Collateral Damage

Chapter 9: Red-Handed

"Sam!" said Lex, in barely a whisper.

"What?" said Sam, for some unknown reason, also whispering.

"I need you to come over here, like, right now." Still, with the whispering.

Feeling a little foolish, Sam decided to stop whipsering. He was starting to feel like one of those fuck-up spies in the cheesey action flicks. "Why?"

"Sshhhhhhhhh, not so loud. For Pete's sake are you trying to wake up your whole neighborhood??? I don't have time to explain, just get over here, it's important."

Sam rubbed at his face. Ten in the morning was way to early for the cloak and dagger stuff. "Ok, ok, I'll get some clothes on, get Bee and--"

"No! Don't bring Bee. I don't want him to know just yet."

Sam sighed. This was just getting more and more difficult. But he was intrigued. About that he couldn't lie. His brow furrowed, and he went silent for a minute, trying to come up with any excuse that seemed an even slightly plausible reason to go running off somewhere without his car. "Ok, so no Bee. If I ride my skateboard a good ways from the house, can you pick me up?"

Lex hesitated. Sam could almost hear the gears turning in her skull. "No, I don't think it would be wise for me to leave the house right now. I think it would be bad, actually. But like, if you get a good distance from your place on your skateboard, and call a cab, I will pay the fare when you get here."

Now, more than a little worried, and a lot intrigued, Sam told her he'd be there in about 15 minutes, and went to make some excuses to his car.

Lucien Lacroix was not at all amused. Vachon had managed to escape unscathed after making his report (he'd been wise enough to leave out the kinkier bits of what he'd seen), but just barely.

Not that the lack of Vachon's damage was a sign of kindness or weakness. Far from it. He just wasn't sure he believed everything he heard. According to Vachon, his wayward daughter was consorting with giant robots (that could maybe be Japanese?). The story made no sense. Lucien leaned gracefully against the bar of his club, The Raven, and looked on as his employees, a motley mix of humans and vampires, readied the club for tonights business. In all honesty, he didn't really see much of anything. He was too busy thinking. There had been more than one occasion when after drinking a crackhead or some other junkie, Vachon had had what humans called 'a bad trip'. If that were the case, Vachon's sight wasn't trustworthy. However, Vachon had sworn he hadn't touched any junkies, and Lacroix would know if he were lying.

And, what if he was, by some leap of the imagination, telling the truth? After all, Lacroix knew that vampires existed, and while he wasn't sure if any were still amongst the living, he'd encountered a werewolf or two in his time. In this age of technological advancements, giant robots didn't seem to be too much of a stretch. Hell, when he was a great general of the Roman armies, if someone had shown him a working lightbulb, he would have thought it either witchcraft, or a gift from the gods. Now, he took them for granted. Besides, if Vachon's story was accurate, his daughter could be in danger, and that was unacceptable.

If he got some of his human employees to load his coffin onto his private jet, he could easily be in Tranquility tonight.

The little four-eyes robot Lex had managed to ressurect was, to say the least, a handfull. He'd been afraid at first, zooming all around her basement workshop, thinking that perhaps she was fixing to attempt some murder. When he finally settled down, he thanked her profusely in his high-pitched stuttering voice, and insisted on calling Lex "Savior" though she asked him repeatedly not to. Afterwhich, he wrapped her leg in bone crushing hug. That was how she'd gotten him out of the basement, and into the kitchen-- with him holding her leg.

Four-eyes had promptly spotted her cell phone, an LG EnV3, scanned it, and pitched it across the room. Then he transformed into an exact replica of her phone. Lex didn't need a translator for that little message to be clear. Evidently, four-eyes wanted to be her cell phone. The problem with that was, Lex often carried her phone in her back jeans pocket. Lex wasn't so sure she wanted that freaky little spazz sitting right next to her ass all day.

Then... well, then, he'd found the coffee.

In no time flat, he'd brewed enough coffee to fill the sink and was currently wallowing in it, much like Elizabeth Bathory must have wallowed in the blood of her victims. On top of all this, Lex had called Sam, and she hoped like hell that he did as he said, and did NOT bring Bee over, because Ratchet was due home at like any time, and that was bad, because she had a sneaking feeling that maybe Ratchet wouldn't be all that happy with her recent recreational activities.

Looking at the disaster area her kitchen had become, Lex wasn't so sure how happy she was right now, either.

