Rust

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It's cold.

That was Shiloh's only complaint about the wastelands. No matter how many space heaters she collected and refurbished to warm her abode, there was always a chill that sat heavy on her shoulders.

It was the weather at times, when November rain swept through the fields of abandoned scrap metal and soaked well into the outer limits of the city; it was the isolation at others when the ostensible stillness of the air provided the sense that for a long couple of hundred of miles around her, Shiloh was all alone.

And the chill stuck around, even though it was late May already. The spring was filled with brisk air and clouded skies that were perfect for days where she could swing her window wide open and sit atop her desk to work. Currently, Shiloh sat cross-legged on one of her makeshift tables - a wonderful, mahogany slab of wood found in the Creak - fiddling with her scuttler and listening to the same record on repeat.

She had sent it, the robot, and its two siblings out in the section of the city she had most recently began exploring to do some salvaging. Everything was per usual, nice, quiet and steady, until twenty minutes into the expedition when the scuttler malfunctioned and dropped dead on the tenth floor of some decrepit building.

She was one foot out the door when she heard the alert go off. It made her jump out of her skin, of course, being that she was not used to hearing the sound of her monitoring system emit anything other than the quiet beep, or the occasional boop. So instead of going out to find some food where her supplies were running low, she was forced to forgo her original plans and track down its signal. It took her most of the morning and afternoon until she had finally picked up its last location and carried it back to base.

Upon first glance of her creation, she saw nothing but a few dings and scratches on the scuttler's head. This would always be the case, though, since Shiloh had built them all out of salvaged parts and scrap metal. These bots in particular were designed to be able to traverse the tall, crumbling walls of buildings and the debris-filled terrain of the Creak, and were especially good within the city, having the likeness of a crab with its six legs, a pair of retractable claws, and a head that recorded footage and analyzed its surroundings for reconnaissance purposes. It had never had this problem before . Sure, this one seemed to be predisposed to losing a screw or two when lifting scraps that were a little too big for its tiny structure, but this time it seemed to have just dropped dead.

Shiloh brought it over to her work desk and under the magnifying lens once something odd caught her eye, prompting her to reach under its carapace and crack it open to reveal its interior. Inside its core was a destroyed wire; its plastic coating torn, and filaments spilling and tumbling out from stringy, crooked edges. There was no way this would have happened on its own without someone having opened it up. The wire had been cut, it had been tampered with.

After precariously piecing it back together with a bit of electrical tape, Shiloh slid the opening closed and rebooted the scuttler. She was hoping to recover whatever footage she could still pull out of it and onto her laptop where there might be an answer as to what caused such a curious injury to her bot.

The recording rolled. Little, metal legs roamed around the building she had grabbed it from, and its head whirred as it swerved left and right, trekking through the rubble. Shiloh scrubbed forward through the footage of the bot picking up and analyzing pieces of scrap metal, discarding the ones with no worth and storing the valuable and precious ones like she had taught it to.

She stopped when it had reached the tenth floor. 

Shiloh watched as the scuttler caught something out of its peripheral vision. Three pairs of combat boots appeared within the frame when Shiloh lurched back from her screen, knocking over a cup of tea she had been sipping from all over her desk. She quickly moved her laptop away from the area, not having the wherewithal to care any less about the soaking sketches and parts beside her as she watched the bot turn its head to scan the anomaly.

There were three suited people, all except one were characteristically male from what she could see. Their faces were covered with masks and a pair of huge goggles, looking like something out of a horror movie. The scuttler stayed very still, but it seemed that the one in the front had already seen it. Her heart shook inside of the walls of her chest as they approached.

The offender turned its head curiously at the invention, obviously studying the eclectic menagerie of salvaged parts, before reaching a gloved hand into its internal compartment and tearing the wire. At least, that is what Shiloh assumed they had done when the scuttler ceased its squirming and the footage came to an end.

She set her laptop down, feeling sick to her stomach about what she had just seen. As far as she knew, she was the only person in the wastelands of sector nine. She had been the only person cast out to the farthest and most isolated portion of the ruins for twenty years, she should be the only one that has survived.

Shiloh bit the skin on her thumb nervously, thinking hard about the intruders and what they wanted. They did not seem to be from TRBD, for their uniforms were usually an industrialized, sterile, manufactured white. These people were dressed in a stark black. Unless something major had changed inside the city walls, these people could not be from her old civilization.

As she contemplated the nature of her discovery and balanced out the risks in her head, a strong wind carried itself through the hollowed buildings situated a couple kilometers away from her home. Its tune rang out into the night sky and an eerie creaking noise she had become so familiar with washed over the wastelands. The Creak, deftly named for this haunting sound breathed and groaned every so often, as if stretching itself awake and reminding whoever could hear that it was still out there, not quite forgotten.

Shiloh pushed herself off her the surface she was leaning on, briskly making her way to the falcon, one of her hardiest flying bots, and plugged the coordinates of the section in which she last sent her scuttlers. And as she watched it take off into the night, mechanical wings whistling slightly in the frigid and still air, she worried about the intruders that stepped onto her territory, the first real people she has seen in a long time. She thought about who they might be and what they thought about her creations roaming in the same territory. The thing that troubled her most, Shiloh thought to herself as she surveyed her cozy home and everything she has built over the course of eight years, was that these visitors certainly did not look like they would just let her be.