Sacrificed to a Robot

“LET ME OUT!” Bee howled, thrashing back and forth in the cold empty basement. “PLEASE! I’LL DO ANYTHING! JUST LET ME GO!”

She felt the bumps in her spine press painfully against the concrete at her back and the spray of water as it splashed from a small dripping pipe and onto her bare feet. Her own cries echoed sorrowfully around the underground hiding place and reverberated in her ears giving her mind the mental picture of what the darkness around her must look like.

She knew that it had been a bad idea to go in the company of the other survivors, but she had never even considered that this outcome was even a possibility. It served her right for joining a gang, she supposed.

Bee continued to screech for mercy, tears puddling onto her breast and torn t-shirt to trickle down her chest. “PLEASE!I DON’T WANT TO DIE! I DON’T WANT TO DIE! LET ME GO HOME!”

“Oi, shut it, kid!” There was a loud metallic banging from the doors above and a deep voice shouted out. “You’ll bring the bots in!”

“I DON’T CARE!” Bee howled, thrashing harder and accidentally falling over onto the floor so that she bit her tongue and blood trickled from the side of her mouth. She squirmed to try and get upright again but the tight zip-ties around her wrists were too tight to let her move about.

“I DON’T WANT TO DIE!”

She whimpered, her chest heaving with throbbing sobs that hurt her lungs and burned her throat. She was trembling all over, sweat dripping down her face and vibrating with the movements of her body. This was how it was going to end. All of those books and movies that Bee had watched had always depicted death as a sad, emotional scene with such dignity packed into it that made one want to stand up straighter. But that wasn’t real life, Bee soon found out.

This was the opposite of dignified. There was no weeping bunch of friends crowded around her deathbed and no final last words of wisdom to impart on them. Here she was, curled up in the dirt and mold with several rats as she cowered like a sheep. There was no way to make a heroic comeback, and no companions to save her. She was completely alone.

Dirt smudged with the tears on her face and made it itch terribly but there was no way for Bee to relieve herself with her bound hands. She couldn’t even help herself with the tiniest things anymore.

She let out another cry, this one rough and buzzing as if her throat was lined with sleep-deprived flies. “I don’t want to die… I don’t want to die… please… somebody… anybody…”

I don’t want to die. Her mind flew to the first time she had screamed that horrifying phrase, about a year ago. She could still taste the soot and blood in her mouth from that fateful day like it was still happening. Well, that probably was due to the fact that her mouth was full of one of those two things.

Bee could even remember what clothes she had been wearing. A dress, she recalled. Hell, how long had it been before she had worn something that unnecessary and frivolous? To delight in any personal comforts anymore was a death sentence out here, and she couldn’t bear to think about the life she used to live before this- this... purgatory.

Bee closed her burning eyes and tried to bring back the memories of that fateful day. Most of those memories were swirls of smoke, fire, rubble and screams, but there was the vague recollection of her sneakered feet pounding the gravel and her overweight body screaming in protest from her sudden over-use of her body. Her lungs had been on fire and her eyes like two puffy suns, while her hair had been a solid block of stiff, sticky ash and dust.

She remembered her cries feeling like they were dragged out of her throat like a cheese grater and the blind-panic she had been in. There was that explosion under her feet that sent her flying and made her ears ring… yeah, she remembered that now. She had cradled her bloodied arm and staggered to her feet, running as hard and fast as she could. That’s when she had seen her first robot.

It came bursting suddenly from underneath an overturned car, its long snake-neck whipping back and forth, long jaws snapping dangerously with a metallic clang and its eight clawed legs scrabbling for purchase on the slippery ground.

How she had survived only had to do with incredible luck. A chunk of asphalt had flown over her head and nailed the creature directly between the eyes, killing it instantly. Bee had seized her opportunity and ran like hell for the nearest building, which turned out to be an ice cream shop. She had swung the glass doors open, leapt over the counter and huddled among empty ice cream tubs… but that’s where the memories muddled together and pooled and swarmed like fish. They were there, but incomprehensible from her adrenaline-pounding brain.

Her next clear recollection was from the aftershocks of the event. Slight trembles in the ground and blaring car alarms. She had emerged timidly from under the store counter and ventured outside to see the hellscape that had once been her old suburban neighborhood.

Cracks lined the earth in jagged tears as if some giant had taken a pencil and dug it through a city-sized eraser. The sky was filled with brownish smog and dust that blotted out the sky above, and power lines crackled with electricity on the ground and the sparks flew all over whatever parts of the old roads that hadn’t been demolished.

And Bee had seen the wave coming minutes before it hit.

Present Bee blinked and shivered. She had tried to block that out so many times on account of her recurring night terrors. But, to no avail. She still lurched up in the middle of the night, screaming as the others held her down and gagged her to keep the robots from hearing her. Well, on the plus side of dying they wouldn’t have to worry about her night-terrors anymore.

The wave had been seventy feet tall and several miles long and it had roared towards the shore with an alien-like speed. A tsunami. No doubt caused by the explosions underground.

The nineteen year-old had run for her life, knowing full-well to get to high ground. Inland, she found the tallest thing there was: a signal tower. About a hundred feet tall and extremely sturdy. That was the decision that saved her life. If she had continued to run further back towards the towns where the waters wouldn’t reach, the tsunami’s breaker would have caught up with her for certain. Luckily, the young adult had run up the stairs as if fueled by rockets and had watched with horror as the ocean itself came and slammed into her safe-place, roaring with fury. The memories faded out again after that.

