So this story is technically defunct, because I'm re-writing it as 'WORSE THAN 2 PAIRS OF HANDCUFFS: REDUX' -So if you're trying to keep up with my current story
STOP READING THIS, AND GO READ THE REWRITTEN VERSION
Besides, it's better and shit
I will be removing this story soon and entirely switching over to the REDUX version, check my profile page for it
Thanks peeps,
~Don
CHAPTER 1
Scavengers.
The wind was rather calm today, it wasn't very noticeable, a feint whisper, a slight force that flowed fluently and softly past everything it came into contact with, like invisible and weightless water.
It was a consistent breeze, parted occasionally by stronger gusts that whipped tentacle-like extrusions of tan off the dust licked surfaces of twisted metal, and grimy rock. The sky above was clear, blue, glowing under the attention of the star in the void above that once had supported this place with life bearing heat.
Rolling expanses of browned and drably colored land cascaded in likeness to bundled cloth for as far as the eye could see to the west, coated in a thin fur of dead and sad looking vegetation, that was thin, skeletal- unappealing in greens or even fleshiness -these too undulated quietly in the wind's direction.
Stick filled trees lacking leaves or brightness to their stances, gridded the hills and expanses of dirt and rock in the thousands, acting as a sea of toothpicks that all were shaven clean of their natural right to beauty in and of themselves.
The air was warm, cooled with each wind gust, sound overall was almost non-existent, save the tiny crinkling of millions of dead branches brushing and caressing against each other, and the lap of water over mud and sand.
Here, to the east, running down a thick line of layered browns and creams, was a coastline and beach- soiled, heavily, with tendrils of slimy seaweed and driftwood carried in by the tide, which expanded and receded back and forth repeatedly from the ocean ahead, taking away debris, shifting it, or sometimes adding to it all.
There was an undisturbed tranquility of overall silence to the area, it was simply... still. Eerily still. Showing the echoes of a planet that had been robbed of its greatest evolution of life, robbed of its Godhood, its nature, its clean air even.
Indeed, the Earth here, for all this stillness and quiet- had been wrought through the fingers of sentient malice, tossed into a sea of coals and molten metal, and it had been spit out a dusty shadow of its former self. Humanity had consumed everything they had been blessed with in the fires of radioactive energy and copious manufacture of means with which to kill and maim and destroy.
If one could remove their eyes from the soiled coast here, from the rows of dead trees and dead hills and dead rock fields behind that... They would be granted a view of a thousand erected monuments of humankind's ultimate defeat at their own hands- a city was back here, highlighted blue, and made feint from the distance- it was a city of brick skyscrapers and old looking houses of wood and plaster.
Here the streets were festooned with entire roads atop the actual roads of automobiles, rusted and stripped evenly after around two centuries of abandonment and abuse, the land was roamed by horrors that had only existed in people's nightmares, and for what few had survived the greatest genocide in history, you could make an argument that half were no better than these beasts.
Sunken into the sea of death, the planet was born anew, except, much duller, much more lackluster, filled with monstrous ambitions and appetites, and the overwhelmingly set stage for the influence of pure and unadulterated evil.
The human race had been concerned with their neighbors- the prospects of 'Democracy' became blended with the tactics of totalitarianism, Communism fractured in its standing to support the countries it was adhered to, and people's understanding of, well, EVERYTHING, began to change into something that no one could guess.
The United States of America, the most powerful country on the face of the planet, became embroiled in an arms race, and even a race of ideology with the People's Republic of China, and in the meantime, the nation states of the European Commonwealth sewed their own countries into chaos through a brutal invasion of the Middle Eastern States and the North African Independencies, subsequent civil war broke the wealthiest economies in the world.
With desperation for fossil fuels and the rapid advancement of atomic energy, the United States Army repelled the largest invasion of American soil in human history, and imposed American authority upon neighbors who once were considered friends and allies to the north, and to the south where suspicions and tension had re-arisen and spiked.
