Robot Wasteland, Chapter 3 - Meeting
Well, Fiction Friday came and went, and Fiction Monday does not alliterate, but here is Chapter 3 of Robot Wasteland all the same.
Robot Wasteland is a serial that I wrote a while back, based on an RPG I developed of the same name (did not get sold or anything, I just ran it for a bit - so if anybody wants to publish it, you let me know), in which humanity was all but wiped out by a DARPA experiment to create Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robots (An actual real-world DARPA submission, and Yes, the acronym for that is E.A.T.R.) gone completely wild.
A couple of decades after the fall of mankind, surviving humanity has to hide, and survive, in the wasteland left by the rampaging robots who consume any organic material they can find, avoiding the metal monstrosities referred to variously as devourers, eaters, metal, etc.
But maybe there is hope.
Fewer devourers are active as time goes by, their processors fried, or their conversion chambers empty for too long.The Factories, giant moving fortresses that churned out devourers, are a thing of the past.
Maybe it is time for Mankind to stop hiding and reclaim the Robot Wasteland.
In chapter Three, we return to KAz, solo on the outskirts of the Ruin after the death of her friend Bel, and her lover, Fritz, under the claws of a Reaver - eight hundred kilos of nasty. She is along and miles from the safety of Junkyard as dusk closes in around her.
Chapter 3 - Meeting
Kaz kept looking along her back trail for the glint of metal moving through the ruins. That the ravager had let her escape the campsite and her dead companions was a miracle she could scarce credit. Nothing was following her, at least nothing she could detect.
The long dusk was deepening to full dark when she heard the groans and moans of walkers. As she scanned the ruins nearby for shelter, they staggered into view - three of them, a stone’s throw south, shambling out of the cover of a broken down building corner. Damn! She had been considering that very spot as a hiding place. Instead she picked up her pace, the straps of her heavy bag yanking painfully at her neck and shoulders with each stride, bow and her pair of arrows clutched in her right hand, toward a huddle of buildings a few hundred paces to the right of the road up ahead. Behind her, the walkers hissed their interest in the chase.
Kaz was faster, but she had to shake her pursuers. The walkers would stay with her for as long as it took. She didn’t want to fight. Fritz’s scattergun, would alert anything else in the area. She wasn’t anywhere as good with a bow as Bel had been. Two arrows wouldn’t deal with three walkers. The beamer was way too much gun for walkers, but it did have the advantage of being quiet.
Better to hide. But to do that she had to break line of sight. That probably meant spending the night in the buildings she was heading for. She cursed wordlessly: no Junkyard tonight.
She neared the buildings, slowing, sighing in relief as her pack no longer threatened to tear her arms off. The chorus of the dead followed. Snowflakes danced across her field of vision for a moment, whirled on a freshening breeze that chilled the sweat on her arms, set her teeth chattering. She didn’t like the idea of huddling in the shadows of a fireless camp as the snow fell around her. She would prefer a roof over her head, walls to keep the wind, and the walkers, out. Nocking one arrow to Bel’s bow, she concentrated on her immediate surroundings. It wouldn’t do to escape the walkers behind her, only to bump into another bunch up ahead.
Putting some walls between her and her pursuers gave her a chance to look for shelter. The walkers would nose around for a while, but without more encouragement, they would wander off. She needed to find someplace that would hide her until that happened.
The nearest building was a battered corrugated-metal box with one collapsed corner that had brought down the two attached walls and much of the roof. Kaz dismissed it as a good place to become trapped. Instead she jogged toward a taller wooden structure with a massive doorway that overlooked the avenue between the rows of buildings.
At the doorway, she listened, glancing over her shoulder to see if the walkers had rounded the corner into the thoroughfare. Not yet, and no sound from within. Bow and arrow ready, she stepped inside, clinging to the shadows along the wall, straining to hear as her eyesight adjusted to the darkened interior. Wan irregular light filtered downward as dim and dusty beams from above. To her left there was a set of rungs on the wall that continued through a square hole in the ceiling to a second floor. Moving closer to the rungs, she saw that the interior was divided into a main room that ran the length of the building, with a rectangular pit in the center of the floor. On her side, a hallway was separated from the main room by a filthy, crooked wall that had not finished falling down. At the other end of the hallway, she could see the outside behind the building. A door might once have kept out the elements, but it was long gone. Another exit was good. She breathed easier knowing she was not trapped.
Looking back in the main room, she ventured close enough to look into the pit. A set of three steps led down to a strange x-shaped object at the bottom of the pit. It looked inert, and heavy – probably worth hundreds of Scrap. Someone with a wagon should clear this place out, she thought. Then she remembered the sheet metal building across the way and the worry at the back of her mind edged toward panic. This much metal was a scrapper’s dream. Just off a main road between Junkyard and the Ruin, it should have been picked clean years ago.
