10-year old Amy LePine has earned herself a much-needed break today. She woke up at 4am having an asthma attack, took a puff from her inhaler, and flicked on her flashlight to have a look around the shelter. To her horror, NPC-Face the Mungo was gone and the north-facing door (towards the mall just a few tiles away) had been left hanging wide open. She quickly slammed it shut and curled back up in her bedroll next to the terminal… but there would be no more sleep for this night. Instead, she read a trashy erotic novel she’d picked up from the library and drank a bottle of Wild Apple. Smut and alcohol? It’s the end of the world. Who’s going to stop her?
After a rough couple of hours waiting for the sun to come up, she ventured out and to the West. For the last week she’d been scavenging through the city here for supplies. This time, getting further than ever before, she found herself standing at the far edge of a military checkpoint. In the middle, besieged by zombies, was a terrifying machine. Amelia hadn’t ever seen a Chicken Walker before… not a real one. She had a newspaper clipping with a picture of one back at the shelter, and a couple photos of one on her e-Ink tablet. Pictures didn’t do the clunky death-machine justice. From the south, a cluster of zombies came wandering up to investigate all the gunfire. Not realizing how close they’d gotten, Amelia got caught between facing down a horde of zombies with just her Glock-19, or rushing North towards the chicken walker in hopes of finding a window or alley to duck into. What she found instead was a functional Military Transport Truck.
Amy could barely reach the pedals. She could hardly keep the steering wheel straight. Her hands were trembling as she turned the key, still in the ignition, and revved that beefy diesel engine up. She was sure that all eyes, robot and undead, would instantly fall upon her. Instead, the Chicken Walker just kept firing away at the river of walking corpses surrounding it. She slammed her foot down on the accelerator and tore out of that place going as fast as she could… but that proved to be dangerous. One particularly nasty slip of the wheel saw her truck sliding sideways through an intersection completely flooded with zombies. To her shock, however, the massive truck just mulched the lot of them into a reddish-black smear of rotting guts. A shocker-brute lurked up the road, for days now preventing her access to the hardware store at the end of the block. Screaming in rage, she slammed down the gas pedal again. Barreling down the street at thirty-nine miles per hour, Amelia LePine struck the brute so hard that it crashed into the wall of the gun store across the street. Then she too crashed into the wall, knocking it down and splattering the shocker brute as easily as anything she’d ever seen before.
Backing up, she climbed out of the truck and hacked the monster apart. This has become her ritual… because even though she’s never seen one come back to life, that doesn’t mean that none of them are capable of it. Inside the twisted creature’s body she found an intact chain-lightning bionic, a power-storage bionic, and a few other broken bionics too damaged to function. Until then, she’d just assumed the shocker brutes were big bulky monsters with superhuman powers. The realization that they were just bulked-up people using technology to give them said power changed everything.
It meant that SHE could have superhuman powers, too. It meant she had a chance of becoming strong enough to fix this broken world, at least a little. Although she failed to install the power-storage bionic, installation of the chain-lightning unit was a resounding success.
Now a new mission has taken hold inside Amelia’s young mind: Find more bionics, become stronger, and establish a foothold for survivors to gather.
But for now, she’s Dead Tired. She spent the rest of the day plowing through the streets wiping out as many zombies and other various monsters as she could manage to crush. She plowed through wrecked cars, clearing paths and ensuring an easier time of traveling through the mess. The only problem is, the truck’s a mess… and there’s a skyscraper of a giant zombie lurking somewhere in the city. She’s going to need to plow it down if she wants to have any hope of killing it.
Tomorrow will be a day of car repairs and refueling missions. The day after that… the hunt resumes for fancy high-end electronics shops.
