Robots Versus Humans (The Robot Planet Series Book 2) Read Online Free

around looking for advice, too.”
    “Advice?”
    “He’s thinking about leaving Marfa. He figures we’re done and he wants to know the best way to go about disappearing.”
    “What you tell him?”
    “What did I tell him?”
    “Yessir.”
    “You’ve been hanging out with old Raphael too much. You’re a young man and better educated than that. You should use your diction.”
    “Yessir.”
    “Don’t say it if you don’t mean it.”
    I sighed. “What did you tell the sheriff about him leaving?”
    “I told him I’d take his tin star from him if he was serious. He shouldn’t be leaving his post, though.”
    “He must be taking Travis’s death hard.”
    “Travis is why he should stay. I don’t know if he’s really serious about heading out or just kicking tires, testing the idea out on me. He’s got a duty but I’ll bet you the rest of that can of peaches he’s a coward who won’t do what needs to be done. There aren’t many of us left, you know.”
    “Do we have a head count?”
    “Over the last month or two, a lot of people drifted away in the night. Traveling the desert when the moon’s up makes more sense. I suspect a lot of people are holed up, watching and waiting. People probably put too much stock in that train stopping one of these days. We might have to do something about that.”
    I looked up and down the street. A hot breath of wind pushed a bit of trash in circles. Dirt devils kicked up in the distance among heat shimmers. I saw no one and heard no one but I wondered if someone was watching us. “Why would someone kill Travis and not empty the store of everything, Dad?”
    “Maybe it wasn’t about the food. Maybe it wasn’t planned or they got away with more than you think they did. And from what Hubby told me, the murderer doesn’t need food.”
    “If a bot killed him, a machine’s safeties are off and we need to find out what that’s about and stop it.”
    My father squinted up at the sun and shrugged. “There may not be many of us left but a lot of people who took off left their bots behind. Some of those bots…well, I don’t know. Just seems to me we should leave it to the sheriff and you and I should get inside before we get heatstroke. I’ve got some plans to discuss and something to explain.”
    “And while we’re in there, we should inventory whatever’s left,” I said.
    He smiled. “Sounds like work and our work should be compensated. That might be a problem solved, at least for a while. Do you think there are any peaches left in there?”
    “Doubtful.”
    “Between what’s left of Travis’s stock…hm. I wonder if we go through all the empty houses in Marfa, do you reckon we could scrounge enough to make our own way out of here without depending on that damn train?”
    He might have been right. We didn’t get a chance to find out. We heard the people before they came into sight. They were screaming in a way that made me shake as I pulled my pistol out. My father and I both turned in the direction of the screams as if we could see what was coming. We heard no engines but whatever was on its way was coming with Hell close behind. I tried to discern how many voices sang in that terrified choir. Too many to count but, by the sound of their anguish, I guessed there’d be fewer soon.
    Through the heat shimmer at the end of the street, a running crowd turned the corner. The leader was a woman in an old dune buggy. She wore goggles over her eyes and her long black curly hair was wild. Behind her came a stampede of people in cy-suits. The tech was of a much newer vintage than the assistive gear my father wore.  
    At first I thought the people in the exoskeletons were chasing the woman in the solar dune buggy. As the mob ran closer, though, I saw their faces. They ran from Death.
    “Get inside, Dante,” my father said.
    “What’s chasing them?”
    “Whatever it is, we don’t want to be here when it arrives.”
    The woman driving the buggy tried to take a