“I can’t believe it,” murmured Thundercracker.
Body after body rose up from the sand, creaking, jerking, and twitching jauntily into motion. Sharp cracks and moans announced their awakening, and one after the other, the decrepit shapes of dozens, no,
hundreds of shambling fleshbags began to lurch towards the dock.
“Believe it,” stated Isaac, gritting his teeth and stepping forward with his blade aloft, its hammer-battered metal length flashing in the dim light. “It’s happening right now.”
“I know,” whispered TC. “...hundreds of injured, ugly old men looking for our help.”
The Red Baron’s mechanical frame whipped around with a sharp creaking of gears, and Isaac stared out of his cockpit in disbelief.
“Are you
serious?”
Thundercracker’s lip plates betrayed the hint of a twitch, his remaining optic twinkling with a mischief that was startlingly reminiscent of his wing-mate.
“I know that they’re zombies,” he said, cocking his good arm towards the crowd. “I’ve seen
28 Days Later. And all the sequels. And I read a novelization.
And I have an autographed poster with Cillian Murphy’s-”
“Let’s get back to the ‘take care of business’ part,” Isaac stated, cutting TC off. “We can talk about… whatever it is that you’re talking about later, Racker.”
They moved in unison, a trifecta of mechanical motion that crossed the dock in lengthy strides which vastly outpaced that of the shamblemen, who for their part were trudging across the beach with a gait matched only by those who were suffering from fresh leg injury or a college student walking home with a hangover. From a sweeping spectrum of far beach and near shoreline they approached, some faster than others, swarming the pier but never entering the water which came up to grasp the sand then retreated back in its tides perpetually.
Bottlenecked around the base of the pier, the zombies were like moldering fish in a skunky barrel. When the first swollen, rotting foot dared set itself on the warped wooden panel that marked the dock’s beginning, they rained death, death with
finality, upon the undead horde. A barrage of munitions that could only be described as patently
excessive ripped through the crowd, tearing wretched bodies asunder, spraying ichor and organic debris most unpleasant through the air. The bits of undead that reached the water began to attract fish of questionable livelihood like a tosspot of D-grade chum.
“Yuck!” exclaimed TC, watching a bullet rip through a forehead, come out the other end grey and oozing, only to find a new home in the bloated belly of a rather uncouth looking dead gentleman who looked to be the zombie equivalent of Wilford Brimley. “This is
really gross.”
“Don’t! Stop! Dismembering!” yelled out Skywarp, who was going at it with both arms, grinning madly as his machine guns rattled out a steady rhythm of destruction. “These zombies aren’t going to dismember themselves!”
TC thought that - although there was a strong argument that they
would, in fact, dismember themselves made all the stronger by a shambling corpse whose leg snapped when he tripped over a piece of driftwood - some things might just be figures of speech, and better left unargued.
“At least this is easy!” hollered out TC, an almost palpable sense of relief in his voice. “After all of the struggle back in Nippur, and Broadside, and everything, I thought we’d have some kind of challenge here!”
The zombies stopped in tandem, stock still, the front line tip-toeing over the dock’s wooden border dangerously. Easy a target as they were to mow down, the trifecta of ‘mechs halted as well upon noticing the opposition’s strange behavior, the thundering roar of gunfire ceasing abruptly. Acrid smoke wafted from each of their respective pieces of weaponry, filling the already tepid air with another layer of stench.
“Why are they stopping?” Isaac asked aloud. The authority in his tone made the question a demand, but the curiosity in his voice left it rhetorical.
A strange crunching, rattling sound took up the absence of noise left in the wake of the killing field, and bizarrely enough, inanimate pieces of rubble began to vibrate gently in what could’ve been assumed to be their final resting places.
Unable to rest, however, they actually began to levitate.
“That’s odd,” Skywarp stated, watching a black garbage big lift up from the beach to hover in the air. “Right? That’s pretty odd, isn’t it?”
Other pieces of rubble began to pull free of the sand; a shattered green bottle and all of its pieces shot towards the levitating trash bag, a diaper soaring through the air soon after to join them- spiraling wildly end over end, then
spattering into a sort of epoxy resin between the black garbage bag and the bottle, all of the individual pieces of suddenly mobile garbage pressed together of their own volition. A few jagged branches of driftwood even began to choke together near the nexus of refuse, forming into a vague ‘v’ shape that gave the faint impression of a clavicle.
“They’re coming together,” Thundercracker observed with interest, pointing one mechanized finger at the end of his uninjured servo at the unholy amalgam. “I just
knew this was too easy. They’re
transforming into something...”
“Gross,” tacked on Warp, wrinkling his face plates in profound disgust. “We have to fight literal
trash? Though I guess it’s an improvement over Broadside-”
The trash, in fact, was growing in size and variety, putting itself together in a vaguely humanoid shape that wasn’t quite as large as some of their recent opponents, but was still larger than any of the three warriors’ machinery individually. A shattered screw conveyor slapped itself onto the end of the driftwood arm at an angle, forming a full limb, then began rotating violently in a clockwise direction.
“I’m not just going to wait for it to
build itself,” Isaac announced abruptly, stepping forward with an air of affronted purpose.
“You know, this reminds me of an episode of Street Sharks, the cartoon from-”
“TC!” snapped Warp, shooting him a look. “This isn’t the time! Come on, let’s take out the trash!”
