IRONHEART
by Jonathan Maberry
-1-
Duke took his pills one at a time, the way he always did. If he took more than two of them, they caught in his throat. That made him feel old, because it was the sort of thing his grandma complained about and he was too young to feel that old. He sat at the kitchen table with them lined up across his plate. Thirty-six pills. Every day. Thirty-six every freaking morning; thirty-six every freaking night.
He hated taking them. All that water sloshed in his stomach and made him have to piss. But he took them anyway.
The ones for the pain. The ones for the infections. And the ones to keep his body from rejecting his robot heart.
He knew the pills were expensive, too. The VA was supposed to cover part of the cost, and his insurance was supposed to cover another part. But they covered about as much as a string bikini covered a hot girl on the beach. Technically it was coverage, but there was still a lot left over. And unlike a bikini, what was left wasn’t fun.
Duke loved robots, but he hated his new heart. Unlike the housebots and the farmbots, this didn’t fit in. It was a machine made of plastic and metal, but his own flesh and bone didn’t want it. It was a constant fight, and like many heart-replacement patients, it was not a fight he was going to win. Some people did. The happy, healthy-looking, tanned and fit people on the posters at the doctor’s office and on websites for the manufacturer. And that golfer who had a transplant five years ago was back on the PGA tour. So, sure, some folks won the transplant lottery.
A lot more didn’t, and Duke was pretty sure he was getting close to his sell-by date. Maybe Christmas this year. Maybe Valentine’s Day next. In that zone. His family kept calling him a warrior, a fighter. His nephew Ollie made him a key chain in metal shop in the shape of nine letters hard-welded together. Ironheart. Duke carried it with his keys, and on good days he’d hold it in his fist and yell, “Kiss my ass!” to the world. On most days, though, it hurt him to look at it.
The line of pills on the kitchen table seemed to mock him and the challenge of that steel-welded nickname.
Duke heard a clanking sound and turned to look out the window. Gramps was riding the small tractor and pulling one of the robots back to the barn on a flatbed trailer. Duke couldn’t see which one because it was covered in a tarp, but he figured it was Farmboy. That would be just about right for the way things were going. But no matter which one it was, it was bad news. The bots were all falling apart. Every damn thing around here was falling apart. He sure as hell was.
“Duke,” called Grandma from upstairs.
“Yeah?”
“You take your pills?”
“Yeah,” he said, then hastily swallowed another one. “Yeah, I took ’em.”
“All of them?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he lied. He would take them, but it always required effort. Like bracing to pull off a bandage. There was nothing fun about it and the only power he had in the moment was his ability to stall, to make the pills wait a little longer.
“You sure?”
It was the same conversation every day. Sometimes she’d yell from the living room, where she had her sewing stuff, sometimes from upstairs where she had her workbench. Grandma made corn dollies and kitchen witches and sold them at the roadside stand.
“I took them all,” called Duke.
A pause. The house was old and its bones ached. Duke could hear it groan whenever the wind shoved it or the rain fell too hard. It smelled nice, though. Grandma always had a pot of something simmering. Soup, because soup was cheap and you could put anything in it, or game stew if Gramps was lucky with his gun. On Social Security day there would be a roast in the oven. Sometimes Grandma would just put herbs in a pot and let it simmer all afternoon. Nutmeg and cloves, cinnamon and ginger. Sometimes the house smelled like apple pie and sometimes it smelled like Christmas.
Like Christmases used to be before the Troubles.
The Troubles.
They started before he went off to the army. A couple of bad seasons on the farm. Drought followed by leaf blight. Then more drought and the plant diseases born of dryness. Some years they barely made enough to pay the bank loans on the machines and seed stock. So it wasn’t all him. But then he was on foot patrol with a rifle squad in Afghanistan when the man in front of him stepped on the IED. Blew that guy back to Jesus and filled Duke with shrapnel. The medics and field docs later told him that he died five times and they brought him back each time. They grinned like football champs when they said this. And, sure, they were heroes. Good for them. But screw them, too.
As Duke swallowed another damn pill, he wondered how much of a favor those medics did when they saved him. The army paid for the first round of surgeries, and they even kicked in a chunk toward the heart replacement Duke got a year after he was discharged. But now that he was out, Duke discovered one of the ugly secrets of the military—they’ll do a crap-ton for you while you’re carrying a gun and fifty pounds of battle rattle through hot foreign sands, but once you’re a civilian, you’re nothing more than a nuisance. A drain on the society. That was what one of the congressmen said in an interview. Veterans were a drain on the society. Every year the benefits were cut and the red tape doubled.
