An impromptu first draft. I blame impulses. If possible, read while listening to some Sunny Day Real Estate. That's how i wrote it.
Now with corrections!
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An attempt at Romance.
Mike woke to the sound of Anna's screams. A quick glance to his side showed her bed empty, the covers roughly pulled aside. They had come then, at last. Terror rose as a black fist in Mike's throat and blood rushed from his heart as he clambered into his suit of armour. He could her cries growing further away. Still pulling on his cuirass, Mike snatched up his helmet and his rifle from where it lay by the door and ducking under the tent's open door flap, rushed out into the night.
The night air was cool and aching as Mike saw the Talon Company mercenaries, five of them, pulling Anna away along the valley. She flailed defiantly, screaming Mike's name as loud and as long as she could. Mike's heart twisted painfully, and a shuddering gasp left his body.
"Anna," he...whispered, and realised his failure. "ANNA!" he screamed, so forcefully he snapped something in his chest. Better.
The mercs turned at that. One of them barked orders at the others, who readied their weapons. Mike was ahead. He slammed on his helmet and snatched up his rifle. Already the helmet locked itself in place and activated once more, showing everything through a green lens, fraught with combat readouts and environmental displays. Good. Mike dropped to his knees as he shouldered his plasma rifle and fired.
Luck. His first shot hit a merc on the group's left square in the chest, blasting straight through and soaking him in plasma. He flew to the ground, convulsing violently and managing to scream in tearing agony even as he vomited plasma and bile into the air, head twisting side to side like a dying rabid dog.
His friends started. The leader continued to try and lead. Suddenly the air was filled with bullets. Mike squeezed off two more shots before a shot to the shoulder left a pronounced dent in his right pauldron and sent him spiralling to the earth. He quickly rolled onto his stomach and looked up. One of his shots had left another merc without his right hand, a plasma-drenched stump remaining. He readied his rifle once more.
A bullet tore into the gap in the armour over his right knee. Mike cried out in considerable pain as his knee exploded.
"MIKE!" a familiar voice screamed. Anna. Through rapidly closing eyes, Mike tried to shoulder his weapon. From somewhere unknown and empty, a merc delivered a swift kick to his rifle, launching it through the air for it to land some feet away, before doing the same to his face. Mike's nose snapped and several teeth promptly left his mouth as he was propelled onto his back. No energy left to cry out. Had he failed so easily? Nothing much changed, then. Somewhere, the heavy smell of gunpowder. As his vision partially returned, Mike found a shotgun inches from what he thought was his temple. If there was any left. Surely he was done.
The merc holding the gun to Mike's head spoke. He looked edgy, but with experience wearing down his eyes. He was losing hair and had a rough goatee. Mike thought he was the leader. "It's over," he delivered, out of breath. The ferryman.
Somehow, Mike managed to lift his head slightly and look over to the others. Anna was on her knees, tears clouding her face. The two surviving mercs stood at either side, weapons loosely trained on her. Mike thought they looked decidedly ill. Maybe seeing two friends melt did that.
"She's ours now," spoke the leader, still with that nervous, weary look in his eyes. "It's over," he repeated. Death, then. He had failed. Finality.
Then Mike thought otherwise. They had both been wrong it seemed, as his mouth stretched in a rictus of horror. Berks wasn't safe. Not safe at all.
"DEATHCLAW!" one of the mercs exclaimed in what was without doubt the highest pitch he had or would ever achieve in his soon to be ended life. The eyes of the leader widened momentarily before the abomination that it is a Deathclaw tackled him from behind, breaking his back like a dead twig. The merc in its grip, the creature kept on charging, planting a scaly taloned foot the size of a cabin door on my chest as it went. My armour wheezed and buckled, and what felt like my lung may have punctured.
Anna. With great effort, I climbed to my feet and was amazed to find one of the mercs charging at me, apparently out of ammo and apparently discounting the Deathclaw currently mauling his superior against the valley wall opposite.
The merc tackled me back to the ground. Shapes swam in front of my eyes. From somewhere far, far away, Anna called out to me again. I kept going for her. She powered me. The merc was on top of me, driving my head into the ground again and again out of sheer terror and desperation. It was futile. I grabbed hold of him, hauling him over to the ground in my place, grasping his head in my hands and headbutting him. With my helmet on, his skull caved in immediately, and his eyes rolled back into the fathoms of his head as some of him oozed out of the corners of his mouth with a tiny gurgling noise. I drew to my feet and turned around.
