Atom V: Big Bad Wastes

AN: My thanks to Aegon Blacksteel, Paladin Bailey, The Desert Dancer, Alternative NonFiction and Master Doom Maker for their reviews, critique, and support.

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The Albatross descended from the sky and touched down in the dry bed of a river an hour on foot away from Fort Constantine. Not too long after, Sarah sent them off with their orders and a nod laced with a wish of good hunting meant only for Gallows. He could feel the eyes of the two younger Knights, Kestrel and Danton, on him as they parted ways minutes later. They didn't understand his need, the hunter's urge. Only Sarah did, but she was a warrior first, bound to a warrior's mentality.

Out of the entire Pride, Colvin did the least, despite being reckoned as the most insightful and the closest thing to a counselor the Chapter had. His faith colored his views as much as Gallows' own upbringing in the Circle did his instincts. They'd never understand each other.

Ultimately, it didn't matter. They respected each other and their boundaries. It wasn't their first joint scouting either: Colvin knew enough to lead the others on a parallel path up the rocky ridges skirting around Fort Constantine. Far enough, but not so much assistance wouldn't come swiftly if needed.

The land below was Gallows' personal hunting ground.

Fort Constantine rested tucked away at the flat bottom shallow valley, the slopes marked by ashen trees and the tracks of disused roads. Taller rock formations – some natural, some the result of the seismic force of the bombs - encircled it to the north and west as well as the south, the direction Gallows came from. Not tall enough to completely hide the zeppelin's approach, however. The Knight-Captain checked his surroundings before he removed his helmets and sniffed the unfiltered air.

Faint but growing stronger, the peculiar stench of unwashed bodies filled his nostrils.

Freaks. Frankensteins. Supermutants.

The helmet slotted back into place with a hiss. Gallows set off into the woods.

The Circle's instructors drilled three words into every cadet, a malapropism of an old U.S. army motto. Adapt, Survive, Thrive. When Gallows and his late fellow black ops specs had come to D.C., they all had enough Stealth Boys to go by. Twenty years of unexpected, grinding warfare and even the ones taken from the other two's bodies had quickly run out. Only a small, emergency stash was left for the rainy days, one he hadn't touched yet in over a decade.

He'd taken the words of his instructors to heart instead, and built on their training to new ends. It had made him a hunter, where before he was a glorified assassin. His mindset changed with his evolving skill set as well, so much that when the Western Elders sent a new unit from the Circle after the Outcasts' secession, they never even saw him coming. After that, the attempts on Elder Lyons' life had stopped.

The muties didn't see him coming either. There were three of them forty meters away, advancing ponderously up the road from an old visitor center. The one at the front was larger and hunched over: arms strong enough to snap his spine bulged obscenely under the metal plaques of his armor. The minigun looked comparatively toy-like in those huge hands. It wouldn't be long for the abrupt growth spurt that turned the elder Frankensteins created by this strain of the FEV into Behemoths.

Gallows flattened behind a trunk and observed them, loosening his ripper and silenced SMG in their holsters. Lasers were good, but lasers were noisy and visible.

His heart almost skipped a beat when the master moved closer to his position and he got a good look at the second mutant. Green, where the others were dirty shades of yellow. But it was the armor it wore that made the Knight's eyes narrow. Not welded together scrap, but a well-fitting set of combat armor ceramics only reinforced here and there with second rate scrap.

Worse still was the bearing. Its strides were heavy but not graceless, its posture straight and coiled. The beady eyes under the pronounced brow sparked with frightening intelligence.

A flickering thought carried the stories of the Master's army to the fore before he relentlessly squashed it.

'Eliminate the threat first. Leave the conjectures for later.'

Gallows threw a decoy and flitted out of cover in the opposite direction. Endless practice and the mods to his power armor silenced his steps on the brittle soil, an extra precaution necessary against the muties' sharp hearing. He circled around his prey, a gray shadow closing in on a gray background. When he was only a few meters away from the last on the line, he switched the decoy on with a small remote.