Gramps called it a damned disgrace. But he didn’t give one of his patented “in my day” speeches, because it really wasn’t all that much better during the wars that followed 9/11, back when Gramps was nineteen. And they weren’t really better when Dad wore sergeant stripes in the second Deash War. War was war, and politicians needed soldiers in uniform and didn’t want the hassle of dealing with those who lived, crippled or not, once they were discharged.
That was when the real troubles started. After Duke’s discharge, because the actual transplant happened when he was a civilian. A short, ugly year later.
He couldn’t work the farm like everyone had hoped. Five years ago Duke was a bull. Tall as Gramps and as broad-shouldered as Dad. Well, as tall as Gramps had been, once upon a time. And Dad was dead now. Smashed along with Mom when their autonomous drive pickup went offline and sent them through a guardrail on Berkholder Ridge.
Troubles. Nothing but troubles.
When Dad died while Duke was overseas, the farm had started to die. Anyone could see it. Dad had the knack of keeping even the oldest and clunkiest of the machines running. Mom called him the bot whisperer. She wasn’t far wrong, either. Dad said it was all a matter of relating to them, and applying some blood, sweat, and tears. He said it wasn’t always about knowing the repair manuals cover to cover, but knowing the machines.
“They want to work,” Dad told him once when Duke was little. “Every single one of them machines wants to work. They want to work all day and night.”
“I don’t get it,” said Duke. “They’re just machines. They’re just circuit boards and gears. How can they want anything?”
Dad had smiled a strange little smile. The conversation had taken place out in the barn, and Dad was tinkering around inside the chest of a burly stump-remover bot. He’d painted the machine to look like the Incredible Hulk from those old comics. Big and green, with a scowly face. Dad spat on the corner of a cloth and then reached inside to clean some carbon dust from a rotor.
“You got to think like them, kiddo,” Dad said as he worked. “They’re built for farming and they got no other uses. This is why they exist. Like you and me. We’re farmers. We’re here to work the land and feed people with what we grow. If we stop being farmers, then what are we?” He shook his head. “The bots are no different. They work the land and get to know the land. It’s theirs every bit as it’s ours. You just have to know how to look at it. Some folks see oil leaking from a broke-down bot and they think it’s a useless pile of junk. Me? I see a hardworking farm machine who’s sweating oil and bleeding grease and who is just tired from all them long hours. It doesn’t mean the bot’s done or that it’s junk. You have to look inside, touch it, let it know that you feel the same, that if we bleed black or red it’s all the same. We’re farmers, Duke. Flesh and steel, breather and exhaust.”
The dark lights on the stump-puller bot suddenly flicked on and Dad leaned back, nodding, satisfied. He patted the green metal chest.
“Never forget, son, it’s his farm, too. And he wants to work for us because we’re his family. Just like he’s ours.”
That was almost the last conversation Duke ever had with his father before that bad night on Berkholder Ridge.
After that, Duke had taken over the maintenance of the bots. It took him a while to move through and past his grief and get to a clearer place; but once he did, he found that he understood some of what Dad had said. The robots and the family and the farm. It made sense to him.
He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to understand why he had ever left the farm to go to war.
Duke lifted another pill to his lips and gagged at the thought of taking it. He closed his eyes, took a breath, took a sip of water, and almost slapped the pill to the back of his throat, then drank more to wash it down. It went down like a brick.
Grandma handled the farm accounts, and she did a good job of intercepting the bills before Duke ever got a chance to see them. But he knew. He was sick, not stupid or blind. Grandma always looked so worried when Gramps went into town to refill his prescriptions. Since he’d been taking those pills, there had been fewer Christmas and birthday presents for the kids. Duke had seven nephews and nieces. None of his own. Grandma canceled the cable TV. There wasn’t meat on the table every night the way there used to be. Sometimes he heard Grandma on the phone with someone, asking for more time. And heard her crying afterward.
He knew and he understood. It was expensive to keep him alive.
It was how it was.
* * *
It was so twisted that he had once raised a hand to God and sworn an oath to protect America from all threats, foreign and domestic—and now he was here, losing a fight to sickness and bills. In a way he was the enemy, because his bills were dragging everyone else down.
