Fallout: Fury Blood

Chapter 30: Damaged Soldiers

The darkness was a thing, a consciousness that slipped beneath her skin to unravel her sanity. She was within a void, her void, lost to her own depths as it all billowed upon her.

"You can't escape it."

But she made an attempt, raiding her void for that escape, for rifts of light that might offer it to her. Instead, she found only pain. Sharp impacts like nails to her feet, fingernails shredded off, harrowing slices to her flesh, then, the stabbing, over and over, explosions in her gut that no amount of cries could express. They pulsed throughout her entire body. Before they could consume her, her throat was slashed by a jagged edge, and she was gagging on blood, drowning in herself. Then there was a horrid wrenching as her throat was torn out.

Just as she had done to Doom-Guy. In a flash, she saw his monstrous face, the blood warpaint, the decayed teeth, the fangs, the scars, the cruel eyes that could see right into her soul and know her deepest madness. He was laughing. She was screaming. He was dead. She was drowning.

"It will hunt you no matter where you hide."

It was the silhouette, the same one she had seen in the quarry, of a shadowed man. His voice was familiar yet amorphous. At first, she thought it to be Doom-Guy's, weaved with his slimy tones, but then she recognized that it was just that-only weaved with his voice but not wholly his.

"You'll never escape it."

Blood came next. A sea of it. The world was devoured by it, a megalithic sphere of blood hovering in space. People floundered in waves, crying out for mercy. She was one of them.

Blood was suddenly shrivelled into sand, molten skies lapping up the moisture with heat and sculpting the landscape into dry, rolling dunes. The people of the world were swallowed whole by the land like quicksand, cries smothered, straining hands the last glimpses of them she saw before the sand took them. She was alone in the red desert, painted in blood that dripped from her skin and to the sand, hissing away in the heat to quench the thirst of the air.

"It's hunting you out here."

She ran as the skies were cast aflame, burning up her air, chasing her across the endless plains of wasted Earth. It was gaining, growing in potency with each stride she took. She knew there was no escape, so why did she run?

"It will never stop hunting you. Just let it catch you. Let it take away the pain. Let it consume you wholly."

So she listened to the silhouette's distorted voice. She just stopped running. She let the radiation catch her.

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Climbing up the Prydwen's rungs in power armor with an unconscious woman draped over his shoulder was an awkward and risky task, but Danse managed to achieve success without failing in the multiple ways his mind imagined. He secretly breathed a sigh of relief, and carefully lowered Harper down from his shoulder-guard and back into his arms, glimpsing her slack and grubby face before following Elder Maxson into the infirmary.

"Knight-Captain Cade," Elder Maxson summoned upon entering the small confines of the room, "It's Knight Harper. She collapsed spontaneously."

Cade ceased reviewing his terminal and came out from behind his bench, eyes trailing over Harper's slack form. "Alright, let's get her on the cot and I'll take a look."