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Low-riding, slow and confident, cherry-red paint glistening under the dim street light, malice pouring from every curve of metal, the car advanced. It crept along the road, headlights glaring into the night as if searching for something, then suddenly, it stopped. It rested there for a moment, its prey in its sights. A kid in a gray sweatsuit, blinking and bewildered.
“ You ain’t mad, are ya? ”
Then the engine roared, a deep, full sound that screamed of power, and accelerated, tires screeching on the asphalt.
The sound of burning rubber filtered in through Paul Roberts’ radio, accompanied by a shrill synthesizer note as he watched the tall screen. It was a cheap flick, but hey, it was a cheap place. The Skyview Drive-In Movie Theater had been on its way out for most of his life, but Roberts deserved this. Call it a reward.
Right. A reward, he thought, sighing and popping open the tab of another Coors. For what? Shuffling through documents and invoices all day, spending hours trying to get in touch with agents who couldn’t be bothered by the bank? He took a swig of the beer, feeling the condensation beading on the can. It wasn’t that he didn’t like his job. He got to handle thousands every day, he was the only reason these hotshot Fed divisions even got their money in the first place! But even still, how the hell was he supposed to find a way to explain that forty thousand of a hundred thousand dollar loan had gone toward “cryonic development”? What even was that?
This is what he got, Roberts supposed, idly swirling his beer, for working with the freakshow side of the Feds. Sector 7 was complex and irritating as it was, and all of a sudden this nutty Arkeville and her gaggle of loons had shown up and- no. No more work stuff. His office was miles away, papers and files on hold til Monday morning at 8 AM sharp.
The movie had slowed down, lots of talking, so Roberts tuned out the sound from his radio for a moment, looking at the precious few others that had seen fit to visit a dive like this. There was an older Betty in a gray hatchback three spots away, looking through her windshield at the screen with a dour expression. Roberts squinted at her for a moment, attempting to decide if she would look prettier with a smile. A white sedan sat a few rows in front of him, and he could hear the chatter and popping bubblegum through both windows. Kids. The plate was even a vanity, “U WISH”. He scoffed lightly and leaned back in his seat. Sure, a birthday present like that might do for a stupid teen, but a man of his standing needed something a bit more… mature.
The Dodge Tempo struck just the right chord with him. It was practical, comfortable, and the engine was nothing to sneeze at, either. Sure, he was told that the boxy frames of the headlights weren’t really intended, but he liked them. Broke up the shapes a little, gave the grill some variety. Roberts took pride in it, and the old ball and chain may have yapped his ear off about his waxing and washings, but there really was nothing finer than a good car.
Speaking of- there was a damn good car in this flick. The picture of a hot rod: a ‘57 Plymouth Fury. The essence of the car commercials Roberts remembered from his boyhood, the car that ferried boys in leather jackets with greased-back hair and girls in poodle skirts to diners, chrome and shining, fins tall and proud. A Fury- that was a good car.
They really just didn’t make ‘em like that anymore, Roberts thought mournfully. Nowadays it was all doors that folded up and thin front ends. Nothing on power , nothing on the proud kind of air that a good car needed-
His reminiscing was cut off by the rev of an engine, one that he almost mistook for another sound effect. He turned, startled, towards the noise, and it only took his brain slightly longer than it should have to note that no, that was no sound effect.
The sound cut through the night, and in the stillness of the lot, the engine to which it belonged was absolutely unmistakable. The coupe whipped around the corner entrance, headlights white and blinding, probably three times as fast as the limit imposed by the cheerful signs, yet not for an instant did the tires slip on the dry, packed dirt. The windshield was dark, and the shifting light from the screen threw flashing highlights up and down the body, the light slick and fluid on a paint job that put the fiery red of the Fury to shame.
Very suddenly, Roberts felt the Coors can slip from his fingers and swore as he fumbled to catch it.
The coupe came to a screeching halt beside him, and the left side of Roberts’ view was encompassed by crimson. Staring out his window, he let his eyes run up and down the length of the car, illuminated by the screen and the ambient glow of other headlights. Decals, so faint and fine that Roberts almost skipped over them, covered the door, stopping neatly at the seam. A Pontiac, he thought rather distantly, though he didn’t recognize the other emblem, which was triangular and sharp, almost reminiscent of a horned face.
The coupe sat there, idling, in the dusty drive-in lot, looking for everything like royalty on four wheels.
Roberts looked on a moment more, the audio of the movie all but forgotten. He looked out his windshield again, suddenly very conscious of the short, almost snub nosed front end the Tempo sported, the stains from ash and beer that the seat cushions would not let go. Jealousy, bitter and unchecked, darkened his expression as he stared at the Tempo’s latched hood. Still, though, he thought, looking back at the coupe: a man deserves to know when his car is that damn good.
