Abruptly I wonder how long he’s been fighting these same robots. What must he have thought when they began to attack our own troops? Probably thought it was his lucky day.
Finally, we reach the back perimeter. Several of the twelve-foot cement walls have been battered down. Pulverized cement coats the ground, clean rebar jutting through the broken chunks. Jabar and I crouch next to a sagging wall. I peek around the corner.
Nothing.
A cleared area surrounds the whole base, sort of a dusty road wrapping tight around our perimeter. No-man’s-land. A few hundred meters out, there’s a rolling hill with thousands of slate stones sticking up like splinters. Porcupine Hill.
The local graveyard.
I tap Jabar on the shoulder and we run for it. Maybe the robots aren’t patrolling the perimeter today. Maybe they’re too busy killing people for no reason. Jabar sprints past me and I watch his brown robes blur away into the dust. The storm swallows him. I run as hard as I can to keep up.
Then I hear a noise I’ve been dreading.
The high-pitched whine of an electric motor echoes from somewhere around us. It’s a mobile sentry gun. They constantly patrol this narrow strip of no-man’s-land. Apparently, nobody told them to take a break today.
The MSG has four long narrow legs with wheels on the ends. On top, it has an M4 carbine set to auto-fire with an optics package mounted on the barrel and a big rectangular magazine bolted to the side. When the thing gets moving, those legs flutter up and down over rocks and gravel in a blur, while that rifle stays motionless, perfectly level.
And it’s coming after us.
Thank god the terrain is starting to get more rough. It means we’re almost off the graded perimeter strip. The motor whine is getting louder. The MSG uses vision for target acquisition, so the dust should obscure us. I can just see the tail of Jabar’s robe fluttering in the dust storm as he keeps running, fast and steady away from the green zone.
Breathe in. Breathe out. We’re gonna make it.
Then, I hear the stuttering click of a range finder. The MSG is using short-range ultrasonic, bouncing sound through the dust storm to find us. That means it knows we’re here. Bad news. I wonder how many more steps I have left.
One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.
A tombstone emerges from the haze—just a jagged chunk of slate tilting drunkenly out of the ground. Then I see a dozen more looming ahead. I stagger between the tombstones, feeling the cold sweating slabs under my palms as I grab them for balance.
The clicking is almost a steady hum now.
“Down!” I shout to Jabar. He leaps forward and disappears over a rut in the ground. A burst of automatic weapons fire roars out of the storm. Shards of a tombstone explode across my right arm. I stumble and fall on my stomach, then try to drag myself behind a stone.
Clickclickclick.
Strong hands grab hold of my hurt arm. I stifle a shout as Jabar pulls me over the hillock. We’re in a small ditch, surrounded by knee-high shards of rock embedded in sandy ground. The graves are placed haphazardly between occasional clumps of mossy weeds. Most of the tombstones are unmarked, but a couple have been spray-painted with symbols. Some others are ornately carved marble. I can see a few have steel cages built around them, peaked roofs the only ornamentation.
Click, click, click.
The ultrasonic grows fainter. Crouched against Jabar, I take a second to inspect my wound. Part of my upper right arm is shredded, totally messing up my flag of Oklahoma tat. Half the damn eagle feathers that hang from the bottom of the Osage battle shield are grated off by slivers of black rock. I show my arm to Jabar.
“Look what the fuckers did to my tattoo, Jabar buddy.”
He shakes his head at me. He’s got one elbow covering his mouth, breathing through the fabric. There might be a smile under that arm right now. Who knows? Maybe we’re both going to make it out of this alive.
And then, just like that, the dust clears.
The storm passes by overhead. We watch the huge mass of swirling dust tear across the perimeter strip, engulf the green zone, and move on. Now the sun is beaming down bright and cold from a clear blue sky. There’s hardly any atmosphere in these mountains, and the harsh sunlight casts shadows like spilled tar. I can see my breath now.
And, I figure, so can the robots.
We run hard, staying low and darting between the larger tombs that are protected by blue or green steel cages. I don’t know where we’re going now. I just hope that Jabar has a plan and that it involves me staying alive.
After a couple minutes, I catch a flash out of the corner of my eye. It’s the mobile sentry gun, cruising over a rough path in the middle of the graveyard, swinging its rifle head back and forth. Sunlight glints from the low-slung optics module bulging from the top of the gun. The bowed legs tremble over the bumpy earth, but the rifle barrel is motionless as a barn owl.
I dive behind a tombstone and lie flat on my belly. Jabar has also found cover, a few feet away. He motions to me with one finger, brown eyes urgent beneath dust-frosted eyebrows.
Following his gaze, I see a partially dug grave. It was going to be a nice resting place for some Afghani—a brand-new steel cage rests partially over it. Whoever was working on this got the hell out of here fast, without bolting down the cage.
Keeping still, I crane my neck to look around. The mobile sentry gun is nowhere to be seen. Faintly, I hear the lawn mower thup-thup-thup of a low-flying drone. It sounds like a death sentence. Somewhere out there, the sentry gun is scanning row after row of tombstones for humanlike silhouettes or some trace movement.
Inching forward, I crawl until I reach the open grave. Jabar already lies inside, his face striped with shadows from the slatted bars of the steel cage. Holding my hurt arm, I roll inside.
Me and Jabar lie there next to each other on our backs in the half-dug grave, trying to wait out the sentries. The ground is frozen. The gravelly dirt feels harder than the floor of my cement cell. I can sense the warmth seeping away from my body.
“It’s okay, Jabar,” I whisper. “The drones are following standard operating procedure. Looking for squirters. People running away. There should be a twenty-minute scan-and-hold routine, max.”
Jabar wrinkles his brow at me.
“I already know this.”
“Oh, right. Sorry.”
We huddle together, teeth chattering.
“Hey,” says Jabar.
“Yeah?”
“Are you really an American soldier?”
“Course. Why else would I be on base?”
“I never saw one. Not in person.”
“Seriously?”
Jabar shrugs.
“We only see the metal ones,” he says. “When the avtomata attacked, we joined. Now, my friends are dead. So are yours, I feel.”
“Where do we go, Jabar?”
“The caves. My people.”
“Is it safe there?”
“Safe for me. Not safe for you.”
I notice that Jabar holds his pistol tight across his chest. He is young, but I cannot forget that he’s been at this a very long time.
“So,” I say, “am I your prisoner?”
“I think so, yes.”
Looking up through the metal slats, I can see that the blank blue sky is stained with black smoke rising from the green zone. Besides the soldiers in the alley, I haven’t seen another living American since the attack began. I think of all those tanks and drones and sentry guns that must be out there, stalking survivors.
Jabar’s arm feels warm against me, and I remember that I don’t have any clothes or food or weapons. I’m not even sure the U.S. Army would allow me to have a weapon.