Murder Drones : Born From Ashes REDUX

Sitting on The Roadside

Ruger woke up to see a singular frayed wire hanging over his head. The surface below him felt oddly spongy and frozen. Moving caused the material below him to crunch and disintegrate until he rolled out and onto the carpet below him. Looking up he was greeting with a wide view of the decimated city below them. Rubble was everywhere, each building had seemingly toppled down and crushed the next smallest one, causing it to collapse and repeat the cycle. Some of the structures were still standing, as their neighbors were made with lesser quality materials to save money.

In the center of the town was a factory complex. There were strange formations surrounding the area, tall reaching spirals that... oh...

He could see their arms and white skin in the moonlight, those were corpse spires. It was a fairly modest one, only reaching up a little way past the height of the nearest smoke tower, and it did get slimmer at the top. Back then he was terrified of them, though their looming presence had since lost all effect on him after the 100th or so time he saw them while organ running. Another Murder Drone anomaly, stacking bodies as high as possible. It was a way of announcing their presence in the most "Murder Drone" way possible. The implications of the corpses eventually decaying would have to wait until after the threat was dealt with. As of now, there were nearly 400 of them. Most settlements considered to be a "natural disaster time bomb" due to how easily they could be toppled over. The toppling of a few bodies wouldn't be enough to have much impact.

However, due to most of the larger spires' foundations being made up of the first wave of casualties, it would only be a matter of time before they lost their structural integrity, and crumble, causing the whole spire to collapse at once. The combined weight and energy from the bodies falling from the top would be enough to cause a minor earthquake. thanks to their close proximity to one another, it would lead to a chain reaction.

The worst part was that it was impossible to acquire substantial evidence. The current risks did not justify the information that would only be useful if any of them lived to see the next decade.

Ruger stopped thinking about the corpse spires, they always got him thinking about later, and he couldn't afford to dream about that, he had to focus on now. The ledges of the windows were lined with freshly placed sandbags. Looking to his right was a machine with arms and legs.

It had a cheese wheel like head, with a twistable lid on the top and a small satellite dish on the right side. He wore a cargo vest and a baby blue t-shirt which had a frayed stitch on the emblem that's wording was illegible. Unlike most drones, he wore a pair of water waders, but he did wear rain boots. His straw hat was placed on his side, with a feather placed on top that would move in accordance to the wind. He laid prone, with an Arisaka Type 38 rifle aiming down towards a factory.

"Can you stop standing there?" the drone asked, his voice was decades old, you could still hear the falsetto digitization and filters being applied to the beeping of his sound card.

"Oh, I'm sorry-" he moved into cover but was cut off again.

"Stop talking. I need complete silence."

Ruger held his voice and felt his arm bump against a desk. Turning around were a collection of wires that reached out to the side, which trailed off towards a shattered EDEN single monitor computer. And wireless keyboard. Against the wall was a figure crouching against the wall, coated in a fine layer of ice. Its sockets were empty and three sections of the rib cage were sitting inside its pelvis. Little flesh was present so as to not give any insight to who this homo sapien once was.

"Your girlfriend is in the walk-in closet, take the first door to the right." The drone said. His face was still hidden as it remained transfixed forwards.