Dirt Roads and Robots by Will McIntosh

* * * *

On the way back from the Minute Mart, Tommy saw the damndest thing he’d ever seen. There was one of those robots working in Edgar Deal’s front yard. It was trimming Edgar’s hedges, which were so overgrown you could barely see the windows. The thing was using a motorized cutting attachment on the end of a mechanical arm. It was round and brass-colored, low to the ground, with eight roach-like legs.

How in hell had Edgar managed to afford a robot? They were thousands of dollars. Hell, that robot cost more than Edgar’s beat-up, paint-peeling, lopsided old house was worth. Tommy shook his head, kept on driving.

He cracked open a Bud, keeping one eye on the road. It felt nice and cool going down. He chucked the empty out the window, into a ditch, cracked open another. The old tub-a-lard would bitch at him if he drank too much where she could see.

The truck kicked up a cloud of dust as Tommy turned off the shimmering pavement and hit the top of the dirt road that led to his house. From here he could see the whole farm—it was quite a sight. The triple-wide trailer house needed a coat of paint, but it was holding up pretty good. They were only supposed to last twenty, twenty-five years. His daddy had bought theirs thirty-one years ago. But what was really something was all the planes sprawled out across the fields. All fifty acres were covered with airplanes of every size, from little Cessna ultra-lights to gigantic Boeing 787’s. Made his heart jump to see them, a sea of silver metal glinting in the sun. He and his son Wayne joked all the time that they hadn’t given up farming, they’d just swapped crops, from cotton to airplanes. That always cracked them up good.

Out past the house was the hay barn, now stuffed to the gills with airplane parts, and the grain silo, sticking out like a giant, useless thumb among all the airplanes. Closer to the house were other kinds of mechanical devices—washers and dryers, air conditioners and the like—but they were mostly junk, they’d given up on that end of the business when they started getting heavy into the airplanes.

Ever since they’d come up with ultra-thin alloys, you could buy old-style steel and aluminum planes for damn close to nothing. They were worthless as scrap, and most people didn’t fly heavy metal planes any more. But you still had your buffs, and they were Tommy’s customers. He was making way more than his daddy had ever made farming.

As he pulled up Wayne pulled his head out of a Cessna 860’s engine. Good boy, didn’t need to be told what to do. He was twenty, not a boy any more. Tommy kept forgetting.

He went inside and put the rest of the Buds in the fridge. One of Jacklyn’s damn dogs had pissed on the damn carpet again. It smelled like a kennel with all those dogs and Jacklyn too lazy to paper train them properly.

Tommy went out and got working on a pretty little Concorde. The fuel system was shot, but he figured he could jury-rig something.

* * * *

It was getting up on lunch time when Tommy pulled his head out of the engine compartment of the Concorde and went to grab another Bud from the fridge. That’s when he saw it, coming down the road.

“Hey Wayne, take a look at this,” he said.

Wayne popped out from under the Cessna, grabbed a rag and wiped his hands. “What?” he said. Then he caught sight of it. “God damn. That Edgar’s?”

A robot was coming down the dirt road, happy as you please. “Nope, that ain’t the one was in Edgar’s yard, no sir,” Tommy said. This one walked on four thin legs, like it was on stilts. Like a porcupine on stilts—all sorts of pointy things stuck out the top of it. It was about two feet high, looked to be made of ultra-thin, flexible titanium.

It just kept coming, walked right on past Tommy and Wayne and climbed into the engine of a Jetstream 1800. Tommy and Wayne looked at each other, mouths hanging open. They walked over to the Jetstream.

“Hey! What the hell you doing?” Tommy yelled, feeling stupid yelling at a machine. Course he yelled at the airplanes all the time.

There was all sorts of whirring and thunking going on. Wayne stuck his head under the hood. “I’ll be God-damned!” he said. “The damn thing is taking apart the hydraulics!”

“What?” Tommy said. He poked his head in to get a look, and sure enough, the little robot was in there head-first, power drivers, socket wrenches, you name it popping out of it and then retracting. Parts were lined up along the engine block. It was cleaning the parts before it put them in the line. It had a hose attachment, what looked like a detergent dispenser, and a rotating buffer.