The registered cackle of ferals echoed from the mutants' right, drawing their attention and the muzzle of their weapons with it. Gallows slithered in from the left, capitalizing on the distraction.

The ripper's low whirring was cut short by the squelch of shredded flesh and bone. The flanged chainsaw carved under the helmet of the largest supermutant and Gallows barely felt any resistance as it bisected its spine. The colossus dropped dead, taking the blade with it. Gallows' silenced 12.7 mm belched a short burst at the green mutie before the body touched the ground. At point blank range, the heavy caliber rounds tore through the combat armor and into the mutant. Green arterial blood spurted from its navel to its collarbone and the mutant fell on its knees, its face warped in an expression of almost human pain.

Gallows silenced the building scream by crushing its windpipe with a power-armored fist, then stepped into the last supermutant's super-sledged swing. The shaft connected with his pauldron and most of the force in the swing dispersed into the kinetic dampeners built into his armor. Gallows squeezed the trigger and what remained of the hateful mutant's face slackened, a fine mist of blood, bone and gray matter all that remained of the back of its head.

A foot slammed onto the tarmac behind him. Gallows spun, crouching on instinct. The green mutie's fist flew over his head and Gallows slammed into it with a low whine of servo-motors. He pressed its laser rifle between their bodies, muzzle low, as he reached for his backup knife. The mutie's eyes had assumed a more familiar look, one of pain, disgust, and rage, but Gallows' worst suspects were confirmed when it spoke: gravelly and in pain, but other than that, it articulated better than most raiders.

"You'll die, human. Adam will purge you and the rest of your Brotherhood, but not before you witness the Ascension."

The mutie coughed blood in his face, splattering his visor, but its strength was failing it. Gallows drew the blade and slammed it under its ear with a wet thud. The light went out from those intelligent eyes.

The Knight checked his surroundings and meticulously gathered his weapons, then dragged the bodies out of sight with some effort. Not matter his training and the power armor, he was slowly approaching the latter part of his forties, his prime long past him. And mutants were heavy.

It was only as he stood over the body of the green skin that Gallows noticed the mark burned onto its breastplate by a poker: an eye, staring out of a triangle decorated with three sets of short lines perpendicular to each side. The other two sported it as well, but burned into the skin of their foreheads. Same imprint, same shape.

The lines on Gallows' face deepened and he tapped into the radio set built into his helmet.

"Gallows to Albatross."

Sarah's voice came out scratchy from the old speaker. "Albatross here. Come in, Gallows."

"We've got a problem."

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In his week in the outside world – well, two, but he'd been out like a light for the first seven days or so – Hog had left the Regulators' barracks only for the check-ups with Moira, his shifts, and the Sheriff's training sessions. Lucas Simms never took him and the others far from the town walls and always out of sight from the Vault, but the farthest he'd walked until the previous day had been the outskirts of Springvale and the few houses there where he'd learned the basics of breaching and room sweeping.

The ravaged landscape of Tysons had been depressing and melancholic, but Hog had been too focused on staying alive.

By contrast, the long hours walking along the Potomac where an eye opener.

"Jesus Christ."

From the vantage point of the hill they were skirting around, Hog could see for miles and miles in nearly every direction. And what he saw was dead, ravaged, and empty. Craters pock-marked the land on both shores of the Potomac, the glassed terrain catching the sun's glare and shining in an entrancing, disquieting way. If he'd thought Tysons was bad, even from a distance he could tell the area around each crater was in near total ruins, the very topography altered dramatically by the Chinese carpet-bombing of the region.

"Welp, it's gone."

Lucy's disappointment drew him out of his contemplation. The zeppelin she'd been looking at was barely a dark dot in the distance, growing smaller. The Regulator dusted herself off and rose from the boulder she'd been resting on. "Let's get going. The miles won't cover themselves."

