God, I forgot this chapter goes on forever. I needed to cut it in two.
Chapter 3
Scattered cries of terror woke up the majority of the camp that next morning, as some select tribesmen blurted out screams from violent waking nightmares, the horrors of a sunless sky; before remembering where they truly were. Shepherding a cloister of shut-ins was proving to be a hassle already, the Traveller mused his misgivings as he groggily tried to stretch out the back-cramps symptomatic of a night spent in a sleeping bag propped on hard rock. Perhaps it would be best to have the Tribe wait here until he and the boy could scout a clear shot through the entire mountain, rather than drag these poor folks through cave to cave, setting up a new camp each night. Of course, that was assuming there even was an exit on the otherside of those caves and that the Tribesfolk had not been taken for a total ride in the first place.
It was whilst preparing his duffle bag of equipment for the next step of their journey that the Traveller came up short on one key item. Namely, the ballistic weave tactical vest with a recent abdominal hole torn through the material that he had to peel off his body the night before. That Cazadore stinger had totally destroyed the front trauma shock plates but his exhausted self from the night before had passed off the replacement job onto the next morning; and that duty would only drag on further now his vest was totally absent from the duffle bag he had propped it atop of.
Groggy children and crotchety elders were still fighting the morning torpor from their very rude sudden awakening as the Traveller browsed through the camp tents trying to spot his pilfering bandit. All except for one early riser who was well up and busy by her rust-worn loom, weaving, knitting and sewing the various frayed shirts and trousers of her rough living brethren. And on her lap, under the delicate care of her dexterous needle, and awkwardly positioned against her burgeoning baby bump, was the Traveller's black combat vest.
The woman gasped softly as she spotted the Traveller curiously looming over her shoulder. "Oh gosh, I expected you to be asleep for longer!"
"Well it's hard to sleep with all- that." New waking wails erupted across the camp every few minutes or so. It was a wonder the whole place was not shaken awake yet. "That's uh- that's my vest you've got there, isn't it?"
The young woman flushed red. "I'm deeply sorry, sir. I was not stealing, honest! I just saw your torn vest lying by your bag and I-" that vest had seen him through thick and thin. The Traveller had spent many a night stitching rips and fabric tears in the black cloth. "I thought, 'look at all those poor stiches, I could do better'!"
Choosing to ignore that unwitting jab, the Traveller simply grimaced. "How... spontaneous. But shouldn't you focus on keeping the Tribe's shirts together? Someone in your- condition, shouldn't be loading extra work on her back."
She frowned. "Eventually, yes. But I wanted to do this for you in return for the service you're offering for our tribes. It was meant as a surprise. A gift for a gift."
"A gift? And ain't that a little premature, don't you think?"
"Not at all." She smiled sweetly. "You stopped to help us when anyone else would have passed us by. Or taken advantage of our numbers. You've already done so much more for us than we could have hoped for! And it not just our lives you're protecting, but my son's too. When he's born, I'll be sure to tell him about you!"
"Uh huh." A deep crease burrowed across the Man's forehead as he balanced between feeling abashed by her flattery and offput by her reverence. "Anyway, how much do I owe you?"
The woman chuckled, light as the breeze. "Don't be silly, I can't charge you!"
"Well, I can't just accept your hard work for free." The Traveller insisted. It was hard not to be something of an old soul when it came to 'barter' and 'trade' when you lived a life valued to the Water Bottle Cap standard, afterall.
"But this isn't free." The pregnant woman frowned. "This is my service of duty, rendered in kind for your service. That's how it works around here. Everyone performs to their duty, the growers feed, the washers clean, and I keep our clothes from collapsing off our bodies. Everyone works together, and the unit is enriched by the efforts of everyone. Is this- new to you?"
The Traveller thought on it for a moment, then shook his head. "No, I guess it not. It's just a very... egalitarian way to live. Not like most of the Wastes out there, let me tell you. You can begin to forget-"
Forget what?" She pressed him with wide brown eyes, unwinding his natural guard.
"What a Tribe feels like."
