Chapter Seventeen: Fear

Sitting beneath the morning sun, on a hill overlooking the small settlement of Kaw City, an M-ATV sits alone, lone watchman over the plains of what used to be Oklahoma. Sitting in the back of the vehicle, both bored out of her fucking mind and too tired to do anything substantial, is Seh.

Idly, she fidgets with her ponytail, twirling the black strands at its end around her finger. She considered getting it dyed some neon color for her eighteenth birthday two months ago, but the few stores she had access to had run out of dye at the time and she hadn’t had the chance to escape her father for even a few minutes since. To Seh, it seems the man is deadset on ensuring the safety of their little lake hugged home, regardless of the cost it wrought upon his relationship with his daughter.

Seh resents that fact, and the fact that he forced her to take part in it.

{“-.-. --.-”}

Jerking up, Seh fumbles as she pulls out a note pad and begins to inscribe the message. She might hate having been forced to learn morse code, the communication method having aged rather poorly in her opinion. There are other options, but in the cash sparse environment that they live in it’s by far the least risky. Something that helps is that Seh doesn’t mind the process of decoding it. It’s like she’s playing a minigame where the cost of her getting it wrong is someone potentially dying. No big deal, obviously.

{“-.-. --.- / -.-. --.- / -.-. --.- / -- ..- / -- ... --. / ..-. -- / .-. ... ...- .-. / -.-. --- .-. .--. --- / ..-. --- --- -.. / ... ..- .--. .--. .-.. -.-- / - .-. .- .. -. / -. -... / -.- .. .-.. -.. . .-. . / .- .-.. .-.. / -- ..- / .. -. - . .-. -.-. . .--. - / .- ... .- .--. / .. / ..}

(CQ CQ CQ MU MSG FM RSVR CORPO FOOD SUPPLY TRAIN NB KILDERE ALL MU INTERCEPT ASAP I I )

It takes a few seconds, but Seh quickly finds herself paling as she reads more and more of the message. She doesn’t hesitate when she finishes it, even with the message repeating over the speakers – she throws the notepad onto the seat beside her and leans forward to shake her father’s arm. The man, who had definitely been snoozing in spite of his own assumed job, stirs and looks at her with a raised eyebrow.

“Tecumseh? What’s up?”

Doing her best to not roll her eyes at him using her full name, she frantically explains:

“There’s a train northbound to Kildere, the Reservoir gang idiots are calling everyone to intercept it!”

Cursing under his breath, Seh’s father starts the truck and immediately slams his foot into the pedal. Seh barely manages to get her seatbelt on before the car bursts into speed as it storms down the hill. Feeling a trite bit more nervous then she usually does, a bad feeling about the upcoming inevitable confrontation, Seh checks the rather blocky pistol that her father gave her for her birthday, making sure the safety was on and all that.

If they end up in a fight over this, she’d rather not be the one who causes it.

It doesn’t even take five minutes of them going full speed for it to become obvious that they definitely were not the only ones that had heard the call put out. The number of quickly growing dust clouds tell a quite harrowing story. Multiple of their somewhat family, somewhat neighbors, have begun rushing full speed towards the ruins of Kildere, each hoping to get a piece of the juicy loot the Reservoir gang is potentially going to scatter across the floor.

Most of the people she is able to see don’t worry her. The majority are converts, civilian transports jankily repurposed into mini-war machines – cheap, but very fragile in the larger scheme of things. There are a couple of more traditional military style vehicles like her dad’s M-ATV, owned mostly by those that have jobs that actually require a ride like that, but none have the firepower to actually derail a train even if they tried. Sure, they could do a great job of pissing off a major corp, but even they aren’t that stupid.

She hopes, at least…

The real issue is the fact that the big guns have decided that this is a chance they can’t let go. Several Mecha and Mecha transports rumble to the west, the knowledge of the damage that they could cause makes Seh’s mouth feel like cotton.

Over the last few decades, Kaw City has become one of the few settlements that survived the fall of Oklahoma, even managing to thrive at points if the stories that Seh heard as a kid were true. The reason for this is twofold: First, the city is surrounded nearly entirely by the Kaw Lake, creating a chokepoint that is easy to hold against any monsters bent on destroying them. Second are the four roughly equally powerful families that dominate politics, a four way power share that leads to a surprisingly stable base of governing.