The hours-long march had extolled its due from Hogarth, much to his surprise. Years of daily training had left his body supremely conditioned and Moira's serum, whatever that was, helped to deal with fatigue as well. However, Vault life was stationary and claustrophobic, ill-suited to prepare for the long march on the treacherous terrain Lucy was leading him through. A couple of hours in, Hog's legs and back had started to cramp, only worsening as they stacked up the miles.

They dumped the empty food cans that had been their lunch and soon were on the road again. The convoluted path Lucy picked for them didn't really deserve that name, however. They kept well off the road, the Potomac a constant fixture to their left, with its rumbling waters and insect swarms buzzing along the shores. From that distance, he couldn't be sure how big they actually were, only that they were bigger than the flies buzzing around Lucy and him like the blood-sucking predators they were.

Regeneration or not, he didn't fancy meeting their mutated counterparts. A frown climbed on his face as the thought rooted into his brain and branched out. Lucy picked up on his mood but missed the target.

"How bad is it?"

It was the first piece of not survival-related conversation since they set off. "I'm sorry?"

"This," Her hand swept to encompass the wastes. "You've got the look of someone who can't believe what he's seeing. How worse is it from before?"

He contemplated the wastes for a few moments, unsure of how to respond. Then his eyes roamed east, over the jagged profiles of D.C.'s skyscrapers, and south. Billy's words about white coats taken south by Talon nudged forward. James was there, somewhere, in the complete opposite direction to where he was going.

He spoke before he went any further down that line of thought. "We had books and holofilms back in the Vault. Mr. Brotch, he was my teacher at school, used to show us movies and documentaries about the world that was, on how the Vault was the last holdout of the old U.S.." Growing up, he'd reckoned it was all trite propagandist bullshit out of Almodovar's book, but looking around now at the hell on Earth, doubt took hold somewhere at the back of his mind.

"Dad gave Ian this old picture book for his birthday when we were little," Lucy said when the silence stretched for too long. They were descending down the side on the hill now. Up ahead, Hog could see one of the craters: every building around them had been flattened long ago, either by the shockwave or time. "Looking back, it was a rotting mess. I couldn't begin to tell you what it was about, but a couple of pages still had some nice pictures. One was this tall statue of a woman on an island, holding a book and some kind of torch." She pantomimed the position. "And there was a city behind her, large boats in the water. I may be only a wastelander, but that city didn't look anything like D.C."

"New York."

Lucy gave him an odd look. "What?"

Hog shrugged. "The city's name, New York. It's some States north from here, I think." Old World geography hadn't been high on his list of priorities either. "That picture was of the Statue of Liberty, the first thing people from the old continent saw when reaching the States by boat." She gave him a hesitant nod, her mind parsing the information and another half-dozen question on her lips. They didn't stay there long.

For the next hour, Hog regaled Lucy with some disparate bits of what he remembered from his visits to the Vault's public library. That had been one of the few places she could find some quiet after his estrangement from the rest of the Vault and while the shelves didn't offer anything like weapon manuals or anything 'unrest-inducing' by the Overseer's standards, the collection had been pretty rich and varied.

Her curiosity seemed inexhaustible, but the more he spoke, the more the air of melancholy around his retelling thickened. Speaking of a world long expired in nuclear fire while surrounded by what little remained wasn't exactly a balm for troubled spirits. He wondered if the Statue of Liberty still stood. Somehow, he doubted that.

"You know, this place seems even shittier now," Lucy said after a while. "They say there's bliss in ignorance. I think I get why now."

Hog opted to remain silent. His infamous speech as valedictorian, the thing that set the ball rolling those years ago, had touched on that same topic. Had the rest of the Vault being ignorant, or simply accepting of the status quo? They certainly had been ignorant of the threat lingering outside the Vault's door.

'And look at where that got all of us.'

"You know what really drives it home? More than the ruins and this fucking heat?" He changed the subject, loosening the parka's buttons to try and cool down his body. "It's silence." It was rarely ever silent in the Vault, what with all the echoes in the cramped corridor. "Every video they showed me, every book and picture told or implied that millions of people lived here. Millions."