“What in hell is it doing?” Tommy said. “You think it’s fixing the hydraulics?” Wayne shrugged. The robot pulled out a pressure hose that had a good-sized crack at the seam. The hose flew past their noses and into the weeds. The robot came out after it. Tommy and Wayne watched as it stilt-walked around the yard, poking its head into one plane, then another till it found a replacement hose and dove back into the Jetstream.

Tommy looked at Wayne. They busted out laughing. “I got me a robot!” Tommy said. He slapped Wayne on the back. “Hey Jacklyn!” he yelled towards the house. “Jacklyn!”

Jacklyn poked her head out the front door. “Whaddaya want? I’m watching something.”

“Come on out here,” Tommy said. “You gotta see this. Craziest thing you ever seen!” Jacklyn thumped down the porch steps in her slippers, her big jugs and belly swinging, both threatening to pop out of a tank-top.

“What is it? I’m missing my show.” Wayne pointed into the Jetstream’s engine compartment, trying not to laugh. Looking put out, Jacklyn poked her head in. “Holy—” Tommy and Wayne cracked up.

They watched the robot work for half an hour, then sat on the porch and drank beers.

“Tommy, come look at this,” Jacklyn yelled from the living room.

“What?” Tommy yelled back.

“Quick, you’re gonna miss it,” she said. Reluctantly Tommy got up and went to see what she wanted. Wayne followed. “Aw, it’s over,” Jacklyn whined when Tommy got there, pointing at the TV set. “They was talking about having trouble with robots. You should of seen the pictures—there was robots all over! All over the place!”

They waited till the news came around again.

“See?” Jacklyn said. “They’re everywhere!”

Tommy shushed her. The news guy explained that the robots were so hi-tech that when they wore out, they were programmed to replicate. So if you bought one it was guaranteed for life, because a dying robot built you a replacement before it headed off to the dump. But they were malfunctioning, making copies of themselves when they weren’t worn out. At least that’s what Tommy got from the report. News reporters talked too fast.

The TV footage was something—there were robots everywhere. Traffic was clogged, cars were running over robots like they were empty beer cans. The reporter barely had anywhere to stand.

That explained where Tommy’s robot had come from, and Edgar’s, too. Tommy figured he’d keep his mouth shut unless someone came looking for a lost robot.

* * * *

Two days later, another robot came rolling down the road. Tommy called to Wayne and Jacklyn; the three of them watched it roll toward them on three wheels. It was about a foot and a half high, looked sort of like a tricycle with big cartoon eyes, one on each side. Kind of cute.

It rolled right up to the porch steps, then arms came out and it boosted up the stairs. It stopped at the front door.

“I think it wants to be let in,” Jacklyn said. “You think we should let it?”

“Maybe if you let it in it’ll fix the toilet,” Wayne said. The toilet kept clogging, and Tommy couldn’t find anything wrong with it. They let it in. It rolled into the house, and a round tube came out of its ass and started vacuuming the rug.

“Now I got me a robot!” Jacklyn cackled. She hooted and pumped a plump fist, like she was at a football game, then sat right down in her recliner, picked the remote off the coffee table and turned on the TV. As if she wouldn’t have done the same thing if a robot hadn’t shown up and started vacuuming.

When the robot finished vacuuming, it dusted. Then it did the laundry, which was piled waist-high on the cement floor in the mud room. Jacklyn yelled updates of what the robot was doing out the screen door.

* * * *

Six more showed up the next day. Four came down the road, the other two through the woods behind the south forty. One pulled six gallons of paint out of the shed and started painting the house (Tommy’d been planning to paint, but hadn’t gotten round to it). Another started fixing planes, and another washed and buffed Tommy’s truck, then started washing planes. It didn’t pay attention to the condition of the planes—even washed rusted-out cabin compartments with no wings or tail.

One robot went into the house and started following Jacklyn around like one of her dogs waiting to be fed. Half an hour later she was yelling out the door again. “Pa, come quick! Lookit this!”

Tommy dragged his ass inside, stood waiting, hand on hips, to watch whatever stupid thing Jacklyn wanted to show him.

