Chapter 9: In which Wildrider brings the rain

Primus, they're going to…

Wildrider nearly panicked at that moment. He had no leverage off the ground; with nothing for his wheels to grip, he couldn't move, and with his thrusters offline he couldn't fly. And at that angle, he couldn't have brought his guns to bear on either machine even if they had been functioning.

The forklift's tines reached the compactor.

Something flickered before Wildrider's vision. It was tiny and brief as a firefly's glow and any other Decepticon might not have noticed it, but one reason Wildrider was easily distracted was because so many things caught his attention. The flash in his diagnostic queue was no exception.

Transformation sequence: online.

The tines lifted slightly so that Wildrider's wheels would clear the lower jaw of the compactor. He transformed in that moment, falling between the tines and landing hard on the ground. Then he scuttled between the two machines on hands and knees as fast as he could, completely undignified and not caring, as the forklift's operator began yelling for help.

Another machine trundled closer, though in the growing darkness Wildrider couldn't see what it was and he wasn't really looking anyway. He lurched to his feet as the forklift swung ninety degrees to face him, tines rising until they were at the level of his chest. It plowed forward just as Wildrider pulled his scattershot gun from subspace and fired.

He didn't have the time to aim, but at that close range, he could hardly miss. A beam of lasers shot out, fanning rapidly, and punched through the forklift in two dozen places, blowing it apart. Wildrider didn't see – or care – what had happened to its human operator. He was still a little unsteady on his feet but the joy of battle surged through him like fresh energon as he turned to aim at the compactor.

A faint wssssh was the only warning he had as the three-ton wrecking ball swung at him. In the near-darkness, he didn't even see it until it was almost on him. He had one impression of a huge something coming at him fast, and he jerked aside. Too late.

The massive steel weight scraped past his chest and hit his right hand, dislocating two fingers instantly. It also sent his gun flying. Wildrider staggered back, air hissing through his intakes at the new shock of pain, and the wrecking ball struck a small warehouse which all but exploded under the impact. Chunks of concrete sprayed in all directions. Wildrider's armor turned most of those aside, but one jabbed into an ankle joint and he nearly fell.

The ball swung back and Wildrider took a stumbling step away even though he was already out of its path. But that's not good enough, not when the slagging machine can move! I have to be somewhere they can't reach--

He was expecting the next attack. Not that he could guess what it would be, but he knew the humans weren't going to stop, and he whirled around as he heard the tanklike treads. That was nearly too late as well. The flexible shaft joining the steel shears to their cab was so long that the shears reached him at the same time as the grinding roll of the treads.

The shears opened. They were giant pincers capable of snapping steel bars like twigs, and they would have closed around his neck if his injured ankle hadn't given out as he spun around. He went sprawling and the shears snapped shut where he had been standing. Lightning flashed again overhead, turning the Drag Strip-yellow of the machines to the color of bleached bones.

Wildrider glanced around desperately but his gun was nowhere in sight. He saw the pieces of broken concrete, though, and grabbed one with his good hand. The shears reached for him again and he threw the chunk of concrete at the machine's cab.

Glass shattered, the sound drowned by the thunder, and the human operator dropped out of sight in a red splash. Wildrider hooked an elbow around the shears' shaft as he pulled himself back to his feet – the operator of the wrecking ball was jockeying for a better position, trying to get the ball directly over him to drop it.

That was when a bloodstained hand grabbed at the levers of the shears for support. The entire structure jerked, pulling Wildrider off the ground; the shaft lifted and flexed crazily as he clung to it. He wasn't sure whether the operator was really trying to kill him or was just so badly injured that he didn't know what he was doing, but the result was the same. Abruptly the shaft jolted up until it was nearly vertical, seventy feet into the air, with Wildrider hanging on to it all the while. The cab spun sharply.

Wildrider lost his grip, flew through the air and slammed almost at once into one of the props of the water tower. He grabbed at the structure with his good hand and felt the vibrations in the thick steel support from the impact. The giant storage sphere was thirty feet above his head, looming like a fallen moon.

That's it, he thought.

The shears swung back and forth in a groping, disconnected motion and something else was approaching from his other side – a grapple with a giant articulated claw that opened and closed, opened and closed – but it didn't matter. Wildrider wrapped his uninjured leg around the steel prop to anchor himself and reached out as far as he could.

