The Commonwealth
14.11.2287
01: 49 AM
'The Warehouse' Affiliation: Gunners
The Reaper
Even though the November night sky was clear the stars that were millions of lightyears away provided little light.
The silhouette of the hooded man standing under the open sky wondered if these were the moments when being...'spiritual' and believing in the existence of a bearded man in the sky was a good thing.
Maybe then the blow would be less painful.
Maybe then, he would find solace in the belief that she was in a better place.
He inhaled sharply, and rubbed a rough, calloused palm over his stubble laden cheek.
The scars he felt on his face were old, well healed.
The ones on his heart...not so much.
He exhaled, and once again he was focused.
He had to find a man.
Bridget was annoyed.
Over the last month more than fifteen crews had gone dark.
Some psychotic fuckface who called himself the Reaper would leave his regards written in the crew leader's blood after decimating crews, messing up turrets and taking off with anything that wasn't bolted down.
She had seen the pattern. This Reaper was a walking arsenal. She had seen throat slits, chops to the top and side of the head, stabs to the back of the head and limbs hacked off with precision, and the profile of the wounds indicated something slightly shorter than a machete. She was pretty sure it was an eight or nine inch blade, but even then, the wounds were too cleanly made for a very heavy blade yet too deep for a light one. There was evidently some amount of trickery going on. She had seen people shot with .308 rounds and 5.56*45 mm rounds mostly to the head and upper torso area, some 12 gauge buckshot here and there, but the results were mangled, blown open knees and elbows with chipped bone fragments poking through the skin. A few people had a load of 9 mm hollow points to the torso and the results were bloody, and with her particular brand of humour, she would say they were well ventilated. Most for the 9 mm bullets were grouped to the left, with a few shots that were off target, and lodged in the walls. She guessed that the weapon was some kind of automatic pistol, and was fired one handed in reckless abandon. There were even .45 rounds, but they were fired tactically, to the shoulders and the head, and with a properly made pistol. But the reason this asshole needed two different sidearms was anyone's wild guess.
Some particularly superstitious lot of ex-raiders...or in other words, most of her crew, considered the Reaper to be a manifestation of revenge, a being beyond the grave that had come back to haunt them for their crimes.
She had no time for such bullshit. Their superstition was mostly a manifestation of what little values had been instilled in them in their childhood. And when they raped and pillaged their way through one settlement too many, those values came back to bite them in the ass.
Idiots. She had seen his handiwork. It was human, and not of a supernatural being.
But even then a lurking fear rumbled around in her stomach.
Could one man be capable of wiping out half of the largest mercenary group in the wasteland in just a month?
So she had relocated to the warehouse, possibly the most important location under the Gunners in the Commonwealth. It was there that their weaponry was stored. Gunners did not use scavenged weapons made with some pipes and duct tapes. They smuggled guns in from the west. And if some idiot were to lose the warehouse, the Gunners would be done. And she wasn't that idiot. She was tougher, and better than those hot-headed raider turned mercenaries with no discipline. She was a professional. She was not going to die alone in some armoury. She had to stay alive, no matter what. Her daughters were too young to face the horrible wasteland alone. They would never know the pain she knew, and she would tear the entire world apart if it came to that.
If the Reaper came for her, he would face thirty men armed with Chinese pattern assault rifles and shotguns in close quarters.
He wasn't a 'Reaper', he was a fucking radroach, and he would die like one, too.
She broke off from her musing and started barking orders.
Groups of five, patrols, safeties off.
She felt confident. For she was prepared.
And then it started.
No amount of preparation could prepare her crew from panicking when the lights went out, accompanied by a blast.
It was eerily silent.
The air was punctuated with curses and murmurs of "We're all gonna die...We're all gonna die."
She barked out orders again, back to back, as soon as possible.
She had checked the generator herself, there was no way it could overload.
A faint, taunting whistle punctured the air.
"Jenkins! Check whatever the fuck that-"
She was never allowed to finish; a blood curling scream accompanied by the sound of a body dropping dead finished for her in her stead.
The whole crew was riled up.
Torches were pointed here and there, but they are too late.
With a faint but distinct 'skeeent' and a gurgle, another gunner dropped.
The Reaper had arrived.
Guns were hurriedly pointed here and there; half-learned trigger disciple already forgotten.
This time, rather than a murmur, someone broke down audibly. "Oh man, we are all gonna die!"
Suddenly another scream, a beam caught a dark shadow on the opposite wall.
In a snap, all guns were pointed at the shadow, and all triggers were depressed.
Twenty seven guns roared deafeningly with the signature blinding flash of yellow of ignited gunpowder in a dark space. She thought that it was a good thing she had asked everybody to put on earplugs.
Bridget and the two men standing beside her noticed that slowly, the firepower lessened.
Mentally she scoffed. The fuckers that constituted her crew were so lazy that they hadn't even completely loaded their magazines.
Two and a half seconds later, their guns clicked empty.
When the ringing in their plugged ears passed, and the smoke cleared, they noticed they had blown the warehouse a rather large new hole, other than that, nothing was different.
Other than one, very minute detail.
They suddenly noticed that they are standing on some sort of dark, thick liquid.