They’ve utilized this in multiple ways, but one of the universal mandates they all push for is the accumulation of weapons for the “Defence” of Seh’s home. Mecha are expensive of course, but not enough to prevent a dedicated town from buying one every so often. The metal monsters have begun to build up over time though, to the point where there have been some actual skirmishes between families over the years, “to settle things like men”.

The main problem with the way things are done is exactly what’s happening right now: if one family makes a bad call and the rest of the four decide to follow regardless, everyone in the city suffers as a result. For example, a couple of months ago the Ford family decided it would be a great idea to jury rig a random shipping container they had into a refrigerator before calling a hunt on a large herd of Beefalo that was in the area. Good in theory, bad when the electrician fucks the work up and the plan literally spoils. The herd was gone at that point, and food supplies were getting scarce.

Seh does realize that’s probably the reason that this is even happening; most of them had been hoping for another herd to show up to fix it, but a corpo food supply train could give far, far more in exchange for the high risk of dying. Apparently the cost of the risk isn’t nearly enough to outweigh hunger, which Seh supposes she can’t blame them for.

Doesn’t mean this is a good idea. Not at all. Kaw City’s entire tenuous relationship with Corps was born from specifically her family’s work with them in reducing violent crime and coordinating the salvaging of “damaged corporate property” in the aftermath of the war between Texas and the Midwest two or so decades ago. Seh’s father was barely an adult at that point, but participating in it beside her grandfather was apparently enough to leave a chip on his shoulder about their family being the only semblance of true justice in this part of the world.

Seh quietly holds herself back from giggling as she imagines her overweight dad in a Batman costume with a cowboy hat, riding a horse down the hill. Then she imagines herself in a Robin costume doing the same, and she decides to hang that mental image in a place where she’d hopefully never have to see it again. She looks horrendous in bright colors.

“Dad,” Seh asks to try and center herself, “What are we even going to do? It’s not like we can pull up to the side of a Mecha and yell stop at them, they’ll swat us aside!”

After a moment, the man grunts out, “I’m mostly hoping that we can get to Kildere before the train, so while we wait for it to arrive we can try to convince the idiots to stand down.”

Seh growls quietly, “Dad, they’re hungry. Unless we offer up our own stores, they’re going to push regardless. Survival comes before all else.”

The man sits there stoically, before slowly responding, “That might just be what we have to do.”

Seh looks at him like he’s crazy. “We barely have enough for a month ourselves!”

“But we have enough! If that’s enough to get them to not ruin our relationship with the Corps,” He argues, “I think we need to bite the bullet if we get the chance.”

Groaning, Seh sits back in her seat. When the old man gets like this, there’s nothing that she can do to stop him. It’s times like these Seh wishes her mother was here, that humans didn’t lean towards Patriarchy. Seh then finds herself really missing her mom for the first time in a while, and she sighs as she glances out the window towards the east. Seh idly stares at the horizon, wondering what her absent parent is doing right now. She doubts it’s anything like this.

It’s nothing less than abrupt when the atmosphere of the situation suddenly shifts, a thin undertone of doom swiftly rising to begin dominating everything. Seh’s hair stands on end, and her heart begins to slam in her chest, the impact of each beat getting more and more frantic with every second. Seh begins to escape into the little room in her mind that she so often does at times like these, but is taken out of it when her father quietly mutters,

“What the fuck…? What is happening right now?”

Seh glances at him, finding that he’s in a similar state to her at the moment, maybe even worse. Sweat has begun to slide down his face, and he nervously fidgets with the steering wheel as he attempts to keep his grip steady. His breathing has sped up, and he frantically scans the view in front of him to figure out what is happening.

Getting very nervous, Seh unclips her pistol from beside her seat, trying to use it to keep her grip on reality. Something was obviously wrong, but she simply couldn’t figure out what. She looks out the window beside her, then back out the windshield –

Right as death arrives, in the form of a giant metal dog sprinting towards the caravan of vehicles. Seh watches in muted horror as the monster casually slaps aside a convert as it moves, sending it tumbling without even stopping to do so. To Seh, the edges of the beast are obscured by some sort of shadow, each of it’s movements causing her heart to skip and the truth to shift in unison.