Unless something stopped them.
The groaning of the walkers was close. The gaping doorway must have called to them as it had her. She could hear the stagger-steps nearing. If they looked in, they couldn’t fail to see her. Taking the arrow off the string, she started up the ladder as silently and swiftly as she could. The rungs moved as she climbed but they held. As her head emerged into the upper floor, she quickly scanned the cramped space, detecting no movement, no sinister shapes revealed by the little light that entered through holes in the roof. Pulling herself through into the cluttered triangular space under the roof-beams, she halted as soon as she was clear of the lower floor. The roof was largely intact except for several small tears , the sources of the light she had noticed below, and the far corner where the wind seemed to have pulled the ceiling away at the base. The noise of the walkers grew louder as they entered through the large doorway.
Shuffling sounds came to her through the opening to the floor below. Not trusting the rotted wood on which she crouched, she held perfectly still, waiting for the zombies to exit. She had not had time to get into a good position to shoot through the ladder hole, but at least she would hear if one of them tried to climb to her. Ears tuned to the noise from below, Kaz let her eyes wander the upper floor.
Across the floor from where she crouched, Kaz could see a low mound, back lit against the darkening sky she could see from the open corner. She had the impression of mesh or a clutter of items, possible Scraps if she could lug them back to Junkyard. Nearer her position, a narrow ledge and walkway surrounded the ladder hole and led toward the pile of whatever it was. Looking past her bent knees at the boards by her feet, she perceived hundreds of tiny impressions in the wood. These were almost obscured by a layer of dust too thin for this sheltered, abandoned loft.
Eyes wide, she peered about, trying to make out whatever had been keeping the dust away, suddenly more afraid of what might be up here than the known threat below.
The mound drew her attention again. What she had thought of as potential Scraps a moment ago became a sinister unknown, which she could not investigate while the walkers were near. Frozen, afraid even to breathe, her attention was caught between the movement below and the mystery just out of arms-reach.
One of the walkers must have bumped into something below. She heard a thud, felt it reverberate through her perch. A moment later, a scratch of sound came from the pile before her, the sort of sound a single rubbler might make. It was a tiny noise, but in the confines of this shed, it carried to whatever senses the walkers below possessed. The shuffling from below approached the based of the ladder.
A faint scraping from the mound drew an enquiring groan from below, a tiny gasp from Kaz. Another scratch followed, then clicks from several sources within the pile. The cramped loft overflowed with a tide of small noises. The walkers clustered beneath the ladder, hissing. Tiny lights appeared in the pile, red, like rubblers’ eyes reflecting the firelight of a campfire. But these eyes glowed without the aid of a light source to reflect – at first just a few, then a dozen, more. Kaz gasped as her mind’s eye supplied the details she could not make out – a hundred fist-sized metallic spiders, serviles clustered together on low power to preserve energy. These were what had kept this place from being salvaged years ago. Her fears were confirmed as tiny tracking lasers sprang into being, playing over her body with a hundred swirling red dots as the swarm cam on-line.
Ducking clear of the majority of the tracking beams, she squirmed out of her heavy pack, swung it up to intercept the first few tentative kill-shots.
Continuing the now smoking pack’s parabola, she sent it through the hole with enough momentum to knock the ambitious walker on the ladder into his fellows. Her tuck and roll got her clear of most of the barrage as she followed the pack, dropping away from the lasers in a compact ball. Her questing fingers caught a ladder rung to sommersault in mid air over the heads of the floundering corpses. Her left leg extended of its own volition, her boot-tread striking the face of a walker toward the read of the group at the stairs. They fell together, Kaz landing more heavily than she liked, her bent knee striking the ground with a crack of plastic on concrete at the lip of the pit – the walker gnawing the air by the hand she planted to steady herself, head twisted too far to one side to still be attached to its spine. A yelp nearby, from her she realized, drew the attention of the crowd. She did not think about staying to put arrows in the remaining two walkers’ brains. Instead she leapt the corner of the pit to her and ran through the doorway. The staccato tread of a hundred serviles followed her as the swarm descended to feast on corpse flesh. Metal generally was not particular as to the source of its protein.
Outside, Kaz kept running. The walkers occupied, this was the opportunity she had been hoping for. Out of sight around the corner of a nearby building, she stopped, taking in air in huge gulps before slowing her breathing as she had been taught. Also as taught, she took inventory of her body. Still mobile, but pain that she hadn’t noticed until this moment flared along her shoulder and back. She started panting again, her good arm darting to the wall as she felt her balance go.
She pulled back the heavy shirt where it was burned through. The wound she could see was bad. Raw; Red. Leaking clear yellow fluid. Pain as bad as anything she had ever felt. Her back was worse. Rather than fall, she let her knees go, dropped into a crouch, her breath coming in panicked gasps again, the raw meat taste fo fear in her mouth.
