Fallout: Fury Blood

Chapter 94: Operation Purity

The sun's fingers of light stole Kelly's dream. It was a rough transition from the groping hands of savage men to the groping of pain in her savage world. She winced, the smell of warm dust filling her nostrils as she wriggled her fingers to feel the Jet still in her palm. It was full of her divine poison, and she was devoid of it. But how long could she fight it?

Kelly winced again as she moved her limbs on the hard cave floor, gathering them up to enable herself to peer around. She had blacked out in the night, sleeping through the raider hunt for her blood, unfound, and lucky as fuck.

She shouldn't have let herself slip away like that. How long was she out? Tapping at her Pip-boy, her heart beat received an unwelcome shock when she found she had slept until midday. It was the first time she had slept since her hunt for the Minutemen, and while it had been much needed for her own sake, she had let herself be vulnerable, and had lost precious time.

Irked with herself, Kelly forced her aching body to stand with assistance from the surrounding rock and waited while a brief faint spell passed. She still felt like walking shit, and didn't waste time before giving herself a fresh dose of Med-X to curb the withdrawals and general pain of her injuries. She drank a whole bottle of water without pause and replenished her shot energy with some morsels that she had stolen from the raiders in the night, chomping down those dried fruit and nut bars that actually didn't taste like ass. Denying her body's plea for more sugary sustenance, she stashed the rest away and tuned into her surroundings with keener eyes.

What she had missed under the veil of darkness was a narrow, horizontal opening at the bottom of the far wall. Maybe just wide enough for her to squeeze through. Peeking beneath it, she saw a widening tunnel that extended out to what may be another cave on the other side. It was too risky to just shuffle out of her hiding place while the raiders could still be looking for her. Knowing raiders, they had decked the canyon out with creative traps, just waiting for some bigfoot idiot to spring one. She needed to embody her Railroad call sign and become a whisper if she was to move through the canyons unseen.

The rock opening was a tight squeeze, but so was good sex and after some tender loving care the tunnel ejaculated her out into another dark, damp cave. From there, the cave soared upward at a steep angle, winding up inside the canyon wall without a pinch of sunlight breaching the rock. Kelly's only source of light to guide her pistol glow-sight emanated from the bioluminescent mushroom stalks and clusters of curling shoots that swayed apart as her legs grazed through them. Curious, she stooped to them. They held no bulbs of food or flowers, so she ignored them.

Over time, the humid air began to aggravate her bruised lungs and cause her to wheeze. A wet cough left speckles of blood on the back of her wrist, and after a few more stubborn minutes of walking at an increasing incline, she was forced to take a break and catch her breath, leaning forward on her knees and grimacing.

Moving up the canyon wasn't her original plan. By the talk of the raiders, the Bleeding Abyssal sounded like it was underground. But if she reached the top of the canyon and found a way outside, it would give her a better view of the layout around her, and hopefully, where an underground entrance might be. Failing that, at least it was an escape from those rapist fuckfaces.

Moving out again, Kelly found her mind wander more and more to the stash of Jet in her pack. The more she fought off the taboo thoughts, the more her mind betrayed her and wandered right back to them. One hit would provide her enough energy to sprint up this bitch and burst out at the canyon top without breaking a sweat. It would lend her the focus she would need to map out the canyon and leap across the rocky heights like a free-running parkor ninja fairy.