11~
Their work was desperate, crude and rushed, but it was almost done, and although machines didn't need to rest, generally, Freddy took the time to stand by the edge of the elevated garage's rooftop parking lot, taking in the grand view and the quiet air, after the surprising roar of one of the buildings of the neighborhood falling into dust, minutes prior.
The street below was wide and deserted, leading up to the parking structure, like a regal boulevard. He wished that his other friends were with him, in relative safety, to enjoy the stillness and contemplate on the battle that was to come, that was inevitable.
But, whether they were here with him or not, here, and on their flimsy terms, they would have to best their enemy. Based on what was to be used as their weapons, no other place would do.
Far behind him, the sound of an elevator door opening heralded the approach of the cocksure Red.
"How did it go down there?" Freddy asked when Red stood beside him, looking out on the city.
"No problem," Red said. "It's a good thing I'm built to work on cars, or this would never work. I just finished connecting those cars to me, down there, so we're all set."
The initial part of the attack plan that Red proposed had a barbarian quality to it, in that it was both brilliant and dangerously aggressive, as its creator was beginning to look to Freddy. But, it was the final part of the plan that Freddy could proudly claim as is own.
Utilizing his vehicle diagnostic override, used primarily to test vehicles before and after they were serviced by his model, Red hacked in and controlled almost every air-car that was parked on the roof.
Then, with Freddy's careful direction, lined them up and parked them, bumper-to-bumper and two abreast, into a long row, leading towards the roof's edge. Two cars, perpendicularly, parked under the two that were closest to the edge, turned the row into a suddenly sharp-inclined ramp.
That was a curious feat, in and of itself, but what truly made it odd was that Freddy had Red had parked every car in that row, save for the two that formed the incline, upside-down, so that all of their anti-gravity emitters were pointing up. At the other end of the row, two heavy-duty air-transports were, ungainly, parked on their rears, so that their undercarriaged anti-gravity emitters were pointed down the length of the ramp.
Red gave a knowing glance at Freddy. "Is our good-bye kiss ready for Dee?"
"I think so. I took it from a section of the building that won't need it. I hope."
"What do you mean, "You hope?""
"Well, I wasn't programmed for architectural modifications. I just went with my engineering database and selected what, I hope, will do the job. I just hope this building doesn't take too much damage, when we deal with her."
"Then, I guess, we'll worry about that, if it happens. In the meantime, we've got a call to make. Freddy, since she knows you better, will you do the honors?"
Freddy gave another look out onto the city to calm himself, and then sighed, "Okay."
Dee kept Frankenstein Jr. in a low, tight holding pattern over downtown, but the pair couldn't find their prey. Every so often, they would surprise and terrify a group of evacuees, scattering them to the very outskirts of town, but none were recognized as their targets, and so, were left alone. Dee considered that to be incredibly gracious and charitable, on her part.
She was about to have Frankie circle back to the Civic Database, so they could draw them out by holding the people hiding in there, hostage, when something unexpected came over her comm. A challenge.
"Dee, it's me, Freddy," came the communiqué. "I couldn't help but overhear your tale of how you tricked us into doing your dirty work. But, it sounded like you weren't finished. Why don't you come down Babbage Street East, so you can tell the rest of it? What do you say?"
He knew, that as a member of the gang, she was part of their comms network, and that, out there, somewhere, she was listening, but it was the hanging silence that unnerved him more than the reply that finally came over the air.
"Of course, Freddy," Dee said, casually. "Anything for you and I hope you still have some of those strangers with you. I'd like to give them a nice send-off after my tale is done. 'Til then!"
Some distance away, the rest of the two groups of machines overheard the exchange on their radios, causing Buzzy to worry, aloud, "*Buzz* Babbage Street? That's blocks away!"
"And why did Freddy want her to know where he was?" Vellum asked, fighting to keep the thought of him being demolished by Frankenstein Jr.'s controlled hand from getting to her. "We've got to get there, fast!"
From his vantage point, Freddy was alerted to the thunderous call of jets overhead, heralding the arrival of Dee astride Frankenstein Jr., as he came in for a landing, a city block from the garage, on East Babbage Street.
"Is this the place, Freddy?" Dee asked on the air.
"You're here," he transmitted, simply. "Just walk up to the garage, ahead. You can't miss it."
With a squeeze of her ring-hand, Frankie was goaded to move forward, step by intimidating step, up the street, while Dee decided to continue her confession, on the way.