The goal of the hellhound becomes obvious as it rushes towards one of the Four’s Mecha, it’s ominous red eyes flashing as the slightly rusted machine notices it coming. There’s no obvious weaponry displayed on the monster’s body besides the vicious looking claws, but apparently it doesn’t even need it to dominate the battle. The Mecha the dog hunts raises up two gatling guns and begins to unleash a volley into it, yet it doesn’t even flinch as it runs into the attack and summarily rends that particular machine into pieces.

There’s a scream on a nearby Vehicle, and Seh gasps when she sees that upon the converted pickup next to them, one of her cousins is standing on the flatbed with a guided missile launcher. There’s a flash of light as it fires, the explosive dart zooming through the air towards the hostile Mecha. The dog barely even shifts it’s head to acknowledge the incoming attack. It blurs as it sidesteps the attack, before shifting it’s momentum towards the new hostile target in it’s vision.

“Fuck.” Seh finds that her dad is maybe understating how bad this is. “Fuck fuck fuck.”

Slamming his foot onto the brakes while spinning the wheel as much as he can, Seh’s dad tries his best to get out of the way of the combat scenario they’re caught smack dab in the middle of. Seh may or may not squeak just a bit as she reaches up to hold onto the cloth handle above her for dear life. She anxiously watches as her cousin dips back into the truck as it too attempts to disengage.

It’s all too late though.

There’s barely any time for Seh to register it as the Mecha knocks the convert into a roll with a swipe, right at the perfect angle to launch it into the M-ATV. There’s a resounding slam before Seh’s world flips over itself a few times, each spin coming with an aftershock that threatens to send her head right into the metal walls around her.

Then just as abruptly as it started, it’s unsettlingly still and silent. Hanging upside down from her seatbelt, Seh is pleasantly surprised to find that she both isn’t dead and didn’t pass out. Her hands trembling, she pointedly tries to ignore how their car has been crumpled like a soup can as she fumbles for her sheathed knife, something that her dad insisted that she carry at all times. She didn’t like it until this moment, but now she’s thankful he did it.

It takes a minute or two of cutting, but even with the amount of blood in her head making her lightheaded, Seh manages to cut herself out of her restraint. She realizes right as she falls that she probably could have thought this through better. Without much more then a moment to think, Seh curls up, doing her best to protect her head and neck during the fall. She lands on her back and hisses as a sharp metal edge cuts into her side. When she shifts to a flatter space though, she finds herself coming face to face with her father.

Or what is left of him.

Seh doesn’t get much time to internalize much more than that though, as the ATV suddenly begins to shift. She yelps as she slides a bit in one direction, then freezes as she sees what is actually occurring. A huge claw rips through the side of the car, opening it up like a can of sardines for the Mecha to look into.

Seh’s heart feeling like it has stopped entirely beneath its piercing crimson gaze, she finds herself completely locked up. She internally screams at herself to move, to get away from the specter of death staring her down. Her muscles twitch, unwilling to answer.

But she pushes farther.

And something cracks.

A flood of energy enters her, and she scrambles back as far as she possibly can go. In an instant, Seh understands what has happened. Ignition. She never thought she’d be one to experience it, yet this is exactly the kind of moment she has heard described.

She also knows exactly what power she got.

Willing her newly found energy into the metal behind her, it begins to shift. A decent chunk of the M-ATV is affected by this, changing into a thin metal dome surrounding Seh. The fear, though not as powerful as before for some reason, is still there, and she nervously uses her power to pull her pistol over to her. She holds it tight, and in spite of the futility, she finds herself resolved to shoot at the monster should it rip into her new shelter.

It’s a excruciatingly long time before anything happens, and she is on edge the entire time. Eventually though, there’s a particularly human knock on the side of her dome, and with relief she wills the metal to open up. It unceremoniously drops her onto her ass.

When she looks up though, she’s surprised that it’s not her family nor neighbors that have found her. It takes them a minute to get it across to a thoroughly exhausted Seh, but they tell her that they’re a corporate swift response team who were immediately dispatched when her father passed. Apparently there were things they had agreed on that he did not bother to tell her.

After what just happened, Seh doesn’t have the energy to even try to be mad.

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