While Europe, the Middle East and Africa burned, people in Eurasia, China and Russia starved, Canada and Mexico were viciously restrained by military might they were not capable of standing up to, and the United States Army had begun a front on China's coasts, and Korea and Japan.
Before here, before now, before this quiet and polluted shoreline, before this dead and barren forest and this dead and barren city, the world was on the brink of destruction, and the fate of the human race balanced all in a single moment of transcontinental release.
Nuclear warheads had been aimed to and fro, back and forth, and threats had been made for decades, and while the young male generations of the world's super powers butchered each other in the mud and ruins of a collapsing civilization, rulers and governments spelled doom for everyone evenly.
Nobody knows who launched their missiles first, some people claimed it was the United States, some claimed it was China, others that it was a collection of states in the European Commonwealth- but at the end of the day, did it really matter?
Through human's brashness and foolishness, through their degrading to that of lowly apes and primitives, thousands of years of what should have been people's improving upon petty conflicts and disagreements, culminated in their near extinction.
The plumes of radiation took years to settle, but when they did...
-This, what you could see here, this dead coast, dead land, dead city, was what the entire planet looked like now.
Everything was gone.
Cities, the staple of human cooperation and technological ingenious, were all blasted and ruined. Places and landmarks of history and the formation of society, were all left to the dirt, and forgotten. The oceans were poisoned, the forests poisoned, the hills and mountains and even the blasted sky, all poisoned, nature's sheer potential, its beauty and stabilization, all wasted like it was nothing of importance.
The human race had done this.
How worse could it have gotten?
What else could mankind do to this dead world? To each other?
chsk-SH! -The soiled sand here was disturbed by a clenching, oval-like extrusion of reflective steel, that shot down and penetrated the sea of browned grains, and tugged a small object from their sunken, buried depth.
The piece of machinery gave off tiny tan waterfalls of sand loosing from its crevices and interior, it left a little indent in the beach's surface from where it was ripped out of, and the mechanical device clenching it between two prong-like digits turned the device to and fro.
"Hmmmm... This looks-" The prongs waved back and forth, shook more sand from the thing's form. "-Like what I was looking for! Haha! HA! Take that, you frikkin' seaweed slurping bitch of a beach! I FOUND IT! VICTORY!"
-So, maybe, the question here wasn't what else humans could do to the Earth.
Maybe it was the question of what this robotic organism here, could do that would cause a lot of damage.
"-That's right, sir! I FOUND it!" The being spoke into a long distance connection of communication systems, levitating in place through the burning eye of a thruster-unit jutting from the bottom of its rounded ball-like chassis, detailed with three triple-digit limbs hanging low around its waist plate to drape towards the ground below.
"You did?" A voice, less raspy, less... crazy ...-responded through crackling static. "Nice, man, bring that back here for me, will ya'?"
"BAH! Do it yourself, you lazy baboon!"
"Oh here we go..."
"DON'T GIMME' THAT CRAP! I'll fly over there and rip off your balls! That oughta' piss off the mutant frog!"
-There was crackling and shifting on the other end.
"...Can I have my helmet back?"
"-That 'mutant frog' is going to disassemble you and scatter the remains throughout the Commonwealth, stop giving us a hard time and BRING IT, here, usiner."
"...Can I, like, please have my helmet back?"
"NOBODY THREATENS, THE HAN'! OR STEALS SAN-BO-FAN-FORD'S HEADWEAR! YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED, YOU ESCARGO-OBSESSED, GENETICALLY MODIFIED HUMANOID NEWT! YOU HAVE DADDY-PROBLEMS!"
"...Cher siegneur... My patience isn't very... Present, today, monsieur'. Can I throw him through a wall when he gets here?"
"I'd prefer you didn't, girl."
"You can't blame me for trying."
"Not at all."
"CONSPIRATORS! Trying to undo the badassness that is ME, through numbers! I'll fuck you up!"