The Traveller returned to his tent disquiet, ruminating on their situation. Every member of the tribe had collectively hedged their hopes and dreams on the spluttered rumours of some half-drunk prospector and some might say that by entertaining this little expedition, he himself was merely contributing to that delusion. 'A sanctuary tucked behind a gold-tipped gate'; sounded about as solid of a rumour as a mountain built from beach sand, but what could he really say to the Tribes now? They were too far in to back out now. Say they were being hotly pursued by some raiding force like the Tribals seem to believe, there might be any number of spear wielding nutjobs hounding at their necks. But then, that story seemed to rub up against common reasoning too. The Legion had well earned their image as a marauding force of Tribe-conquering warriors. Yet from all The Traveller had seen of this camp, aside from Lari, all the Displaced consisted of were children, the elderly and women. Their designs on the women may be obvious, The Traveller acknowledged darkly, but what of everyone else? They were not exactly 'new recruit' material. And the Legion would want to be building up it's numbers again after The Dam.
He shook his thoughts dry before they could start to become grim. No point worrying about the why and the if, no when he should be worrying about the how. As in, how the hell is he going to defend this camp against a possible Legion raid with three guns and half a bag of ammo between them? Most of his dynamite reserves had just been expended, not that dynamite was going to prove an especially vital playing piece in the event on an attack. He just was not equipped enough to be sticking his neck in the middle of another firing line. Hell, he was hardly geared to survive the road as is. He lacked the time to grab anything important before leaving. It had all happened so spontaneously. No time to pack or plan. Or to stop and listen to anyone who might have talked him down...
"Have you seen Catha?" spoke young Lari who had crept up on his tent whilst The Traveller was lost in his thoughts. He'd never have managed that in my prime. The boy held the flap of his tent open with one hand but pointedly placed the majority of his body as afar away from the man as he could, remaining as standoffish towards him as he had been since yesterday.
"I don't know who that is." The Traveller admitted with a shrug.
"But you literally met her yesterday!" The boy sighed "She is a child, Thirteen. Mud-coloured hair, river-blue eyes. And she- she follows me most of the day, trying to do the things that I do." The account bought a smile to Lari's face, but under the crease of his worried brow it came off more like a wince.
"She's not in her tent, and I can't find her with any of the other children."
"Right, I think I remember her. Short one, always eyeing you up like the last hen in the house?" Lari nodded as sure as he could for someone who had never seen a hen in his life, the analogy sounded about right. "Can't say I have, where'd you say her tent was?"
The camp was still groggy despite the constant unwelcome wake-up screams, the washing ladies were using baskets carrying water they had prudently carried from previous day to give morning laundry as solid of a scrub as it could get in day-old warm water. The tribe was smartly saving the various stacks of bottled water for rationing during however long this journey would take. Still, the Traveller counted the supplies of food and water as they passed, there would only be enough to keep the bulk of them fed for maybe a week. Probably less. Fingers crossed their interment would be brief.
The girl's tent was empty.
"See?" Lari nervously shuffled on his feet "Catha is usually the one to wake me up. She annoys me for her entertainment, I think. But today... she would not leave without saying anything!"
"And yet-" Picking up a trail on the stone floor was difficult for the most trained eye, especially when one is trying to trace the footfall of someone as light as a thirteen year old girl. But there are always tells, just as what caught the Traveller's eye. A muddy smudge of a tiny boot print on the rock face right beneath one of the cracks leading out of the grotto and into the tunnels. As if a little person had tried to climb over the rock lip leading into the crack and scuffed her shoe in the process. "Today it seems she did."
Lari felt his stomach fall away from under "That leads towards the deep caves; further than we've already cleared! How long has it been, how far could she have gone? I have to go after her!"
The Traveller sighed "Guess that means no breakfast today."
The Traveller was still shaking the morning stiffness out of his dusty bones as Lari led the both of them into an early morning expedition into the myriad of tunnels inside their mountain. Not that Lari was really leading the pair all that much. The Traveller was taking his steady time tracking the path left by their mark, pausing to get down on his knees and agonise over a scuffle of rocks or invisible cave scratch here and there; meanwhile Lari was bounding forward as far as he dared waiting for the man to indicate which one of the many branching tunnels they would commit to next. Junctions and forks in the path were becoming more and more frequent the further, and thanks to the topography of those particular tunnels also the deeper, that they went.
"Tell me about her. The girl." The Traveller said once navigating endless junctions in anxious silence grew stale."Kefka?"
