Fallout: Fury Blood

Chapter 101: Here There Be Monsters

*WARNING*
Violence and gore. Sexual content.

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"I almost wish that Clay-Crawler was with us."

Kelly found herself the victim of one of Danse's skewering stares.

"Almost," she squirmed under it. When it didn't relent, she tilted her head to coax him. "You can't deny how helpful he would be out here. He knows this land, knows the wildlife. What to hunt and what to avoid, what's edible and what's poison..."

"Which rocks to bang together..." He let it drift off mockingly as he returned his stare outbound.

"You salted butthole."

Danse conjured no comeback, but Kelly could see the grin beneath the scruff of his beard. She wanted to bite it from his lips and taste his tongue on hers, but quelled the urge by biting at her own lip. She was growing stronger day by day, and would soon be strong enough to bite and taste him all over. She just had to keep her patience.

The desert was wrapped in a dense heat. The Bloodlands were a savage expanse beneath them, both thriving and withering with the daily clash of life and death. The canyon stood tall and silent with red growth on it's shoulders, Dark Blood motifs and warding totems flashing on territorial stakes to lay claim to the colossal rock. Shrouded on it's red shoulders were Danse and Kelly. The climb had taken him all morning with the weakling woman on his back, but Danse had prevailed in order to get a vast scope of their surrounding hunting grounds. Their food stores were dwindling, and the time for hunting was drawing near.

"It would seem as though this place has an overabundance of predators, and few prey," Danse observed from his flattened position at the edge of the precipice. "Everything has mutated to kill. It's unbalanced. Unnatural."

Kelly nodded at his side, squinting through the sun in her eyes. "Radiation has a twisted sense of humor."

"In this case, deadly." He had his sights set on a roving band of radraptors, their territory passing through a Western loop of the canyon passages into an open gulch devoid of raider activity. Probably for good reason. The radraptors eerily resembled the depictions of their dinosaur counterparts, fast and agile and terrifyingly intelligent. The only features of difference were the enlarged size, taller than a man when walking bipedal on their hind legs, and those twin horns jutting from their heads like those of deathclaws, giving them a demonic aspect that sent shivers down Kelly's spine. Their long skulls were tipped with upturned snouts, concealing jaws that she would fear to be acquainted with. Their sickle claws were obsidian black, flexing on their long forelegs. Their reptilian skin was a deep grey trimmed with vibrant blood red, befitting the land and it's gods. They were clustering around the overgrowth of giant, twining roots the color of red wine, nesting their eggs beneath their shade. Kelly had never seen roots so thick, they were like worms coiling into a maze, and there was no sign of their plants.

She felt uneasy at the thought of Danse hunting down there, alone and up against a predator that neither of them had faced before. Remembering how brutally he had contended with the bloodbeast known as Deadskull, bringing the axe down on it's skull to save her from it's jaws, still didn't appease the dread in her gut.

"How are you planning on drawing one out alone? You won't get near their nest."

Danse rubbed along his scruffy jaw with thought, and when he answered, it was as if he were thinking aloud to himself rather than to her. "I'll have to lure them with the notion of an easy meal. A haunch of meat laid out in the open, one of the last from our store. With luck, something small will prevent them from investigating as a whole pack."