The next thing Bee could recall was waking up in the arms of a huge man who was tending her wounds gently.

He had told her his name: Landon, and that the radio tower she was on fell over and crashed into the ground. He had seen her and taken her into his refugee camp, which was made up of seven others who were delighted to have her.

For the first time the whole day, she had felt safe. From then on, Bee had stayed with her newfound family. And together they worked like a wolf pack, protecting each other, feeding each other, and caring for each other. They were the most inseparable of inseparable friends. Led by Charlie, the young woman who could kill twenty tigers with her venomous stare and dashing smile alone, they were unstoppable. Everyday they looted the old streets for supplies and went to work on the old radio tower that had been knocked down. When they finished, they would send out an SOS and be saved! They would all see their families who managed to escape, and be able to live normally again!

The hope that they had felt was the strongest anyone had ever felt, and those haunting days had actually felt happy despite the gruesome circumstances they were under. But of course, all good things have to end eventually.

It was two weeks before the completion of the tower, and things had been looking good. No one had been injured too badly, everyone was happy, and their pantry was stocked up with food for several months.

But before the normal shift of work on the tower had started, Charlie had stopped them all.

“Do we really want to do this?” she had asked pensively in her high, Brooklyn accent. “Do we really want to go home?”

“Of course!” Bee had begun to say, before, to her horror, everyone lowered their tools, looking thoughtful.

“Think about it!” Charlie had said, leaping up on top of a van and speaking down at them challengingly. “We can do whatever we want here! There’s no laws! We can all agree that this is the happiest we have been all of our lives! The sights, the thrills, the danger? Don’t tell me you secretly don’t need it? No paperwork, no laws, no buildings and restrictions getting in our way. All we live on out here is our adrenaline! Our will to survive! This is the kind of happiness that we can only get here. And you want to throw it away? C’mon!”

“She… she’s got a point guys.” William, her younger brother, had said shyly, rubbing the back of his neck. “I’ve always been told that I was too weak and cowardly to do anything right, but look where I stand! I might not be the strongest here, but I certainly am tougher than I was three months ago!”

“Yeah, and Bee’s certainly slimmed up a lot.” John chortled, pointing at the woman-in-questions’ stomach. Bee had blushed scarlet, tucking her hands in her sweater pockets under all of their mocking stares.

“So, should we really fix up this tower?”

That’s how the real hell had started. With the majority of the group voting to stay put, they had tried to remain the same as they had been. But with no common goal, they began to grow toxic.

Insults and slurs were now out of real hate, and violence was becoming more and more common. Bee still felt bile rise in her throat whenever she remembered Landon coming back with John stumbling in his shadow, clutching an arm twisted impossibly the wrong way and bleeding profusely from a gouge across his eye.

Any sense of common decency was forgotten in their new primal lust for blood, it seemed.

The regular robot hunts weren’t even about safety anymore. The hunters would start delighting as the prey keeled over and died and leave it there instead of searching it for parts.

Through it all, Bee had tried to stay positive. It’s just a phase. They’re only playing around. No one is going to go evil. Someone’ll rescue us soon.

But meager hopes and wishes can’t do much against the tide of sin that a gang of adults and teenagers left to their own devices can create.

Then, it finally happened. Three days after the one-year anniversary on the island, a new machine had been spotted by Wyatt, the ripped, crazed sentry. He claimed that it was around eighty feet tall, and almost Godzilla-like the way it had smashed down buildings and uprooted trees, leaving all of the humans in a panic.

It would be easy for a creature that immense to crush them all underfoot and the fear of death drove them all insane. Two hours of drunken, adrenaline-pumped debate had crawled by as Bee, William and the others had waited outside for the results. Once the chatter from inside had stopped they silenced themselves, straining to hear what it was that the leaders had to say.

Landon and Charlie had come out of the shelter, eyes alight in an odd way. They had told them that there was still hope of surviving this humongous droid. They were not going to kill it. They were not going to wound it. They were going to give it a gift.

And that brings us to the present. With Bee tied up under the shelter waiting to be sacrificed to a metallic monster.

She knew that the others didn’t actually believe that the robot would leave them alone if they gave it an offering. They just wanted to see human blood fly, but the cowards couldn’t do it themselves. Instead, they were going to watch from a distance as her body was ripped apart in the fanged, rusty jaws of a machine.

Bee curled in on herself, imagining what the horrible creature would look like. She doubted that it would be a cute, fluffy bunny, and she knew that it wouldn’t hesitate to rip her apart.

She ran a tongue over her cracked, ashy lips and imagined what it would be like to be in the place of the monster. To see such a small, tiny human down below… so frail… so helpless…

She whimpered in terror, shivering. She wasn’t ready to die yet. She didn’t want to be near the death sentence that was that robot. All Bee wanted to do was to run away. Run away from the images of a scaly, spined lizard-machine emerging from the ground to bite her in half off of a pillar. Run away from the haunting images of a giant drone reaching down talons longer than she was to crush her to a pulp…

Bee felt her heart drop as a rattling and streak of light illuminated the basement. A silhouette appeared in the light, and the large calloused hands of Landon reached own for her-

She started to hyperventilate, wiggling back and forth with more force than ever before. This couldn’t be happening this couldn’t be happening this couldn’t be happening this couldn- SMASH!

All faded to black as the beer bottle made contact with the back of her head.