Fallout: Fury Blood

Chapter 148: Danse Macabre

They passed derelict cities drowning in dust and bone on the road South. Gusts of wind flayed his skin, laced with radioactive debris caught in dust devils. But there was a hollow tone to the winds here. The loneliness of ghosts. This was to be his new home. The Capital Wasteland, they called it.

He thought it quaint. Not the city. The new misery.

Far from the Commonwealth, he was told he would be safe here. If this place itself didn't eat him up first.

The land was mottled with impact craters, denoting a once brutal war that took place in ancient times M7-97 was only just learning about. To think that all of this occurred far before the walls of his existence were even erected, the Institute only a concept forged from the fires of the world's fall.

"Why?"

Pongo stopped in his tracks to face him, scarf hanging from one side of his face to allow him to catch his breath in the dry heat. His lips were pale and chapped, split in the centre and angled up in one corner to express crude puzzlement. "Why what?"

"Why all of this?"

To that Pongo made a show of taking in their surroundings, then threw his shoulders up and let his hands smack back down on his hips in commiseration. "That's one heck of a loaded question, ol' buddy ol' pal. Been asking myself that one for years. You, me, and the rest of the children of the Big One. Corporate greed, inbred bigotry, religious zeal, one madman at the helm of a government. Didn't really matter in the end, did it? One idiot pressed the big red button first, and it was all over."

Somehow this didn't seem answer enough, though judging by the look of smug satisfaction on Pongo's wind-burned face, it should have been.

The Railroad agent stood squinting at him a moment longer. Then he clicked his tongue, rolled his eyes, and strolled lazily back to M7-97 to take him by the arm, ushering the synth on again in the manner of a close friend whispering dirty, forbidden secrets. "Look. If you really ask me, and I really answer you..." he spoke through that pursed corner of his dry mouth, patting at M7-97's bare arm as though to tenderize him for the bombshell he was to drop. "I'd say that it was all over the moment those dildo-heads back then created the big bomb. We got ahead of ourselves. Like little fat kiddies frothing at the mouth for more candy in the store of endless promises. We fucked ourselves with those dildo-heads."

M7-97 allowed himself to be tugged onward, but he was determined to let his mind drift to where Pongo insinuated of it's own accord.

In the dragging silence, Pongo waxed suspicious until he pressed the synth to a halt again. "Okay, open the can of spam. What's going on in that big head of yours?"

He frowned down at the smaller man. "I was only reflecting on what you said."

"That was the noisiest reflecting I've ever heard, gotta tell ya."

"I... never said anything."

"Exactly. Need to work on that poker face of yours. It's all in the deflect and distract."

"I..."

Pongo silenced him with a finger to his lip, then shook his head at the dumbfounded look he received. "So, what did you churn up?"

"Well, I..."

"Actually, hold that thought! We should get somewhere safer and settle in for the dusk breeze before we get carried away unloading our thoughts and feelings."

It was at times like these where Pongo severely irked M7-97. He reminded him of some of the younger scientists in the Institute who had been given the privilege of meeting him for the first time, as the famed prototype archetype courser. They had always been bursting at the seams with youthful exuberance, eager to engage and discover in his deepest intricacies, though easily distracted by the most fleeting of thoughts. Pongo was just like this, only somehow worse. At times he managed to make M7-97 still feel like a specimen, so far away from the tortures of the Institute.