"Hancock,"
"WHAT?!"
"Please shut up and just bring the thing back here, PLEASE, I beg you."
"ONWARDS! I fly as a courier of Democratic masculinity!"
-This being here, screaming his vocal-emitters off, having gained some obscene form of sentience in his bloodless body, seeing the world through three stalk-like ocu-lenses, and interacting with it (usually through violence) -with a robotic claw on his one arm, a variety of weapons on the others, was named Hancock, he was a former U.S. Army designation 'Mr. Gutsy' robotic platform, and there were no others like him.
The central-thruster on his chassis ignited, and with a sparking kick, a blast of orange illumination, the robot speedily hovered down the dirty coastline to the north, following the division between sandbar and tallgrass closely.
The year was 2290, two hundred and thirteen years after the nuclear holocaust, and Hancock was one of a trio of individuals, living in the post-apocalyptic remains of the city of Boston, in the ruined state of Massachusetts, and they had come together under such peculiar circumstances, that it was of no wonder that their story was far from over in this harsh, remorseless world.
There was Hancock, as introduced, but there was also his best friend, his compatriot, his 'Mi-Amigo', his 'Fellow Expert on the arts of Underwear' as Hancock would quote him- and his name was Sanford Tobs, and he was the man that Hancock had been communicating with.
They had been interrupted by a being considered beast by most, in possession of a variety of languages and cultural distinctions that otherwise no longer persisted on blasted Earth- she was a seven foot tall, biogenetically engineered weapon, a reptilian creature of swiftness, agility, and strength.
Most people knew her species as 'Deathclaws' -horrors of the Wastes.
She was Nyx, and, she couldn't have been too bad, because she had been living with the two of them for the past year.
Indeed there had been an adventure, one of diluted nonsensicalness, of epic paragon change, with lots of fighting and heroic actions... They had beaten a super power back, and had collapsed another one, found out a lot about themselves and each other, and it solidified a team that showed no signs of breakage.
Sanford, Hancock and Nyx had traveled the city of Boston and the northern expanses of the territory referred to as the 'Commonwealth' last time, in a quest that was unmatched by anything any of them had ever done before.
Sanford was tired of it, and so was Nyx, and while Hancock always had a desire to shoot things, he too was willing to take a temporary leave of such practices- all three of them had no idea, that in the following few days, that leave wasn't going to last.
But, as of right now, none of that was important.
It wasn't important, yet.
So Hancock sped down the beach without much care to any of that, because, well, he had no idea any of it was coming.
He bypassed the splayed out and sleek form of a dead Razorfin, the mutated dolphin lain on its side, its fang-ridden mouth agape, and its one seeable eye wide and lifeless, sand matted its otherwise pristine hide everywhere, and flies had started to congregate by its jaws.
Out to sea, to Hancock's right, the shadowy outlines of several boats and aquatic craft sat half-sunken in the salt water of the Atlantic, mostly tugboats, trawls and some old private yachts- having drifted from wherever they had been tethered into the shallows, they were eerie husks.
Hancock wasn't aiming for any of those.
It was the queen mother of wrecks, right up ahead, that he was heading towards.
With its stern protruding and raising into the blue, detail lacking sky of Boston by almost four stories- a massive ship painted red and black along its rusted flanks, and white by its varied cabins and superstructures on top of the deck, was sunk up to its midpoint in the sea, where its rear beached and shot upwards.
The ship had no name that anyone knew or remembered, or, really that anyone gave a crap enough to actually discover- there were great tears and holes ripped and broken through its hull everywhere, including one that was relatively close to the sand of the beach, its bottom chin underneath a shallow diversion of sea water.
Hancock zipped under the shadow of the wrecked cruise ship, and he levitated over the lick of water by this breach, kicking up a tiny salty breeze in his wake, he slipped into the fissure beyond.
"SIR! I GOT it! Haha! HA-HA! Ha! Yeah-ha! Just another proving point to my SUPERIORITY! Take that, peasants!"
