Disclaimer - "Transformers" and all related characters, events, and concepts belong to Hasbro, Takara, and any other related owners/distributors/producers. I get no monetary benefit from this. My benefit is the enjoyment of dealing with beloved characters.

Salted Wounds
by DragonDancer5150

Chapter 2 - Cursed

Optimus resisted pacing as he waited for Captain Fanzone to arrive. He couldn't explain why he was so on edge. It felt as if the very air in the building had changed. It was colder, much colder even considering Detroit's current weather. It was heavy and choking too, clogging his vents despite his diagnostic systems insisting there was nothing there. He rolled his shoulders in an attempt to banish the tension from his struts and stepped over to Bulkhead at the main control console. "Anything?"

Bulkhead shook his head, attention glued to the monitors. "Nothin', Boss-bot. Sensors aren't pickin' anything up either."

"And no word yet from Prowl, Bumblebee, or Sari?"

"Nope, an' I don't wanna call 'em an' give their positions away in case of hostiles in the area."

"Good thinking, Bulkhead. Give them another ten cycles, but then I do want you to call if we haven't heard from them first."

"Sure thing."

Maybe it had been a mistake to split up the team, but something was going on and they needed to figure out what. While Ratchet made sure the medi-lab was prepped, Prowl scouted the exterior perimeter and Bumblebee and Sari checked out the upper floors of the building in case anyone might be hiding out up there.

Just then, the latter two strode into the main room, crossing to the communications area. Bumblebee shrugged. "All clear, Boss-bot. If there was anything up there, it's long gone now."

Sari jumped as her cell phone rang. She looked at it, then answered. "Hi, Dad."

Bumblebee snickered, whispering to Optimus. "She's got a comm now. How come he doesn't just call her on that?"

Optimus didn't know and wasn't about to speculate. He listened to her father's voice on the other end. "Sari, are you on your way home yet?"

Sari rolled her eyes. "Dad, it's fine. I'm with the Autobots."

"No, no, no, Sari! You know I don't like you out past eleven o'clock at night, especially not on Halloween."

"Dad! Come on! I-"

"Sari," Optimus interrupted, "you did promise him you'd be home. One thing about being an Autobot is keeping your word, even when you don't want to."

Sari heaved a sigh. "Yeah, you're right. Sorry, Dad. I'll be right there." She hung up and put away the phone with a disappointed look on her face.

"Want me to take you home?" Bumblebee offered.

"Nah, I'll be fine." She called up her armor, the skate wheels popping out from the soles of her shoes. "I'll make it before eleven, no problem. And if any ghouls or creepy-crawlies try to stop me?" She deployed both arm blades, swinging them around. "They'll be sorry!"

"Young-bots…" Ratchet shook his head at her as he returned from the medi-lab.

"Boss-bot, Captain Fanzone's here."

"Good. Let him in, Bulkhead."

Optimus crossed to the main roll-up door as it rose. He saw Fanzone turn and watch Sari as she skated past him, waving a quick salute in passing, and headed out to the sidewalk. Fanzone shook his head and stepped inside.

"I trust you found the place all right, Captain?" The Autobots' base was a secret location, but Optimus felt it was long past time anyway to share it with their friend and unofficial liaison with local law enforcement.

"Yeah." The human officer had an unreadable scowl on his face as he looked around the factory. "Know the place pretty well, actually."

Prowl returned from his patrol just then, slipping through the entryway before Bulkhead put the rolling door back down. "You do?" Then on reflex, he shuddered and looked around. "Did someone turn the AC on?"

"Uh-uh." Bulkhead shook his head. "It's weird, though. It's almost . . . oppressive, isn't it?"

Frowning, the ninja-bot nodded agreement.

Fanzone's own frown hadn't abated as his gaze took in one Autobot after another. "Lemme see this writing you mentioned."

Fanzone followed the Autobots as they crossed the room to the living room area they'd set up in the back corner. The screen they used for a television was enormous, a scavenged monitor from old, abandoned Olympia Stadium, one of those massive ones they had above the seating to play live footage on so people higher up in the stands could better see the action going on below. The monitor was easily a good fifteen to twenty feet high and mounted another eight to ten feet off the floor. Fanzone could see something on the surface about halfway up the glass. "Prowl, give me a boost."