"Catha" Lari corrected absently. "She is one of the oldest of the children, thirteen years old, and the most important. She is the only child of our old Chief, Cede."
"The only one, is that so? Funny, the way your Seer told it, running the Dead Trees was supposed to be something of a family business. With 'lines of succession' and all that."
Lari nodded. "It was supposed to be. Until Catha's birth. I don't really remember it myself, but Seer Pinac said that her birth was the result of a terrible labour. Ten hours of nursing from every midwife in the tribe. And in the end, after it all; even combined they could not save both the Chief's wife and daughter.
They we're not together long. The Chief's wife was a midwife for the Tribe herself, they met and quickly married having Catha just a few months after their wedding. The Chief did not remarry."
"Huh." Was all the Traveller could say. 'Heartbreak kicks you right in the teeth', a rotted little cowpoke in the back stools of a bombed-out saloon once told him 'And some folk can't take a hit like that more than the once. Get scared off for good.' Not that The Traveller himself would know. He was more of a card playing man, himself.
"Usually, Catha would have been bought up learning the duties of leadership and responsibility. How to envision the future without forgetting the present. The study of a lifetime to shape her as the new successor. But Catha is a firecracker." Lari chuckled bitterly, despite the gnawing dread squirming down in his gut. "Why train to be the best leader when she could instead be the best marksmen? Or the finest hunter? She never had the patience for 'mediation' or Pinac's 'wise words'. Everyday it was in one ear and out the other with her. And why not, she's a natural at most everything else. Why pain herself twisting about in lessons she didn't want to learn? She used to try her hardest to ditch lessons and I... I..." He shook his head in frustration. "I can't lose her."
"Hey, hey." The Traveller reached out and caught Lari's shoulder pulling the boy to a standstill so he could affix the certainty etched in his own face. "We will find your girl, okay?"
"What if more of those Devils are hiding in the caves? What if they ambush her? We should have bought some antivenom, is there any in your bag?"
"Okay, Lari. Firstly, Cazadores don't like company. We cleared out their whole hive, they're gone. Secondly, the way I see it your Catha probably just tried to make herself useful with some early morning scouting and got herself lost. Happens all the time. But that doesn't mean she's going to stumble herself into danger, not that girl. She's like a wild little bobcat, running off like all kids do, but she's no flat-footed fool either. It was both her and you in those hills tracking me when I first walked into camp, wasn't it? And the two of you moved like valley shadows. She knows how to keep out of sight, that one."
Lari flushed with embarrassment. "You saw us?"
"Well yeah. I did, but I'm an exception. I've got the eyes of an eagle. And I'm a dab hand at scouting- as well as shooting, mind. It's gotten to the point I can out-scout a primed Frumentarii, and that's no idle brag. I've had an encounter or two."
"Are your eyes robots too?" Lari turned his nose away as he asked, trying to disguise his distaste to poor effect. The Traveller released the boy's shoulder and regarded him curiously, trying to pick out his angle.
"Do I unnerve you?"
"No- well... maybe. I'm unsure." Lari mumbled, trailing off as he eyes decided to settle on an inexplicably 'interesting' formation of cave pebbles on the floor.
The two of them hovered in an uncomfortable silence for a while, not quite sure how to proceed. Eventually Lari kicked a rock and followed it's tumbling journey down the slope of the tunnel system, and they began their tracking again.
After a considerable enough amount of time had passed for them to let the matter settle, Lari tried speaking again. "What is a 'Frumentarii'?"
The Traveller grimaced. "Wheat collectors. Also scouts. And spies. When the Legion proper is planning on moving its forces somewhere new, the Frumentarii tred the lands first. They scout out the landmarks, infiltrate local communities and sum up the potential benefits and drawbacks to The Beast expanding out that way. Like... real estate brokers."
"What estate?"
"Nevermind." The Traveller grinned at his own joke which he himself only partially understood through osmosis of all the old-world terminals he used to consume. "They can also be assassins. Though after a meeting with me, most Frumentarii usually hang-up their busy careers to pursue the exciting life of serving as fertiliser."
The boy glanced over his shoulder at him, blankly.
"Am I not speaking English over here? I kill them, boy."
Lari mouthed an 'oh' and tried to drop the topic from there, but curiosity is a hard sated mistress. "You fight the Dread Bull?" He pressed with muted excitement.
