5. TICKLER

NEW WAR + 10 MONTHS

As our squad continued to travel west toward Gray Horse, we met a wounded soldier named Leonardo. We nursed Leo back to health, and he told us about hastily built forced-labor camps placed just outside the larger cities. Massively outnumbered from the start, it seems that Big Rob leveraged the threat of death to convince huge numbers of people to enter these camps and stay there.

Under extreme duress, Laura Perez, former congresswoman, related this story of her experience in one such labor camp. Of the imprisoned millions, a lucky few were bound to escape. Others were forced to.

—CORMAC WALLACE, MIL#GHA217

I’m standing alone in a wet, muddy field.

I don’t know where I am. I can’t remember how I got here. My arms are scarred and bony. I’m wearing filthy blue coveralls that are close to rags, ripped and stained.

Shivering, I wrap my arms around myself. Panic stabs at me. I know I’m missing something important. I’ve left something behind. I can’t put my finger on it, but it hurts. It feels like there’s a piece of barbwire wrapped around my heart, squeezing.

Then I remember.

“No,” I moan.

A scream rises up from my gut. “No!”

I shout it to the grass. Flecks of spit fly from my mouth and arc away into the morning sunlight. I spin in a circle, but I’m alone. Utterly alone.

Mathilda and Nolan. My babies. My babies are gone.

Something flashes from the tree line. I flinch instinctively. Then I realize it’s only a hand mirror. A camouflaged man steps out from behind a tree and motions to me. In a daze, I stumble toward him through the overgrown field, stopping twenty yards away.

“Hey,” he says. “Where did you come from?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Where am I?”

“Outside New York City. What do you remember?”

“I don’t know.”

“Check your body for lumps.”

“What?”

“Check your body for lumps. Anything new.”

Confused, I run my hands over my body. I’m surprised that I can feel each one of my ribs. Nothing makes sense. I wonder if I’m dreaming or unconscious or dead. Then I feel something. A bump on my upper thigh. Probably the only meaty part left on my body.

“There’s a bump on my leg,” I say.

The man begins to back away into the woods.

“What does that mean? Where are you going?” I ask.

“I’m sorry, lady. Rob’s bugged you. There’s a human work camp a few miles from here. They’re using you as bait. Don’t try to follow me. Sorry.”

He disappears into the shadows of the woods. I shade my face with one hand and look for him. “Wait, wait! Where is the work camp? How do I find it?”

A voice echoes thinly out of the woods. “Scarsdale. Five miles north. Follow the road. Keep the sun to your right. Be careful.”

The man is gone. I’m alone again.

I see my own set of staggering footprints in the muddy grass, tracking north. I realize the clearing is really an overgrown road, on its way back to nature. My stick arms are still wrapped around me. I force myself to let go. I’m weak and hurt. My body wants to shiver. It wants to fall down and give up.

But I won’t let it.

I’m going back for my babies.

The lump moves when I touch it. I find a small slice in my skin from where they must have put it in. But this wound is farther up my leg, close to my hip. I think whatever-it-is is moving. Or at least it can move if it wants to.

Bug. The camouflaged man called it a bug. I let out a snort of laughter, wondering how literally I should take that description.

Pretty literally, as it turns out.

Snatches of memory are coming back to me. Faint pictures of clean-swept pavement, a big metal building. Like an airplane hangar, but filled with lights. Another building with bunk beds stacked to the ceilings. I don’t remember what they look like, the jailers. I don’t try too hard to remember, though.

After an hour and a half of steady walking, I spot a cleared-out area in the distance. Smoke is rising in gentle puffs from it. Sunlight glints from a broad metal roof and short chain-link fences. This must be it. The prison camp.

A weird sliding sensation in my leg reminds me that I’m carrying the bug. That man didn’t want to help me because of it. It stands to reason that the bug must be telling the machines where I’m at, so it can catch and kill other people.

Hopefully, the machines didn’t expect me to come back.

I watch the pulsing lump under my skin with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. There’s no way I can keep going with the bug under there. I’ve got to do something about this.

And it’s going to hurt.

Two rocks, flat. One long strip of fabric torn from my sleeve. With my left hand I press one rock into my thigh, dimpling the skin just behind the lump. The bug starts to move, but before it can go anywhere I close my eyes and think of Mathilda and Nolan and with all my might, I slam the other rock down. A knot of pain flares in my leg and I hear a crunch. I bring down the rock three more times before I roll over onto the ground, screaming in pain. I lie on my back, chest heaving, looking at blue sky through tears.

