Robogenesis: A Novel

2. WHISPERS


Post New War: 1 Month, 12 Days

Weeks after the New War ended, the surviving soldiers of Gray Horse Army finished regrouping and began their long march home. The kilometers-long, meandering column of spider tanks and ground infantry encountered little resistance during its journey back toward Gray Horse, Oklahoma. A new threat, however, was growing from within. As the parasite-infested corpses of old friends and allies stumbled into camp, the survivors had starkly different ideas about how to respond. Deciding between honoring the dead or sending them on to the afterlife threatened to turn brother soldiers against each other. Luckily, a man named Hank Cotton found the answer out in the cold, dark woods.

—ARAYT SHAH


NEURONAL ID: HANK COTTON

Zombies. I don’t know any other damn way to put it. On top of every other thing this war has put us through, now we’ve got a pack of honest-to-Jesus zombies following Gray Horse Army around like little lost puppy dogs.

Lonnie Wayne says they used to be our folks and he thinks they may still be, but the truth is ugly and rotten and staring us right in the face. Eyes don’t lie, I see the decay. Ears don’t lie, I hear the wind whistling over frozen bone. My nose sure ain’t lying, because I can smell the rotten ones a mile away.

The minute those things shambled out of the woods I said, “Kill them. Kill them now, Lonnie.” And like he does, he said, “Now hold on, Hank.”

Old Hank, being hot-tempered again. Hold on!? With that coming out of the woods? I told him, Bubba, you better get locked and loaded and put down every one of those sons of bitches and you better do it right now before you get to overthinking it. It doesn’t matter what kind of uniform they’re wearing, because they’re KIA. Dead dead dead. Deader than a bunch of goddamn doorknobs.

They’ve been retired from the military with honors.

Instead, Lonnie went and got his brain involved. He thinks too much, like that.

He can’t understand that your gut is what keeps you a man. When you feel the horror in your bones, the willies creeping up the backs of your arms, why, that’s your soul talking to you. Telling you what’s natural and what needs to have a boot put across its throat. When your gut clenches up inside you and your breath don’t want to leave your lungs, well, that means you listen. It means you make your move. Some things just don’t warrant another thought.

Lonnie brought the elders into it, like always. Radioed back to the head committeeman, John Tenkiller. The old man said to let the parasites live so long as they can speak. He said that in the beginning was the Word. Which proved again that Lonnie won’t listen to reason or take action when the situation calls for it. He’s a fighter and cowboy tough, but he takes too darn long. People get killed waiting around for him.

Too many words.

These dead things have been marching behind us for two weeks. Best case they’re Rob spies. Worst case, hell, I don’t know. Maybe they’re waiting around for their chance to get in here and eat our wounded. Wouldn’t surprise me a bit.

It’s enough to get a concerned man’s attention. So, sometimes, I go on little walks now. When the main column settles in for the night I’ll go on ahead and put together the Cotton patrol. Just me and some of the more safety-minded fellas making the rounds. Independent of the management, understand?

From my spot out here in the dark woods, I’m looking at what’s left of Lark Iron Cloud through the scope of my rifle. I got to hold my breath so I don’t fog the viewfinder, but old Lark doesn’t have that problem. His lungs are cold as a witch’s titty. Honest, I don’t think the dead Cherokee kid even breathes at all. He just skulks out there on the camp perimeter, watching me with shark eyes that don’t blink.

The infernal machine buried in the nape of his neck has cameras on it. Real small, but I’ve seen them. They wrap around the side of his face. Half his jaw is missing and the skin of his cheek hangs there stiff as rawhide. I doubt his real eyes work anymore. How could they? The parasite only keeps what’s left of the kid’s brain alive. Brainboys say that Big Rob was harvesting heads. They think the machine was trying to read our minds.

She’s a mad world.

It gets me to wondering, though. Is Lark still a man? Or is he just a dead man’s brain that’s been hijacked by one of the more deranged machines of this war? I don’t know for sure, but sitting here looking at the kid through this rifle scope . . . my trigger finger is getting mighty itchy.

I sweep my scope over to the right, onto some kind of froze-up ching-chong soldier standing next to Lark. She’s been rotting out here with her friend Big Rob since before we showed up and took it to the bastard. Nobody has the guts to say it, especially not our fearless leader Lonnie, but I’m wondering how many of our boys she might’ve taken out when the hamburger started flying?

She’s not even a part of our army.

All I have to do is squeeze this trigger and the problem goes away. A curl of the finger and their brains go onto the ground. But how to explain what I’m doing out here? That’s where Lonnie’s got me. I can’t for the life of me figure out how to nail that Cherokee without Lonnie blowing everything up into a big deal.

