These Forsaken Few - Chapter 9 - LadyShockbox - Transformers (2024)

Chapter Text

i

For all its violence and brutality, the Beast Wars had united its survivors in ways that no one on the other side could hope to understand. With all they had gone through, you would never find a closer group of Maximals. They were survivors who had seen the worst (and best) of times while lost in it headlong. On an alien world closer to their own than they would realize, cementing themselves in the annuls of history. That growth of genuine fellowship through its most violent moments made each of them stronger— together. Those fire forged bonds would last for as long as their sparks oscillated.

“How do you figure that?”

“Pretty easy, buddy.”

“Hmmm… well, I think that’s fair.” A warm chuckle from his friend followed. “I can see what you mean, looking at it that way. Not many people would believe what we’ve gone through.”

“Exactly.”

They had started their notorious little “adventure” with a dive through the literal unknown. Steering all the way through space and time itself— the final frontier to end them all. There was danger, history in the making, and those handful of battles that ranged from pointless to saving “everything there ever was.” The Beast Wars as a name could have derived from intensity rather than anything having to do with their alt-modes. The sacrifices made by those who would never make it home was evident of that truth in profusion. Nothing equated to their struggles in a way that any of them had known before… especially him. Rodimus Prime and his crew, who helped facilitate the destruction of Unicron, had nothing on them.

At least Ultra Magnus and those guys lived in the end, right? Not Dinobot, Tigertron, Airazor, or the others.

“Hey, now. It’s not a competition.” He stopped. A pause. “I miss them, too.”

“Eeh, well, it could be! You… huh.” Rattrap stopped himself before he could get too carried away. He had meant to deflect from his guilt by trying to be a little funny, but then that phrase… “Everything there ever was?”

“Yup.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Rhinox didn’t elaborate, but the phrase didn’t go wholly forgotten. Even if he had only mentioned it in passing during a conversation Rattrap couldn’t quite remember… there’d been a lot going on at the time. The drowning of the Axalon and digging up the Ark had been a hefty distraction. He did hear Rhinox say it again, though: right before the guy drove the Autobot shuttle straight through the ancient warship Nemesis. His amnesia after being infected with Megatron’s virus couldn’t erase something so visually epic. When your best friend was insane enough to drive one space-faring shuttle straight through another, it gave you a lot to think about.

Because of course he had been referring to the “everything” in everything that ever was. They hadn’t only been travelers in time, or simply lost in it. They were saving it.

“Now that,” Rattrap said, referring a little to both, “was crazy.”

“I thought the Planet Buster would have been a better contender,” Rhinox answered. He was visibly shaken but still jovial, vibrating with the kind of excitement more suited for Spots. He laughed and continued to smile as wide as Rattrap had ever seen him. “Either that, or bringing Optimus back from the dead.”

Hindsight was everything when you were an unwitting time traveler. Rattrap only wished that someone would have given him some… warning. Not only about how badly Optimus’ revival from the dead was going to go the second time around, but about everything else. The sheer feeling of loss. The devastation he had been feeling since leaving prehistoric Earth. The anguish over losing more of himself than he had ever imagined possible: being reformatted so defenseless was only half of it. Also, no matter what Megatron said, the Maximals did win the Beast Wars. Winners to any contrary didn’t end those victories strapped to the roof of a damn ship, screaming like a toddler having a tantrum. Yet, their success was hollow when it stared down their losses. Those fire forged bonds from before had been drowned. That was grief as potent as losing the ones who hadn’t made it back with him.

The friends he had lost.

The unwitting family he had still lost after the fact. Cheetor and Optimus both being gone would hurt him forever. As long as his spark continued to oscillate.

The feeling of knowing he aimed his gun at Rhinox not even thirty cycles earlier.

“Don’t blame yourself,” Blackarachnia said, who seemed to get it. It’d hurt her more than once to have to attack Thrust and Jetstorm in the past, during the periods she thought each was Silverbolt respectfully. “It was almost a disaster back there. We did everything we had to.”

(For everything that ever was.)

“Threatening to shoot Rhinox was the least of our mistakes,” she continued. She absently reached up to touch her hair. The matted tangle where Optimus had grabbed and tried to drag her outside the hydroplant were evident. Loose strands were coming out where they were pulled from her scalp. “We…”

Watching her struggle was another grim reminder to their situation. Their universe had gone so south that they were prone to hitting rock bottom. Her encounter with Optimus Primal had been a close call, second only to how close Thrust had gotten to Cheetor… which was way, way too close for comfort. Because the same as the Beast Wars, nothing happening now equated to anything they had dealt with before. The main difference was that Prehistoric Earth united its survivors in ways that no one on the outside could hope to understand. Meanwhile, the Spark War had torn them asunder— morally and physically. If stopping Megatron didn’t destroy them, dealing with the zombies would.

So, Rattrap wasn’t sure what was worse in the moment. There were plenty of contenders to choose from.

The first was that the Beast Wars veterans in question had gathered in the main section of the warehouse space, and they were just… three. Rattrap was pressed to include Waspinator and Silverbolt to that count, but they were their own casualties. The chances of saving both from their confinement inside the generals felt next to none. Especially now, in their current situation. Megatron’s previous opposition had made it feel particularly hopeless and now was no exception.

The second was that the zombies were still excitedly baying from beyond the confines of the hideout.

The third was the way Rhinox was now looking at him.

“Well, then,” Rhinox began, with a voice he recognized but a tone that was exclusively a stranger’s, “it looks like the rest of us are finally in attendance. Perhaps we can get to business.”

“Blow it out of your exhaust pipe,” Nightscream said.

Not off to a great start.

The five of them — now six — had gathered at the roundtable in awkward silence. Some more than others, with Rhinox looking particularly confident in his posture. The rest were either guarded or shrunken in on themselves, with poor Blackarachnia as the latter. Rattrap was already feeling put off when Rhinox, with Tankor’s face, swung his helm around to regard each of them. The calculating stare was none too comforting as the sensor light in his visor pulsed back and forth. Scanning the room and its occupants, leering with the kind of vicious contempt Rattrap would have understood better of Megatron. He wondered if the former Maximal had looked and sounded the same when he was temporary reprogrammed into a Predacon… he hadn’t seen much of that affair. Rhinox had never wanted to talk much about it, either. For a long time, it had only been one of those weirder Beast Wars oddities: manifested in a bastardized recreation of itself bordering parody.

Tankor was his own kind of zombie, come to think of it. His body was little more than a puppeteered corpse hiding how ugly Rhinox had become. A parody in a parody that was a black comedy turned tragedy. What a mess. Dinobot would have had a whole spiel ready to go for something like this— quoting Shakespeare and the works.

“It would appear that we have some catching up to do,” Rhinox said.

“Ooh, good! That sounds great.” Jetstorm clasped his servos together. Leading the pack ahead of Thrust and Nightscream, taking up what Rattrap realized was a defensive posture. “Say, call me shocked, but I thought I was the one with the great supervillain voice! Guess you’ve knocked me down a peg around here, huh? Impressive.”

“I am also impressed,” Rhinox answered, and none too wholesomely. His tone bridged from condescending to downright mocking. “For someone always so focused on running his voice box raw, it’s a miracle you managed to survive. Call me shocked.”

“c*nt,” said Jetstorm.

There’d been briefings on the Axalon with weapons drawn that were less hostile. The tension swirling into a similarly noxious cloud could have been scraped through with bare claws. As the two largest mechs in the room continued to size one another up, Rattrap caught a glimpse of Thrust’s dismayed expression. Ooh, yeah. Time to intervene.

“How did you survive?” Rattrap asked. It was a sharp enough icebreaker to stop the two huge Vehicons from maybe resorting to blows. For now. He hated how his voice almost shook. “Pal, we saw you overload yourself with the Key when you attacked us in the orchard. You didn’t go offline?”

Rhinox went rigid. “The Key no longer exists.”

Nightscream’s ears twitched. “That’s not what he asked.”

Rhinox glared. Nightscream winced backward, but the teen was still right— that wasn’t what he asked. Huh. Rattrap felt his hairs stand up on end.

“Jetstorm and Thrust also said the Citadel was overrun. How did you escape?” Blackarachnia still had a glazed expression. The chaos from before was still settling in a bad way over her, but her voice stayed firm out of forced necessity. Rattrap felt terrible on her behalf and worse for not being around to help. “You owe us an explanation at minimum.”

The answer he gave was brief. When the initial outbreak began, Rhinox had simply made himself scarce. He understood that attempting to repel the infected drones without shelter was suicide. It was illogical to try and fight such a lost cause, and Megatron was no master worthy of protection. A position as fortuitous as the Citadel was not worth holding when destruction was so inevitable. Not once did he explain how he endured the devastating power of the Key reverse-flowing into his own body before that. Any electric polarization that powerful would have destroyed a mech three times his size or more. Nor did he explain where he had been hiding afterward. Rattrap felt the omission was on purpose… how had he even found such a powerful relic in the first place?

No one else pursued wrenching the truth out of him for now. He wasn’t likely to give it up, anyhow.

Jetstorm and Thrust gave each other a look.

“I am curious how you two escaped,” Rhinox added, turning on the Vehicons. He wasn’t done with them quite yet. He may have been picking up on their rising hostility. “You never struck me as… survivalists.”

“If I had a nickel for every time I survived being crushed under your fat aft, I’d have exactly two nickels,” Jetstorm quipped. “Which isn’t a lot or a usable currency on Cybertron, but it’s still weird that it happened twice.”

“Storm.” Thrust’s little voice of reason was a welcome relief. The last thing they needed was a fight to break out. “C’mon. Knock it off.”

“Hey! The point is that if we could survive him, it shouldn’t be a surprise that we could survive anything else just as stupid.” Jetstorm’s optics narrowed as he reeled toward Rhinox again. “We’ve always been able to outpace our own drones. We got out in one piece, didn’t we? What’s it to you?”

“Not all one piece,” Rhinox said. He pointed at Thrust, and the motion of raising his arm immediately had Jetstorm tensing his metal hackles. It was a rude gotcha, either way. “It would seem to me that you’re not as quick to survive as you think you are.”

Thrust shrugged. He wiggled his bandaged shoulder for good measure. “That was done in house. The bite from your ex-pal puss*cat never healed after he got his teeth in me.”

In a morning full of activity in the worst ways possible, they had icing on their cake. All disguised tranquility in the room had its façade shattered. Instant chaos erupted. Rhinox raised his canon into its active firing position, summoning a mad scramble. There was a burst of movement, shouting, and a single high-pitched shriek.

Jetstorm had moved to engage Tankor immediately, poised to lunge with his claws extended and turbines on full. He was halfway positioned over the table and ready to use its surface as a springboard with his bare servos. Nightscream had already strafed to jump on the table with his fangs flashed bare, ready to deploy. Blackarachnia had launched across the room to stand in front of Thrust. It was a pose compounded by Thrust moving his arm to shove her back, as if to shield her body instead.

Rattrap didn’t move, but his vox ached. That was when he realized he was the one who screamed.

“STOP! STOP!” Rattrap found himself between Rhinox and the table. Where the ex-Maximal had retreated, Rattrap had put himself directly in his firing path. He never recalled moving. “Thrust is fine, Rhinox!”

“HE’S INFECTED!” The larger mech was beside himself— terrified. Rattrap had never heard him sound so fearful. Not even when the Ark was going to be destroyed by the Nemesis. His oversized weapon remained in the ready position to fire; its aim stayed level even with a noticeable tremor. Rhinox was afraid. “HE IS GOING TO TURN!”

Rattrap was the one who had to bring him down from the edge. At least he attempted to. Explaining Thrust’s survival wasn’t without difficulty. He started from the beginning and kept going from there. He couldn’t even hear what he was saying— all he knew was that he was talking with a continuous ringing in his audials. Even after the feedback loop from his own scream stopped assaulting his hearing suite, the tone continued. The story felt like a fever nightmare of its own volition.

“Surviving the viral load is not possible,” Rhinox finally snapped. For a guy who was definitely wrong, he sounded very sure of himself. “Learned immunity on a molecular level cannot be achieved. The virus’ effect on the degradation of Transformiumis fatal in all circ*mstances. There is no way to prevent the decay that occurs. Optimus Primal’s initial infection was embowed with a version of the virus that made sure of that.”

“You sound awfully convinced,” Thrust drawled. He had squared himself up considerably, carrying himself with undoubtedly still feigned strength. “I was showing symptoms almost immediately after being tagged. Now I feel fine— had to sweat it out. No saving the arm, though. The others gave me a hand with that part. Probably ought to check your notes on the rest.”

“More like we took the hand,” Jetstorm jibed. No one paid attention to him, even if it was objectively funny. Black comedy was still comedy.

“Yeah, man. If you’re such an expert, what do you know about the Midas Flu?” Nightscream asked. Even the kid was getting in on matching the aggressive conversation. “I mean, you didn’t even notice Thrust’s optics? Seriously?”

Rhinox recoiled a second time. The newest slip in his composure spoke more to what Rattrap would have expected of his former friend. As much as he could hold his own, Rhinox was still a regular mech like the rest of them… he looked exhausted, Rattrap thought. Had he really not noticed Thrust’s most superficial symptoms until they were pointed out? The white pilot lights and foggy visor were each a hard cue to miss.

It was a grounding moment that felt like they were on the same playing field again: Rhinox was truly no better off than the rest of them. He was just as afraid, scraping by, and as tired as everyone else in their situation. No amount of an unpleasant disposition could fool them now.

“Midas Flu,” Rhinox finally intoned at the end of his tremendous pause, flat as a board. He’d become momentarily detached from reality.

“We named it,” Blackarachnia said.

The huge mech gawked at her.

“We’re not changing it,” Blackarachnia finished.

No argument came from that. They moved on.

“I was able to barricade myself in a makeshift lab not far from this location,” Rhinox resumed. He was still struggling to rebound and reestablish his fascia. His optics never left Thrust. “My research was unfortunately interrupted with the loss of my power generator. Without Megatron to manage the grids remotely, and my fuel reserves running low, I was forced to abandon the site. During my stay, I was able to observe the conduct of the virus in real time. The behavior of the drones was… informative.”

“Yeah, well, this sector of Cybertropolis is powered by the hydroplant,” Rattrap said. He was desperate to wrench some level of positivity from this experience. His synthskin felt clammy and he wanted to be sick. “This place will always have power, buddy. Nothin’ for you to be worried about, now.”

Rhinox said nothing. He continued to glower at Thrust.

Thrust reached up with his remaining arm and waggled his clamps at him. He was the straight man to whatever routine Jetstorm had up at all times, but the biker could be funny on his own terms. Rattrap felt like he was starting to like him without trying.

“Yes… correct. I was also aware of the existence of fuel reserves, here.” Rhinox was trying and struggling to collect himself. Maintaining his artificial calmness looked like it was becoming difficult, again. He was unnerved and becoming more unwound by the klik. “Courtesy of these two, I bargained that leaving for the hydroplant would allow better accommodations. I was not expecting company.”

“COMPANY!?” Jetstorm was beside himself. “I’m sorry, is this Hotel California? Did any of you make a reservation? Since when did we advertise that this hole in the wall was free real estate? It’s ours!”

“Megatron was a fool to many dealings under his own roof, but aware of a great deal of others,” Rhinox said. “Your goings on were an example of the latter.”

Jetstorm froze. His kinetics locked, and his optics flickered sideways to look for help. His gaze met Rattrap’s for a brief klik before swapping to Thrust. The fear and silent request for help was blatant. Rattrap felt terrible for him, too.

“Hey,” Thrust growled. He pointed at Rhinox. “Stop that.”

The threatening tone was a convincing means to force a topic change. Rhinox’s poker face was more than stony with such a rigid faceplate, but he was continuing to slip on a steep decline. Rattrap saw the tension in his stance go severe. The hydraulics to his massive pincer claws going tight was as close to white-knuckling as you could get.

“While it’s suspicious that Thrust is non-symptomatic, his infection still persists,” Rhinox snarled. Without taking his sights off the other mech, he raised a large servo to point an accusing claw. “He cannot be trusted.”

“Cool story, bro.” Nightscream crossed his arms. “Like you’ve ever given us a reason to trust you.”

If a fight was going to break out, it was dodged only by virtue of inconvenience. Zombies began to bay outside in a rising, deafening chorus. The survivors froze to listen in, fearing that something had excited the mob. Thrust was the first to move and check the nearest window— a swell had formed a knot in the middle of the street a block away. A living drone must have wandered into the road from the alley and met its swift end. Any suffering would have been limited with that many swarming bodies.

“Never mind,” Rhinox hissed. “The situation can be assessed with renewed perspective going forward. With both Megatron and Optimus gone, it is more than clear to me that the time for new leadership is long overdue.”

There was an immediate and substantial silence. No one said a word. Rattrap felt a pang of incredulity slam him over the processor, graceful as a club, once he realized what the other mech had just said.

“Ooh, no! No! Hold the phone!” Jetstorm was the first one to respond. He raised his arms and flashed his claws. “No way, loser! I can tolerate rude houseguests, but you just got here! The first thing you talked about was how you were surprised your old furry friends hadn’t canned me and biker boy. You want to be the boss, now? Frag off!”

“You are not in a position to threaten anyone,” Rhinox said. “You are outnumbered.”

The “you” in that threat was more than obvious— and yes. It was absolutely a threat. Rhinox was out of his element but still plenty capable of being a menace in the moment, more than capable of backing up his words. Jetstorm and Thrust immediately tensed on the spot. All at once, there was that sensation of remembering that the two Vehicons technically were outnumbered: from three-on-two to four-on-two. Rhinox had made it more than clear that he was no longer in their court, even if calling him a Maximal still felt misplaced.

