Without warning – without rhyme, or reason, or so much as a hint of an explanation, the ungodly roar of gatling-fire tore through the air, interrupting the shinigami’s conversation. A hail of bullets rained down upon the city street, rending concrete and pavement; pedestrians began to drop like flies, and cars crumpled beneath the onslaught. From somewhere around the corner, something exploded.
As one, people started to scream.
The civilian crowd erupted into chaos – a wild mash of normal, everyday humans trying to figure out what was going on – what to do – where to go. People shoved against each other in frantic, mindless desperation, fighting to get away from the gunfire. The busy intersection was overrun in record time, and, left with nowhere to go, cars were quickly abandoned. Any attempts at order were ignored...or drowned out by the wordless shouting and screaming.
Heralded by the pandemonium, crashing into the four-way stop with a bizarre sort of ungainly grace, a seemingly endless hail of bullets, and a wrenching, agonizing mechanical shriek, a machine came into view.
To say that it was a threatening construct would be an understatement. The machine towered above the crowd on four legs, standing at least twenty feet high; a broad, heavily-textured wheel braced the legs against the ground, biting into the broken pavement. Sharp, angled lines of armor protected every inch of metal visible to the eye, armor upon armor. An outer shell of an unearthly, pale, and flesh-like color framed it, unlike anything that could be found in the world of the living. The area around it seemed to darken, as though it were sucking energy from the very air and heaving it back out in the form of fire, death, and ungodly noise.
On either side of the bulky device was an arm, each bristling with weapons – machine guns, missile launchers, rocket launchers,
grenade launchers, ominous cannons and bayonets. And that was
only the arms. The machine’s cockpit sat at the center of the chaos, although the pilot was little more than a shadowy shape behind a layer of heavily-tinted glass.
But that wasn’t important.
What was important was the cylindrical container set just behind the cockpit, made of glass and framed by black metal. A figure – a man – was suspended inside, encased in metal from the waist down and otherwise nude. Scars riddled the man’s pale skin, old wounds long since healed, and an array of tubes, wires, and unfriendly devices buried themselves in the man’s chest, connecting him to the machine. A mess of pale, oddly-blue hair framed his face, weightless in the clear liquid that filled the tube. The lower half of his face was hidden beneath a gag – something that made more sense the more one knew of the man. His eyes a vibrant yellow-orange, were open, fixed upon the carnage that surrounded him. With every shot fired, with every movement of the mobile armory, the tube glowed green and the man jerked with wordless agony. It didn’t seem to faze him.
The monster of a machine stood still in the middle of the intersection, paused, considering. In the shadows of the cockpit, the pilot mashed desperately at his controls – to no avail. There was a stillness as some of the people, the ones who hadn’t seen the source of gunfire before now, stopped and stared, their jaws slack and eyes wide.
Then, like a physical illness, fear spread through the crowd again. The screaming and shouting returned with a vengeance, and the resulting panic turned them into pack animals, bolting in the face of a starving predator. Some of them forced their way into the towering business offices that lined the sidewalks and some just
ran, without thought or any particular destination to guide them, too afraid to stop. The dead were trampled underfoot; those who were too slow were pushed aside or knocked to the ground.
It was an absolutely
adorable demonstration of human nature.
If March hadn’t been so...preoccupied, he might’ve laughed. As it were, he was both incredibly distracted and incredibly gagged. A minor inconvenience for someone who had, through sheer force of will, seized control (however temporarily) of a moving death machine. Clearly, the scientists and engineers and all-around crazies who had put him here had underestimated him. Sorely. Their mistake.
Or maybe not; it depended on what their intentions for the machine had been. After all, he who sat upon a Pale Horse was said to be Death.
And Hell was to follow with him.
