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He’d been out scavenging when it happened. One klik, the sky had been dull and empty and the next, it had been the swirling indigo of an active space bridge. And something had fallen though it.
Something bright and unsettling, glowing purple-black in Cybertron’s perpetual twilight.
He hadn’t survived on Cybertron this long by going toward unsettling things, so he transformed into his vehicle mode and started driving away. Behind him, the thing flared bright enough to overload his light receptors for several kliks.
And when he could see again, there was an arm pulling itself out of the ground in front of him.
“What the frag?!” he accelerated, driving over the thing as the hand at the end of the arm tried to grab his front tire. And then he accelerated again as more body parts–and whole bodies, what the frag--pulled themselves out of the wreckage.
They were all glowing that unsettling purple-black where they’d had biolights before, and the ones that had mouths were dripping faintly glowing foam. Their plating was still the dull grey of death, but they were up and moving like the empties that had once haunted horror vids.
And, weirdly, for a moment they were focused on the space bridge. At least, as long as he wasn’t in grabbing distance.
He’d almost managed to drive out of the ruins of Kaon when the spacebridge collapsed. And the reanimated bodies had all cried out once, sounding weirdly sad. And then, the ones closest to him, realized he was there.
And they might have been dead, but they were fast.
He transformed his cannon out, even though he didn’t really have the fuel left to run it. The bodies charged. He fired. And fired, and fired and fired.
But he was one bot, and there were dozens of the things. He screamed when the first one bit into him. And he tried to accelerate away, but he’d wasted too much energy firing his cannon and he was already moving as fast as he was going to go now.
Another body bit into him, and a third ripped off a piece of armor. And then one of them reached inside his body and grabbed somthing that sent errors cascading across his heads up display and hurt more than anything he could remember. He fell back into root mode at the shock of it, tumbling at high velocity for several meters.
He was bleeding into the pavement as he realized they’d torn out his fuel pump.
He felt the corpses surround him more than saw them, as errors kept piling up on his display. And then one of them leaned into his face and he recognized his best friend. This time, he didn’t fight as the reanimated corpse bit into him. He just turned off his optics, and hoped his friend wasn’t suffering the way he had been.
As the world went black, and he didn’t even feel the pain of the bites anymore.