Fallout: Fury Blood

Chapter 60: Steelfall

*WARNING*
Violence and torture, so if you're affected or triggered by that, please read at your own discretion.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Blood. The Initiate thought he would have been desensitized to the smell of it after living in the company of the Dark Bloods for so long, but no. That sharp tang of iron still crinkled his nose with odium.

It was a smell his body instinctively knew was bad, warning him of a wound, or a death, guiding him away from the festering of a diseased carcass or it's lurking killer. Yet these raiders had adapted to relish it. Sadomasochist, carnivorous animals.

He watched under a glare of silently blazing hatred as these sadists moved about the camp. Wild. Barbaric. Savage. One was beating a slave in the sand, sampling his raw blood and declaring he wasn't ripe enough for consumption, that pain would ripen him further; two were fucking rabidly against a large boulder for everyone to hear and see, and another was taking advantage of that, sitting nearby watching, jerking himself off.

Animals. The Initiate often wondered how Slay and Dark-Drinker kept them in order. The hierarchy of order by force of power, he knew. Not so different from the Brotherhood of Steel, except they followed a code of conduct to keep corruption at bay. These animals had no laws besides the way of the wilds.

Hunger knocked on his stomach, but the gory aroma was quick to convert it to nausea. In an attempt to distract himself from the churning in his gut, he swept his eyes over the camp he and his fellow slaves had been marched to. It was a processing camp, not far from the Northern border of Dark Blood territory, where newly drafted slaves were hauled in to determine their fate. Worker, warrior, entertainment, or food.

The Initiate had long since been through the process. They had slapped a specimen to his head, engaged him in their primitive rituals that would imbue him with enough radiation resistance to survive what would usually kill within one day of exposure, and enrolled him in the ranks of the workers.

He watched with a weary detachment as droves of people were devored by the entry gate of barbed fencing, like pre-war Nazi death camps. Droves of innocents marched to their doom, too overwhelmed by the chaos and the cold to fully comprehend the horror they were about to experience. But instead of the biting cold, here it was the bite of radiation.

His detachment slowly wore away into empathy. Watching the young and strong men thrown to the pit of thrashing specimens. The shouting, the panic, the hysteria, pleading, then the futile resistance as the creatures latched around their throats and squeezed them into submission. The convulsions, the pain, the paralysis.

He watched as the women were herded off for entertainment value, most likely to serve as sex-slaves or pretty pieces of meat to mess with in the torture chambers for the youngbloods to practice on. He kept an eye out to check Grace wasn't among those poor women.

The old, ailing, or otherwise useless were passed off as food, even some of the children if they were too resistant to indoctrination. The Initiate had no idea where they were taken. All he knew was that they came back as baskets of dripping flesh.

He tore his eyes off the death march before they could settle on one of the children. He couldn't risk locking eyes with one of them, and then carrying that with him for the rest of his life. However much longer that would be.