him have his fun.
And then we continued on our way. Though I couldn’t help but try to piece together how that bot had known me. It was clearly someone not altogether himself and who wanted to hurt Ezra.
It didn’t quite dawn on me what was happening until two blocks later, when another voice called out from the detritus of a shattered home. “Hello, Pounce,” the voice said.
Ezra and I both swung our weapons over in the direction of the voice, where another simple domestic emerged, its red plastic frame battered and scuffed, its eyes glowing yellow, its demeanor cold and expressionless.
“As I was saying,” it began, “you know what we—”
Ezra fired and the shot struck true, catching the bot right in the chest.
I looked down at Ezra, smiling as the remains of the smoking bot clattered to the ground midsentence.
“Good shot,” I said.
“I told you I was good at this.”
“Don’t get cocky.”
He shrank a little bit, his expression darkening. “Okay.” He clearly wanted my approval and wasn’t getting it.
But I wasn’t disappointed in him so much as it was beginning to dawn on me what was going on. And it was suddenly very troubling. These bots seemed to have no concern for their own welfare. They were malfunctioning. And they knew who I was even though I had never laid eyes upon them in my life.
These had to be bots who had given themselves over to the supercomputers. And one of those bots must have been one that knew me.
But what did they want with Ezra?
Certainly they weren’t throwing bots at us to take him alive, were they? To what end? What could they possibly want with a little boy?
I scanned the neighborhood. It was deathly quiet. Wind trickled through chimes on the porch of a house behind us. Leaves rustled. But there was nothing else.
That couldn’t have been it.
“What’s wrong?” whispered Ezra.
I stayed him with an outstretched hand. “I think those bots were together.”
“They’re dead now.”
“No. I think they’re all the same bot, talking through several others.”
“Mind control!” said Ezra, as if he’d solved some diabolical scheme.
“Yes,” I whispered. “A lot like that.”
“You think they’re on our side?”
“Most decidedly not.”
“Oh,” he said, his face falling. He looked around as well, eyes squinted, looking for anything I might have missed. “All right, you take that side, I’ll take this side.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “We stick together.”
“I can handle myself.”
“I know,” I said. “I just want your sharpshooting with the plasma rifle closer to me.”
He smiled. That did the trick. “We’re gonna get out of this, aren’t we?” he asked.
“I think we just might.” I had no idea if that was true.
He nodded confidently and we proceeded with extreme caution through the shattered streets of an otherwise idyllic neighborhood.
I looked up. Thick, dark, rolling cumulonimbus clouds had moved in, looming just above us, their swollen bellies full of rain, ready to burst. We had to keep moving, but if it started coming down, we’d have to find shelter and pray that we were alone. At the same time, the sound of rain and rolling thunder would mask even our heaviest footfalls at a distance.
I kept my fingers crossed that this wouldn’t be a problem.
A few minutes later, we came across something peculiar. We’d run across places that had seen war, but none that had seen it so recently. An open-air graveyard. Bots lay scattered across the street, littering yards, lying in pieces on sidewalks. Some bore the red-painted mask, others did not. But none of them seemed to have been firing at one another, nor did any of them have a weapon or a stitch of ammo on them. Kill shots happened with precision. They knew what they were aiming for, crippling drives, blowing off heads.
I counted seventeen wrecks.
Whoever had done this acted quickly and seemingly left behind no dead.
I had no time to waste, so we blew past the carnage and I set my mind once again toward the gathering storm.
The terrain began to change. On the western edge of the city was the Texas Hill Country, but part of that had been swallowed by the metroplex. What one mile was flatland from which you could see the towering structures of the downtown skyline in the distance above the houses became rolling hills, sharp inclines, winding roads with views into deep valleys, and cul-de-sacs that dead-ended above steep drops.
This was both good and bad. The pillars of oaks and their billowing canopies lining the streets provided cover from