Motorplex

Author's notes: Don't own nothin'. A great many ideas were contributed by my friend Red, who I don't think has an AO3 account but who is Red One1223 on this website!


The day had started so normal, if early for a Tuesday morning. Kane had launched an attack against the Motorcity fresh water source, and Mike and the gang had successfully drawn the Kanebots away. Nothing out of the ordinary, just a lot of flying Kanebots falling into smoldering rubble with each successful hit of Mutt's charger cannons. Mike picked them off one by one, shot by shot, until they were down to the last two or three. It was almost a day not worth telling Jacob about, he thought to himself, until a Kanebot blew and a spark fell just past Julie's window.

"Mike, heads-"

That was all Julie managed to get out before the wall next to her went up in a pillar of smoke and white flames, and the day went from normal to terrifying in the space it took Mike to blink. It took two seconds for his brain to catch up with what he just saw, and his heart clenched as he wailed, "JULIE!"

"I'm okay!" 9Lives peeled out of the smoke at full tilt, paint gone on the driver's side but still driving. 9Lives tires squealed as Julie pulled her out of a fishtail. "I'm okay, it just surprised me!"

It didn't do much to calm him down. His rearview mirror was quickly filling with black, billowing smoke and little licks of flame that jumped towards the ceiling. Mike shouted into the comms. "Everybody behind me, and floor it! We gotta get out of here before it catches up with us!"

Driving in formation and keeping close to Mutt, The Burners collected a safe distance from the tower of fire and watched it gutter and put itself out almost as fast as it had started up. Mike jumped out of the car and headcounted everyone, checked Julie over to make sure she was all right, doublechecked 9Lives to make sure it wasn't leaking or melted or punctured. Other than Julie's ear ringing and the singed paint and tires, everything was fine.

Mike had to repeat that to himself out loud a few times. Maybe if he did it enough, his heart would stop pounding. "Okay! Okay, we're okay, everybody's okay? Everybody's okay."

Texas pointed over his shoulder to the billowing smoke and licking white fire slowly licking their way back down to the ground. "What about that? That doesn't look okay."

"All right, WE are okay!" Mike frantically corrected himself. "We the Burners are okay, and nobody's dead, and that's good! Today's a good day!"

Chuck was already pulling up screens, checking the Motorcity map. "Only you would call a day that included the city catching on fire 'good'! I need to check what went up so we can-" His screens blinked red with alerts. Chuck said with alarm, "I don't get it! According to my readouts, that should have been a solid hunk of metal scrap and trash! There shouldn't be anything that combustible over there!"

"Oh gee," Julie droned in her most bitter snark, "Makes me feel so much better that there shouldn't have been an explosion. I can almost hear the ringing in my ears magically going away."

Chuck scowled. "Just like I can feel my relief that you're alive magically going away."

"Guys! Woah!" Mike put himself between Chuck and Julie and pulled them both in for a hug, one under each arm. He could feel them struggling in his grip, and he only squeezed them tighter so they'd calm down. "Let's be nice, that's the adrenaline talking, everybody cool down-"

Texas pointed back to the smoldering pile. "Can we really cool down while Motorcity's on fire?"

"I mean- no?" Arms full of squabbling friends, Mike tried to shrug. "Guys if you have ideas, help me out, but I'm at a loss here! Firefighting is not something I thought we'd ever have to do!"

"I don't think we need to really hurry," Chuck pointed out. Untucking himself from Mike's arm, he zoomed in on his map, showing off the sector in a low-resolution thumbnail. "Uninhabited in a two mile radius, no crops growing there, no recycling programs in place- I mean, literally, it's just a big pile of compacted garbage. It might as well be a giant rock."

Dutch let that thought hang with the statement, "A giant rock that exploded."

"Well not really 'exploded'," Chuck corrected. "Just kind of 'combusted' and- aagh!"

It hit them all at once: the smell. The acrid, bitter, pungent smell that rolled down from the clouds and along the road, the smell like every awful part of burning tires and bleach and sewage and mold, it all came down in a wave that hit their noses and stuck straight to the backs of their throats. Poor Chuck, who had his mouth open at that exact moment, nearly hurled onto the ground. Mike, Dutch, and Julie all pulled their shirts up over their noses. ROTH, safely tucked into Whiptail, screeched with alarms and sympathetic whirs of discomfort.

Texas brayed out a noise of horror. He was the only one who didn't have a shirt to pull over his nose and mouth, and he was left to wail. "It smells like my grandma!"

