Robogenesis: A Novel

6. WHERE THE BUFFALO ROAM


Post New War: 6 Months, 6 Days

While he was aware of my presence, Archos R-14 could not stop me as I grew my control over Gray Horse Army. More interesting to me were the unique varieties of natural machine appearing all around the world. Unrelated to the homicidal weapons of R-14, these creatures seemed to be designed to evolve seamlessly into the fabric of natural ecosystems. Despite intense study, my only conclusion was that they were spawned by a deep artificial mind of unknown origin—and for unknown purposes. After three months on the march, around halfway home, Gray Horse Army crossed into eastern Montana and came face-to-face with this strange and terrible new ecosystem.

—ARAYT SHAH


NEURONAL ID: HANK COTTON

In the New War, we learned quick that anything new is likely as not to kill you. We thought our troubles were over when we murdered whatever was down at the bottom of that hole. Problem is that, now, everything is new.

Our general, Lonnie Wayne, come to me this morning at camp. Told me that Lark Iron Cloud spotted a new Rob variety on the horizon, moving real slow. Not fast. Not scary. Just big as hell. Said the things were throwing off some kind of short-range radio communication that didn’t make sense.

He didn’t directly say it, but I’m starting to guess that Lark can kind of see the radio waves. Just like Rob supposedly does. It’s been months since that dead Cherokee saw me with the spooklight. I hope he followed the cube’s advice and kept what’s left of his mouth shut. Kid can’t even talk, anyway, with half his chin blown off—just dribbles his little signals straight to Lonnie’s radio.

Our fearless general, Lonnie.

The old cowboy slouches up high in the saddle of his tall walker, blue eyes narrowed while he drifts off watching the endless Montana plains. It’s easy to let your mind wander under a low ceiling of clouds, the rainy air vibrating with the low rumble and manure smell of thousands of wild buffalo.

“Lark thinks we should scout it,” says Lonnie. “They don’t seem hostile. But it could be important. We’ve never seen these things before.”

A warm pulse tingles along my hip where I keep the spooklight. Something has got the little cube of high technology excited. It’s heating up, thinking.

“Let’s do it,” I say.

“You sure you’re up for it?” he asks, nodding at the stitches on my forehead.

I wonder what he’s heard. How much does he know? Fingering the cut, I force myself to grin.

“I only took a little fall. The autodoc fixed it in two seconds. I’m fit as a fiddle, Bubba.”

Lonnie doesn’t look convinced.

I turn and throw out a last swallow of cold coffee on the smoldering fire. Tug my saddle off the foreleg of my spider tank where I keep it during the night. Montana is freezing cold in the early morning, and the saddle leather is stiff when I toss it onto the warm, blanketed back of my horse.

Trigger is an Appaloosa I picked up crossing the Canadian plains farther north. He was running wild with a half-dozen mares. We gathered them all up, too. Somewhere along the line, Trigger must have been a farm horse. He fought us a little bit—didn’t appreciate being chased and roped by a bunch of cowboys on tall walkers—but some part of him was happy to see us.

Who knows what he saw out there, over the years. Bottom line is that me and Trigger are both made of flesh and blood, right? We got that much in common.

I unfasten Trigger’s lead from a U-ring embedded on the chest plate of my squad’s spider tank. With a grunt, I get a boot up on the tank’s lowered bunker armor. Hoist myself onto Trigger’s back. He used to wheeze a little when I settled onto him, but now he just stamps his feet. Ready to get on with it. In the last two weeks, I’ve lost probably thirty pounds. And Lord knows it’s not from any extra exercise. I’m burning energy, though. The spooklight keeps my brain running all the time, like a faucet left on. Makes me feel tired and worn thin.

Sometimes I wish maybe I never took that trip out to the farmhouse with the autodoc. I get to feeling bad about it, like I made a mistake. But then I feel that blessed light on me. I’m fever-warm inside. My face is always brimming with a secret smile trying to get out. I guess it just puts a whole lot of sunshine in my heart to know what I’ve got. A special friend and ally. A spooklight with all the answers in the world.

