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Foreboding 1.b
"Do you believe in the Boogeyman?"
Squealer couldn't hold back her shiver of fear as the corpse-pale cape gave them one of the most disturbing smiles she had ever seen, mouth far too wide and teeth far too sharp than they had any right to be.
Her feelings of dread only redoubled as the doors to the warehouse were thrown off their half rusted hinges by a wave of black matter. Her heart caught in her throat as the mass moved like a living being as it crashed into the panicking Merchants. Glowing yellow eyes and far too many midnight black teeth tore out of the wave and became smaller but no less disturbing horse-shaped figures whose skin gave off an unnatural shimmer in the near lightless building.
Squealer winced a bit as Skidmark gripped her arm in an effort to pull himself up. It wasn't that strong of a grip compared to when he would punish her for her behavior, but she wouldn't be surprised if she got some bruises.
"Get the tank," Skidmark growled as he glared at the cape who took no notice of him, seemingly lost in her own little world as she gazed down onto the carnage with something akin to satisfaction. "Let's wreck him."
Squealer pursed her lips at the thought of wasting her baby's grand appearance on some no name like this. Such events were meant to be savored with a low satisfaction of watching everything and everyone around you shake with uncontained fear as you unveiled your new power. Using it to crush this single cape and her army would be a waste of a perfectly good entrance. "What about-"
She was cut off by a rough shove from Skidmark and shrunk in on herself at the angry look he gave her. "Go get the tank," he said, his eyes lighting with a slight maniac gleam. Squealer fearfully nodded in compliance as she slowly backed out of his reach. Skidmark was a good boyfriend and gave her some great sex, but he had this annoying habit of hitting her whenever he was angry. She knew he loved her but it got pretty irritating at times to have to pay attention to his moods so she wouldn't get hit. Still, he was right, now wasn't the time for her to argue with him about using her vehicles.
Even if it was such a waste.
"I'm gonna kill you!" Skidmark roared as he approached the cape. The woman's uncomfortably yellow eyes locked on Skidmark's form as Squealer raced out of her field of vision. While the rest of the fairly idiotic Merchants were still trying to futilely push their way past the demonic horses that blocked their way to the doors Squealer made her way to the side of the building.
Whenever Skidmark had meetings that were made up of more than a handful people he would always make sure to have at least one secondary exit for the two of them, a policy that had saved their skins more than once from heroes and villains alike. Squealer pressed her hands against the ancient corrugated metal siding and pushed.
A rectangular section of the wall about four feet tall and wide that she had carved into with her personal welding torch not but a few hours earlier popped off and fell to the ground with a clang that was covered up by the sound of the terror filled screams of the Merchants. As she squeezed through the smallish hole in the wall she knew that Skidmark would be okay. She knew that he was more than capable of taking care of himself and had waxed more than a few upstarts that had tried to usurp his position over the years, but it was always a nerve-wracking experience for her. The thought of Skids, the only person in the world that had treated her with an ounce of respect, getting hurt by some no name bitch weighed heavily on her mind.
She would make sure that this newbie learned the price of messing with her boyfriend.
The thought of the bitch's smug smile fading as she was crushed underneath tons of steel brought a smile to her own face. She only hoped that Skidmark wouldn't get hurt. The last time he had been out of commission for an extended period they hadn't been able to have sex for a couple months.
Squealer tried to cast those unwanted thoughts out of the forefront of her mind as she raced over to one of the adjacent buildings. She could feel her heart beating against her ribcage as more screams echoed out of the hole she had left, grating against her eardrums like a symphony of the damned as she approached a nearby warehouse.
The side entrance to the warehouse fell open as her body slammed against it, the rusted lock absolutely no match for the force she exerted with her shoulder. Compared to the meeting place the warehouse was in pretty good condition comparatively. It had been one of the things she had insisted on when she had helped Skids pick the meeting place, she didn't want some homeless junkie to wander in and take a piss on her baby, or even worse, have the building fall down on top of it when she started it.
The behemoth of a vehicle that sat in the darkness was the culmination of months of work. Just getting the necessary supplies and raw material to build her without raising any flags had taken almost two months. Actual construction had been in the timeframe of around four to five months and she still wasn't completely finished, at least in her mind. She had wanted to add two more fusion cannons on the rotating turret to give her baby 360-degree coverage, but Skids had balked at the price tag she had given him for the materials to build two more. She could understand his frustration, she had already sunk what was probably around a million or two dollars into her baby, but she still held true to the idea that the price tag would be well worth it.
With her baby, they would be capable of taking on Lung. Wasn't that worth spending some money?