Hancock floated over a rectangle of shallow water, filled up nearly to its top with piled rubble and scrap- up above him there were at least two stories of the ship's interior that had collapsed and were holed out, with the cabins and chambers of each side of the vessel clearly visible in the broken 'Walls' on either side of the trench.
"I'm up here, Han'," -A metal arm jutted from the top lip of one of the floor sections of a chamber above. "-Come on up."
"-Well! What if I don't FEEL like it?!"
"Fine, then fuck off."
"NAZI!"
"Screaming coffee machine."
"Pube-Pulling Ape!"
"Ranting soda vendor."
"BIGFOOT SCREWER!"
"Barking car muffler."
"MONKEY!"
-Hancock's further rants were cut off.
PNK! -A piece of rusty steel, a flap of the stuff, probably peeled off a wall- rebounded off the space between two of his ocu-lenses, and splashed into the water below him.
"-AGH! I'M HIT! MEDIVAC! DOCTOR! SOMETHING!" Hancock reeled back, and felt about his chassis with his buzzsaw attachment. "-HA! Not a scratch on me! You don't have no game, you overgrown garden snake!"
Up above, leaning over the chin of another floor section on the opposite side of the trench that Sanford was in, was a seven foot tall, hunched over, and scaly being, with individual, black colored spines running down her back.
Her elongated head was lowered for the robot down below- Nyx smiled with rows of fangs behind her chops, she reached up and scratched at an irritation behind her left, curling horn with her knuckle.
"You must at least offer me... 'Kudos'... is it?" She looked across the trench for Sanford.
"-That's right." He chimed.
"-Yes, then, you must give me 'Kudos' for good aim, usiner."
"Suck my sprocket-pump!"
"Pffft..." She blew it out her chops, lips flapping, the Deathclaw rolled her eyes and turned back to whatever she was doing up there.
"DING-DING! Second floor! Tinkering mad-men playing Frankenstein with blow-up dolls!" Hancock laughed as he rose up to level above. "-How long is this shit gonna' TAKE you, sir?!"
"A 'Blow Up Doll', really?" Sanford grinned, his helmet still off- he turned around from where he crouched in a rusty room by Hancock's flank. "Did you find this guy's chip?"
"AFFIRMATIVE! Fucker tried to dump it on the beach! Well I showed him! With my DETECTIVE skills!"
"Yep, detective, uh-huh."
"MOCKING SON OF A BITCH!"
"Quit yelling and gimme' the chip! Good Christ!" Sanford jammed an armored hand and arm up, flexing his fingers. "-Let's go!"
"But Sanford! It's in my nature!" Hancock floated into the room and stuck his claw into Sanford's plated palm, depositing a tiny square of thin, plastic-ish' synthetic material.
"...There isn't a THING natural about you, usiner..." -Came in a slight echo from the other side of the ship's demolished center.
"Nobody asked you, Puff The Magic Assbag!" Hancock snapped. "-I don't know how Sanford tolerates your Communism induced shit! But I sure WON'T! I REFUSE!"
"Soyez silencieux..."
"Quit using your cryptic foreign-person code on me!"
"Be quiet..."
"NEVVAAAA!"
"Shut UP." CLNK! -Sanford leaned over and chucked yet another object at his robot, where it bounced off and rattled to the deck.
"-IF ONE OF YOU SCUFFS MY PAINT, I'LL-" Hancock spun around, and then, he looked down at what his comrade had thrown at him. "...D-Did you just nail me with that man's severed hand?!"
"It's synthetic, cry for me." Sanford shrugged, turning back around. "Guy was fast, I'll give him that."
"No creature from the Institute is too fast for me." Nyx chuckled from across the trench. "-I found some coppery material, mon ami', is that... good?"
"Is it wire?" Sanford stopped what he was doing, angled his eyes back, narrowing them.
"Yes."
