“Would you look at all that rekindelite?!” Pete said in an excited whisper as he scanned the bay filled with crates upon crates of random parts sitting in tufts of hay. Looking around, Pete saw a crate with a special item sitting halfway popped out of the top. “That Steppenwolf chick will pay nicely for that part!” Pete looked at the flywheel with coins in his eyes.
“You’re a lunatic if you think you can grab that without the Ravagers noticing.” Helge said to him.
“Lunatic to the core, baby!”
The flywheel sat aside an assortment of parts, and it was not the only item that Pete was angling to walk away with, he wanted everything that was strewn about the seemingly abandoned facility and, with caution, the couple inched forward step by step, Pete leading the way.
The place may have seemed empty but both knew the terrible secrets hiding in the shadows.
“You think there are any around?” Helge asked as she cautiously looked around. “Ravagers I mean.”
“You know it, babe. They’re just waiting for us to move out into the open, to a place they can catch us easy…so let’s not make it easy, okay?”
“We’re taking more than just the flywheel, right?” Helge asked.
“You know it…we’re gonna grab as much as we can from this place before the Scavengers show up.” Pete started skulking forward. "You go around that way, down the hall and see what you can find, " he pointed to the right. “I’ll go straight down, this way,” now he pointed forward. Then, he looked back, and Helge was gone. He looked around and down the dark hall on the right, and he assumed that she took off running when he told her to go right. But, if he had looked up, then, he would have seen her feet lifelessly dangling from an air shaft and, quickly, a cable silently slipped around them and pulled them up and out of sight.
He turned to look back the way he was heading, and he crept down into the main holding bay. There, only minutes later, he was surrounded by parts of all kinds. Crates of nuts and bolts, and rivets too. Steel frames for heavy vehicles, their engines, and their transmissions. Tires, rims, large and small. He even found a completely assembled Jeep, a Jeep that had already seen some action, riddled with bullet holes. Pete knew that the Scavengers were on their way but he still had just about an hour before they would show up and, so, he set to making a pile of items in the back of the Jeep. As time ticked away, and the Jeep filled up, he wondered what Helge had found, and left the main bay, and walked down the dark hall.
Uneventfully, he encountered nothing and no one as Helge was nowhere to be seen. That’s when he began to think something terrible had happened but, inexplicably, he heard her voice calling out for him back the way he had come.
“Pete!” she called, and her voice echoed through the complex as though she spoke through a loud-speaker. “Pete, come here!”
“Where you at, babe?” Pete hollered back.
“Pete!” her voice sounded a little frantic, and Pete started to run back to the main bay.
“Babe! Are you in here?” he asked as he looked around.
Then, the sound of a brass artillery shell made him jump as it clanged to the concrete floor. He looked in the direction it seemed to come from, and the rattle of a diesel engine roared to life, and that’s when Helge answered, “I’m right here.” A red light lit up the far end of the bay with a second and a third red light turning on, then, a fourth and fifth. Thick black smoke highlighted in that same red light billowed all around.
Pete’s blood ran cold at the sight. All the red lights shined onto a tank, and affixed to the tank’s turret was Helge, propped up and looking like a grotesque statue of victory. Cables and wires all connected to her body from every direction, and five Ravagers surrounded her, one of them controlled her through a direct connection to her brain through the base of her skull. The barrel of the tanks cannon leveled and aimed directly at Pete.