Hello everyone, hope you are doing well.
Please enjoy.
The slavers escorted Damian to the Mill. They took him through a door next to the dome of the arena. There, a woman in metal armor and with the right side of her head shaved stood in front of him and looked at him with a small grin.
"What's that? I already have my personal slave," she said.
"This scab wants to fight in the Hole," said one of the men escorting Damian.
"So, you're the poor bastard who signed up to fight," cried out the woman with a light laugh. "You've got guts, but will that be enough?"
She motioned for Damian to follow her and led him down a small corridor, lined with empty liquor bottles and human skulls. They walked down a staircase until they reached a room occupied by a large drainpipe cut in half and a generator.
A locker with a broken door was against one of the walls. The room was lit by small braziers, and on a table, Damian noticed a syringe lying next to a pile of RadAway. Cages, similar to those at Paradise Falls or Raiders camps were finishing decorating the room.
A woman was in the room, wearing a black tank top and jeans of the same colour and carrying an assault rifle across her shoulder. When she heard the woman and Damian enter, she looked up.
"Hey Faydra!" said the woman in the metal armor. "I'll bring you some meat for the grinder."
Faydra, whose face was devoured by the lesions of the Trog disease, stared at Damian and inspected him from head to toe.
"What?" she said. "That's what's going to fight?"
"Yeah," replied the woman in armor. "Ashur asked who among the scabs wanted to "rise up" and this guy volunteered."
"Great," said Faydra unemotional. "I hope he lasts longer than the last asshole who showed up."
The woman in armor walked away and leaned against a wall before lighting a cigarette.
"Okay," Faydra said to get Damian's attention. "I'll explain the rules to you. When the doors open, you fight. Nothing could be simpler. The last one standing wins. Once the doors open, the barrels fall and there's no turning back, so there's no crying in front of the door."
"What barrels?" Damian asked.
"Radioactive, just to spice up the show a bit. So, hurry up and kill the others before you turn into a ghoul."
"Yeah, otherwise you're going to look like Faydra," laughed the woman in armor.
"Do I get any weapons?"
"You'll find stuff in the locker behind you," Faydra replied while giving the other woman a murderous look.
Damian looked over his shoulder. He approached the locker and opened the door. Inside, he found a studded board, a metal bar and a Chinese assault rifle with two magazines.
"The fight starts in twenty minutes, so if you have a last wish, now's the time."
Damian entered the pipe. He walked a few meters before he found himself in front of a large fenced door. He was in the hole dug in the factory floor. As he looked up, he saw several barrels of radioactive waste hanging from ropes and attached to the wire dome a few meters higher.
The arena must have been about ten meters wide. Wooden or metal piles had been fixed into the walls. In the center, small walls of cinder blocks or sandbags and a small scaffolding provided shelter for the fighters.
Slaves and slavers began to gather around or sit on the dome's grid. Damian could hear encouragement or requests for killing that turned into a great hubbub.
A voice rose from the crowd and covered all the others.
"My friends! Lord Ashur offers you, the arena!"
A thunderous roar of exclamations and applause echoed through the factory.
"For you! A band of slaves, ready to kill each other to be among the privileged few!"
Damian prepared his assault rifle. He was going to confront the same people who had asked him to free them. For these slaves, crushing others to get to the top was easier than waiting for a savior to come. In the end, it was only human nature that manifested itself once again. The only difference was that they were not two co-workers competing for promotion, as Damian had heard about in the pre-war world, but slaves who were going to kill each other to become free men.
Damian looked down into the arena. In small enclosures like the one he was in, he could see the silhouettes of men and women, all holding firearms or hand-to-hand combat.
"Let the entertainment begin! Fight!"
The door to Damian's pen unlocked and opened. At the same time the rope holding the radioactive drums was cut and the barrels fell into the arena.
Damian rushed forward. He stopped behind the scaffolding. A shout from the arena and a wave of exclamations from the crowd above him told him that his opponents had already started to kill each other.
