Collision XX
Bear Bait
By: The Feesh
Life on the road, as it turned out, was incredibly boring.
Fortunately, it hadn't taken much in the way of persuasion to get the abominable, incessantly grouchy Saleen to let him use the laptop. It kept him sane over the long, drawn out drive over the flat-as-it-was-long Oklahoma. Though in the nine hours it took Michael and Barricade to drive from Mayflower, Arkansas to the flat desert of Amarillo, Texas, Romano was honestly certain the police interceptor was about to lose his mind.
"Uh, 'Cade? Barricade? Stay on the road!"
Mike grabbed ahold of the steering wheel and jerked it hard, veering the drifting Saleen Mustang back onto the highway before they had a chance to slam into the beginning of a guard rail on the right shoulder. Beneath his hands, the wheel stiffened as the interceptor metaphorically took control again. Barricade had been doing this for the last four hours, worsening steadily after the sun had gone down behind the desert horizon.
"Dude, th' fuck's wrong wit you?"
"Nothing!" Barricade snapped, growling. "It … I am ... slaggit."
"What, man? Slag what? This is not fuckin' okay anymore, dude, pull over or somethin'."
The snarl that resulted seemed to rattle forth from every solid piece within the S281's cab. "Drive, carbonmonkey."
"Oh yeah? In what? You got some phantom goddamn taxi followin' you around or something'?"
"No, you moronic bone-bag! Drive me!"
Suffice it was to say, that statement caught the New Yorker completely off guard. "Do .. Wha?"
"Take the wheel and drive. I am tired. I will resume automation after I recharge some."
"…Oh. Yer fallin' asleep," Mike offered tentatively.
"Yes, now drive."
Barricade had been in the process of following a slow left-hand curve at seventy miles per hour, and then he simply…didn't. Romano squealed girlishly as the car jerked back towards the side of the road and grabbed the steering wheel reflexively, expecting anything other than the simple automotive obedience that came when he eased the interceptor back on the right track. But, the Mustang went left when he asked, slowed down when the brake was depressed, and sped up as the human driver commanded it to, so the greasemonkey relaxed after a moment and leaned back in the seat. He couldn't really say he'd ever driven a souped-up Saleen, or a police car, or an alien from outer space; so really, it was a triple win for him.
Well, he thought to himself. I guess it could be worse. This also meant he could take his own piss breaks and get food whenever he wanted without having to fight his odd friend for the stop, at least until Barricade woke up. Mike decided he would take the gift that had been given to him without looking at it in the mouth.
The horizon stretched out for miles and miles, a great flat expanse of sand and scraggly brush; above them, spread out, was a vast ocean of stars so clear it was startling. In New York City, one could never really see the stars for the lights and smog that engulfed the great city. Romano found himself staring upwards as he drove, listening to the low, growling thrum of the 4.8 liter V-8 engine sitting only feet in front of him, with just a few layers of metal and plastic separating him from the heat of a running engine. Or perhaps there was something else there, behind the disguise of the dashboard, radio face and steering wheel; maybe somewhere under that motor was something completely alien that Barricade was simply too good at hiding for a mere human to see. There had to be. The mechanic's mind wandered, thinking over the whirling dervish of clanking, shrieking metal as the interceptor formed limbs and a horrible face and stood up on its own. The Saleen S281 that Michael had thought he was dealing with had exploded and reformed into something beyond all human imagining. All those different pieces had to be somewhere, hidden away, tucked below layers and folds of car parts and body panels, invisible to prying eyes.
He wondered what space was like. Was it cold and empty as all the books said it was? Or was it throbbing with its own rhythmic life, unique to itself and all of its vastness? Staring at the dusting of white that peppered the black desert sky, Mike contemplated things he hadn't ever really considered before. The presence of alien life, what space sounded like, just how big was the universe? Perhaps Barricade would know, and maybe he wouldn't; nonetheless, if there ever was one to ask such things, he would get no better opportunity than to ask the alien himself.
Itself, the New York native reminded himself. He answers to "he" but he's an "it". Christ on a pogostick, that's weird.
Romano realized it was snowing just a little bit.
As it turned out, Barricade clearly did not need much sleep. It was a short four hour trip from Amarillo to Albuquerque and as they closed in on the New Mexico city around three in the morning, the Mustang took control once more.
"Got yer beauty rest, eh, man?" Romano ventured, stretching as much as he could in the cramped cabin space.
"Stuff it, carbonmonkey, lest you discover what it is like to become one with a cactus."
