Amy jerked awake, a dream of horror and loss present in her mind barely a moment before it disappeared, leaving only emotion behind.
This wasn't her bed.
Oh. Right.
Shelves filled with books, models, gadgets, logic puzzles and more lined the walls, illuminated by the dull green glow of a large twenty-four hour time display. The room of someone who hated being bored.
She'd been in his room before, of course. Even hidden under the bed a few times. It had... seemed like a good idea at the time?
Amy settled back down onto a pillow that smelled of stale mints and machine grease, clutching the obnoxiously silent communicator close to her chest.
He never built a second bedroom. Never deviated from the pattern. She knew why without ever asking.
Because of Sonic.
Because he'd never come back to a place where there was a bed waiting for him.
Had Sonic been the one in her dream?
There hadn't been any contact from anyone. Not Knuckles. Not even Sonic. Definitely not Tails. Hours stuck alone, fearing the worst. Well, not quite alone. Big was sweet, and an excellent listener, but…
A metallic banging broke through her thoughts. Had that been in her dream too? Had she been sleeping through someone trying to get in?
The banging came again. Amy pushed herself out of her borrowed bed, running her hands down her quills and groping for her headband. Not that she needed either, her quills were stiff enough to stay put on their own, but the off-chance that it was Sonic at the door meant looking her best, or at least as close to her best as being woken in the middle of the night would allow. She glanced down at herself. An old white t-shirt with a heart on it and her leggings. Could be worse. She stepped into her boots, grabbing her gloves off the cluttered nightstand as she hopped out of Tails' room and into the main lab, leaving her winter jacket where it hung from the door.
The light of the broken TV illuminated the room in flickering shadows. Big's enormous torso moved with the slow and smooth rhythms of sleep, his new flail glowing softly on the floor beside the straining sofa with a light all its own.
The metal door banged again, loud, urgent, needy. Big snuffled, rolling with a creak of suffering wood and fell still once again. Amy rubbed her bare arms as she crept forward, still haunted by the ghost of a dream, dull and fearful all at once, gripping the handle and pulling the door open to peer into the chill night outside.
… Darkness. Amy shivered as snowflakes drifted into the lab, propelled by an icy wind.
She frowned, still rubbing her arms as she peered out into the dark. If there was a moon tonight then it was behind the Lost Hex right now. Even with the snow she could barely see beyond the small cone of flickering TV-light spilling out the door. Had it been her imagination? Was she still dreaming?
She was just shutting the door when she noticed the footprints. Amy crouched down, fingers resting lightly on the snow. Size ten and a half mobians... Sonic's size. Leading both towards and away from the door, out into the dark.
"S- Sonic?" Amy squinted out into the night, hands pressed tight against her pounding heart.
A pained moan spilled from the darkness in reply.
"Sonic!" She ran, snow crunching underfoot, frost nipping at her arms and cheeks, infiltrating her short fur and thin clothes in moments to send goosebumps rippling over her.
Should have brought her coat. Stupid. Didn't learn her lesson last time she was out in the cold. The t-shirt wasn't even a cute one.
No, didn't matter, if So- if someone was in trouble she needed to help them. Even a wolf would suffer out in this weather, especially if they were hurt.
There, shivering hunched over in the snow, too dark to make out much. Mobian. Spikes. No clothing, so a boy... Hedgehog?
"Sonic!" Amy lunged forward, hugging her hero from behind. Cold, clammy flesh pressed against her arms, no warmer than the snow itself. A foul stench of carrion permeated the quills pressing against her face.
The hedgehog turned his head, a wordless moan slipping from rancid lips. Amy gasped in surprise as fingers gnawed down to the bone thrust over the hedgehog's shoulder, stabbing through her eyes. She fell backwards, rings tumbling into the snow, screaming as she clutched her face.
The hedgehog turned, upturned spikes silhouetted against stars, pulling the disembodied arm it had been hunched over from its mouth with the sound of tearing flesh.
