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Fifty tons of thick steel plating and roaring engines go careening past the corner. Metal screeches hideously upon stone, the mech’s ridged feet making mince meat of the street in its scrabbling attempts to stop without toppling over. It manages. Barely. Momentum is less kind to the general store that sits -- sat -- at the street juncture. The chest and shoulder of the two-story machine pulverizes the wooden storefront into splinters and past-tense.
More screeching. No time wasted on mourning the wrecked building: the mech is already turned and pushing off in a new direction.
This far from anywhere the well-off call civilization, even government equipment is more or less cobbled together from scrap. The mech is a squat, lumpy thing, rusted where it isn’t black with grease. Below a plate declaring ENFORCER in block letters and peeling paint, a bulbous glass sphere containing controls and a pilot has been jammed into the machine’s torso. The shape and placement creates the appearance of a potbelly. The mech does not look fast.
Looks mean shit. The enforcer explodes after its quarry, needing only seconds to regain the speed it lost on the turn.
Said quarry -- Wynona -- swears, fumbling cartridges as she turns away from the charging machine. Reloading her shotgun on a galloping deer is tricky business without the ground shuddering under the abuse of a sprinting steel mountain. She is grateful she does not drop her ammunition, although she doubts the puny gun will be much use against the monster at her heels.
Around her, people are -- understandably -- screaming and running. Unfortunately, there is little room to run. Cragsmire is less a town than a trading post at the mouths of a series of dusty reddish canyons. The permanent structures pool at the entrance of the rocky labyrinthe, while the temporary tents of passing merchants spill out into the stone fissures. Wynona had hoped her pursuer would let her escape in favor of trampling through the narrow and crowded space. Obviously, she miscalculated. Soaring canyon walls turn the marketplace into a bowling alley for the world’s biggest and ugliest bowling ball. She would feel guiltier, though, if she were not half certain that she was about to die.
Her mount may be the only thing in the whole mess having fun. The thing wearing the shape of a canyon deer smiles in a decidedly un-deer-like manner, exposing decidedly un-deer-like jagged teeth. Wynona would snap at it to hide its fangs if the jig wasn’t already up. The not-deer runs too fast to be a deer. Chipping paint -- a precaution now rendered pointless -- reveals gleaming turquoise antlers and hooves. Antlers and hooves that crackle with electricity. And if that wasn’t enough for people to figure out what she was riding-
“WARNING. UNLICENSED DEVIL. REWARD FOR THOSE WHO ASSIST IN APPREHENSION,” blares the mech’s speakers.
It’s just Wynona’s luck that a few people in the frey are fast thinkers. A rogue devil captured -- dead or alive -- is worth a not-insignificant amount of money. An amount of money not many here can afford to ignore. And if practicality is not a good enough reason to go after the devil, then there is a fair argument to be made for altruism. Even idiots know rogue devils are bad news. Wynona almost forgives whoever it was that fired the bullet that clips the brim of her hat.
Canyon-deer are nimble things even when not possessed by lightning demons, but Wynona does not care to test that against guns. She jerks her reins around. The devil obligingly leaps off the road and into the nest of tents.
Are we feeling a little shy? the devil teases, its smooth voice easily heard above the bark of gunfire virtue of being spoken directly in her head. It bounds between the sun-worn canvas structures jovially, crashing through merchandise displays and knocking over tent poles. For all its concern it may as well be frolicking in a field of daisies, the air aflutter with butterflies instead of bullets.
When we’re being shot at, YES, growls Wynona, taking a shot at a leather-clad merchant aiming at her with a rifle. She regrets it almost immediately. She is literally firing into a crowd, and not everyone here is firing back.
Something enormous smashes the tent to her left and the ground jolts under the devil’s hooves. Diving among the tents may have given Wynona cover from her opportunistic shooters, but it also slowed her down. The enforcer caught up. Wynona shoots at the mech. In her panic, she forgets to feel regret when it ricochets off the pilot bubble and off to god-knows-where.
“WARNING. YOU ARE HARBORING AN UNLICENSED DEVIL. SURRENDER NOW OR FACE GREATER CHARGES,” says the enforcer. It rears its hand back for another strike.
Hold on! chirps the devil. Wynona barely has time to heed its warning as it springs up the canyon wall.
The devil makes a good showing of how its species earned the moniker "canyon deer.” It finds footholds on outcroppings no bigger than a credit chip, skipping lightly across the near-vertical surface. Bullets spatter the wall behind Wynona and the devil, spraying out stone shrapnel with each impact. One stone sliver slices the side of her temple.
“You couldn’t have done that sooner???” demands Wynona, agitated enough to shout out loud.
You didn’t ask, replies the devil cheerily. It hops back down the wall, behind the mech, and gallops back in the direction they came.
This proves to be no escape. Another squat rust-bucket scrap-pile enforcer mech rounds the corner, trampling the wreckage of the store destroyed not minutes before.
On impulse Wynona jerks the devil around, only to be reminded of what she was running from in the first place. A giant steel hand almost flattens her. Wynona screams shamelessly.
She wastes precious seconds dodging around mech one’s swinging fists and firing ineffectually at the pilot bubble. The devil might be fast, but so is the enforcer, and unlike her it is big enough to simply run over tents instead of having to scramble around them. The newly arrived enforcer will be on them in moments, and she does not like her chances of lasting even a minute dancing around two murderous house-sized machines. Swearing, she scrubs her hand over the cut on her forehead and smears her blood on the devil’s mouth.
Just give me however much juice that’s worth, when I tell you to, Wynona orders.
The devil licks its lips. It shudders. Of course, it purrs.
Mech two arrives sooner than Wynona would like. She prays she gets her timing right.
Now! she barks, as mech two launches its fist at her. As the devil leaps out the way, it looses an arc of electricity at mech one. Instead of dodging the blow with her, mech one stalls just long enough for the newcomer’s fist to punch through its pilot bubble. Wynona decides not to think about what must have become of the pilot.
There is still one mech to worry about. Steeling herself, Wynona says: For the next one, I will fill my tin cup for you.
The devil’s smile stretches. I will have my payment before the sun sets. Or I will take what I am owed from you myself.
Wynona grimaces. Deal.
Even without either enforcer to chase her, neither she nor the devil escape unscathed. Two bullets found the devil’s flank, another its shoulder. Wynona bleeds from a hole in her calf.
Might want to start collecting that, the devil suggests, sing-song as it trots merrily between the scrub-brush and cacti, seemingly unbothered by its own injuries. The sun’s getting low.
Wynona bites back a retort. The sun is beginning to scrape the tops of the purple mountains on the horizon. It casts long shadows over the cracked earth.
With a sigh, she stoops and digs for the cup in her saddlebag. If she’s lucky, she won’t have to put more holes in herself to repay her debt.