Chapter 2 #2
Reaching the end, he entered the large room that had once served as a place for humans to congregate and eat. The long tables and chairs were overturned, their legs broken off, and daylight streamed in through the shattered windows. Weapon raised, he scanned the vicinity.
Though the dust here was constantly shifted by the wind, the boot prints in it were unmistakable.
They wove between the tables and into the dark kitchen, and along the wall to the right, stopping at the restroom.
The gait was uneven, the tread obscured in places due to the left foot dragging.
Either a human or a damaged bot, though Ronin suspected even a damaged bot would’ve had more regularity in its stride.
He sidestepped to the counter, activating night vision to scan the kitchen.
Someone had come through recently and torn it apart, as though there could’ve been any food left after so long.
This place hadn’t seen regular use in decades, if not centuries, and humans these days had trouble preserving food for even a few months.
Ronin crossed the cafeteria, following the tracks to the restrooms. He stopped at the door with the faded image of a circle perched atop a triangle—the female restroom.
He didn’t understand why that data had survived in his memory banks when the Blackout had robbed him of so much else.
Keeping the stock of his rifle firm against his shoulder, he slowly pushed the door open with his left hand. Its hinges whined in protest.
There was no light inside, so he switched his optics to infrared and swept the room. The stalls were all open, all empty, and the only heat he detected was from his own reflection in the shattered mirror.
He proceeded to the men’s restroom. It was similarly cold; whoever had been here was gone. Reverting to his normal optics, Ronin drew his flashlight from an inside coat pocket and clicked it on.
The remains of a small fire lay beneath the open ceiling vent.
Nearby were a few tiny scraps of cloth, the dried-out bones of a small animal—a prairie dog, based on the size and skull shape—and a crumpled tin can.
The dust wasn’t as thick in this room, but the disturbed spot on the ground indicated someone had lain near the fire.
Ronin stepped around the leavings and moved to the sink.
Though the porcelain was yellowed and run through with fine cracks, it remained in one piece.
Within lay a few hand-rolled cigarettes, with flakes of whatever plant had been used to make them gathered in the basin.
A canteen, wrapped in tattered canvas, stood on the flat part of the sink near the mirror.
Dark, rust-colored drops had dried around the edges and inside of the sink. Blood.
An injured human had sheltered here and had either left in a hurry or been taken.
Letting the shoulder strap take the weight of his rifle, Ronin picked up the canteen and shook it.
Liquid sloshed inside. The container didn’t have many uses for a bot, but it would for a human.
He’d done good trade with them in the past. If not in Cheyenne, he’d exchange it elsewhere.
There were other towns on the edge of the Dust, and he had no true ties to Cheyenne.
He slipped the canteen into his largest coat pocket. It clinked against the ammunition.
Returning to the cafeteria, he switched the flashlight off and put it away, turning his optics toward the sunlight. It had taken on the red-orange hue that signaled the approaching sunset.
There were thousands more square feet to comb over, even without counting the trailers outside, but it would be best to head back. Minor as it was, his damage would only cause more complications the longer he ignored it, and his pack was full of scrap already.
He’d spent 51,642 nights in the Dust and the surrounding wilds since his awakening. More than enough time to know that, despite his night-vision and infrared optics, the world was even more dangerous after dark.
Return, trade, recharge, repair. Then he could set out into the Dust again.
The bot district’s lights shone bright as Ronin closed in on Cheyenne’s eastern entrance.
The buildings inside the wall stood in stark contrast to the ones outside.
Most of the structures in the district had been constructed before the Blackout, maintained over the years by automated units that had such tasks hard coded in their programming.
Those bots existed in many towns. The majority lacked the higher cognitive functions of more advanced bots and synths.
Still, Ronin envied them. They possessed definitive purposes, dictated directly by the Creators, that hadn’t been claimed by the ravages of time.
The town’s upkeep wasn’t unusual. Many towns with high concentrations of functioning bots had pre-Blackout buildings, in some cases with electricity and running water.
But the wall set Cheyenne apart. It surrounded the entirety of the bot district, with a separate section containing the market.
Standing three meters tall, it was an amalgamation of mismatched materials, much of which had been salvaged from the buildings that once stood outside its borders—sheet metal, wooden boards and planks, bricks, concrete blocks, and corrugated tin roofing.
Ronin had only seen such structures erected by humans. This one protected only bots.
The main road into Cheyenne followed mostly buried train tracks.
To the north stood the wall, sheltering the pristine buildings within and blocking everything from view save the light cast onto the clouds overhead.
To the south were several old factories, now silent and still.
A pair of guards waited in front of the roadblock between the disparate sectors.
One was a synth who’d had the skin peeled off the top of his head to display the polished metal cranial casing beneath, where the gear and skull symbol serving as Warlord’s mark was painted. He called himself Reg.
The other, Baron, was an earlier model bot, lacking an artificial epidermis. It was humanoid, but its limbs were disproportionate; it could never be mistaken for an organic. Baron wore Warlord’s mark on its chest, the paint faded and flaking.
Not unlike the wall, the guards’ rifles were hobbled together from mismatched parts that shouldn’t have fit together.
Ronin’s vision flared and darkened as his optics adjusted to the changing light.
“Coming in late, dustwalker,” said Reg.
“Warlord doesn’t appreciate visitors after dark.” Baron’s words were tinny, as though echoing within its vocal synthesizers.
