Fallout: Fury Blood

Chapter 108: Prisoners Of War

Kelly awoke in a hot coffin of rock. Red rock that glowed from within, lustrous and reflective and wet. Wet with her sweat. Her body was burning and crying from every pore.

So this is what waking up in hell is like...

She breathed in deep of the hot, humid air. The last thing she remembered was a score of tribals restraining her from Danse, her futile efforts at reaching for him as he sank lower and lower to the ground, then a prick at her neck before falling into a black vortex. Danse. Where is he? What if he's dead? What if they killed him? What if he's in hell too?

The dark presence in her mind wanted her to die. To dwell through the inescapable sludge of her pain and grief, thinking of Nate, Shaun, her world. To give one final rave at the top of her lungs, crack her head open on this rock, and then just give up as her fury blood escaped her, eternally bleeding in the bowels of hell where she belonged.

But what remained of her thought of Danse and of finding him.

You better not be dead, too.

Lifting her neck, her forehead touched the rock above her as she peered down at herself. She was clean, and garbed in red. A basic bando enwrapping her breasts and a short wrap skirt that barely concealed her, open at one hip with only a thin braided rope to keep it in place. She found herself unable to even roll and check in the tight space, but she dearly hoped it was enough fabric to cover her right ass cheek.

At least she wasn't in her birthday suit.

All of her gear was gone. A smoother, more elastic version of the white healing paste she and Danse had used was slathered over her mosaic of wounds, and by the feels, even over the scratches and lacerations to her face that she had obtained from her catfight with Star Paladin Groves, when the woman had stomped down on her head and dented Danse's helmet into her face. That felt so long ago now, though in reality it had only been two weeks ago. She briefly wondered what the one-eyed bitch was up to, if she was still joined to Maxson by the hip after his poisoning, or out fulfilling her promise to hunt down Danse to take her vengeance.

The bitch would have to go through her, again, to get to Danse.

Kelly had just enough room to squeeze her hand up through the space between the rock and her body to feel at the paste on her face, two slashes running in parallel lines down from her right hairline to the equator of her forehead, just above her brow, and one along the peak of her right cheekbone. If she was lucky, she would sport some badass scars to rival Maxson.

"Hey fuck-boy, you like a woman with battle scars? Not just a pretty face now, huh?"

Done checking over her condition, Kelly sent her fingers on a quest to search the rocky space for a crack or an opening or something. She was hoping she wasn't buried alive or cooking in some sort of natural oven to be eaten at a feast for cannibals. The only threads keeping her from snapping free in panic were the tides of grogginess sweeping over her limbs from whatever poison she had been dealt. "Hey!" she screamed after finding no luck with her fingers, bashing her fists at the rock instead. "Let me out!"

The space was too tight to even pass a leg over the other or shift position to stretch out sore muscles. She tried, but only ended up exerting herself to a point where the narcotic in her bloodstream sent her head on a vertibird fly-by around the tallest skyscraper in Boston, only there was no Deacon to hold onto this time. Fat, luscious beads of sweat rolled off her skin, pooling beneath her like a bed of oil to crisp up her skin. Just what the cannibal ordered.

"HEY! LET ME OUT!"

Before she could give in to panic, a sonorous crack startled her to the bone. New light and fresh air flooded in through an opened fissure before it yawned wider and eventually peeled away, just like the lid of a coffin. She was in a firelit cave. The smell of Earth, smoke, and sweet flora filled her nose. Kelly sprang up to find herself face-to-face with another woman holding her at spear point.