"Dude," said Dutch, "What the hell is your grandma doing to smell like that?"

"She's been dead for seven years!"

Dutch shouted, "GOOD LORD!"

"I'm all for just turning around and letting this dumpster fire put itself out of its misery!" said Julie. "Show of hands, who's out of here?"

Chuck, muffled, spoke through his shirt. "My hands are staying right on top of my nose thank you very much!"

The last of the smoke was finally starting to dissipate. It carried up and out through the vents that would take it into Deluxe, if the air filters didn't catch it first. Mike chuckled at the idea of Kane having to suffer through this awful reek, because faced with this mess it was about the only thing that could get him to smile. The ugly lump of metal and wreckage, invisible to him for the years he'd lived in Motorcity, settled into a singed speckled black hill sticking out of the city skyline.

He backtracked. What was speckling? He tilted his head to get a better look, and the little flecks of white and blue shifted along with him. He reached out to touch Chuck's shoulder. "Hey. Can I borrow your slingshot? Just the zoom function, not the whole thing."

Chuck winced. "And drop my shirt?"

Mike shot him a look, sympathetic but insistent. "You can handle a bad smell for a few minutes, Chuckles."

With a resigned whimper, Chuck freed his shirt and popped his cybersling into place. His face wrenched as the smell hit his nose in full force, but he held himself still while Mike's head settled onto his shoulder and looked down the sight. Chuck zoomed in further to the wreckage, and the rest of the Burners crowded his arms to look for what Mike was sighting out.

"Guys…" Mike pushed Chuck's wrist, scanning over the whole hill. "It's hollow."

The fire had left behind a framework. It wasn't constructed that way, by any means. It was a tangle of old bicycles, bunkbeds, and piping, and those were just the bits Mike could recognize at a glance. The speckling was light shining through the gaps from the other side, and as Mike dropped the zoom view, he spotted something through the holes. Something in the center, rectangular and dark, on the inside of the structure.

"Chuck…" Mike asked, "Can you find us a road that gets to that thing?"

"You wanna go towards the thing that nearly blew up my car?" Julie snarked.

"It's a part of Motorcity I've never seen before…" Mike grinned. "You bet your butt I do."

They gave the stench a few more minutes to pass before loading back into the cars and setting off. Chuck's maps lead them down a blackened side road. The trip was nerve-wracking and quiet. The road went so narrow they had to drive down it single file, so winding that they inched along at 10 miles per hour, so steep along the sides that Chuck couldn't even enjoy going that slow. They dove deep into that tiny excuse of an alley, that little sliver of space between the ramp and the exploding hill, and found water.

At least, Mike assumed it was water. It still smelled pretty bad, but in a way he could faintly recognize, like a watered-down paint thinner. The bare ground below his boots lead off into a gradual slope down into the dark moat that surrounded the trash mound. The enormity of the thing really sunk in now that he was standing at the base of it, but his eyes instead followed the line of the water through the hill's understructure… and below it, into an alcove.

"Check it out, guys," said Mike. He laid his hand on the metal superstructure- the "moat" was only about an arm's length across- and knelt down to peer into the little recess. "A hidden cave. Anybody got a flashlight?"

"Well, yeah but no?" said Dutch. "I mean it's in Whiptail, but…" He vaguely motioned over to where Julie, Texas, and ROTH were doing vague geometry, trying to find a way to turn Stronghorn around without bashing into the other cars. "I kinda wanna make sure we can leave here without having to drive backwards up a hill first."

Mike ducked his head and offered Dutch an apologetic smile. "In my defense, I didn't know space would be so... limited?"

Dutch rolled his eyes just in time to catch Stronghorn's bumper getting dangerously close to Whiptail. He darted away. "WOAH DUDES! Watch the finish!"

Mike just gave a little chuckle. Speaking of, actually, here was Chuck now, tugging on his shoulder with a mild panicked whimper. "Mike, move, your boots!"

He looked down, and with a little gasp of alarm, he jumped up and back from the moat. The toe of his boot had been nudged into the moat water- it couldn't have been for more than a few seconds- and it had already begun to foam and melt the rubber sole. Mike winced. He liked these boots!

"That stuff must be seriously strong acid!" Chuck whispered. "Or something- something really bad! And caustic! If it did that to your shoe-"

Mike completed the thought with a small amount of dread. "Imagine what it could do to our skin."

"Exactly!" Chuck raised his voice just enough to be heard, and even then, it echoed loud in the high bare walls. "Nobody touch this stuff! It'll melt your skin!"