Danger.
Amy flipped to her feet, snow tumbling from her shirt as she slipped her hammer into trembling fingers.
"Y- you're n-not Sonic."
She hoped.
Oh, Hoshino, she hoped.
The hedgehog replied with a lunge, swinging the disembodied arm - was it human? - with blistering speed. Amy barely intercepted, hammer cracked against bone. She stepped back, winter boots gripping tightly on the snow.
This was pretty bad either way. Amy had pushed herself to the limit to get where she was, strong enough to take down a badnik on her own, fast enough to more or less keep pace with her heroes. She parried another brutal blow, leaving grooves in the snow as she skidded backwards, sweeping her hammer up into the charging hedgehog to send him flying into the air.
He didn't even lose any rings. Amy frowned, squinting through the darkness as she stumbled in the opposite direction, towards the light of the laboratory door, swinging gently in the wind.
Compared to abnormals like Sonic and Knuckles, she was still a baseline mobian with a hammer. Only the youngest or weakest of abnormals couldn't outmatch her, and even a baseline mobian was almost unstoppable with simple hammer strikes. A hammer blow just didn't do much more than sting unless she crushed them between her hammer and something solid, and even if the snow and earth had been hard enough, that would still make her a murderer.
A moan sounded from the darkness to her left. Seconds later, from her right. Amy grimaced. He was toying with her. Keep moving. Tails' lab was sturdy enough to more or less survive Knuckles when he was in a mood, if she could-
Crunching snow and rapid footsteps. The hedgehog charged from the dark in the original direction a moment later. Amy barely managed to slip her hammer up before a bony fist - the one not attached to him - smashed into her defences, sending her rolling head over tail into the wall of the lab.
"I'm getting real sick of you, buster!" Amy pulled her head free of the snow and rolled upright just in time to scoop the hedgehog up into the air once more. She followed through as he fell, a home run to his head. The arm tumbled to the ground at her feet and the hedgehog soared off into the distance.
… Really hope that wasn't Sonic. But he'd forgive her if it was. When the mind control or whatever wore off. Hopefully.
Amy glanced down at the arm, highlighted in the light spilling from the lab. Greenish yellow flesh long decayed, tattered where it had been… chewed.
Amy clutched her nose, breathing hard as she pushed away from the grisly weapon. Was it better or worse that it wasn't fresh? Did she need to go hunt him down so he didn't find his way to Station Square?
The idea of a mad mobian loose among the humans was a terrible one, after all. He hadn't been as fast as Sonic, but still easily strong enough to kill a human in moments.
Amy shivered, rubbing her hand over where her eyes had been momentarily impaled. Hopefully she wouldn't catch something. First she-
A moan sounded out from her left. Another from ahead a moment later. Amy looked up to see two dark figures trudging towards her, a wolf and a human, a tattered suit falling off his shoulders.
Amy swallowed drily, stumbling sideways as she heard their approach accompanied by pounding feet charging through the snow. She was halfway through the door when the hedgehog from before leapt through the air, now empty hands outstretched.
Amy barely had a moment to register a flash of matted green fur and mottled green flesh before he was upon her, dull hedgehog teeth grinding into her shoulder as she fell backwards, head cracking against the bare floor as the hedgehog tore at her with fingers as rotten as his meal. White, unseeing, dead eyes stared through her as he tried to push his way through her defences to her throat.
Apparently she'd been worried about being a murderer for no reason.
"Big!" Amy screamed, tears of pain blending with blood on her scratched cheeks. More rotting horrors poured in through the door, three, five, eight, only their own numbers slowed their mad rush to pile into the lab.
"Activate Security Protocol Prower Seven." Her lips moved on their own, words dreamy even despite the murderous dead attacking her.
"Manual. Security Override. Confirmed!" Tails' sampled mechanical voice remarked cheerfully from all sides at once. "Commencing. Purge. Prower. Seven. Zero."