When they turned they saw that twenty four corpses lay face down in their own blood and brains, with the smell of death slowly overtaking the smell of gunpowder.
Some of the lucky ones had the backs of their heads partly split open, and most lacked anything recognisable as a head other than a mangled mass of flesh with a bullet inside.
The boy on her left fell back on his ass, and the smell indicated that he had soiled his pants with the bad sort of diarrhoea.
The man on her left was wordless, frozen.
She started screaming on the top of her lungs, probably to hide her fear and not have a mental breakdown like the other two.
"Reaper! You fuckwit! If your mother suckled you on your tits, then step out of the shadows, face your death like a man!"
She had been pushing her luck, but she realised that her only chance at survival was in bringing him into the light.
A part of her head hell bent on levity told her that the Reaper could easily be a woman, and in which case, she would put one in her skull and leave, but Bridget pushed that part of her brain into the shadows.
"You hear me? Come fucking out!"
With a boom and a flash a .45 bullet blew open Mr. Diarrhoea's like a split melon.
She felt sick when he found a bloody, hairy mass on her boot, probably a fragment of his scalp.
The man to her right possibly recovered, and so he turned around and made a run for it.
Two more gunshots look care of his knees, and the last one tore through his neck.
Bridget gulped. She knew what was coming.
Before she could react, or move away, there was another bang, and with that bang she lost the feeling in her entire left leg. She fell down before her other leg could properly support her.
She could notice, even in the darkness, that her left knee was reduced to a red and white mass of mangled bone fragments.
She felt no pain, but she knew it was just the shock, and pretty soon it'd wear off.
With the distinct 'clink' of a flip lighter a hooded man wearing a faded grey jacket and cargo pants probably of the same colour looked even more demonic than he was in the orange light, leaning against a crate.
He had a cruel face, unkempt stubble, a long nose which was only slightly bent to the right. There were old scars on his face, and bright, malicious brown eyes. He was demonic, yes, but at the same time, he looked better compared to all the people in the 'Wealth.
His left hand held a long black knife, liberally smattered with the blood and brains of some poor mercs.
Bridget, even from where she was standing, could judge that the knife was nine inches long.
She was partly right. A poor solace in her condition.
The Reaper held the flat of the blade over the edge of the crate, and dragged it down, removing the brain matter before putting it in a sheath on his left side.
She could see a bandoleer across his right side, filled with red shotgun shells, he drew four in his gloved hand.
He picked up his assault rifle from where it lay resting against the crate.
It was an advanced kinetic weapon, Bridget observed, unlike what most scavvers used.
It was black, with quite well made rails, a very good buttstock and a covered reflex sight of some sort.
There was a scaled down pump action shotgun attached below the gun, and to her surprise, it wasn't a badly made hackjob attached to the rifle with industrial glue and duct tape.
This one looked like it was a weapon out of old pre-war pictures.
The only place she had actually seen guns like these were with Gun Runners, and even though it was well out of her reach for a closer examination, she could half tell that this weapon was better made than a Gun Runner job.
She cursed herself.
Why was she looking on with such morbid curiosity at the weapon that would soon tear her apart?
It was probably because she felt like she was paralysed.
A .45 to the knee could do that, unfortunately.
The demon pulled on the cigarette, and holding the buttstock under his arm, loaded four red shells into the magazine tube.
He was so casual doing it that she felt infuriated.
She opened her mouth to shout, but found no voice.
Once he was done loading, he pumped the action, and at the same time, exhaled the smoke out through his nose.
He took slow, casual steps towards her.
In her mind she pictured something feline about his stance. Like the legendary rad-panther in the ruins of the Commonwealth Zoological.
She was scared. But she needed to survive, her daughters depended on her.
So she did something she felt she shouldn't have done.
She tried to reach for her handgun.
BOOM
In the very next moment she realised that her right hand was nothing but a shredded stump, and that, drained whatever courage she had remaining.
"Now, I was planning to ask you a question before I started doing that, but since you wish to die, who am I to complain?"
He pumped the action on his shotgun attachment, and then he continued, in his gravelly, calm and somewhat amused voice. But she had dealt with people long enough to know that that voice was a facade. A well made one, but she recoiled from the immense fury in his voice masked by his tranquility.
"I give you two choices, one, answer my question and I kill you clean. Or two, let me blow off whatever's remaining of your body and let me move to the next filthy Gunner I can find. You decide, I don't really care either way."
He took a few more steps, and she found herself staring at the wrong end of a shotgun, with the wrong end of an assault rifle on top of it. She was going to die, she had accepted it. But her only regret that she had not prepared her daughters enough for the world they would now face alone.
"Here's my question, it's slow, and properly articulated. Where. The. Fuck. Is. Kurtz?"
Oh boy. Here we go. First ever piece that is not me drabbling something into a mess. More used to writing poetry. Yes, this is going to follow a plot and no it won't be full of half-baked characters and cliches. Oh and no gratuitous smut or mindless romance love-at-first-sight, I hate those. I hate hurt/comfort as well so don't even think about that. No power of love bullshit either. This is about the darker sort of human emotions.
Leave a review, those motivate me to put in more time into this and ignore school. And thank you JM38LACK and Vanillathunder215 for the kind words of encouragement and inspiration