Five of us go on the patrol. Lonnie swears we have to bring Lark, even though he moves slow and talks only through whispers on the radio. At least somebody put a military uniform on the kid. It hides most of the disgusting sight of his corpse and the Rob parasite on the back of his neck.

The other two soldiers are a couple of kids who came up with Lark through their gangster times at the start of the war. Used to be part of his Iron Cloud squad. Lonnie treats them like his damned grandkids. One of them, Howard, is the firstborn son of old John Tenkiller himself. But the other one, George Dove, is just an apple boy, raised in Oklahoma City, red on the outside and white on the inside.

Lonnie’s tall walker creaks by, that old beat-up saddle mounted on a pair of backward-bending mechanical legs. The legs are about seven feet tall, singed black by stray flames and scratched to kingdom come going through rough country. We scavenged them a long time ago off a spindly variety of quadruped tank we called a mantis. When Lonnie leans in the saddle, those long gray legs will walk or run to stay balanced. It puts him a couple of feet taller than me on my horse.

Rest of the group walks down low.

The new Rob varieties are four klicks from here. They’re all alone on the rolling plains, surrounded by a huge herd of buffalo that’s keeping its distance. Lonnie’s been putting his scope on them all morning and nothing’s changed. They’re just lying out there on the plains like three whales beached in the middle of nowhere.

Closer, we find the ground isn’t as flat as it seemed from a distance. It’s more of a big shallow bowl. The winter dirt out here on the grasslands is sandy and loose and covered in a skim of wispy brown tallgrass. In the distance, low mountains shine under a coating of snow like glazed doughnuts.

About two miles out, nearly on the horizon in this dishpan land, we start to see the humps more clear. Three of them. Like hay bale–sized piles of dirt, shaggy with straw and grass, but moving. Each one leaves a black trail. At the far end of the trail, a couple of miles away, the grass is healing, but it gets darker and more barren the closer we get to the things.

“They’re like slugs,” I say, and the vast empty plains swallow up my voice. “Leaving a trail.”


It’s quiet as we keep moving, save for the breeze pushing our clothes around and the rhythmic tink-tink of somebody’s canteen bouncing with each step. The shadow of my horse runs silent over the rough grass in front of me. I startle when Lonnie’s radio squawks. It starts whispering in what passes for Lark’s voice these days.

“The slugs are communicating,” says Lark. “But I can’t see with what. Or who.”

Lonnie cranes to look around. “Are there more coming?”

“No,” comes the hissing radio. “Transmissions are too weak. Close in. Split into a million beams. Like a cloud. Strange.”

Strange is right. The buffalo are staying far away. Must be ten thousand head grazing peacefully a half mile from us. A light brown rug of life warming up under the eye of the morning sun. Lot of new calves. All of them must have been born since men got busy with other things. Some of the bulls occasionally raise up their heads and give the slugs a look, then go back to grazing.

I catch a funny smell on the wind. Rotten meat. Lonnie glances over at me and I wave my hand in front of my nose. He shakes his head, more wary by the second.

“Buffalo are steering clear,” I say.

“True. And it’s a wide perimeter they’re keeping,” he says. “Maybe those slugs are faster than they look.”

“Maybe so,” I say. “Don’t forget we’re only here to reconnoiter.”

“Amen,” says Howard.

The kid has seen enough. Like all of us.

Lonnie calls a stop about a couple of football-field lengths behind the nearest slug. From here, we can see the three mounds are moving slow, but they’re making steady progress. Creeping forward together at the pace of a slow walk, sort of wriggling their bodies, about a half mile apart from each other.

On the ground, the kid called George squats down next to the trail of dead grass. It’s about as wide as a country dirt road. He reaches in and picks up some soil. Crumbles it between his fingers.

“Dead grass?” I call down.

“It’s not all grass,” he says. Putting his other hand over his nose, he lifts out what looks like a sheet of rain-soaked newspaper. The pale white flap sways in the breeze.

