Fallout: Fury Blood

Chapter 134: Grim Reaper's Sprint

Danse knew these confines. The rock entrenching his mind was moving, groaning with a motile wroth, like an animal stalking in for the kill. He knew the inner workings of predators. It pursued him, this groan. It's anger moved the rocks until it flowed like magma, chitinous and thick, grumbling together and swirling apart.

The Bleeding Abyssal. Danse could scent the hot blood in the walls, giving life to the carved ravines that formed their twisted mural. They were veins, vessels, arteries, imitations of a living structure, a creature, raised to life by pain, torture and death.

He was within it, this sculpture of flesh. He was a pulse point, a nerve cluster. A contributor in the corporeal machine of deviant art.

The shaman was there. In that dreadful cave. Danse's instincts told him it was a man, but the illusion of femininity was strong, overruling. The concept of androgyny was alien to him. The Brotherhood of Steel had never primed him with this knowledge of gender ambiguity.

"I want to kill it." The susurration of Kelly's disembodied voice entrenched him like the rocks.

Danse felt her hatred for the shaman bite from the shadows. The victims of ritualistic torture were strewn in his peripherals. Everywhere he looked, he was unable to escape them, but when he tried to centre his vision on them, they would slide just out of direct view, slipping back into his peripherals. Always just beyond sight.

"Look at them, Danse."

Again, he attempted to look, to confront the horror.

"I can't."

The shadows pulsed. "Yes, you can."

Braced by her voice, he looked harder into those shadows. They were almost soporific, offering a respite. They moved, and he moved with them, tracking them the way he had been trained. It was a mechanical part of him, the hunter/killer nature of his mind.

But as the shadows broke apart, and Cutler emerged in his monstrous, mutant form, Danse froze and his body refused to cooperate.

He shook his head. He didn't want to do this again, kill Cutler, over and over. How many times could he relive it before it consumed him wholly, indefinitely? Had it already consumed him? He didn't want to be condemned this way. With great effort, Danse turned his back on the scene, on his friend, the guilt and dishonor washing at him like a storm.

"This is our world, Danse. Suffering. You don't want to see the world for what it really is. Not the way I see it."

"What does that even mean, Kelly?"

"It means that you're too good for me."

"That's not true. It's you that's too good for me. Without you, I would cease to exist."

He saw her glide out from the shadows. She was dressed in blood, only blood. He watched the tapestry of events unfolding in languid dread. The shaman became a victim to the unassailable vortices of her darkling mind. His pain became a pulse point for the artistry of the Bleeding Abyssal. His blood fed into the structural gullies, furnishing the walls with scarlet waterfalls.

"Then maim the shaman. Torture him like he tortured our people. Like he deserves."

When Danse looked down, there was blood on his hands. It was hot, bubbling and popping as it boiled on his skin. He stared at them emotionlessly. This was the blood of the raider he had tortured at the canyon. Tortured and left alive to suffer in his pursuit of Kelly. He was not the Unpossessed. The prophesies were wrong. This land had tainted him just as it had tainted Kelly.