The only thing that made Duke feel better was knowing that pretty soon he wouldn’t be there to hurt anyone.
Outside the first birds of spring sang in the trees.
Duke swallowed the last pill and washed it down with a gulp of water. Christmas, he thought. Or maybe a little after.
Sooner, if God wasn’t going to be a total dick.
-2-
“Duke,” she called, “you feel up to chores today?”
He smiled at that. Grandma never came right out and asked him if he felt sick or weak. She asked if he felt up to doing chores. As if he was ten years old.
If he said no, she’d come down and take his vitals and brew a special tea and set him on the couch with a blanket and a book. If he said yes, she’d actually give him something to do. Nothing heavy. He couldn’t drag the trash can outside anymore, and he couldn’t chop wood or milk cows. Most of his chores were things he could do sitting down. Rewiring one of the nutrient sensors they used to test the soil, or rebuilding the little feederbot that took seeds out to the henhouse. Duke liked fixing things, so that was all right. He loved machines of all kinds, and according to Grandma, they loved him. More times than he could count, Duke had repaired something Gramps had given up on. Before the last surgery Duke had even fixed the solar cells on Gramps’s car, which saved them all about two thousand dollars. Grandma had cried and Gramps hugged him until he couldn’t breathe.
“Sure, I can do some chores,” said Duke. He was only half telling the truth, because he didn’t feel great. The cough had come back, and twice he’d spit up a little blood. Not much, just a couple of drops. Enough, though, so that he didn’t dare tell his grandparents, because they would take him straight to the hospital.
Apart from the cough, though, he felt okay. Good enough to walk around the farm if he didn’t go too far. Good enough to use some tools. He’d been working on Farmboy off and on and still felt he could fix the big old bugger.
“Come to the stairs,” called Grandma, and Duke got up and walked into the living room. Grandma stood at the top of the long flight of stairs and peered down through the gloom at Duke. He held his arms out to the side and turned around, keeping a grin on his face the whole time.
“See?” he said. “Right as rain.”
He couldn’t see her eyes from that distance, but her mouth was pursed and puckered the way it was when she was thinking hard.
“What was your blood pressure this morning?”
He told her. And his weight, blood sugar, and temperature. They’d all be entered into the med-pad, which meant she could access them from her tablet upstairs, but Grandma seemed to like it better when he told her the numbers.
“The lawn mower stopped working again,” she said.
He shrugged. “The drive circuit pops loose if it hits a rock. I can fix it.”
Grandma nodded. “It’s in the barn.”
“Okay.”
“Your grandfather just took Farmboy in, too.”
“I saw.”
“Don’t mess with it if you’re too tired.”
“Okay.” He actually wanted to open the old bot up and take a look. Maybe he could conjure up some of Dad’s old bot whisperer mojo and get it on its feet again. That would be nice. That would make him feel like he was contributing something around here. Apply a little blood, sweat, and tears, Dad used to say. And wishful thinking, too, mused Duke.
“Wear a sweater,” she said. “It’s still cold.”
He smiled. “I will.”
He turned to go, but Grandma said, “I love you, Lyle.”
She was the only one who ever called him by his real name. He was Duke to everyone. He used to be Big Duke, but the “big” kind of fell off with the weight he’d shed since the transplant. Duke hated his name. Lyle.
Grandma had a special pass, though. On that and everything else. If there was a real “ironheart” in their family, it was her. Powerful in the way some women are. Not with muscle or knuckles, but with wisdom and heart and tolerance.
There was so much sadness in her voice that Duke didn’t dare look up at her. “Love you, too.”
He put on a sweater and went outside.
-3-
The barn was a big, red monstrosity. The paint was peeling and the boards looked weary. It was taller and longer than the house and nearly twice as wide. Back when it was built, nearly a hundred and forty years ago, it housed four tractors, a combine harvester, a cultivator, a chisel plow, a harrower, and other old-fashioned farm equipment. Over the years, Duke knew, those machines had been gradually replaced by newer models. Gas engines gave way to solar power, drivers had been replaced by autonomous drive systems and GPS, and then those had been replaced by robots. Farmboy, Plowboy, Tillerman, SeedMonkey. Even the old VetMech, which could do anything from delivering a breeched calf to repairing a ruptured bowel on a mule. All kinds. Duke always loved to hear them all going clankity-clank out in the fields. Giants of metal and graphene, wires and flashing lights. Clankity-clank as they tilled the fields, clankity-clank as they harvested the crops. Sometimes, when he was little, he’d lie awake at night and hear them clanking out in the field, working around the clock because they didn’t need to sleep and they didn’t need daylight.
