John drove ahead of the column, the road at this part of El Paso seeming less damaged than usual. Of course, he did not seem to notice, for the song playing on his radio distracted him from other thoughts.
….then, maybe…you'll ask me….to come back again…aaaaand, maybe….ill say…maaybeeee…
He sang to himself. He knew he presented a big target, wandering the wastelands in a rarity; a working automobile. Very few, if any, wastelanders knew about working vehicles, less knew how to operate them, and practically no one knew how to repair the many abandoned ones laying about the road. He did, however, belong to a clan experienced of such things. Besides, if they encountered any trouble, they had the guns to fight and the speed to escape.
The road jolted him around, and he began to notice it was turning to soft sand, and he raised his hand out the top of his convertible to slow the rest of the convoy down. This part of the trip he did not ever enjoy, as he clicked the radio off and turned out the headlights. This road led through hills, and was perfect for an ambush. They had lost many people on this road.
Suddenly, an old pickup rolled in front of his path, blocking the way. This would not have startled him, if not for the fact that the pickup was currently ablaze.
Slamming on the brakes, his vehicle screeched to a halt. The convoy did the same, various shouts coming from the vehicles behind.
Just to his left, a huge man clad in what looked like scrap metal and discarded truck tires lifted an old, taped – together assault rifle above his head and roared. At least John now knew where the truck had come from.
As the man leveled the rifle down on him and rattled rounds off into his door, John ducked. He pulled a revolver from the glove box and peeked over the dash while rounds pinged against his heavy metal door. From what he could see, it looked as if an entire army of raiders was coming down onto his clan. He pulled a radio from his fighter pilot jacket (which he found in a place called a moo-zee-uhm) and yelled into the speaker,
"Back up! Back up!"
Turning his head, he saw that they had rolled a burning car behind the rearmost cargo truck. They were trapped.
A heavy sledgehammer just barely missed his head, smashing into the steering wheel. The raider snarled, spittle and bad breath assaulting John. He kicked his door open, knocking the ugly, smelly man over. He sighted his gun between the raider's eyes and pulled. Hot crimson splashed over him. .50 cal does make a mess, he thought to himself.
From what he could see, the raiders vastly outnumbered his party, but they were all armed with cheap melee weapons, and his clan members were cutting them down with fury. John smiled, but the grin quickly faded as he saw even more raiders coming over the hills.
A filthy, slightly fat raider girl lunged at him with what looked like a shiv-made-spear from a broom stick. He easily sidestepped the clumsy attack, and smashed his pistol into the back of her head. She crumpled to the ground and did not rise.
Another raider came to him, weapon raised high over head, and John dispatched the man by shooting him in the gut. He heard footsteps behind him, and ducked just in time as a sharpened piece of metal swung over his head. He turned and drove his six inch blade into the raider's chin. (yet another item from the moo-zee-uhm) Blood streamed down his hand, and with a look of evident disgust, pushed the raider away.
John walked towards the center vehicle, just as a raider's body fell to the floor behind it, headless. Another raider approached from the side, and was hit in the templed with the recently deceased raider's severed head. Turning to look, he saw his partner, Francis, engaged in melee with a comically huge machete. The huge man chopped and stabbed, removing limbs and making a bloody mess of things. Another raider tried to sneak up behind the huge man, to his own demise. Grabbing the machete with both hands, Francis swung the blade like a baseball bat, rending the raider in two, from waist to shoulder.
"I'm glad we are on the same side!" John shouted.
The big man laughed heartily, as a plume of red liquid burst from his chest. He looked at John confused, before another three eruptions followed, felling Francis to the floor.
"No!" John screamed as he turned, seeing the raider leader sighting on him from his position on the hill.
Click
The raider leader threw his weapon down in disgust, and dropped into cover as John pulled his revolver up to sight and pulled, just missing his target.
"You motherfucker!" John screamed, and in answer a rocked sailed through the air and hit him in the side of the head. He fell to one knee, as his vision went hazy. It was then when the raider leader appeared, and started to run towards him, hatchet in hand. John raised his revolver to shoot, but as he brought the weapon up, nausea and dizziness assailed him, and he fell to the ground.
The raider drew closer.
John got back up, and leveled his revolver again, but his vision was so hazy that he could barely even see; it was like opening eyes underwater.
The raider was in striking distance now, but then he suddenly stopped. From this close distance, he could see the fear in the man's face (even though he had shown his courage charging a man with a gun). He was not looking at John, yet at something over John's shoulder.
There was a roar, something huge and terrible. Screams followed. Panic.