It’s maybe five minutes before I can bring myself to check the damage to my leg.

Whatever it is looks like a blunt metal slug with dozens of quivering, barbed feet. It must have cut through my leg on the first hit, because part of its shell has been mashed into the pulped outside layer of my skin. Some kind of liquid is leaking from it onto my leg, mixing with my blood. I wipe my finger in it and bring it to my face. It smells like chemicals. Explosive chemicals, like kerosene or gasoline.

I don’t know why that is, but I think I might have gotten very lucky. It never occurred to me that whatever it is might be a bomb.

I don’t let myself cry.

Forcing myself to look at it, I reach down and gingerly pull the crushed thing out from under my skin. I notice that it has a cylindrical shell on the other side that isn’t broken. I toss the thing on the ground and it lands limp. It looks like two rolls of breath mints with lots of legs and two long wet antennae. I suck my lower lip into my mouth and bite it and try not to cry out as I wrap my leg with the strip of blue fabric.

Then, I get up and hobble closer to the work camp.

Sentry guns. The memory dances back into my head. The work camp is protected by sentry guns. Those gray lumps in the turf will pop up and kill anything that gets within a certain range.

Camp Scar.

From the tree line, I watch the field. Bugs and birds flitter back and forth over a thick carpet of flowers, ignoring the lumps of clothing wrapped in the turf—the bodies of would-be rescuers. The robots don’t try to hide this place. Instead, they use it like a beacon to attract human survivors. Potential liberators, ambushed again and again. Their bodies piling up in this field and turning into dirt. Flower food.

If you work hard and stay in line, the machines feed you and keep you warm and alive. You learn to ignore the sharp crack of the sentry guns. Force yourself to forget what the sound means. You look for the carrot. Stop seeing the stick.

Off to one side of the compound, I see a wavering brown line. People. It’s a line of people being marched here from another place. I don’t hesitate, I just hobble my way around the sentries to reach the line.

Twenty minutes later, I see an armored six-wheeled vehicle jouncing along at maybe four miles per hour. It’s some kind of military job with a turret on top. I walk toward it with my hands out, flinching when the turret spins around and locks onto me.

“Stay in line. Do not stop. Do not approach the vehicle. Comply immediately or you will be shot,” says an automated voice from a loudspeaker mounted on top.

A broken line of refugees staggers alongside the armored car. Some carry suitcases or wear packs, but most just have the clothes on their backs. God knows how long they’ve been marching. Or how many there were in line when they started.

A few weary heads lift up to glance at me.

Keeping my hands up and my eyes on the turret, I join the line of refugees. Five minutes later, a man in a mud-splashed business suit and another guy in a poncho come up and walk on either side of me, slowing together so that we drop back a ways from the military vehicle.

“Where’d you come from?” asks business guy.

I stare straight ahead. “I came from where we’re going,” I say.

“And where’s that?” he asks.

“A work camp.”

“Work camp?” exclaims the kid in the rain poncho. “You mean a concentration camp?”

Poncho boy eyes the field. His eyes dart from the armored vehicle to a nearby clump of tall grass. The business guy puts his hand on his friend’s shoulder.

“Don’t. Remember what happened to Wes.”

That seems to take the wind out of poncho boy’s sails.

“How’d you get out?” the business guy asks me.

I look down at my leg. A dried patch of blood darkens the upper thigh of my coveralls. That says it all, really. He follows my gaze and decides to let it go.

“They seriously need us to work?” says poncho boy. “Why? Why not use more machines?”

“We’re cheap,” I say. “Cheaper than building machines.”

“Not really,” says business guy. “We cost resources. Food.”

“There’s plenty of food left over,” I say. “In the cities. With the reduced population, I’m sure they can make our leftovers last for years.”

“Great,” says poncho boy. “This is just fucking great, man.”

I notice the armored car has slowed down. The turret has quietly turned to face us. I shut up. These people are not my goal. My goals are nine and twelve years old and they are waiting for their mother.

I continue walking, alone.

I slip away while the others are being processed. A couple of patched-up Big Happys watch and play prerecorded commands while the line of people ditch their clothes and suitcases in a pile. I remember this: the shower, coveralls, bunk assignment, work assignment. And at the end, we were all marked.

My mark is still with me.

There is a subdermal tag the size of a grain of rice embedded deep in my right shoulder. After we’re inside the camp and everyone has thrown off their belongings, I simply walk away. A Big Happy follows me as I cross the field toward the big metal building. But my mark identifies me as compliant. If I were out of compliance, the machine would crush my windpipe with its bare hands. I’ve seen it happen.