Clankity-clank all the way to the bank.
That was something his Gramps used to say. Back when it was true. Back when Duke’s family could afford to maintain those machines.
For a long time, Duke’s grandfather and dad had kept up with it. The robots helped, but they only saved money when they were working right. Repairs were expensive, and parts for the older ones had to be special ordered. One by one the big machines fell silent. SeedMonkey was the first to die. That was how Duke saw it. The robot died out in the field. It had been sick for a while, leaking oil and lubricant and wheezing white smoke. Gramps had fixed it a dozen times, and Duke had fixed it twice, but after a while some things couldn’t be fixed anymore. Duke knew that firsthand. Now SeedMonkey was a pile of parts in a bin in a corner of the barn. Plowboy went next, and Tillerman the following season. VetMech still worked, but there wasn’t enough livestock on the farm to give it much use.
It was Farmboy that kept the farm running, though, because he was a multifunction robot. With the right settings he could till a field, sow seeds, manage irrigation, pull weeds, chase crows, and even harvest anything from potatoes to corn.
When he was working right.
Duke stepped into the barn, moving from the bright sunshine into shadows, feeling the change in temperature much more than he used to. He smiled. Good thing Grandma had bullied him into the sweater.
Farmboy sat on an overturned wooden barrel. Like a lot of the midcentury robots, he had been made to look more or less human. Not actually fake skin, hair, and eyes like some of the receptionist bots or Starbucks baristas, but built with two legs, two arms, a head and a manlike torso. The skin was metal, though, and the paint job was the same yellow as the old Kawasaki riding tractors Gramps used to have, with some red stripes and some darker red rust spots. A few gray patches where he’d been repaired. Streaks of green on his legs. Farmboy’s face was a screen of wire mesh that protected the cameras and sensors from grit. The dealer had painted two black quarter-size dots for eyes and welded on a metal hat made to look like woven straw, and Gramps had originally removed it, then thought better and put it back. It made Farmboy look like a cartoon version of a robot. Fifteen feet tall when he was standing, with that faux straw hat, broad shoulders, and a barrel body. Duke thought he looked more like something from the 1950s than the 2050s. Now, two decades after his manufacture date, the old boy looked hokey but charming.
Be more charming if he worked, mused Duke. But he regretted the thought. Farmboy had always been his favorite of the farmbots. He was tall and useful, and it was fun to watch him striding across the fields pushing the plow, or walking backward with a chain wrapped around him and a tree stump. Farmboy always won a tug-of-war with a stump, even a big ol’ oak stump that the other farmbots couldn’t handle. Shortly after Duke came home, he used to sit up in his bed and look out through the window as Farmboy went back and forth through the harvested corn, cutting down the withered stalks and then tilling the ground to freshen it for the next planting. He used to wish that he was Farmboy. That he was a towering metal giant, indestructible and useful and reliable, instead of a broken toy soldier with a clockwork heart.
That had been the last season for Farmboy. The big bot had stopped working that winter, proving that he—like Duke—was neither indestructible nor reliable. Duke had tinkered him back to life, but he failed again. And again, each time more quickly than the last. Everything wears out and everything stops working. Human and mechanical hearts were no different after all.
Duke’s tools were where he had left them, in an open red box on a hay bale. As he sat down, he felt suddenly very tired. And that pissed him off. The walk from the house to here was a hundred yards, and he felt like he’d run a marathon. He dragged a forearm across his brow and looked at the dark sweat stains on his sleeve.
“Damn,” he said softly, and the wheeze in his voice made him want to cry.
It was nearly five minutes before he felt well enough to bend and pick up a screwdriver from the toolbox. And it was another minute or two before he risked standing up. The barn swayed and he had to use one hand to brace himself against Farmboy’s chest to keep from falling.
When he trusted his legs to hold him up, he took a steadying breath and slotted the screwdriver into the first of the four screws holding the chest plate on. The screws were rusty, too, and the slots partially stripped from all the times the plate had been removed to make repairs. Duke grunted with effort and finally managed to turn the first one. It felt to him, though, like this was a statement about his whole life, measuring his current capabilities against what had been effortless once upon a time.