"I've fought." The Traveller clarified. "Against them and... I've lived a lot of lives, Lari; there's not a lot of folk I haven't traded bullets with."
His tone was cagey, but not uninviting enough to completely fend off the boy. "Oh. I did not know. Are they fair?"
"Eh?"
The boy blinked. "The Dread Bull? Do they make for fair bullet merchants?"
The Traveller's eyes narrowed to slits as he tried to make out if the boy was making fun of him. But no, he was just backwards. "Good god, Boy, I mean me and the Legion have shot holes in each other. Violent conflict. It's a euphemism! You know what those are, right?"
The boy stopped dead. He did not respond, nor did he look back at the Traveller when the man ended up walking right into the static boy and tumbled. The Traveller instinctually muttered customary apologies and then stopped too when he caught sight of what had frozen up Lari's motor functions.
"Tell me... Tell me that is not Catha." The boy said weakly, indicating with the hand not shakily grasping his shoulder strapped hunting rifle, to the bleach-white stripped skull jutting atop a wood pike at the end of their cave passage, at the corner of the next split. Behind that effigy was the licking flames of a brazier torch which cast the skull-mounted totem into twisting, looming shadows over the cave roof.
"It isn't Catha." The Traveller said quietly, suddenly acutely conscious of their noise pollution.
"Okay." Lari acknowledged slowly, matching his guide's restrained tone. "Now tell me why it's not."
The Traveller took a moment to swallow a wad of saliva. "Well, unless your thirteen year-old grew her head to the size of a full grown man's in the space of a night; that's not your girl."
Lari had no means of confirming what the Traveller was saying, but the man's expertise made for a fine pillar on which to rest his own worries. He released a sigh that was closer to a sob. "Then who left this here? Why? Could there be another tribe?" The boy offered his last suggestion with some hesitation, not wanting to think about what tribe would stoop so low as to mount the remains of their honoured fallen. Even their enemies.
The Traveller crouched to his knees once again and brushed his fingers along the groves of an imprint left by shoes he had an hour ago identified to be Catha's, they lead directly down the same cave route, stopping briefly by the skull totem, and then proceeding with heavier and more precise steps down the left most branch. Towards another hanging skull he could just about make out reflected from the bouncing shadows around yet another corner. His bones ached as the man deduced how their next few hours were going to be spent. "Nope. It's not a tribe. Much worse."
"Worse?" Colour drained out of Lari. "What?"
"Super Mutants."
The Traveller knew better than to and send Lari back to wait at the camp, not with that fire in the boy's belly to 'prove his worth' or whatever it is that drives upstarts around this neck of the Wastes. Still, in place of preventative measures he was implicit with his affirmation that Lari abide by his every rule to the letter.
"Super mutants aren't mindless hell bugs like Cazadores." He affixed Lari by the white of his eyes, never so much as blinking. "They're big, they're dumb; but they've enough functions in that irradiated lump they call a skull to be dangerous. They can operate weaponry, engage in basic tactics and, incidentally, tear a man's arms off and beat him to death with it. That I've seen..." He frowned as he remembered the encounter in his head. Not for it's horror as much as for it's bizarrity; the way that caravan guard came apart like a frayed doll was strangely unreal to his eyes. "Also, mutants aren't blind, they travel in packs, and they tend to eat their captives. I'm not telling you this to scare you, just to let you know seriously I'll mean it if I ever need to tell you to run. I don't want any second guesses, no crisis of morals, all that's gotten too many folk ground to paste. I say run, you run. Got me?"
Lari firmly nodded with a stalwart heart, knowing well enough there was no way in hell he was retreating without Catha over his shoulders.
The deeper that the Traveller led them into the occupied caves owned by the mutants, the more disturbing those 'decorations' marking the confines of their 'territory' became. Hanging ribcages, splayed hand reliefs, piles of muddled up bones, all picked clean of flesh. It was a grisly sight, though considerably less so than the Traveller was expecting. Typically Super Mutant dens were resplendent with half chewed torsos, rotted thighs and other unfinished man meals, but here every bone was picked clean and displayed as some sort of ward, almost like a warning. But why would a Super Mutant want to warn off their potential next meal?