“But you already know that. We’re simply obligated to inform you of the local customs and policies.”
“Praise the Creators,” Ronin replied, “for they programmed you with far more patience than I. Warlord actually make you play these games every time, or have you two learned to take delight in it?”
The guards exchanged a glance.
Reg lifted his chin. “What’s in your bag?”
“Scrap,” Ronin said.
“I expect vague answers from meatbags, dustwalker. What’s in it?”
Responses flitted through Ronin’s processors, assessed and discarded rapidly.
It would be easy to deactivate these two.
He had twelve rounds in his rifle; from this range, it wouldn’t take more than three shots into each bot to knock out their power cells.
Even if they managed to get their rifles up quickly enough to return fire, their weapons were as likely to explode as they were to shoot.
And what then? It would accomplish nothing, would fulfill no directives, would bring Ronin no closer to the truth of his core programming.
And Warlord had many more bots bearing that symbol in his service.
The few belongings Ronin had left behind in his residence in the bot district could be replaced. He could turn around and walk away right now.
He recognized it as an illogical overreaction, but that didn’t stop him from being tempted by the idea. The Dust had eroded his patience for these overbearing formalities. Out there, things were dictated by the rules of survival, not the arbitrary policies of a self-important local leader.
But Cheyenne remained an important place to restock and care for his gear. No one could walk the wasteland for long without supplies.
“Steel. Copper. Plastic. Damaged power cells,” Ronin said.
“Quantities?” demanded Baron.
“Will be determined by the scrapper.”
For five and a half seconds, none of them spoke. The wind wailed over the wastes and the distant shouts of humans drifted over from the slums.
“We need to send on word and wait for your entry to be approved,” Reg finally said, head twitching to the side once.
“Fine. Be sure to send the answer over to Centennial, and don’t forget to explain to Warlord why my haul is being traded there instead.
” Ronin turned on his heel. Centennial was one hundred and thirty kilometers away.
He could be there by morning. But it was a much smaller community and couldn’t offer the same price for goods as Cheyenne.
“Wait, dustwalker,” Reg said.
Ronin halted, slipping a finger behind the trigger guard of his rifle. Most settlement-dwellers, whether mechanical or organic, had been relatively fair in their dealings with him. The reavers kept to the Dust, for the most part. But Warlord’s town wasn’t normal in many ways.
After another pause, Reg spat, “Enter.”
Ronin didn’t immediately remove his finger from the trigger. He’d been pushing for a fight, he realized. Baiting, as humans sometimes called it. He forcibly eased his grip on the rifle and redirected himself toward Cheyenne.
“You’d be better served behind the barriers. Picked up sight of you just over two miles out. Easy targets,” Ronin said as he passed between the two guards and through the concrete barricade.
They made no reply, but he saw them exchange a glance in his peripheral vision.
He walked in the shadow of the wall. The factory to his left had once been a refinery, but Warlord’s bots must have repurposed it; there hadn’t been any oil pumped in this region for at least two hundred years.
The chain link fence around it was mostly intact, though it was a patchwork of rusted steel and newer sections likely taken from the supply warehouse Ronin had searched on his way back to town.
Steadily, voices came into audio range—the drone of conversations from the market and the shouts of humans calling for children to return home, as nightfall was fast approaching.
He didn’t divert any processing power to isolating and amplifying the individual voices.
Their words didn’t matter. Everyone was simply doing their best to survive.
Ronin simply needed to offload his scrap and get repaired. Come morning, he’d pick a new direction and start walking. He didn’t have to return to Cheyenne if he didn’t want to.
As he walked, another sound caught his attention over the rest. High-pitched, clanking tinkles; little bits of metal tapping together, perhaps. He’d noticed it in this part of town before but had never investigated.
The first of the human shacks entered his view as the path shifted gently northwest, leading away from the fenced-in factory.
Ronin glanced up at the cracked remains of the roadway that had once bridged the tracks.
The north end used to lead directly into the bot district.
Most of the rubble had been scavenged, leaving only the most irregular chunks of concrete and rebar piled beneath the crumbled ramps.
The sound grew more distinct as he neared the human dwellings. He couldn’t help but compare the shacks to the wall on the other side of the road. The resemblance was undeniable. Both were makeshift declarations of defiance in a homicidal world, imperfect but somehow practical.
He didn’t understand the logic chains his processors followed, not that he could call them that; there was little logical thought involved. These were observations and baseless speculations. Nothing that did him any good.
Yet wasn’t it that manner of thinking that allowed him to find what other dustwalkers had missed in the wasteland?
Louder, higher clangs claimed Ronin’s attention. He turned his head to the left, where a shack stood at the edge of the dirt-and-gravel pathway. A metal loop with an eclectic array of items attached to it dangled from its eaves.
He changed his course, walking to the hanging object. The metal ring was hung by fishing line, with more lines of varying lengths suspending forks, spoons, knives, and keys from it. The items bumped into each other in the wind, producing sounds in erratic tones and pitches.
Why would a human create such a thing? Did they find the noises it made appealing?
Another sound drifted to his receptors, this one from a living throat, wordless but distinct. Humming. Inside the shack, a female human hummed along with the chiming, matching its pace but not its notes, complementing it without mimicking.
Tilting his head to the side, Ronin approached the shack’s entryway. A gap had been left between the door and its frame, granting him view of the figure moving inside.