Fallout: Fury Blood

Chapter 138: Tranquillity Lane

Clay-Crawler was aware of his crippled state from the moment of regaining consciousness. His mangled ankle throbbed with his blood flow, and his missing forearm was a phantom itch that never left him. As for the missing top half of his right ear, well, he liked to think it added to his charm.

He was warm. Too warm. The fire cackling next to him was circled with cooking tools and grubby utensils. An uncooked kebab was resting over a long flat stone. His stomach grovelled and tumbled inside him.

Without hesitation he reached for it. The meat was raw and slimy, with the distinct taste of human. It had been so long he had almost forgotten the feeling it sparked off in his head, like a walk in the wilderness and the comfort of home all in one swallow.

"Finally, he's awake." A flame-haired woman filled his vision from above as she stood over him, hands on hips. She wore jean shorts and a patchy, oversized leather jacket. He vaguely recognized her, and his memory rolled back to him all at once.

The bear-trap, his snapped fibula piercing through his flesh, the attempt at freeing himself with a shotgun blast, the radiation sickness and blood loss. Then the Dark Bloods descending on him like dark angels from the Dark Deep. Was he a prisoner or a rescued stray?

"Thought the rad-demon had gotten inside ya." The woman squatted down beside him with a broad grin, showing a slight gap between her front teeth. "You must be one of the lucky ones with two cherub kisses. No way you'd have survived the radiation out there otherwise. Not with a gaping wound like you did."

She had an experienced look about her. Dirt had worked into her fine lines, giving her face an aged visage. Her eyes were beaten discs of copper, and she had a smattering of pale freckles across her nose and cheeks, like flakes of matte gold. Her hair was a fluorescent red cut above her jawline in edgy, tapering layers, but he suspected she was a natural redhead beneath the dye. Other than that, her features were remarkably clear and simple for a Dark Blood. No elaborate makeup or face paint, tattoos, piercings or modifications. Not even the common fang tattoos beneath her lower lip. How boring.

Clay-Crawler felt overdressed in his Dark Blood disguise. He peered down at his ankle. It was heavily wrapped in bandaging and braced in wooden splints. "Is fixthed?" He had forgotten the stupid fang prosthetics on his canines that gave him a lisp.

The woman's broad smile dropped, and his hopes followed. "The bones were fucked up, scav. We had to scrounge around in there to get the shotgun pellets out. You lost a shitload of blood, had to give ya a transfusion. Without knowing ya bloodtype, that alone was a 50-50 chance of death. Couldn't find ya bloodtype tat anywhere; you not from a warband?"

"Warband? Uh-" He hadn't thought of a fake warband name, but she rambled over him before he got the chance to dig himself into a hole.

"Then we had to set the bones that were sticking out of ya leg. That was rough going. You really have some bad luck with ya limbs, huh scav?"

Clay-Crawler tried to ignore that last part. She hadn't exactly answered his question. "But... is fixthed?"

"Yeah, babydick, it's fixthed," she said, mocking his lisp.

"Babydick?"

"Well, we had to look everywhere for your bloodtype tattoo, like I said. I mean, everywhere. Raiders these days are getting tats in the dumbest places, I'll tell ya."

He grunted at her in discomfort. "I am grower, not show-er."

"Hey, it ain't the size, it's how you use it."

D-Con had once said something similar, though that had been about his silenced pistol, the penis gun for girls.

"Thankths for fixthing." Sitting up, he tugged the fang prosthetics from his mouth and took a look around for the first time, seeing a cave and a group of Dark Bloods in the distance, huddled around something he couldn't see. "We are in Bleeding Abyss?"