Great stomping feet and loud hair-brained cackles reached the boys before they laid sight on any Mutant, advising them to slow their pace as they approached what must have been the heart of enemy territory in these winding caves.
That slowed pace came to a hastened stop when the Traveller held up his hand at a junction and ushered Lari behind a largish stalagmite. His warning came timely, as two hulking monsters came out from two different branches in the caves to meet.
They were grotesque things, these mutants, like a once-human man swollen into a hulking seven foot green skinned mass of muscle with great gnashing teeth no lips could conceal and hate-filled bulbous eyes. True to The Traveller's warning, they carried rifles almost identical to Lari's, in make and rust, and wore straps of scrap as clothing, old street signs and supermarket trolleys; whatever they could fit over that unnatural frame. Lari had expected something overgrown and ugly, just like the devil bugs from before, but it was the Mutant's clearly human-based frame which unnerved him most. Almost as though there was a normal man trapped inside some hideous green suit locked around them. A prison of bulbous flesh. What if they were once men inside all of that? What if anyone, even him or his tribals, could be twisted and broken into such a hellish caricature of their old selves? The idea made his gut shrivel up into the size of walnut.
"Where is kitty?" The one from the eastern tunnel asked in a loud, dumb tone. Like a child that had yet to learn how to modulate it's volume to fit it's surroundings.
"Kitty still lost. Dawes angry. Dawes call more mutants." The western Mutant, a little smaller than his partner, spoke back just as brashly. " 'Get kitty to Pencil man'. Or Dawes make us go in tubes!"
His partner's shoulders sagged for a moment, before he puffed himself up again and struck the other mutant with his huge hand. "Stupid! Why you tell Dawes about Kitty in first place?"
The other took his punishment and scowled back, or as much of a scowl has he could pull with a face lacking most facial muscles. But he did not act back to his bigger contemporary. "Dawes said so. Dawes say: 'Report'. I Report. I say 'Me saw Kitty.' Not my fault. Kitty's fault!" His friend growled with menace before throwing up his arms and giving in.
"Fine." He said. "We find stupid Kitty, go."
He roughly pushed his friend back down the western tunnel he came from and grouchily flanked him, arms hung and swinging like a toddler. And that tunnel which they barely squeezed down with their huge frames that scrapped both sides and the ceiling without trying, just so happened to be the same tunnel down which the Traveller's tracking led.
The two of them shared a glance, nodded, and reluctantly stalked the same plodding steps that the Super Mutants trod.
The mutant's path did not take them far, winding and twisting a small ways before opening into a tiny cave that dropped into a sudden plunge into an inky black. The huge green mutants squeezed themselves inside that cramped space, and then proceeded further, descending that plunge through outcrops of cave rock just large enough to fit their oversized feet as they carefully tackled the path down single file.
Lari and the Traveller watched the two bodies disappear in their decent, and then cautiously crept up to the very tip of that plunge, just close enough to peak into the huge subterranean hollow at the bottom of that drop, untouched by the lapping light of the braziers dotting the Mutant's territory. As their eyes began to attune to the dark, so too did their ears pick up on the grumblings of the stalked mutants, joined by a raucous smattering of their gruff mutant brethren, calling out amongst themselves. Their shapes started to melt out of the dark, peppered about that recess below them and wading through litters of dagger-like rock growths stabbing out of the floor and ceiling, as those gross green bodies searched.
"Kitty?"
"Come back, Kitty!"
"Pencil man want you, Kitty!"
Catha's trail had veered off a few tunnels back, and returned to the same path as their mutants, only to dry up at the very tip of that plunge just shy of the rocky outcrops their mutants had climbed down. Those last dozen feet those foot smudge impressions of her distinguishable shoes had become obvious enough for even Lari to follow. Their imprints were heavy and frequent. As though the girl were was running.
It did not take the deductions of any crackshot gumshoe to deduce the identity of that 'kitty', the Super Mutants were hunting.
The Traveller focused on the makeup of the Mutant search party. With their stalked Mutants joining the fray, that made for five or six of the lumbering monsters, all trotting up and down hardly more than a few feet from each other. If Catha was down in there hiding from those beasts, and chances were looking likely that she was, they would inevitably be giant green roadblocks to securing the child's safety. And knowing their kind, the Traveller brooded, any confrontation is doomed to violence.