A bullet whistled near Damian's head. He turned around and saw a young woman with a bolt-action rifle behind him. She cocked the breech of her gun. Damian raised his rifle but hesitated. The woman aimed and Damian dove to cover, feeling the bullet miss him by an inch. He had no will to kill these people, but they were. Damian heard a third bullet passing next to his hear. He rose from his cover and fired at the woman. The determined expression she had on her face turned into an expression of surprise. She dropped her rifle and fell on her back holding her stomach.
Damian heard a scream beside him. He turned his head and saw two men fighting hand-to-hand. One of them, a very tall man, stuck a plank of wood in his opponent's face and pushed him against one of the walls where he impaled himself against a wooden spike.
The tall man turned to Damian. He hid behind a cinder block wall when Damian aimed his weapon. He fired, one of the bullets went through one of the concrete blocks and hit the man in the shoulder.
The man picked up a stone and threw it at Damian. He bent down and dodged it. When he stood up, he saw the man run into him. He grabbed the barrel of Damian's gun and disarmed him. Damian put his foot in his stomach before turning around and running towards the woman's body.
The man had grabbed Damian's rifle and he could hear him pulling the breech of the weapon. Damian hit the dirt. He rolled to the side and grabbed the woman's rifle before crawling behind the scaffolding.
Lying on his stomach, he aimed. Through the empty space between the scaffolding and the ground, he hit the man in the leg. The man fell to his knees. He tried to get up and received a second bullet in the head.
The crowd exulted. A torrent of applause rose.
"Oh, my friends! What a fight!" cried the voice of the commentator. "How far will this slave go?"
Damian stood up and glanced at the woman who was dying on the ground. Upstairs, he could hear the slavers ordering the crowd to move away. The show had ended, and everyone had to go back to work.
Damian kneeled next to the young woman. She was younger than him, and, just like him, she seemed to have just arrive in Pitt, as she had no skin lesions or sign of the Trog disease.
The young woman looked at him, in silence. Her chest and stomach were bleeding and Damian knew that there was nothing he could do to save her. The girl had her hands on her belly and pressed one of the wounds to stop the stream of blood.
He breathed heavily, and, after hesitating, he put his hand on the young girl's.
He looked into the young girl's eyes and to his great surprise, he saw no hate or fear. He felt the girl grabbing and holding his hand.
"I'm sorry," Damian whispered.
He did not want to kill these people, but it was the only way to free the slaves. This woman had not hesitated to shoot at Damian, yet he did not feel any anger or resent toward her. She had probably asked to fight in the arena to gain her freedom, unaware that Damian was fighting not for him, but for all the slaves of Pitt.
Damian felt that the grasp of the girl had loosen. He looked at her and saw that she was staring at the ceiling and that she had stopped breathing. Damian sighed and stood up.
He returned to the room where Faydra was.
"Looks like we have a sentimental scab over here," the slaver said. "Don't tell me you were attracted to that chick. I'm pretty sure she would have finish you off, if your situations were reversed."
"Only two fights left, right?" Damian asked.
"Don't get too excited about it, scab," Faydra spat. "Ashur already has plans for you."
"When do I go back?"
Faydra was about to answer but no sound came out of her mouth. She glanced at Damian with a mixture of admiration, fear and questioning.
"Your next fight is tomorrow morning, and you can do the last one in a row, if you make it out alive, of course."
Two slavers entered the room. They disarmed Damian and took him to the small square where Ashur had held his speech.
Damian searched for Midea but could not find her in the crowd. He had several questions for her, but he would have to wait until he saw her.
His belly began to growl, and he realized that his last meal was when he was with Wernher in the tunnels.
He walked to the place that served as a refectory for the slaves. An unappetizing smell rose from the pots and plates and dampened his urge to eat. Damian approached the slave who was in charge of the service, a woman, with her skin almost rotten like a ghoul by the lesions and disease.