Ten feet out in empty air, fifteen. The prongs of the grapple's claw clashed against each other, but Wildrider's fingers brushed the shaft of the shears. Overstrained servos set off pain sensors but he ignored that as he closed his good hand and drew back, pulling the shears towards him.

The giant pincers scissored open, wide as his own armspan and stronger by far. They were so close that they could have taken his faceplate off, or jabbed an optic out even if they missed. Wildrider dropped first, though, ducking beneath the twin blades as they came together – they were fast by human standards, slow by those of a Cybertronic processor. He was still holding on to the shaft, and he yanked it as far back as he could.

The shears snapped shut around the thick steel prop of the water tower. As fast as he could, nearly losing his balance on the horizontal support that braced the props, Wildrider grabbed one of the pincers and bent it with all his strength. His arm shuddered with the effort, but it worked. The shears lodged in place, sinking deep into the steel that was too thick even for them to snap completely. Then the cab jerked back and the entire water tower trembled.

The grapple's claw snapped at Wildrider, barely missing, and he decided he was tired of playing death-by-Constructicon. Humans had rushed to help the injured machine operator, and he could hear them gathering near the fence, probably planning a counterattack.

Have to get somewhere secure, then. The nearest roof was behind him, in the opposite direction from the electrified fence, but it was also thirty feet away – no, closer to forty. With his thrusters still offline, if he missed it at that distance…

It's either that or sit here and wait to be picked off. Anyone who doesn't want to live on the edge doesn't want to live.

He sprang off the support, launching himself into the air and willing himself to transform. For a cold moment he thought it would fail, that he had been too badly damaged, and then his body folded and transformed. It hurt, but he was braced for that; his engine revved in midair and his front wheels spun as they hit the roof. His rear wheels missed it but the instant of momentum was enough to drag the rest of him on to the roof as well.

I did it! he thought happily. Maybe I'll try that with the Grand Canyon some day. Now, time to deal with the humans.

His engine racing, he shot forward and pivoted in a turn-on-a-cog maneuver. Weapons finally online, check… but not fully charged up yet. A single shot was all he would get for the moment, but one prop of the water tower, on its far side, was already destabilized from the shears yanking at it. Wildrider targeted the other.

His guns swiveled and he fired, a controlled searing of lasers through steel. Slowly and ponderously, the water tower leaned to one side, looming over the fence. People screamed and began to run. The lasers flickered and went out, but Wildrider hardly noticed that; he was watching in fascination as the giant sphere came down in a smooth unstoppable arc, as the water tower collapsed.

"TIMBERRRR!" he yelled.

The sphere hit the electric fence like a meteor and shattered in a gush of spray. Tremors shivered through the building beneath him, but the grapple's forward motion abruptly halted, as did the human cries. Water plus electricity equals very hot water, he thought, and began to giggle. He felt as though he was on the verge of over-energizing, though he knew it was a combination of residual pain, the relief of escaping with his life and the sheer exhilaration of causing so much havoc.

Wildrider had once fought a human crazier than he was – and almost as dangerous – who had called him the Avatar of Chaos and the Black Horse of the Apocalypse. He hadn't understood the second name ("I'm grey, and I'm not a horse!" he had yelled back at the human. "Get your optics checked!") but he liked the first one. The Stunticons got their thrills in different ways, and for Wildrider it was proving that no object was immovable when it met his irresistible force. What you can create, I can destroy. What you built high, I'll bring low. He laughed, rocking back and forth on his tires.

The light-headed feeling intensified. I could leap off from here and come down harder than that thing, he thought. I could leave this whole place a smoking crater in the ground. I could--

Suddenly he realized how close he had come to detaching from reality again. No. No, I'm not going to lose it. I'm all right now. He grasped at the first sane, practical thing to do and checked his diagnostic queue.

Warnings still flashed, but at least his stereo system was in working order. As he selected Megadeth's "Symphony of Destruction", the first raindrop struck his windshield and trickled down the glass, carving a clear trail through a layer of dust.

"Hey, no need for that," Wildrider called up. "There's plenty of water down here already." The sky didn't seem to be listening, though, because it started to dump more rain on him. His vents fell silent as the water helped cool him off, and he remembered that he was supposed to be looking for Geri.

He checked the location of his emergency beacon – it was in a smaller building far to his left, but on the lowest floor. All right, let's distract them from her then, he thought as he turned left and transformed. His scattershot pistol was gone, which annoyed him – he'd liked that gun – but he had something else, the full can of gasoline.