After a time, she was able to seize control of her breathing, push the pain into the background. Her pursuers had not found her. Maybe they had done for each other. She hadn’t been watching the doorway to see if anything had exited, couldn’t hear over the pounding of her own heart.
Her knees ached, especially the left, where she had smacked it twice hard on the ground. Jules would shake her head, send her back to the hall for another hour of floor work. Thinking of the older woman was like a warm hand on her chilled, sweat-damp forehead. She rose with a groan, then stooped again to pick what had been Fritz’s pack before the reaver attack. One of the swarm’s lasers had severed a strap, another had punched a hole through the pack itself.
She flipped it open to examine the contents. The scattergun had a new black stripe on the sawed off grip, but was otherwise fine. Bel’s extra work shirt had been neatly sliced across the shoulder. A flash of memory: Bel’s head, shaking in time to the rhythm of the reaver’s mascerators, dead eyes staring accusation. Kaz was gasping again as her sight blurred with tears she could not let come.
She concentrated on the present. The shotgun, other than the black score in the grip, was fine. Servile lasers were not really high enough yield for real carnage, but enough of them could cut you into neatly cauterized pieces. She rummaged through the pack for all the shells she had – five. Five wrecked serviles wouldn’t make a dent in a swarm of a hundred or more fist-sized devourers, but it would work against walkers or other devourers that might happen by. She was a long run from Junkyard, and it didn’t look like a quiet night’s sleep was very likely. In her present condition, she wasn’t sure she could fire it. But she knew it was a better option than attempting to draw the bow with the wounds to back and shoulder.
Pushing herself, she trotting away from the back doorway, reasonably assured that the swarm had contented itself with zombie take-out. Leaving the last shack behind, she stopped. A crooked post, bearing an octagonal sign from Before, facing away from the clutter of building, away from the Ruin and easily visible if you were coming down the road from Junkyard. On the faded red face of the octagon, a skull had been painted in silver – scrapper code for a dangerous site. Kaz scoffed, wondering if she had missed another warning tag at the other end of the patch of buildings, or if the tagger had been too lazy to put one up.
*****
The buildings were a hundred paces behind her when the bellowing began – a wordless roaring that held to much rage, and too much stupid, to be any sort of machine. That much volume would bring the swarm, the walkers and anything else nearby running. Ignoring the pulsing pain of her wounds, she continued toward Junkyard, to the curve of the main road, largely unmarred and unobstructed for a good distance ahead, only to stop when the sound of several crashing thuds joined the madman howling. Something must have found him. She heard no weapon’s fire, only the repeated thudding of heavy impacts. Sure that the fight would be over in another instant, she found herself turning back toward the noise all the same.
A stealthy glance around the corner of the last building revealed a humanoid shaped almost buried under the horde of serviles. The spidery robots swarmed over and around him, lasers flaring as the chittering horde cut and scored. The bellowing had stopped. A two-handed maul fell from the figure’s hands as it teetered, about to fall into the scatter of dead serviles at its feet. There was nothing she could do – whoever it was, was beyond help.
About to turn away, she spied movement from one of the buildings she had not explored, a tiny metal shed that might have been the offspring of the larger one. A girl crept forth, tentatively, arms together in front of her, pointing toward the figure covered by the crawling cloak of devourers. Suddenly, the shadowed scene flare bright white. Lightning flared from the girl’s hands, arced over the man and his coat of devourers, jagged fingers of white fire that crisped the metal bugs wherever it touched. It must have had some effect on the man too, because his voice rose again; not a howl of rage this time, but a shriek of agony.
Without thinking, Kaz stepped forward, re-holstering the scattergun, slinging the pack around to dig in, and draw out the beamer. She couldn’t stand the shriek, couldn’t bear to consider what this man she had never really seen must be enduring. She raised the beamer, about to pull the trigger to help lightning girl finish him, when she saw the serviles falling away, inert or fried or skittering for the shadows. The man’s wailing slowed, stopped. He began to swat at the remaining machines with armored fists, crushing the delicate limbs, tearing the insectile forms from him. He reached down, retrieved his maul. With unsteady steps he staggered free of the circle of dead and dying serviles, to stand, head low, bent forward at the waist. Kaz could hear him panting heavily, the sound strangely amplified and distorted.
The lightning stopped abruptly with a final pop. A hundred feet away, kaz felt the static crawl over her body, making her clothes itch, her wounds flare with fresh fire. The girl approached the big man tentatively. His helmed head turned, barked something to the girl that Kaz couldn’t make out. The diminutive figure flinched, said something in reply, but the man turned away, down the main avenue, to face Kaz. The long-hafted hammer came up and the big man took two steps in her direction before stopping as though considering his next move.
Giving voice to the same roar she had heard earlier, he swept the maul high overhead, and charged.
End of Chapter Three