He shook his head, struggling with his words. "It's so many people I don't even think I can imagine all of them. And they all lived in this place. Now, it's practically empty, so much it seems we're the only people for miles. Well, almost."

Lucy followed his finger, pointed at the Potomac. She grimaced at the bugs there and the distinct profile of a bridge in the distance. "Nope, I don't think you'd like to meet most of the things usually squatting about. We're going further inland for a bit to avoid that bridge, then loop around. I'm pretty sure Talon garrisons that."

Hog's nostrils flared, but the flare of anger was as brief as it was impotent. There was nothing he could do about it. As Simms said and Lucy's pointed look reminded him, he had to learn to pick his fights.

"Got it."

The rest of the afternoon passed under the mechanical stomping of boots over gravel and dirt. Gunfire would explode in the distance from time to time, always out of sight and too far away for them to do anything. Another thing he learned quickly was that sound carried a long way in the wastes, making judging distances a tricky practice.

Lucy adjusted their route a couple of times, perusing Hog's Pip-Boy from time to time to check the lay of the land. From the marker Simms had put on his map, Planky Town stood at the edges of Leesburg, inside and on the roof of a Super Duper Mart general store.

They'd just passed under the faded ad board promoting some kind of Halloween special sale at the Market two hundred years expired when Hog spotted movement among the cars dotting the parking lot at the store's entrance. The sweet stank of rot coupled with the metallic smell of blood the hit him a moment later, a powerful waft that had him gag and almost double over sick.

That's when a dog started barking and Hogarth was introduced to his first zombie.

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The Brotherhood descended on Fort Constantine hiding in the last lights of the setting sun, their forces divided in a pincer maneuver to pin the muties into their position and then smash them open like rotten tatos.

Needless to say, no plan survived first contact with the enemy. In Sarah's case, the proverbial wrench had manifested in the shape of pre-war robots stiffening up the freaks. And all of a sudden, Gallows' talk of intelligent Frankensteins up and about became much more real.

"Beta team, suppress those lodgings!" She ordered into the radio set of her helmet as she sent a short burst of laser fire into a rampaging Mr. Gutsy, blowing its grav-thruster and turning it into a heap of metal. "Gamma, ready to flank Maryland as soon as Beta is in place." The ayes in response were drowned out by a missile shrieking through the air and impacting into an old truck a dozen meters away only moments after the two Knights taking cover behind it, Fromm and Keaton, dashed off. The vehicle's fusion core had long been removed, but the explosion still picked up the two Knights, throwing them several meters away.

"Delta! Heavies on the main complex. Take them down!" The sniper team made of Gallows, Colvin, and Dusk offered their reply by placing a trio of rounds into the supermutant at one of the windows as it tried to chamber another missile. "Vargas, Artemis, take Fromm and Keaton into cover and check them. Alpha team, advance!"

Glade, Kodiak, and Initiate Danse abandoned cover with her just as Bravo team, led by Paladin Tristan, opened up on the muties' position in one of the personnel lodgings closer to the command center and the armory. Their miniguns and gatlings tore into the old plaster and concrete as Sarah's team and Gamma team rounded around the lodgings in a two-pronged attack from the left and right – flank Oregon and flank Maryland respectively.

"Alpha, this is Delta," Colvin related flatly across the radio. "Two Sentry Bots and thirteen muties approaching your position from CC."

"Roger that. Whittle them but keep suppressing their heavies, we'll take the rest." Sarah signaled at her team to move forward and take cover on either side of the main road leading into the inner courtyard, surrounded by a blasted-apart chain-link fencing. They complied, but not before Danse capped a plasma grenade and tossed it into the lodgings. They lit up a moment later, the hollers and screams inside cut short as Gamma team breached from the other side and cleared the room.

"Brandis, sitrep!"

"We're meeting stiff resistance, ma'am," the Midwesterner growled over the line. She could hear the whirring staccato of energy weapons and heavy ordinance from his position even without the radio. "Three KIA so far, but we're making good progress. ETA six minutes, east-north-east."