"Gha-?" The furthest, and smallest, of the searching mutants began shouting before getting promptly cut short.
From their perch above the plunge, neither the Boy nor the Traveller had an angle on what was going on. That Mutant had just wandered away from the others, to the far end of the recess, and vanished into the dark corners, only for the rest of his crew to spin around in alarm to the face of some thing.
A stretched nerve of anticipation proceeded, and then the cave exploded into shooting and screaming.
"Die! Die! Die!" The most garishly oversized of them roared, clutching his massive gangrenous meat-paws around his hunting rifle and blasting ringing bolt-rifle shots that seemed to bounce off the cavern walls and clang against the ear drums.
Soon the entire recess erupted into a chaos of smoking muzzles and deafening cracks, all of which easily carried up to the Traveller and Lari's cave and rang off the walls further into deep Mutant territory. The din would pick up curious ears, there was no doubt.
The Traveller had little choice but to help Lari scurry down the cave plunge, into the dark shadows of the giant recess, whilst the mutant retinue was good and concerned with their unknown assailant. The two of them tucked behind a couple of large stalagmites poking out of the ground and peered across the recess to the carnage being lit by flashes of violence.
When fire had rained down from the skies and soaked into the earth, not everything died as it fell upon them. Few who remain can intelligently deduce why some died and others were twisted, but any layman could see how that which weathered The End, came out hardy and unyielding. Such that it was for wild grass, no longer able to survive under the irradiated skies, learning to survive away from the sun, eating nutrients deep under the earth. In that recess, tufts of that grass grew under the feet of the Traveller and the boy as they crouched behind their tiny rock-walls, trying to discern the inexplicable. And in the middle of the carnage, grew a miniscule underground glade, rife with greenery and life, and between them a monstrous grown guardian of it's own.
Amidst that miasma of noise and bullets rose a vastly oversized, (obviously, the wasteland had no patience for normal-sized critters and fauna these days) giant Venus Flytrap plant, which had its chlorophyll teeth clamped around the head of a screaming and convulsing mutant. Bright green ooze trickled down from it's thick stem, sizzling like acid on its cuticle.
Large calibre rounds flying from the barrels of screaming mutants did little to deter the Flytrap, as the plant took it's pleasure pulling and twisting until the Mutant in it's mouth shuddered with a spine-tingling crack.
The green body fell away from the plant, without its head, as the Mutants shouted louder at the sight of their brother's headless corpse falling in a lifeless leap, as though their rage, as much as their bullets, was their foremost weapon.
Being too mad and dumb to appropriately assess the potential danger in front of them, those Mutants slowly and obliviously lumbered closer to the overgrown Venus Flytrap, blasting tiny holes out of the subterranean plant.
Its rows of giant green teeth pursed, then split wide open melon. From somewhere inside that gaping maw, the Flytrap spewed out a gunk of green ooze across the face of it's closet assailant; coating the monstrosity in a glob of gunk that immediately began to fizzle and burn.
A piquant stench of chlorophyll and melting flesh teased the nostrils only to horrify them, as the monster's entire upper body rapidly decomposed right down to the deformed skeleton underneath the fortified green muscle.
Spotting opportunity, the Traveller pre-emptively loosened the leather shoulder strap of his shotgun and slipped out from behind his stalagmite hiding spot before Lari had any clue what was happening.
The Traveller darted like a rodent through the darkness. He descended on the closet of the Mutants, a particularly broad-backed shirtless creature just as blindly affixed to the monster Flytrap as his companions, and slipped his bowie knife out from his belt.
Then he lept up the height of a nearby stalagmite, planted one foot on the rock and used that edifice to launch himself high enough to latch onto that shirtless Mutant's back. The Super Mutant immediately shot rigid as the man landed on his back, but lacked the time to react before that same intruder slammed the bevel of his large knife into the base of its skull.
That outer layer of Mutant skin was tough and unyielding, like plyboard, but as the Traveller twisted and drove the blade more, cutting through the lumps of subdermal callouses and sliding smoothly into the spongey matter therein, neatly severing the brain stem. Whatever radiation and unfettered genetic experimentation had done to grossly mutate their bodies, the fundamentals of biology remain the weakness of all living beings.
