Gramps found him. Duke barely remembered it. The screams that were maybe Grandma’s, maybe Gramps’s, maybe his own. Hands on him, checking him, feeling for a pulse, taking way too long to find it. Dim views of faces lined with pain and fear. The expressions of people who knew what they were seeing, who knew how this would end. And when. Night was falling and Duke knew—as everyone else knew—that there wouldn’t be a morning. Not for him. He’d reached his sell-by date, and he began to grieve. Not for himself, but because it meant that he was leaving his grandparents, and that felt like it was they who were dying. He felt shame at having failed them.
Gran called the neighbors who came and helped carry him to bed. The doctor came and his diagnosis was clear on his face. He left without recommending that Duke be taken to the hospital.
That night Duke sat up in bed, because lying down brought on coughing fits. Grandma had made soup. Now she and Gramps were both downstairs, and Duke could almost feel them trying to decide how to react.
As if there was a playbook for something like this.
The hours of that night were eternal. Sleep was a series of bad dreams linked by coughing and spitting blood into a bucket. The doctor hadn’t even lied to him about how bad this was, or how bad it was going to be. Instead he’d written the prescription and didn’t meet Duke’s eyes. Not once. Why would he? Doctors were all about trying to help the living. They wouldn’t want to stare into the eyes of the dead.
All Grandma could do was cry.
Not in his room, not where he could see her. Downstairs, where she thought he couldn’t hear.
He heard.
He heard her praying, too, and he wondered when the Lutheran minister would come back to handle unfinished business.
The TV was on, but Duke didn’t watch it. His face was turned toward the window, toward the night that rose like a big black tsunami above the house. Duke wept, too, but his tears were quiet and cold and they were not of grief. He wept because he had failed his family. Enlisting in the army had been stupid. Sure, it was a family tradition, but no one had forced him into it. No one said he had to. But he did anyway, and he’d had his heart shredded in a war that didn’t matter to anyone he ever knew or ever met.
If he’d stayed here, he’d be able to work the farm. He’d have kept the robots from falling apart or running down. He’d have fought for his family in a way that mattered.
Now . . .
All that was left was the actual dying. All other failures had been accomplished.
When the next wave of coughing swept through him, he thought it was the last one. There was a high-pitched whine in his ears, and there didn’t seem to be enough air left in the room. The mechanical heart in his chest kept beating with grotesque regularity. As if there was nothing wrong. As if the house of flesh around it wasn’t burning down.
In the depth of his pain, Duke thought he heard that sound again. Chunk-chunk. Like a heartbeat. Sympathy pains from Farmboy, he thought, and for some reason that made him laugh. Which made him cough even worse.
The coughing fit ebbed slowly. So slowly, leaving Duke spent on the black shore of a long sleep. In his spasms he’d turned onto his side so he could spit into the bucket. The curtains were open, and outside the moon and stars sparkled above the roof of the big barn. Duke could see the doors, and even in the midst of his pain he frowned at them. There was something wrong. Something different.
He’d seen Gramps close them at sunset, the way he always did. There were no farmhands left, and his grandparents were downstairs. He could hear Gramps trying to comfort Grandma.
So why were the doors open?
Why?
He heard the sound before he saw anything move. Not a cow or pig. Not a horse. It was faint, metallic. Slow.
Familiar in a way that made no sense at all, and Duke strained to hear.
Clankity-clank.
A machine? But which machine? They were all piles of junk. Like him. Broken and dead, or a short step away from being dead. Just like him.
Clankity-clank.
Duke pushed himself up so he could see better. Moving his body was like trying to move a truck with his bare hands. His body was a bundle of sticks, but it was also improbably heavy. Dead weight, he thought, and almost laughed.
Clankity-clank.
Duke saw something, and he froze and squinted to try and understand what he was seeing.
A figure moved in the shadows just inside the barn doorway. Tall. Big.
Gleaming.
“What . . . ?” asked Duke, but his voice was a whisper. Almost gone. A ghost’s voice.
The figure took a step forward.
Clankity-clank.
Duke saw the metal leg step out into the moonlight. Then a swinging arm. A chest. A head with a metal hat welded on. Two black eyes seeming to look up at him.
Clankity-clank.
Farmboy stepped out of the barn. The metal plate was back in place over the control panel, but bright light escaped from around its edges. The barrel chest of the robot was as bright as polished silver.
Except for some black smears on its chest.
Even from that distance, Duke was sure he saw those smears. Black as oil.
Duke knew that they weren’t black.
He knew.
And he smiled.
Then Farmboy turned slowly to face the big, dark fields. There were hundreds of hours of work that Duke couldn’t do, and that his grandparents were too old to do alone. The robot began walking toward the field.
He turned once to look up at the farmhouse, but by then there was no one to look back. Then the robot turned back to the field and began to walk. Clankity-clank, clankity-clank.
Going to work.
TEAM ROBOT
* * *
BY JONATHAN MABERRY
I’m Team Robot. All the way. Team Robot for the win.
Not that I have anything against faeries. Nope. I have faeries in my middle-grade novel series, The Nightsiders. I’m good with all the realms of faerie, and I enjoyed fairy tales in all of their many forms.
But . . . robots.
C’mon.
Robots?