The police interceptor took a moment to get his bearings. They were still headed due west on Interstate 40, towards a larger city in the state of New Mexico. The Saleen drove silently, vaguely aware that his passenger was also quiet, nothing more than a still weight of heat against the leather of his left front seat. Dismally, Barricade thought over his initial plan and came across a troubling revelation: he was wrong. He had done very little travel in the American southwest and had thought, for the fleeting moments he was thinking of his escape, that it was less barren. There were hills and scraggly little scrubs, but overall, New Mexico was nothing but wide open desert. He could not hide in wide open desert.
As he drove, Barricade researched. Southern California always seemed to be on fire, and as such, was relatively unsuitable for hiding if the brush was always burning. However, just due north, was an area rich with places to vanish for a short while – and the Saleen was not talking about the type of disappearing one did in a city. There was still that chance that whatever big town he found himself in, there would be some image that some tourist would take that would catch him in the background, and somehow, the Autobots would get a hold of it. He meant to disappear completely, off the roads, away from civilization, and as much as Barricade loathed the idea, a thorough camping trip was likely the best course to take. He would lose them by getting off of the roads and away from prying eyes, by walking through the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. At least then, with no way to tell which way he was headed, the Autobots would be hard pressed to figure out which side of the wilderness he would come out at.
Like organic prey taking to a shallow river to shake its hunter, so would the Saleen.
Barricade changed direction in Albuquerque, getting off of I-40 for the first time in well over a thousand miles. Their little trip was nearly over, in far more ways than one. Michael would likely find it a relief to be free of the no doubt suffocating confines of his interior. Humans were such needy, picky creatures. The Romano monkey complained about cramps after only a few hours, when Barricade had spent upwards of several weeks in his alternate form without complaint. Supposing that being himself in a different form was not a sufficient enough comparison, the shock trooper thought about a suitable situation in which he had once found himself, deciding that on numerous occasions, for numerous reasons, he had, indeed, been stuck on a tiny little ship with mechs far larger than himself with barely elbow room to spare. He didn't complain then, although Barricade would gladly admit he was all too eager to get off of that miserable little star jumper and back to the shiny, destruction-filled Nemesis.
And it had grand at one time. In its prime, the Nemesis had been the immaculate flagship to the once impressive Decepticon fleet, a great black beacon of wanton destruction spearheading the Decepticon movement. Barricade had been proud to serve on the battlefield that was Cybertron, but nothing, absolutely nothing would ever compare to being an officer, an Elite, even, aboard that ship. Cybertronians for millennia would know the names of the officers of that vessel, and the black and white's had already been branded into the minds of so many Autobot foes for his vast reputation as a killer. But he was so much more that such a plain word simply could not describe all the fields in which Barricade had managed to excel. He started as a shock trooper on Cybertron, ascending through his talents in blockade running to serve among officers. There, he became a notable interrogationist as well as a vicious soldier on the battlefield, and was over time passed up through the higher echelon until the eyes of Megatron himself descended upon him. Loyalty and promise held much sway with the ruthless king.
Barricade had a vast background, however, most notably, in the scientific fields. With the Allsparks launch came their leader's disappearance, and the Nemesis was deployed to find him. There the Saleen was allowed more freedom to his whims, achieving Chief of Science and starting a project that would, with hope, give rise to a new army. Before anyone else had figured out the secret, they were successful. In the belly of that glorious beast known as the Nemesis, well over two-thousand lives were sparked to be groomed into the new soldiers to serve under Lord Megatron as soon as they found him. Unfortunately, as plans tended to go, things went awry; Megatron was killed and the Allspark was destroyed.
And the Nemesis? Nothing more than a derelict, sitting in a collection of its own slowly melting debris as the acidic atmosphere of the great moon Titan served an unexpected but worthy deliverer of the flagship's coup de gráce.
He didn't realize he'd driven almost an hour and a half, stuck in the middle of his little trip down memory lane. How things change. In that short time the landscape had gone white and transformed from the barren deserts of New Mexico to the woods and mountains of the beginning of the Santa Fe National Forest, which was precisely where Barricade wanted to be. Signs for a town called 'Glorieta' flashed by, and for a moment the Saleen Mustang was reminded sharply of dead birds and Mayflower rednecks, but shook off the feeling of contempt. The tiny town of eight hundred or so was as good as any to end this weird little game.
It was the forest he wanted. Dense and horrible and organic as it may be, it would be so easy for even a sixteen foot ebony-clothed killer robot from Mars to merely vanish without a trace. That, and Michael was beginning to drive him mad. Every waking moment of every day for the last several days the fleshbag had done nothing but whine for cigarettes, which Barricade wouldn't let him smoke while in the cabin. Why? The scent was absolutely foul to the Saleens particularly keen olfactory sensors, so offensive in fact that he couldn't reasonably stand it even with both windows all the way down. Most humans wrinkled their nose at the smell of cigarette smoke, but a single burning stick of that cancer-causing garbage made Barricade suffer the most intense desire to flee the scene and scrub himself until there was no paint left. He likened it to the fetid fumes of a week dead floating corpse left out in the peak summer sun for six days in a place like Ecuador.