The mutant crumbled like a scrunched up paper note.
Collapsing forward with the Traveller on his back resulted in the almighty thud of a felled tree, strong enough to shake the rock, more than enough to alert the only two Mutants not currently wrestling hand-to-hand with a horrible plant monster that theirs was an ambush on two sides. The stouter of the pair was quickly and soundly rewarded for his attentiveness, as the Traveller deftly swung his Caravan shotgun from his back into his hands and blasted a shell in it's chest.
Bang
The shotgun buck violently rocked the stout Mutant's shooting arm, tearing into the skin and throwing it's body back, throwing its weapon off into the blackness of the caves. But the beast somehow managed to catch itself and remained standing.
Bang
A second shot to the Mutant's gut, splintering the plastic plates it had fashioned for a stomach-plate, sending exploding dull-plastic splinters flying. But the mutant still did not keel over.
The beast whipped it's head up at the Traveller, eye's burning with unimaginable hatred, and the beast charged. Exactly the reason why the Traveller hated fighting those horrible green monsters so much, they always took more punishment than you expected.
With an expert's grace the Traveller snapped his shotgun's spine back open and slid two more shells from his emergency shoulder pouch into the barrel, only for an air-robbing punch to the chest to rock him as the taller Mutant fired it's own rifle payload in revenge of his brother.
His black-plate armour squashed the bullet, but the sheer powerful impact of the 308 round knocked the man off his balance, sending him tumbling over the bulbous mutant corpse he was straddling on, tripping backwards off his feet and bashing his head hard on the cavern floor.
Black spots danced across his hazy eyes and copper mixed with steel tinged under his tongue in a mad muddle of senses. Until a mush of a shape, green and huge, filled his vision before solidifying into the stout, and bitterly wounded, Mutant falling upon him.
With the weight of a small truck, the ugly Super Mutant kneeled on his chest, crushing the Traveller's ribs into his own lungs like the teeth of a beartrap inside of his body. All he could do was raise his left arm in a dazed defence over his face as the first crunching fist rattled against his forearm.
The beast wailed on the small plaything underneath him, delighting in his coughing gasps for air as it beat against his relatively tiny body with a singular conviction. So singular that the creature never noticed the Traveller's right arm snaking over to his dropped shotgun, clamping the spine shut between his free fingers and then sticking the barrel right against the soft of the mutant's stomach before firing again.
The force of the shot blew a whole through its guts, stunning the monster in one glorious moment of visceral payback. Just for the stout Mutant to flex up its slumping body, and raise it's fist for another blow. An enraged Super Mutant is an unfeeling one, afterall.
Whilst the two of them exchanged whacks and point-blank shotgun blasts, the taller of the Mutants poked around their struggle mess, searching for an opening it could shoot the squishy human from. Lari observed as the Mutant inched closer and closer to his rock, and could feel as the petals of opportunity blossoming out with invitation.
Lari was gripping his rifle with a white-knuckle tense. He had been doing so ever since the Traveller slipped away to wage a one man war with the Mutants, and had stood there watching uselessly as his guide battled with an inhuman effort against green monsters twice his size. Like a storybook warrior, the Traveller fought feverishly and bitterly; as though willing himself to keep breathing until all his enemies were not. And to think that Lari had the hubris to judge the character of the man? Robotic organs or not, everything that Lari envisioned when he pictured his role as 'Pathfinder of the Displaced' was encapsulated in the struggling form of that man blasting chunks out of the Green giant pummelling on top of him. That was who he needed to become.
Carried on that rush of inspiration, Lari hardly registered himself when he slipped into the mind space of a Radstag hunt, poked out from behind his rock, lined up the sights of hunting rifle to the unsuspecting skull of the taller, oblivious, Mutant and squeezed the trigger.
His 308. round smacked into the skull of the tall Mutant, likely chipping a chunk of the deformed enamel directly into the mush of grey matter inside. But the beast only wobbled.
Lari had but a moment to gape in bewilderment as the reality of cave recess came rushing back to him, and before the Mutant spun around it's own rifle to face the boy and fire back in kind, sending him ducking behind his stalagmite.