The Deathclaw was killing Anna. Multiple internal things snapped in my brain, heart and soul. All thought imploded. Feelings merged into feelings in great invisible collisions. The remaining merc was backing away from the scene, screaming, firing his salvaged assault rifle madly into the thing's back with little consequence. I charged, unarmed and dying.
Luck. One of the merc's insane bullets shot into the Deathclaw's long tapered ears, inciting it enough to turn from the thing that had until recently been my everything, my only reason for life, and lunge at its new prey, snatching it in its jaws and tearing it in two with one bite. Mostly.
By now I had retrieved my gun and fired. The plasma glanced off the thing's back. It turned towards me, eyes of the clearest hell burning into me before it sprinted, arms outstretched, towards me.
Some animal sound erupted from me then as I fired again, blowing away a considerable piece of the creature's jaw. It cried out, a horrid sound of pure savagery before it caught me in its hands, each the size of a man, and pinned me to the valley wall with them.
My rifle was again knocked from my hands from the force of the collision and the Deathclaw gnashed at me, biting at my armour, which bent and twisted under the pressure. Still screaming from somewhere, I combined my hands into a single fist and piled my elbows again and again into its monstrous head. Its teeth began to tear through my chest-plate, and searing pain leapt into existence in my stomach as it was destroyed. In another world, I realised I was crying as I screamed and beat at my nightmare, locked in solitary battle.
A knee to the jaw, instinctively. The ruins of its mouth distorted even more, and it swung me away. I landed hard on my equally ruined front and screamed. Something caught my eye as I heard leathery feet charge at me from behind. The merc leader's shotgun lay nearby, smeared with blood and gore. With all my strength, what remained of my life, I pulled myself towards the weapon, planting fingertips onto it – before the Deathclaw was on me again, pulling me over. I screamed again, the sound echoing in my helmet as the nightmare dug its teeth into it. I beat in futility against its head with my fists as its teeth breached my armour and reached my head, scraping deep gouges down its sides and tearing an ear open.
For Anna. I grabbed its ears and twisted. One snapped. The creature roared again in this waking nightmare midnight and reared away. One chance. I pushed back with my feet, flailing my hands desperately above my head until they came into contact with the shotgun. I pulled it down into my arms, and hoped that it was loaded as the horror lunged its head at me again.
Scream, aim, fire.
Then silence. Awful, black silence.
Death flitted over me on swift wings, tempting me, but I pushed it away. Arms screaming, I shoved the Deathclaw's carcass off of me, and crawled. Crawled to my beloved.
Little remained. Most of an arm was gone. A leg below the knee lay nearby. Organs littered the area. Much of her face was gore.
I clawed at my helmet. The joints, broken beyond repair now, wheezed steam as they released. I threw the helmet away, somewhere, and fell on my lover's corpse. Gone. Emptiness and sorrow consumed me as my failing lungs threw all they had into open weeping. The one pure being in a land of death, gone. My fault. Such sorrow, and agony. It bit into my heart, tearing it open. Nothing could halt it.
She lived.
My breath caught painfully in my throat as her remaining eye flickered, and then opened. Focusing on me.
"Mike..." she bled. Bled from her mouth steadily as her life trickled slowly out of her.
I could barely speak. "A...Anna...don't..."
"I'm gone, Mike," she whispered. "Gone..."
No reply needed. More weeping. Somehow, she comforted me, shushing me, soothing me.
"Not your fault..."
"How can you say that?" I cried, choking on my tears. "EVERYTHING WAS MY FAULT!"
"My...fault..." she emitted, breath rasping. "Should...never...have talked... to you in the first...place..."
She smiled! How? "This can't be it!" I cried.
"It is," Anna replied. She coughed fitfully, and I cradled her head as blood spurted from her mouth before she subsided. For a moment I thought she had died again, before she took my hand. I knelt close.
"I...love you," she whispered, her breath only a shadow.
My tears cascaded onto the barren earth. "I love you too," I whispered back. "Forever."
I moved closer and kissed the remnants of her mouth, the act warmed by my unending tears.
"Up...to you now," she told me. "Go...on..."
And then she died.
My world tore itself apart.
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Oh, and review, please.