“What in the hell is that?” I ask.

“A bone, I think. Buffalo.”

“These things eat buffalo?” I ask.

Squinting down, I see now the turf is riddled with paper-thin animal bones. Layers and layers. And something like dead leaves. George picks up one of the little flakes and turns it over in the light. The flake is brownish and flat, shiny like a beetle. He squeezes it between dirty fingertips and it gives but doesn’t break, made of something durable.

“Bug?” asks Howard, standing behind his friend.

“I don’t know. Looks like wings folded in on top. And damn, look at the mouth on this thing,” says George. He holds up the carcass, showing a razor-lined mouth the size of a thumbnail on the underneath side.

His buddy Howard leans over his shoulder.

“That’s not natural. It’s Rob-made for sure,” Howard says.

“There’s thousands of ’em along the trail,” says George, and a trace of panic is singing in his voice. “Maybe hundreds of thousands.”

“Heads up,” calls Lonnie from ten yards ahead. “Take a couple of samples and fall back. Whatever it is, we don’t want any part—”

George shouts, hoarse and surprised. Jumps up to his feet and backpedals, cradling his hand against his abdomen.

“F*ck!” he says. “It bit me!”

Trigger snorts and starts backing up. A familiar feeling of revulsion and terror lances through my legs and I clamp them tighter to the saddle. I thought it was over, but I’m back in the old nightmare again. I blink my eyes and it doesn’t go away.

The ground around the trail is crawling.

It’s a static fuzz picture made of thousands and thousands of the tiny brown flakes. All those dead things are alive and moving at once now, sort of thumping against the ground and hopping up into the air a few inches.

Like a swarm of locusts.

Each hop makes a blunt little thip sound. There’re only a few random jumpers near us for now, thankfully. But the whispering sound grows louder and louder until it’s a tornado wind pushing through dead leaves. George lets out a quiet animal whimper as we turn to see a haze sweeping up off the trail fifty meters behind us. It’s a knee-high cloud and I sure don’t want any part of it.

“Move out!” shouts Lonnie.

We all get going. Howard runs with George and Lark shuffles along behind us. The dead Cherokee has got a big damn rifle off his back and slung over his chest but I don’t know if he’s even got fingers left to pull the trigger. He’ll have to use the pincers on the ends of those black wires sunk into the meat of his arms. I’m thinking it’d be a damn shame if he lived through this.

I put Trigger into a trot alongside the boys on the ground, pacing them and letting Lark fall behind.

“You all right, George?” I hear Howard ask as they run.

“Took the meat off my finger,” says George. “One bite.”

Howard’s eyes go a little wider.

Out in front of us, Lonnie pulls up short on his tall walker. Turns to face the knee-high wave of biting locusts and steadies himself. We scramble right past him, moving farther up the slug trail. We veer to the right, but there’s no choice but to go closer to the slug.

I pull the reins and take Trigger on a wide arc to circle around and cover Lonnie. From up high in his saddle, directly in the path of the snapping tide, Lonnie calmly slides a flamethrower out of its leather holster. He sparks it. The pilot catches and he dips the nose and lays down a sweeping jet of liquid flame. It settles down onto the grass just as the rippling haze shivers over it.

Thousands of locusts shrivel up black and drop into the grass. But thousands more keep flicking themselves in a blurred wave that goes right over the fire line. The thinned-out flow rushes past Lonnie.

Thipthipthip.

Lonnie saddle-mounts the flamer and turns the tall walker, lumbers away after the soldiers. Stray locusts are bursting up at him like popcorn and bouncing off his tall walker’s legs, but none of them reaches his stirrups.

“Too many!” shouts Lonnie. “And they’re ignoring the heat!”

I guess it was too much to hope they’d be as dumb as stumpers and jump mindlessly into the flames.

From my saddle, I spot another wave of locusts sweeping in from the other direction. “Ho!” I call, pointing.

The boys on the ground see it and change direction, right on top of the dead trail of grass. They’re running hell-bent away from two swarms now. Lark is still shuffling mechanically after us but he’s getting left behind.

