Alex is in the forest now. Or at least in what's left of the forest. Trees ripped apart in the hundreds, gigantic mechanical warheads half-buried in the mud. Hollowed-out tank-hulls hardly standing among the grass.
The sky is grey. It's going to rain very soon. One last ray of sunlight pierces the cloud enveloppe high above, landing on one of the metal exoskeletons populating the field. The machine's carcass has long been overgrown by moss.
Alex gets up from behind the tree she's been sitting with her back to for the last ocuple hours. She rbs her eyes with energy. She hasn't slept for a day now. How long's it been since she left home? She fled at around ten in the morning. She checks her phone. No battery.
- Crap! - she utters.
She shoves the object back into the back pocket of her jean.
She's all covered in dirt now.
- I must look like such a catch right now... - she says.
And then :
- Cashew!
She whistles.
- Come back here! We're leaving this place!
The animal rajoins with the teenage girl. It's a cat. Tigr-like in appearance, with straws all over its light-brown-colored back. It's belly area is a pure white.
Alex isn't too bad either. She's a Texan girl. Faithful to her cowgirl ascendance, she wears rugged blue Levi jeans with cow-boy boots made from snake skin. Het top's a half-open checkered shirt, half-white, half-red, and it's obvious she's not the type to wear bras, from the amount of flesh her revealing apparel lets the eye gaze upon, yet as she has no proper breasts to speak of, one could potentially mistake her for a boy, if that person doesn't look too intently at her, doesn't spot her swinging her hips like a badass when she walks, or the flashy crimson lipstick she's on right now.
But the makeup, moreso than the jean even, shows that the young women hasn't been home for quite a long time now, since even the red of her lip balm is starting to flake away.
She picks up her big hiking bag - the most convenient container she's found in her hurry to get out the house and the city - and settles Cashew inside of it; zips it up a bit, and there she goes: Out the forest and into the parking lot.
She's been eyeing the place for quite some time now. Cashew not so much, the furry creature was more concerned with attempting, quite unsuccessfully, to cacth butterflies, but hey, who's gonna blame a cat for doing a cat's job?
The reason why Alex didn't immediately make her way through the place and turn of that car she's been wanting to get to for a little over four hours now, it was because of the remaker.
It'd been standing there, seemingly lifeless or at the very least immobile, looking at nothing in the distance. Standing right in the middle of the parking lot, he'd stood as a very convincing obstacle between the Texan girl and her motorized goal over at the other end of the car park.
She could have tried to sneak past it then, but she'd preferred to wait. You never get second chances with these guys.
Ok, so what. It had moved now. No. Not exactly. It had teleported. Suddenly enbalmed in a pillar of photons, it had vanished from sight. That's their primary mode of transportation. Or its because it's convenient, or it's because they're real lazy.
Alex thinks about that.
I mean, she tells herself, if I had the power to teleport, I'd use it all the time so... Props on these freaks for being intelligent enough to do the same.
Now that she's thought a bit about the remaker, she realizes that yeah, it's gone. So that's why she's moving currently. She manages to reach the car she wants unharmed. It's not her car, but it's probably no one's anymore, so starting from that, she decides that it'll be hers from now on.
It's a fancy sports car painted in a flashy dark violet and ghostly white flames running all over its hull. It's engine is peering out from under its hood, and when Alex starts the machine, the aforementioned engine starts to roar immediately and even spits out flames when the woman presses with her feet on the acceleration pedal.
So there she goes, right? Leaves the abandoned outdoor parking facility, gets to the road, makes her new toy show its moves.
Slaloms over the empty highways that she traverses, her cat timidly daring to look out the window a few times a minute, putting his head back down immediately when he sees how fast they go.
Alex doesn't mind the speed. She likes it even! She's got the blood of horseriders flowing inside her youthful veins!
As she traverses the contryside of the state she and her whole family tree's been living in for the past ten generations, she spots something.
Now, she's not a coward, far from that, she's perhaps more confident and courageous than most of the boys she's dated (and God knows she's date only tough boys), yet she can't help herself when she sees what she's seeing now. So she lets out a "gasp!".
Now, that's more terrifying than even the remakers. That's one of the things that's killed her family. A gigantic hybrid of a spider and a human and a moth, all white of course, like its remaker friends, with the same featureless visage.
The car approaches the creature. Alex is only like what, a few kilometers away from its position now. Even three-thousand meters of distance are not enough to make the monster disappear from sight. That's a testament to its size. As big as an eight story house, if not more.
And what's it doing?
Nothing much, Alex reckons. She's gradually gettinga better visual comprehension of the situation. Yes, she sees something else.
The radiant behemoth is hunched over... A house! That's a house in front of our Texan girl!
She makes the car drift and makes a ninety-degree turn to go help out whoever's still alive in there, if anyone is.
The monster doesn't move an inch. All is calm. Cashew stays inside the car, Alex gets out of it.
She approaches the monument. The place is mostly in ruins already.
It's a church.
Inside is a man, praying for something.