Then she heard the sound of the cab's engine. Thank God, something to keep her mind off the mess. Her purse was sitting on the kitchen counter. Lex snatched it open, grabbed fifty bucks and ran for the door. She opened it as Sam was about to knock, shoved the money in his hand, and told him to tell the cabby to keep the change.

When Sam got back from the cab the second time, Lex was still waiting for him at the door. It was wierd, too. He could hear strange noises coming from the kitchen, almost like metal scraping metal. He stopped just outside her door. "Hey Lex, what's with all the racket in there?"

In answer, Lex just grabbed him by the hand, and let him to the kitchen. By the time they got there, Frenzy had hopped out of the sink and was busily going through Lex's purse, where he'd evidently found her Driver's License.

As soon as Sam saw Frenzy he yelled, "He stole my pants!!"

Before Lex could even begin to fathom the meaning in that, Frenzy, somehow managing to gleefully snicker and stutter at the same time, held up Lex's license and announced, "Your n-n-name is L-Lexington?"

Sam briefly forgot about his pants upon hearing about his friend's misfortune and asked, "Isn't that a street in New York or something?"

"My name is Alexia, that's how I sign all of my art."

Still brandishing the license, Frenzy said, "It says Lexington."

"My father is a sick man, ok?"

Sam got himself smacked by asking, "Is your middle name Avenue?", to which he and Frenzy both spent some time snickering at.

After a few minutes, or months, one or the other, Frenzy left the kitchen at warp speed to skitter around the rest of the house. Sam managed to put on a somewhat serious face and said, "Lex, how did he get here, he's a Decepticon. He's evil and out to destroy human civilization."

"Well, if he keeps taking coffee baths in my kitchen sink, he might be able to pull it off." Sam gave her a hard look, and Lex continued on, trying to explain. "Look, I found him under my front porch about a month or so ago. He was torn to pieces, something or someone pulled him apart like a puzzle. I just wanted to see if I could put him back together."

Frenzy zoomed by carrying Lex's laptop, heading towards the living room.

"Where are you going with my computer?"

"F-Fixing it."

Lex rubbed her face tiredly. "I didn't think it would actually work, ok? But it did, and like, I tried to, ya know, set him free. I mean, I'm not stupid, I figured he wasn't an Autobot, if he was, I'm sure I would have heard something from Bee or Ratchet. I figured he was one of the other ones, the bad ones, but I thought, since he wasn't that big, if I let him go, no harm no foul. Its not like I resurrected that big one, Megatron."

"If you tried to let him go, why is he still here?"

"He didn't want to go. He begged me to let him stay, and started babbling something about 'they are always mean to me'. What was I supposed to do?"

Lex was begining to worry about Sam. He was sweating profusely and constantly scrubbing at his head, like a bee was stinging him or something.

"Lex, you don't understand. This could be like, some kind of Decepticon plot to use you as leverage against the Autobots, or something, I don't know. I just know this can't be good."

In answer, Lex grabbed him by the hand once more, and started dragging him off to her basement workroom. "I have something to show you." She went to her workbench, still strewn with bits of wire and tools, and picked up something that Sam couldn't quite identify. She turned to him, and held out her hand, and then he realized what they were. She was holding a handful of blackened, blistered microchips, far more advanced than anything he'd ever seen inside his computer.

"They come from four-eyes up there. When I rebuilt him, I left these out, they were just too damaged. I'm no expert, but these look almost like, memory chips or something. Do you think maybe he's not acting very Decepticon-y because he doesn't have these anymore?"

"I don't know, Lex. This is WAY out of my league. We'd need to ask Ratchet.... oh God, oh God Ratchet! Oh, he is going to be so pissed...."

"I know."

"And, Bee, he's going to be pissed, too. Hell, they're ALL going to be pissed!"

"I know! But we have to tell them Sam."

"What's this 'we'?"

Lex glared at him as though he was no more than a traitor and a coward and Sam relented, "Ok, you're right. How the hell are WE going to tell Ratchet?"

Lex opened her mouth to answer, but was interupted by the poof of a holo forming in the basement work shop. Looking thunderous, eyes roving the room for a wrench of some sort Ratchet growled, "He already knows."

A/N: It's odd. It's been so long since I've worked on this fic, but I still had no problems getting right back into the story line. Once again, I'm still using Wordpad, and the Spell checker here on FF is just not working for me, so please, I can't spell. If you see something glaring, feel free to point it out.

April Raven Girl: Thanks for getting me motivated on this again, I hope you like this chapter, and I'm already planning the next. XD