“Lookit what I can do,” she said, lying in her chair. Then louder, she said, “Fetch me a lemonade!” The robot waiting by her chair shot into the kitchen and returned with a tall glass of lemonade with ice, on a tray. Jacklyn picked it off the tray, took a swig. Some of it spilled down her chin, onto her shirt.

Tommy clapped sarcastically, went back outside to watch the robots fix things with Wayne.

They were watching one robot repair a rotor while another was trying to buff it, when Wayne tugged at Tommy’s sleeve and pointed at the robot painting the house. It had stopped painting and was doubled over. A wide seam, like an oversized mouth, formed across its waist. Suddenly a pile of parts burst out of it, onto the ground.

“What the heck?” Tommy said.

The pile quivered. An appendage popped out of the center and started to assemble the pile. Tommy and Wayne gawked, dumbstruck. Half an hour later an exact replica of the robot painter stood testing its joints.

“I’ll be damned,” Wayne said.

Tommy shook his head. “If I hadn’t just seen that with my own two eyes, I wouldn’t believe it. No sir.”

“Daddy?” Wayne said. He pointed up the road. Three more robots, heading toward the house.

* * * *

The cable was out, so they went to bed early. Tommy lay awake, hands laced behind his head. In the darkness robots skittered across the floor, under the bed. One stood motionless on the windowsill, silhouetted in the moonlight. Outside, drilling and hammering drowned out the trill of the crickets.

“I don’t like this no more,” Jacklyn whispered.

“Me neither,” Tommy said. “We’ll figure something out in the morning.”

* * * *

Tommy, who usually slept late, was up at first light, peering out the bedroom window.

There were hundreds of them.

Fat round ones, tall thin ones, cute ones that looked like cartoon characters, scary ones covered in rotating blades. Some wandered aimlessly, bumping into each other. Others were building an addition onto the house. Tommy had no idea where they’d gotten the wood. One was tilling the soil with the tractor, weaving around the planes. The tractor had been a rusted heap, abandoned in the woods thirty years ago. Now it was freshly painted, the motor humming. There were others planting crops in the freshly tilled soil. Tommy stormed out of the bedroom.

“Wayne,” he called, “wake up! We got work to do.” He grabbed his keys off the kitchen counter, unlocked the oak rifle cabinet in the living room, and pulled out a 12-gauge shotgun.

“I’m up. Couldn’t sleep worth a damn with them things moving around,” Wayne said. He already had on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt.

Tommy retrieved a dozen boxes of shells from the mud room. With practiced ease he cracked open the shotgun and loaded it. “Get yourself a gun,” he said to Wayne, motioning toward the cabinet. Jacklyn walked by in pajamas without a word, headed into the kitchen, started making coffee. She clicked on the radio.

Tommy went out to the porch, Wayne right behind. He stacked the shells on the railing, leveled the shotgun, took aim at an eight-legged robot that looked like a cartoon crab, and fired. The shot tore three of its legs clean off, and ripped a sizable hole in the thorax. It twitched spasmodically, then was still. None of the others took any notice.

Jacklyn came out with two mugs of coffee, set them on a white plastic table near the door.

“Radio says things are worse in the cities. Robots so thick people can’t get around, not even on foot. I don’t like this.” She disappeared into the house, came back with a mug of coffee for herself, sat in the rocker.

They shot robots for an hour. Tommy couldn’t help notice the parade of robots coming down the road and across the fields, and the ones being birthed.

“There’s too many,” he said. His shoulder ached from the kick of the gun.

“Hang on,” Jacklyn said, disappearing into the house. She returned with a shovel, an ax, and an aluminum baseball bat. Tommy nodded his approval. He cleared the chambers of the shotgun, leaned it against the house, took the ax from Jacklyn.

He could not find a route around the robots littering the porch steps, so he cleared them off with his work-boot as he stepped down into the yard. Raising the ax high, he brought it down on one of the housecleaning robots. It shattered with a satisfying crack. Stepping on the lifeless husk, he pried the head of the ax out of it. He took a level swing at a tall, thin one and took the head right off it. The head tumbled end-over-end, ricocheted off a once-rusted dryer that was now not only refurbished, but tumbling empty with no apparent power source.