The ninja-bot obliged, lifting Fanzone to stand on his cupped hands as Fanzone studied the bloody writing. "The letters are too wide to have been drawn with someone's fingers. Not sprayed and doesn't really look done by a paintbrush or anything else either. You're sure this is blood? It looks too fresh. Should have dried by now, or at least started to."

"It's blood, Captain," Ratchet assured him. "I scanned it myself."

Fanzone stared at the still-very-wet letters, willing them to explain themselves. Finally, he shook his head. "Anyway, no human could have reached up this high, not without help. Not without someone noticing."

"So what you're saying is . . . what, exactly?" Bumblebee asked, sounding as if he thought Fanzone was intimating that maybe one of them had done it.

Fanzone couldn't deny that a small part of him suspected it, but . . . no. He knew these guys. They were good people. Good robots. Whatever. The only one he might have really suspected would be their youngest member. Bumblebee was a punk trouble-maker of sorts, but this wasn't his style. His kind of trouble ran more in line with speeding and street racing.

Which left Fanzone with only one other thought. One he didn't like at all.

He shifted to look around Prowl's arm at Optimus Prime. "You guys might want to sit down. This may take a bit to explain."

The Autobots settled on "furniture" cobbled together from concrete slabs and giant tractor tires, and he stood facing them on what passed for a Cybertronian-sized coffee table.

"All right, a little history lesson on your 'Home Sweet Home' here. The automobile manufacturer that built this factory was the last company to successfully run a business on this plot of land. Nobody's been able to be successful here for more than a few years at a time. Most went under."

"Went under what?"

Fanzone pinned a look on Bulkhead and had to remind himself that there would probably always be some phrases the alien robots didn't seem to know. "It means to go out of business. Some were just outright abandoned. Pretty suddenly too. That's what happened with the car manufacturer."

Ratchet looked around, his tone dubious. "They just picked up and left? Why?"

"Always on or around Halloween too. Rumor has it, the land is cursed." Fanzone hoped they didn't put too much stock in the words. He sure didn't. But he didn't know what else to tell them. "Back in 1937, there was a salt mining company that operated on this site. Or under it, if you will. Story goes that a local Native American shaman had tried to warn them not to work this area, that they'd awaken a great evil. Claimed his ancestors had fought some kind of dark spirit until they were able to trap it and bury it deep in a cave in the same area the mining would take place."

"And something did happen, didn't it?" Prowl guessed.

Fanzone nodded. "Shortly after starting operations, ninety-one miners died under mysterious circumstances. Official records say they hit a big pocket of natural gas and died of hydrogen sulfide poisoning. The few survivors who managed to escape said it wasn't poison, and it wasn't natural. What it was, though, none of them would say. Whatever it was had them too terrified to speak of it."

"So, what, now it's haunted?" Bumblebee sounded incredulous, but his expression betrayed him. Then he gasped, full horror taking over his face and tone. "And we're sitting on the site of this? You mean our base is haunted?"

Ratchet growled at him. "Bumblebee, don't be ridiculous. Of course not. There's no such thing as-"

"Hello!" Bumblebee was insistent. "Unexplained cold, energy drops, oppressive feelings, machines running by themselves? Tell me those aren't signs of ghost activity." When the rest of the team just stared at him, he huffed. "Sari's told me all about it, and we've watched movies on the subject."

"Fantasies and sensationalism," Ratchet stated with a snort.

Fanzone agreed, but he couldn't shake the feeling that something . . . something weird was going on here. That dream he'd had…

"Captain?"

Fanzone flinched a bit at Optimus's voice and found the whole team staring at him. "What?"

"What's an ariel?" Prowl wanted to know.

"Huh?"

"You said 'ariel'," Bulkhead clarified. "Kind of muttered it, actually."

Ratchet studied him. "You're looking a little pale, there, Captain."

"Captain Fanzone." Optimus seemed worried. "What's going on?"

