The Dreadking!
Hello the world of the internet! This is my first attempt at writing of any kind really so I hope you enjoy! Please comment/rate/give feedback. Also I don't have an editor so sorry in advance for some OCD inducing grammar mistakes.
George Parks sat in his dirty cage and watched the horror around him with little fuss. Originally he had trembled and screamed at the harrowing sites that the Super Mutants had forced him to watch. But at some point during his time here George had stopped caring and, in fact, started getting use to the drag of daily life. Watch the Mutants feed the Centaurs, Watch the mutants rip the weaker Centaurs to shreds, Watch them rip other humans to shreds, watch the mutants rip each other to shreds… It actually got a bit boring. Both how long he had stayed here and where here was was unknown to George. Yet he didn't mind, one day simply blended into the next and nothing monumental seemed to happen to measure time. While this did seem a bit depressing George took light in the fact that he could remember better times from his youth and today he decided to remember the day he got captured.
It had been a typical day in the small town of Dept. which meant hot, irradiated and bullet filled. George was part of the 'Police', a group of specially selected warriors who fought off and eradicated the raiders in the area. Before the Great War the 'police' would reside in the main structure with the Dept. sign that gave the town its name, until they were called upon by the citizens to solve their problems. George's people had stumbled across the site, realised it was much better than the hole in the ground that they lived in (as what they lived in was literally a hole in the ground) and made the place their own. They later set about learning all they could from the Dept. building: weapon handling, hand to hand combat takedowns, how to solve domestic disputes etc. and put it in to practice to purge the wasteland of its unruly scum. The building itself was a large rectangular box shape with a second rectangular box as a garage. Inside the building was enough bullet resistant armour, pistols, shotguns and ammo to outfit a small army. So with an adventurous day of brain splattering ahead of him George walked into the arid sunshine and smiled.
That smile was then dropped as he saw something in the distance, something big, bulging and dark. Pointing it out to Sargent, who had taken the name as he was the leader of the Police, George asked "Sir, what is that in the distance?" to which Sargent replied "It's dead if it gets any closer". He then paused for a moment, a stone hard gaze fixed on the bulbous shadow that approached from the horizon, before adding "order everyone to get inside".
George was standing by one of the downstairs windows of the rather rectangular Dept. building, combat shotgun in hand, when the huge mysterious shadow became clear.
They were disgusting.
Bulky green muscle trying to rip out of its own flesh, mouths filled to the brim with shattered yellow teeth, blood etched into themselves and each one of their chosen weapons. They stood there for ages, snarling and roaring constantly without attaching, scaring the poor people of Dept. into submission. Then slowly out of the crowd, rose him. He was different to all of the other mutants only by being the most hideous of the bunch; his yellow skin actually torn in places where the tension from his muscles was to great. The muscles themselves were stacked on top of each other and growing from places that no other natural being would even have. His right arm was massively deformed looking like a second smaller mutant was attached to his shoulder. He opened his great jaw which contained more teeth then it could hold and bellowed, "I AM THE DREADKING! AND I SAY THAT YOU ARE ALL TO BE SMASHED!", and with that the horde of hell spawn broke into a wild roar and stampeded towards the now small and weak Dept. building.
George then came back to his current world of blood and gore as he couldn't remember what had happened to him next. All he could remember was waking up to this nightmare. George left his memories for another time and instead looked around at the world outside his cage that continued to haunt him. His cage was at the bottom of a very familiar hole in the ground, not surprising as this grey, dark and rocky crater, surrounded by lifeless shrubs used to be his former home. Despite its grey and drab look George still fondly remembered the stories that were told here and the songs sung. Now, however, the super mutants had wreaked it, just as they wreak everything else. Surrounding the hole was a mishmash fence of sharpened wooden spikes entangled with barb wire. A single gap had been left in the fence allowing the super mutant raiding parties to come and go as they pleased. A half-arsed attempt at a stairway lead from the gap to the flat floor of the hole. The floor itself was quite large with a 50 metre diameter allowing all of the mutants sleeping space. At the foot of the stairway was where George and the other prisoners resided, of which there were between 10 and 15. Some grouped together while others, like, George in their own cramped cage. At the opposite end of the floor was another poorly designed stair which lead up to the Throne of the Dreadking. The throne itself was just a few well organised rocks with a huge scaffold of bloody weapons, human entrails and a thousand different parts from a hundred different machines, erupting from the back of the chair.
And upon the chair sat the Dreadking, currently smashing the face of a weaker mutant into the jagged slope of the hole,
"WHAT DO YOU MEAN; ONE OF THE RAIDING PARTIES WAS WIPPED OUT?"
Unsurprisingly the mutant didn't reply.
"DAMMIT!" roared the Dreadking, "It's those damn slavers; they want our trash" he said to himself as he gestured towards George and the others, "Well… LET THEM COME, WE WILL SMASH THEM WITH THE REST!" the other mutants roared in agreement. "WE'LL DESTROY THEM, WE'LL CARVE THEM TO PIECES, WE WILL…"
At that point the Dreadking stopped his rallying, clutched his face and screamed at a pitch that shattered souls.
A second later the crack of a sniper rifle was heard echoing throughout the hole.
George then watched in slow motion as each of the super mutants was killed or injured by a rain of bullets. He then looked up to the edge of the hole to see… mercs; a group of mercenaries were trying to free them!
In the aftermath of the surprise attack enough of the mutants had reacted to rally a counter, climbing the edges of the hole to chase after the attackers as they fell back to drag any support away from the most powerful enemy: the Dreadking.
Now unfazed by the .308 bullet lodged in his eye the Dreadking reached behind his back with his gigantic right arm and lifted up his Super Sledge. Able to weld it with only that huge right arm the Dreadking swung at one attacker, snapping his spine, before swinging at a second and smashing her against the slope of the hole with a gut churning crunch.
The Dreadking reeled back again as the sound of a sniper rifle cracked a second and third time. The Dreadking turned back, rage pouring as freely from his face as the blood. He then let out a world shattering roar, raised his Sledge and charged at the sniper standing at the gap to the hole. Two final cracks were heard before the Dreadking collapsed at the foot of the stair, silent for the first time in his life.
The silence disturbed George. For the first time in months, maybe years, he no longer heard the constant noise of the mutants. The snarling, snoring, roaring, laughing… all of it was gone. Then George heard a noise, it was the sound of slow rhythmic claps.
"Very well done Dreadking", the gravelly voice of a ghoul murmured, "close but no cigar".
The ghoul then came into view for George as he finished his decent down the stairway, sniper rifle slung over his back. Slowly the attackers came back to the hole, some wounded, some drenched in mutant and human blood, some not coming back at all. The ghoul reloaded his rifle before unloading two more rounds into the Dreadking's corpse. "Can't be too careful with these things" the ghoul jokingly said to the other attackers, "Now time for our reward".
George saw the ghoul look over at him and the other prisoners, a demonic, lustful look in his eyes.
And the realisation hit him.
These weren't mercenaries as he had originally thought; these were the slavers that the Dreadking had cursed in his final speech. They wouldn't liberate George but instead throw him in another cage, subject him to other horrors and make him retreat to other memories for comfort. They may even force him to remember the days he spent with the mutants and say, "How fun those days were, full of sunshine and hope", for now all of the hope had died in George Parks and indeed on that day George Parks died .