For whatever reason, many of the inferior insects let themselves fall to the cigarettes addictive properties. His current passenger was no different. For much of the trip, the carbonmonkey was twitchy for more reasons than just boredom. He chewed gum and ate hard candy like they were going out of style and couldn't ever seem to keep his hands still. After the fiftieth time of Michael changing radio stations and poking knobs and buttons to see what they all did, Barricade nearly went off road in the extremely loud bloom of rage he suffered, explaining by use of excessive decibels precisely what was going to become of Romano's hands if he dared to touch his radio face again. It tickled, god damnit.
Barricade pulled off of the interstate, slipping onto an unplowed two lane road, tires struggling for grip in the icy slush that still covered the ground. He was relatively impervious to the cold, but damned if the mech couldn't have his opinions on it, and he absolutely hated it. He preferred heat over cold mainly because a hot dry road was by far easier to drive on than a cold frozen one.
There wasn't much to Glorieta, New Mexico. Barricade might not have elected to drop Romano off there had there not been that single conference center that sported primitive cabins for camping. At six in the morning, there was no one there, but the Saleen figured he could break into one of the cabins and toss Mike in there so that the human could fend for himself. It was cold as hell, but the center would open in just a few hours and surely the weak little carbonmonkey could handle himself until then.
The black and white sports car pulled over to the curb. "Fleshbag."
"Hm?" The greasmonkey sat up partially from where he had slumped against the window to nap. "What?"
"The end of the road," Barricade said. "Get out. This is Glorieta, New Mexico. There are primitive cabins for you to stay in until morning when you can find your own way home. Santa Fe is not far from here."
The end of the road? "Oh…Okay." For a moment, the New Yorker just sat and stared at the steering wheel. "Where are you gonna go?"
Barricade seemed surprised by the question. "None of your business," he snapped sharply, before revising the words with a mechanical sigh. Romano didn't mean any harm, surely. "I am going to vanish. I suppose the term 'camping', while crude, is sufficient."
Romano looked into the dark at the black depths of trees that started not far from them. The town was settled at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. "Yer goin'… out in that? In winter?"
"That is correct. The cold does not bother me as it does you. The Autobots will not be able to adequately hunt me out there." The Saleen's door opened.
"I guess so," mumble the mechanic as he stared out of the open door, cringing away from the blast of cold air. "I guess 'dis is g'bye?"
"Yes, that is what this is. Farewell, fleshwad."
Mike pulled the blanket he had bought on one of the stops closer around his shoulders and watched the Saleen Mustang pull off and drive away. He had to admit, he would miss the crazy ass cop. Barricade was one of the most interesting things to happen to him since the birth of his kid, and he sort of wished, in some whimsical part of his brain, that he could have gone with the S281. But Romano had never been the adventurous type, and turned back to find the cabins once he could no longer see the bright white doors and blazing sanguine tail lights. He looked at the pretty building in front of him, the Catholic Center, and decided it to be boring in his eyes. The entire tiny town was disquieting for all its utter silence; Romano despised the peaceful tranquility that seemed to engulf Glorieta, so used to the din and clutter and loudness that surrounded New York City.
With a sigh, he turned back around. Barricade had said he was going camping, talking a walk through the woods, and the logic behind the maneuver was sound, Romano supposed. If the Autobots were tracking him, he could vanish into the Santa Fe National Park and Christ knew where he'd come out at. He could traipse along the Rockies clear into Canada if he wanted to. The greasemonkey sighed a bit once more and gathered the blanket closer, casting a quick glance around before heading off down the road. The sun would be up relatively soon and a few hours of walking wouldn't hurt him. Besides, he didn't really want to break into some after hours cabin to steal time from a conference center run by Catholics. They'd damn him thrice for that.
This is as good a place as any.
Thought, of course, with the sardonic voice in the back of his heading telling him there was no good place to stay in the woods. It all sucked, and it was cold, and wet, and organically foul but it was all there was. The Autobots had spooked him but good this time, enough to drive him across the country and completely off the road itself. Barricade wanted nothing to do with the interstates or cities. He was never going to fully heal if they kept finding him, and it was bafflingly unclear to him how in the Primus-forsaken Void they kept managing to do that! Track him without him knowing, set a trap and spring it – all without his knowledge! He was the damn hunter, not them!