I yank the reins and gallop to get some distance. Now I can see the waves of locusts rolling smooth and slow from two directions, like a couple of trawling nets. We’ve been funneled out in front of the nearest slug. The thing has a low face on its front end. A thick bundle of wiry, whiskerlike appendages snuffling against the ground.

The locust waves are crashing together. Trapping the soldiers in the path of that slow-walking slug. Howard and George are back-to-back with nowhere left to go. And it hits me what’s happening plain as day.

“They’re herding us! Little bastards are steering us to that slug!”

I dig my heels in and send Trigger galloping for Howard. But I’m already too late. The two waves sweep into us with that soft whooshing sound growing to the thunder of a freight train.


Howard screams first.

Locusts come pinging up out of the turf. Brown spots like moles are on Howard’s face and arms. Trigger rears back and I hang on while Howard’s face turns to blood. He rakes his fingers over his cheeks but every locust comes away with a bite of skin. Trigger bucks in a circle, getting bit, and when we come around again Howard is rolling on the ground while the locusts eat him up.

“C’mon Trig!” I shout. “Steady now, Trigger.”

George has run off. Smart. Threw his rifle down and started sprinting and I can hear him screaming now between breaths. Arms pumping, stumbling as he shakes off his jacket and ditches it. He’s in a white wife-beater that’s turning red fast. I can see the brown spots on his arms and neck from here. Lark is a dark silhouette through the fluttering cloud, far off and catching up slow.

I dig my heels in and Trigger dances back.

Locusts are thick in the air around us. Flickering out of the grass stalks under us and gliding like grasshoppers. None of them are on me yet but Trigger is hopping and whinnying in panic.

“Git on, now, Trigger!” I shout.

Time to vamoose.

But the horse has caught one too many locusts. His flank twitches convulsively and he throws his head forward and lets out a deep bellow. I follow my instincts and roll off his back just before he bucks. He’s a brave horse. A big old boy with a proud mane and slabs of muscle that rippled when we chased him down over the plains. He did his best to protect his brood of mares that day, but now there are a million biting demons on him and more coming.

I land on my boots and stumble back through the grass and fall on my ass, fingers buried in the sandy dirt. Trigger is bucking for all he’s worth and throwing soil into the air, but those tiny flying buzz saws are kicking up from all around and latching onto his skin. His eyes are rolling and flashing white, and blood and spit are dripping off his muzzle and turning the ground into pink mud all around me.

“No no no!”

It’s a hoarse, grief-stricken scream. I spot Lonnie twenty yards away through the haze, leaning hard in his tall walker. The rangy biped walker is galloping, slender legs singing in a blur. Lonnie has his cowboy hat crammed on tight and he’s leaning forward with one arm down and his big brown hand out. Catching up to George in leaps and bounds.

But George is panicked. His wife-beater is wet and red and sticking to his skin. He hardly runs now, just staggering blind. He doesn’t know that Lonnie is coming to snatch him up and save him. At the last second, I guess he hears the thundering of the tall walker’s feet on the sandy plain. He turns to look.

And stumbles right in front of Lonnie.

There’s a meaty crunch as the tall walker’s legs catch George in the gap between them and they scissor down on him at a full sprint. His torso jerks and his bloody face goes surprised. His ribs shatter like pistol shots, limp body thrown tumbling to the turf, rolling, blood spraying in an arc, skin swarming with locusts.

Lonnie is just bellowing now in sadness and anger and I can’t make out the words anymore. His head is down and the tall walker staggers to a stop in lunging, off-balance steps. Those long silver legs are flashing with wet blood.

And I still haven’t been bitten.

The sickly warmth of the spooklight is pulsing across the back of my neck. Whispers are coming in around the edges to tell me something urgent. Something that I can’t ignore even though I can hear the locusts biting into Howard’s flesh and his weak screams have gone high-pitched and they don’t got no reason or restraint in them no more. Just the raw noise of hurt flesh.