The detectors all over the camp seem to recognize my tag. No alarms are set off. Thank god they didn’t blacklist my number after dumping me off in that field. The Big Happy retreats as I skirt around the camp toward the work barn.

The instant I walk through the door, a light on the wall begins to flash. Shit. I’m not supposed to be here now. My work detail isn’t scheduled for today, or ever.

That Big Happy will be coming back.

I take it all in. This is the room I remember most. Clean-swept pavement under a huge metal roof, as long as a football field. When it rains outside, this room sounds like an auditorium filled with gentle applause. Row after row of fluorescent lights hang over waist-high conveyor belts, stretching off into the distance. There are hundreds of people in here. They wear blue coveralls and paper face masks and stand alongside the belts, taking pieces from bins and connecting them to what’s on the conveyor belt and then pushing them down the rollers.

It’s an assembly line.

Moving fast, I jog up the line where I used to work. I glance down to see that today they’re building what we called tanklets. They look sort of like the big four-legged mantis but are the size of a small dog. We didn’t know what they were at all until one day a new guy, an Italian soldier, said that these things—tanklets—hang on to the bellies of mantises and drop off during battle. He said that sometimes broken ones could be rewired and used as emergency equipment. Said they called them ticklers.

The door I just came through slides open. A Big Happy steps inside. All the people stop moving. The conveyor belts have stopped. No one makes a move to help me. They stand as still and silent as blue statues. I don’t bother to call for help. I know if I were in their place I wouldn’t do anything either.

The Big Happy closes the door behind it. A boom echoes through the huge room as the bolts to all the doors slam shut. I’m trapped in here now, until I’m killed.

I jog along the assembly line, panting, leg throbbing. The Big Happy stalks toward me. It moves one careful step at a time, silent except for the soft grinding of motors. As I move down the line, I see the tanklets evolve from small black boxes to almost fully complete machines.

At the other end of the long building, I reach the door that leads to the dorms. I grab it and yank, but it’s made of thick steel and locked tight. I spin around, back against the door. Hundreds of people watch, still holding their tools. Some are curious, but most are impatient. The harder you work, the faster the day goes. I am an interruption. And not that uncommon a one. Soon, my windpipe will be crushed and my body removed and these people will get back to what is left of their lives.

Mathilda and Nolan are on the other side of this door and they need me, but instead I’m going to die in front of all these broken people in paper masks.

I sink to my knees, out of strength. With my forehead pressed to the cool pavement, I hear only the steady click, click of the Big Happy walking toward me. I am so tired. I think that it will be a relief when it happens. A blessing to finally sleep.

But my body is a liar. I have to ignore the pain. I have to find the way out of this.

Pushing my hair out of my face, I frantically look around the room for something. An idea comes to me. Wincing from my injured thigh, I haul myself up and stagger down the tanklet assembly line. I feel out each tanklet, looking for one that’s at just the right stage. The people I get near step away from me.

The Big Happy is five feet away when I find the perfect tanklet. This one is just four spindly legs hanging from a teapot-sized abdomen. The power supply is attached, but the central nervous system is a few steps away. Instead, raw connector wires sprout from an open cavity in the thing’s back.

I snatch up the tanklet and turn. The Big Happy is a foot away, arms out. Stumbling backward, I fall just out of reach and then limp toward the steel door. With shaking hands, I pull each tanklet leg out and press the abdomen against the door. My left arm quivers with the effort of holding up the solid hunk of metal. With my free hand I reach into the tanklet’s back and cross the wires.

Reflexively, the tanklet pulls its barbed legs into itself. With a wrenching squeal, they catch on the door and claw through the metal. I let go and the tanklet clanks to the ground, arms grasping a six-inch hunk of solid steel door. A ragged hole gapes where the doorknob and lock used to be. My arms are dead tired now, useless. The Big Happy is inches away, hand out, grippers splayed and ready to clamp down on whatever part of my body is closest.

With a kick, I send the mangled door flying open.

On the other side, haunted eyes stare at me. Old women and children are crowded into the dormitory. Wooden bunk beds stretch up to the ceiling.

I duck inside and slam the door shut behind me, pressing my back against it as the Big Happy tries to push its way in. Luckily, the machine can’t get enough traction on the polished concrete floor to shove the door open right away.

“Mathilda!” I shout. “Nolan!”

The people stand in place, watching me. The machines know my ID number. They can track wherever I go and they won’t stop until I’m dead. Now is the only chance I’ll ever have to save my family.