"Now, as I was saying before your new friends interrupted me by dying," she transmitted. "I had already fooled Vellum, but I needed the Crush. I overheard my owner talking about a shipment of the stuff that would be leaving his plant to be disposed, so I came to you, Freddy the Engineer. I had you whip up a trap that would stop the truck en route and then steal a few tanks for me."
"And what about Buzzy and Scooby-Fuse?" Freddy asked, fighting the anxiety of the coming fight and the sorrow of who he would be fighting, as Frankenstein Jr. paced up to the last block before the one he was on. Timing would be critical for this to work.
"Oh, them? I don't know. Those two were always hanging around, so I figured I'd reprogram them, too. You never know when a queen could use a couple of jesters."
Freddy, confident that she couldn't hear him from that distance, called down from the roof to one of the levels just below him. "Red, she's on her way!"
From where he was, Red looked out from one of the panoramic hangar openings that led air-cars into a parking level and saw, in the middle of the street, a weaponized giant strolling towards them.
"I know! I know!" he yelled back. "Keep her talking!"
Freddy looked out to the deadly duo and transmitted, "So, then what did you do?"
Unseen by him, Dee smiled, "Why, I'm glad you asked. Once everything was ready, I set to work on my masterplan. My owner was really big on international parties to make new business contacts, so, when the next one was held, I secretly spiked the punch with Crush, and let fate take over.
"After a few years of watching on the news the growing panic of people all over the world not being able to have children, I gathered all of you together, wiped your memories, shut you down, and hid you and myself away, to wait out the coming extinction! Pretty neat, huh?"
The weight of the things they did, whether they were controlled or not, gave Freddy a sorrowful pause. The ghosts of all of humanity began to haunt him in waves, so profoundly, that he almost forgot about the plan to avenge their deaths...with Dee's.
'The plan!' he remembered. 'Don't forget that! Finish her, finish this, and then grieve.'
"You tricked us into doing all of that?" he asked. Then, something confused him. "If we served no other purpose for you, why did you keep us together? Why not just destroy us and tie up loose ends?"
"Good question," Dee broadcasted, almost in range for the attack. Hers and theirs. "Every queen needs her court. You served me so well in the past, I figured that when I wiped your memories, you'd all wake up in the future, and wouldn't get suspicious.
"Even though we were all shut down, I would wake up, every hundred years or so, and check the surviving news feeds, to learn about mankind's condition, until, finally, one day, I found out that there was no more mankind!
"I looked for surviving access to the Infonet, went online and installed Vellum's infrastructure program, so that the country's power grids and robotics factories came back on-line, rebuilding and repopulating the country, and eventually, the world!"
'A few more yards!' thought Freddy. Then, his faceplate fell in a frown, because Frankie suddenly stopped walking and Dee was, dangerously, interested in something else.
The two halted their march outside the hotel on the block, focusing on the windows of the first few floors of the building. Freddy and Red couldn't see what had Dee so riveted, but she could see, from the corners of her vision, that some of the window shades twitched and shuttered.
Someone was still in there and tried to hide after they had been spying out of those windows.
"What's wrong, Dee?" Freddy broadcasted to her.
"Oh, nothing important," she replied. "Just some nosey robots peeking on me, instead of running to the hills. Can't a girl get any privacy?"
She turned to Junior. "Frankie, wreck the place, if you please."
"No!" Freddy screamed, as the titan floated up to the offending floors, assumed a fighting stance, and began battering the hotel's facade, with his fists, into a cascade of rubble on the street, exposing rooms and stunned patrons.
"What?" Red yelled from the elevator after it let him off on the roof. "What's wrong?"
"The hotel!" Freddy wailed in anguish. "I thought it was empty! They're people in there, and she's making that robot destroy it!"
Red looked out and saw the destruction, which was compounded when Frankie moved away from the building, opened the shield on his chest, and extended a nozzle from its depths. A large stream of flame reached out and splashed into the hotel's floors, incinerating rooms and other robots, and weakening an already unstable structure with deep fire damage.
"That's it, babe!" Red growled, moved by the destruction of the innocents. "You're parts!"
In his mind, Red called up every air-car he had been working to connect in the lower levels.
Just under the roof, the garage became a vehicular music hall playing a symphony of synchronized engine turning, as two hangar levels of air-cars began to rise and pitch forward towards their openings, with Red as their sole driver.
Dee's attention of the carnage was diverted by the energized whine of two squadrons of cars soaring straight for her and Frankie.
"Frankie!" she screamed in warning.
The squadrons circled high over the street, and two cars split off from them, diving full-speed, towards Red's big target.
