammer, I make sure nobody is holed up in the top three floors. The robots already targeted this place and cleaned it out. No gore. No bodies. Just that eerie cleanliness. The lack of clutter scares me. It reminds me of those ghost stories where explorers find empty towns with dishes set on the table and the mashed potatoes still warm.

  The creepy feeling motivates me to move fast and methodically, as I throw canned food onto a sheet that I drag down the dark hallways.

  On the roof I lay out a few lines of detcord. I stay away from the water tower. On the top floor, I line the walls of more apartments with more detcord and drop a few blasting caps. I keep my distance from the central skeleton of the building. I don’t want to bring down the whole thing, just do some cosmetic damage.

  I work alone and silently and it goes fast. Normally, my crew would spend months wrapping the walls with geotextiles to absorb flying shrapnel. All explosions throw chunks of metal and concrete for surprising distances. But this time, I want the debris. I want to damage nearby buildings, chew them up and blow out their wind
ows. I want to tear holes in the walls. Gouge out the apartments and leave them like empty eye sockets.

  Finally, I dart across the street and into my building’s open parking garage door. The rolling metal door is already torn off its hinges from when the smart cars left the garage on the first day. The door hangs there like a scab about to fall off. Nothing is inside but dumb older-model cars and darkness. The initiator in my hand, I creep way down into the garage, doubling the range because I haven’t kept to the usual safety precautions.

  It only takes one fist-sized chunk of concrete to make your head into a bowl of helmet spaghetti.

  I find Dawn waiting inside the garage. She’s been busy, too.

  Tires.

  Tires piled up five high. She’s raided the garage and found the old-model cars down there. She stripped their tires off and rolled them up to the doorway.

  It smells funny, too, like gasoline.

  Suddenly I understand.

  Cover.

  Dawn looks at me, raises her eyebrows, then splashes gasoline onto a tire.

  “I’ll light it, you roll it,” she says.

  “You’re a goddamn genius, woman,” I say.

  Her eyes try to smile, but the sharp line of her mouth seems to have been chiseled from stone.

  From the safety of the garage, we roll about a dozen burning tires out into the street. They fall over and burn, sending coils of concealing smoke up into the air. We listen from the darkness as a passenger car approaches, slow. It stops in front of the tires, maybe thinking about how to get around.

  We retreat deeper inside the garage.

  I hold up the initiator and turn the fail-safe. A cherry-red light hovers before me in the darkness of the garage. With my thumb, I feel the cold metal switch. I put one arm around Dawn, plant a kiss on her cheek, and throw the switch.

  We hear a sharp snapping sound from across the street, and the ground heaves beneath us. A groan echoes through the dark cave of the garage. We wait in darkness for five minutes, listening to each other breathe. Then Dawn and I march up the sloping driveway, hand in hand, toward the smashed garage door. At the top, we peer through the torn gate and blink into the sunlight.