“Hey! Guess again, jerk!” Nightscream unexpectedly shoved himself between Thrust and Jetstorm. He reached up to grab Thrust’s good shoulder and grounded himself as an anchor. “Thrust has saved my aft more than once. If it wasn’t for him, I would have been killed. Jetstorm’s the one who made that giant sign for you to know we were all in here, too! If it wasn’t for him, you would have been zombie chow. What the frag have you done for us so far, huh? You’ve been nothing but an ass!”

Rhinox scoffed. Dismissing the dissent, he turned to look at Rattrap and Blackarachnia. Nightscream’s opinion was hardly important to him.

“We’re all one team,” Blackarachnia said. Hollow in tone but plenty firm. She wasn’t going to budge.

“We’re not doing leaders.” Rattrap added, and his vox felt like it was on autopilot. He meant what he said, though. “No way, buddy.”

“You are a fool!” Rhinox was recoiling for a third time. He was taken aback to a genuine extreme. “You cannot be serious and expect me to—”

“I nominate Thrust,” Nightscream said.

Now Thrust was reacting. The usually collected biker twitched, which in itself wouldn’t have been too severe of a reaction… but hey. Rattrap had gotten to know him a little better since their first day hiding in the hydroplant. The biker’s tells for shock were slightly more noticeable to him, now. “Hello?”

“WHAT!?” Rhinox was shaking. His roar broke the confused lull with a burst of his voice box nearly choking on its own codec. He was beside himself. “ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR—!?”

“I second that,” Jetstorm chirped, albeit with a subdued tone. He was looking at Nightscream with a strange expression. “Sounds like a blast.”

“Third,” Blackarachnia said. Her eyes were still as glassy as they had gone hard.

Rhinox swung his helmet around, and Rattrap found himself under his withering stare.

“I might have been the odd guy out voting to sit on our afts and not help Thrust when he was sick, but all that slag that went down in the pharmacy?” Rattrap crossed his arms. “Sorry, Rhinox. If we are gonna pick leaders, you’d find it hard not to convince me that biker boy has got his ball-bearings together. He wants us all to survive, and you’re talkin’ about getting rid of our friends. It’s four for me on this one, pally.”

(Friends. He called two Vehicons his friends.)

“I DO NOT BELIEVE THIS!” Rhinox was furious. “All of you are imbeciles!”

“Right. So, that’s four for yay and one for nay on that topic.” Rattrap pointed at Thrust. “Congrats on the promotion, Wheels. Guess your opinion don’t really matter even if you gave Rhinox a pity vote.”

“Cool,” Thrust said. He was pokerfaced. “My first act of leadership is to say that there is no leadership. We all happy now?”

“Yes! Anarchy!” cried Jetstorm. He spun on his antigravs. Did he ever get whiplash changing moods so fast? Rattrap couldn’t help but wonder. “Political disorder! Lawlessness! Tax evasion! Shoplifting without consequences!”

“Pretty sure our last shoplifting attempt almost did come with consequences,” Nightscream muttered. “Getting eaten alive?”

Jetstorm stopped spinning. He paused, whirled the other way around, and grabbed Nightscream by his shoulders. His massive servos dwarfed the poor kid’s whole upper torso.

“Shhh.” Jetstorm’s expression was whatever his version of deadpan panned out as. “No.”

“Well, that was a thrillin’ conclusion to this mess.” Rattrap griped. He looked back at Rhinox and overlapped his arms again. He was starting to feel better, himself. Rhinox’s range of expression was hard to gauge, but he started to find himself annoyed when he saw how miffed the other mech was. “See? We’re fine doing things the way we are right now. You’re the one rocking the boat, big guy.”

Rhinox snarled, turned away, and rolled off on his treads. He was getting nowhere with this. Whatever session they were having as a group, he was checking out. For now.

The five who remained simply… remained.

“Were we supposed to take minutes?” Jetstorm asked. “Do we even have a quorum, anymore?”

“Meeting adjourned,” Nightscream murmured. “Man. What a f*cking prick. What crawled up his exhaust and—?”

“Thanks for that,” Thrust interrupted. He pulled away and reached out to nudge Nightscream on the back of his shoulder with a closed set of clamps. In a previous lifetime, he would have been jabbing him in the back as a threat to pump him full of bullets. It was a far-off memory that felt more put off from reality than it was in truth. Weren’t they enemies only days ago? Weeks? How long had it been since they were fighting that other war? “Jetstorm and I were worried there for little bit.”

“Don’t be,” Rattrap said. He found himself staring off in the direction that Rhinox left. He’d disappeared among the rows of shelves wide enough for him to pass, allowing his silhouette to vanish into the dark. “We came this far, didn’t we? Not much sense to turn on each other now.”

“Even if I can’t be trusted, or somethin?” Thrust’s rumble was soft— pensive. It was hard to measure what he might have been feeling with his expression locked the way it was. Rattrap imagined he was feeling a little more upset than he gave away. “He seemed sure about… ah. Never mind.”

“About you still maybe turning into a zombie?” Nightscream huffed and blew his hair out of his face. It was an exasperated sigh, regardless. “After this whole time? Fat chance. That jerk definitely isn’t as smart as he thinks he is.”

Thrust didn’t answer right away, and that worried Rattrap. It wasn’t enough to take a step back to reassess the situation more than what it was already worth, though.

The five of them continued to linger together, without any hint of malice or distrust. Nothing that came close to what Rhinox had put off in similar energy. It bordered amazing, frankly. For all its violence and brutality in even greater abundance than the Beast Wars, this new conflict had united them in ways no one could understand. No one on the outside for certain, and yes, Rhinox was an outsider. Even with all they had gone through…

Once again, on a world that was familiar but still so alien, they had cemented themselves in the newest annul of history. Fighting for everything that ever was, again. Whatever growth of fellowship was happening here had made them stronger— together. How long they would last to forge that bond even stronger, assuming they survived (doubtful). Rattrap was still fairly sure they were all going to die, but hey. Now he knew more than ever that it was likely they would go out together.

When Thrust finally found his voice again, his vocoder was subdued. “Still a lot we don’t understand about this virus. Who knows anything?”

“Exactly.” Blackarachnia was still being quiet. She was looking down. “I want to know where we go from here.”

“I want to know how he knew about Optimus being infected first,” Jetstorm said, and the silence was deafening. Who could ignore that?

ii

It was twilight when he woke up.

The humidity was clinging to his synthskin as he came back online in the dark. Wet and sticky in its thickness, sweating up through his fur where mats had begun to form. Along with it came the smell of acid and rust. It was an odor almost as horrific as the other smell wafting into the attic warehouse from outside. Billowing and rotten as it was stale, tightfitting to his hide until his face was damp with it. He found himself blinking stinging sweat out of his optics.

For a moment, there was a brief period of silence… or almost silence. As his hearing suite finished its slow reboot, the cries of the undead finally cut through. At least the stinkin’ zombies had the sense to be a little quieter than usual, eh? They seemed their “calmest” when nothing had their immediate interest. As quiet as you could be when you were in constant agony, at least.

The howling laments sure beat the slag he’d heard in his newest nightmare, then. Another tic for the scoreboard. Better now to get it over with than later.

There wasn’t much expectation for anyone else to be awake when he made his way out of the loft. He used the ladder to descend while in beast-mode to keep quiet. He couldn’t recharge, but it didn’t mean he was obligated to bother or wake the others. He stepped off and dropped the rest of the way to the floor with a soft thud. He made his way towards the whiteboard and grimaced at the number of tallies already there. The list had grown.

As long as this kept up, they were going to have to swap to using actual numbers. It was the score of the worst game ever. He marked his section and put the cap back on the marker he barely remembered even picking up. His processor felt like it was in a haze of its own waking nightmare.

That was when he noticed Jetstorm out of the corner of his optic sitting up in the nook. They had moved the shelves back for easier access— Thrust’s damage necessitated making the area more accessible. It offered a better line of sight into the alcove, and he saw the blue Vehicon deliberately shift his weight. Awake. He wasn’t the only one who couldn’t recharge.

He was cautious while making his way over. “You too, huh?”

“Not just,” Jetstorm quipped low, and that was when Rattrap realized how awful he looked. Apart from the faint condensation clinging to his own armor, the dim glow to his optic backlights indicated his own level of fatigue. “Roller wonder and I have been taking shifts.”

At the mention of one of his many pet nicknames, Thrust snored. The part of him that was holding onto Waspinator for safekeeping had the same sense of humor, huh? He was still pale compared to his old complexation, but at least he was… healthy. Rattrap was glad for the upturn. Faded armor and fatigue was leagues better than the alternative… even if he was still a little sad to watch. Anything was better than before. He was propped on his side with his neck turned into the heavy blankets— heat retention was still an ongoing issue for him, by the looks of it. The universe had finally thrown them a bone in the middle of being boned a billion times over: one for each zombie wanting to tear them to pieces.

“How is he?” Rattrap asked. Then, as an afterthought: “You?”

“He’s good as he can be. I’m peachy.” Jetstorm paused. “I hate fruit, by the way.”

“That’s awfully ironic, considerin’ yer personality.”

“Ha.” Jetstorm’s turbines rumbled. There was no ominous threat in its timbre— not like Rattrap was used to. It was a generic sound as opposed to anything angry or annoyed. “Walked right into that one.”

“Sitting.”

“Don’t push your luck.”

Luck was all he had right now, but it was worth the subject change. Idle chatter wasn’t going to get them far when their world had done nothing but fall to pieces around them. To say nothing of the part where those same pieces got back up and tried to eat you. Rattrap finally decided to put himself on a more even level by phasing up into robot-mode. It put him optic-level with the other Vehicon for the first time in their interaction.

“So,” Rattrap tried, “I suppose you two have haven’t been keepin’ watch for zombies, huh?”

“Tankor, Rhinox… urgh. Whatever his name is? We don’t trust him.” Jetstorm tilted his head to glare at him critically. The anger in his stare wasn’t directed at him, at least. “You listened to him yesterday. Short of throwing us under the bus he wants to drive so badly, that would have been a coup. You can’t say it wasn’t. He knew about Optimus being infected first, too. Smart is smart until it’s too obvious that he shouldn’t have known that much. Nothing settles right with me about that. I smell a rat— for once it’s not you.”

Rattrap shrugged. “Lucky guess? If you knew the Boss Monkey back in the day, you’d know problems sort of follow wherever he goes. To no fault of his own.”

(He missed Optimus.)

“Maybe.” Jetstorm hummed. He looked away, optics down, and seemed to take particular interest in his talons spread in front of him. “Then again? Maybe not. What if the biters outside are the least of our problems, right now? They’re outside. He’s in here.”

Which implied that Rhinox was worse than a zombie for that exact reason. Rattrap felt like he should have been more offended, but… he wasn’t. Rattrap wasn’t sure how to feel about his take on that, either. “That sounds like a hard sell when you’re talkin’ about one of my best friends.”

“Zombies bite. They attack, hold on, and tear you to little pieces until the same scraps start trying to get up on their own. It’s animal behavior without the… sorry. Current company notwithstanding, they’re the worse half of the critter spectrum. Monsters.”

“No offense taken.” Rattrap meant it. In another lifetime, he would have also considered himself a monster. Now being a rat was as integral to his being as being a robot— in disguise or otherwise. A monster went so far in the other direction that there was no comparison… not unless you were Megatron. Rattrap was glad at the very least that he was gone, but then there was the point that Jetstorm seemed to be getting at. “You think Rhinox is even more dangerous?”

“Your friend Rhinox is sneaky. He pretended to be Tankor when the poor lug stopped existing. He snuck around behind our backs when the bosses weren’t paying attention. Don’t even get me started on his rolling up and trying to play king-of-the-castle. Nothing he does is straightforward. You can’t predict him like you can one of the biters, and this is coming from someone who loves being unpredictable. Who knows what he was up to when he got his oversized claws on the Key to Vector Sigma, or whatever you want to call it. We all know that wasn’t Tankor who—”

The silence that followed was stagnant. Almost as foul smelling as the humid, wet heat wafting in from the outside. On the backs of the wailing zombie chorus, lingering with a ringing in Rattrap’s audials.

They stared at each other.

“Oh.” Jetstorm made a face. “That’s something.”

Put it back.

Rattrap felt his spark turn over. “You don’t think…?”

“I don’t know what to think,” Jetstorm snapped— he’d been worse than spooked. His talons curled tight where he drew his shoulders higher. It was a definitively wary posture. Like the suggestion of what they were both thinking had the capacity to spring up and start biting, too. “I don’t have the processing power to unpack that. Don’t ask me to.”

Rattrap had a similar non-explanation for what he was feeling. Even if this version of Rhinox wasn’t the version of Rhinox he had come to adore, he wasn’t evil. He couldn’t be. He was only lost and angry, right? His time imprisoned as Tankor under Megatron’s control had stripped him of more than his identity on its surface. Rattrap would have been the same way, if their roles were swapped— he knew that as a certainty. He almost ended up lost with his anger when he went to Megatron to take care of business himself. Having his “friends” misread the situation and turn on him was. Did Rhinox feel as abandoned as he was disconnected from himself? Worse, even?

Jetstorm muttered something.

“What?”

“You and I should maybe keep that Key thing to ourselves,” he repeated. His expression was still stretched worried. Mask taught, his optics brightened and flushed deep red. “That’s scary. He said it was destroyed, right? Sounds like something I would lie about if I wanted to keep an ace up my—”

“We’ll worry about it later,” Rattrap interrupted. When Jetstorm’s pose didn’t relax, he felt something in his spark twinge. “Hey. I can take it from here if you need some shuteye, Jets. I ain’t goin’ back to recharge for a while.”

“Okay.” Jetstorm sagged in relief. “I doubled my last shift. Thrust is still recharging longer than usual.”

“I imagine he’s is still building back his strength. I don’t blame ‘im.” Rattrap unwittingly patted the jet on the shoulder without realizing he moved his arm. By the time he did, his servo lingered for a klik longer than he imagined it ever would. Not for a guy he hated, at least. “You’re good, flyboy.”

Jetstorm said nothing, and his following power-down was prompt. His chin rested on his uppermost chassis as he conked right out… maybe a little too quickly than what he would have expected. The abrupt shutdown made Rattrap wonder if he was running low on energy. His antigravs couldn’t have been fuel efficient. Legs gave you the option of static idling, and Jetstorm didn’t have that luxury. He hoped it wouldn’t be a problem later.

He wandered to the opposite side of the warehouse. Slow on his wheels and mindful of the creaking in his gears as he went… being as sore as he was made him wonder what other maintenance the others might need. Not to mention Thrust and his lingering physical grievances, how was everyone else stacking? He made a mental note of it and made a turn for the nearest cache of bits and parts he’d found. If they were as low as they presumed they were on medical supplies, they’d need to improvise. He might not have been anywhere close to a medic himself, but he knew a thing or two about tinkering with tech. They were still robots, after all.

As he turned the corner, he saw the huge bulk of a familiar shape standing by the furthest window looking out. A hard, black shadow cut across his shape where the sunset tossed its harshest light.

“Whatcha got there?”

Rhinox whirled on the axis of his waist. Swiveling around his entire upper torso while the rest of him stayed planted to the floor. It was as mechanical a move as it was menacing. Red light from the sick sunset lit his face crimson past the acid-streaked glass. If he had been holding something like Rattrap thought he was, now it was gone. “Nothing that concerns you, I’m afraid.”

It couldn’t not, even if he wanted it to. The belief he wanted to have that he wasn’t hiding something felt dashed. As Rattrap made his way over, Rhinox’s servos subspaced the item. Gone and out of sight, away from his prying optics.

“Your research, or something?” he tried.

“Something,” Rhinox growled. “Stop pestering me.”

They stood together for several cycles longer, not saying anything. For all the aloofness that his former best friend was putting off, he at least seemed to be tolerating his company. Rattrap chanced his own look out the window and realized the horde had changed its migration pattern sometime during the afternoon. Now they were northbound.

“The flock,” Rhinox said, finally breaking the silence between them, “are having to migrate using a different route. A bridge collapsed south of this location to force the change. Not as an intelligent decision, mind you. They’re being driven to do so on a level even baser than lingering, pre-programmed instinct.”

“The Oracle?”

Rhinox tensed. A hydraulic line close to his neck twitched.

“I mean… that’s gotta be that, right?” Rattrap reached up to touch the other mech on the leg, then decided swiftly against it as he twitched his servo back. “We sort of already have that figured out.”

“That tally on the board,” Rhinox murmured. He turned his head, looking at him straight on for the first time in their conversation. “Each of you here has been affected by its attempts to communicate, then.”

Rattrap felt his spark flicker with heat. “Have you?”

Rhinox didn’t answer for a long time. It was a telling reply enough in its own way. His newfound confidentiality under his Vehicon guise was as ironclad as his body, but Rhinox would always have his tells. Whatever influence the Oracle had over him, he would never give away. Secrets were the last currency he had left at his disposal for trade. Information was a weapon of infinite use when you were on a budget with real ammunition.

Finally, Rhinox moved his huge servo back towards subspace. When he reproduced it, an item was clasped gently in his grip. In the evening glow, the vial’s expired contents were golden amber.

Rattrap felt his hair stand up on end.

“I presume you found this at the pharmacy not far from this location,” Rhinox said, turning over the dead vial for Iarum vaccine. “An attempt to treat Thrust’s infection, then?”

“Yeah,” Rattrap said. Seeing the vaccine being held so high up and casually had his hair standing up on end for a whole new reason. Defunct or not, he wasn’t ready to see it destroyed— accidental or otherwise. One mishandled tumble would send its contents to oblivion. “We never got to use it. Temperature gauge ran too high.”

“You ran out of time.”