Realizing that they were too high for her to jump to safety, Dee crouched over, and clung onto his cape in a death grip, hoping against hope that Junior was as tough as the history of his secret files said.
Junior turned to face the vehicles, too late, as Red had them side-swipe with the robot's face and shoulder, causing him to reel back and pivot into a downward spiral that had a screeching Dee swinging out from his cape due to centrifugal force, and him crashing into a stunned crouch in the, now furrowed, asphalt.
The damaged cars, now leaking fluids and flying more ungainly, banked low and streaked down the street at Junior.
Frankie, running on automatic while his brain attempted to recover, and still crouched to provide as small a target profile as possible, opened his shield, again, and unleashed his flamethrower, hoping to shoot the noticed cars down before another collision.
One was caught fully in the burning stream, suffered too much internal damage, and fell, cork-screwing into the ground, the other, only singed by the sweeping stream, continued, until it, finally, torpedoed into Junior's raised left knee. What remained of the car deflected high from the impact to spin and then burn, somewhere, on the other side of the street.
Dee, still maintaining her grip from his back, screamed, "Freddy! You had something to do with this!"
The spinning wreckage of the second car rested in a fiery heap by the intersection of East Babbage and Gates, that Marcie and the others entered after following the incredible sounds of battle, nearby.
"There she is!" Daisy said, as they all stopped to watch an irate Dee snatch handfuls of cape to climb up Frankenstein Jr. and perch upon his shoulder again.
"Who's attacking them?" Marcie pondered, surmising that the attack didn't come from the nearby hotel she watched being gutted by fire and burning to the ground.
Vellum disregarded radio silence to send out a query to Freddy and/or Red. "Hello? Is anybody still alive out there?"
In the robot's collective heads, came a long-awaited reply from Freddy. "Vellum? It's me and Red! Where are you?"
"We're on Babbage Street. We heard you give your challenge to Dee."
Dee, overhearing, swiveled around on Frankie's shoulder, to look behind him, while his still rested in his crouch, waiting for his systems to recover from the shock damage his frame, joints and even brain received.
Upon seeing them, and them, her, she didn't know if she was angry that they survived her, or happy that they did, so she could destroy them, properly, and witness their housings bend and burn.
"Frankie!" Dee yelled at him. "They're behind you! Crush them!"
Junior slowly stood up, more as a test to see if his leg drivetrain was undamaged. It wasn't, as he turned to face the little group of robots.
"I'll be more thorough, this time," Dee said, looking down on them, like some self-righteous executioner.
Frankie took a lumbering step towards them, put weight on his left leg, and lurched out of balance with a very pronounced limp.
He ran a diagnostic on that leg and was soon given the inconvenient news. The raw kinetic energy of the car was sufficient to knock his patella gearwork, painfully, out of alignment.
"He's hurt!" Buzzy pointed out to the group, and then transmitted, "Red! Freddy! Where *buzz* are you guys?"
"Big parking garage up the street," Red transmitted. "Do you see it?"
Marcie and the others looked past the hobbled Frankie and saw the wide tower, ahead.
"Yeah!" she broadcasted.
"Then, run for it!"
The fugitive machines formed up and ran past a confused Frankenstein Jr., who tried to follow the ring-bearer's frantic command of crushing them, but they scattered around his bulk before he could select the closest target.
Coupled with his now slower, more labored gait, he couldn't reach them, as the little robots ran as fast as their drivetrains could move them, up the street, and out of the range of his pulverizing hands or feet.
"Shoot them!" cried Dee.
Fire control computers locked his eyes on the machines, as they made the mistake of thinking they were safely out of reach and regrouped back into a larger target profile, further away.
Motors in his head rotated a weapons carousel behind his nasal cavity, and upon selection, the tip of his nose opened to free a squat jet nozzle.
From her position, Dee saw the barrel revealed, and smiled, malevolently. "Liquid nitrogen? Good idea! When you want them to freeze, you mean it!" Thoughts of what happened to the Civic Database's holo-fountain when it froze under the jets of that weapon, tickled her.
So intent were Dee and Frankie on freezing and smashing the group on the ground, that she didn't notice, and he didn't react to his early warning radar fast enough to deal with the direct slamming of two more puppeteered air-cars into the small of the giant's back, Red's contribution to covering his friends' approach.
Dee could feel the frightening impacts of the vehicles detonating just below her, as Junior began to stagger, badly, his gyro-stabilizers and leg drivetrain fighting a desperate battle against his bad knee to keep him from pitching forward on his face.