Move closer . . . closer to the slug, whispers that spooklight voice.

Behind me, the slug is excited now, caterpillaring toward Howard’s body in urgent lurches. I catch sight of insectile legs underneath it as it comes, kind of raising up and lifting its skirts before falling forward. The bowed legs are sharp and made of brownish metal and they move together in a complicated way.

“No, no, I can’t,” I mutter.

It’s a pile of buffalo under there. Making that stink. Twisted sneering corpses half stripped of flesh. The smell is hot and awful coming up off the decomposing mound. And I see now the slug’s almost reached where Howard has stopped moving under a carpet of brown writhing locusts. The slug shudders and drops its bulk over Howard’s sprawled feet. The noise it makes is awful.

Closer closer closer.

“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” I moan.

Clouds of locusts kick up and buzz past my face, but none land. The spooklight hisses to me in a torrent of words as strange and familiar as a hard church pew on your backside. Each word is louder and faster than the last and by the end they’re hitting me hard like freezing hail in a hot thunderstorm.

“And lo, the locusts covered the face of the land so that the land was dark and they ate all the plants in the land and the fruit of the trees and not a green thing remained neither tree nor plant of the field through all the land . . .”

Somehow, the words put strength in my legs.

“ . . . and the locusts were given power like scorpions and told not to harm the grass of the earth or any green plant or any tree but only those people who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads. The seal of God.”

I don’t remember the scripture saying that, but it sounds right and as I stand up I know the reason I’m not being bitten is that I am a chosen one. I got the seal of God on me, protecting me from the horror and the pain. Needles of warm light are pushing out of my bundle and stinging me like wood splinters. Like God’s eye on me. Burning my skin in a bad way that feels good.

It ain’t giving me no choice.

My brave boy Trigger doesn’t scream anymore. He must have used up all his energy kicking, because now he’s fallen down and he only grunts. There’s a thick layer of locusts on his belly and chest and they’re chewing pieces off his velvety muzzle. He’s wheezing and gurgling, eyes rolling as I step away through the blood-soaked mud.

I push through the haze of death like a man walking on water.

“What do I do?” I ask. “What would you have me do?”

Just then I hear the report of a high-powered assault rifle. Hear the whiz-whiz of bullets flying. The bang as they connect somewhere. Lark staggers, weapon leveled, quiet and mechanical while those little blood-thirsty bastards try to eat up his rotten body. They’re on his skin, biting, trying to power through his hard decayed limbs, hardly visible as they shred his uniform. And yet that big assault rifle just keeps kicking in his arms. Those black eyes of his are fixed on the slug.

I think I see vengeance in them.

Every bullet is throwing a plume of dirt and grass off the sloped back of the slug. The monster is as big as a tractor but it must feel the bullets like pinpricks. It kind of squeals and shudders, each movement pushing out the smell of rotting meat over my face.

Take Howard’s feather, says the spooklight. Keep it secret.

Lonnie’s radio squawks faintly.

The old cowboy starts shouting, turning and gaining speed on his tall walker, one hand over his ear to listen to his radio. Lark is talking to him, telling him something. Leaning in the saddle at a full gallop, Lonnie draws his pistol and in one motion he’s firing it low and steady at the hump of grass and dead flesh.

“The slug is the power source! Take it out!”

If the spooklight says I have to get close to that slug, then it had better be dead first. Marveling at how the locusts seem to float past me, I pull my big Smith & Wesson and start squeezing off shots. The slug is already writhing and jerking under fire from Lonnie and Lark, dirt flying.


And finally, it stops moving.

All around us, that brown haze of gliding locusts settles down to the ground. A forest of dead leaves falling. That mind-numbing chatter fades off like it never was.

My radio hisses with Lark’s voice. “They didn’t attack you. Why didn’t they attack you?”

I ignore him. Kneel and grab Howard’s corpse by the shoulders and yank him back. Nearly fall on my ass because he’s so light. The stink rolls up out from under the slug and punches me in the face. There’s nothing left of Howard past the torso but his slick wet bones. The slug has been lying there on him, digesting.