Previously hidden slats in the wall snapped open, revealing a series of metallic tubes. The deafening roar of autocannons exploded from outside the lab. A moment later the dim light within became radiant as a multicoloured array of lasers flashed through the air in a glorious prismatic spray. The beams crisscrossed through the air above her in rapid motion, starting from the ceiling and working their way down.
The tallest of the crowd of zombies - a human - crumpled as the beams hit them first, lasers reducing them to a pile of neatly cauterised cubes from the neck up without slowing. Teeth scraped Amy's chin as a second monster leapt on top of the first, a mangy yellow wolf covered in dirt and worse. Part of its face was burnt away, an old Resistance Forces uniform dangling over its desiccated body.
Well, after the war there were plenty of dead bodies laying around after all. Amy groaned in pain, recalling her hammer from where it was pinned beneath her and pulling it free just in time to wedge the handle over her head. The considerably sharper, if mostly missing, teeth of the wolf cracked down on it instead of her face.
And then the wolf zombie was gone, pieces tumbling down around her. Moments later, the hedgehog's attacks ceased too as the ceiling of lasers descended, reducing it to so much smoking meat. Amy squeezed her eyes shut as the lasers reached her…
"Phase. One. Complete. Clean up initiated. Stay out of my stuff next time, Eggman!" Tails' announcement voice spoke up cheerfully.
Nothing happened. The cannons outside fell silent.
Amy opened her eyes to see a bewildered Big staring about himself in blank-faced confusion to match her own. She sat up, shivering from the shock of her injuries to stare at a pair of small mechanical foxes with gaping mouths that emerged from hidden panels in the walls. They paced the floor with the sound of a whirring vacuum, consuming the remains of the things that had so recently been after her. Black smoke drifted from their ears as heat radiated from their orange flanks.
"You are one weird little guy, Tails." Amy muttered, wincing from her split face as she stared down at them in wonder. "Wait, hey!"
A sizeable square of her t-shirt where the zombie had been pressed against her was now conspicuously absent, its edges burnt black with heat she hadn't felt, the fur beneath completely untouched.
She was just figuring out whether to be annoyed or impressed when a monitor fell from the ceiling to break painfully against her head.
"Ow!" Amy scowled, feeling a rush of rings pouring into her from the destroyed monitor. Her body instantly recovered from its shock as wounds fused together in moments, leaving her in perfect health once more, though still missing a chunk of perfectly good shirt. A second later another monitor smashed against her head at high speed, and a fire shield blazed into life around her, as well as another around Big.
A pair of gatling guns and what appeared to be a flamethrower briefly descended from the ceiling. They performed a silent sweep of the room without shooting, then withdrew.
A deafening roar sounded from outside, along with a burst of orange light that shone through the door as though the sun had risen for a moment. Both door and wall panels slammed shut with a click. The room descended into flickering darkness once again.
"Phase. Two. Complete! Facility… Secured. Two. Lifeforms. Remaining. Commence. Mind-control. Capture. Protocol?"
"... catch… Froggy?"
"No!" Amy waved her hands frantically. "No capture! Big. It's… it's fine. Just… go back to sleep. Everything's fine."
"...Confirmed. Sequence complete. Entering. Passive. Mode."
There was a brief hum of machinery before the lab went quiet once more, a thud as the giant purple cat flopped over on the couch without a word, orange light of their shields combining with the flicker of the television.
Amy blinked, as wide eyed and empty faced as Big for a moment before closing her eyes with a sigh.
To think she broke into this place multiple times a week! What kind of person was Tails to have this level of security?
Shivering in her snow-soaked, blood-stained shirt, Amy rubbed the back of her head where the flame shield monitor had struck, feeling the small scar at the base of her skull she'd had as long as she could remember, now slightly swollen from the impact.
What kind of person was she that she'd somehow known how to activate it?
She shook her head, pulling the still silent communicator from the air around her.
Questions like that could wait for when there weren't people in danger.
