Fallout: Fury Blood

Chapter 85: Blood Rock

A leash was snapped onto the slave collar around the Initiate's neck. The tattooed runner pulled him in tow through the doomy cave mouth of Blood Rock, it's flanks chiselled down from it's vast height in the depictions of fangs.

Those fangs were kissed by elaborate flame. Flamethrower devices propped at the tips of the fangs were keeping them fed a steady slew of fire, manned by dead-eyed slaves drenched in oil and sweat. It reminded the Initiate of his labors out in the oil fields, shovelling sand and mud to plug the fountains set alight by the Red Claws.

Before being pulled under the entrance, he forced himself to glance back at his fellow slaves, and Mole. Those blackened eyes were watching after him like pits of sorrow before they set their focus on what Banshee presented to them.

A mobile cage of specimens.

The mutations given by the specimens were their only means of long-term survival out here. But it didn't dull the trauma of having those things wringing out your sanity and mauling their way into your skull.

Even while horrified for his friend and the slaves he had promised would be liberated by the Brotherhood, the Initiate could only see the smile that Banshee twisted around at him as if in slow-motion. A perverted, glittering smile of rapture. Torn from the beginning of the scene, he heard the subsequent screams as he was dragged under the flaming fangs.

The heat singed his bare flesh on passing. But within the cave mouth there was no respite. At once, the radiation from the ancient craters that leached within the caverns cooked him from the inside out, making the marrow in his bones quiver with heat. Even with his daily dose of Radaway and Moondrops, he wouldn't survive long without a specimen mutation.

He walked the hot caverns in a daze. Nightmarish creatures skimmed him in the foot-traffic, observing him with quiet hunger or taunting him with cruel pokes and prods. It took a while for his exhausted brain to register these creatures as raiders. Ornately adorned in warpaint and tattoos, barely clad in leather, animal pelts, and ceremonial armors. Heavily pierced, sporting outlandish body modifications from protruding horns planted beneath the skin to shards of metal growing out from points of bone, some looked more demon than human.

One warrior was naked but for the warpaint lashing his limbs and the carved strip of a pre-war type encasing his manhood, chained in place about his hips where it was clipped into his very flesh with locket piercings. One huntress was also proudly naked save for the upper cranium of a bloodbeast mounted around her hips and the sabretooth fangs dangling at her nipples by a narrow bando of braided leather. She snapped her teeth at him on passing, noticing him staring dumbly at her hidden nipples.

Branching out over an open ledge, the Initiate was witness to a deep pit. Bodies thrashed below to reverberating tribal drum beats. Naked bodies splashed in red paint, or was it blood? The heat of those bodies rose to the cave ceiling, reaching up at the hanging stalagmites that forever threatened to drop and shatter skulls below. Thick smoke obscured the Initiate's view, but he couldn't keep from staring into the bloody rave, captured by the bone-shaking drums, the hypnotic flashing of fire torches, and the shameless rutting of bare bodies. Were they dancing or fucking? Both? He ogled the sight of live orgy sessions where vampiric creatures drank the blood of each other's throats. Felt like a deprived boy seeing a girl naked for the first time. So many bodies. So much skin.

The Brotherhood would never allow such excessive sexual activity in it's ranks. Even breathing the word 'sex' in the wrong situation or context could land him a verbal warning from Paladin Danse. Or even Elder Maxson. It had happened before to a greenhorn like himself.