Ten paces away Wayne swung for the fences with the aluminum bat, his beefy arms bulging. He howled like a warrior as he pounded one of the scary-looking ones over and over, sweat pouring down his red face. Tommy liked the sound of it, and let out a battle-cry of his own. Jacklyn took up the cry, her belly hanging out of a ZZ-Top t-shirt, the shovel plunging and hacking. Seeing Jacklyn up and moving like that actually got him a little horny. He funneled the energy into his swing.

Tommy’s hands were leathered from a lifetime of work, but eventually blisters rose on his palms, then popped, leaving raw pink circles that burned with every swing. Jacklyn had wrapped her hands in rags a while back. Still, Tommy had no idea how she kept going. She wasn’t used to hard work.

The robots kept coming. Tommy spotted a cylindrical robot that looked like the one in the Star Wars movies digging a hole, and he went over and clocked it good. Another grabbed the bottom of Tommy’s jeans. He started and jerked his leg, but the robot hung tight. A little hose came out of its face and sprayed something on a mud stain. A little brush popped out and scrubbed at the stain. Tommy hammered the little bastard across the yard with the flat end of the ax.

“Oh, Jesus,” Wayne shouted. He had stopped swinging the bat to catch his breath, and was staring up the road. At the top of the road a horde of robots headed their way, climbing over each other, jostling like a crowd at a rock concert.

“There’s too many,” Tommy said. “Let’s get inside.”

There were fewer robots inside. They collected them up and flung them out doors and windows, then closed the house up tight. Tommy sent Wayne out the back door to fetch wood from the barn. They covered the windows with plywood and nailed everything shut with two-by-fours. Then there was nothing to do but sit by the radio.

Most of the stations were out. Jacklyn found a religious station, and for a few minutes they listened to a near-hysterical preacher saying prayers. Finally Jacklyn turned the tuner, found a news station.

“...just horrible,” the reporter was saying in a blubbering voice. “People trapped in the streets are being crushed. There’s a woman below me trying to walk across them. Oh! She lost her footing. She’s down. The churning mass is sucking her down. Oh, God, I can’t watch—”

“Oh, Jesus,” Tommy said. He looked at Jacklyn. She was crying, her arms hugging her shoulders. Tommy patted her knee. “We’ll be okay. The worst of it is far away.” Jacklyn nodded, but kept crying.

* * * *

Tommy was jolted awake by the sound of breaking glass, followed by loud thumping. He sprang out of bed, ran into the living room and turned on the light. They were spilling in through a breach in the window, skittering around on the wood floor, looking for something to do. One started sweeping up broken glass as soon as it righted itself.

Wayne stared, open-mouthed, from the hallway.

Tommy became aware of a constant sound coming from outside—a howling clatter he felt in his gut as much as his ears, like a stadium of people clapping with metal gloves on. He wasn’t sure how he could have missed it before. Maybe because it had been building slowly.

Reluctantly, he looked through the breach in the window. Silver moonlight reflected off a sea of churning metal. He could see patches of sandy ground in only a few places. He tried to stay calm. What to do? The truck? No way they could drive it out of there. They needed to get to higher ground ... the roof! Then he spotted it, the sentinel towering high above the chaos.

“The silo!” He shouted. “Get supplies, anything you can think of. We may be there a while. Maybe weeks. We need food, water, medicine, radio...” he ticked them off on his fingers while Wayne and Jacklyn listened. Then they scattered.

Tommy yanked a big blue suitcase out of the hall closet, filled it with boxes and cans of food from the pantry. “The gas grill, and propane!” he shouted.

“Got it!” Wayne shouted back.

They’d need a way to haul the supplies to the top of the silo, Tommy realized. He found a 60-foot length of rope in the mud room, then headed for the back door. When he turned the knob it flew open; a pile of robots tumbled into the house. He kicked his way through them, into the yard.

The ground wasn’t visible at all any more. Tommy climbed onto the churning mass on his hands and knees. It was like wading through a swift stream, except the turbulence was not all pulling in the same direction. Again and again he lost his balance; he was battered and cut by the time he had plowed his way to the silo twenty feet away.