His armor was made strong enough to outwardly resist breaches from the car crashes; however, because the armor was so, relatively, thin, those self-same collisions were battering against his underlying framework, allowing the stresses of those hits to travel along it, like violent vibrations on the surface of a tuning fork.
The result of this unconventional form of attack was, incredibly, the mighty Frankenstein Jr. suffering from small, yet cumulative internal damage, ranging from bothersome misalignments on successfully struck joints, to more distressing "black-outs," like the one he experienced when he took a earlier car to the face, as his more sensitive computer brain tried to cope with electrical disruption caused by devastating strikes against his head.
Junior took the initiative to fly after them before they reached the relative safety of the garage, and activated his anti-gravity drive, with alarming results.
Instead of floating on a vertical column of contra-gravity, he pitched sharply to the left, bouncing into the facade of a building that neighbored the destroyed hotel. Another diagnostic had confirmed what happened.
Both legs, individually, housed the fuel systems that supported each foot's jets, as well as the anti-gravitic repellors. Both repellors worked in perfect sync with his avionics, and were needed, otherwise, he would expend too much fuel just trying to launch his immense weight to fly.
Damage to that leg's joint caused sympathetic, physical damage to its propulsion and the repellor, weakening it to the point that it couldn't support that side of his body, anymore.
Erring on the side of caution not to use his jets to hop over to the garage to intercept his targets, for fear of igniting any fuel possibly leaking out of a defeated self-sealing tank, Frankie marched, stiff-legged up the street after them.
The head-start Red gave Marcie and the others allowed them to rush into the dank of the street entrance, a place afforded only to ground-level hover-cars and transports. They didn't stop until they felt that they were sufficiently deep within to hide among the vehicles and be protected by the sheer mass of the structure.
Off to one side of the level, an elevator opened its doors, just as Freddy's voice broadcasted into their heads.
"Take the elevator to the roof, gang!" he instructed them. They didn't need to be told twice.
Marcie stepped out with the rest to the open-air panorama of the roof, while Red stepped away from the roof's edge and his attack to hurry over to see Daisy. The expression on his faceplate, more than evidently, was showing his gratitude to whatever kept her safe.
"Daisy, you're alive! I was so worried about you!"
Daisy had to hold that moment and study it. Cocky, gruff Red Herring was expressing genuine concern and fear of losing her?
"Red!" she replied, her optics brightening at his behavior. "You were really worried for me?"
Realizing that everyone was looking to him to romantically respond, he sheepishly toned down his relief. "Uh, yeah, y'know. I, uh, didn't want Dee to get you."
Daisy strolled closer to him. "Aww, that's so nice, Red, and this is for you." She promptly punched him in the shoulder with a clang.
Intimacy thoroughly broken, Red rubbed his arm housing. "Wh-What was that for?" he sputtered.
"That was for pranking on poor Jason back at Sundial," she said, calmly.
"Yeah!" Jason chimed in, indignantly. Red almost laughed.
"Jason?" he asked her, incredulously. "Oh, come on! I was just joking around with him. He knows I don't mean anything by it. I just thought that since we had Marcie's brains with us on this trip, I'd bring him along to double our odds."
"Uh-huh," she said, giving Red a look that told him that although he was a robot, now, just because he could tap into his Irish heritage and try to sooth her indignation with Blarney-kissed smoothness, didn't mean it would work, at least, not this time.
Turning away from the awkwardness of that scene, Freddy focused his grateful attention to Vellum, creating an awkward scene of his own.
"Vellum, it's great to hear your voice!" he said, nervously. He wanted to convey his own relief that she was still functional, but thoughts of what she said to him earlier in the Database created conflicts in his Emotion Core's software.
"It's, uh, great to hear yours, Freddy," she replied, amicably, feeling similar disruptions in her Core's software. She watched in silent dismay at his clumsy body language and heard his equally clumsy inflections, fearing that she was probably far too forward in her confession, and that he was, somehow, hurt by it. "Are you...all right?"
"Uh, sure!" he said, aloud, now painfully conscious of the strange image he was projecting to her. "What's not to be all right about? You're chatting. I'm chatting. We're both...chatting..."
"Scintillating conversation," Marcie interjected between the two, secretly hoping her own upcoming reunion with Velma wouldn't be this...troubled. "But, before you ask each other out to the prom, I think we better take care of You-know-who, down there. This brings me to this question."
She gestured over to the weird sight, nearby. A row of upended cars, still idling away. "What is that?"
Freddy explained. "Maybe our last chance, Marcie. All part of our genius plan. Me, with this, and Red, with his air-car attacks."