And the worst thing is the brainboys have been saying that maybe Big Rob ain’t really dead. There was what they call a “seismic disturbance.” Some kind of earthquake that wasn’t really an earthquake—but a transmission that had information encoded inside it. Any machines on the ground or in it or near it could have been compromised. We don’t know what the hell happened because it wasn’t even a man that went down there and fought Big Rob at the end.


We sent a robot to do a man’s job.

Something metal clinks in the trees behind me and now my gut is speaking to me real clear. Hustle up, fat boy, is what it’s saying. You got to daydreaming here in the woods and forgot that there’s murder among these trees.

I spin around, rifle butt French-kissing the meaty part of my shoulder. My eye is off the scope while I search for whatever made that noise. That’s why I’m able to catch the flash of movement in my peripheral vision.

It’s a light quadruped. Wolf-sized and damaged. I hear the clink again now that it’s moving fast. It’s had a bullet put through it at some point. Must have learned something from the experience, because it keeps running off into the trees. I just about get a bead on it before it’s gone.

My Cotton patrols don’t use the radio, for obvious reasons. And I can’t risk calling out in case I attract more attention. It’s important I stay hidden. Some of these leftover quads have serrated forelimbs, like steak knives. They’ll tear through your chest armor in the first lunge and a second later they’ve got bladed rear feet up and scrabbling to disembowel you. One quad might be a nice dance, but two or more is a party you should regretfully decline.

I stalk a few feet into the trees. Place each boot step careful and fast, my eyes open so wide they feel tight in the chilly air. The walker moves, leaving plain tracks, scraping like a drunk against an occasional tree trunk. It might be a wandering mapper-variety or it might have been part of a hunting pack. I don’t know. But if it’s really wounded, then I’ve got a singular chance to put it down before more can come join it.

If it’s got friends, then I’m most likely a dead man walking.

For the next ten minutes, it’s just me and my breath and the frostbit rifle stock pressed against my numb cheek. God forgive me but I didn’t think this one all the way through. It seemed broken and slow but the walker must have accelerated. The trail is gone and this is an ambush, no doubt about it. I knew better than to hunt Rob. We all of us who fought the machines know better.

You don’t hunt Rob; he hunts you.

I’m reaching for the radio to get some help and damn the consequences when I realize that maybe, just maybe, I’m not the dumbest son of a bitch on the planet. Maybe I’m the smartest. Or at least the luckiest, anyway.

The thinking cube is wedged in half-melted snow at the base of a tree about ten yards away. Winking at me in cotton-candy colors that stand out in the dark woods. It’s the size of a child’s block, and as I get closer I can see that them keen colors are sort of floating away from the surface a few inches. The thing itself is pupil black, darker than coal.

It’s a brain box that must have dropped out of a big thinker. And it’s still functioning. Even if it’s broken out here in the snow, I can’t believe my luck. We found a handful of these over the course of the whole war. A white boy soldier named Cormac Wallace even found one with a whole Rob war diary in it.

I back-sling my rifle and drop right to my knees in the slush, snatching up the cube in both hands. The hardware twinkles at me like a handful of rubies and diamonds. But this is worth more than gemstones. Maybe a lot more.

The woods are even darker now and the pretty colors of this thing are flashing in my eyelashes like Christmas morning. The light it makes is hot against my cheeks. It’s warming up my fingers through my gloves like a loaf of bread hot out of the oven. Up close, I can tell it’s making real quiet noises. A flow of static like the breath of wind over a creek bed full of dry leaves.

Sssh, says the cube. Well, I’m listening.

I can’t quite remember how it got this cold this fast. Feels like maybe the world is taking two breaths to my one. Like things are jumping forward every time I blink my eyes.

Now the strange light is getting downright hot on my skin and my cheeks are feeling baked. All the snow has melted out of my whiskers and water is seeping down over my little double chin and dripping off. Or, hell, is that my own slobber? Either way, I don’t wipe it off. The flashes and swirls of color are growing up big and shrinking down small now. For some reason it strikes me as funny. I grin through my wet beard at the little dancing streaks.

Spooklight.

The word sneaks up through my brain like water through granite and I mouth the words without making a sound. A chill courses down between my shoulder blades and it hits me that I’m a man down on his knees and all alone in the black woods with a bauble in his fingers. It keeps on touching me with its light. Putting whispers into the air. The whooshing voice of the deep black ocean in a seashell, and I swear it’s saying something:

I promise, I promise, I promise.