"Then I say, take it."
"Oui'."
"Han', quit floating around like that, make yourself useful, and get over here."
"-Now you're gonna' give me orders, eh?!" Hancock ranted, his thruster angling, his chassis drifting closer. "We-he-hell! I've got NEWS for you, ya' Black Shirt lover!"
"-'Black Shirt'- lover?" Sanford chuckled, looking over the corpse a bit more. "What does that even mean, man?"
"BLACK SHIRTS! Like the Italian ones, you bigoted panty-wearer!"
"Can you believe that was almost four, five hundred years ago?"
"Nope! World's still as ugly with just as many ugly freaks populating it!"
"Yeah, well, while you're having a stroke," Sanford gestured down. "You wanna' cut this guy's chest open?"
"...Holy Nixon's Scams! CAN I?!"
"...Yes?"
"EAT MY BUZZSAW, CADAVER! HA-HA!"
"...Oh Christ..."
Conveniently, one of Hancock's robotic limbs ended in a buzzsaw, a literal buzzsaw- a wheel rimmed with sharp teeth all around, one of the choice melee weapons his model had been upgraded with from the standard civilian variants.
There were some hysterical, and gruesome, memories that came with that saw, and the robot's unhealthy obsession with using it to cleave through hapless fools who challenged him in a fight- today's target though, was already dead.
A tan-skinned man, he looked around his late thirties, was lain out on the rusty decking of the interior hold chamber, on his back, from where Sanford had flipped him over to examine him- he had been wearing stitched together clothes, 'Commoner' attire, a red vest over a white shirt with brown slacks, he looked like a farmer.
There were cauterized wounds lacing in a gridded pattern up and down the man's back, from super heated particles of carbon that had singed clean through his clothes, and had destroyed the sections of flesh they had impacted, leaving blackened holes that smelt of burning skin.
One of the bolts had clipped off the man's left hand, and another left his left leg connected to his pelvis by a mere few strings- there wasn't a lot of blood, and Sanford had no qualms with his killing of the person who had, in past actuality, fled from them for almost six miles from where they'd found him.
The reason for this was simple.
This man was supposed, to be Edwin Pym, a crop tender on a nearby agricultural settlement, but the problem was, this was not Mr. Pym, even though it looked like him, dressed like him, talked and sounded like him, and even smoked the same cigarettes he liked...
The scrunched up face of the imposter remained expressionless through Sanford's judgment after the killing shot had been made here- he was able to lean back in his armor, and raise his lower lip in all knowing as Hancock began his bloody work.
It was actual blood, but it was blood that had been grown around a body of inorganic material.
sVVVVVMMMMM! -The sound of the saw cutting into artificial flesh, it sounded exactly like it did with normal flesh, Sanford knew, he'd heard both before, many times.
Blood catapulted from the spinning, shining wheel of Hancock's saw- gradually replacing the outer rings of silver with reflective crimson- blood spattered in the form of a million dots on the ceiling above, and Sanford made sure to step back enough to avoid the spray.
As he moved, his very body made mechanical thuds, thunks, and servo whines- his limbs were protected by enwrapping gauntlets and boots, his body beneath a cuirass of impenetrable alloys, and the entirety of the armor supported by an internal pipe and circuit system over a skeletal exo mainframe.
Sanford Tobs was a scavenger, he had always been- and it was how he had come into possession of the armor he wore- which was an experimental X-01 type that had been manufactured around two hundred years ago, by the United States Military's brightest scientific minds at the eve of nuclear holocaust.
This was the suit that had lasted Sanford the last year throughout the territory of the Commonwealth, the former city of Boston- his birthplace before the war, or the world it had created. Understand, that Sanford was over two hundred years old, and he had Vault Tec and their cryo systems to thank for that.
He also, had a particularly significant pair of people who played a hand in the way he had evolved- and they were the ones responsible for this mockery of humanity on the floor of the cruise ship chamber.