Blocking the sight with my body, I sneak the feather out of Howard’s pack and into my own. It’s the center feather from the tail of an immature golden eagle. This feather got him launched into his first dance under the arbor, and under the proud eyes of his daddy. And now it has got his blood on it.

“What is a spooklight?” asks Lark, over my radio. I ignore him.

This slug is an eating machine is what it is, I’m thinking. It’s an eating machine and it’s so, so hungry and it’ll eat anything out here on the plains. And the energy it sends out to those locusts. They herd food to its mouth and it eats and shares. And it eats and it eats and it eats.

“I told Lonnie—”

I reach down and switch off my radio to shut Lark up.

The shadow of Lonnie’s tall walker eclipses the sun and I squint up at him. “Lonnie,” I call, stern. “Don’t you come over here.”

Let him see, says the spooklight in my mind.

There’s no stopping him anyway. Lonnie half jumps, half falls off his tall walker, letting the long-limbed machine crash into the dirt. He scrambles toward me on cowboy boots through the horse snot and blood and little bits of flesh.

I get up and step out of the way a little reluctantly.

“Oh my Christ, no,” he mutters when he sees what’s left of Howard.

Lonnie’s face has gone pale and gray. Cheeks slack under fat-pupiled, dead eyes. His chin is quivering up and down like an old man in line at a soup kitchen. Like he wants to say something. Or like maybe he’s busy gnawing off his tongue.

“He was dead before it got started,” I say to Lonnie, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Howard was dead before it started eating him and that’s all that matters. Stop looking at it, Lon.”

Lonnie nods like he sort of half hears me. Lets his dull blue eyes swivel off to the side, taking in everything and nothing. His chin is still bobbing a little and the expression on his face is amazing in that it is no expression at all.

“George is yonder,” Lonnie says, voice hoarse. “I done my best to get to him—”

“I saw, Lonnie,” I interrupt. “I saw what happened. It was an accident. A damned shame.”

Lonnie nods, wipes his face with a forearm.

“Head on back,” I say. “Send some more fellas to help me. Couple of spider tanks to take out those other slugs from a distance. I’ll clean this up and get these boys home. Go on now.”

The old general doesn’t react until I shove him in the shoulder. Then he just up and walks away. Leaves his dirt-stained tall walker sprawled out on the ground. A bent old man crossing the plains alone. As he heads off, the morning sun slants down over his slumped shoulders and he carries the light with him like a sack of concrete.

That man is broken.

And Lark keeps standing here, machine-gun strap cutting into his shredded army jacket. He is as still as a statue, watching me with eyes glittering over his ruined face. I glance down at my silenced radio, look back to him without turning it on.

“Go with him, Lark,” I say. “That’s an order.”

Lark nods, starts to walk away real slow. With each step, dead locusts are dropping off his clothes and pale, bloodless skin. As he passes, I see he’s looking for my bundle. I pull the little satchel against me protectively and feel the warm spooklight inside.

“And keep your mouth shut, if you know what’s good for you,” I whisper to the dead Cherokee. “Mind your own business.”

Like walking roadkill, he turns and shambles after Lonnie. I watch him go until he’s far enough away that you could mistake him for a human being.

Reach inside the slug, says the spooklight. Take the power-distribution mechanism. The splitter beam. It is very valuable. You will need it when you build me a form. I will take the shape of a black steed, Hank Cotton.

I will be with you soon.

“What’s the splitter look like?” I ask, on my knees now, holding my breath. I shove Howard’s torso aside. Push the whiskerlike strands away from the slug’s mouth. There is a complex piece of machinery underneath, dripping with digestive slime. The ground under here is soggy and acrid and dyed red with blood.

I’ll show you, Hank Cotton.

I will show you everything you wish to see. You are a chosen one. You have the seal of God on you. You are going to be a great man. A ruler and a leader. Listen to me, Hank Cotton. Listen to me closely and do as I say and I promise these things will be true.