"You're lucky," said the slave. "Tonight, to celebrate the opening of the arena, we have dog food on the menu. But hurry up, or you'll only end up with that shitty Trog meat to eat."
Damian grabbed a plate from the counter and walked away. He began to envy the Brotherhood's military rations or the Vault's recycled food. Disregarding the harsh taste of the meat, he quickly ate his meagre meal and looked for an empty place in the dormitory to spend the night.
He stayed awake for a few moments, waiting for Midea's arrival, before sinking into a deep sleep.
"So, scab, you ready for your new fight?"
Damian had been awakened at sunrise by two slavers who escorted him to the arena. He had not been able to see Midea and ask her all the questions he wanted.
Damian had not slept well. He had dreamed about that young girl he had to kill the day before. He no longer cared about the smell in the city or in the dormitory. All night long he had had the impression that something was creeping into him, and he was convinced that small marks appeared on his arms and legs, similar to those that Faydra or the other inhabitants of Pitt had.
Faydra greeted him with a broad grin, further distorting her face, which was already damaged by the disease.
"I am ready," Damian replied.
"Glad to hear it. Ashur wants this morning's fight to be memorable, so he's decided to give you the Bears Brothers. Don't get fooled by the weird name," said Faydra when she saw Damian's surprised expression. "They're a nice bunch of bastards. I hear they're already half Trog."
The fight commentator's voice began to echo, and Damian turned his head towards the pipe that led to the arena. He felt something land against his chest and looked down to see what it was. Faydra had just given him a combat shotgun.
"Come on, scab. Your audience wants you."
Damian entered the pipe and stopped in the pen. His opponents were already in the arena and made great victory signs to the crowd of slaves and slave traders who cheered them from the top of the dome.
The Bear Brothers were two African American men in their late thirties. They looked very much alike and Damian was startled to see that they also resembled one of Sarah's men, Paladin Kodiak.
Both brothers had very short hair. Their faces were covered with skin lesions and began to freeze in an expression similar to the Trogs of the Steelyard or the ruins of Pittsburgh.
One wore a puffy protective suit and raised a flamethrower above his head. The second, dressed in metal armor, had a huge right hand, ending in long claws. Damian thought it was a mutation before he saw that it was actually a Deathclaw hand, transformed into a glove for combat.
The commentator finished his presentation of the two gladiators, adulated by the crowd, and the door of Damian's enclosure opened as the radioactive casks fell from the dome. He automatically raised his weapon and aimed at his opponent with the flamethrower. Damian pulled the trigger. He heard a small click. No rounds ejected from the weapon. He pulled the breech and looked inside.
His gun was empty. He turned around and saw, at the end of the pipe, Faydra giving him a little smile and waving in her hand what looked like a 12-gauge shell.
"Bitch..." Damian said.
He had completely forgotten to check his gun before entering the arena. Now he found himself unarmed in front of two opponents, able to cut him to pieces or burn him alive.
Brother Bear with the Deathclaw hand moved quietly towards him, while the one with the flamethrower remained in the center of the arena and continued to excite the crowd.
He raised his arm and struck Damian, who parried the hit with his gun. The claws of the Deathclaw gauntlet got caught in the butt of the rifle. Brother Bear growled and pulled with all his strength while Damian pulled on his side as well. He dropped the weapon and his opponent, driven by his own strength, staggered backwards.
Brother Bear regained his balance and tried to remove the rifle stuck in his gauntlet. He raised his head and saw Damian's fist crashing into his face. He swung back and fell to the ground.
The second brother had stopped exciting the crowd and turned to Damian. When he saw him running towards him, he raised his flamethrower. Damian dove towards him and threw him to the ground. Brother Bear with the flamethrower got up and tried to move away to activate his weapons, without risking catching fire at the same time.
Damian stayed as close to him as he could. He punched his opponent in the jaw and knocked him to the ground. Brother Bear fell headfirst into a puddle of radioactive liquid. He let out a terrible scream as Damian crushed his foot in his face. Brother Bear fell into the puddle of radioactive goo.