He climbed the rusty exterior ladder, tied off the rope at the top. He had to scream at the top of his lungs to get Wayne’s attention over the roar of the machines. Wayne appeared on the porch, which was still in decent shape because it was elevated above the sea of robots. But it would be overtaken soon—Tommy swore the robot tide was rising fast enough for him to see it. Deftly he threw Wayne the end of the rope; Wayne snared it, turned, shouted to Jacklyn. She dragged out Tommy’s old foot locker. Wayne tied the rope to the locker’s handle, and Tommy reeled it in. It bounced furiously over the robot swarm.

They worked for half an hour, stockpiling supplies until the robots were close to rising past the porch. Then Tommy climbed down the side of the silo until he was just above the robots. He tied one end of the rope to the ladder, and tossed the other to Wayne, who tied it around Jacklyn’s waist. Good boy. Tommy was proud of him, he knew just what to do, kept his cool when the pressure was on. He’d of made a good soldier.

Jacklyn crossed on all fours on top of the robots, her hands and feet occasionally sinking through as if she were crossing thin ice that kept giving way. Halfway home, both of her hands lost their purchase simultaneously, and she disappeared head-first into the swarm.

“Jacklyn!” Tommy cried. He grabbed the rope and heaved. He saw her leg break above the tangle, sneaker churning to find purchase. He tugged frantically; the bandaged blister wounds on his palms screamed. Another leg surfaced. Howling from the strain, hearing Wayne exhorting him (“Pull!”), Tommy heaved, and Jacklyn flipped ass-first to the surface, the top of her head gripped by a bowl-shaped robot. Tommy dragged her, hand over hand, Jacklyn swimming to keep her head up, until her scrabbling hands clutched the ladder. He ripped the robot off her head and tossed it. Jacklyn’s hair was neatly trimmed, the mass of frizzy knots gone. The damned thing had given her a haircut.

Wayne came across cussing and punching; when he was safe they hustled to the top of the silo and collapsed in exhaustion. Tommy could hear Jacklyn’s wheezing gasps clearly over the din below. But the sound didn’t piss him off like it normally did—she’d earned the right to breathe loud.

When his hands had mostly stopped trembling Tommy stood and surveyed the scene. It was a terrible, awesome sight. As far as he could see, nothing but robots. In the distance where the details were lost, it looked like a shimmering silver sea had flooded the land. Trees and houses poked out here and there, but otherwise there was nothing to see but robots until sight distance was lost in the gentle rises that passed for hills in south Georgia.

A big industrial robot, wide and flat and hinged in two places, climbed onto the roof and looked around for something to rivet, or solder, or whatever the hell it did. Wayne dragged himself to his feet, retrieved the baseball bat from inside Tommy’s foot locker, beat it till it stopped moving.

“We’ll have to take turns knocking ‘em off the ladder,” Tommy said.

Wayne peered over the edge to see if any others were climbing up. “What if they just keep multiplying?” he said.

“Let’s take inventory of what we got,” Tommy said. He pulled a suitcase from the pile and opened it up. “That ice chest was a good idea.” He gestured at the blue and white chest. “Y’all pack it with meat from the freezer?”

“I did,” Jacklyn said. “I figured food was gonna be most important.”

“Smart thinking,” Tommy said. It felt strange to pay Jacklyn a compliment. Neither of them had had anything nice to say to each other in a dog’s age.

“I tossed in the six packs too. Figured we might could use a drink while we was waiting for the rescue.”

* * * *

Tommy stood watching the last few black shingles on the roof of his house disappear. He tried to picture the inside of the house packed tight with them, pressed up against his shirts, his guns, his deer trophies. Four days, and no sign of rescue.

“God help us,” Tommy said under his breath. He figured they had food and drink to last three weeks, but at this rate they’d be under robots before that.

A friendly looking robot came up the ladder. Tommy recognized it, or its type anyway. “Go fetch me a lemonade,” he said. It headed back down the ladder, double time. Tommy laughed.

