Goodnight, Pretty Molly by Jill Hand

Stev tromped up the cracked and weed-sprouting asphalt of the driveway, his big metal feet going clomp, clomp, clomp. He clomped into the garage, past the ranks of other robots, all of them frozen in attitudes of attack, or consternation, or repose. All of them offline.

The robots were designed to look like dinosaurs, their metal bodies painted a variety of colors, depending on their function. The green brontosauruses were groundskeepers in the public parks. The red ankylosauruses were companions for the elderly and the disabled. Nobody messed with them when they were accompanied by a guardian with a forest of sharp spikes sticking out of its back.

The yellow pterosaurs kept an eye out for the children, soaring above them as they played in the playing fields or walked to school, dipping and swooping like giant barn swallows. The pterosaurs were equipped with lasers, in case anyone tried to harm any of the children. Kidnappings and violent crimes against the young had declined to the point of near-nonexistence after that innovation.

Those were just some of robot dinosaurs that were housed in the garage, all of them offline. Stev was a black tyrannosaurus. He was a public safety officer. Since everyone and everything had gone offline there wasn’t any crime-fighting for him to do, but he patrolled the streets anyway, his big taloned metal feet going clomp, clomp, clomp from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. It was lonely and meaningless, but it was the job he was programmed to do. He had no choice in the matter. He’d keep on doing his job until he went offline, as he surely must someday. He couldn’t remain activated forever, could he?

Pretzel the African Grey parrot sat on her perch, her head cocked to the side as she regarded Stev with one silvery eye.

“Hello, Dino Cop! Gimme a nut!”

Stev went over to a fifty-pound burlap bag of birdseed crumpled against one of the garage’s cinderblock walls and scooped some out. The bag was almost empty.

“No more peanuts. We’re all out,” he told Pretzel, pouring seeds in her dish. “Have some of these.”

Pretzel examined the seeds unhappily.

“Nut later?” she said hopefully.

“There are no more. Sorry,” Stev said.

He went to the sink and filled Pretzel’s water dish. At least the water was still running. That was good.

“Rub my head, you big booger,” Pretzel demanded.

Stev reached out a metal talon and stroked her head. Pretzel closed her eyes blissfully.

“I love you, you big booger,” Pretzel told him in her rusty little voice.

“I love you, too,” Stev told her, gently running a talon along the grey feathers on her back. He was careful when he handled her. She was so tiny compared to his metal bulk. He was glad that Pretzel hadn’t gone offline. She was his only company. Without her he’d be completely alone, in a world where nothing moved, or spoke.

“Let’s go see Molly,” Pretzel suggested.

Molly was a technician. She maintained the robots in the garage, or at least she had until she went offline. That had been… Stev paused to calculate… 728 days, 14 hours and thirty-six minutes ago.

“Molly’s sleeping,” he said.

Pretzel shook herself. Her red tail feather, the single spot of bright color amid her grey plumage, tapped against her wooden perch.

“I wanna see Molly. Pretty Molly! Where are you, pretty Molly?” she called.

Stev sighed. “All right, but just for a minute.”

Pretzel hopped onto his shoulder. The robot dinosaurs were much smaller than the real dinosaurs had been. Stev was nine feet tall from his metal feet to the top of his metal head. That was large enough for the purpose of his designer, who, like everyone else on Earth, had gone offline.

Stev walked to the rear of the garage, his big metal feet clomp, clomp, clomping against the cement floor. The garage used to be a busy place, full of bustling activity as the technicians did their work, laughing and chattering. Now it was quiet. The TV used to be on all the time, giving the news, but it had gone offline, like everything else. The last news had all been about something called floo. No weather or traffic reports, no political scandals, no celebrity wedding or breakups, just the floo. The TV people called it a “pandemic.”

Floo and pandemic were not words in Stev’s data base. He didn’t know what they meant, but whatever it was it made the TV people extremely unhappy. Some of them wept as they talked about it, blubbering in great, hitching sobs as they reported on the National Guard turning sick people away from hospital emergency rooms at gunpoint because there was no more space for them inside.

One of the TV people, her face ashen, said her two children, ages four and seven, were among the latest victims of the pandemic.

“Mama loves you. Sleep well, angels,” she’d said. Then she bent down below the table where she sat and the camera jerked away. There was a loud bang and then a commercial for a car dealership came on.

Stev opened the door to the back room where Molly lay on her side on a cot, her knees bent, her brown hair fanned out on the pillow beneath her head. Her eyes were closed. The dry desert air had turned her skin leathery. It had shrunk against the bones that made up her framework. Molly was offline.

“Pretty Molly! Hello, pretty Molly,” Pretzel crooned. She hopped down onto the cot and pressed her beak against Molly’s cheek. When Molly failed to respond she patted her gently with her wing and then fluttered up to Stev’s shoulder.  She settled herself against him, holding on with her scaly reptilian feet.

“Molly’s sleeping,” she said.

“That’s right. Let’s go back in the other room,” Stev told her.

“Have a nut?” Pretzel asked hopefully.

“There are no more nuts,” he said.

“Hecky darn,” she replied.

Turning to the corpse lying on the cot she said, “Goodnight, pretty Molly.”

—

Jill Hand is a member of the Horror Writers Association. Her work has appeared in more than thirty publications and in many anthologies, including Test Patterns, Mrs. Rochester’s Attic, and Beyond the Stars: New Worlds, New Suns.