Turning the handle, Roberts rolled his window all the way down, and the dry night air washed through the cabin. He leaned to the left, propping one elbow on the exposed door, lifted his beer in the direction of the coupe, and whistled, long and low.
“That, sir, is one knockout ride.”
The air was still, and for a moment, the coupe’s rumbling engine seemed to grow quieter. It was just long enough that Roberts had started to worry that his comment had been misplaced, maybe a chick was driving and had taken offense, before the coupe’s tinted window, opaque in the night, rolled down a fraction of an inch.
“Is it now?” The voice that seemed to emanate from the vehicle, rather than inside it, was smooth, low, and dripping with arrogance. “And here I was worried about the trim.”
Roberts gave a laugh, small and a bit incredulous. This guy sounded like he belonged in a board meeting, feet on the table and a glass of whiskey in hand, not a dilapidated drive-in theater playing a schlocky horror flick.
“With that paint job, that wax, tin foil’d look good.”
The unseen driver gave a short hum, clearly reveling in the praise. Then, he spoke again.
“Versed in the ways of buffing, are we? I wouldn’t have guessed, given your…” Roberts got the distinct feeling of being scrutinized, scanned under a pair of unseen eyes. “State of being.”
Shit, the driver was right. Last weekend, he’d been called to stay late at work, eating up time he would have used to polish some errant scratches and scrape away some California grime. He grimaced and took another sip of his beer.
“Yeah, well… you know how it is. What I do, some nut job from the Feds’ always got a complaint. I’d love to put a little more shine on her, but…”
Again, the engine’s volume dipped.
“The Feds?” The driver asked, and Roberts could practically feel the raised eyebrow.
“Yeah,” he said, shaking his head. “You seen that base out west? Sector Seven. Big, real high and mighty. They’ve just got a new department too, Department of Xeno-something-or-other. Just means more trouble for guys like me.” Roberts finished his beer and refrained from tossing it out his opened window, placing it in a cup holder instead.
The night went quiet, save for the low, almost pensive, purring of the coupe’s engine.
“Say,” the driver said, the engine rumbling suddenly louder. “All that calling out a window can’t be doing you much good,” The smile was audible in his voice. A sharp click! of disengaging locks sounded, and the passenger door popped a few inches open.
“Let’s talk shop.”
Now, like everyone, Roberts liked to think he had a pretty good handle on the concepts of personal safety. Don’t walk into shady alleyways, keep your eyes peeled on the streets, and, perhaps most glaringly, don’t get into strange cars. But, like everyone, Roberts thought himself in circles. This wasn’t one of those shady, beat up vans, this thing was legit! Polished and pristine, and for crying out loud, he was in the middle of a lot, nobody would risk a kidnapping here. So, secure in his drunken reasoning, he rolled up the Tempo’s window, killed the engine, and crossed the short distance to the Pontiac’s door, hanging ever so slightly ajar for him.
Roberts seized the edge of the door, throwing it open, sliding into the seat, and pulling it shut behind him in a surprisingly fluid motion, blinking in the sudden darkness. The movie must have been on a dim shot, because not even its light made it into the pitch black cabin of the coupe.
He shifted on a seat that was rapidly revealing itself to be extremely uncomfortable.
“So… ‘s the cabin a custom job, or GHK— ”
A thick, plasticine ribbon ( the seat belt , he thought distantly) lashed out from behind him and wrapped itself around his mouth. Dazed and sluggish, he barely registered the chafe of the polyester around his wrists and legs. At the same time, the lights came up in the cabin.
Totally unlike the bright, almost cheerful yellowish lights of the Tempo, crimson light bled from almost every surface. The strips of neon red flowed all around the cabin, stinging Roberts’ glassy eyes as they shifted slightly, pulsing almost imperceptibly, as if to a heartbeat. Patterns and light bloomed on the windshield, writing and diagrams that made no sense to his swimming head. Helplessly, he turned, jerking his torso to the left, hoping at very least to finally see a face, start to make some kind of sense of whatever was happening-
Only to still, heart hammering inside his chest, breathing hard, eyes wide with fear. The drive-in’s screen had brightened, casting a faint, sickly light into the cabin, and mixed with that eye-searing, all-encompassing red, Roberts could see it plainly:
The driver’s seat was empty.
“Now, fleshie, I really like to keep a clean interior. So please, try to keep your skin grease and thrashing to a minimum.”