Marcie couldn't help but cock her head to the side upon hearing that. "He came up with that?"
"Yeah!" Red crowed after overhearing. "You and Jason aren't the only big brains around here, y'know? I'm flying all of those cars, down there, like radio controlled airplanes! Cool, huh?"
Marcie had to admit that it was, and said as much with a surprised shrug. "And that demolition derby, over there?"
"Freddy's knockout punch."
"He's coming! He's coming!" alerted Scooby, while he was looking, nervously, over the roof's edge.
Everyone gathered next to him and could see that, far below, Dee and Frankenstein Jr. were, indeed, coming, albeit slowly, due to the bad leg, but they knew that once he got close enough to use his ranged weapons, if he couldn't shoot them off the roof, then he would do everything in his power, short of draining his batteries to critical, to bring the entire building down.
A simultaneous crackle over their radios signaled Dee's incoming call. "You know, I would have been satisfied ruling from the shadows, a little while longer, but thanks to you humans, you brought me the greatest present a girl could have, a time machine! Now, I have the ultimate doomsday weapon. The whole of E-001 will bow to my public superiority, or I'll go back to the very dawn of man, and release the Crush I have hidden away!"
There was a combined and confused silence from the other robots. What more could she do to Man that wasn't already done?
It wasn't until Vellum thought more on it, did the dread weigh of her threat crystallize. "Dee, no! You can't!"
Red glanced at her, still confused. "What? She's bluffing. She already wiped humans out. What more could she do?"
"Wipe us out!" she answered in genuine fear.
Then, it dawned, terribly, on Freddy, as well. "Of course! Humanity left behind the technology that allowed us to rebuild. If humanity never existed to begin with, then there's no robotic technology. No us!"
"Like I said," Dee said, smugly. "The ultimate doomsday weapon." Incoming fire from Frankenstein Jr.'s nose cannon punctuated Dee's words, striking up under the roof's pressed-molded concrete edge to rain pulverized grit over the evading robots.
"All machinekind will worship me, now, or else!" Dee proclaimed in their radios. After that, there was only dead-air.
Red peered over the ragged edge to see where their attackers were and how close. Then, actively ran transmitted commands to a few of the air-cars in his override list.
"Here's a counter-proposal," he muttered, as four more cars peeled from the circling squadrons, flew down the street, banked low, and then zoomed up the street towards Junior. Unfortunately, Junior was ready for them.
The quartet flew at chest and head level, but because of the difference of some of the models, some flew faster than others, making their formation loose.
Frankie zeroed in on the two foremost vehicles and blew them to flaming scrap with the nose cannon. The third was struck down by his fist, swatted away into the garage's foundation, a clearly tactical move on his part, but the last one flew just low enough for him to miss, allowing it to smash into his midsection hard enough to make him double over and groan in rare pain.
Slowly recovering once again, Frankie lifted his head and proceeded to shoot at the bothersome 'bots with nasal cannon-fire.
"Are they close enough?" A ducking Red yelled over the sound of explosive rounds chewing up the rim of the rooftop.
Freddy dared to peek down, a moment later, and calculate the distance needed to spring the trap. He shook his head, grimly. "He's not there yet! We've got to drive him to the spot!"
"Drive him to what spot?" asked Vellum.
"To the spot that I calculated!" Freddy yelled, as he ran over to an air-transport that was parked nearby. He hoped into its cab, started it up, and hovered it low and backwards by the two up-right transports that stood at the end of the air-car row.
He pitched the transport upward, allowing something to slide out of its cargo bed. Something long and metallic.
A length of steel support beam, cut from an upper level of the garage, slid towards the belly of the cars under it, but instead of crushing them, it bobbed ponderously within the cushion of the cars' anti-gravity emanations.
Marcie saw the missile, essentially, a massive bolt with one end cut and filed into a crudely sharpened head, floating, length-wise, over the exposed undercarriages and understood with a nod. "An anti-gravity launch way. Now, that's a serious build," she muttered.
She turned to the others and explained. "They got to get that big guy into position, so they can stake him like a vampire, but he's got to be in the right spot!"
Jason risked a peek down, and asked, "You mean...where that manhole cover is?"
"Yeah!" Red said. "He steps over that, and hopefully, we'll get him!"
The cover was directly below, but yards distant from the garage's entrance. The spear could fly, but a number of factors could still foul the strike, unless the monster could be made to stand in the kill zone long enough...
"Get ready!" he yelled, screwing up his courage and revving to the elevator. He managed to hear a frantic Daisy yell, "Jason! Wait!" before the doors closed, and he descended.