"Copy that. Bravo team, advance Maryland. Pin the reinforcements in place! Glade, time for Little Boy!"

The burly Paladin actually barked a laugh over the comms that managed to break through the renewed exchange between the Brotherhood and the fresh Supermutant forces. All were heavily armed and branded on the forehead, she noticed as she placed a trio of shots in the belly of the lead one. None wore the custom armor of Gallows' victim, but that was only a small comfort when the Sentry Bots rolled into view, the missile pods mounted on their chassis open and filled to capacity. She had to duck under their barrage of laser fire. One of Tristan's Knights wasn't so lucky and was hit in the hip as he turned away.

"Vargas, need med support on Tristan's position!" She lobbed a grenade over her cover, but Danse's had been the last of their plasma allotment. The frag shrapnel maimed a couple of supermutants, sending them to the ground howling, but pinged harmlessly of the war robots' thick plating. "Glade, hurry the fuck up! They're zeroing on our position!"

"Ready here, ma'am. Gimme some cover!"

"You heard him!" She followed her own advice and leaned out of cover, sending a barrage of lasers in the direction of the supermutants. The surviving freaks were dispersing from their advance column, moving for cover or using the Sentry bots as such in a display of tactical awareness that left Sarah cursing under her breath. Tristan's laser gatling tore a scorching line across their ranks, drawing the attention of one of the bots as well.

"TARGET-ACQUIRED," the machine cawed. "DEPLOYING-EXPLOSIVE-ORDINANCE."

"Fire in the hole, motherfucker!"

Glade abandoned his cover in one smooth movement, unencumbered by the Fat-Man propped against his shoulder. He stood still for a moment, then the catapult slung its payload in an arc. Sarah didn't need to order everyone to take cover. Not that anyone would have heard her over the thundering detonation and the radioactive heat washing over their armors.

It took a few long moments for the ringing in her ears to subside. Then she heard Glade laughing over the radio and took a look, knowing already what to expect. Where a moment before a dozen muties and the bots had stood, now remained only a couple smoking metal chassis and mutant corpses half-fused by nuclear fire, the dirt and sand around them glassed into tiny shards.

At that moment, like every time Glade brought his Little Boy to bear, Sarah was acutely thankful for the HEPA filters in her breathing unit.

"Team leaders, sitrep."

"Bravo operational, but Paladin Jensen's wounded. Armor breached but his conditions are stable."

"Gamma operational, ma'am. Missing Keaton and Fromm."

"Delta on overwatch. They're retreating into the CC."

"Vargas here. Keaton is dead, Fromm heavily wounded. He needs immediate med-evac."

"Brandis here with Echo and Foxtrot. We're closing in on your position, ma'am. Muties are retreating."

It took Sarah only a moment to pick their next move. The losses stung, but the time for mourning would come later. If she got distracted, the tally would only stack up.

"Albatross, you've got two wounded inbound, prep the med bay. Gamma, head to Echo's position and cut off the muties' retreat there. Danse, help Jensen's to Vargas and assist with the med-evac." The Initiate had held admirably under live fire and didn't protest to his removal from the battlefield. The blood hadn't got to his head then. Gunny had trained him well. "Alpha and Bravo will proceed to the Fort's Command Center and secure the perimeter. Watch out for mines and bots: as soon as Echo and Foxtrot link up, we sweep the complex. Delta, if anyone pops their head out, you cap them."

A chorus of ayes resonated on the radio from the team leaders and the Brotherhood was moving again. Sarah couldn't help the grim satisfaction and excitement coursing through her veins under a tight leash. After the upheaval of the past few weeks, being on the field again was like easing into a pair of gloves that had just started to go stiff from disuse. Guilt bit briefly on her conscience at the Brothers freshly dead in the assault, but she knew she was doing her very best leading them and had nothing to blame herself for.