And suddenly, there he is. My quiet little angel. Nolan stands in front of me, his dirty black hair ruffled. “Nolan,” I exclaim. He runs to me and I grab him up and hug him. The door jumps into my back as the machine keeps pushing. More are surely coming.

Wrapping my hands around Nolan’s delicate little face, I ask him, “Where’s your sister, Nolan? Where’s Mathilda?”

“She got hurt. After you left.”

I swallow my fear, for Nolan. “Oh no, baby, I’m sorry. Where did she go? Take me there.”

Nolan says nothing. He points.

With Nolan on my hip, I shove through the people and hurry down a hallway to the infirmary. Behind me, a couple of older women calmly push against the rattling door. There is no time to thank them, but I will remember their faces. I will pray for them.

I’ve never been in this long wooden room before. A narrow central walkway is partitioned off with hanging curtains on each side. I stride down the middle, yanking the curtains away to find my daughter. Each yank of a curtain reveals some new horror, but my brain doesn’t register any of it. There is only one thing I will recognize now. One face.

And then I see her.

My baby lies on a gurney with a monster hovering over her head. It’s some kind of surgery machine mounted on a metal arm, with a dozen plastic legs descending. Each robot leg is wrapped in sterile paper. At the tip of each leg is a tool: scalpels, hooks, soldering irons. The whole thing is moving in a blur—precise, jerky movements—like a spider weaving her web. The machine works on Mathilda’s face without stopping or seeming to notice my presence.

“No!” I shriek. I set Nolan down and grab the base of the machine. With all my might, I lift it up off my daughter’s face. Confused, the machine retracts its arms up into the air. In this split second, I shove the gurney with my foot and roll Mathilda’s body away from the machine. The wound in my leg reopens and I feel a trickle of blood spiraling down my calf.

The Big Happy must be close by now.

I lean over the gurney and look at my daughter. Something is horribly wrong. Her eyes. Her beautiful eyes are gone.

“Mathilda?” I ask.

“Mom?” she says, smiling.

“Oh, baby, are you okay?”

“I think so,” she says, frowning at the look on my face. “My eyes feel funny. What’s wrong?” With shaking fingers, she touches the dull black metal that is now buried in her eye sockets.

“Are you okay, honey? Can you see?” I ask.

“Yes. I can. I can see inside,” says Mathilda.

A sense of dread creeps into my belly. I’m too late. They’ve already hurt my little girl.

“What can you see, Mathilda?”

“I can see inside the machines,” she says.

It takes only a few minutes to make it to the perimeter. I lift Mathilda and Nolan over the top. The fence is only five feet high. It’s part of the lure to would-be saviors on the outside looking in. The hidden sentry guns that lurk in the field are designed to be the real security enforcers.

“Come on, Mom,” urges Mathilda, safely on the other side.

But my leg is bleeding badly now, blood pooling in my shoe and spilling over onto the ground. After getting Nolan over the fence, I’m too exhausted to move. With every last shred of effort, I keep myself conscious. I wrap my fingers through the chain link and hold myself up and look at my babies for the last time. “I will always love you. No matter what.”

“What do you mean? Come on. Please,” Mathilda says.

My vision is going away, getting smaller. I’m watching the world now through two pinpricks—the rest is darkness.

“Take Nolan and go, Mathilda.”

“Mom, I can’t. There are guns. I can see them.”

“Concentrate, honey. You have a gift now. See where the guns are. Where they can shoot. Find a safe path. Take Nolan by the hand and don’t let go.”

“Mommy,” says Nolan.

I shut down all my emotion. I have to. I can hear the whine of tanklet motors as they swarm the field behind me. I sag against the fence. From somewhere, I find the strength to shout.

“Mathilda Rose Perez! This is not an argument. You take your brother and you go. Run. Don’t stop until you’re very far away from here. Do you hear me? Run. Do it right now or I will be very angry with you.”

Mathilda flinches at my voice. She takes a hesitant step away. I can feel my heart breaking. It’s a numb feeling, radiating out of my chest and crushing all thought—eating my fear.

Then Mathilda’s mouth squeezes into a line. Her brow settles down into a familiar stubborn frown over those dull, monstrous implants. “Nolan,” she says. “Hold on to my hand no matter what. Don’t let go. We’re going to run now. Super fast, okay?”

Nolan nods, takes her hand.

My little soldiers. Survivors.

“I love you, Mommy,” says Mathilda.

And then my babies are gone.

No further record exists of Laura Perez. Mathilda Perez, however, is another matter.

—CORMAC WALLACE, MIL#GHA217