His internal repair systems hadn't quite been the same since the accident with the garbage truck two years previous. The greasemonkey had repaired him enough to jumpstart the system and get it going again, but since then, it had been…slower than normal. Barricade had been known to have a freakishly fast repair rate, but that speed had been cut down a staggering forty percent since then, and that news was exceptionally unsettling to the mech. He could not afford to heal slower when he was dealing with the Autobot mange dogging his heels every step he took!
Barricade grumbled to himself and settled down on his side in the snow with a giant old pine firmly against his back. He had much to think about and consider for this part of the game, important things, such as where he was going to be getting fuel from in the Rocky Mountains. He wanted to stay away from heavily travelled roads as much as possible, and decided that he would simply not eat. It wouldn't take him more than a week and a half to get to where he wanted to be, and he could survive without refueling until then. Sure, perhaps he would be but a scant step away from complete starvation, but he would make it. He just had to keep his head on straight when the hunger became so biting that eating his own armor seemed like a good alternative.
Primus, but he did hurt. The mechanical beast rested just a few negligible miles from the tiny town that was barely deserving of a name, but he knew no one would find him out here. No one would know to look. The snow was deep and Barricade had chosen to trudge the terrain on all fours, dragging his feet enough to bury his footprints and throw off anyone or anything that might have wanted to follow him. Logic dictated that he keep moving, but he feared that continuing as he had would aggravate his problems past the point of healing at all. It was a very, very long walk, and one that had to be conducted at a quick pace lest he simply starve to death in the anonymous expanse of conifers in the Santa Fe –
"Is this th' only five star joint around?"
If five thousand pounds of metal could move at teleportation speeds, Barricade had surely achieved it. Startled out of his doze, the Saleen spooked like a deer and bolted to his feet, staring in ire at none other than the Primus-thrice-damned human being he had dropped off a few miles away. "What are you doing here?" he demanded.
Romano shrugged, but kept his distance in case the alien robot decided it was a fantastic idea to tear him apart. "I figured if I was goin' campin', I was actually gonna camp. Or something. And it's scary stealing from Catholics. And the cabins smell like mothballs."
"Mothballs," the monster repeated, as if incredulously, before sinking back down in a lazy sprawl against the conifer. "I hope you become prey to some indigenous feline predator. Or a bear."
"More likely to freeze t' death, and even then, I'm from New York. It gets fuckin' cold there."
"In fact, I believe I saw a bear den not that far from here. With bears in it. You should go sleep in it."
"Ha ha," retorted Romano with a waved rude hand gesture. His expression sobered some. "Ya dun look like ya feel too good."
Barricade snorted. "I do not. You remember what being shot feels like, but you did not have to run a cross country marathon immediately after."
Mike hadn't really thought of it that way. "Ya gonna … make it through a'ight?"
"I always do, bonebag," growled the machine. "I always do."
The New Yorker made a huffing sort of noise and moved closer, watching for any sign (that he could read, what if body language for the aliens was ass backwards?) that his proximity was unwelcome. When no such signal was issued, he eased down to sit on a rock with his back against the lower part of Barricade's chest, against a set of vents he knew to be there from the few times he was close to the beast in his … uh … form. The Saleen seemed to tolerate that contact well enough, as the human was fairly certain that if his weird asshole of a companion had seen fit, he would have cut him up and left him for bear bait for now. Besides, he wasn't all that inclined to move, what with the steady woosh of hot air against his back coming from the slotted vents that presumably led into Barricade's internals. Like a computer fan.
"So…you know where ya headed afta 'dis?"
Barricade realized how much he hated Michael's accent. "No. And if you do not shut up and allow me to sleep, I am going to turn you inside out, hang you from a tree and fish bears with you as the bait."
I guess he read my mind... "But I thought you already slept?"
"Michael."
"…sorry."
Author's note: So I have a question for anyone who reads this and feels like answering. Chapter twenty was designed to be the last chapter of the Collision series, but I have been entertaining the thought of continuing it. Problem is, I am fresh out of ideas, a problem I have been having for a while with Collision. I love the story, but I've struggled with ideas. WHAT I NEED FROM YOU ... are those ideas. Note me with any further plot points you'd like to see in the series, exempting a Barricade/Mike pairing. Think outside of the box, be creative, as apparently my creativity center in my brain has decided to be stupid. Even if you think it's a stupid idea, please, note me, I may just be able to use it. I want your ideas! What would YOU like to see in a chapter of Collision? Obviously, rude or otherwise uncalled for messages will be shrugged at and deleted.
Also, I'm alot more likely to use ideas PM'd to me than ones in reviews. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love my reviews, that's what keeps me writing, but I'd rather discuss plot points and ideas privately, that way each plot I write is a surprise for everyone else. :)