That voice again, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. Roberts attempted to say something, something that would have been along the lines of “What?” or “Wait!”, but it came out as more of a pathetic “mmph!”
Without so much as an audible shift in gears, the coupe lurched into reverse before shooting towards the exit, churning dirt and scraggly grass under the back tires.
Roberts blinked blearily, trying to clear his head from the fuzzy sensation it had suddenly acquired. The strobing red lines left afterimages on his eyelids, and looking at them for too long made his head start to pound in time. He looked up and around the cabin, trying to get his bearings.
The effort was dizzying, and not just because of the alcohol. The cabin just barely had enough features that made it recognizable as such, and not as some kind of… weird, sci-fi pod. Look for what you know, he thought. It’s a car. Some kind of crazy, remote-controlled car, but still a car. The dashboard (or the equivalent) was long and glassy, a shifting visualizer of segmented bars sliding up and down at its center. The seats were angular and sharp, with hardly a shred of dark canvas covering on them. What drew Roberts’ attention, however, was the thin, sleek steering wheel, and the shiny pedals beneath them.
Taking another furtive glance around, making completely sure that he was the only one in the coupe’s cabin, Roberts threw his body weight in the direction of the driver’s seat, hoping to crash into the steering wheel or get a foot on the brake pedal.
Before he could move six inches, the seat belt snapped tighter, firmly relegating him to the passenger side.
“ What did I say about the thrashing?” The voice demanded.
The Pontiac sped along the dark desert highway, the lights of Brighton Falls growing smaller with each passing moment. The car had no speedometer that Roberts could see, but he could tell when a car was moving fast. Far faster than any coupe, no matter how nice, had a right to move.
The car had just whipped around a bend in the road when the speed suddenly dropped. The throttle eased, and Roberts no longer felt slightly pinned to his seat from the forward acceleration (the seatbelt, however, remained in place). Confused, he looked out the side window, squinting in the side mirror for any clue as to their current surroundings, or even why the car had slowed.
High beams blinked. Once. Twice.
Roberts practically sagged with relief. He wasn’t alone.
The coupe decelerated further, and the vehicle tailing it began to gain in the right lane. Peering out the window, Roberts could make out the imposing frame of a heavy-duty hauler, like the ones he had seen roaming around the Sector Seven base. Even better, he thought, rather desperately. If anybody knew about weird stuff like this, it would be those wackjobs at the DXB. Or at the very least, Agent Burns would be quick about destroying this one, hopefully without him inside.
His hopes stayed high for another moment or two, then began to sink. The soft backwards glow from the headlights didn’t shine on the dusty beige regulation paint, and revealed neat, uniform navy and steel, paint scraped and nicked with obvious wear. The hauler thundered along, until both it and the coupe were cruising at the same speed, side by side.
“Mmph!” Roberts leaned down and towards the window, trying to raise his bound hands, wave, move, do something to alert the hauler’s driver to his predicament. “Mmph!”
There was a scoff, contemptuous and amused, when the voice spoke again.
“Breakdown, you would not believe this skin-job.”
Roberts blinked in confusion, before another voice, deep, rough and warm, answered, and he felt his stomach drop in utter dread.
“I take that to mean you got ‘im?”
“Like taking energon from a new-forged.”
His captor- his captors shared a laugh, easy and familiar. Roberts whimpered softly as the reality of the situation set in. That hauler was just like the coupe.
“Where’d you find him? Last I saw you were in town by the piers.”
The Pontiac made a noncommittal sound. “Nothing much down there but junk and minivans. Most exciting thing I saw was a Corvette.” The road had turned from asphalt to dirt, and the two vehicles kept perfect pace. “I picked him up over at the Skyview. Screamer’s lucky my charms are so irresistible.”
The hauler (the coupe had said Breakdown? ) laughed. “You got that right. Your vocalizer’s practically made for sweet-talking.”
The road passed for a beat of silence.
“Doesn’t hurt that you’re so easy on the optics, either.”
Roberts, who had been struggling to process the easy banter between his two kidnappers, looked up suddenly. It was hotter in the cabin than it had been a moment ago.
“Now darling, we’re on duty. I let Starscream know I’d retrieved his little boon, and once he picks up the fleshie, we’ll be off the hook.”
Looking out the window, Roberts could see just how far out they were, and his heart only beat faster for it. The edge of a sandy cliff, one that jutted out into a knife-shaped ledge, loomed before them, far too close for comfort. Behind it, the darkened desert and the star-choked night sky stretched placidly, uncaring and unaware of the man who was certain he was about to be killed.