He popped a door and pulled the can out between thumb and forefinger. Several windows on the topmost floor of the building were lighted, and he picked the largest of those. He hefted the can in his good hand, drew his arm back and flung the can out as hard as he could.

Years ago, Breakdown had come up with a game he called "Stunticon skeet shoot". The rules were simple – lob a full can of gas as far out as possible, and try to shoot it before it hit the ground. Points were scored based on how far the can traveled and how many shots it took.

Wildrider liked watching the gasoline explode into flames, like liquid fireworks, and even Motormaster didn't seem to mind them leaving the base to play (in other words, he didn't call them all stupid idiots for wasting their time). Unfortunately Drag Strip won the first shoot and bragged about his performance until they were all sick of him.

After he offered to give them lessons in target practice, Wildrider punched him, but Breakdown fumed quietly and later said that they needed a better strategy. "Hitting Drag Strip only makes him sure that we're jealous of how awesome he is. We've got to really flatten him."

Really flattening him required two months of secret and intensive shooting practice, which made Wildrider feel somewhat flattened too, but it paid off during their next game. The look on Drag Strip's face when they both beat him was worth it, though what really cracked Wildrider up was when Dead End, in his position as scorekeeper, pretended to berate both him and Breakdown. "That was genuinely sub-par, Wildrider. Are you feeling unwell today? And Breakdown, I'm certain you can fling it at least another half-mile!" Drag Strip listened with an expression of utter horror, though he figured out he was the aft of the joke as soon as Wildrider started giggling uncontrollably.

The end result of the competition, though, was that both Wildrider and Breakdown were very good at hitting gas cans in flight, and although it had been a little while since the last skeet shoot, Wildrider felt as confident as always. The can arced towards the largest window as he transformed, zoomed in with his optics and brought his forward-mounted guns to bear on it.

Have to time it right. If he hit it outside the building, the rain now coming down in sheets would put out the flames. The can neared the window, turned it to a spiderweb of cracks and smashed through it. Wildrider fired in the next instant.

The can exploded, showering whatever was beyond the window with burning gasoline. Wildrider thought he heard people shouting from inside as he transformed again, climbed down half of the way and leaped the rest. The fence was off, though he guessed the humans would have cut power to it after the water tower collapsed.

Darkness and pelting rain hid the worst of the destruction, though the demolition machines still stood frozen where their operators had abandoned them. Wildrider transformed again, gunned his engine and shot forward, weaving between the wrecking ball and the grapple. His rear wheels flung up a slurry of water thick with blood and dust. He raced across the wide compound towards the small building at the far end, homing in on the signal.

Part of the building's topmost floor was on fire, but Wildrider didn't spare that another look. After the electric fence, he was going to make slagging sure the humans didn't trick him again. So his optical sensors swept his surroundings in night-vision mode, intensity range at maximum, and he saw Geri dart out from the building, smack dab into another human. Wildrider knew it was funny, but for some reason, all he could think was, That optics thing is gonna get her slagged some day, as he accelerated to top speed.

He couldn't crash into both of them, but she tried to pull away and the other human hit her. That separated the two of them for the moment that he needed. In the storm and the noise all around, the human didn't see or hear him until it was far too late.

Racing at just over two hundred miles per hour, Wildrider roared forward, tires throwing up waves on either side and splashing Geri from head to foot. The human was far bigger than she was but at that speed and with his much greater mass, Wildrider hardly even felt the impact that picked the human off the ground and hurled him through the air.

He threw the brakes on as the human landed twenty feet away with a heavy, soggy thud. Touchdown! he thought and skidded to a halt just before he could smash into an office block. Water sloshed around his tires. Rather than waste time turning, he threw his transmission into reverse and sped backwards again, just as two more humans rushed out of what looked like a parking lot, heading towards Geri. She had pulled herself up on one knee by then, though, and Wildrider reached her first, splattering her with water for a second time.

He popped a door open and did his best Terminator impression. "Come with me if you want to live."

It occurred to him a moment later that imitating someone else's voice was probably not the smartest thing to do when dealing with a blind human, but his Texas twang must have undercut the impersonation enough to give him away. Geri grabbed the edge of his door and used that to haul herself up. She flung herself inside, sprawling half across his front seat and all the DVDs.

"Get your legs in!" Wildrider didn't know whether she was injured or not, but he didn't have the time to find out and bellowed orders usually motivated the Stunticons. Geri pulled her legs up just enough that the door slamming shut didn't take them off at the ankles, and Wildrider thudded the locks down.