Damian turned around and saw that Brother Bear with the Deathclaw gauntlet was still able to fight. He had managed to get the weapon out of his gauntlet and was now running at Damian, raising his arm to slash him. Damian looked around him. He grabbed the second Brother Bear's flamethrower and pointed it at his assailant.
His opponent's eyes lit up with terror. Damian pulled the trigger and a long tongue of fire stretched out to encompass Brother Bear. He tried to scream, but all the oxygen around him and in his lungs had been consumed by the flames. He staggered and waved his arms in an attempt to extinguish the flames before falling to the ground.
The silence that had gripped the crowd gave way to applause and exclamations of joy. The commentator could hardly believe what he had just seen and was struggling to find the words to present Damian as the winner of the fight.
Damian returned to Faydra.
"No romantic holding hands this time?" she smiled.
Damian stared at her
"Oh, come on, don't make that face," the young woman said. "You're alive and they're not."
"I still have one fight left. I want to do it. Now," whistled Damian.
Faydra looked at him for a moment. She turned her head towards a man Damian had not noticed until then. It was the man who had given Ashur the megaphone and who seemed to follow him everywhere. He had a haircut similar to the other slavers, with a goatee, he wore only black shorts and a bullet belt around his waist, rangers and a metal harness his bare chest. Surprisingly, there was almost no evidence of the disease on his body.
He looked at Faydra and nodded, as if to give his consent. The young woman turned towards Damian.
"This is your last fight, scab," she said in a rather solemn tone that intrigued Damian. "If you are victorious, you'll have won your freedom and I'll never call you that again."
Damian thought he saw a slight friendly smile on the woman's scarred face. He didn't care what she might think of him. All he cared about was winning the next fight, to meet Ashur, get the cure and get rid of the slavers.
"Okay," said Faydra. "Your opponent is Gruber. One of the few to win in the arena as a slave, and now he's a full-time gladiator, which makes me thinks he must be loving the smell of blood. Unfortunately for you, he's quite a good shot."
She gave Damian a Chinese assault rifle. This time, Damian checked the gun and the magazine.
"Oh, come on, don't tell me you're mad at me for trying to make the fight more entertaining," said Faydra feigning sadness. "Don't worry, these are real bullets, just don't test them on me."
She put her hand on her rifle and Damian saw the other slaver imitate her.
"Come on, get in the arena. Gruber's should be there any minute."
Damian took one last look at the two slavers and returned to the arena. The bodies of the Bear Brothers had been removed, along with the radioactive barrels. Only the smell of burning flesh remained in the arena, as well as traces of blood on the walls and the floor.
The door of the enclosure opened. No radioactive drums fell out. The crowd above him chanted the name of his opponent. Damian heard a slight slap and felt something graze his ear.
He pressed himself against a cinder block wall. A bullet whistled beside him. Damian did not hear any gunshot. He looked around, looking for his opponent. Hidden in the darkness, sheltered behind a sandbag wall, a man in a dark metal suit and a motorcycle helmet hiding his face pointed an R91 assault rifle at him. The rifle was equipped with a silencer and a scope and its stock was retractable. He fired at Damian who dove for cover. He fired a blind burst and quickly raised his head.
His opponent had changed his position. Damian got up and ran to another shelter. He tried to find his way by sound, but the exclamations of the crowd, combined with the fact that his opponent was using a silencer and the pounding of the machines, made it impossible to locate his opponent.
Damian saw movement in his peripheral vision. He aimed his weapon and saw that it was just a stone rolling on the ground. A bullet whistled in his ears. He switched to automatic fire and fired several bursts blindly into the arena.
A second bullet slammed close to him. Damian got up and fired. He heard a squeak and saw Gruber stiffen and fall backwards.
"Gruber... Gruber falls!" the commentator shouted in disbelief. "Gruber falls! A new slave is coming out of the gutter to join us! Hail to our new champion!"