It felt a lot like they were running out of time. Even now. “Biker boy pulled through on his own, but it was touch and go. Feels like he shouldn’t have come out the other side, y’know? We got lucky and it ain’t gonna happen again.”

Rhinox said nothing. Rattrap felt his fuel pump hammer starring at the vaccine canister continue to be dwarfed in those behemoth claws. Something in his chest clenched at the thought of it being destroyed— like they still might need it. Somehow, for some reason. Was it just him? Was he being hopeful and simply clinging onto anything that had even a sliver of being able to save them? We’re all going to die had been his verbal calling card for so long that holding out for any alternative, genuinely, was a bizarre sensation to him. As far as being the obligatory pessimist went, at least.

Then, to his surprise, Rhinox handed the vial back to him.

“I merely wished to scan its properties,” Rhinox offered. His seeming admission was a soft-spoken one. “It was… intelligent to retrieve it. Lack of reason notwithstanding with your lot, I am impressed.”

Rattrap sputtered. He took it back carefully. The heavy cycling of his fuel pump finally began to slow down. “Thank you.”

Another lapse of distilled quiet passed between them. Gradually, there came the sounds of the others coming to life further back in the warehouse. Nightscream’s low conversation with Blackarachnia was punctuated by Thrust’s murmured interruption. There was no way to tell what was being said without disengaging from Rhinox and going back the way he came.

Still, Rattrap didn’t want to move. Not yet.

“I get you’re still probably mad about yesterday,” Rattrap mumbled. “I’d be to, if I was in yer shoes. I wasn’t happy when we started working with the Vehiclowns, either… but we’re all in this together, now. Survival of the fittest ain’t all that fit when you’re not pulling all your resources. Working together is something I learned best from all our pals on Prehistoric Earth. You know that.”

“You are a fool to trust them,” Rhinox said.

“Yeah, well… I thought the same about Webs back when we were fightin’ the Beast Wars.” Rattrap felt the admission pull on his spark. It really was wild how much his world had changed since first boarding the Axalon. “I thought the same for a while when the others treated me like slag for always getting in the way. Trust is hard to come by, and trusting my gut hasn’t been real nice to me since crash landing here and losing my best friend.”

Rhinox said nothing, but he was listening.

“All I’m saying is that…” Rattrap trailed off. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to say actually, or even how to articulate it. Not in a way that would make any real sense without more experience in the same context. He winged it. “If you feel like you can’t trust anyone, try and trust me? Please?”

Rhinox hummed. Thoughtful and none at all disingenuous. Progress was that and more… hopefully. It felt like a step in the right direction.

“We better check-in with the others. Maybe get some fuel and go over what we can do next. You wanna come with?” Rattrap transformed back down into beast-mode: his wheels were definitely in need of a good oiling down and touch-up repairs, and he was sore. He wondered if his friend would be less aloof with a more familiar shape to look at. Yet, as soon as he was back on all fours, he felt the mech’s sideways state piercing through him. He felt even lesser to him in less words than one. Rhinox hardly seemed impressed. Not even Jetstorm had seemed so disgusted.

Somewhere in the warehouse, the aforementioned aero-general began complaining loudly. Somehow the sound of his voice was more of a comfort than a distraction, or even an irritant.

Rattrap felt his memory drivers suddenly shutter.

“Hey. Rhinox.” Rattrap craned his neck up to try and look Rhinox in the optic, which was still hard when all he had was that motionless visor. The back and forth of the lit sensor bar made finding his exact gaze all the harder. “When you nabbed the Key to Vector Sigma… what happened to it?”

Rhinox stared at him without moving.

Rattrap felt his synthskin prick. The crawling of it went from the nape of his neck down to his haunches and up again. “You know… after—?”

“It is gone,” said Rhinox. His voice was firm. “As I have already said.”

“Gone gone?”

“Gone.” Rhinox paused. When he next spoke, his codec was silken smooth. Bordering sweet in the same way spiked energon might, pouring down his throat and stinging all the way down to his center. “Completely destroyed. Nothing remains, nor is there a way for me to replicate another series of duplicates.”

“You’re sure?”

Rhinox huffed. “Do you trust me?”

“Yes,” Rattrap automatically said. Yet, as soon as the words left his vocoder, he felt his gut absolutely wither.

iii

“You are a fool to trust them, you know,” Rhinox said. “Perhaps I overestimated the keenness of your judgement. You struck me as one of the more intelligent of Megatron’s entourage. Shame.”

His growing headache pounded with each word from the other mech. “Shame that you can’t shut up.”

Rhinox huffed. “Rude.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever. You and me both. Guess that makes us even.”

Another bizarre data purge during the day had given him its own rudeness in awakening. The growing migraine to go with it was less than ideal on its own, but there was a bad feeling in his intuition-cortex to go with it. Anxiety and worry with a hint of paranoia, plus the unknowns weighing him down—no worse than his injuries, at least. Healing was only half the fight for him right now: the rest was what he had to deal with on the outside. Let alone the stuff in his head, nightmares or fears or… otherwise.

Also, Thrust’s latest dream was a little too vivid for his liking, too. Not as bad as the other ones by a longshot, but the clarity this time was too similar to stay comfortable with. The worst part was that he somehow barely remembered it. Despite the clearness of the image in the back of his mind, materializing the same image in his logic drivers only gave him binary and static. It was a bad feeling that bordered ominous.

“Doesn’t pass the vibe check, then?” Jetstorm asked.

No. “Not even close, Storm.”

“Get your notch on the board then. You and the rat are almost tied.” Jetstorm paused. “Don’t let him win. I have good money riding on you to stay ahead, biker boy.”

“It’s not a contest. You don’t have money to bet. Stop that.”

“Because you won’t give me an allowance,” Jetstorm jeered. He followed it up with a sickly-sweet coo that could have been reserved for something more affectionate. Yet, the flash in his optics spoke to a playful viciousness. Leave it to the jet to not take anything seriously… it was reassuring as well as worrying. His friend’s jabs were only ever meant for deflections or genuine mischief— never anything in the middle. Figuring out which without asking was always a riddle. “Give a girl a break, why don’t you?”

Hmmm. “You okay?”

Jetstorm paused. Ah. It was a good enough answer in less words than one.

“We’re gonna be fine.”

“Easy for you to say. You might be invincible.” Jetstorm stopped. His stare seemed to widen worriedly, but it could have been a trick of the light. “Well… invincible enough. I don’t think we should go testing that theory more than we already have.”

That was fair. Thrust wasn’t in the mood to explore the possibility. He never wanted to see another open mouth too close to him for the rest of forever. Even talking to the Maximals for extended periods with their teeth in too close view made him sore.

“You want fuel?”

No. He wasn’t in the mood to explore if his sense of taste was back from being total slag, either. “I want to stand.”

“Thrust.” Jetstorm’s voice went low. “You’re… okay, right?”

There was no way for him to answer in a way that was safe. “I’m still doing better than the freaks outside.”

A low, nervous laugh rattled from Jetstorm’s voice box. Quiet enough to rasp the edges of his codec where his volume control didn’t quite phase through his exterior speakers right. Full of feedback and the rest of his anxieties buried under all his blue. “Feeling less like wanting to take a bite out of the rest of us, then?”

“Yeah,” Thrust lied. The incident from the night before was still living in his memory codex at the forefront of his recall queue. Forcing down rancid tasting energon was better than considering any alternative, though… not that he would consider it. Chronic post-infection symptoms aside, his altered senses hadn’t driven him to anywhere worse than where he’d already been. Lies and false reassurances put separately, he refused consider it. “I think it was a one-off thing, Storm. I’m fine. Really. Didn’t mean to scare you or nothin.”

Jetstorm let him be after that. As he went to start sorting through their rations with the spider already waiting for him around the corner, Thrust stood up from the cot. His balance was considerably better, but he still felt… off. Especially as he went to the whiteboard to add his next notch to their little growing collection of “horrors.” The parts of his body he still had left felt foreign to him— different. Like he was in a frame he didn’t properly own, and the part he did was the one that had been ripped away and destroyed for his own good. Movement and sensation refused to match up with what he could physically feel. Body dysphoria was the only word combination he could think to describe it. He may as well have been piloting a

Corpse.

As Thrust added the next tally mark next to his name, an itch in the back of his processor nagged at him. He looked at the pen in his servo, mulled the sinking feeling in the center of his shell program, and flipped the board. He found a blank area and began sketching a rough shape.

That was when Tankor — Rhinox — decided that now would be the best time to try his patience. As a special little treat. Lucky him.

“I mean it,” Rhinox said. “They are not truly your allies. How could you ever hope them to be? Your sole purpose in existing was to eliminate them on behalf of our late master. You are a weapon.”

“Because. Shut up.” Thrust growled to himself in frustration. He found himself disappointed with the shape he was outlining, leered, and tried to erase it with the blunt edge of a clamp prong. Time to try again. It was less effective than using a cloth eraser, but he didn’t feel like disengaging to find one right now. Not while the image he was imagining was still half-fresh in his mind. The outlines of the flower’s petals he had seen in his dream took shape in jagged lines… he wasn’t a particularly good drawer. “I’m not in a great mood to be talkin’ with you of all people. Tankor though? Nice guy. Little dim… but nicer than you for sure.”

Rhinox scoffed. “Perhaps it would be in your best interest to trust me, then.”

“You ain’t great at this whole threatenin’ thing. Not as much as you think you are.” Thrust could feel his annoyance skyrocketing. Half-satisfied with his roughly shaped flower, he moved onto the next sketch. This one he had no idea what it was supposed to be— the hard lines were much more severe than the flower. Easier to draw all the same, but no help in figuring out what it was supposed to be for himself. “That’s what you’re doing right? Lemme guess… you’re gonna say you have some blackmail against me in an attempt to get Jetstorm and I on your side, right? That way we can thrash the Maximals on your terms? Keep all that fuel for ourselves?”

Rhinox said nothing. Ooh, yeah. He’d gotten it more accurate than his initial hunch. Maybe Jetstorm wasn’t the person thing that came easy for him to read: maybe it was a Vehicon thing all along.

“I ain’t dumb,” Thrust continued. “Neither is Jetstorm, by the way. Don’t go runnin’ off to try and give him the same spiel, neither. I get you’re new here, but we got a good thing going on. Tryin’ to sell the Maximals on taking us out wasn’t a great move to begin with, and hey, even if you hadn’t? We still wouldn’t have taken the bait. Chill.”

“Yes… but you and your companion are hardly subtle in your own dealings.” Rhinox’s smugness was getting far, far more aggravating than what Thrust bargained for. “I can imagine how troublesome it would be if that sensitive information were to—”

Thrust felt his patience wearing surprisingly thin. “Go ahead.”

Rhinox didn’t respond to that. His gaze stayed locked.

“What would that even accomplish at this point?” Thrust asked. “It’s not a secret anymore, I’m sure. Maximals would have to be dumb, deaf, and blind not to have figured it out. Why would it even matter? Megatron is gone and there’s nothing he can do to punish us, if that’s what you think we’re worried about. Being stuck in this nightmare is bad enough. You think more can hurt us? That’s dumb. Certainly not the animals, and definitely not you. Whatever you’re trying to be.”

Rhinox sneered. If looks could kill, Thrust might have found himself eviscerated on the spot. It was a good thing he had conditional immortality as long as the bug was around, or something. Maybe having that edge of potential immortality was something worth going for him.

“We’re in this to survive,” Thrust continued. “Not to find stupid reasons to turn on each other. This thing that you’re trying to accomplish trying to do isn’t gonna work, but you working with us could. So how about you don’t do that and not be a f*ckin’ bastard for five cycles.”

“What are you doing.” Rhinox’s expression suddenly changed. It wasn’t a question.

It was then that Thrust realized that his servo had been rapidly flying across the board. Over and over, dragging the marker repeatedly over the image he had already drawn. As if his arm was moving on a loop cycle, tracing the picture he had made over and over in a frantic pattern. Trying to force himself to stop resulted in a runtime error cropping in his motor cortex— he was stuck. He couldn’t stop.

Somehow, he didn’t panic. His processor physically wasn’t allowing him to. He felt dizzy.

By the time he had control of his arm back, something had happened. Rhinox, who had previously been behind him rather inches away, was already recoiling. Hefting his arm back in an upward swing hard enough to audially displace the air around it. His visor was flared bright. The marker that Thrust had been holding had gone from his servo and was rolling to a stop on the floor a distance away. The throw hadn’t been a particularly good one, but the toss itself was what hardly mattered.

Thrust reeled himself back in from where he’d turned to lunge at Rhinox’s servo, headfirst. Biting wasn’t exactly easy when you didn’t have the physical chops for it.

The two stared at each other.

“Do not,” Thrust warned, “try to touch me. Again.”

Rhinox’s hasty retreat had garnered some attention, by the looks of it. Thrust could see Nightscream’s silhouette against the rafters from where his shape shadowed the full width of the skylight. Browning clouds fading against the oncoming night hid him well, but the kid was definitely watching. His backlit optics were wide and bright, and Thrust could hardly blame him for looking so terrified. He might have been, too. Instead, all he felt was a numb smothering over the top of his processor. It didn’t register until pain until he realized that he was hungry enough to feel like he might die.

In a last-ditch attempt to distract himself, he looked at the whiteboard to see what he’d drawn.

Uh oh.

“Think I’ve seen that before,” Thrust whispered, then erased the whiteboard as best he could… not before dedicating a still save of the whiteboard to his memory, anyway. Secrets weren’t much good to any of them anymore, but this and that felt like something he better keep to himself.

For now.

While he still could.

Maybe the others were a fool to trust him, all along.

iv

“What if we…? Wait. Aurgh, no. Damn. That won’t work.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive, ladybug.”

For a long night of nothing of interest, Jetstorm’s annoyed griping was suddenly out of place. None too comfortably, either— usually when the leadup to his common antics were usually louder. The chaos from the night before was still ringing fresh in his memory.

Additionally, that almost bit(e) from Thrust to Tankor wasn’t sitting so nicely him. Not after everything they had been through. Surprises were only so fun as much as their context.

“Like what?” Blackarachnia asked.

“Getting gifts,” he offered. “You know… presents, maybe? Those are nice. Surprise parties are a step down.”

“Don’t you mean up?”

“No.” Nightscream shook his head. “My tutor once organized a surprise party for me to celebrate getting accepted into…”

“What?”

He couldn’t remember for the life of him. Their current viral problem aside, Megatron’s own virus was still its own issue. His memory blanked on the item of celebration he was looking for. Acceptance into some music program of prestige? Assignment to continued education posting in his preferred instrument field? Acceptance to… something? Whatever it was, it bothered him not to recall almost as much as the implication of the memory itself.

“Nightscream?”

“Whatever,” he said. Then he sighed and shook his head. The release of nervous tension from his intakes didn’t do much to make him feel better. “I think I want to be done with surprises for a while.”

At this, there was a commotion outside. Another drone, it seemed, had wandered into the maw of the horde with no regard to the danger it was in. The notion that any at all seemed to be left long enough to make it so far away from the plants was wild to him. The bobbing, swaying crowd seemed to surround and dive in on one specific spot close to the nearest alley. When they began to pull away, any signs of the living that was once there was gone… until Nightscream saw pieces of it writhing on the ground through breaks in the mob, and only the pieces. There wasn’t enough left to stand on its own one wheel, presuming it was a cycle-drone. It was hard to tell.

So, yeah. Surprises were so far out of his range of preference at this point that almost anything was preferable. Nightscream was almost afraid to go looking for Jetstorm on that same regard. Still, he tentatively put down the book he had been skimming through and transformed, taking to the rafters above the main meeting area.

What he found was thankfully one of those tamer surprises— one he would have never imagined possible even a week before, at least. Jetstorm, Rattrap, and Blackarachnia were looking at several maps laid out on the cleared table. Two were holographic, two were paper, and one was metal signage likely retrieved from somewhere else in the hydroplant. Jetstorm’s distinct claw gouges in the frame indicated where he had anchored his grip to pry it free. It showed the exterior of the building and designated parking areas, along with a vague outline of the structures around them.

Tankor was nowhere to be seen. Neither was Thrust… good. After what he’d seen earlier, he wasn’t ready to quite look the latter mech in the face. Tankor being gone was fine on its own, for no other reason that he was a prick.

Jetstorm’s frustration was unmistakable. First in his tone, then in posture as he leaned over the table. His wings were raised and squared tensely. “I don’t know what to do about this. This wasn’t supposed to be a problem— even if we hadn’t stocked up.”

“When you guys picked this place, it was in close proximity to some good resources.” Rattrap shrugged. “Not like you guys could’ve accounted for the night of the living dead to block your access to every refuel depot or shopping center around the city. That’s nothin’ to beat yourself up over.”

“More like land,” Blackarachnia said. “Night or day isn’t a factor, now. Their activeness during either doesn’t matter when they’re packing the streets the way they are. There’s just too many.”

“At this rate we should have,” Jetstorm groaned. He reached up with a huge servo to press his forwardmost talon knuckles into the side of his helmet. Either to nurse a growing migraine or emphasize his frustration could have gone in both directions. “Having a fortified bunker doesn’t mean much if we didn’t bother stocking for a longer emergency.”

“How long could you two have even planned ahead, for?” Blackarachnia asked.

Jetstorm’s sigh was one of those kinds reserved for being absolutely defeated. “We barely made it out of the pharmacy. The rest of these places are just too far to reach without getting chewed on. No matter where we leave or what path through the city we take.”

“It can still be done though, right?” Nightscream asked. Better to make himself known now than wait much longer. As the others turned up to look at him, he descended. Changing into robot-mode halfway down, he landed between Rattrap and Blackarachnia as they made room for him. “What if I flew? We’re talking about restocking supplies, right? Sounds like all the ground routes aren’t really worth risking.”

“That and some,” Rattrap muttered. He didn’t sound happy. “Not with all those things clogging the streets outside. Taking a quick fly isn’t going to cut it either, kiddo.”

Huh? “Why not?”

“For the same reason that flying to the pharmacy wouldn’t have work,” Jetstorm answered. He wasn’t looking at anyone. Come to think of it… Nightscream wondered if he was feeling well. The deflation in his pose and tone was noticeably wrong. As if he wasn’t firing off on a full charge… not sick, but definitely something else. “The odds of running into aero-drones still capable of flight, the fact you’d still need to land, you going solo—”

Solo. “You wouldn’t be able to cover me?”

Jetstorm hung his head. Uh-oh.

Blackarachnia tapped on his arm and raised a digit to her face in a shushing motion.

“Jetstorm’s fuel usage is something we may need to start worrying about,” Rattrap answered quietly. “It’s his dang slaggin’ antigravs. Just staying airborne is eating at his reserves faster on rations than what we originally thought. It ain’t a problem yet, but we gotta reserve what we got.”

“Wait, seriously?” Nightscream looked over Jetstorm, and yeah. Now that perpetually exhausted look was a little more dangerously present. “Dude, why didn’t you say anything?”

“Because we’re not exactly on a high spending end budget, here,” Jetstorm snapped. Him being hangry had clearly manifested. With the context of the meeting made clearer, the solemnness of the group’s collective energy made much more sense. “Add Tankor’s body-snatcher to the mix and…”

Frag. “How long can we last?”

No one answered him.

“Guys.” Nightscream felt his fuel pump drop. It was a slow and dragging descent from his chassis into the pit of his midsection. “How long?”

“Four more weeks,” Rattrap said.

“Dude! Down from three months!?”

Again, Blackarachnia smacked him in the shoulder. Her accusing stare was with all her optics raised from under their hoods.

“Watch yourself,” she said. “We don’t want to advertise.”

The notion of who they didn’t want to advertise to was a no-brainer. “How’d this even happen?”

Rattrap sighed. He waggled his palm in a so-so gesture “Changin’ circ*mstances, kiddo. One surprise after another and this is where we’re at.”

No wonder he hated surprises. Nightscream shuddered.

“Thrust is healing, Jetstorm will likely need more fuel to stay mobile, and Tankor’s body is the biggest gas guzzler we have.” Rattrap didn’t sound too happy, himself. He shrugged. “Trying to skirt the issue with my homebrew energon won’t exactly cut it. We might have a way around this mess, though.”

Huh. Nightscream blinked. “Such as…?”

“There’s a cafeteria on the other side of the interior campus,” Jetstorm answered. Still tame in tone and deflated, but there was renewed energy in his response— hopefulness. He pointed to one of the paper maps on the table. Nightscream realized finally that he had seen this same factory blueprint once already. “Thrust and I barricaded this section of the factory off when we Maximal-proofed the place. It’ll be easy enough to move past those points and put them up again. We can move section-by-section to the kitchen and adjacent storage. It’s prison-graded and barely any good. Which is why we never bothered, but it’ll buy us more time to think of something better.”

“Yeah. Going through the sewers was another idea we were working on, but the points that spit you back onto the street? That’s still a hefty distance between there and the nearest fuel dispensary.” Rattrap shook his head. “There’s a lot of movin’ parts here. Walking dead included.”

“There’s also an executive lounge two floors above the main cafeteria seating area,” Jetstorm continued. “There might be some high-grade in there that we can save for when we really start to run low.”

“Hopefully we won’t get to that point,” Blackarachnia uttered. A deep frown creased the synthskin around her face. It was a deep a scowl as she could have managed, Nightscream theorized. His old buddies would have called it a resting-expletive-face. “Could we split into teams?”

Jetstorm shrugged. “Depending on who finds the better stash, we can reconvene after. Sounds like a blast and a half… except for one teensy weensy little part that we’re all forgetting about.”

“What’s that?” Nightscream asked. He had a feeling might already know the answer.

Jetstorm made a jerking motion with his helm over his shoulder. It wasn’t a particularly comfy looking gesture with his anatomy, but the meaning was clear. Even without the opposing party standing right behind him. Nightscream did know who he was talking about.

Rattrap groaned. Blackarachnia’s frown deepened to the point of being a flavor so sour that you could taste it ten meters away. She reached up to pinch the bridge of her olfactory bridge.

“Would splitting up such a good idea after all, then?” Nightscream asked. “Rhinox isn’t…”

He wasn’t sure how to finish the thought. Mainly in front of Rattrap, but the smaller Maximal must have had a coming realization without him noticing.

“Somethin’ ain’t right with ‘im,” Rattrap said. The defeat in his codec was its own flavor, too. “I know.”

“I thought you were going to say he wasn’t a team player.” Jetstorm co*cked his head. “You don’t trust him? Love the plot twist. Glad we’re all on the same team after all.”

“During the Beast Wars? I’d trust him with my life, but now…” Rattrap made an inarticulate gesture with his hands. Tossing and turning his own thought process over in his own palms. “what would you call this? Where we are now?”

“Beast machines,” Jetstorm said. Then he whirled around on his antigravity gear like he’d been horribly spooked. When he spun back around, it looked like he’d seen a ghost.

Rattrap continued. “Where we are now is different. I get that we can trust each other, we’ve been through the Pitt and back already, but Rhinox is… new. I wanna believe he’s gonna come around, but it’ll be a long time coming. For now, we should play it safe.”

Jetstorm was incredulous. “Your buddy Rhinox suggested that you lot get rid of Thrust and I so you can keep all that fuel to yourselves. Let’s not forget that he chose to stay under Megatron than go back with your lot when his spark was allowed to overwhelm Tankor’s shell program. Playing it safe in this economy doesn’t exactly hold reliable exchange value, Mickey.”

Silence pulsed between them in a heavy wave. Nightscream felt like a cold draft was blowing down on them all— no matter how high the room temperature was on its own.

“We need to be careful,” Blackarachnia said. “Until we can get Rhinox on the same page to trust all of us, we have to be very careful.”

“What about Thrust?” Nightscream asked.

That got some attention. Still in the form of silence, but all optics were instantly on him. Fast and severe in ranging intensities.

“What do you mean Thrust?” Jetstorm asked.

Nightscream hated surprises, but he hadn’t accounted for the feelings of the others. This seemed to solidify their own dislike. “Have any of you guys noticed him acting… off?”

Blackarachnia shook her head for no, and that was the end of her shared interoperation. Rattrap paused, seemed to mull the idea, and similarly shook his head. “Has he?”

Jetstorm’s reaction was the one that Nightscream found worth noting. The slight flash behind his optic glass was an immediate tell that his attention was caught.

“No,” Jetstorm said, and Nightscream knew to recognize the lie as soon as it was past his voice box. “He’s fine.”

Thrust, of course, was not fine. Especially as he came wheeling around the corner in a cold sweat, nearly falling over backwards on the turn. The same inertia almost stole his tire out from underneath him as he peddled straight for Jetstorm. The impact nearly rammed his friend off his antigravs outright. The shock that Nightscream felt was stunted only by the freezing fear that gripped his spark. Not because of the tackle itself, but because of the perception of what might have been happening: other zombies were just as enthusiastic in their attacks. The air was ripped out of his vocoder when he tried to inhale to scream. The gasp came out as a squeak.

Instead, Thrust looked up at Jetstorm with wide, terrified apertures behind his pilot lights. He was shaking violently and knowingly. The surprise attack was anything but, but something had still gone horribly wrong.

“Drones,” he moaned. “We’re not the only survivors.”

Surprises were only so much for as their context, and no. Nightscream was still not having fun. Not now, not anytime soon. Maybe never again.

v

It was true. They weren’t the only survivors.

There were eight of them total. Four cycle-drones, three aero-drones, and a single unknown variant that no one recognized. The line they formed was a tight train down the center of the road with zombies surrounding them on all sides. Each was drenched from the helmet down in that black sludge viscera common of their infected brethren… except these drones were very much alive. The distinct presence of color in their optics gave that much away at its most blatant. Next was the way each was touching the one in front of them to keep from accidentally losing the line in the crowd. No amount of darkness keeping them under cover could hide them from intelligent sight.

To say Blackarachnia was horrified was the understatement of the millennium. What were the odds of finding drones left alive?

“Primus, for all that’s…” Rattrap stared in terrified awe. “What—?”

“Smart drones,” Thrust answered. The conviction in that response wasn’t worth questioning: he knew exactly what he was talking about.

Rattrap sputtered. “What do you mean smart drones!?”

“Keep your voice down.” Jetstorm’s entire bulk was vibrating. From his antigravs all the way to his chest and down again, rattling the whole of his frame. “Look, not to change the topic here, but of the drones started to develop, uh, self-awareness.”

Rattrap’s mouth popped open. The silence that followed may as well have been in triple decibels. Thankfully, they weren’t— Blackarachnia wasn’t sure her audials would survive that kind of assault. There also remained the risk accidentally grabbing the attention of the zombies in the street: not when living bodies were down there with them.

“These have to be some of them,” Jetstorm continued. “Regular drones would just run headlong into the zombies like we’ve been seeing because they don’t think. These tin cans, though? It’s a whole different ball game.”

“I hate sports,” Nightscream whispered. If he was trying to make a joke, no one was laughing. Not even him.

The tight train of living drones kept close. With a single cycle-drone leading the pack, the others followed behind in an inflexible formation. Blackarachnia imagined it as the worst conga line of the millennium. The group was continuing to weave their way around zombies with their gazes kept down. None of them made a sound. Even the usually loud cycle-drones had their engines turned down to an RPM barely detectable. Nothing about their behavior wasn’t on purpose.

As their own group continued to crowd by the window, Blackarachnia wondered what the drones below might have seen if any of them bothered to look up. What a sight the five of them were, she imagined. All gawking through the acid-stained glass like animals staring back from an exhibit… the analogy wasn’t so lost on her when you considered three of them were animals. At least they had protection in the safety of their enclosure. As for the rest of them stuck outside—

“Are they infected?” Nightscream asked. His whisper shook on its anxious exhale. “Why aren’t the zombies attacking them?”

“They camouflaged themselves,” Thrust whispered. His servo was shaking from where it was clenched close to his side. “They’re using the gore to hide themselves. Their scent? I have no idea.”

“Do the zombies hunt by smell? They— is that possible?”

“Sight, smell, sound. I don’t think that matters.” Thrust’s codec continued to shake. For someone as stoic as he usually was, this the first time that Blackarachnia had ever seen him so visibly rattled. Not even being infected and sick had gotten him so upset. “They’re bein’ quiet and keeping to themselves. They’re blending in is all that matters.”

“Where are they going?” Rattrap asked.

There was no telling. The group was moving against the current steam of heavy opposing traffic, adding to the danger of the situation in abundance. Worse yet, they seemed to be moving up the avenue without moving towards the safety of the buildings. Wherever they were going, it was still a considerable distance away. Which presumed there even was a true destination in mind: there may not have been. Survival was a luxury that no one could afford and you just had to go for it when the opportunity arose. The rising problem in the moment was that there was no telling where Cheetor was insofar, or if he would fall for the ruse. Blackarachnia knew they were on borrowed time. What about Optimus?

Thrust looked at her. The panic in his face was clear. The dread. They had the same understanding.

“How can we help them?” she asked.

“Storm and I might be able to find them on the drone relay,” Thrust whispered, nearly stuttering. His visor shuttered in a rapid blink. Condensation was building on his armor where his cooling systems were spinning high in fear. “The smart ones deviate from the standard drones because they’re difficult to find on our command-frequency. Sometimes it’s impossible. If we can talk to them, we can reroute them to one of the alternate entrances on the other side of the campus. Get them in an area where they—”

“You cannot be serious!”

Five became six where a shadow was stretched over them. The collective whirled, and Rhinox was shaking above with all his opposing height. Blackarachnia felt a flash of fear shoot through her at the impression of an imminent attack, though none came. Their behemoth of a formal companion was continuing to leer in short-restrained fury. “You want to bring those diseased vermin in here!?”

Rattrap withered. Hearing the word vermin come from Rhinox had done something awful to him, and the impact of that word was clear to the point of causing pain. Blackarachnia felt horrible for him.

“They’re alive, you jerk!” Nightscream waved his arms. Maybe trying to make himself seem big, too. It wasn’t effective. “We have to help!”

“Keep your voices down!”

Jetstorm being the immediate voice of reason in midst of the arguing was enough to stall another bout of shouting. Below, the drones were continuing to move along… though not without its most evident hazards. A close call was already in the making as one of the aero-drones bumped shoulders hard with a zombified cycle-drone. The upright corpse whirled towards the touch on instinct, snapping its jaws on reflex. The only redeeming quality by continuance of the group’s camouflage was that the drone still didn’t see them. Having half its face torn off and hollowed out where others had eaten it through was helpful. If they were going to act, they had to do it now.

Rattrap spun on Thrust. “Whadaya need, biker boy?”

“I don’t have enough power to try and force a connection,” Thrust said. He was starting to panic. The sight of the almost-attack they witnessed was making his resolve crumble. “Even with a boost, I’d never be able to…!”

“Use mine.” Jetstorm pushed away from the window and backed up on his antigravs. He bent his tail to lower his height into something more vertically manageable for the smallest of the Maximals. “Plug in, Ratatouille. Watch out for the private files. I keep my p*rn close to my plot.”

Rattrap didn’t question the offer. He raised his tail, and a port on the side of Jetstorm’s helmet automatically slid back. Small, blinking lights on the interface’s mini-console indicated overall operating capacity and system health. An uncomfortable amount of yellow lights had Blackarachnia feeling particularly uneasy. Low energy was a given, but she didn’t think he had been that far below his preferred capacity. The urgency of their previous conversation relating to fuel had her much more worried, now.

Before Rattrap could plug in. Jetstorm reached up to snatch the base of his tail. Holding him in place with his index talon and dewclaw, his optics were bright and wide. Rattrap tensed as if the other mech might rip the tip off entirely, but then he spoke.

“Don’t touch my shell program,” Jetstorm said. The interruption was pliant in its pleading. “Please.”

“I wouldn’t.”

With the reassurance, Jetstorm let him go, and Rattrap plugged in. His tail attachment twisted as it locked into place to initiate the link. There was a click as the mechanisms jointly locked together. Jetstorm’s back briefly went stiff as the digital handshake became viable and froze out his kinetics. His optics flared bright… and then there was a distinct uptick in his fans. Alternatively, Rattrap’s own equipment cycled down. It was a direct power-transfer rather than a traditional hack.

There was a beat.

In the street below, the train of drones froze. One by one in quick succession, until the entire line was ground to a halt. They remained at a standstill for several kliks longer, turned into an island in the middle of the throng shifting in screams around them. They squared their postures in unison.

“Jackpot,” Jetstorm whispered. “They see me.”

“Tell ‘em to keep going,” Thrust urged. His stare was locked out the window. He reached up with his arm to gesture vaguely back at the other mech. “Send them the schematics of the hydroplant’s exterior. Route them to one of the satellite entrances for maintenance or security. I don’t care which one we pick so long as it’s closest. It’ll be too risky to send them all the way around to the lift. If they can sneak into a lobby close by, we can get to them from another service elevator.”

“Assumin’ it don’t collapse on ‘em,” Rattrap said. “All that weight?”

“Multiple trips,” Nightscream chimed helpfully.

“Without attractin’ attention? None of those tin cans are exactly built for stealth out there.”

“We’ll figure it out. We have to.” The kid shuffled in next to Thrust and kept his voice low. “We can’t just leave them out there. That’d be—”

Cruel was the word that he may have wanted to use, and it was the first that came to Blackarachnia’s mind. She almost mouthed it. The motion of her mouth, and the weight of it on its own, matched the sensation that she felt in her spark as the air around them went hot. Making all the tiny sensory hairs along her body stand up on end, pricking her synthskin. It rippled with an intense itch over her entire body, sucking the moisture out of the air until only the stagnant heat was left.

When the explosion’s roar subsided, the glass from the ruined window three panels down finished falling. Rhinox stood there with his canon poised in the ready position halfway out and down through the open portal. The crater blasted into the street had never been aimed at any zombies, as far as she could tell.

A cycle-drone towards at the back of the group spun in place to look, bumping chests with the zombie standing directly behind it. They crossed stares, snout to ruined snout, and stared at one another. The drone’s engine hiccupped. The zombie’s jaw sagged as it snarled.

Rattrap screamed. “RHINOX!”

The scene fell to pieces. As soon as one drone moved, the others followed. In a mixture of shock and terror, cueing to the horde around them that their present company wasn’t what it seemed. The disguise alone was no longer enough when the live drones failed to behave in a way that was expected of the undead. It was then that mob rushed them in an incredible crush. Each side surged forward in a vice to trap the line of uninfected drones between them.

Blackarachnia watched as one of the two living aero-drone had its face ripped clear off with the downward cleave of a zombie counterpart’s talons. As the stunned and mutilated aero-drone attempted in vain to reach out and resecure it’s removed components, another cycle-drone zombie launched up and proceeded to devour the exposed wires. Snapping and thrashing it’s helmet back and forth, causing the panicked drone to flail uselessly where its balance was stolen. It was bowled over and lost in the throng where its antigravs finally failed.

One of the four cycle-drones was caught between two more of its own kind. Its arms were swiftly seized before having both ripped clear off its body. More dove in around it at the same time, bury their faces in the sides of its shuddering body. Ripping away more and more pieces with their mouths full of rubber and loose metal. The struggling drone was forced to stand in the middle of the feeding frenzy and watch as it was eaten alive.

“f*ck! f*ck!” Nightscream’s dismayed shouting turned into a nauseated warble. He slapped his hands over his mouth in repulsion. “NO!”

It was understandable where his attention was being driven. A second cycle-drone had its head seized by an aero variant, crushing it whole, before tearing it clear off. Its body continued to flail where its processor remained connected by a series of cables. Stretching it further and further away, while more zombies descended on its body, before a final decapitation was able to take place an uncomfortable distance from both halves. Energon splashed from the ruptured line in all directions upward in a fountain.

Thrust howled in agony. Devastated couldn’t hold a candle to the explanation of the sound that came out of him.

Rattrap had already disengaged from Jetstorm to fling himself across the room. While Jetstorm toppled over and struggled to get back up in his shock, the smallest of the Maximals He rushed Rhinox’s leg. He smashed shoulder first into him, then began smashing his hands against his armor.

“WHAT DID YOU DO!?” Rattrap continued to slap him repeatedly on his wide shin plates. Short of hitting him with his closed fist, but still landing those hits as hard as he could. Blackarachnia believed he was going break his servos outright. “WHY DID YOU DO THAT!? WHY!?”

Blackarachnia stayed transfixed on the chaos below. The largest drone — the unknown model — had retreated backwards to the far sidewalk, swatting drones off its body as they tried to topple it over. It was a valiant effort for what it was worth. Each tremendous upheave of its huge arms sent its undead assailants soaring into one another. Toppling them akin to dominos, but more kept coming. There was no way to stop them all— especially as a strafing group managed to ram headlong into its sides. These attackers had already started gnawing their way through the defending drone’s lower chassis. One zombie with a particularly mangled appearance was fast to go headfirst under a slab of armor. Once meant to protect the drone from artillery, it was nothing a biting mouth and howling determination could stop. On the opposite side, an aero-drone had managed to tear off a piece of plating to expose live fuel lines. Ribbons of cables and loose connectors were already torn free and hanging out of its mouth in streaming ribbons. Finally, a single tank-drone lumbering from the alley behind it toppled the struggling behemoth over. The crowd clambered on top in wild abandon. Its arm shot up to reach for the safety that was no longer there. A frothing cycle-drone pounced and proceeded to rip off its index, middle, and forefinger.

Thrust was screaming now. Unhinged and overwhelmed, which immediately dissolved into an even worse sound that formed a name. “NIGHTSCREAM!”

Blackarachnia had been so awestruck in her horror that she never noticed what Nightscream was doing. Not until he stepped back and screeched at full volume, blasting out the window with the force of his sonic boosters set on high. Glass shattered as the paneling holding the panes blew apart under the punishing blast. Her audials were still ringing as she stumbled, as he hauled himself in the frame and jumped out.

Thrust attempted to reach out to stop him with the arm he no longer had.

Jetstorm gasped like the air had been stomped clear out of his intake valves. He lurched up similarly, trying to reach out for the teenager already gone. His talons caught air and not the ankle he had aimed for. “IDIOT BRAT!”

Thrust and Jetstorm had effectively shoved her out of the way with their combined bulk. Scrambling to get her optics back on the unfolding nightmare, Blackarachnia collected herself and raced to the next window to her right. To her immediate relief, she caught sight of Nightscream again almost immediately— he was hard to miss. He was the only body airborne among the swaying mass of bodies. The young Maximal was frantically circling the chaos in beast-mode, gliding back and forth where he remained safely out of reach of the zombies now reaching up for him. No doubt looking for some way to distract the crowd without hitting the drones that might still be alive… under the assumption that any one of them could still be uninfected by this point. She had a severe doubt for as much.

Her optics caught a glimpse of an aero-drone pinned in on all sides by a cluster of chewing zombies boring into its neck and face. Much of its recognizable features were already torn away and exposed, leaving only one arm to flail in panic above the continuing mutilation. Then that was torn off and tossed away into another section of the crowd, too.

“There’s no way…!” Jetstorm trailed off. He was leaning far enough out his window that she could see him from her own. Then he raised his arm and pointed in disbelief. “LOOK! LOOK!”

She followed his line of sight and saw what he was looking at.

There were three drones still intact amidst the carnage. Two cycle-drone variants, and one aero with a busted wing twisted on its hinge joint, keeping it permanently grounded. The three were bashing their way through the crowd that hadn’t yet cut off their retreat. Shoving and pushing their way through the pincer formation of zombies closing in hot pursuit. The one cycle-drone taking pointe at the lead seemed to be the same one that previously led the group. As it pushed forward, it used its shoulders to shove each offending zombie in its path to the side. The second took up the task of dispatching any that got too close on their flanks. Meanwhile, the aero-drone used its rear position to repel more undead closing in from behind. Each powerful swing from its arms either toppled zombies or cleaved through them outright. It was a vicious counter-assault that punctuated exactly how different these drones were from the rest… but that was going to change as soon as they ran into a tank-drone. With several already advancing down the street, Blackarachnia could see the writing on the wall: stained in sick black.

Finally, the group came across one of its former companions. This cycle-drone was in the process of having its innards torn from its chassis. The same one that had lost its arms and had no way to fight back. It never made a sound in the way that the zombies did, but Blackarachnia could see the frozen, unmistakable dismay on its face. She had never seen a drone emote that way. It looked like Jetstorm in more than its exterior shell alone.

Nor had she ever seen them show compassion— until now. As the group passed, the middle-most drone saw the mauling and raised its arm, unloading three fast rounds into its fellow survivor’s face. Gone was the suffering; gone was the potential of it standing back up ever again.

They kept moving, which stopped the formation of a crush too severe to escape from— at least not yet. The noose was tightening as they fought their way down the street back the way they came. Not so tightly packed to restrain their movements and pin them in between a wall of biting bodies, but the noose was tightening. As Nightscream spotted the survivors for himself, he swooped around wide to provide cover. Focusing straight ahead of the group as they fell back, taking out entire swaths of zombies in one pass. The path was cleared as they bolted for it.

“RUN! RUN YOU BASTARDS!” Jetstorm was leaning dangerously far out the window to flail his own huge arms. She would have been more worried if he didn’t have his own set of wings to catch a potential fall, though. “VAMANOS! VAMANOS!”

The walls of bodies were closing in around them. At the end of the road, the zombies had caught wind of the growing commotion and were pivoting to engage their newly identified prey. There were too many to squeeze past now, and the fleeing drones seemed to realize it. Identifying that their group was about to be cut off, the lead drone turned a hard left towards a large dumpster. Stationed outside one of the smaller shops that looked like it was having renovations done, with a hard metal lid. The first drone launched themselves up at the edge and hauled themselves up in the same rolling leap. Scrambling up, it swiveled around to help the next drone up. The second cycle-drone made it and tried to jump.

They fell short. Their arms slipped as the smooth turret edges they landed on their wheel, almost toppling over. They became panic-stricken and struggled to lift themselves back up. Lacking hands to grip made it an impossible ask. Gravity was a glitch.

The aero-drone behind them reacted accordingly.

It was as awing a moment as it was awful. As they rushed in behind the drone, they reached down and caught their talons under the gaps in their shoulders. That was when the drone jacked their huge arms up— an impromptu forklift on antigravity gear. They hoisted them up with the last of their strength as their turbines screamed from stress, followed by their immediate stalling. The cycle-drone was propelled upward with the force of that tremendous shove at the same time that their companion’s turbines failed. As the cycle-drone pulled itself to safety, the aero unit slumped in exhaustion… and tidal wave of zombies in pursuit slammed in behind them. Dozens of snapping maws were already making a meal of them. The drone arched and flailed in a desperate bid to throw their attackers as it was eaten alive pinned to the wall.

The two drones remaining wailed. Blackarachnia knew that the zombies could scream, but not the unturned drones— not like that. Not like grief.

As the aero-drone was dragged backwards into the mob, it reached up to try and somehow save itself. Hopeless as it was valiant, its arm was wrenched clear off as dozens of reaching claws and clamps reached to pull it in all directions. Finally, dozens more hands reached forward and bore into its midsection. Tearing it’s thin flexmeshing wide open like wet paper, pulling ribbons of wires in all directions. Torn fuel lines spewed. If the drone was screaming, it would never be heard over the excited baying of the murderous throng.

Blackarachnia looked at Thrust and Jetstorm. If the looks on their faces were anything worth going by, horror would never come close to describing it. Whatever nightmare they had witnessed at the Citadel was playing out in front of them again. She couldn’t imagine seeing something with her own face being torn to pieces like that.

Undeterred by the advantage of height, the zombies on the ground hadn’t forgotten about the two drones remaining. They tossed themselves at all sides in a wild frenzy, reaching and grasping wildly to extend their reach. Over and over they tried to grab the drones trapped on their metal island in the sea of undead bodies. The dumpster rocked precariously, and the two cycle-drones were left scrambling to stay out of their reach in the platform center. Back-to-back, they began opening fire. The first was torn up around its shoulder and bleeding profusely, but otherwise there was no bite that Blackarachnia could see. The other appeared miraculously undamaged, if not a bit scuffed and shaken.

Nightscream began providing cover fire. Barraging groups of zombies over and over again whenever they seemed to be getting too close at best… or at worst, climb up onto the dumpster itself. Those zombies attempting to haul themselves up were dumpster were blasted down and away, trampled by more in their wake.

Except it was only going to be a matter of time before enough bodies piled up for them to climb up with no trouble at all.

Blackarachnia looked to her left again. Thrust was still there, but—

She had no recourse to stop him or even ask what Jetstorm was doing when he came up behind her. Not when his distinct energy signature loomed over her shoulders, and not when he reached up to seize her around her sides. Capturing her in a vice grip and hoisting her up— in a past life, she may have presumed he was going to kill her. Part of her wondered if he was still going to, but the assault she only half-expected in a daze never came. Instead, she was thrown sideways headlong. She stumbled and careened into Thrust as he was similarly turning, which caused the biker to be thrown off balance. Then they both fell flat on their backs in a heap. Their collective toppling gave Jetstorm the room he needed to smash out the window she had been standing in front of before. The glass exploded outward in glittering, sharp confetti.

Jetstorm hauled himself over the edge and stared straight at them. Past his shape, Rattrap and Rhinox were gawking. Blackarachnia wondered if she had the same agape stare they did.

“f*ck me sideways and call me Silverbolt,” Jetstorm flatly said, in self-defeat, before letting himself fall backwards out the window.

Thrust couldn’t even scream. His voice box was a blast of static where he had briefly blown out the vocoder circuit.

Blackarachnia helped him up. It was a task harder done than anticipated— Thrust’s clumsy fumbling made for awkward maneuvering. By the time they finally finished standing, Jetstorm’s turbines were firing off at full tilt. The remaining windows still intact rattled as the jet rocketed up in his alt-mode to cut across the open air. Blackarachnia watched with Thrust, crammed back into the window frame, as Jetstorm headed straight for Nightscream and the drones.

Shoved shoulder-to-shoulder, she could feel the terrified vibration rolling off Thrust’s body. Whatever furious shouting match Rattrap and Rhinox were now having faded into obscurity.

“They’re gonna get themselves killed,” Thrust whispered, hoarse.

In her coiling dread, Blackarachnia agreed. They might not have been the only survivors, but the odds of most of them surviving for much longer? Those odds were being eaten alive right in front of them.

vi

He wondered what the point of this was.

It wasn’t a thought process in a wholly metaphorical sense, either. The dangers being faced by them all were definitely real in their manifestation… and no, he definitely wasn’t sure what the point of this was beyond that. There was no plan, no plot, and no way for him to work through the current problem without committing to a risk likely not worth the payout. Particularly when falling guaranteed that you would be torn to pieces. Even if you managed to get out half intact, infection in the midst of that swell of howling metal corpses was an absolute. “Trust the Midas touch” and more.

He had no idea what he was doing.

He had no idea what he was going to do to get out of what he was doing.

He—

There was another barrage of bullets that soared past. Arching dangerously close, which made Nightscream instinctively strafe to avoid them. None had been aiming for him, thankfully… friendly fire from Vehicons was not on his apocalypse bingo card. The drones that had marooned themselves on the dumpster below were still trying to fight off their hungry assailants. Stray misfires were coming from the second of the two who was struggling to level its turrets— it was trembling. Like a person might, Nightscream thought. Someone who knew that being so afraid to shake yourself to pieces was the only appropriate response.

Nightscream’s spark was palpitating with a similar tremor that ran superstructure deep. He understood.

As he came to a hover above the dumpster, he wondered exactly what he assumed to accomplish. Never mind how he was going to pull it off, or what he might do after he got there. Below, the two drones were firing off into the crowd and going for as many headshots as they could. For each zombie that was perceived as getting to close, it was taken out with extreme prejudice— though not prejudicial enough to stop the replacement biters from taking their place. It was a forever onslaught of maniac cannibals. Wave after wave in a rising tide.

Nightscream watched as a particularly decayed aero-drone with a hollowed out back reached up to try and swipe at the tires of the survivors. Attempting to knock them down, frothing black foam through its broken jaw continuing to snap at their rubber heels. Nightscream ended up firing a knee-jerk sonic blast into it that blasted apart its upper torso. Black viscera splashed in all directions. The dumpster jolted from the aftershock, and both surviving drones up top flailed to keep their balance. The more confident of the two looked up at him and waved its arms. It’s narrowed visor made it look angry.

“Sorry! I’m Sorry!”

So much for helping that way. With it, the thought of accidentally falling into that same mass came back to Nightscream’s own mind. One wrong push of the wind, one downward gust too strong, and he’d be done. It was a scenario that ignored the tank-drones at the end of the street slowly making their way through and over the zombies blocking their path… if tumbling into the gnashing bodies below didn’t kill him, that sure was going to. So, Nightscream continued to hover uselessly. He raked his mind for any idea that wasn’t insane or risked landing and came up with nothing.

What was he going to do?

There was a blasting gust above him. Nightscream struggled to stay airborne in the churning wake it pushed him down in the stifling air. He managed to correct his orientation before his entire world could go completely sideways— for now. His own fear set in when he couldn’t get himself upright fast enough. As he corrected his height in a cold-sweat, propulsion-system heat caught the tops of his wings. Jetstorm’s antigravs from above made his fur impossibly hot in the sun. In another time, he really would have been ready for an aerial match. Dogfight didn’t quite hit the mark when only one of them was a jet (and the other with a non-canine beast-mode).

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?” Jetstorm beside himself, frantic to the point of frenzy. Usually a hysterical version of the jet was one of the worst to deal with, but for now, Nightscream had never been happier to see his big blue mug. “WE ARE GOING TO GET OURSELVES KILLED!”

Unless airborne zombies rushed them nowhere in sight or fell on their own, sure. For now, Nightscream understood that immediate death wasn’t a pressing threat… but they were on borrowed time. The tank-drones were lumbering closer now, trudging their way through the crowd as if it were the universe’s most f*cked wading pool. He was out here for a reason, though… and as he looked down, he realized what it was. He met sights with Jetstorm once more before looking back at the two drones.

They looked up at him, too. Their combined terror turned to confusion, then molded on a dime into understanding. The bleed of it was a dawning realization that narrowed the visor of the first, widened the second’s, and made them both regard at each other one last time.

The lead drone wasn’t damaged only in the normal way. Nightscream could now see the fresh bites on its shoulder. Large and wide, with a good chunk taken out of one of the hydraulic lines controlling the lift capacity of its arm. That didn’t stop it from seizing its friend around the chassis and heaving upwards, though.

It was as close to communicating as they could manage.

Take this one.

Nightscream didn’t wait. He lowered himself down, latched his claws onto the undamaged drone’s its shoulders, and lifted with all his strength.

The drone didn’t budge. Neither one of them achieved lift.

“OH, COME ON!”

Down the street, there was a tremendous roar and crash. Another tank-drone, this one more mobile than the rest in significant stride, was clambering down the street. Its body was severely damaged to the point of exposing large sections of its lowermost components beneath its gutted chassis. Rather than hinder its movement, the fatal mauling where zombies had tried to tear it apart from the waist down helped its mobility. By stripping the largest and heaviest pieces of armor, the tank-drone had managed a running gait that was closing the gap between them. It was failing its arms wildly when it put them in its sights.

Ooh f*ck.

The sound of gunfire followed. From the windows. Blackarachnia and Thrust had seen the barreling threat and were trying to go for a headshot. Unfortunately, the angle of the hydroplant windows relevant to the angle of the road stopped them. By the time the drone would be in range—

Nightscream looked up and saw Jetstorm frozen midair.

“DUDE! DO SOMETHING!”

Jetstorm was devolving into hysteria. Between the chaos unfolding around them and the sheer volume of all the screaming zombies at once, he spun twice on his antigravs in a full circle one way, then whipped back in the other. As if he was lost— not sure what to do, searching for the something in answer. Nightscream felt less upset with him in the moment and much more pitiful. He had no idea what to do, either. Even if he did waste his ammunition on the unstoppable swath of undead monsters charging their way, more would come to replace them. It was a disaster in an impossible to win scenario.

Finally, Jetstorm started cackling. Maniacal and frightened and crazy, as if he’d finally snapped. He grasped as his helmet, swore up and down in a language Nightscream didn’t initially understand (he found out later it was French), and did a last midair pirouette. The look on his face was one he was… not going to forget. Shadowed from the sunlight hitting the back of his head, casting him in the dark. The glow of his optics emphasized the twist knotting his mask tight. It was as close to genuinely afraid as he had ever seen him. Nightscream hadn’t witnessed him so emotional since Thrust almost died. The dozens of mutilated arms reaching up for him made for an upsetting backdrop worthy of what the humans would have knew for sure was Hell.

Then Jetstorm lurched downward towards him. Nightscream had to pivot his body sideways to avoid being clipped by the other mech’s body— his plasma pylons, specifically. As his talons gripped down on the drone’s shoulder and upper back, he dug in.

“You owe me twice,” Jetstorm snarled, grating and scared. His codec rattled. “First time at the pharmacy, second time now. I’m keeping count!”

They lifted in unison. With Jetstorm’s added strength, they were able to heave the drone up and away. Slow or not, the pace was certain. Nightscream was close enough to the drone’s helmet to hear its internal disc reader skip over in confusion. Its tire spun in bewilderment when it was no longer in contact with solid ground.

Then it looked down and reached out for the other drone still trapped. Scuffed clamp prongs stretched wide, flexing repeatedly in a gripping motion.

Nightscream felt his spark clench halfway through an oscillation.

The lost drone watched them go. Nightscream caught a last glimpse of its despairing face before it turned its helmet away. Staring down the crowd still clambering to reach it, which swarmed on all four sides of its pedestal in the shape of an offering alter. From where it had been with its fellow survivors cycles earlier until now, the stark difference in the outcome of its fate was barren one. It looked lonely.

Slowly, the same remaining drone raised its arms. The sound of its weapons array spinning fully to automatic whirled even over the howls of the zombies frothing to reach it. From half to full and beyond-standard capacity charge: all systems go. Standing alone with nothing left to lose. It leveled it’s weapons and let loose a hail of bullets.

From the windows, Thrust and Blackarachnia were already scrambling to break out the rest of the panning. It was going to be a tight fit, Nightscream realized. Between him, Jetstorm, and the rescued drone, they were going to have to really improvise with this one. The weight wasn’t making it any easier.

Nightscream looked down, and the drone was looking back over its shoulder at its doomed companion. Then it swung its head around to stare up at him. That was when he saw it.

Smeared under the zombie gore splashed across its body, the broad X on its chassis stared back with equal intensity. In dread and in sadness, with no way to answer.

“WATCH IT!”

Nightscream registered his mistake immediately. In his distraction, he hadn’t been keeping his sights ahead of him—he would have seen the collision coming if he had. Jetstorm, likely presuming he was paying attention, had veered his body to allow Nightscream go through the window first. Maybe he had been under the impression he could maneuver himself in much more easily. It was less of a joint mistake by virtue that Nightscream knew he should have been paying attention. As a consequence, the young Maximal found himself striking the wall next to the window. The error cost him his lift and he immediately fell. Screaming and scrambling for purchase against the wall, letting go of his grip of the drone and failing to catch himself. He was saved only by a ridge of concrete jutting out from the wall: part of the building’s brutalist architecture and nothing structurally necessary. It was his only hope to save himself.

He swung forward and back— slamming his back into the wall and striking the back of his head. Through the flash of bright stars bleeding over his vision, he saw a mob of drones already reaching up for him. Even several stories up, it was still too close for comfort. Their whited-out optics bore starving holes into him.

Their cargo almost plummeted, too. As Nightscream lost grip with one foot and barely held on with the other, the cycle-drone was a midair anchor. Jetstorm screeched as he also nearly fell. His saving mercy was the drone catching itself with a clamp against the same outcropping. Even without being capable of vocalizing, the pitched roar of its engine spoke plenty.

So did its second servo reaching out to snatch Nightscream’s other leg. Preventing him from finishing his plummet into the crowd of zombies beneath them if he were to completely lose his grip. I got you, too.

Jetstorm continued to sputter in swearing outrage. He collapsed into the side of the open window, only managing to hold onto the busted ledge with one servo and the other curled over the drone’s shoulder. He flailed against the wall in the fight to kick himself up with his tail. It scraped uselessly where he couldn’t propel himself vertically with any real success.

“f*ck!” Jetstorm fought with the power in his popping turbines to keep his antigravity gear from shorting. “PULL US UP! PULL US UP!”

He was dragged in promptly. Thrust practically launched out himself to reach with his arm, hooking his clamp around the vents in his partner’s hips. Blackarachnia followed up by tagging him with roped wedding— which made him scream again, but honestly? Nightscream agreed that the texture couldn’t have felt great. As Jetstorm was pulled in, the jet kept his talons gripped around the drone who failed its arms. It caught the lip of the window as Jetstorm’s tail disappeared over the edge. Then Thrust launched out to seize it, too. Together, all three managed to pull and shove the offending drone through the gap. The drone never let go of his leg as he was similarly almost hauled up to safety.

Nightscream took a final look ahead in the direction of the dumpster. He regretted it.

Straight ahead, the drone still struggling to hold its own a goner. It had run out of ammunition in its futile bid to keep fighting. Finally resorting to bludgeoning the offending zombies over their heads with its own arms, blunt force was all it had left. Trying to knock them clear off or damage them to the point of submission was its last, desperate f*ck you in the face of annihilation. The realization that it was going to be eviscerated — not just destroyed — must have dawned on it by now. Still, it continued to fight in spite of its own inevitable destruction. Nightscream couldn’t have imagined how that must have felt.

Finally, an aero-drone managed to latch onto its tire and pull. Yanked off balance and forced onto its back, there was no way for it to get back up. The zombies clambering on top of one another finally managed the height necessary to climb the rest of the way up. Piling on top of one another, Nightscream saw an arm torn asunder and tossed into the crowd. Then part of a wheel. Energon gushed from somewhere in the mass, and he finally had to look away.

He hadn’t realized he was being pulled up until several servos reached out to grab him at once. Jetstorm grabbed him around his scruff plating halfway through the window last, practically throwing him to the floor. The burn off from his turbines still screaming so close seared his fur.

“You are grounded,” Jetstorm panted. Condensation dripped from his plating where he jackknifed himself against the wall. He was no longer airborne, kneeling on the bend of his tail. The application of his weight on the narrow joint would have been more than painful. Meanwhile, Thrust was having to hold him up from behind to keep him from falling over. It was a chore harder than it needed to be when you were working one-handed. “Frag me, f*ck—!”

Someone shook his shoulders. When he found his vision again, Nightscream found himself looking into Blackarachnia’s face.

“Are you alright?” she asked. “You could have died.”

“Someone had to do something,” he said. It came out without another moment of reasoning to invest into it. “We had to.”

The drone they had saved was standing awkwardly next to the window. Its stare stayed fixed out into the street. Unreadable in the instant, but Nightscream had a feeling it would have been mourning if it had the emotional prowess to know how. Maybe it already was. The massive X across its chest was much more obvious where the splashed remains of zombie had been wiped away in the chaos. As far as he was concerned, they knew still knew absolutely nothing. Not about the zombies, not about the drones (for sure), and not about—

“Rhinox, you can’t just…!”

Tankor’s huge bulk came thundering down the length of the attic. Nightscream was still so shaken that he almost didn’t register the rumble of his weight bearing down on them through the concrete floor. The Vehicon’s huge claws were raised with Rattrap trying to cling and pull back on his leg plating. It would have been funny as a standalone instance of physical comedy. Not now, though. Not when Nightscream could still feel himself shaking without Rhinox’s help.

“The risk of infection, of exposure to the viral load…!” Rhinox’s scanning visor locked in on Nightscream. His towering presence suddenly had him more afraid of him than he had been of the zombies outside before. Even at the risk of falling into the mob, this was a threat somehow much more imminent. He might as well have already fallen: straight at the pedes of their newest nightmare at the end of the world gone belly up twice. Being ripped apart by zombies was a given at this point, but being murdered after surviving all that he had? All that effort to live wasted?

What was even the point?

Even more confusing was the sound that the drone made at the sight of Rhinox — Tankor — whatever the drone must have of him. As Nightscream swiveled his head to look at it, he saw its pilot lights flash bright. There was no telling what it was feeling beyond the implication of a terror similar to his. Certain cues for fear went universal between your average Transformer and these “smart” drones, if this was what they were like.

Then the drone lifted a turret to the underside of its helmet and pulled the trigger. Nightscream wondered what the point of that was, too.

vii

The drone never got back up.

“Why would it?” Rattrap asked. He was remarkably quiet. “It shot itself in the head, didn’t it?”

“Don’t call them it,” Thrust said. He was also quiet, even if for an undeniably different reason. His codec was a flat murmur against the disquieted hum of white noise around them.

“Sorry.”

Thrust hung his head.

Another terrible hush fell over the group. They continued to wait. Now he understood what the phrase bated breath meant. The punishing silence had him forgetting to cycle air between pauses, and each one he took felt agonizingly loud. Holding it gave him the false security he knew his self-preservation software was trying to fool him with… because the alternative was a nightmare waiting on the concrete in front of them. The bullet fired from its turret had punched clear through the underside of the drone’s helmet and gone straight up. The force of it blew through the frontal complex of its braincase. Pieces of shattered motherboard and fragmented support casing had scattered across the floor.

Still, the drone never got back up. The body remained in exactly the same place as it first fell. Cycles more passed while they waited, and Jetstorm decided it was the worst game of playing possum he’d ever watched. Presuming you could make it a sport, the drone was definitely winning.

Briefly, a warning popped up on his HUD. He ignored it for now. Considering the sh*t he just went through, he was sure he had damage somewhere. Thankfully nothing of the biting kind, or a bullet through his braincase: self-inflicted or otherwise. Running a distracting diagnosis could wait.

“It wasn’t infected,” Blackarachnia finally announced. Her exhale came out loud as she finally relaxed. It was more than one way to state the obvious, but who was going to fault her?

Rattrap wasn’t above being that guy, apparently. “It shot itself in the head. Why would it— sorry. They. Why would they do that to themselves if they weren’t?”

She pointed. “Look.”

In all their time staring at the drone, none of them had… actually been paying much attention to the rest of it. The “rest” being the energon pooling around its body, which was bright and clear in color. Even with the smell still being pungent, it was nowhere near how Thrust’s had smelled. The memory made him gag.

Thrust picked up on the sound and swiveled his head to look at him. “Storm?”

“I’m fine,” he answered, hating how he sounded. His voice was still hoarse from all that yelling less than ten cycles earlier. At the same time, another warning flashed on his HUD. He absently tried to analyze what it was without dedicating more of his processing suite to the task, but it was gone before he could load the readout. “I’m doing fantastic, roller wonder.”

When the other mech didn’t reply, Jetstorm looked back at him. Thrust was always a bit of an enigma on the best days: his silent, tough-guy brooding was as far from being an act. Even after they formed the loosest version of their comradery, he was secretive only for the reason that he wasn’t sure how to socialize. That much was more than apparent in his dealings with the spider, and later with… him. Sort of. Thrust was smart but lacked the social skills to sharpen how he interacted with others— unless it was someone he trusted. So, with all his flaws, his awful disposition, everything wrong with him, Jetstorm was still shocked that person of confidence was his own. Amazing. Thrust was either a bad judge of character or he was missing something about what the other mech saw in him. Maybe a little of both applied.

So, yeah. When Jetstorm looked at him and saw the absolute sunken look of anguish lit up behind his visor glass, he knew things were not fantastic.

“Biker boy,” he tried.

Thrust looked him down and up again. The subsequent stare told to the fact that, no, he was not fantastic. Not even close. “You hurt?”

No. Thankfully. Either way, everything that had gone down was a close call. “Nah. Might throttle the bat later, though.”

“Good,” Thrust said, with a flat inflection. Between watching the drones die and seeing him outside, the realization of what Thrust must have been thinking finally dawned on him. For as upset as he was about the drones, the only thing that would have made it worse had done him the favor of coming back in one piece. “Don’t do that again.”

“What? Be a hero?” He had meant it jokingly, but when Thrust’s stare didn’t lessen in intensity, he wondered if the jab landed south of its mark. “Not strong, fast, or fresh from the fight.”

Thrust’s servo snatched out to grab around one of the vents on his hip. He couldn’t exactly grab part of his servo with the angle of their bodies so close, but the threat in the grip was more than enough to get his point across. In all its affection and desperate direness. Thrust’s armor had broken out into condensation along his helmet. His fans were spinning their highest speed.

“Do not ever,” Thrust said, “try to be a hero.”

Watching Thrust almost die was not an exciting engagement for anyone. Least of all him, because when all was said and done, Thrust was the only one who got him, too. Who more than simply tolerated his presence when everyone else — even Jetstorm — thought he was insufferable. After being as sick as he had, watching him go headlong out the window while the zombies were tearing their drones apart… Jetstorm never imagined Thrust as the type so easily scared. That was when it finally dawned on him what Thrust may have been imaging as a probably worst-case scenario. Infection at best, or outright annihilation at the whim of a crowd ripping him to f*cking pieces at worst. It could have been the other way around, too. Infection was slow and painful. Biker boy knew that better than anyone already.

Regardless of whatever came first, it would have destroyed him.

So… yeah. Dully noted.

Don’t be a hero.

“I won’t,” Jetstorm replied. Another warning on his HUD went by as he said it. He couldn’t focus on it with his friend’s stare lancing through him.

“Promise me.”

Less dully noted was the new upward tweak in Thrust’s voice. He was holding his composure steady on his external façade, but it finally dawned on Jetstorm — really dawned on him — that Thrust was worse than upset. The intensity of his stare stayed focused without pinning him down, which meant this was something else he hadn’t seen before. Not anger or even what might have accounted for his regular mode of upset. Enigma or not, the meaning behind Thrust’s newfound desperation more than clear. He didn’t need to be his best friend to see it for himself. As awkward as they both were when it came to this kind of stuff outside of each other’s company.

“Please,” Thrust said.

“I won’t.”

Thrust finally let him go, but not without squeezing the frame around his hip vent first. Once to ground Jetstorm, once to ground himself, and once for them both in good measure. Their kind of comedy always came in threes without devoting itself to the same three-word phrase that most might have been accustomed to.

Turning his attention back to the Maximals, they were still jabbering away to themselves.

“Why did he kill himself, then?” Nightscream asked. He was particularly upset, himself. “He must have known he wasn’t sick, right? Him and all his buddies out there knew to disguise themselves. They understood how the zombies act if they went through all that effort to—”

“Effort wasted,” Rattrap mused. “Criminy… what a disaster.”

Jetstorm felt that hard and fast: guilt. The weight of it was almost as overwhelming as the strain on his flight gear. Guilt for the kid, guilt for Thrust, guilt even for the other two… and guilt for the dead drones, specially. With so many damn unknowns clogging the works of any of their understanding, it felt like he was being choked similarly.

Tankor, though?

Finally satisfied that the drone wasn’t going to leap back to its wheel, Jetstorm switched his weapons array online. From dark to all systems green for go, lighting up his interior plasma pylons. His battle computer flipped switch and engaged at full RAM. It may have been more of a concern to him that an energy flux error popped up on his HUD, but that was a less pressing problem in the moment. Anger was always a powerful motivator to him. Second only to his own annoyance to the Maximals before his career path was violently tossed off course… goodbye Vehicon General managerial position, hello unemployment line! It burned deep with the same core temperature of his turbines. Now it was burning even hotter, bordering a nuclear meltdown.

Jetstorm was f*cking mad. Another two warnings blinking in his peripherals didn’t stop him from seeing red.

“Give me one good reason not to blow your head off!” There was a chorus of shouting as he lurched up and poised his weapons array to fire on Tankor – Rhinox – whatever the prick’s name was. He had ascended upwards on his antigravs “Your vicious, scheming, little…!”

“Little,” Tankor said, in Tankor’s voice, without Tankor being there at all. Ooh, he was more than missing the lug, now. Thrust was right about him being a nice guy compared to this prick. It was a good a taunt as any in the moment. When he was back to using his own voice, it was dripping in its scorn. “I would re-evaluate your perception of the situation, Jetstorm— or perhaps Silverbolt is the one to blame for your lack of insight. He was always rather dull.”

Now it was the spider causing a fuss. She came stomping up to Jetstorm’s left, and suddenly he felt a little less alone in his boiling fury. The others seemed to be catching up. All of her optics were open and narrowed in a glare from their opened hoods. “You want to talk about perception!? That disaster was your fault! Why did you shoot!?”

“Cheetor,” Rhinox said— never again Tankor. That was more than clear. Also clear was the confidence in the Maximal imposter’s tone, which bordered infuriating. Jetstorm was more than tempted than ever to start shooting. “He was stalking that little congregation of Vehicons in the crowd. They didn’t have him fooled. Had they reached any entrance that you were tempted to compromise our safety on, he would have no doubt attempted to invade.

Fooled or not, Jetstorm knew that was a lie. Not because he happened to be a good read… Thrust and Blackarachnia’s little trysts months ago had been more than noticeable. On the opposite end of the same spectrum, Rhinox’s words popped up more red flags than zombies popping out of nowhere. With the same biting ferocity and same danger beneath the thickness of his armor. Jetstorm swung his helmet around to see if any of the others had picked up on it, and Nightscream was the first one to meet his optics.

Yeah. He was lying through his damn vocoder. Cheetor was an animal, but he didn’t stalk in the same way you would expect: he was a missile. The klik he knew you were available to take a bite out of, he’d go for it— full stop. Nightscream knew it, too. The teen had seen it with the Vehicons in the Catacombs the same way he had in the Citadel. They’d both seen what he did to Thrust.

Nightscream’s optics were wide. Rhinox had a great poker face, but not the bat.

An error message with a code blinked on his heads-up readout once more. Jetstorm suddenly realized he felt dizzy.

“We could have dealt with it,” Thrust said. The misery in his codec was more than clear. He was still where Jetstorm had left him, propped against the window. “You had no right—”

“Dealt with it? As you did with Cheetor?”

Thrust wilted. Jetstorm had only ever seen him look so broken twice before: first when the spider finally rejected him, and second when he was sure he was going to die.

The widow was the first at his defense. Now she was the one all but leaping at Rhinox. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and you couldn’t scorn Blackarachnia twice in a row and get too far away with it. “You stop that! This isn’t getting us anywhere! You exasperated the situation by not talking to us first. We could have avoided this entire disaster if you had only—!”

It was then that the drone on the floor twitched. Their collective group whirled to train their weapons on it, but the dead drone still didn’t get up. Silence ensued, minus the hum of all their artillery. Even Rhinox had levelled his canon to meet the body in his crosshairs.

“Power surge.” Thrust announced. He had a strange expression, now. “Leftover static in the body is triggering post-deactivation cycle twitches. That’ll go on for a while.”

Yeah. Jetstorm found himself staring at the body again. Upsetting as this whole afternoon had been, it was nothing compared to the distress of knowing that the drone had just… killed itself. Without any other visible injury or site of possible infection, the drone who survived out of all its friends in secure safety had decided to

Wait. Hello.

Jetstorm felt every circuit in his body prick. His logic center spun and threatened to skip on its following attempts to read itself out. He gyrated on his antigravs, ignoring another error on his HUD— which were cropping up more often. It could wait. This was important.

“What did you do to it.” It wasn’t question. Jetstorm knew he didn’t need to ask a question: only obtain its answer. Even as another warning blipped across his vision, the need for an explanation for that meant nothing in the face of this newest realization. He’d learned to trust his gut in his dealings with the Maximals… there were some warnings you had to heed at their double-faced value. Intuition was a master of all and cuck to none. “What do you know about that mark on its chassis?”

“Mark?” Rattrap asked. “What the…?”

Jetstorm wasn’t looking at him, but the beat and resulting hush told him that the others were finally paying closer attention. Minus Nightscream, perceptibly. He knew the teen had already noticed. Given their last little encounter…

Rhinox stared. Immobile in his face, body squared like a wall. “I did nothing. I was on the other side of the room. I know nothing about its marking— whatever it means.”

Another three warnings on his HUD in rapid fire succession, but he wasn’t paying attention. How could he manage multi-tasking at a time like this, anyhow? He was dizzier. He wanted to lay down.

“Before you waltzed over and it saw you, it was fine! It was okay! It was alive! Then it sees you and puts a big fat round in its processor? I’m no detective, but I’m not stupid. Neither is anyone else here. What do you know?”

Rhinox continued to stare. It was as close to a gotcha as they were going to ever get.

“Everybody, stop! Knock it off!”

Rattrap rounded the imposter Vehicon’s huge bulk in robot-mode. Arms waving back and forth, with a facial expression that Jetstorm wasn’t sure how to read. As he arced wide on his wheels, it seemed like he was trying to cut the behemoth tank off. Either to diffuse the situation as it reached an emotional crescendo or diffuse it physically didn’t matter. It could have very well been both. His optics darted between all of them as quickly as he could.

No need for him to lie about how he was feeling, then. Jetstorm thought he looked terrified.

“It was an accident,” Rattrap said. “He didn’t mean for the drones to get done in like that. Righto, big guy?”

Rhinox snorted.

“Rhinox,” he insisted. Desperation didn’t look good on rodents, Jetstorm decided. Distinctly when Rattrap was the only one with a beast-mode that was a prey animal… ignoring that they were all prey, if you wanted to be morbid. “You. Didn’t. Mean it. You gotta let us know that, pal.”

“Objectively?” Rhinox paused. As if it was something he needed to think about. “That is… correct.”

Liar, liar, solenoids on fire! Jetstorm wanted to smack the bastard at minimum, if none of the other Maximals were going to let him.

“It was an accident,” Rhinox finished.

“You’re not even trying.” Jetstorm snarled. “Bastard. All those drones are still dead because of you!”

“Drones,” Rhinox repeated. Smug bastard fragger. “As if there was much life there to begin with.”

“f*ck you!”

“It’s done, Jetstorm. There ain’t nothin’ more we can do about it, now.” Thrust wasn’t looking at anyone— he’d taken an odd interest in the floor. He was worse than broken without showing the cracks to anyone else who might care to notice. “Drop it.”

There was no forgetting. Certainly no forgiving either, or anything else beginning in “f” that wasn’t another uttered f*ck (or frag) in stereo. As the atmosphere condensed to the point of crushing them all whole on the spot, Jetstorm locked in on Rhinox one more time.

At the same time, a final warning on his HUD popped up again. It was a low fuel readout at critical mass, or a lack thereof. Stasis lock without immediate energon was imminent. In less than two cycles on rations alone, he’d burned through ninety-five percent of his power reserves. Auxiliary and mandatory.

“Oh,” Jetstorm said— and collapsed. Smashing his head on the concrete, cracking his helm. Without help, he couldn’t get back up.

viii

It was no secret that Thrust knew many of his drones on a personal level. The smart ones, anyway. Favorites to use in a fight who had survived more than one or two scraps against the Maximals, or those intelligent enough to avoid fights outright. There were plenty of those where they counted, too— the ones who hung back when they knew destruction would otherwise be inevitable. A great deal of respect had to be afforded to both groups because they were intelligent as a whole. It was no doubt in his mind that Megatron would have destroyed them outright if he knew they were free thinking. Drones by sole definition alone they were not.

He may not have known who the drone was who killed himself, but that was a given. There could have been thousands of them. He did know a handful of the others, though. They even had names.

Leader-One. The “twins,” Laconia and Hollister. Davidson. Harley.

“You kept track of them?” Blackarachnia asked. It was a lifetime ago compared to where they were now. Back when the pressure of being Silverbolt squared on his back alone— never Jetstorm. It was inconceivable that a mistake in identity was possible by that point. Not with his memories; not with the spider’s convinced assurances. They were in the honeymoon phase, as it were… according her, at least.

“Honeymoon.” Thrust repeated the word twice more to try and force recall on a definition. They had been in their old hideout, the abandoned mall on the outskirts of the city’s main metropolitan area. Small and nameless without clear exterior signage; it was wholly unsuspecting. A perfect place to hide away with their… distractions. “I don’t know what that word means.”

Blackarachnia rolled over on the berth they were sharing. From her back to her side, propping up her lithe chassis with a bend in her arm for support. The other with its free servo wandered over his chassis. He was still beading condensation. “You don’t?”

“As separate words, sure.” Thrust felt like he should have been embarrassed but wasn’t sure why. Maybe his shell program hadn’t developed much further than the other free-thinking drones, back then… those were the early days of the Spark War. A personality program could only get him so far as free will— his language cortex had to be built up beyond its basic components.

He was young. So, the most of what he felt in that moment was confusion. Both for his situation and the direction of the conversation… the intensity of their earlier activities was driving him to distraction, too. It wasn’t the normal “pillow talk” he had come to expect, and she had to tell him what that meant, too.

Thrust…?”

“Honey is an organic animal byproduct. It’s food. A moon is a celestial object. We got two orbitin’ Cybertron, now.” He paused, doubting if even these were really the right answers. Even without looking at her, he knew he was being stared straight through. “Not sure what the combined version is. Can’t eat a moon all that easy unless you’re Unicron— and he’s gone.”

“A honeymoon is a vacation spent together by new bonded couples,” Blackarachnia answered. The spider laughed low and soft, and her long, slender digits trailed over his chassis. The sharp tips lingered on his Vehicon insignia to lightly scratch at the metal. No doubt testing the integrity of the pressed vinyl in case it could be stripped or lifted away. No such luck; it was pressed firm in his hide as deep as his paint. “We talked about going on one when we got back to Cybertron from Prehistoric Earth.”

“Too bad I still don’t remember none of that.”

“I could try to get you to,” she offered. As she did hundreds of times before by that point— empty promises that were still somehow so full that they bordered overbearing. She moved her arm up and touched her hand to his helmet, and he briefly saw a flash of green. His memory cortex lit up behind his HUD.

Thrust automatically moved his head away. He hadn’t meant to make it so obvious.

Blackarachnia recoiled, too. “Silverbolt?”

Wrong. “Forget it. I… yeah. I ain’t in the mood right now. Sorry.”

“Tired?”

Yes, but also wrong in the scheme of why he was avoiding her help in the moment. “Last one gave me a headache in my whole body.”

Blackarachnia pursed her lips. Her stare at him narrowed, briefly shifting from affectionate into something else. Critical? It was hard to place her expressions when he had such a tough time reading them, already.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she replied, flat. “I think I’ve heard someone say that to me, before.”

“Nice to know I ain’t the only one with memory issues, then.” Thrust rolled his neck back, staring up at the ceiling. The weight of his helmet sagged the packing foam he had folded into a crude pillow. Iridescent green webbing reflected its soft bioluminescence above them. It should have been a pretty sight, but all he was feeling was a lingering sense of dread. The looming presence felt like a net ready to drop at a moment’s notice. “Puts us on equal turf, I guess.”

“We will always be equal. You’re that and my everything else, Silverbolt. I won’t let Megatron separate us again.” Again, she lowered her hand. She touched his chest again, above where his borrowed spark was contained, before moving down to his arm. Her hand found his servo, stroking the prong closest to her. “As long as we’re together, that’s all that matters.”

In the grand scheme of existing, there was a lot more that mattered— even if she couldn’t see it. Thrust at least knew he could. What he lacked in social prowess he made up for in observation, and he was more than keen on knowing survival meant more than being with the ones you loved. The he power of romance alone was never going to save lives— no matter how sentimentalized. He’d learned that well in regard to his situation even before the zombies became as large of a problem as they were. His is brush with almost joining the undead ranks was a particularly spectacular sell on the same point.

His shoulder began to itch. The loss of his arm should have made him feel lighter, but all he felt was heavy.

Blackarachnia touched his back. “Are you okay?”

Nah. “Fine.”

The femme’s hand lingered. “You feel warm. Are you sure…?”

Thrust did feel hot, actually. Even when he’d barely done anything to help the situation as it devolved upstairs, his whole frame ached— burning. The sensation was sensor deep and had his circuits tingling. As if he’d run his systems ragged under tedious physical exertion… which he hadn’t, obviously. Yet the sensation lingered. Even his processor was oscillating on heightened RAM allocation. He had a headache (in his whole body, no less) and he was nervous. “Actually? No.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“No,” he said, which was the truth. He exhaled when he realized he had been holding his intakes without realizing. The sound wheezed past his vents in a tight, painful squeeze. His vents choked. “Don’t think we should talk about it out loud, neither.”

“You’re right,” she mused. She finally began to match his pace, brushing beside him as they continued to hang back. She arms brushed. She was ice cold to the touch where her shoulder brushed the arm he still had to his name. “We can talk later. When someone’s not in earshot…”

That someone of particular contention was leading the way through the maintenance corridor. It was one of the ones adjacent to the lower factory floors— leading to a separate part of the main hydroplant building. This was a section that housed the call center offices, according to Jetstorm. They had been there once before when first scoping the place out, never finding much of interest. Not besides the cubicles and thousands of phones: three per desk, at minimum. There was also the size of the room itself: another warehouse space that had more than enough clearance for Rhinox’s imposing height. It was a space that might have originally been used for storage, similar to the actual hideout.

“Converted into a complaints department, of all things,” Jetstorm crooned. He was languishing— definitely. The rigidity to his shoulders indicated that he was faking his posture. It was a trick he did in uncomfortable frequency when dealing with Megatron on low energy, or feigning confidence outright. Thrust knew he was going to have to ask him about it. “This whole factory must have been through a PR washout.”

“Was that a water joke, dude?” Nightscream grunted and stopped, standing straight to stretch his back. “You’re really gonna commit to a water pun at a time like this?”

“Don’t be such a wet blanket,” Jetstorm answered. He never missed a beat, but yeah, he did sound tired. The clapback would have been harder hitting, otherwise. “Cry me a river.”

Nightscream groaned.

Rattrap grunted and came to a rough stop, as well. He couldn’t exactly keep dragging the body without the extra help. “Hey! A little warning, next time? I nearly tore my arms out of their sockets.”

“Enough blathering,” Rhinox growled. “Keep moving.”

Nightscream growled and bent back down. He wrapped his hands around a shoulder pauldron and braced his knees to keep pulling. “You could help, you know. This would be easy for you.”

“I refuse to touch the remains.” Rhinox sounded angry at even the concept. “I told you what I believed we should do. You all insisted otherwise. Now move.”

They did, though none too happily. Continuing to pull along at their slow pace, with Rhinox in the lead. It wasn’t as if he knew much of where he was going, either… but it beat having him following behind the rest of them. Thrust was more than glad to keep him where he could watch his every motion.

“I don’t want him anywhere behind me,” Jetstorm whispered to him. Blackarachnia, too: the femme seemed to have garnered a place in the jet’s good graces. In their time since first arriving at the hydroplant, it was one of the first instances Thrust had seen him more than only tolerant of her presence. “Not where I can’t see him. Not a damn chance after all that.”

Finally, they finished dredging the dead drone’s body to the other side of the call center. A large filing closet, built on the far end of the room like a reinforced safe, was bolted to the floor at its furthest end. Industrial bolts the size of Thrust’s entire servo riveted it to the floor. Mounted on the door was an electronic keypad controlling a two-factor verification system. A plaque soldered next to the interface indicated it was one of the high-end models. No doubt they were storing financial information at best, bodies at worst.

Figuratively speaking on that last point— until now.

“I imagined my first time would be nicer than this,” Jetstorm mumbled. Thrust realized only-half listening that the other mech was talking to him. His tired, dreamy sing-song banter to himself seemed to be more of an attempt to feign his being okay with the situation than anything else. Dinner, a movie, poaching Maximals to get the mood right… hiding the body by moonlight. Romantic.”

“Some date.” Thrust scoffed. “Suppose you would make me do the actual hiding.”

“Do you expect me to pay for drinks, too?”

“When I was a Predacon,” Blackarachnia began, “that would have been my idea of a date, too.”

Rattrap began to work on getting the safe open. Wordlessly plugging into the console with his tail, progressing through the mechanism digitally in order to rig the door open. Nightscream stood looking over the body with an expression Thrust couldn’t place. Then there was Rhinox, who… well. He was as unreadable as Tankor had always been. Thrust felt numb looking at him for all his immobility. He would have been a statue without the pulsing visor light swinging back and forth, scanning nothing and everything.

Jetstorm chuckled. Trying to make light of the situation, no doubt. He was talking to the spider, now. “Candidates?”

“No one you know, thankfully.” Blackarachnia pursed her lips and furrowed her brow. She was glowering at her own memory. “Quickstrike got dangerously close, once. A dirt pile to dig himself out of would have been good for him.”

Thrust chuckled. He didn’t find the situation funny, but in the face of how upsetting their situation was turning out to be, he appreciated it.

Jetstorm didn’t laugh. Instead, he shuttered his optics and groaned. He reached up to rub his helmet with the knuckles of his talons.

“That was a hard hit you took when you fell,” Blackarachnia said. “You should let us take a look at that. Is the fuel helping?”

“It was. Fine. Maybe.” When Jetstorm onlined his optics again, Thrust could tell they were dimmer. He was still in an energy-conserving mode of operation. It wasn’t a state he could maintain without losing a good portion of his vision on the spot. Even with the spider so close, he still trusted her enough to be in that position of vulnerability. Growth for sure, even under the worst circ*mstance. “I need another refuel. I’m still chewing through my energy levels.”

“Why the sudden drops now?”

“Blame the rationing,” Jetstorm said— quietly. Thrust noticed at the same time that Rhinox had turned his helmet ever so slightly in their direction. Jetstorm had picked up on the change in positioning, too. “We did it for so long that my body is reacting… not great. I can’t conserve or go into an economic setting, sweetheart. I wasn’t designed for casual mileage.”

“What can we do?” she asked.

“Get me started on normal intake again,” Jetstorm answered. He vented hard. “Not a great workaround to keep from blowing through all our fuel.”

“We’ll manage.” Blackarachnia reached up to touch him on his arm, and Thrust saw the flash of apprehension in her stare when she made contact. Jetstorm’s lack of negative reaction was an inspiring one, either way. “Hang in there.”

“Got it!”

Rattrap finished with the lock, and the group reengaged as a distinct whole. The heavy door was pried open with additional help from Nightscream. Inside were boxes and wrapped bundles of datapads. All contained financial data of complaining clients across the city— likely for ease of refunds. Before the zombies made their survival a more pressing matter, Thrust realized he would have loved skimming through them. Not like he had much time to pique his curiosity, anymore. Not in this economy as Jetstorm would have put it.

“This does seem as suitable a spot as any, if we are so insistent on keeping the body,” Rhinox finally said. “As if we need to.”

“We’re not feeding the zombies,” Nightscream growled. He was refusing to look at Rhinox. His renewed anger over their situation had his hair standing up on end along his beast-mode kibble. “That’s messed up.”

“As long as this drone has energon in his system, it’ll be prime pickings for its old buddies outside. I don’t give handouts to the enemy.” Rattrap huffed in an attempt to catch his breath. He stretched his back again— hunching over to get a decent grip on the body’s shoulders He looked exhausted. “We’re also not leavin’ the body in the open, neither.”

Rhinox scoffed.

“You wanna live with a body upstairs where we eat and sleep?”

“I would rather we dispose of it entirely, exactly as I already have. Your hoarding days from the Beast Wars do not serve us here, Rattrap.”

Rattrap hung his head.

“We can use the body for parts as well,” Blackarachnia interrupted— which was far less comforting than what Thrust was sure she intended. “It just… makes more sense to keep it down here. For now.”

Thrust understood her apprehension. On top of the fact that it was a body, and they were stuck in a nightmare surrounded by zombies, he didn’t feel keen on keeping the body close by, himself. Particularly when it wasn’t locked down, where no one was completely sure it wouldn’t wander away. Even if “not” infected, an overabundance of caution was necessary. The giant X painted across its chassis was too uncomfortable hallmark to ignore. Combined with of the motive for the drone’s self-deactivation being an undetermined variable, there were too many unknowns. Everyone was on edge in the midst of their most recent disaster.… some more than others. It was no surprise no one wanted to say anything about it.

Thrust was not one of those people.

“Who do you think did that?”he asked.

No one said a word. The silence that permeated the wide space was even more hollow with the temporary cubicle walls absorbing his echo.

“I think we can all agree it wasn’t the drones who did that,” Thrust continued. “Seems like somethin’ we should be concerned about, is all.”

“All the more reason to dispose of the corpse outright,” Rhinox snapped. He seemed quick to respond on the matter. Fast-paced wit and intelligence cortex aside, his voice was stiff projecting out of his vocoder. He was nervous, too— for a different reason. No telling exactly why without the context of asking, and the mech was never going to tell. Not unless his life depended on it. “The parts are hardly useful for what we may need. Exposure to the outside, moving amongst the reanimates, leaves us at constant risk of contamination in a way we are not prepared for.”

Nightscream looked at his hands smeared in viscera and recoiled. He hurriedly wiped his palms on his upper legs, realized he was making the situation worse, and appeared to start panicking.

“It ain’t transferrable that way,” Rattrap said. “Don’t scare ‘em, Rhinox. We went over this before you even got here.”

“Went over a lot of things before you even got here,” Nightscream grumbled. He had already calmed down, but he definitely wasn’t happy about being covered in gore. He looked around, picked up a piece of paper from a nearby cubicle, and attempted to use it to towel himself off. It wasn’t remarkably effective.

“Viruses evolve. Your lot should more than be aware of that… minus certain technological company.” Rhinox gestured vaguely. “I would hardly expect my cohorts to understand the simplest of viral functions from a biological standpoint.”

“Bite me,” Jetstorm snapped.

Silence.

“Okay,” Jetstorm chirped, realizing his mistake. “My bad. I’ll take it back. Eat me? Oh. No, that’s worse.”

Rhinox ignored him. “The virus is constantly changing. From infection to infection, mutating out of control. There is no telling what variants exist now that the spread is planetwide. What changes to the electronic genome have occurred since the first point of infection to the next, hmm? New symptoms? Shorter incubation? New methods of transfer from host to host?

“Are we talking about something airborne?” Nightscream asked. Now he looked panicked again. “Could this end up like Megatron’s virus?”

Rhinox sneered. He glared at the closet, then the body on the floor in front of it. Finally, he turned away and rolled off on his treads, motioning to leave.

“Wash your hands,” he said.

Rattrap and Nightscream, still the most able-bodied people in the room, locked the dead drone behind the door. Rattrap reprogrammed the lock to a code of his choice, but Thrust was able to feel the electric frequency on his energy grid for the harmonics.

“We’ll worry about the marked-up drones later,” Rattrap said. “I think we got a little more to worry about.”

“Uh huh,” Jetstorm murmured. At the utterance, Thrust felt his energy field flux against his own harmonics. “I… think I need to lay down.”

Rattrap raised a brow.

“Antigravs,” Jetstorm clarified. He was whispering. “I’m burning through my reserves, here.”

“Just don’t make me carry you, too,” Nightscream replied. “My back’s killing me… geez, you sound terrible.”

“Thanks! I feel like a million bucks. In property damage.”

Thrust felt like he had exerted himself too… even though he hadn’t. The others had plenty of reasons to be tired, but not him— not like this. Injuries aside, what he was feeling was something separate: new. As soon as the door was closed, his whole body began aching all over. Every hydraulic line in his body cramped with frighteningly familiarity.

Then he realized the room’s smell was instantly worse. The air reeked as soon as the dead drone’s corpse was locked away.

Oh was right.

Thrust spun on his wheel and retreated back the way they came. He kept posture squared as neutral as he could manage. He hoped no one noticed the sharp notch in his engine’s RPM out of panic. He could already feel himself starting to condensate.

“Thrust?” That was Blackarachnia. The edge to her tone suggested more than worry. He couldn’t hide anything from her.

“Hey!” Jetstorm was particularly hurt by his exit. He did sound terrible, actually. The weakness in his tone was notable. He wondered if Rhinox had still noticed. “Roller boy! Where are you going?”

Away. Far, far away. Far away from anything that might tip him the wrong direction of his own weaknesses in the making. That X on the dead drone was feeling less like an omen and more like the tail end of a treasure trove needing excavation. Sweet as honey, glowing as ominous as a moon, and a secret more than worth its weight in hunger worth hiding. Something that he did not want to know on a person level.

What a great smell.

ix

The rest of the morning, leading into day, dragged at the same pace as the shambling crowd outside. Feeling less safe by the cycle as the horde grew. It the vitriol of its living death; their rediscovered doom.

“I’m not even sure I want to call them that, anymore,” Nightscream said to him. His voice was soft. Even after washing the gore off his hands and fur, the dark tackiness remained. “Living dead, I mean.”

“What makes you say that?”

After returning to the safety of their main hideout, they boarded the rest of the windows. At least, three of them had… Thrust had disappeared somewhere else in the facility without indicating where. Jetstorm was barely mobile as it was. Rhinox would be no help, so the remaining Maximals boarded the broken windows. Then they covered the rest for good measure— with the exception of two. With the sun beginning its descent from that highest point in the sky, its angle ushered an uncommon darkness within the safehouse. An even more unusual hush followed. No one wanted to engage with the reality of their situation any more than they already had that day.

Nightscream shrugged.

“Kiddo,” Rattrap tried. “C’mon. Humor me.”

Nightscream shrugged again. His apathetic demeanor made seem so much older than he really was. It was a sharp contrast to how he had been earlier that night. If Megatron’s takeover of Cybertron hadn’t robbed his youth from him, this purgatory of theirs had finished the task. “That down there? It isn’t living, even if they are moving. I get they’re zombies and that it’s not that hard of a concept to get… but that down there is worse than being dead. You hear about all the old Transformers who died in the Great War and are supposedly at peace now. That’s the opposite. That’s a f*cking nightmare to think that you can spend the rest of eternity just wandering around. I don’t care that they’re only drones— not all of them were mindless. We saw that today.”

They had. There had been more to the strategy of blocking the windows than trying to ignore the zombies… the eventual recognition of some of the horde’s newest members was its own horror. Those unfortunate drones they had seen mauled earlier were beginning to get back up. The ones who remained intact long enough to stand back up again, anyway. It was a grotesque anti-miracle in its own right. Starting with the drone that none of them recognized, who was the most noticeable of those “survivors” in the worst sense possible. With its chassis torn apart and hollowed, spilling cables and shredded metal, spewing black from its wounds. It lumbered with its backstrut snapped backwards at an angle. The gait it carried itself with was a morbid shamble. Its face caved in and unrecognizable— sans the intake gear that flexed its internal pseudo-jaw.

“It’s not death either,” Nightscream continued.

The drone who had died defending its friend was one of the worst to recognize. What had saved it from being ripped asunder was its position on the dumpster, where not all the drones could tear it to pieces at once. That delay in its dismemberment had allowed it to reanimate, and the results of its mauling were gruesome. Its chassis was empty, exposing the housing where its engine had once been. Now all that was left was an internal core sputtering sparks on the empty housing. It was true that the virus itself did take over the shells on a cellular level… there would have been no means for it to move, otherwise. its body was supported by its bare backstrut visible through its cracked chest. Visible creases in the metal where it had been ferociously gnawed shimmered where fluids dripped, pooling in each visor. Its visor had shattered, but the remaining pilot light that hadn’t been chewed of its tracking line was a white beacon in the dark. The glow was a broken, flickering headlight

It stood motionless in the street staring straight up for a long time. Howling the whole while, straining its dead vocoder until the fuse box shorted out and never came back on. Then it moved on with the rest of the flock, open mouthed in its static choked yowling. They never saw it again.

Rattrap hated watching, but at this point he felt like he had to. With everything changing, there was no telling what other freak scenario might catch them by surprise. “It’s not?”

“Think about it,” Nightscream said. Not in a way that begged dismissiveness, either— he was as serious as he could manage. Deadpan tone notwithstanding… he was exhausted. How could he have not been? “They’re out there. In the real world, I mean. The rest of us are stuck in this concrete box with nowhere else to run to. Like a casket.”

Rattrap didn’t get it. At this point, he was almost afraid to.

“We might as well be dead, too,” Nightscream finished. “We’re living dead in the other direction. The only thing separating us is that we’re not trying to tear them to pieces. Not yet anyway.”

“I think you should get some rest,” Rattrap said.

Nightscream transformed and took off towards the rafters. Rattrap found himself alone for a while longer as an eerie half-darkness settled. Casting the whole warehouse in sick brown glow, festering like the color of aging dirty oil. He doubted any of them would be getting much sleep. He found himself staring off into street as the horde continued to pulse and sway. Barely lit in the shadow of the buildings blocking that already strangled daylight. Pollution clouds made the sky pale in ill pink and red.

Rhinox’s voice resonated behind him. “Rattrap.”

“I’m not fixin’ to talk to you right now,” he warned.

Rhinox didn’t leave. He didn’t say anything, either. Rattrap had no way of discerning with his emotions which one was worse. They both stood by the window for a long time. Every klik that he had his back turned on the former Maximal had Rattrap’s fur standing up on end.

“What happened wasn’t an accident,” Rattrap said. “You did that on purpose.”

“You’re not completely changed for the worse, then.” Rhinox’s codec dripped with the sort of scorn Rattrap would have thought better for Megatron. It made him think about that time during the Beast Wars when he had his programming altered to Predacon standards. That personality had been so far flung, it was hard to imagine he was ever the same mech as his gentler self… or the version that Rattrap presumed he knew. Anyone could put on a face for the sake of pretending. It made recognizing the truth of a person that much harder. “I never penned you for as a sympathizer as far as an enemy mattered.”

“Things are different, now.”

“Hardly.” Rhinox scoffed; then he chuckled. He didn’t say what he found funny. “We are still fighting a war. The crux of the topic has changed, but the outcome we wish for has not.”

“What are you fightin’ for, then?” Rattrap finally turned on him. The only way he was able to find the other mech was by the glow of his visor. Burning red with its tracking light phasing back and forth. He wanted to imagine he was searing through that stare with the same intensity of his own. “You didn’t want to come back to us, remember? You don’t strike me as ever wanting to work for ol’ Grape Face, neither. This whole schtick that you’re puttin’ up reeks of whatever your own goals are— whatever they might be.”

“Is it not obvious?” Rhinox asked. Rattrap must have made a face, because the larger mech looked particularly offended. With his new expressions that barely moved, Rattrap recognized Rhinox’s annoyance for what it was. Being in a different body didn’t matter as much as he once expected. “This planet deserves a leader worthy of its potential. Megatron and Optimus hardly qualified.”

“Optimus never wanted to rule the planet,” Rattrap snapped. “Potential, Rhinox? Really? Look around, pally. There wasn’t exactly much potential left before the zombies came clambering out of every damn nook and cranny on this metal junkheap we’re stuck on.”

“I am more than aware of our current circ*mstances,” Rhinox muttered. He wasn’t quite as annoyed as Rattrap thought he might be. “I survived them insofar to this point, the same as you have. Potential is boundless in the grasp of a worthy ruler, and every master should have his allies to shape the same. Regardless of an apocalypse, or any other minor… inconvenience. A broken world can always be repaired.”

That was the hint. That was when Rattrap realized exactly what was being said. They stared at each other. as if he was aware he had said too much.

“You think you know how to fix this,” Rattrap said. There was no question.

Rhinox said nothing.

“You do know how to fix this,” Rattrap continued.

Rhinox turned to leave.

“Buddy,” Rattrap begged.

“As I have already indicated to you, allies are a short commodity for my expectation of trust,” Rhinox mumbled. “I trust I’ll have your support when the time is right for it.”

He left, rolling on his treads to the opposite side of the warehouse. To the same spot he had found him earlier that same day. Staring out the window onto the same street, putting them physically apart despite their… objectively identical views. In more than sight alone, because execution and methodology were two sides of the same personality where it mattered. Rattrap found himself turning over the request over and over in his head for a while longer. By the time he realized he had been staring off into nothing, the mob in the street below had migrated a significant length down the road. Those zombies he had recognized as being part of the group killed earlier were long gone. Replaced by the hundreds of others that had no doubt been turned in the amount of time that passed— smoke from the nearby production plant was still swirling overhead. The fumes choked the night and any hope they might have had left without a solution. How many more of those things had been turned in the amount of time he had been sitting here doing nothing? How many more would end up undead before the planet was crammed full to burst?

Through the smog, the outline of Unicron’s braincase peered over the buildings. Rising slowly, making gravity light and the pit of his fuel pump heavier than it had ever been in his life.

Rattrap made his way back over to the front of the warehouse. He was in serious need of a recharge… being awake for more than twenty-four cycles was making his processor lag. He cut along the far wall by the nook where the longer-resident Vehicons had set up, but only Jetstorm was in the alcove. Thrust was nowhere to be found, and Jetstorm was in his spot leaning up in the corner with his servos propped awkwardly. It wouldn’t occur to Rattrap until later that the other mech was struggling to hold himself up.

“You holdin’ up?” Rattrap asked.

“Low power allocation,” Jetstorm admitted quietly. “Still running low.”

“You refuel already?”

“Like I had a choice.” Jetstorm’s voice box turned over in a sigh. “With big and gruesome doing his lurking, being in decent fighting condition is sort of a must have.”

Big and gruesome. “Optimus?”

“Don’t act dumb.”

He wasn’t. “Where’s your better half?”

“Don’t know.” Jetstorm shuttered his optics closed with a downward motion of his brow plate. He kept it lowered for several kliks longer than Rattrap imagined he would have ever done the same. Trust was a rare commodity, like Rhinox said. “Lost track of him after we got back from dealing with the surviving member of the suicide squad, back there. Comms are still done from before, so no getting a hold of him that way.”

Ah. “He, uh… seemed pretty upset, huh?”

“Upset.” Jetstorm’s guffaw was almost inaudible. “Understatement of the millennium, Ratatouille. He needed his alone time more than the rest of us.”

Agreed, but following was an awkward beat where neither of them said anything else. Still, Rattrap would have been remiss not to admit that Jetstorm’s company was… preferable. Compared to how uncomfortable he had felt with Rhinox, this would have bordered something much more pleasant in a better time. Come to think of it, he couldn’t immediately remember the last time he was full and truly upset being in the jet’s presence… huh. It may have been when larger mech was passing his own gun back to him, after the scare involving their missing biker friend. Optimism for their future had as rapidly dwindling as the growing number of zombies threatened to bash in their door. It still was, but knowing they could co-exist in their collective limbo was a bittersweet one. A shared coffin — their tomb — was not a wholly bad place to be in the majority of their present company.

Rattrap sighed. “I got first watch this time, wingding.”

Jetstorm raised an optic ridge.

“You’re not the only one worried,” he admitted. “I’ve already been up all night and day now. What’s another few hours, right? Can’t exactly split the time with yer buddy when he’s taking care of himself, right?”

Jetstorm continued to stare back. Not glaring, either. Just looking straight back without the malice he would have come to expect, nor did it ever manifest. When he finally broke optic contact, he shuttered his optics again outright. The light flickered behind the red glass as he relaxed the power allocation going to his vision suite. He finally let go of the nervous tension in his body that Rattrap hadn’t even registered was there until it vanished.

“Thank you,” Jetstorm said. Genuinely. The anxiety leaving his codec dropped his voice half an octave. He sounded normal rather like than a maniacal cartoon character— like Silverbolt. Without all the soapy charisma, in the tone a regular mech he might have met on the street of a half-decent neighborhood. “I think trouble is still on the way, but it’s nice to know I don’t have to look over my shoulder for everyone.”

Rattrap agreed. He took to beast-mode and found a place under one of the shelving units to camp out, wedging himself between a canister of cleaner fluid and box of tools. Listening for anything that might have sounded out of place. Out of sight, but still watching for anything that might go awry. For a short while

Less than megacycle later, there was a tremendous crash. Glass shattered. A terrified, piercing shriek reached his audials over the roar of tumbling debris— and Rattrap was convinced their goose was finally cooked. He was sure that Optimus had come for them. It was the only explanation he could think of as he scrambled out from under his hiding spot. As he raced out, Rhinox’s energy signature remained on the far side of the room. He never moved from his spot.

As it turned out, Optimus had not come in through the ceiling skylight. The situation was far worse than that. Both in morale and for the longevity for their survival, and everything in-between. The skylight remained intact, but the smell of energon was overwhelming to the point of nausea… for some more than others. As Rattrap rounded the corner, Thrust came close to bowling into him. There was no telling when he had come back from whatever hiding spot he had dragged himself out of. He collapsed around the corner gagging and shaking. Violent dry heaving wracked his backstrut where he fought to stay upright, half-collapsed against a shelf. Rattrap was positive he was going to start vomiting through his vent slats.

Blackarachnia was screaming. “WHAT DID YOU DO!?”

Rattrap transformed to get a better view. He slowed as he rounded the femme’s back from where she was standing. In front of her, the energon supply closet had its doors ajar. Nightscream already through the threshold. The stunned teenager continued to stand in the middle of the room covered in energon from head-to-pede. It dripped off his frame where several cubes on the collapsed shelves had come crashing down on him. He remained frozen in the center of the destruction with only three shelves remaining intact behind him— then two. Adding insult to mortal injury was the collapse of one more shelf for good measure, shattering cubes all around the poor teen’s ankles.

Trouble wasn’t on the way. For “everything that ever was,” with fresh rising moonlight, it was already here.