Texas was quick with a line about "Boiling aciiiid!", and the Burners quickly fell into a little rhythm of pop culture jokes and light-hearted ribbing. All that excitement for a nasty pool of acid, which wasn't all that uncommon in Motorcity, and a hollow bubble of trash. Chuck and Dutch were bouncing theories back and forth about how it was probably the fumes from the acid lake that started the fire, and it made enough sense to settle his mind. Mike still wanted a peek into that little cave, though, if only to know for sure that it was a dead end and didn't lead into the inside of the bubble. He stole away from the chat to take another look, still wanting a flashlight. If it were just plain water, he could probably just wade through and check. There was more than enough clearance to keep his head above water, and he was sure the pool couldn't be that deep.

From within the little alcove, he heard tapping, and his body locked into place. All senses tuned to that little knocking noise, he stayed still and listened. Carefully, he watched.

A bottle floated out.

"ROTH." Mike waved the little robot over. "Come get this for me."

That plastic bottle- more of a jug- bobbed just out of his arm's reach. ROTH flew out to pick it up instead, and through the paint melted off his "fingers" where he held the bottle, he wasn't in any obvious discomfort while he held the bit of litter up to Mike to see.

It was a plastic jug of synthetic motor oil.

Texas immediately gasped and spoke. "I call it!"

"I'm the one that got my paint stripped by the explosion!" Julie snapped back. "I call it!"

"Why isn't this dissolving?" Mike asked Chuck.

Chuck shrugged, as if the answer was obvious. "Acids don't melt plastic. ROTH's mostly plastic, and he's not melting."

Texas shot between them, pointing out into the moat. "Well, then I call that thing!"

"What thing-" Mike's question caught in his throat. That one little bottle was only the beginning: now the moat was full of little bits of plastic junk, all pouring out of the mouth of the little alcove. Grabbing any plastic thing- take-out forks, cups, squeegee brushes, whatever- out of their cars, the Burners quickly collected a little cache of goods packaged in plastic. Wiper blades, power steering fluid, antenna toppers, hoses and gaskets, and one miscellaneous sealed package of women's underwear which Julie claimed, all sat at their feet in a wet little pile while more junk and bits of boxes still floated in the acid moat.

"Man, and I just needed some new window gromits for the cars!" Dutch cheered. "Awesome! Happy birthday to us!"

"Where's this all coming from?" Julie thought aloud.

Mike's eyes fell back on the trash dome, and his face split into a massive grin. He had an idea. "Hey guys. Think we can get one of those canoes from the park at the lake?"

"The ducky paddle boat ones?" asked Texas, "Or the plastic flat kayak-y ones?"

Chuck blanched. "Mikey, you don't mean-"

Mike pulled the Burners into a huddle. "Think about it, guys. This could be untouched scavenging territory. What if there's more automotive stuff like this inside, waiting to be picked up?"

Dutch was starting to catch Mike's drift, as well as his smile. A light sparked in his eyes as he imagined possibilities. "Even the stuff we don't use, we could trade out for other goods!"

"And to some top buyers, too," Julie whispered with a delighted undercurrent of conspiracy. "It could be one of the only scavenging sites for car parts that the Duke doesn't have his hands in."

"Why trade it when we can stash it all back in the garage for later?" Texas suggested. "We go through these little weenie car parts like Jacob goes through water! We get enough stuff, and we won't have to pay anything for replacement parts for, like, the next two million years!"

Chuck worried, "Guys, we're counting our chickens here! For all we know this could be everything, and there's nothing but mutant rats and radioactive acid eels in there or something!"

"We've gotta track this back to its source." Mike punched a hand into his fist. "And those dumb little plastic tourist boats are our ticket to paydirt."

"This is seven different flavors of a bad idea," Chuck whimpered. "I can feel it in my gut."

Dutch rolled his eyes. "That's probably just your breakfast."

Chuck huffed and crossed his arms. "I'm telling you guys, bell pepper and radish tastes good together! Just not for the first couple bites."

Mike threw an arm over Chuck's shoulders. "We'll bring safety gear and flashlights, and one car so we're not packed in like sardines when we come back. For quick escapes. Good compromise?"

With a sigh, Chuck deflated into the half-hug. "This isn't so much a 'compromise' as me being outvoted, right?"

"Ex-actly." Mike patted his back firmly. "Let's regroup at the garage, guys. Today just turned into a treasure hunt."