They shifted into motion with Isaac in the front, Skywarp in the middle, and Thundercracker tailing the rear; it took them little time to cross the boardwalk and reach the conglomerated horde, gawking at the garbage monster putting itself together nearby.
Isaac stepped onto a group of zombies, emulsifying them beneath the Red Baron’s heavy tread. When he pulled up his step, it pulled as if stuck by gum; a thick agglomerated paste of sloughed flesh, pulped organs, and powdered bone resisted his stride before giving in to his power with a nasty
SNAP. Skywarp punted another group of undead away, following Isaac’s lead, and Thundercracker stepped around the mess they left in their wake.
The zombies nipped ineffectually at their heels, gnats in the scope of the battle at hand, while the trio threshed the field and stepped out onto the open beach, a mob of hungry flesh eaters scrabbling at their legs.
“It’s assembling!” Isaac thrust his sword towards the monstrosity. “Quick!”
A torso, two arms, a head, and the beginnings of a pelvic floor had already assembled from the scattered beach detritus; some points of notice were the trash bag that wore glass bottles for eyes, the golem’s arms made of driftwood and discarded manufacturing equipment, its hips made mostly from a jetty that had fallen into disrepair near the shore.
“TC!” Warp cried out, pointing at the head. “It’s just a trash bag! Get up there and SONIC
BOOM that thing!"
‘Cracker nodded, stepped forward purposefully.
He rubbed his hands together, feeling the jolt of pain in his injured elbow, then looked up at the Trash Golem.
“Alright!” he called out, the echoing rumble of his Outlier ability reverberating inside his chassis, primed and ready. “You want it? You got it. You can call me Uncle ‘Cracker, because my SONIC
BOOM is about to swim through your veins like a fish in the sea!”
Skywarp palmed his face and groaned audibly. TC, oblivious to his wing-brother’s plight, carried on.
“SONIC!
BOOM!”
He clapped his hands together, wincing audibly when the pain shot through his arm wound, and felt the eruption burst out in front of him in a wave.
The garbage shook. One of its green bottle eyes popped audibly, sending a spray of shattered glass tinkling across TC’s already damaged chassis.
And yet, it still stood. It even kept assembling, more trash rattling across the gritty, polluted sands to reach its hulking mass. Even a few of the
zombies were caught up in the writhing whirlwind of garbage, tumbling over the ground in a tangle of limbs to slap against the golem with a meaty, somewhat comical
thwack.
TC looked ineffectually from one hand to the other, and finally looked back at his allies.
He shrugged.
“Didn’t work!” he called back. “I don’t know if you can stop trash with sound!”
“Then it’s the old fashioned way!” Skywarp yelled, springing forth.
He vanished in a flash of violet, and reappeared behind the monster, plunging a fist through its head- his talon-tipped digits shredding easily through the low-density materials.
The fist punched through, scattering rotting food and paper products across the beach in front of the monster like confetti.
It kept assembling.
“This is
stupid,” complained Warp, scowling as the garbage monster whirled around- its awkwardly-assembled body flagellating forward, engulfing him in a sort of
hug, waves of assorted trash pressing over his face-plates in an attempt to suffocate him. He shredded it away with a slash of his talons, red optics blazing bright with anger as the junk golem hung off his frame like a particularly determined limpet, the remnants of a baby carriage clattering in an
intensely irritating riot of spinning wheels as it slapped against his helm. Again. And again. And
again.
With a short crackle of static, he zapped out of the creature’s grasp in a flash of warp-lightning, staggering a little as he reappeared next to Thundercracker and Don Isaac. He looked over at them with a baleful glare, wings drooping in defeat, then went briefly cross-eyed as he flicked the remnants of a rotten, brown-spotted banana peel from his nasal ridge.
All around, the zombies continued to uselessly batter at their legs with feeble fists made of mere flesh and bone, gnawing uselessly on the solid metal. It would’ve almost been funny if it wasn’t so sad.
Thundercracker rubbed at his chin, his sole remaining optic narrowing in deep thought. “There’s like, an
endless amount of trash on this beach. I don’t think we’re gonna get anywhere just beating the stuffing out of it. It’s like
The Blob... it’s just going to get
bigger.”
“I am inclined to agree,” Isaac murmured, similarly contemplative, tightening his grip on his sky-saber with a
creak of metal. “There must be some power calling it to gather itself… some form of sorcery, perhaps…”
The three ‘mechs eyed the junk golem as it staggered forward, its every footstep seeming to literally
leech additional junk from the shoreline. Even a few of the ancient hulks of cars littered across the beach began to rapidly corrode at its approach, their already rusted exteriors crumbling to dust and rising up in a flourish to become part of the shambling creature’s unnatural armor, fortifying its softer parts.
Finally, Skywarp gave a slight shrug of his wings and fell into a battle ready stance, his servos clenched into tight fists at his sides.
“Whatever. While you guys figure
that out, I’m gonna keep punching it!”
TC sighed. “If only we had some kind of trash receptacle. If we’d chosen garbage trucks as our alternate forms, this would be over in a jiffy, but-”
Isaac paused, his hesitance at the strange statement noticeable, which cut Thundercracker off at the knees.
“Right! Punching! Let’s do a
lot more punching! No time to banter, Isaac!” TC yelled over his shoulder. “Better just focus on the fight, and not on anything that might be on our minds! Yep, just fighting! No time to think about anything else!”
The machine guns on his servos whirred into life, and he grimaced.