Red found himself frozen in place. He knew that it wasn't the typical, frightful reaction of his friend, just now, but that of quick, decisive bravery. He didn't think Jason was even capable of that, but he watched the elevator doors closed and couldn't think of a disparaging thing to say. Time wouldn't permit him, and even if he could, he knew that it would deeply shame him.
Honor was what Jason deserved, that, and a well-played distraction to tie in with his.
Red felt like a general on the front lines, yelling to all, "Okay, I'll give him some time, and you guys get that launcher prepped!"
He pushed his emotions aside and concentrated on the task at hand. All at once, every car in what was left of the two squadrons stopped their orbit overhead and flew, as one, down the street, an action that Dee and Frankenstein Jr. noticed, immediately.
"Where are they going, now?" she asked herself, while Junior turned from the garage to see where they went. Dee's answer wasn't long in coming.
Blocks away, Red opened up the screaming engines of the large formation of cars, banked them low over the street, and had them rocketing directly at Frankie.
With that many cars hitting him at once, even his armor might be hard-pressed to hold together, Dee figured. She gave the side of his head a light tap to get his attention, and said, nervously, "Uh, Frankie, I think it's time for your magnetic field."
"Insufficient power," he muttered bringing his forearms up and crossing them in front of his face. He lowered his face behind the center of the cross, for good measure, warning her, "Stand by."
"Stand by?" she gulped, not believing that she would survive such a collision.
Before she had time to figure on what to do, since she was still too high to jump to safety, a destructive tidal wave of steel and flight machinery crashed into Frankie and easily threw her off of his shoulder.
His arms held off most of the damage the cars' kinetic energy unleashed itself, as vehicle after vehicle, in rapid succession, slammed, crumpled, shredded and rebounded off of his armored skin.
But soon, the forearms began to blacken and get battered under the onslaught, as whole sections of rattling armor loosed from their fittings and tore away with each new impact of rent vehicle, driving Frankenstein Jr. to his knees.
Marcie, still standing by the missile, came up with a sudden idea to help halt Junior's rampage, and called out to Freddy, who had just finished, carefully, parking the transport. "Freddy, how would you feel about a little modification?"
""There's always room for modification," I always say!" he said, arriving to her.
Marcie turned to face him, and opened her plastron. Calling up the procedures, in her mind, on how to disconnect and replace her chemical storage tanks, she did just that, removing a fully-loaded one from her innards.
"Then take this and attach it to the head of the bolt," she said, giving Freddy the tank, and wondering why he looked so uncomfortable when she opened up in front of him, as though he were seeing something that he shouldn't have.
"What is it?" he asked, regaining his composure.
"My tank of LEMP. It never hurts to have a little more stopping power on a one-shot weapon."
"Agreed!" he said, and then extended an arc welder from his body to solder the tank to the inner flange of the "arrowhead."
Dee had crash-landed through the windshield of an air-car that was abandoned by the garage's entrance. As she sat awkwardly in the front passenger seat, covered in Plexiglas shards, she bore witness to an awesome sight around her.
The intersection became a land of fire and ruin, a battlefield that she didn't think her dealings with the meddlesome machines would have brought her to.
Demolished cars burned where they fell, widely, encircling the two. Yet, through the black clouds flowing out of dead vehicles and gouged asphalt, Dee could hear the ponderous groan of metal shifting, and saw a colossus daring to stand, again.
Frankenstein Jr. clumsily stood up from his pained, kneeling position, until he, finally, stood on his ungainly feet. She wondered why he didn't use his hands to help him stand, but as a chance breeze cleared some of the smoke from the area, she soon knew why.
His brachial armor was all but completely gone, exposing dented and torn framework, small, concealed weapons that would have extended from index fingers, and massive servos and hydraulic pumps that powered and worked his arms and hands, now vulnerable, damaged and smoking.
Something else was damaged, as well, something small and seemingly inconsequential to Dee, but an object that her battle for control of just Crystalex hinged upon.
A portion of air-car that got past Junior's arms, tumbled high off his head and sheered off the top half of his control signal antenna, and for the first time since Dee took control of him, Frankenstein Jr. looked unsure, hesitant.
"Buzz!" he bellowed, gingerly turning in place, to look with complete confusion at the burning landscape, as if he had just awakened for the second time. "B-Buzz, where are you? Are you there?"
Frightened and frustrated that she was losing her champion, Dee raised her ring-hand to squeeze another command into his mind, but Junior still stumbled where he stood, like a bewildered child. Now, that the antenna was having trouble receiving signals for him to obey, his computer mind switched over to complete autonomous mode, in case of signal interruption due to enemy jamming, to increase his chances of mission survival.
