[Original Novel] Little Robot, Part 17

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...But it never did. The metallic whine peaked without ever reaching us, then began to slowly recede into the distance. I felt almost disappointed as fear jockeyed with curiosity for control of my mind. Madeline emerged from the doorway flush, strands of hair in her face but also with a bottle of pills in hand.

“That’s it?” I inquired. She nodded excitedly, Lars appearing behind her. “Alright. Grab whatever else looks useful. Bandages, burn cream, whatever. Then let’s get the fuck out of here.” As we bid a hasty retreat, I noticed some of the doors in either side of the corridor hanging open.

“What are you doing? Don’t stop” Madeline implored, but I had to know. Did any patients make it out of here alive? Could there still be some poor soul bedridden in this forsaken place? I cautiously nudged the door further open with my foot, then swept the flashlight around inside.

The figure in the bed lay motionless. The life support machine to one side surprisingly still worked, but kept shutting down then trying to boot back up. Each time displaying only a blinking icon in the shape of a battery with a diagonal line through it.

“I thought the power to the city was cut” Madeline whispered. I explained that hospitals always have a backup power source of some sort that kicks in to keep life critical machinery operational during outages. She mulled that over as we backed out of the room. “Then why aren’t the lights on?”

I didn’t have an answer for that. We continued tentatively inching down the corridor back towards the front desk. That’s when I heard the floor creak. “Helper, how much do you weigh?” She answered indignantly that it’s a rude question to ask a lady...just before the floor collapsed under us.

It’s just one thing after the next. The first thing I heard after the dust settled was Lars cussing up a storm. Madeline joined him. I lifted a fractured wooden beam off my midsection, reoriented myself, then swept the light around.

The basement. Storage by the looks of it, crates piled high along the wall in various stages of being unpacked. Black scorch marks up and down load bearing pillars, indicative of fire damage, made sense of the collapse. Someone must’ve been through here before us, shot up a few robots, then left their remains to smolder.

“Anything broken?” Lars called out. I checked myself for injury, finding only some new bruises. I asked about Madeline’s ankle. “No, I fell on my shoulder. It hurts like hell but it’s still in the socket. No fractures that I can tell.” When I aimed the light at her she was busy brushing dust and drywall flakes out of her hair.

First order of business was to scope out the room around us. Concrete floor, cinder block walls coated with white paint as well as sizable splotches of dried blood. Both human and robot remains littered the floor. “Some shit went down here” Lars murmured.

“Found the batteries!” Madeline called out, gesturing towards a row of bulky cabinets behind us. Until now I wondered why we didn’t hear any generators on the way in. No gas smell down here either. “The label says there’s a full megawatt hour worth of cells. Something’s sucking down the power, too.”

She took the light from me and shone it at the power meter mounted next to the cabinet at the end of the row. It was spinning at a ridiculous rate. She pressed a button next to a digital meter on the battery array’s control box. It read “641kwh remaining. 4kw draw continuous, 8kw peak.”

“Could they be routing power from this building to someplace else?” The question hung in the air, none of us having seen enough so far to answer it. So we began to explore. Everywhere we found the charred, blackened remains of a robot there was also significant fire damage all around it.

Signs of struggle were everywhere. Fire extinguishers lay depleted, trailing puffy white foam globules from their nozzles. Several spent magazines scattered about, along with shell casings. But also, curiously, emptied bottles of baby formula.

We discovered why soon after entering the adjacent corridor. A young woman clawed and beat at a door, crying in frustration. I approached cautiously to ask if she was alright. She turned her head slowly to look at me, and when the light hit her I gasped in shock. Her rubber skin, torn away from the forehead down, fully revealed intricate mechanisms responsible for facial expression as well as two glassy faux eyeballs.

The mutilated mockery turned back to its task, apparently prioritizing it over attacking the three of us. Relentlessly it clawed at the door, fingertips now bits of exposed metal from the friction. “The babies” whimpered the robot, scraping at the door with bloody metal claws. “The babies. The babies the babies the babies the babies the babies.”

