Further Into The Future!

Chapter 28

Dan and I kept quickening our pace to catch up with Hammer, but no matter how fast we walked he always seemed to be one step ahead of us. He was muttering and cursing under his breath, and occasionally his voice would break into a yell on a point he wanted to emphasize, like a homeless man on a street corner.

"I never liked this part of town, or the stupid band that lived in it," he said to himself as he took huge strides down the nearly empty street. "I never should have let them become so powerful. Nope. That was one of my biggest mistakes. They seemed so harmless until that one year they swept American Rock Star – what was that, '91? '94? God, I don't remember"

A woman, the first person we encountered on our walk, dropped her grocery bags when she saw Hammer walk by. The bottom of one of the bags was slowly soaked in red juice from a bottle that broke inside. She turned her body as we walked past so she could keep her gaze on us.

"Hi, missy!" Hammer yelled, waving his old withered arm at her. It flailed in the air like a whip. "Come! Come with us!"

When she failed to move he scoffed and turned his head back to the decrepit road in front of us. Weeds poked through the concrete in places, especially near the ends where the sidewalk began. I could feel waves of heat reflected off the dark gray asphalt. Hundreds of yards ahead the air bent and twirled from the heat, and beyond that were richer, more colorful buildings and their moving advertisements, with hazy figures walking around on the street, defined only by the way they blocked the streams of sunlight. It was like a mirage.

I heard the familiar clapping of plastic and all of the sudden Tiberius was beside me, the rest of the robots marching in their square behind him.

"Tiberius, I'm glad to see you're all right," Dan said. He walked to the other side of me where Tiberius was, but he didn't respond. He was staring at the back of Hammer's baggy red uniform with an intensity only a robot is capable of.

He seemed to be debating whether to approach Hammer. He would hasten his pace to come within arm's reach of him, and then slow down again to be with us. He repeated this a few times until he finally broke into a jog so he was right next to Hammer.

Hammer stopped mumbling abruptly and glanced at the robot next to him with a little bit of disgust, as if Tiberius smelled bad.

"What do you want?" he finally asked, after they had walked about a block together.

"Mr. Hammer, Sir, I would like you to know that I fought for ten years for you in the Philippines, and I lost an arm there. And I fully support your possible return to power today," he said. He dipped into a bow while maintaining Hammer's swift pace. When he stood back up he offered his metal and plastic arm to Hammer, who hesitated for a few moments, then shook it.

Before Tiberius's hand had gone its precise course up and down even once, Hammer slipped his wiry hand out of the grip and looked straight ahead again as if nothing had happened. Tiberius slackened his pace to return to our level in the procession.

As we moved along, the weed-filled vacant lots and crumbling concrete buildings around us were slowly replaced by colorful glass ones, although even these were only a few stories tall and often appeared old and ignored. A five-story red cube on our left had an advertisement on it: a baby was sucking on his bottle, and "Herman's Baby Milk" zoomed across the screen as the child giggled, exposing a toothless mouth. The bottom left quarter of the advertisement was discolored, but flickered back to normal colors every once in a while.

A red car whizzed by so quietly it startled me. It moved to the left side of the street to get around us, because Hammer was walking along the dotted white line in the center. After it had gone a dozen yards or so ahead of us, however, it stopped.