Squealer ducked under the bottom of her baby and pulled the entrance hatch open. A small ladder slid out that she quickly climbed up as she tried to ignore the nervous sweat breaking out all over her palms.
Despite her assurances to Skids that her baby would work she had never actually tried to turn her on. Oh, she had done systems checks on the cannon and driven her around a few times as a test run, but she had never actually had them all on at once. In theory, the reactor that she had installed should be enough to power the enormous energy consumption her baby needed to function, but she had found out about two weeks ago that the uranium rods that she had received were of far lesser quality than she had originally ordered. She wasn't entirely sure that the reactor would be able to handle the strain of the fusion cannon in addition to running the other systems.
Maybe if she redistributed the power draw then-
"Focus," Squealer thought to herself as she strapped herself in. This wasn't the time to get lost in tinkering, her boyfriend was counting on her to bring the cavalry, and while she would have preferred to spend some more time on her baby to fix all the bugs she didn't really have an option. Armsbastard had trashed her motorbike last month which left her without any working vehicles. As of this moment, this tank was the only complete creation she had. It still felt wrong to have to ruin her grand unveiling of what was sure to be her greatest creation on this admittedly very scary upstart but her boyfriend was in trouble.
"C'mon," Squealer chanted under her breath as she activated the tank for the first time. She held her breath as the control panel flickered for a few seconds before powering up in full. The drug addicted tinker let out a triumphant cheer as all the systems came on without any issue, even the fusion cannon. Squealer could feel the hum throughout the vehicle as the multi-gigawatt cannon activated.
"Haha," Squealer laughed manically, "Let's see who's scary now!"
The tank erupted forward, shaking the earth as if a thousand wildebeests were stampeding through, its roar the cry of an angry dragon. The sheet metal that made up the warehouse structure didn't even last a second against the mechanical monstrosities' forward charge, instead, it smashed apart the building with the ease a child would knock over a sandcastle. But even with part of the building's roof collapsing on the tank, it was unmolested by the debris.
Squealer let out another slightly insane laugh as she crashed through the meeting place's wall. The look of shock on the bitch parahuman's face was something to relish as it was plastered in high definition video feed on her twenty-inch screen.
"What are you going to do now?" Squealer asked through the external speakers as her fusion cannon fired a warning shot. Purplish energy crackled along the barrel for a split second before a solid beam of purple energy shot out from the cannon like the wrath of an angry god. Squealer laughed in elation as the beam cut through the building like it was a knife going through butter. Her sense of excitement only heightened as her cameras angled themselves to look through the smoking hole it had left behind. From there she could see that it had not only plowed through the next building, but it had kept on going until she couldn't make it out anymore.
This was real power.
Squealer adjusted the cannon's angle to lock onto the still stunned cape who remained motionless in front of the clearly dead body lying behind her. Squealer couldn't make out who it was with the way the cape was standing but it probably wasn't anyone important. Squealer cursed as the cape vanished from her targeting sensors, revealing the decapitated head of the corpse.
Sherrel Bailey's blood froze.
Staring back at her were the empty eyes of Skidmark, his face frozen in an expression of pure terror. Squealer felt her heart clench up as blood from her boyfriend's headless corpse poured out onto the stained floor.
"nononono."
Squealer could barely hear her whispers of denial as the truth laid in front of her.
Skidmark was dead.
Adam was dead.
He was dead.
"NO!" She screamed as sorrow turned to anger and she slammed down on the fire button. She couldn't' have that- that body staring at her, mocking her, judging her. The fusion cannon's lance of energy struck the corpse with such power that it didn't just burn, it disintegrated on a virtually molecular level, becoming nothing more than superheated dust.
"I'M GOING TO KILL YOU!" She roared in anger as she swung the beam around in a blind arc, searching for the killer of her lover. The only man who had ever shown her kindness and given her freedom.
Her attack was indiscriminate, both Merchant foot soldiers and nightmarish horses fell before the power of her fusion cannon. Even those who avoided the lance of energy didn't emerge unscathed, the sheer heat emanating from the fusion cannon was enough to turn the sand horses into pure glass with a pass, freezing them into warped statues. A few more Merchants were just as unlucky, their clothing and hair igniting into flames as their skin melted, only adding fuel to the fire of panic. Squealer's vision blurred as angry tears gathered in her eyes. She had to find that bitch, she had to make her pay.
The warehouse before her was chaos incarnate as Merchants tried to escape their captors and the fury of their enraged tinker. They pushed and shoved and fought each other just as much as the horses. Squealer growled, teeth grinding against each other as there was still no sign of the murderer. She could hear dozens of horses pounded against her armour plating as they tried to crack it open like a walnut. Not that it would do them any good, she had designed this thing to withstand punishment from an amped up Lung, there was no way they were getting through that.