Fanzone hesitated, then dragged a hand down his face with a sigh. "Ariel's not a what, but a who. Ariel Hugo. She was the subject of a missing persons case that turned into a murder investigation a number of years ago. Cause of death was never determined for certain. No suspects, and the murder site was never located for sure, but the body was found . . . " He nodded the group's attention behind them. " . . . laying in the middle of that circular panel in the floor over there." The one they'd painted that big, bright red Autobot sigil on.

Optimus shifted to look over his shoulder, then turned back with wide, bright optics. "She was found here?"

Bumblebee hugged himself. "Okay, that's just creepy. Oh! Guys, what if she's still here?"

What indeed, Fanzone thought, unable to put his nightmare out of his mind.

A blast of cold air, arctic-frigid and carrying an acrid scent of ozone, swept through the room just then, eliciting yelps of surprise from everyone. Fanzone shivered in the sudden chill and watched the Autobots shift and shudder. It struck him as strange, in that he didn't think robots felt cold like humans did. Or maybe it wasn't the temperature they were reacting to.

"Okay, that was definitely not the AC," Bulkhead asserted, his voice shaky.

Prowl frowned in thought. "Was hers the only incident, Captain?"

Fanzone reluctantly shook his head. He didn't want to read too much into things - maybe they were connected and maybe not. "Unfortunately, no. This isn't a great neighborhood to begin with, but . . . over the years, there have been a number of reports of missing persons. Most turn up sooner or later, some never have. Of those that turned up, most did so as dead bodies. Usually, cause of death could be determined, but . . . not always. Too many times for my liking, there's been something or other strange about how the person died."

Ratchet sat back, folding his arms. "I don't like this, Prime."

"I don't either, Ratchet." To Fanzone, Optimus asked, "What do you think could be behind all of this?"

Besides something supernatural? Fanzone thought caustically. "My professional opinion? I don't know. A cult of some kind, maybe. Some yahoos descended from that shaman using mysterious herbs to poison sacrifices to 'appease the spirits', for all I know." He gestured air quotes with his fingers as he said it. "If that's the case, though, it'd be an unusual one, and being done by generations of people. Major instances seem to happen only once every thirteen years."

"Thirteen years." Fanzone heard Optimus's fans hitch as a thought occurred to him. "You said the original incident was in 1937? That was a hundred and sixty-nine years ago."

"Whoa!" Bulkhead looked at Optimus in shock as whatever it was apparently hit him too. "That's the square of thirteen!"

"Excuse me?" Fanzone wasn't following them.

Optimus explained. "One hundred and sixty-nine is thirteen times thirteen. And you said that ninety-one miners died in the original incident? That's thirteen times seven."

"But wait," Bumblebee interjected. "Isn't seven supposed to be a lucky number?"

Prowl shrugged. "Apparently, their luck ran out."

"Be that as it may!" Ratchet interrupted, speaking forcefully to derail the conversation. "That's all in the past. What are we going to do about our situation here and now?"

Optimus stood, prompting his team to follow suite. "If Captain Fanzone is right and there is some kind of cult activity, we should try to find and put a stop to it."

"But where do we start?" Bulkhead wanted to know.

"The salt mine?" Prowl suggested. "That seems to be where this all started."

"Do you think the shaft still exists?" Bumblebee didn't look eager to find it.

"If it hasn't been paved over," Ratchet groused.

A sharp click cracked the silence, followed by the grinding of ancient gears.

"The Autobrand!" Bulkhead cried, pointing at the floor behind them.

Fanzone jumped the space between the coffee table and the couch, straining to pull himself up high enough to see over the back. Sure enough, that circular panel was dropping below floor level.

"Hey, maybe it's the mine shaft," Bumblebee suggested.

"Oh, like we should be so lucky!" Ratchet's voice was sharp with sarcasm, but his gaze was uncertain as he stared at the new hole in the floor.

"Everyone, hurry!" Optimus motioned the group to action before scooping up Fanzone into his arms, prompting a startled yelp. "We should see where it's going. It has to be connected to everything else going on."

Fanzone clung to Optimus's arm as, one by one, the Autobots jumped onto the descending platform.