The raider leader grabbed John, sat him up against the rear bumper of his car, and ran. He dropped his hatchet, not bothering to pick it up as he ran for the darkness in the desert. John leveled the revolver and fired, barely missing the raider leader as he fled, the sand falling from where the round hit. The man didn't even look back.
John turned to see what the commotion was about, and immediately wished that he was hallucinating.
Both clansmen and raiders were fighting together against the largest deathclaw he had ever seen. Some raiders ran, those who thought they could outrun the beast, but most stayed and fought because they simply had no other choice. A fight they were badly losing.
One raider came at the beast with a broken pool cue, stabbing it into the thing's gray flesh. It failed to pierce the skin, succeeding only in getting the beast's attention. He backed away, just as a massive clawed hand passed through the raider's body with lightning quickness, rending the man into four pieces, blood trailing behind the four digits. Another clansmen shot at it, scoring an eye in the process. The beast roared and closed massive jaws around him. The beast swung the body at a group of raiders and clansmen, knocking them down and spraying blood over them.
The beast leapt over the fighter's heads and atop the cargo truck, the suspension squealing in protest under the immense weight. One of the tires popped, and the safety ring on the rim shot out, severing a clansmen's legs and embedding itself deep in his chest.
John, by this time had slightly recuperated and shot the remaining two rounds into the beast. It whipped its head towards him, as if the rounds had done no harm, and leapt from the rear convoy truck to his current position, a distance of at least fifty yards.
He dove and rolled out of the way, as the deathclaw drove one of its clawed hands into the trunk of his car, bringing the suspension down to full bottom and poking the talons out from underneath the frame. Enraged, the creature swung its free hand at him, barely missing him. He saw what happened to the raider, and backpedaled to keep his distance from those talons.
The beast roared at him, its mouth open and careening spit at him. With a mighy tug, the deathclaw freed its hand from the car, ripping out the trunk, bumper, and pretty much all of the left rear quarter panel. John saw that it had injured itself in the extrication, the middle clawed digit hanging and the palm and other fingers torn to shreds, bleeding black blood. It fell to the floor like oil, but it didn't seem to bother the Deathclaw. He saw that both yellow eyes glared at him, as opposed to one.
Regeneration. Great.
He opened the drum on his gun and was loading rounds one by one, and with quick glances to the deathclaw, saw the beast slowly approaching him, placing one foot before the other like a cat does stalking a mouse, mouth open and trembling with each hellish and guttural growl.
Amazingly, Francis appeared with his machete in hand, and brought it down on the creature's wrist. It howled in fury as the blade semi – severed the hand, but as it jerked away from the big man he lost his grasp and stumbled forward, trying to regain his balance. The deathclaw swatted him away with the back of his injured hand, and he flew over the hill and out of sight, tumbling head over heels into the darkness.
At this point, John saw the remaining raiders had fled, and those few clansmen who remained came to his aid. They screamed and shouted as they fired into the beast, which reared up and covered its head from the devastating amount of firepower now localized on him.
John carefully placed rounds into the Deathclaw, under the chest, into the legs, armpits. He didn't know this creature's anatomy, but one could only guess.
The beast began to back away, when it let out a squawk, quite possibly the last sound John expected it to make. It fell to the ground, covering its head with its claws and bringing its legs under itself, and settling into the sand. The clansmen fired more rounds into it, ceasing when they noticed it had stopped moving.
No one moved for a long time. "Is it dead?" someone asked, yet no one dared to answer, as if it would bring the creature from hell back.
John eyed the creature, unmoving in the sand. The holes in its hide did not close, and the machete deep in its wrist still led the bloody cleaving. It seemed dead.
Another roar, this one distant. The clansmen gasped and turned. That roar was answered by another. And another.
Soon, the night was filled with roars, which were soon becoming worryingly louder.
The clansmen formed a circle, and by now, the blazing road blocks had become glowing embers, enshrouding them in darkness. Then, from atop the hills, appeared one more deathclaw, then another, and another, until they were surrounded on all sides by nightmarish silhouettes, staring back at them with yellow, unblinking eyes.
John turned to the first deathclaw, now obviously not dead, completely regenerated, albeit for the machete embedded in its wrist. It removed the blade in its teeth, then snapped it in two when it had removed it.
"John," whispered Magatha, their medic and John's current love interest. "What do we do?"
John only stared back at the first deathclaw; He did not want to die. Grinning, he snapped the drum closed on his revolver, brought the sights between the beast's eyes, and pulled.
Welcome to the Wastelands, stranger. Welcome to Hell Paso.