Casualties in war were sad, especially when you could put a name and an anecdote on almost every face, but hardly surprising when assaulting an entrenched position. She'd grown up seeing the number of familiar faces around her thinning over the years as D.C. took its toll. She knew how her men felt, what they risked, because she had lived through the same with them, on the frontline and at home both. And that was why she could bear the burden of leadership. Why she had to.

'Arthur or my dad couldn't do any better.' She shooed the bitter thought away, her attention fully to the fight at hand. This was where she belonged. On the battlefield, leading her Brothers and Sisters to victory.

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"What in –"

"The legs! Aim for the legs!"

Lucy followed her own advice and opened up on the shambling figures stagger-charging out of the parking lot, growling and cackling. The bark of her rifle shook Hog out of his horrified stupor, his eyes as wide as saucers. His hands awkwardly extended the assault rifle's collapsible stock and he opened up full auto, spraying the things with lead in a wide, low arc.

"Trigger discipline!" Lucy yelled, panic boiling in her voice. "Don't lose it, Vaultie!"

The zombies were fast, in their uncoordinated way. They bounded forward, leaping and swaying on rickety legs, sinewy arms flailing and reaching forward with gnarled hands. They smelled of rot and gore, the choking stink tear-inducing and growing by the second. Beastly sounds came from twisted mouths full of broken teeth and blackened gums dripping with blood.

Bullets scythed through their legs, dropping half a dozen into trashing heaps on the tarmac. Some howled, other growled, but none showed signs of being in pain, clawing forward where their legs didn't support them. It didn't matter: more came, stomping over their kind in a mad dash towards Hog and his juicy brain.

'Don't think about it!'

The rifle clicked dry and Hog went for another mag, but he fumbled with his belt and the clip clattered on the ground. Hog didn't have time to curse when the first zombie leaped at his throat.

Years of CQC training with Officer Gomez kicked his senses into overdrive. Hog twisted his body like a whip and smashed the butt of his rifle into the thing's temple, deflecting its momentum. Or so he thought, until the head smashed open like an overripe melon and the rest of the body smacked into him.

Hog staggered back and pushed the dead – deader body away. Lucy was falling back, her words incomprehensible over the staccato of her revolver striking true. Then another zombie jumped at Hog and it was like back in the Old Tunnels with the ants, only this time the fuckers were bigger and faster, but he was armed too.

The large part of his brain screaming that this wasn't fucking possible! fell silent. Hog focused on his breathing, shutting out the abhorrent visage of the zombies and concentrating only on surviving the onslaught.

He backpedaled, sending two charging zombies off-track, and drew the Desert Eagle as well as the fire-axe in a short-handled grip. The gun was steady in his hand and while firing one-handed was a bitch, there was little missing the fuckers as they barreled at him. He put three shots into the nearest chest then swung around, pistol-whipping another in the face as the axe slashed open another from shoulder to hip. Lucy shouted again and Hog turned to her in time to see her sinking her knife into a zombie's face, only to be tackled to the ground by another.

Hog punched a zombie in the face, broken teeth sticking into his padded gloves, and kicked the thing on top of Lucy in the side with all his strength. Ribs shattered and the zombie flew a few feet away but Hog stumbled as another leaped onto his back, wrapped its hands around his torso and bit into his shoulder.

The Vaultie dropped the gun as agony washed over him. His other hand, the one holding the axe, lashed out over his shoulder and the metal head caved the zombie's skull in. It let go in a squirt of Hog's arterial blood, taking away a chunk of parka and flesh underneath. Hog's knees buckled, his head spinning. Lucy picked up his gun, unloading the last of the clip into the nearest zombies: her face was a mask of blood flowing from her forehead and a mix of anger and sadness flickered over it as the Desert Eagle clicked dry.

"Take it!"