"Show yourself," Squealer shouted, her speaker amplifying her roar of rage and anguish so loudly that the entire building seemed to quake.
"I thought you might have shown more appreciation."
Squealer scrambled out of the pilot seat and harness so fast she might have gotten a mover rating for it. Her hands flew up as they wrapped around the cold grip of her personal pistol as her eyes flickered around the cockpit, looking for any sign of the murderer.
"I mean, I did kill Skidmark for you," the voice said, almost as if it was offended that Squealer wasn't thanking her for killing her lover.
"Come out so I can put a bullet in your brain," Squealer growled as she slowly circled the cockpit. She resisted the urge to fire towards the echoing laughter that filled the tank. If she missed she was likely to get hit by a ricochet, or worse the bullet could damage any number of the power conduits and cause a feedback to the reactor. The resulting explosion wouldn't just blow up the tank, it would practically vaporize everything within a two-block radius.
"As…tempting as your offer is I'm afraid I'm going to have to decline," the cape said with an amused tone, as if their entire thing was just one big joke as if what she just did to Adam didn't even matter.
"You're not getting out of here, not for what you did to Adam," Squealer said as she cautiously checked under one of the control panels for any sign of the intruder. All she saw were the shadows produced by the brightly lit bulb in the center of the cockpit. She couldn't let this bitch get away, she needed to make her pay for what she did to Adam.
"I honestly don't get why you're so upset, you should be overjoyed that I freed you from Adam's control," the cape said in what sounded like an honestly confused tone as if she couldn't comprehend what someone would be upset that their lover had just been killed in cold blood.
"You don't get to say his name," Squealer growled, her fingers squeezing the grip of her pistol so tight that she could feel the grooves digging into her calloused palm like tiny knives.
"And may I ask what Ada- my bad, Skidmark did to earn such loyalty from you," the cape asked. Squealer whirled around just in time to see a pair of yellow eyes and sharpened fangs fade back into the shadows.
"He saved me," Squealer screamed as more hot tears gathered in her eyes. "He saved me. He gave me my freedom, he appreciated me, he didn't use me like…like…"
The cape asked the one question that Squealer defiantly didn't want to hear, "Like everyone else?"
Squealer snarled animalistically at the reminder, "You don't know anything."
The cape gave her an amused laugh and it was all Squealer could do to keep a shiver of fear from running down her spine. It was the kind of laugh that one would expect from a psycho killer in a horror movie as he ripped the dumb blonde of the group in half with a sadistic gleam in his eye. That image did little to ease Squealer's nerves as the shadows seemed to grow more oppressive with each passing second.
"Oh, I know more than you could imagine Sherrel," the cape said, her voice circled the chamber, bouncing off of the walls and equipment making it nearly impossible to tell where she was. "I know the fears that haunt you every night, the ones that you try to ignore, that you try to hide from everyone, even yourself."
"But you can't hide them from me," the cape whispered mere inches from her ear. Squealer turned around so fast she felt her spine light on fire as a nerve was pinched. She fired a shot off into the space the cape had previously occupied, her desire to see this cape dead overcoming her caution of firing her pistol inside. The glow from the muzzle flash revealed a glimpse of the cape's shadowy form for a mere second as it dived into another, darker shadow. The bullet slammed through the view screen, cracking and smashing it into a thousand pieces. The cockpit dimmed somewhat without the light from the screen to assist the single light bulb she had placed to illuminate the room.
"Being used, that's what you're afraid of, and you've been used all your life Sherrel," the cape asked in a conversational tone.
Squealer licked her dry lips in nervous anticipation as the voice circled around her like a shark circling its prey. She had gotten lucky that that shot hadn't ricocheted into her own skull or worse, she couldn't allow her emotions to overcome her like that again. Which meant listening to the cape as she pulled her darkest nightmares up to the surface.
"You were used by your friends, Johnson, Alex, by Timmy," the voice mocked.
"Shut up," Squealer screamed as she tried to cover her ears while maintaining her grip on her pistol, but it did little to shut out the cape's voice. Each word was like a fishhook digging into her skin, into her soul. Memories better left unremembered popped to the forefront of her mind in all their terrible glory. Echoes of angry tantrums and shattering beer bottles filled her ears as images of a man she thought she had loved covered her vision, each one corrupted by the taint of betrayal.
"Even your own family used you, didn't they? Did it hurt when you found mommy dearest pimped you out, or did it happen so often you didn't even note it?" the cape asked, her bodiless voice cool and collected as Squealer continued to shake in rage.