“Come on, you prick,” he muttered as he fought the second one. The third. The fourth turned easily, but that pissed Duke off too. Kind of like the world admitting it was screwing with him.
He set the plate down and laid the screws atop it, then clipped a small work light to the edge of the panel frame. Duke spent ten minutes poking inside with pliers and a probe, checking connections, tracing wiring, testing chips, looking for the fault. Nothing obvious yelled at him. There was some dust and grit, but no burned boards, no fried wiring. The robot’s metal chest was rusty and dirty, but that shouldn’t have affected his functions.
“The hell’s wrong with you, you old sumbitch?” he murmured, then sniffed back a tear. “Damn, Farmboy . . . I always thought you were the one bot who they couldn’t put on the bench. You’re the king, man.” He leaned his forehead against the cold metal.
Duke pushed off and leaned back, weary and frustrated.
“Who’s going to take care of things when I’m gone?” Duke touched his own chest and then tapped the metal chest of the big robot. The face of the big robot seemed to frown down at him. The black eyes seemed to be sad. Defeated.
“Ah, fuck it,” said Duke. “I’m talking to a big pile of rust and bolts as if you’re real. You can’t hear me, which is okay, because there’s nothing I can say or do that’s going to mean a single thing. If I can’t fix you, then once I’m dead and in the dirt they’ll have to sell you off for parts just to pay the light bill. Jesus.”
Duke turned to reach for a rag to wipe off the rust, but as he twisted to bend for it, he felt a spasm in his chest and suddenly he was coughing. Hard, deep coughs. Wet and brutal, and the fit lasted for half a minute, slowing and then intensifying, over and over again, and then finally tapering off. Duke turned and sagged back against the solid bulk of Farmboy, head bowed, feeling suddenly a thousand years old. His chest and throat had a punched, bruised feeling to them, and fireflies seemed to dance around him.
“Jesus . . .,” he gasped. Then he looked down at the rag he’d used to cover his mouth. It was speckled with dark dots. They looked like oil in the glow of the work light, but he knew that they were a dark red. It chilled him, scared him, and made him want to cry.
The bleeding was starting again.
The last time that happened was when he had an infection in his lungs that turned into a case of pneumonia so fierce that he was on his back for six weeks. It took a lot of trial and error for the docs to find the right mix of antibiotics. There was a point when Grandma had the minister from the Lutheran church come to visit him in the hospital. The preacher didn’t go as far as to give him last rites, but Duke figured he was expecting to do so. Duke recovered, but never all the way. He dropped weight that he couldn’t put back on, and ever since then he’d felt as if his bones were as brittle as old sticks.
That pneumonia had started with a cough exactly like this.
Just as sudden, just as deep.
And the blood.
Duke felt new tears in his eyes, but he blinked them back. Tried to, anyway. They lingered, burning like cinders.
The metal skin of Farmboy was cool and soothing against his back. When Duke felt he could risk it, he turned very slowly to look up at the metal face.
“Yeah,” said Duke, “look at us. We’re a real pair. Used up, broke down, and no damn good at all to anyone.”
Farmboy’s black eyes stared back at him from under the brim of the fake straw hat. Duke smiled and used the cloth to wipe at the flakes of rust around the open control panel. He saw that there were many tiny drops of blood spattered on the chest, and some had gone into the open panel and glistened redly on the circuit board. The blood made a small hissing sound as the moisture soaked in through a wire mesh air vent on his chest.
“Oh, shit,” said Duke, and quickly dabbed at the blood, trying to blot it all up. There was a sudden, loud chunk-chunk of a sound, and for a microsecond lights inside the robot’s chest flared. It was so quick, so sudden that it sounded like the throb of a heartbeat, but Duke knew what it was. The blood had shorted something out. Maybe the starter. He cursed and tried to get the last of the blood off the sensitive circuitry, but then he stopped, knowing that it was already too late. The robot sat there, and somehow it felt different. Colder, maybe. Deader? Something, anyway.
He looked down at the blood and grease on his rag and shook his head slowly, admitting his mistake—however much it wasn’t his fault. Circuits and moisture were never friends, and he’d known that all his life. Now his crumbling body seemed to be taking his mind with it. This was a stupid mistake. A rookie mistake. And it was going to cost his family everything. Just as his own mechanical heart was the most expensive part of Duke’s own body, the central circuit board was the robot’s heart. Maybe fixable five minutes ago, but killed now by his own traitor blood.