The pair slowed to an eventual halt, fifty or so feet from the edge of the cliff, in a small, bare clearing. Roberts was just about to make another attempt to speak, plead with whoever was operating this that he was just an intermediary, if they wanted his wallet, they didn’t have to drop him off a cliff, he wouldn’t talk, he swore- when sound from his right made him snap his gaze out the windshield.
It was a sound with an odd rhythm to it, a quick five beats, as Roberts’ brain struggled to make sense of what his eyes had seen. The hauler just… changed . There was nothing slow or deliberate about it, in one decisive motion the side plating had separated, doors had slid out of place, and in a flurry of moving parts and shifting metal, a hulking, navy and gray robot stood in the small clearing, yellow eyes like spotlights focused directly on the coupe.
He was burly, and Roberts thought of the dockworkers that frequented the restaurants in Brighton Fals, pure walls of muscle mass and power. The hauler’s wheels had shifted to his shoulders, covered with silver guards that jutted upward over a wide, boxy chest. The ground literally shook as heavy feet adjusted themselves. In the dim light, Roberts could make out a dusty orange-colored face, framed by more strong-looking silver pieces.
“Want me to get the human?” The hauler ( Breakdown, that must be his name, Roberts thought rather hysterically) offered a massive hand, a single digit thicker than Roberts’ body and probably five times as strong.
“If you’d be so kind.”
The door Roberts had been leaning on suddenly popped open, and the seat belt released its hold on him just as quickly, sending him sprawling to the ground. Limbs heavy, breaths quick and frantic, he tried to force his way to his feet, making for the woods in a blind panic-
When something like a vice clamp closed around the back of his suit jacket, stopping him dead in his tracks after a painful jerk backwards. For that instant, Roberts was suddenly, ridiculously reminded of a kitten being grabbed by the scruff of its neck. Then the ground was suddenly dozens of feet away, and the dry night wind blew his tie in crazy circles, and his legs dangled helplessly over a long, long drop.
Too taken by shock to even scream, Roberts instead let out a long, strangled, wheezy sound that was quickly lost in the wind. Breakdown held him at half-arm’s length, looking expectantly at the coupe.
That five-beat sound again, and in another whirlwind of impossibly complex mechanics twisting and turning, the coupe transformed itself and from his vantage point, held aloft from gigantic fingers, Roberts got a long, unobstructed view, illuminated by Breakdown’s still-active headlights.
The chassis had separated neatly down the middle, the two pieces folding in at an angle, forming this robot’s chest. The two doors shifted outward, forming sleek, flat guards over wickedly clawed hands. The wheels scissored backwards in pairs, and situated themselves in the heels of pointed feet and over sharp shoulder plates. He had a kind of helmet, the kind of backward-swept sculpted metal of an old hood ornament, brilliant crimson over countless ghostly, chalk-white metal plates that made up a face twisted in a smirk.
A searing, neon-red eye bored into him, and Paul Roberts promptly lost consciousness.
~
Knock Out quirked an optic ridge at the organic, then glanced up at Breakdown. His partner blinked, followed his gaze, and looked at the limp little figure himself. He gave the squishie a little shake, and the organic simply swayed limply in the air.
“What, did you kill him, doc?”
Knock Out rolled his optics, switching a thermal filter on and observing the little organ in the center of the chest, still hammering away.
“ Please. I’d like to think that organics are hardier than that .”
Breakdown smiled as he shrugged and shifted his hands, delicately placing the unconscious organic in the flat of his servo. So delicate, so much control. Knock Out had seen those hands tear a mech’s limbs off, punch straight through unguarded spark chambers, and yet, here was his partner, handling an organic without so much as a snap.
“Knock Out?”
“Hm?”
He lifted his gaze from his conjunx’s hands to his warm yellow optics. He rolled his shoulders back, stretching cables and cords that had grown ever so slightly stiff during his search, and folded his arms.
Breakdown regarded the organic in his servo, suspicion in his optics that gradually morphed into a cool, obviously feigned indifference.
“What kind of car was he driving?”
Knock Out’s face split into a grin, lost in Breakdown’s golden optics, reveling in the shared vitriol, in that specific, indescribable feeling of having fun at someone else’s expense.
“The ugliest excuse for an alt I’ve seen since we got here.”
Breakdown laughed into the night, and Knock Out joined him. A ping on his HUD flared scarlet and urgent, a brief, sharp notice that their illustrious Air Commander was on his way, and that the human better have some good information. They stood there, together as the dry breeze whistled through the scraggly plant life, as the galaxy painted itself in a spray of colors in the night sky, as somewhere in the distance, jet engines screamed.