Damian approached Gruber's corpse. The man was dead and still held his assault rifle in his hands. Damian tore it from his hands and inspected the weapon. It was a little lighter than a standard R91 and was painted black. He took the weapon with him and went back to Faydra.
The young woman greeted Damian with an admiring smile. The second slaver, wearing shorts with his leather harness around his chest, approached Damian.
"Good work," he said. "You've only been here less than a day and you survived the Trogs in the ruins of the Steelyard and three fights in the arena. I think we can make something of you."
"I want to see Ashur," Damian said.
The man seemed neither surprised nor angry and answered with a slight smirk.
"You will. He asked to see you anyway. You'll find him in Haven."
"And how do I get there?"
"The boys will show you. Oh, one more thing, now that you're not one of the slaves anymore, get yourself some better clothes. You'll find some stuff in that crate."
He pointed to a military canteen on the floor behind him. He left the room with Faydra, leaving Damian alone. He opened the canteen. Inside, Damian found dirty jeans and a t-shirt with a hole in it, probably taken from a dead body.
He put on his new clothes and went back to the Mill. All activity in the factory had stopped. Only the pounding of the presses continued to resound. The slavers stared at Damian and exchanged a few words in a low voice, while the slaves looked at him with envy.
Two slavers approached him.
"Ashur is waiting for you, and it's best not to keep him waiting."
Damian put Grubber's gun on his shoulder and followed them through the Mill to a checkpoint in the factory, consisting of scaffolding and a fence. The guard unlocked the door and stepped aside to let Damian and his escort through. On the other side was one of the emergencies exit of the factory.
The exit led to a small alley that ended to a main street. This district, located just behind the factory, was mainly composed of apartment buildings and shops more or less destroyed. Several ramps and scaffolding made it possible to leave the street level and climb along the facades of the buildings and enter the interior.
"Welcome to Uptown," commented one of the slavers accompanying Damian.
They climbed up until they entered one of the buildings. The slavers had rearranged the place into a pantry and dormitory. Many of the slavers, both men and women, slept on bunk beds or mattresses on the floor. Some smoked a cigarette while drinking a beer and chatted quietly while watching the ruined city, while others gathered around a small table and played cards.
A large system of suspension bridges, made of metal or wood, allowed people to cross the streets and go from one building to another. Damian noticed large spotlights on the roofs of the buildings, which lit up the streets below or the collapsed buildings, preventing the Trogs from sneaking into town.
The degenerative disease that turned people into Trogs was accompanied by acute photophobia, and the people of Pitt made sure they always had a powerful light on to cover the entrances to their town against mutants.
They walked past a bar on the roof of a building. There, the slavers sat at the counter and chatted happily, boasting of their shooting skills, while a couple of slavers sat on an old brown couch and chatted, holding hands and smiling at each other.
Damian found this vision quite strange. To him, the mere fact that people like slavers, Raiders, or soldiers of the Enclave could behave like normal people and have a romantic relationship was inconceivable. He had always seen them, as inhuman beings, whose only occupation was to kill or torture others, and to see these two slavers like that made a strange impression on him.
The Great War had put an end to many things. In Pitt, the society Ashur had established was similar to a feudal system. The slaves, the lowest stratum of this society, lived in Downtown, under the control of the slavers, the middle class, who obeyed Ashur, the Lord of Pitt. The symbolism was even stronger, since the slaves lived on the ground floors of the buildings in Pitt, while the slavers occupied the upper floors of a different district.
This image of a post-nuclear feudal society was confirmed to Damian when he arrived in front of the Palace of Ashur.
Situated on the other side of a main street crossed by a tramway line, the fiefdom of Ashur stood opposite of him. A large concrete tower, illuminated by a few spotlights, erected in front of a large square, surrounded by a large gate. The building had been spared by the bombs and only a few small pieces of the facade were damaged. The place looked like a fortified castle and Damian noticed several lit windows in the upper floors. Ashur must surely have been at one of these windows contemplating his empire and dreaming of the day when he would rebuild civilization.