Duke sat there for a long time, saying nothing. Feeling so old, so thin and faded. He raised the rag and rubbed at the rust spots again. Doing something because there was nothing else he could do.
“We used to be something, though,” Duke said slowly. “You and me. Couple of badasses. What the hell happened to us?”
The robot, being a robot, said nothing.
Duke started to say something else, but stopped, his mouth open. He stared at the robot’s chest and . . . something was weird. Something was wrong. There was a spot, a small smear where he’d been rubbing, where the rust flakes had fallen away to reveal bright metal. Duke glanced down at the rag and saw that he’d accidentally used the part that was spotted with blood, but instead of smearing red atop the dust and rust, it had cleaned the metal. It gleamed like polished stainless steel.
“I don’t . . .,” he said, then rubbed at the spot some more. The spot of bright metal expanded from the size of a dime to the size of a quarter. “That doesn’t . . .”
He closed his mouth with a snap and tried rubbing again but with a clean corner of the rag. Some rust flakes fell off, but the metal remained an oxidized red-gray. Duke spat on the rag and gave it another rub. Same thing.
But that bright patch seemed to shine at him. Duke looked down at the blood spots on the cloth, then back up.
“Don’t be an idiot,” he told himself.
A few seconds later he pressed the bloody part of the cloth against the spot he’d rubbed twice with no effect. This time, though, the ruddy color changed, vanishing the way grime does when scrubbed with a powerful cleanser. Bright metal shone in the weak light.
“No,” said Duke. “No way.”
He rubbed and rubbed at it until he had a spot as big as his palm. By then the rag was covered in dirt and rust that had mingled with the blood and truly turned it black. When he bent forward, he could see his reflection in the mirror-bright metal.
Duke tried to make sense of it, fishing in his memories of high school science for something rational. Was there some kind of enzyme in blood that eradicated rust? He doubted it. Was it the heat of the blood? No, that couldn’t be right, because spit would be just as warm, especially after more than a minute on the cloth.
Which left . . . what?
He rubbed again, but there wasn’t much of the blood left and the effect was diminishing. He tried spit again and got nothing. Even an industrial abrasive didn’t work.
“The hell . . . ?” he asked the robot.
Farmboy said nothing.
Duke sagged a little, though he had no real idea what he was depressed about. So he’d cleaned a patch of metal. Big frigging deal. All that meant was that Farmboy was a minimally cleaner piece of junk.
He punched the robot. Not too hard. Enough to make his knuckles hurt, though.
“Damn it,” he growled. Then suddenly he was coughing again. Harder. So much harder. It struck him so fast there was no time to brace himself, no time to even cover his face. He caved forward as forcefully as if he’d been punched in the gut and only just managed to keep from smashing his face on the robot by slapping his palms against the cold metal. The coughs racked him, tore at him, pummeled him from the inside out. Spit and blood splatted on Farmboy’s chest and across the sensitive circuits inside the open panel. There were no sparks, of course, because Farmboy was dead.
Duke coughed, feeling the weight of each spasm as it pushed him down, making his head bow down between his trembling arms. It felt like he was surrendering. Like he was giving up. Being forced to admit that this was how it was going to be. Not a holding pattern, propped up by pills and careful living. Not a slow slide down.
No. The cough was immediate and it was huge. It was a great big fist and it was going to smash him. Maybe not this minute, but soon. Without doubt, soon.
Fresh blood splashed across the robot’s chest. He was dying, right here, right now. He could feel his own internal systems shutting down.
I’m sorry, he thought, wishing he could shout those words so that everyone who’d ever loved him could hear them.
He coughed for five long, brutal minutes, and then he leaned there, gasping, tears running down his face, blood running hot over his lower lip and hanging in fat drops from his chin. Sweat, cold and greasy, beading on his forehead and trickling over the knobs of his spine.
The minute hands seemed to fall off the clock for him, and Duke had no idea at all how long he stayed in that position, hands braced against the fall all the way down. When he could speak, it was to gasp a single word.
“Please . . .”
Said over and over again.
When he could finally stand and walk, it took him twenty minutes to go all the way home. All those thousands of miles from the barn to the house.
-4-
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.