Chapter 20: Through the Valley of Uncanny

Sylvester shot. The bullet must have hit; the bot crashed to the floor.

John tried to raise his weight off of his pack, to force his arm to lift him off the ground, but his limbs refused to respond. They didn’t hurt nor were they numb, but they wouldn’t move no matter how much he strained. His vocal cords rebelled as well. He couldn’t even gurgle, much less form phonemes into words, but he held his breath. With trepidation, he tightened his sphincter. So, he wouldn’t be shitting himself today, a plus.

Elroy slung his and John’s rifles over one shoulder and John’s pack over the other. He grabbed John by the shoulders and dragged him through the doorway. Broken bits of bot rolled underneath his back. The broken innards jabbed into his muscles and set off cramps he had no hope to massage. If his back hurt like this, Sylvester would have felt the full pain of his injury. John wouldn’t wish this helplessness on his worse enemy.

John’s helmet rolled along the floor with each of Elroy’s steps. The tendons in his neck strained. He got a glance of the destroyed faces of the Pithites, faces he had destroyed.

What do they look like under the armor?

John’s pack slipped down Elroy’s arm and smacked John in the face. He blinked. Elroy threw the pack through the doorway and continued to drag John into the middle of the room with the light. At least he wouldn’t have to spend the rest of the day with ever worsening dry-eye. He had control of his eyes, lungs, butthole, and nothing else.

Sylvester hopped in with his arm still around Justice.

“Are you comfortable?” Elroy rotated John’s head upward. “Blink once for yes. Twice for no.”

Something still protruded into his lower back. John blinked twice.

“Is that a no or two yeses?”

John widened his eyes and shook them as if he screamed, the limit of his expression.

“Not funny.” Justice stood behind and talked over Elroy’s shoulder. “Where does it hurt?”

John moved his eyes downward. Something hard turned the muscles beside the vertebrae in his lower back into a screaming mass of spasms.

Justice slipped his fingers underneath, pulled it out, and held it in the light. “That couldn’t have felt pleasant.”

The muscle relaxed; the pain subsided. Above the fuzzy edge of John’s cheek, the top corner of the open door was still in his view. John glared at Justice and blinked. When Justice payed attention, John looked at the door, back to Justice, and back to the door.

“Right.” Justice rushed through the doorway. The sound of the door on the other side of the two Pithite corpses came into the room. After he came back, he closed the inner door as well.

Elroy clued in and stepped over John. Flecks of dirt landed in his eye. Tears welled up. The other door closed. The fireteam had shut themselves in, as secure as could be in here.

Justice and Sylvester guarded over the door they came in. Elroy, the last able body in the fireteam, watched the other door. They waited. At any moment, a Pithite fireteam could breach the door. Faint pops came through the walls once in a while, far off at first but closer with each extinguished minute.

***

About twenty minutes later, maybe thirty, the Pithite’s synthesized chirping came from the hallway. Something else mixed with the sounds, a scraping of a thousand sheets of metal. Each scrape came in intervals, almost like music. The music grew and ceased. More chirping.

The door to the room next-door room opened. The bot must have found the two corpses. It let out a sharp tweet. All three shuddered. John only tensed his sphincter. The Pithites investigated just outside. All guns trained on the door.

Heavy footsteps faded from the room. The bots didn’t bother to quiet them, maybe a good sign. The scraping started again and diminished along with the footsteps.

Elroy waited a minute. “We good?” He spoke under his breath.

“Define ‘good.’” Sylvester sneezed the words out of the side of his mouth.

“Think they’re gone,” Justice said.

They listened for a few more minutes. No sounds made their way through the halls, not a thing. Silence blessed the place.

John’s hand twitched. He moved his fingers.

The DI’s voice appeared in John’s ears, maybe through the WarFace. “Everyone make your way to the entrance. Exercise over.”

Like a rusted machine, the muscles along John’s spine groaned back to life. He sat up. “Holy shit. Did that ever suck.”

“Did it?” Sylvester tried to stand, only to slide back down the wall. “How unfortunate for you.”

John’s stiff legs forced him to lean against the wall. Elroy and Justice helped Sylvester to his feet and walked him out the door. Once John’s limbs finished their metal beam impressions, John scooped up his rifle and pack. The other three plodded past the two corpses and toward the blast doors.

By the time John’s muscles returned to something close to normal, he stood in the hall with the other pair of corpses. He stepped over one, Sylvester’s second kill. His first, the homicidal bot, still lay there on its front, head facing away.

“You coming?” Elroy called over his shoulder.

“Yeah. Just want to check something out.” John rolled the thing over. Its different colored eyes showed nothing but the absence of life. The ghost in the machine had escaped. He gripped the armor that half-covered its face and pulled. The latches inside released and exposed a nose and mouth. The Pithite had an uncanny approximation of a human face, made of flat surfaces and hard edges.

Free of the armor, its mouth opened. Inside, a tongue flopped against the roof of its mouth.

Does it have a throat?

John resisted the urge to put his finger in its mouth. The bot was dead… or something like dead, but he wouldn’t mess with an actual human’s corpse either.