Fallout: Fury Blood

Chapter 110: The Cruel Throttle

The Throb was his friend again. Only this time it felt bigger, not stronger but more widespread, like bloodsauce squirted through the bone in his arm and then smeared outward on a jagged knife edge.

He was growing tired of dying and waking alive again. But what was a Fury Blood if they had not died at least once?

Remembering the weight of the cherub snuggled into his head, Clay-Crawler moaned and rolled, cracking his eyes to see through the fleshy drapes. He saw steel, a deck of dark, polished steel. Military boots stomping over it to-and-fro. Above that was a row of gurneys, each with a dead Dark Blood with various forms of fatal wounds. He was on the airship.

But why was he laying with the dead?

"Ah, our shining hero awakens," said a familiar voice in tones of dull enthusiasm. "Come on, sit up straight. You'll want to see your stub, no doubt."

Ew. It was that snooty dickface, Ketway. The one who treated him after he was first rescued by Deadskull. Beside him was Scribe Haylen, smiling with her pretty face, no longer concealed behind a screen of plastic. Clay-Crawler did as he was bid with ease, finding the weight of the cherub at the back of his head surprisingly light. "M-my stub?" he stammered cloudily, his voice hoarse from disuse.

The Senior Scribe gave him a ridiculing look over his glasses. "Why, your stub of an arm. Surely you didn't think I was speaking of that other stub you have? It hardly bears mentioning. And yes, we had to disrobe you in order to cleanse and decontaminate you. Not the most joyous part of my day."

That wasn't very nice. Still cloudy, though buzzing with a strange new source of energy, the young raider peered down and with the help of Haylen, peeled off the layers of bandage cloth wound over his stump. At the sight of fresh new skin, shiny and pink and more of it than before, he gasped so loudly he frightened Ketway.

His arm was growing! It was still sore and raw, but it was definitely growing longer, just like a cock when it grew from a stub to a big nuke-launcher!

"Your plan worked, Clay!" Haylen enthused at his side, joining in his excitement. "The specimen mutated your cells while you slept and healed your cell breakdown, and your arm. Look at it! It might look a bit ugly right now, but give it time. We've never seen anything like it, not even with the FEV experiment files that Harper recovered from the Institute."

He had no clue what FEV was, and only a vague idea of what the Institute was, but he listened to Haylen with rapt attention, hanging off her every word. Was this his reward? Were the Apocalypse Gods finally blessing him for all his suffering?

"Using the blood tincture recipe you left for us, we managed to coax the specimen from it's hibernation without negatively affecting it's mutation process. That was less than an hour ago, so it didn't take long to wake you, and once we examine you fully and have the process approved, our infected troopers should regain consciousness in much the same way."

"D-Con?"

"He's doing fine. There's actually a few side effects from his mutation that you might find interesting to see, but he's not in any danger. About forty percent of those infected have incurred various side effects, but only ten percent have been of any concern to their health. As soon as the method of awakening the troops from their comas is approved and we hear of Deacon coming out of his, we'll fly you down to the ground to see him. As for those suffering from the same condition of cellular breakdown after removing the specimens, Scribe Neriah is working on a serum that will replicate the effect of receiving another mutation in order to heal the damage. We would have woken you sooner, but your condition took a while to stabilize to the point where we felt it would be safe to proceed. It's been a few days since the battle for the aquifer." Haylen took his bony shoulder in hand. "We won, Clay. Your people's old outpost is liberated, along with a lot of the inhabitants they kept as slaves. You'll be happy to know that plenty of them survived the nuclear airstrike. And because of your intel on the radiation absorbing effect of those creatures down there, we're able to purify and provide clean water to the survivors, and our own troops."