Madeline took aim. Obsessively focused on breaching that door, the robot never knew what hit it. That demented mockery of the human form toppled over, spasming, putrid fumes from the burning battery billowing out through the bullet hole. It’s a harsh, acrid scent you’d never mistake for anything else after smelling it once.

“The babies” it whimpered. “….thheee baaa-aabiiieeesss….” Finally it stopped moving, frozen in its final pose. We waited a bit to make sure it wouldn’t spring to life and lash out like at the gas station. Then Madeline warily knocked at the door the robot had been so eager to break down.

“Anyone in there?” Initially no reply. Then a timid, accusatory voice asked if we were robots. Madeline glanced at Helper, then waved her off. “Helper, get behind me” I whispered. “Whoever’s in there probably doesn’t want to see another robot at the moment and may shoot at you.”

Helper obliged. Madeline asked the voice on the other side of the door if she could come in. The clickety clack of sequentially unfastened locks followed. Then the door opened just a sliver, through which I could see a thin vertical stripe of dirty, frightened face as well as a single blue eye. “Oh thank God. I thought maybe the robots were pretending to be human now.”

“So far only one that I know of” Lars joked, “but we’re as alive as it gets. At least for the time being. Anybody else in there with you?” The girl, perhaps twenty three and wearing a bloodied set of scrubs, opened the door to permit entry.

“Just the babies. The ones I rescued from the maternity ward. There weren’t many left…” She fell silent, an anguished look on her face. “Don’t tell me the robots went after the maternity ward...!” Madeline exclaimed, eyes wide.

“Just one actually. That’s all it took. I hid in a closet during the worst of it, waiting until the gunshots stopped. When I came out the first thing I did was head up to check on the babies. A single nurse robot was already inside, tw-” her voice faltered. She struggled to proceed, choking on her words and tearing up slightly.

“...It was...twisting their heads...until the neck snapped. One at a time, it just lifted each baby with one hand, took hold of the head with the other…” she gagged, and Madeline urged her not to continue if she didn’t want to.

“...I could only save two. They’re all that were left by the time I got there. The rest...were in their cribs or incubators. Heads...turned backwards...not breathing. I bashed the robot with a fire extinguisher. Knocked it down long enough to tuck a baby under either arm, then I fled down here. It’s the only place I thought would be safe, but the robot followed me.”

She was sobbing now. I couldn’t blame her. Not another living soul in the building that I’d seen, the poor girl must’ve been waiting here for hours surrounded by corpses and flaming mechanical wreckage.

“There was nothing you could do” Madeline reassured her, only to be swiftly rebuked. “That’s so easy to say, isn’t it!? To excuse myself. But if I hadn’t gone and hidden in that closet for so long-” Madeline again cut in: “You’d be dead. So would the two babies you saved.”

The girl’s eyes darted around. Still in shock, blood stained hair dangling partly in her face. So much blood on her face and clothes, too. I didn’t want to imagine what she saw before we got here. The smoldering carnage we passed so far attested to an absolute bloodbath no normal person could witness and come away unchanged.

“Let’s get you out of here” Madeline urged. “The babies too. Do you know where the stairs are?” The girl nodded, then struggled to sling a pair of baby carriers over either shoulder. Madeline offered to take one, handing her gun to Lars. “You know how to use that thing, right?”

Lars sneered. “Please”. Then the moment I dreaded came, the bloodied nurse rounded the corner and spotted Helper. She shrieked and only didn’t fall backwards because Lars caught her. “SHOOT IT” she screamed, flailing in terror. “IT’S A FUCKING ROBOT, SHOOT IT! SHOOT IT!!”

It was the work of several minutes to calm her. Even then she wouldn’t speak directly to Helper and looked away, eyes screwed shut, whenever Helper tried to speak to her. Only trying to protest her own innocence, but the young nurse was having none of it.