At the front door of the building, a strange statue of humanoid shape, kneeling, with its bust raised to the sky.
The statue was an amalgam of chains, pieces of wood and ropes. Two pipes, spitting out flames at regular intervals, revealed the inside of the statue. Human remains had been trapped inside and blood was slowly oozing to the ground.
Damian went around the statue with his escort, under the curious eyes of the guards who patrolled the area, and entered the building.
Ashur's palace must have been an old hotel before the war. The entrance hall was lined with large black marble columns supporting several balconies. The entrance was empty, except for a few slavers who stood guard near the front door and an elevator, located at the back of the room.
The slavers escorted Damian to the elevator and took him inside. They pressed a button and the doors closed on him and he felt the elevator start moving.
The climb lasted several minutes, during which Damian tried to think about how to get hold of the cure.
The elevator came to a standstill and the doors creaked open into a long corridor. Two slavers were standing in the corridor.
"Lord Ashur will see you in a bit. Just wait by his office door."
They pointed Damian to the other end of the corridor before resuming their discussion. Damian stopped near a double door that was open. Inside the room were two display racks with the remains of two marble statues. Between the two pedestals and in front of a sculpture of a human head carved into the wall was a desk where piles of files or reports were piled up.
The Lord and Master of Pitt was a black man in his fifties, with a thick grey goatee. His face was wrinkled and bore the weight of years and many battles.
Ashur stood behind the desk, in his imposing, tribal-designed power armor. In addition to the Brahmin skull replacing one of the shoulder pads, Damian noticed that he had painted the breastplate and other parts of the armor yellow and that a human skull adorned a leather belt at the crotch.
He was talking to a slaver, the same one Damian had seen in the arena, with his bullet belt and shorts. They were both in a rather heated discussion and Damian had no trouble understanding what they were arguing about.
"Krenshaw," Ashur sighed visibly annoyed. "I'm telling you I've got it under control."
The one called Krenshaw brutally put his hands on the desk.
"Sir!" he exclaimed. "Wernher is back, I'm sure of it. My men patrolling outside town have seen him someone resembling him in the Steelyard. Some guards have reported conversations between the slaves about him and we lost contact with our team sent to the Capital Wasteland."
"'Workers'," Ashur said as if he corrected Krenshaw's speech.
"What?"
"They are 'workers', not 'slaves'," Ashur replied. "It's good for morale and it reminds them that one day they can be free."
"Whatever their name is," the slaver hissed. "Tools have been stolen in the Mill, same for ammo and theses axes they use can very well be used as makeshifts weapons. If they decide to use them against us, it will end bad, for both of us."
Ashur sighed and massaged his temples.
"All right," he finally said. "Put your men on alert in the Mill and in Downtown and pass the word to those guarding the gate and access to Uptown. Tell them to keep an eye on the ones who are being a little too lazy. And keep an eye on Midea. If something's gonna happen, it's gonna have to go through her."
He looked over Krenshaw's shoulder and glanced briefly at Damian.
"I have an important meeting, so if something happens, use the intercom to let me know."
The slaver muttered an answer and walked away from the office and passed Damian before heading for the elevator.
"Come in, young man," Ashur's voice said.
Damian entered the office slowly. He spotted two doors on either side of the large room, and two automatic turrets in the corners of the room on the ceiling.
Ashur plunged his piercing blue eyes into Damian's and he immediately understood how this man had been able to reign over Pitt for two decades.
"Here is the new champion of the arena," Ashur said as he stared at Damian. "I have a lot of questions for you."
I was always a little bothered about the fights in the Hole. You fight your way in the arena to regain your freedom to help the slaves afterward, but you have to kill some slaves to do it. Weren't they supposed to be aware of Wernher's plan?
Anyway, hope you enjoyed and until next time.