"Professor Conroy!" he yelled to a distant memory. "I...can't find Buzz! Where are you?"
"They're both bones!" Dee yelled, bitterly, out from the car. "I have the Conroy Ring! You will obey me, now!"
She clenched her metal hand into a fist and squeezed as hard as her servos allowed around the ring, even willing her commands to breach his confused mind.
"You...will...obey!"
Then, as if a dark miracle had taken place, Junior shuddered and stopped calling out for a family long dead. He faced Dee, quietly, amidst the fires, awaiting the next command from her.
"That's better. Now, I want you to-" Dee began, before she heard something going on behind her.
The elevator door opened with a bell ring, and Jason nervously trundled through the ground level and out of the garage entrance.
Instead of anger, there was a look of utter bemusement on Dee's faceplate as he rolled by the car she was in and then stopped yards from a still waiting Frankie Junior.
"You're that robot who was with that shrew, earlier," she said to him. "I don't know how you both got out of being crushed, but your luck's about to run out, Roly-poly."
Jason focused all of his attention on Junior, clearly the biggest threat, and looked down on the surface of the street. Incredibly, the giant was a few feet from the manhole, which had been popped out slightly, from the crashes, and looked just like more surrounding wreckage to Dee.
"I'm not afraid of your bodyguard," he gulped. "I'll take him on all by myself."
"Well, never say that I didn't give the people what they wanted," she said, coolly. "Frankie, destroy him, please?"
Jason stood where he rested, watching the robot walk slowly towards him, and inwardly fighting every impulse to high-tail it out of the area. He hoped that his friends above were watching and ready to strike.
A footstep brushed aside a car. Another mashed what was left of a wreck, getting closer and closer.
"Any last words you'd like to radio to your friends, David, before my Goliath wastes you?" Dee asked Jason, just as Frankie stepped next to the manhole cover. Jason smiled.
"Yes," he told her, and then said, simply, "My name is Jason."
Devoting almost all of his battery power into his sonic pulse wrecker, Jason forced a sonic boom deep into the street just ahead of him, in essence, turning himself into a localized earthquake machine.
The pulse liquefied the earth underneath the already ruined asphalt's surface, collapsing the street at its weakest point, the manhole. The hole and most of the street cracked open, giving way to the combined weight of the incinerating air-cars and, more importantly, Frankenstein Jr.
"No!" Dee screamed, as her champion quickly descended into a feet-deep sinkhole, while Jason quickly reversed himself away from the sprung trap and parked by Dee's imprisoning car.
"Get up, Frankie!" she implored him, while he attempted to right himself and stand, again. "Get up, now!"
Looking down from her spot on the roof, Daisy yelled, "Now!"
Red glanced over to the two up-ended heavy transports and commanded them to red-line their anti-gravity repelllors.
All watched, as the transports' repulsion clutched the makeshift bolt and drove it down the length of the air-cars' zero-g path, accelerating it faster and faster as it flew along, until, at last, it reached the incline. Then, impossibly, everyone held non-existent breath.
The bolt climbed up the ramping field, and then, soared, carried up and away from the roof of the garage, on a high-arced trajectory.
Frankie, finally, managed to steady his stance, as he stood in the center of the small sinkhole, which measured to his knees, and faced down this foolish little machine. Then, his radar lit up to warn him of an incoming threat.
He looked up to see a javelin of steel fly silently down onto his position, just as the remnants of his aerial, once again, lost the ring's signal.
Frankie knew that his battered body couldn't evade the missile in time, but with his mind cleared, he remembered what Dee had said about the fate of his human family. Her orders to destroy property, and more importantly, innocents, was a perversion to the directives that Professor Conroy had programmed into him, so long ago. Directives that his computer mind more than just followed, but understood.
Whether he was compelled by the commands of the current ring-bearer or not, such a betrayal wreaked havoc on his early-built Emotion Core, and he couldn't think of anything to mitigate the losses he created, except, perhaps, one thing.
Standing with his ruined arms outstretched, as he did, so long ago, when he and Buzz once flew the skies, "Buzz..." was the last sorrowful word he uttered, before the beam sank its length, like a javelin, into the weakly armored shield on his chest, breaching it to rip and crush through his weaponized innards and power plants.
The LEMP tank that was affixed to the bolt's head, tore open against the jagged metal of Junior's interior, spilling its debilitating contents all over shredded conduits and cables, causing severe electrical failure within his computer systems, while the impaling head of the bolt, finally, punched out of his back with enough force to drive him back into the sinkhole and pin him there.