“Keep it away from the babies” she demanded, voice hoarse and vicious. “Robots will do anything. Say anything. Don’t let her touch them.” Helper looked wounded, but kept her distance. I had the nurse walk at the rear of the group and told Helper to lead, lighting the way like some sort of postmodern Rudolf.

“You’re sure the stairs are through here?” Lars queried. The nurse confirmed it. Madeline doted on the baby suspended from her shoulder sling for a moment, folding back the blanket before suddenly looking up and staring at me.

“What’s the matter?” I whispered. She angled the baby carrier so I could see in. When I shone the light on it, rather than a gurgling infant...there was a doll. The sort used for medical training. It had a mouth opening to practice feeding it through which had been overloaded with formula, now leaking from the joints.

“I noticed the carrier dripping when she handed it to me but didn’t think anything of it until I realized I couldn’t hear the baby making any sounds. Couldn’t feel it breathing.” The nurse, who overheard more than either of us expected, called ahead to us. “Oh sure, Geoffrey’s a heavy sleeper. I found him that way, not even the gunshots or screaming woke him.”

I tensed up, as did Madeline. We shared another concerned glance, but kept walking. “I suppose you were right earlier” the nurse feebly babbled. “It’s enough that I saved these two. That’s the most anybody could ask of me right? I saved these babies. I saved them!”

Madeline and I nervously agreed, Lars still oblivious. We passed into a fairly large, pitch black room save for rows of blinking LEDS to either side. “This is the electrical utility room” the nurse explained. “The stairs are through here.”

So we advanced into the cavernous, silent chamber with Helper casting what meager red light she was able. I didn’t notice until we were a third of the way in that many of the blinking LEDs to either side of us had gone dark. Then the overhead lights came on.

Partially anyway. That many robots coming off the charger at once freed up just enough current that the fluorescent tube lighting could sputter and flicker like mad, but not stay on properly. Madeline and the nurse screamed.

We were surrounded. To either side, rows of dormant robots plugged into opened electrical boxes began waking up, heads turning in a staggered fashion to study the unfamiliar intruders. The ones behind us pulled away, cords popping free from the sockets, then retracting up into their bodies as they started towards us.

Madeline dropped the sling and dashed for the door at the far end of the room. The nurse clotheslined her. Madeline collapsed to the floor, still screaming as the nurse ran over and picked up the abandoned baby carrier.

“YOU WERE GOING TO LEAVE HIM!!” The nurse shrieked, wild eyed. “You fucking bitch! I’ll leave YOU, then!” With both carriers now slung from her shoulders, she hobbled through the far doorway, shut the door and propped something behind it to block our escape.

I turned back in time to see Lars blast a hole through the battery pack of a robot that was nearly upon him. He then deftly rolled out of the way before it could fall. If any of us got pinned here, that would be the end of it.

Lights flickering overhead, sporadically revealing cold white walls splattered with blood and robots clambering towards us as though animated in stop motion, the four of us ran to the barricaded door and pounded frantically on it.

No use pleading, the nurse was already gone. Lars kept shooting, downing them one at a time. No good, not in such cramped quarters. Helper waved me away from the door, then unloaded shell after shell into it until it came apart in a shower of splinters and dust.

She then left me to dismantle the fragments and turned around to add her firepower to Lars’. Deafening under normal conditions, the combination of gunshots and shotgun blasts agonized my eardrums due to the closed-in acoustics of the room.

I kicked out the remaining pieces of the door. Once satisfied we could fit through, I struggled to make my voice heard over the din. Only when Lars ran out of bullets did he look back. “EVERYBODY UP THE STAIRS!” I shouted, a dozen or so robots still coming.

They were never more than a few seconds behind us, clanking loudly as they scrambled up the metal stairs. The lights were now fully powered for the most part which aided our escape, as well as our aim on the way out.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 18!}