Fallout: Fury Blood

Chapter 70: Sound Of Silence

Kelly was cold, a state of limbo locking her frozen.

No, not back here. Please not here.

A nimbus of crystallized air danced with her fingers as she spread them across the glass on her pod, frost falling away to reveal the darkest niche of her memories.

The vault. Where it all began anew. The events within frozen over and distant to her, but one glimpse was all she needed to remember in lucid, raw grief. Crystallized grief.

She was forced to witness it all over again. But now, her mind was fractured, one part of her watching the shattering of her family with wrenching trauma, numb fists beating on the glass and screams tearing out uselessly. But the other part of her watched on in silence. Crystallized silence.

The ghost of her memory faded into cold darkness, grasping her into an eternal misery.

There, the war scorched the Earth before her eyes, the people cried out for their gods, and she stood powerless in witness as it washed on forever. Echoing in her limbo.

Echoing...

Echoes of nuclear fire. Echoes of the vast wastes. Echoes of the lost.

Her eternal limbo was cold, lonely, despairing, but as eternity's echoes grew on, the echoes in her grew into burning fury.

And then, one day, she wasn't eternal. The frozen ghost broke free. She fractured once again upon her freedom, one part wrought with delirium, rushing to her dead husband, weeping for his soul, grasping for sentimental mementos, avowing her love and promising to put his soul at rest with the return of their son.

But the other part of her stood aflame with a taste for vengeance, walked the vault in soft fury, ignoring all around her as she seized her first steps out into the wasteland. She was fury walking.

Maiming and slaying, she cut a bloody path to vengeance, Kellogg's dead face forever etched into her memories to remind her there was no escaping the pain of loss. Only a lie in respite, like the dull edge of a blade before it was thrust in deep.

Nate and Shaun were still lost. The world and all it's souls were still lost. She was still lost.

The taste of vengeance bled off into nuclear dust. That dust swirled into fiery sand, giving way to a desert wasteland dripping with radioactive remnants of the war she had witnessed. Following her until the end of her mortal days.

In that desert spanned an endless field of men and women. All Minutemen. All silent. All dead.

Kelly stepped through sand on fire, the bare soles of her feet catching up the flames and burning in painless agony. The bodies of the men and women lay face down, as if drowned in sand. Fearfully, she lowered and turned the nearest body of a woman. Her sightless eyes stared up at Kelly. Cold, glazed. Then her mouth split in a pantomime of screaming agony.

Kelly fell back, pushing and paddling away as all of the dead came to life in silent screams. They rolled over in her direction and folded their limbs beneath themselves to begin standing. Some were headless. Some were missing limbs, some dangling by threads of sinew. Most were riddled with bullet bites and blade piercings.