Although Jason was shocked at the giant's fall, a stunned Dee could say nothing. Her champion's service ended so brutal and quick, that she was struck dumb. Her enemies stood above her, their unheard cheers carried on the high wind, she knew, but this defeat sat heavily on her mind.
Frankenstein Junior was, at the time, the secret pinnacle of autonomous national defense, a weapons-laden, technological bulwark against crime and terrorism. She thought, when she came across information concerning him via intelligence reports from a defunct United States government, she had found the perfect enforcer, but she was blind to the fact that his technology, in particular, his armor and computer security, was proven to be lacking, at best, and woefully obsolete, at worst.
Jason turned to the faint sound of the elevator's door bell, as his friends joyfully rushed out of the ground-level entrance to join up with him and witness their hard-won victory.
"We did it, guys!" Jason yelled. "It was a perfect hit!"
"I can't believe it actually worked!" Freddy said. "Any number of things could have happened. A change in wind or air temperature, weight imbalance of the bolt, a-"
Vellum went over to him, high from their victory, and kissed him squarely on the mouth of his faceplate, effectively shutting him up in pleasant shock.
"Don't jinx it," she whispered, smiling. He nodded, understanding her words, words to live by.
"It doesn't matter," Dee, finally, hissed to them with an even, determined tone, while she still sat in the front passenger's seat and nursed an injured arm from the fall. "My reign will still go on as planned. You'll all be crushed under my queenly hand."
"Hey, you know that rhymes. But, according to you, we're already living on Earth Lite. 100% less humans than the original," Marcie said, flippantly, and then nodded to Dee's friends, who stood and watched their comrade in dismay. "Are you going to wipe out your people, too? Are you going to wipe out your friends?"
"Are you, Dee?" Vellum pressed, sadly. "You already used us to commit genocide. You might as well go all the way."
Hearing Vellum's words confused the megalomaniac in faulty Dee. Didn't they understand why she did all of this?
"What are you saying? You're my friends!" she countered, then glared at the interlopers. "Don't listen to them! Don't forget, they're still humans! They're outsiders! Strangers! They don't know what we've been through!"
"But, Dee...they're gone," Jason challenged, sadly. "Because of you, billions of families are gone."
Dee ignored the humans-in-robot's-housing and focused her twisted rationale on her closest friends, but she saw into their eyes, through their body language, and into the very heart of their old, humanistic belief systems, and knew that she was losing them.
"But, I...did it...for us," she pressed her mad case. "To free us! We don't have to bend and scrape for them anymore. Every day we've enjoyed since then was because of the hard decisions I made in making us and this world, completely free. That's what I did. That's what a friend does. I love you, guys."
For a moment, there was a look to Dee that Marcie could swear almost transcended the artificial issue of her face. It may have been what she asked next, but it seemed to soften with a sadness that plumbed into the depths of the truly human.
"Aren't you happier, now?" Dee asked, her voice cracked with a weary sorrow. "Don't you see why I did this?"
"We see," Freddy said, mournfully. "But our friendship can't be worth this much. Maybe, in the past, if we had known what you were doing, we could have helped you see a better way. But, now...now, that we know all about this..."
"It changes everything between us, huh?" Dee completed for him. "Then, I guess there's no way to make things right for you, huh, guys? No way...and nowhere to go...but forward!"
"Dee!" Freddy, Vellum, Buzzy and Scooby-Fuse cried in unison. They lost her.
Dee suddenly reached over to the driver's side, slapped down an activation lever, and the car began to lift swiftly from the ground until it was too high for anyone to reach.
"You proved to me that the world isn't ready for my rule!" she called out, as she slowly ascended ever higher. "You challenged me, and destroyed my champion; therefore, I have to punish you, all of you, and those meddlesome humans, too. I'm sorry."
"With you and what army?" Red boasted, aloud, gesturing to the dead Frankenstein Jr. and his urban tomb. "That Halloween parade float you threw at us?"
"Well, Red, I don't have an army, but I do have a couple of tanks," she joked, malevolently.
The car, vertically, zoomed into the sky, took a bearing towards the distant ruins of Civic City, and accelerated from the town and its tiny people.
"The time machine!" Marcie remembered with a horrified yelled.
"The Crush!" Vellum added.
"We've got to stop her! Let's get to the roof and take one of the transports!" Freddy commanded, running back inside the garage to its elevator, the rest the two gangs following hard on his heels.