"Stop it," Squealer shouted, voice shrill and slightly unhinged as more and more of the past she had tried to leave behind was dragged up to the surface.
The sound of flesh striking flesh and the sharp pain of a hot red handprint sending her tumbling to the ground made her shiver in fear as memories of the monster that had been her mother came to her vision, the monster in human flesh standing over her, a dead look in her eye as she gave her to the drug dealer.
"MOMMY!"
"Stop," Squealer said, much quieter and more subdued than before. She had left all of this behind when she had triggered when she had gained the ability to run away as far and fast as she wanted to without anyone to stop her. The day she had stopped being Sherrel, the broken little girl whose mother didn't even have the decency to even try and pretend she loved her to Squealer, the vehicle tinker who used her newfound freedom to track down everyone that had betrayed her and leave them as roadkill to be scraped off the street. "Please."
The cape continued to push deeper and deeper into her psyche, undaunted by the Merchant tinker's erratic behavior or her soul aching pleads for mercy. "Then there's Skidmark."
"HE DIDN'T USE ME YOU-" Squealer tirade was cut off as stars filled her vision and her head lit up in pain. She braced herself against one to the consoles, wincing as her elbow dug into the harsh metal controls. Her gun clattered to the floor and out of sight, consumed by the shadows. The cape emerged from the darkness like a nightmare, her corpse pale face twisting into a dismissive sneer. Her eyes glinted in the dim lighting, her irises shining like dark empty pits that she had in the place of a soul. Squealer shivered as the temperature seemed to drop at the unnatural cape's presence.
"You know, I don't know whether to think less of Skidmark for what he did to you or applaud him for convincing you of your own self-centered delusion," the cape said as she approached the downed Merchant, her footsteps reverberating in the chamber. Squealer tried to back away from the cape, but all she did was press herself further against the edge of the cockpit rim, pinned like a bug in a display case.
Trapped. Imprisoned. Enslaved.
"I mean, did you really think that Skidmark, one of the vilest and morally deficient people in the entire city would actually care about anything regarding you except for your creations," the cape asked in and almost disbelieving tone, as if she couldn't imagine that Squealer was as thick as she thought.
"You don't know anything," Squealer hissed out in both anger and pain. She could feel something wet and sticky running down the back of her skull as she tried to steady herself and stand up again, but her head was still ringing from the blow the cape had given her. "Skids loved me."
The cape had the gall to roll her eyes at Squealer's proclamation. "Your denial is adorable Sherrel, but we both know you're lying."
Squealer shuddered as she tried to block the cape's voice out again, but her presence was unavoidable, her words clung to her mind and thoughts like noxious fumes. Squealer wouldn't believe the cape; she couldn't believe the cape. Even if Adam had taken her into the Merchants without her consent that didn't mean he didn't love her, he had had his reasons. He had just been making sure someone else didn't find her and use her to their own benefit. He had given her everything she had ever wanted to tinker, supplies she would have never gotten before and all the free drugs she could want.
Adam had given her everything.
Adam was dead.
He was dead.
She couldn't let this cape sully his memory, not with all that he had done for her.
"He loved me," Squealer said with an absolute certainty as she drew herself into a fetal position in a futile effort to cut herself off from the world, to hide from the truth that had been laid out before her, that he was gone and never coming back. That this cape had reduced him to nothing more than a lifeless husk fit only to be shoved into the dirt and filth.
"He loved me," she said again, repeating the phrase like a mantra, a lifeline. It was the truth that separated Sherrel and Squealer from each other, the single fact that had helped make her life bearable.
He was dead.
Who was she now without Adam? Was she just the blonde dumb ass that nobody cared about, that was only useful as a tool to others? Was all of her tinkering for nothing now? How could it be worth anything if Adam wasn't there to help her, to make it all worthwhile?
He had shown her his appreciation for all she did for him and now he was dead, killed by this upstart. She let out a body racking sob as hot tears stained her vehicle's floor with their salty tang. She…she couldn't…
"Oh Sherrel," the cape said in a somewhat pitying tone. Sherrel, not Squealer this time, looked up to see the cape gazing down at her with a commiserate expression on her unnatural face. "I had hoped that I could break you."
The cape drew her hands back like she was about to swing a baseball as her sand gathered to form one of the sharpest scythes that Sherrel had ever seen. It was so tall that it barely fit in the cockpit, its sharpened back edge scraping against the metal ceiling as the cape raised it high above her head.
"But," the cape continued as her muscles grew tense, "I guess you're too broken to break."
As the cape's form twisted and the scythe sliced through the stale air in its deadly arc Sherrel closed her eyes one last time and prayed that she would be able to be with Adam once more.
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