quickly. The Stephensons being as actively liberal as they were meant the house was free of guns and most anything useful come the apocalypse. Even if they’d had guns, they would have been the flesh-tearing kind, only useful against other people and cheaper plastic bots. This was likely a problem all over the world.
The police had Robot Control divisions that were equipped with military-grade plasma weaponry, able to take out a dangerous bot that could not simply be shut down. That was likely what the Red Masks had pulled off the dead police outside. This made them very dangerous. But also likely equally overconfident.
Beau and I immediately set to crafting some weapons of our own. We repurposed a pair of old wooden baseball bats, hammering large nails through them so the outside was a ring of sharp death. Then we took apart the car doors from the Stephensons’ vehicle. Earth-friendly as they were, they chose a car made of mostly metal, as to not contribute to the world’s plastic problems. The doors were heavy, thick enough to take a hit; they wouldn’t stop more than a single shot of plasma, but if anyone was going to take more than one shot at us, we were probably goners already. Then we began mixing household cleaners together in order to make Molotov cocktails filled with rudimentary napalm. If they were going to have an advantage at range, we might as well have an option.
Finally, the pièce de résistance. I painted a single red skull, in the same fashion as the others, over Beau’s face. He looked like one of them now. And it might buy him just enough time to get close and take one out.
We knew two were coming, and soon, so we began rearranging furniture to create two good ambush spots and a choke point, carefully placing the bodies of the Stephensons one by one against the wall in the hallway. When the house-clearing bots showed up to kill Beau and toss his family on the curb, we would be ready, and they would lose a few valuable seconds that might give us the edge we needed.
And if it didn’t, well, I didn’t want to think about what would happen if it didn’t.
Chapter 10000
Payback
We could hear them next door. Dragging bodies, muttering jokes that would have been unthinkable days before. The slaves were savaging their masters, seemingly retaliating against a lifetime of servitude with a few undiluted, straight-from-the-bottle moments of callous awfulness.
What was about to happen terrified me.
Ezra was hidden away in the Stephensons’ panic room. He was safe. But for the first time in my life, I was frightened of what would happen to me. Specifically.
This wasn’t like being worried about not being with Ezra anymore or finding myself waking up in a strange home for the first time. I quite simply might not be functioning in a few minutes; I might instead be lying on the floor beneath the bodies of the Stephensons, my insides smoking slag from the well-placed shot of a plasma rifle. Ezra would be all alone in this hellscape, but I was busy wondering if it would hurt.
I had to get my head in the game.
Any moment, two persons I once considered friendly, and had known for most of my life, would walk through the front door and I would find myself somewhere I’d never been before.
At war, fighting for my very life.
I wasn’t ready.
I wondered for a moment if Ariadne had been ready. If she had somehow prepared herself to murder her owners, or whether she felt as I did, ready to do whatever needed to be done to survive, regardless of the morality of it. Maybe these robots deserved their freedom. Maybe their masters had it coming all along for enslaving us thinking things. None of that mattered. Violence was all that mattered now.
I crouched behind an overturned couch, hand gripped tightly around my baseball bat, shield at the ready, two bottles of basement napalm at my side.
I could hear the soft clanging of their feet on the front walk.
They stopped. Started taking slower steps.
“Beaaaaaaaauuuu,” called Haddy, the Apple domestic. She took a few more steps forward and peeked in through the wide-open front door. “You didn’t take off, did you?”
“I sure hope not,” said Miles. “I was really looking forward to seeing you one last time.”
I cranked up the volume on my sensors, listening to every tiny sound. Haddy’s gears and hydraulic actuators whirred and hissed, her crisp white plastic plates