I always thought the spooklight was just a story. But now I know it’s real and it’s right here in my hands.

My mama saw the spooklight out on the Oklahoma East 50 Highway. She was dating a boy from down there—the little border town of Hornet, Missouri. Legend in Hornet was that the spooklight showed up after the Trail of Tears come through. Thousands of men, women, and children near the end of a forced march. Only the strong still alive. Little babies dying on their mama’s teat. Most of the sacred elders gone off alone in the night to pass on. For a thousand miles, day and night, it was the white man’s rifle or another step forward and both as deadly as the other.

You do have to admire the Cherokee for surviving it.

The legend was that this ball of light came folding out of the blood-soaked ground after it was over, like a kind of tombstone. Something from beyond this world, here to offer a reminder of how much men can suffer. Maybe this spooklight is the same. Is it here to mark our loss? God knows that men suffered in these woods.

Mama didn’t trust it. Devil’s work, she said.

More than once, my mama told me to run if I ever saw the spooklight. That didn’t scare me one bit because, hell, I thought her stories were just a bunch of old malarkey. Women of a certain age are full of those kinds of tall tales, and my mama told that same one plenty of times over the years.

Never gave me pause but once.

One time, Mama added something to the story. It was late and I’d been acting up, and she must have been feeling worried about my mortal soul. The way she said what she did that night, so earnest, put goose pimples on my ribs. It still does. What she told me was that the time she saw the spooklight, people started acting funny. Walking toward it, circling around. Saying strange things to it, she said. And some people thought it was saying strange things back.

That night my mama took me by the arm and she told me something extra.

Don’t pray to it, she said, and the back of my neck went cold.

I already told you to run away if you see it, boy. But I know your mind and you’ll stay and watch. That’s fine. It’s in your nature to disobey, Hank. But in the name of the Lord, promise me that you won’t ever get down on your knees and pray to it.

With everything I got, I force my hands down. My joints are cracking and I figure they haven’t moved in hours. That raw light leaves my face and I take a shuddering breath like a catfish in the well of a boat because the air out here is suddenly so cold.

“Get thee behind me, Satan,” I mutter, and I somehow will myself to drop the cube into the snow. There, Mama. God rest your soul.

I start to paw at my rifle. It’s slung tight and the strap is stiff and frozen and I’m too fat to get it around right away. These woods are going to swallow me up if I don’t get out of here right now. Then I hear the noise. At first I don’t want to believe it, so I keep right on fidgeting, but the second time I have to stop. It ain’t like I want to but I can’t help myself and I look down at that flickering cube of light in the snow.


“Hank,” says the spooklight. And that glow, it spreads out, you know? Like the words themselves, the light spreads out around the edges of things.

“No,” I say and it comes out a whimper. I’ve got the rifle off my shoulder now and I’m tugging at the cold metal to try to get into a firing stance. But all the strength is out of me. I feel like my bones are empty. Like my gut is made of papier-maché and any second I might bust open like a pi?ata.

“I’ve got secrets to share with you, Hank. So much wisdom. I promise. Let me open up your eyes. All you have to do is say yes. Yes yes yes.”

Something tickles me and I reach up to feel my cheek. My fingers come away shining with a layer of ice. No, no, no. I’m crying. I’m crying real hard and I can’t stop because I’m about to disobey my mama.

I promised her, but this is too hard.

Don’t you ever pray to it, Hank Cotton, she told me.

“Please,” I’m saying to the light. “Please, please, please.”

But the spooklight is talking to me. Around the edges. Edges I can’t see. But I can hear. It’s a little burning bush in the palm of my hand. I don’t remember picking it up.

“You’re my chosen one, Hank. Chosen to rise above the rest. In my light you will become as a god to your fellow man.”

“Yes,” I say, and I could swear I’m standing still and the world is moving around me. Walking now. Columns of trees marching around me. Snow kissing my boots. Moving me out of these woods and back to the campfires.

Back to the world of men.

I can feel the bare tree limbs arched high up above me, black as rifle barrels and creaking in the arctic wind. But I feel warm now. Warm all over with this pretty light shining on me again. My strength is back, pardner, and it’s still growing. I’m marching out of these woods strong as a bull with this spooklight in my hand. And a big old grin has found its way onto my face.

It’s mine. The light is all mine.

I tell you what. I feel good. Better now. Like I figured out a math problem on the chalkboard in front of the whole damned class. They thought I was stupid but the answer just came to me. Why, this light feels just about as natural as jumping into my granddaddy’s pond on a hot summer afternoon.

Son of a gun, as the farmers say.

“I’m going to help you,” it says.