"-JUICY! Ha-ha! All clear, sir!" Hancock's saw gradually clipped to stillness, he saluted with his claw, and levitated back, revealing a crimson trench, parted on both sides with vein riddled, tan-hinted flaps, the mouth of the fissure had teeth too- this creature's shattered ribs.
No internal organs were present beyond that point.
There was an internal skeleton, and rounded protective casing, that was pure white, like porcelain- stained with blood everywhere.
This thing, was not a farmer named Edwin Pym.
It was a synthetic humanoid, a copy of Edwin, installed in the population of the farm by a fallen group of people known as the 'Institute' -which Sanford had collapsed after the largest firefight in his life, a year ago.
The floor behind them shuttered, and metal creaked- Sanford turned over his rounded pauldron of the X-01's flank and watched as Nyx used her long nails on her claws to clench the jagged edge of the separated flooring, and haul herself up to stand behind.
"You got him open, monsieur'?"
"Han' did, yeah."
"His number should read 15.90."
"Are you sure with nine-zero?"
"Nine-zero, Sanford, yes."
Sanford fell to a single knee on the rusty floor, he leaned his bare head around, his lower lip raised at the disgusting appearance of the mangled corpse. The tanned face, still expressionless, almost mocked Sanford with a stuck up look of victory, despite death being met.
He reached up with a gauntlet, and dragged the fingers down the rounded girth of the interior white structuring that was behind the shattered, fake ribs- he slid away some trails of globular blood and matter, and saw a tiny code carved underneath the division between two separate plates.
It read- 15.90-D
They got him.
"Yeah, that's him..." Sanford sighed, the suit lurching as he stood up straight. "We got him."
"Is that the last of them, finally?"
"It only took us two months, but yeah..." Sanford sighed, angling his head down at the corpse. "-Good thing too, one less menace for these people to deal with."
"HA! Take that big-heads who currently rot in hell!" Hancock proclaimed. "-We GOT 'em! ALL OF THEM! NO SURVIVORS! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!-"
CLK!
"-UNHAND ME, VIAL SPAWN OF THE DEVIL-!"
Nyx grunted, reached forwards, and the fingers of her great hand snatched and clenched over the top of Hancock's chassis, before the Deathclaw simply flicked her whole arm past her hip, and sent the Mr. Gutsy careening over the edge of the severed floor behind her, to the bottom of the trench.
There was silence, and then a splash of water, muffled by the consistently trademarked sound of a bag of tin cans.
Sanford looked between his reptilian friend- who was now smiling at the peace and quiet- and then past her to the division of the cruise ship's interior.
"Thanks." He flashed a grin.
"It was my pleasure." Nyx sighed, her tail arcing slowly behind her. "I'm hungry, how about you, Sanford?"
"After all that surgery? That messy, messy..." Sanford glanced up at the ceiling, whistled at the spatters of blood. "-MESSY, surgery?"
"Do we have any Salisbury left? I can't recall if we had found any recently."
"Yeah I think it's in there."
"...MAN DOWN!... I'm drowning! HEEELLLLPPP-!..." -Came from below, echoing throughout the ship.
"-Han', we're coming down, pull yourself together and let's go home..."
"...I've been junked! LIKE A TOENAIL CLIPPING!"
Nyx turned around and leant over the edge of the flooring- still smiling, she looked over at Sanford, her yellow eyes piercing towards him in the shady atmosphere.
"Would you think it a little sadistic that I find pleasure in his suffering?" She asked.
"Nah, not to me, he earned it, he's a little much today."
"Mm."
"Let's go home already, it's getting late."
"I'd love to."
"Han'! C'mon, brother! LET'S GO."
"...I TAKE BACK MY PRIOR ANALOGY! This is worse than TWO pairs of handcuffs! SOMEONE GET THE JAWS OF LIFE! And an old fifties era' copy of Time magazine so I can bore your asses to death! And now I'm- CHAFING! Fuckers!"
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