His ear's howled as exploding chunks of rock echoed around Lari's head, forcing the boy to cower in his fetal position. He could feel the punching power of rock particulate pushing through his rock edifice, digging into the boy's back. When the seemingly endless barrage of hellfire finally let up with the tell-tale ping of an empty magazine, Lari had lost all appetite for fighting and scurried out from his hiding spot as deep into the caves as he could, darting behind another, considerably more diminutive, spike of rock.
Just in time for the next rain of bullets.
The Mutant was relentless, and scarily accurate for a mutated creature with garishly oversized fingers operating a normal man's killing implement. It's rifle bullets seemed to smack against the rock even stronger this time, rocking against Lari's skull as he pressed his head against the stone.
There was nowhere else to go, no more deeper corner to dive into. He was trapped like a rat in the corner of the cellar, only he seriously doubted the 'last stand' biting power of the remaining four shots in his Hunting Rifle.
Suddenly, a thousand shards of agony exploded in Lari's left shoulder along with the rock behind which that shoulder was sitting. Red squirts of fluids splattered everywhere, all up the boy's face and across his eyes, blinding him in a flash of crimson.
Lari had never been shot before, and he took his first time about as well as anyone; collapsing forth in shock and pain as his entire nervous system seized up in utter incomprehension of what had just rocked it.
His entire world was that searing pain, so sudden and absolute that his head refused to face it less he find a gaping hole clean through his body. Instead his eyes stared forward, blinking the crimson film from his retinas just in time to make out the deadly glint of the tall grimacing Super Mutant's black hunting rifle, barrel seemingly lined up his head.
In that moment, his body and it's destroyed woes seemed to melt into nothing. That black barrel expanded into all he could see. Like a pitch-black porthole awaiting the arrival of a silvery head.
Such was his hypnotism with that gun barrel, that Lari did not see the tiny shadow slink up behind that tall Mutant, nor did he see it leap atop a rock with the deft of a cat and then launch itself atop that Mutant's back, just as the Traveller did.
He did, however, notice when the tall grimacing Mutant went suddenly rigid, and then fell forward with that Traveller's Bowie knife sticking out the back of it's head. And then he noticed the tiny girl's hands that were tightly gripped around the handle of that knife.
"Catha?"
The girl stood proud above her slain Super Mutant quarry, maintaining a wobbly balance atop it's overgrown and malformed shoulder blades, and grinned. "Lari? Did you come all the way down here just to see me?"
Viscera and intestinal tract flooded over the Traveller as he finished hollowing out a hole through the abdominal of his Mutant aggressor, he was still attempting to struggle and wriggled his way out from underneath it's ludicrously heavy carcass as the last Super Mutant traded mortal blows with the giant Venus Flytrap. It's giant stubby fingers were around the thick stem of the plant as though the Mutant were wringing the plant's neck, and it's other malformed fist was beating the Flytrap's maw over the head with his 'hunting rifle-now-club'.
Feeling the punishment, the Flytrap wobbled as it bled lime gunk from it's dozens of bullet wounds and spat up globules of acidic goo over everything in reach. It had hardly the strength to wrestle against the Mutant's choking grip, such that it seemed the big green monster might win despite having lost half his face to the corrosive chemicals of the horticultural horror.
Yet just as all seemed to be won, the Flytrap threw it's maw back, opened that pincher-jaw wide, and then clamped down over the Super Mutant's head fully.
At first the mutant convulsed wildly, tearing and clawing at anything it could, ripping chunks of plant matter out of the Flytrap. But then, after a few fatal spasms, the muscle-bound mutant went rigid, then limp.
The Flytrap crunched, then twisted, and then pulled itself clean off the mutant, now headless, with a quickly dissolving green lump in it's mouth as a prize. That would not be a meal the aberration got to enjoy for long, however, as the plant then slackly slumped forward, succumbing to it's many battle wounds.
Catha and Lari looked on with a disdainful fascination, from the distance of half a cave away, as the the last jitters of inexplicable animation drained from it's plant body. Like magic fading from a doll.
They continued to stare, flabbergasted by such a bizzarity, the likes of which were beyond anything they had come to expect from the wasteland. Theirs was a people who considered themselves horticultural experts, tinkers of the land and artists of nature; yet something so monstrous and deathly elegant eluded their best reasonings.
Then the Traveller groaned. "Are either of you two little creeps gonna help me?"
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