He looked at the others. Jacklyn was sleeping, her face pressed against the waist-high silo wall, trying to escape the afternoon sun. She’d cried half the night, till Tommy’d finally had to tell her to shut the hell up.

Wayne had his hunting knife out, and was dissecting the big robot he’d beat with the bat. He was gutting it like a deer, pulling out parts and tossing them across the roof.

Suddenly he stopped, stared off into space with his mouth hanging open. “Hang on,” he said finally, “I got an idea.”

“What’s that?” said Tommy.

“We can build a helicopter. Fly us off of here!” he said. He pulled a clump of circuitry out of the robot and looked at it hard. “We got all the material we need right here.”

“That’s the stupidest idea I ever heard!” Tommy said.

“We can do it, parts is parts, and we got parts,” Wayne said.

“What’re we gonna use for fuel? How are you gonna make the blades?” Tommy shouted. “Jesus, use your head.”

“Well it’s better than sitting here waiting to die!” he said, his voice cracking. “At least I’m doing something.”

He stood, fetched a hooked rod from the littered roof, tied it onto the end of the rope, and tossed it over the side. A minute later he reeled in a mechanic robot, just like that very first one that came down the driveway what seemed to Tommy like ages ago. Wayne clocked it with the bat till it stopped moving, began prying it apart at the seams.

“Need belts to drive the rotors,” he muttered to himself. He was rocking slightly as he pulled a layer of Banlar fabric from the robot’s guts. Tommy didn’t like the looks of this. He hoped like hell someone got here soon, in a real helicopter.

He stared at the piece of Banlar fabric that Wayne had unfolded and carefully laid out. The stuff was strong as steel, flexible as silk. He owed his livelihood to the stuff—it was what made steel obsolete in aviation construction. Would make a heck of a parachute, if they were trying to go down instead of up.

Hold on ... He thought through the idea that had burst into his head, trying to keep his hopes from getting too high till he had it worked out, terrified that he would find a fatal flaw. Then he did find one. Then, he spotted the gas grill and propane, and the fatal flaw was gone.

“Wayne, you’re a genius!” he shouted. Wayne looked up at him, stunned. “Jacklyn!” His shout had woken her up. She looked at him, exhausted and bleary-eyed. Tommy grabbed the patch of Banlar. “Start sewing these squares together into a big quilt.”

“What for?” she asked.

“We’re gonna make us a balloon!” he said.

“Huh? A balloon?” she said.

“That’s right. A hot air balloon.” He let the words sink in. “We’re gonna fly off this stinking roof.”

“You know how to make one?” Jacklyn asked doubtfully.

“Me and Wayne know more about flying than anybody,” he said. Wayne gave him a proud look.

They didn’t have thread, but found filament in the robots that worked just as well. Tommy tried to break it between his big fists, and couldn’t. It was better than thread. Wayne pulled sheet metal off the sides of the silo and started making a basket.

* * * *

The balloon was lopsided as hell, but when they fired up the propane grill it inflated quick as you like. The three of them hooted with joy. After three bumps along the roof, it lifted off, cut a ragged horizontal path, dipped hazardously close to the advancing tide of robots, then started to rise steadily.

Wayne laughed as they rose. “You can kiss my country ass!” he shouted down at the robots.

They floated over the trees. Tommy controlled their altitude by cranking the propane higher or lower, but they had no way to steer. They drifted north, and eventually spotted Atlanta. The robots were piled five stories high. People packed the roofs of the glass skyscrapers, hung out busted windows on the floors below.

“What do we do now?” Jacklyn asked.

“We’ll think of something,” Wayne answered. “We got ourselves off that silo, didn’t we?”

“We need to find high ground. We’re heading for the Smokies, that’ll work,” Tommy said. He put his arm around Jacklyn’s beefy shoulders; she leaned against him, wrapped an arm around his waist.

* * * *

Will McIntosh is a 2003 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop. His stories have appeared in NFG and Interzone (forthcoming). By day he is a psychology professor at Georgia Southern University. Will’s story “Faller” (Challenging Destiny Number 17) was an honorable mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror: Seventeenth Annual Collection edited by Ellen Datlow and Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant.