The Centerline
By: The Feesh
The wind howled.
Bleak and bleary did the breeze bemoan the land's predicament, as the ground lay trapped beneath a layer of snow and ice that threatened to blot out its very existence with every passing day. It never seemed to let up; the sun had even ceased his attempts at piercing macabre clouds with his smiling rays of light, retreating into his burrow to hibernate until spring. The trees were barren and frozen; the roads were slick, a dreary scene appropriate for any seeking refuge from the gleeful cheeriness of urban warmth. Lady Winter had her way, as she did without fail every year.
Shape shifter; a great mechanical being beyond all of the human race's capacity to create took to the silent, mournful highway with naught left behind but a fleeting cloud of steam.
Hunter; he prowled, body hovering almost precariously over the unforgiving asphalt at ever increasing speeds.
Killer.
Or was he? Or was his once proud and successful self now but a relic of the past? Had the name that had once struck fear into Autobot resistance drifted into nothing? Had the very visage that no soldier wanted to face on the opposite side of the battlefield finally succumbed to the cruel pull of time and circumstance?
"Sir, Barricade is leading them. They've broken through the first line as though there was no one there! I urge for a retreat."
Silence.
"Sir! Captain, please, there is no victory to be had here. Outpost 3 says they've breached the walls, and there is no longer contact with 2 or 4. They will be here within a breem!"
"Affirmative. Evacuate the base. Ky-Alexa has been lost."
The Treaty throttled him, suffocated him and left the shock trooper scrabbling for the surface against the pitiless hands of Fate itself. Desperation and despair had become daily emotions within the stoic black chassis; he wanted to do something, he needed to do something, but all his vast purpose and talents had fled to the stars the moment Starscream broke atmosphere and left him behind.
To this.
Marooned. Stranded. Trapped within the confines of a peace agreement designed to snuff out mechanoids just like him.
The wind crooned and the asphalt moaned. Trees reached with bony, fleshless fingers towards the sky, clawing for the moon that had fallen victim to merciless clouds, which knew only of their own greed. White on black drifted over callous and vindictive pavement, cushioned only by the dense rubber of the ghost's tires.
He was a ghost.
Darting forward with single-minded zeal, talons bloodstained with the respective fluids of all of his enemies, both Autobots and their weapon-wielding fleshy allies, Barricade made his way through solemn halls. His foes had retreated in the face of their defeat, the knowledge of which brought the grounder a twisted sense of pleasure, so palpable that it was almost physical. He could feel it. He could taste it. Victory was at hand and he'd take the kill over intimate gratification if both were offered to him any day.
There were still survivors to be found and slain. Roving the archways, hunched like a beast, he hunted. An enemy turned the corner ahead and with a single, powerful bound, the unfortunate lost his head. Another emerged and was gutted with brutal claws, midsection torn and innards drawn outwards to pile in a mess at the mech's feet. The light flickered precariously in and out, delving the halls into strobing states of light and dark and so his scanners and radar were utilized. Visual input was confusing at best in that particular passage and therefore was eliminated. Barricade would rely on his sensors, his radar, and his audios to find his way.
Voices. Amidst the earsplitting din of background explosions, keen auditory receptors homed in on the familiar sound of frantic, panicked voices. He was aware at that moment that the rest of his troops had fallen behind or had otherwise become occupied somewhere behind him, he was traversing the hollowed corridors of an enemy fortress alone and without backup. No matter. Concealed in partial darkness, any who were ill fated enough to cross the killer's path met death one way or another before they could fully comprehend what was coming towards them. In the heat of battle, sniffing out victory, Barricade was most aware; every pressure change in the air, every errant footstep or whisper, every sharp clatter of gunfire nary escaped his attention as he mindlessly, bestially, searched and hunted and prowled for those he had been sent to destroy.
Count the bodies like sheep to the rhythm of the war drum.
Faster. Faster. Five hundred and fifty horses itched to be let loose on slippery roads. An obsidian carcass shuddered and creaked with the desire to run, to fly, to race and kill and destroy – refrained, carnal urges restrained behind the rotting and unreliable cage of the Saleen's sanity. Memories flitted with rapid frequency as his consciousness seemed to lull, yielding to the violent backwash of his subconscious mind. The road was there, but it wasn't. It was asphalt, but it was dust and dirt. It was cold, but scorchingly hot. It was foreign but it was home.
Finally he found them.
Hold up in a room, six Autobot officers planning their most viable method of escape.
He shrilled, a high, horrible sound that grated on the audials of all those who heard it, and they turned to face the black entryway. That was all the time given before the enemy soldier was inside their presumed safe haven.
They were bigger than him, but most did not breach twenty-five feet. They were armed, but surprised, and that would prove to be the dead end of the road for them, the officers stationed at Ky-Alexa.
Victory was right there, staring him in the face, beckoning him forward with slim, nimble fingers. Intoxicating; the smells, the sounds, the sights – scorched material, burnt wiring, the flash of cannons as they fired off outside, the sound of crumbling stone and metal walls and the steady, mournful groan of the establishment as it began to collapse upon itself under the siege of outside heavy artillery.
He went wild. Blood drunk. Mad with the win and the kills that he had worked so hard to earn.
Screaming and gunfire erupted within the room as the ghost blocked the exit and eviscerated the Autobot nearest to him. The dead shell fell haphazardly across the doorway. Panic gripped the remaining soldiers as they realized that this was it, their final stand, against an enemy they couldn't fathom of defeating. A stray shot took out the lights, plunging their world into chaotic shadow.
Sparks cascaded with illuminating beauty from the ceiling, catching bare glimpses of obsidian armor as Barricade lunged to and fro, slashing here, biting there, ducking a frenetic plasma weapon from time to time. Infrared came into play and all he saw were white-hot life forces encased in cold shades of blue and orange as he struck down two more in rapid succession.
Silver talons reached with lecherous need towards his next target, lovingly gripping the throat and taking it with him as he passed by, showered by fresh, hot energon. Still another fell to vengeful claws, the bodies piling up where they died, skewered, beheaded, mangled beyond recognition as the shock trooper tore through the room in seconds flat – and they died and screamed and bled and crumbled like paper beneath his hands and the lights flickered to elucidate the dark, to shed light on the atrocities, stare down at the pallid, gaping faces of the murdered as they gazed lifelessly upward.
One left.
A small one, perhaps eighteen feet tall and young in comparison to some of the others. He crouched; huddled across the room, whispering under his breath, perhaps asking for forgiveness for sins done. Dropping the fifth dead shell, Barricade did not pause to allow this last living his chance to finish what might have been a prayer, or could have been sanity's last slipping grip on reality. The grounder leapt, quadoptics blazing in the dark like beacons as he flashed his teeth and opened his maw and chewed, without repugnance, into the mechanoid's processor.
Victory. The creature stood above the stilled carcass of his last victim of the day and slammed those terrible talons into the cracked stone wall. He howled and shook as energy exploded along his neural network in a familiar built-up reaction; processes overloaded, nodes hummed and his sensory grid spiked with pleasure, causing his back to arch as his cries rose into the air and were drowned out by the sound of heavy gunfire.
Or was that…a horn?
Internal alarms slammed Barricade back into reality with all the force of a freight train. His senses were overwhelmed at first by the blinding light that the Saleen was suddenly faced with, lights connected to the form of a heavy Kenworth barreling straight at him doing sixty miles-per-hour or better. He could see the detailing in the grill as he screeched to the right and back onto the correct side of the road, feeling the cold rush of air as the truck sang past him with feet to spare.
Slaggit all. He'd drifted over the center line.