Hog shoved the fire-axe into her hands and rose swinging at a jumping zombie. The one-two combination that busted its jaw and cracked its temple, sending it into a heap on the road. Moira's shit had already stymied the blood loss from his shoulder, knitting the muscles back together. It was called upon again as a zombie's jagged nails raked over the side of his face and neck before Hog headbutted it and threw it over his shoulder into a gaggle, dislocating its arm in the process.

Before he could get his bearings again, he was tackled to the ground by a big one. Hog grabbed at its neck and shoulder, trying to dislodge the big bastard off him as its jaws snapped too close to his throat. Even emaciated as it was, the zombie must have been a big man in life. Its free hand slapped and clawed at Hog's face, missing his eyes by inches and tearing off the skin from his cheek instead. Hog gasped in pain and kneed the zombie in the groin without success. More were approaching fast. One fell with Lucy's axe into its skull.

Growing desperate and blind with his own blood, Hog grabbed the zombie's head by each side and twisted it with all of his strength. The neck snapped with a sickening grinding of bones and Hog shoved the body off. He staggered to his feet in time to kick the next one square in the chest, shift and follow up with a snap-kick into the jaw on another behind him. Lucy stormed in then, swinging the axe wildly and lopping off a grasping arm before she steadied herself against his back, drawing a ragged breath.

Zombie blood, green and yellow more than red, pooled in the cracks of the road. A least another half-dozen zombies circled around them, snapping their jaws and growling. Apparently, their brains were not so rotten they didn't recognize danger when it started killing them.

"Guns?" He asked, struggling to control his breathing. In and out. In and out.

"Somewhere in the mess. What about you?"

"Got my fist and legs."

She chuckled at that and shifted her grip on the axe's slick handle. "Snazzy."

As if linked to a single mind, the zombies lunged. Two shambling steps in, a loud bark made Hog flinch. A blur of fur and teeth, and then there was a huge dog tearing into a zombie's throat like it was puppy food.

'Ghouls first!'

Hog kicked a zombie in the face, then cried in pain as another's mandibles closed around his forearm. Tears streaking down his face, he punched the zombie in the throat twice, forcing it to let go with a wet snap, then drove two fingers into one of its jaundiced eyes and kicked its knee in. The zombie fell and Hog stomped on its skull with his boot, then made to tackle the one grabbing at Lucy, but the dog was faster.

It drove the zombie to the ground in the blink of an eye and ravaged its neck with teeth as sharp as razors. Lucy slammed the pick of the axe into another zombie's face, smashing it in like a doll's, and then Hog found himself jerking his head left and right for a target that just wasn't there. The crippled ones they'd gunned first weren't moving, their throats ripped apart in large sprays of blood.

The axe's head clunked on the ground, making Hog jump. Lucy was leaning heavily into it, using it as a crutch as the adrenaline ebbed out of her system Disbelief was painted on her face and she bleeding lightly from her forehead and through the torn tissue of her duster. Hog was sure he was mirroring her look, even with one cheek torn open and the other side of his face a bloody ruin. He could feel the flesh knitting back already.

Lucy looked over at him, studying him, her eyes on his healing wounds. A tired smile curled her lips.

"You're like a bad Grognak joke."

"Says the one with the bloody axe." Hog's eyebrow arched in surprise. "Wait a sec. You know of Grognak the Barbarian?"

"Of course I know of Grognak the fucking Barbarian. I'm not illiterate."

They lost it then, peals of laughter coming out mixed with wheezes as they hugged their sides. Maybe it was relief, the tension seeping away. Maybe it was the paradoxical situation of two people from complete different extractions talking about comics with dead zombies littering the ground around them and a huge fucking dog –

Hog's laughter died and his eyes snapped to the last zombie corpse, but the dog wasn't there anymore, the only trace it was ever there a collection of torn throats and a few bloodied paw prints.

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AN: How to make a fight against ghouls tense? Take away the guns. I hope you all got your fix of action in this chapters, as the past few were sorely lacking in that department. Don't forget to leave a review with your thoughts and criticisms on the chapter and the evolution of the plot. Don't disappoint that lovely rectangular box: it's begging you to write into it.