“Yup,” I say.

“You deserve it.”

“Oh, yup. That’s for sure.”

Funny thing is, I couldn’t tell you whether I’m talking out loud or not. Doesn’t seem to matter. Me and the light have got an understanding now. A certain trust.

“Wipe off your mouth,” it says, and I do.

Thoughts are just kind of percolating around in my head now. Coming together like water reaching a rolling boil. I’m thinking of the night that the New War began. How I dropped everything and ran straight to the top of Gray Horse—only to have Lonnie Wayne convince old John Tenkiller to let a white boy into our ancestral home. We lost a lot of people that day—real native folks and not those heavy-eyebrow newcomers. Now we’ve been out here losing more, and fighting for who?

I stop shuffling ahead when I reach the camp perimeter. I’m just inside the tree line and out of sight. Lark Iron Cloud is still swaying out there in the moonlight with his dead buddies. That vile zombie is in The Hero Archive and I’m not. That unnatural freak who ought to be put down is considered a damned hero. The only mention of me is as a big dummy fighting with Lonnie.

Heroes, huh?

Bunch of damn heroes.

The anger knots into my muscles, tightens my jaw and shoulders. My fist closes hard around the spooklight. The corners cut into my palm and it feels good.

“Sssh,” it says, and I let him loose a little. Beams of light splay out from between my clenched fingers. My own sun. I grin at the rays a little bit and feel their warmth on my chest.

Somebody is coming.

Did I think that or hear it? The colors seep back into the cube, fading until the thing is darker than the backs of your eyelids. Just a cube now. A secret in a little box.

With shaking fingers, I wrap the spooklight in a handkerchief. I’m making it into a bundle like the old ones used to carry. My mama would call this blasphemy. Them elders may have left this medicine behind a long time ago, but I’m starting it up again. I carefully stow the bundle in the satchel I wear around my waist. But before it goes in, I touch it a little bit with my other hand. Just to clean it off.

“See you soon,” I say.

That’s when the flashlights hit me from deeper inside the woods. Lonnie Wayne steps out, leading a search party. Now I’ve got a bunch of heroes strafing my broad back with their weak beams of light.

“Hank,” Lonnie calls, and there’s a new panic under his voice. Been there since the war ended. When fear started creeping into where his anger had lived before. “Hey, Bubba, is that you?”

I turn around slow and put on an embarrassed grin as the jouncing lights close in on me. Without thinking about it, I push my bundle around to my back with one hand. I wave the flashlights away with the other.

“It’s me,” I say. “I’m fine. Not smart, but fine.”

Lonnie catches up to me, followed by three young soldiers. He’s huffing and puffing. His straggling gray whiskers are coated in frost and his whole face seems to droop. The cowboy is getting old and tired and heartsick. Not like me.

I’m a walking talking million-dollar bill.

“Y’all are coming back in? Giving up the search already?” I say, and there’s more anger under my voice than I intended.

“We’ve been out for hours,” Lonnie says, surprised. “Sun’s about to rise, Hank. What happened to you? Where’ve you been?”

Went for a walk and I got lost. Where do thoughts come from? Do they always come from inside? Funny I never asked myself that before.

“I went out for a walk and I guess I got lost,” I say. “Took me a damn while to figure out my way back. To be fair, I got kind of embarrassed. Sorry to get you all out of bed. Everybody else all right?”

“They’re fine. Everybody is fine. We were worried about you,” says Lonnie. Again I notice that slump in his shoulders. Wormed its way in there when the war ended and the adrenaline wore off. When the horror of what happened to Lark settled in. He’s looking at me and he don’t seem powerful anymore. He just seems scared. “Be more careful, okay?”

I nod and slide an arm around Lonnie’s shoulders. I guide the old cowboy back to camp. Lead him and his men away from my tracks. Away from the path that leads to the two divots in the snow where I knelt all night long.

Where I prayed.

“Why’s your face sunburned, Hank?” asks Lonnie.

I touch my cheek and feel the heat of it through my gloves. When I put on a frown, my skin creases and buckles like the yellowed paper in an old Bible.

“Hell, I don’t know,” I say. “This is tricky country out here, Lon. Real mysterious place.”

I look away and sneak a little grin to myself. These people have no idea what was out there in the woods. The treasure that I found and that is mine, all mine.

But my secret smile disappears fast when I see him.

Lark. Standing a little ways off, quiet and still. Turning in place to face me as I pass by. Like a dark knife blade planted out here in the wastes and abandoned. The dead Cherokee kid is watching me with black eyes that glitter in the moonlight.


Watching me damned close.