One of the men turned and ran back into the parking lot, but the other one yanked at the handle and then actually kicked the side of the door. And since he wore steel-toed boots, that left a scrape in the red stripe that ran along Wildrider's lower edge.

"Did you just do what I think you did?" Wildrider said. In all his life, he had only ever been kicked by Motormaster, so he did not take that kind of thing from humans.

He flung the door open as hard as he could and it slammed into the human's shins, sending him to the ground. "Okay then, I'll kick you back. Hold on, kiddo!"

He couldn't transform with Geri inside, but that didn't matter; the door swung shut again and he reversed. An engine growled from within the parking lot, headlights flicking on like the eyes of an animal in the darkness, as a massive Ford F-350 started up and lumbered out, heading towards him. Its grille looked as thick as Motormaster's, but it was much slower. Wildrider knew it would never reach the human before he did, though it was trying.

"Aw, that's cute!" he yelled at the Ford as he shot forward. "It's like you want to be a Stunticon when you grow up!" The human with the steel-toed boots tried to scrabble out of the way and a tire rolled over his ankle. Then it rolled back as Wildrider threw his transmission into reverse to get away from the pickup. He could have fired at it, but a better idea leaped into his mind.

Geri struggled up as Wildrider backed away, ignoring the screaming human. He knew more humans were watching from what they probably hoped were safe locations, though one of them took a pot shot at him from behind a dumpster. Geri flinched at the sharp crack of gunfire.

"Don't worry!" Wildrider said, expending his lasers again as he fired back. "My windows are bulletproof." Though dumpsters aren't laserproof, hah. "You can make faces at those morons if you like." And I'd rather have them aiming at the windshield than the tires anyway.

"No thanks." Geri fastened her seatbelt with trembling fingers, and when she spoke, it sounded as though she was hyperventilating. "We have to question them. Find out what's going on."

"Deactivate my emergency beacon first," Wildrider said, watching as the Ford began to reverse as well. Taking on an electric fence, demolition machines and an oversized pickup was a joyride compared to what would happen if Motormaster went out of his way to track down the distress call. "That switch on the left, push it back all the way. All right, done. Hey, did you miss me?"

"I think someone's trying to kill my father," Geri said. "Can you make them tell me where he is?"

"Which one of 'em would know?" The Ford backed away for the length of the drive that led up to the building, and Wildrider laughed softly. Whoever's driving that knows this game.

"Miss Andrews," Geri said. "Tell them to bring her down – her room is on the top floor, and I heard her say--"

"The top floor?" Wildrider and the Ford faced each other from a distance of just over two hundred yards now, and his gearshift jolted forward. "The top floor of the place you were in just now?"

"Yes. Why?"

"I kinda set it on fire." Wildrider's engine revved as though it was trying to burst out from under his hood, but he kept the brakes on. Geri looked as though she'd been hit between the eyes with an i-beam, so he continued. "But that's no biggie. Once this lot sees what I'm going to do, they'll tell you anything you want to know."

"Why, what are you going to do?"

"Play chicken with a Ford F-350."


Taipan Kiryu : You made an interesting point – that when the bad guys try to do something heroic, they usually pay a hefty price for it. I think it's much easier for writers to make villains or anti-heroes suffer than to put good, kind and sweet characters through hell (and if this happens, it usually becomes a hurt-comfort thing).

Also agree that the Stunticons preferred Earth to Cybertron. I don't know if you've read the TF Mirrorverse stories, but there's a great one called "Mind of a Menasor", which features the points of view of the mirror-Stunticons, and mirror-Wildrider's is about how they think of Earth as their home. That version of Wildrider is pretty cool too (and the Grand Canyon comment is a reference to him).

Flarey and Cybernetic Mango: Thanks for reviewing, and don't worry, because Wildrider won't be scrapped by a compactor just yet. I've got something much worse planned for him.

meteor prime: Glad you like the story. :) I didn't even know who the Stunticons were until I read The Starhorse's "Blue 42", where Dead End provides some hilarious moments. After that I became interested in all the other Stunticons as well.

Tugera: The humans were expecting trouble, so they had some security precautions in place, but they didn't expect Wildrider to helpfully knock himself senseless on the electric fence.

tomorrow4eva: I love writing cliffhangers, and there are going to be quite a few more. Thanks for commenting!