VI
Back to Bare Bones
There were very few sights that Sanford Tobs remembered as having instilled such cold, unadulterated feelings of horror into his breast. He wasn't old by far, but he'd been around awhile, and he could still say to this day that what he saw through the window of that building was one of most frightening things he had ever seen.
He remembered when he and his mother and father were delving beneath the ground, entering the Vault years ago. He remembered the blinding plume from the ICBM landing nearby, and he remembered the heat, the wind, the horror of that.
He remembered when he had first seen a Ghoul, during his early years in the Wasteland. He remembered it had been in an old colonial house. He remembered that he had looked under a dining room table, and that there had been a pair of soulless, hungering and yellow eyes staring back at him from the dark.
He remembered when Nyx had been kidnapped by the Institute. He remembered that pitting feeling of dread.
What was happening in the street right now reminded him of all those things, because the emotions flooding into his chest right now were indescribable, and terrible.
All at once, his Deathclaw collapsed. She fell over, heaping onto the street like a large, scaly mound of muscle and armor. Her arms- extended out to the building he was in –flew upwards, and Hancock's blackened, raggedy chassis was hurled in a rolling, clanking report onto the ground ahead of her.
Sanford didn't even have time to call out either of their names. Like vultures that had been patiently spiraling over a dying beast; their assailants descended.
And they came from everywhere.
Sanford saw them, black-painted humanoid visages that appeared on top of roofs, from alleyways, and down sideroads. They walked unsteadily on conglomerate legs, snapped at the air with serrated, robotic claws, and sliced at the space in front of themselves with whirring buzzsaw attachments.
They were machines, like Hancock, but models that Sanford could never even have dreamed of.
He saw one of the Frabkenstein-esque' creatures sprint down the street, right past the storefront of his building. It possessed the rounded hull of a Mr. Gutsy robot, and yet from the bottom of its chassis sprouted a pair of triple-jointed, steel and rusty legs. Six arms grew like twisting plant vines from the sides of its mangled, bolted body, each tipped with a claw, or a buzzsaw, or what looked like Laser Gun attachments.
It was an army of Junkers; robots assembled from spare parts from multiple models!
There were tens of them! Tens and tens and-
"-No~!" Sanford screamed at the top of his lungs, his voice booming via the vox grille in the face of his helmet, it echoed across the surrounding blocks, heavy, and metallic.
Some of the robotic horrors were stilled by his announcement of presence. They skidded to abstentious halts on shanty legs, or whirred to stillness on reversing hover-motors. Strange garbles of electronic nonsense reverberated between unseen squad cohesion, reticules locked on the man in the building window above.
A laser bolt flickered out from one of them, and slapped into Sanford's shoulderpad with a kick of sparks and a flash of light.
Snarling like an animal at the assault, Sanford rode the kick back, steadied himself, and tore his energized blade from his hip.
No time to head downstairs, the scavenger lifted an armored boot, and pressed into the brick sill of the window as his foes closed in on the storefront below, a shifting, thin carpet of steel and electronics. One way quicker ticket.
-With a deafening cry, Sanford lifted himself past his own pelvis level, and jumped out of the sill for the street below, whistling, as his suit caused him to fall with a speed of a dropped bomb.
Crash~! –the street cracked, and chunks of dislodged cement cascaded around the man's armored heels. The fall had been almost weightless and without sensation. Sanford's mind was drowning in adrenaline and manic action, all for the drive to reach his incapacitated companions.
"-Nyx! Hancock!" Sanford cried, grimacing as laser fire and bullets tore up the air. "-I'm coming!"
The robotic horrors fell on him as a singular mob. Gutsy chassis with legs, Protectrons with strange, insectoid torsos, and Assaultrons with mismatched heads and arms assaulted him, swinging with saws, claws, blades and in some cases, duct-taped machetes and sharpened strips of metal.
Laser fire licked off of Sanford's cuirass, scorching the metal and flinging harshly lit sparks. He ignored the warning claxons inside his helmet, and with a terrible roar did he fall upon his seemingly innumerable foes.
Crash~! –one of the robots was separated at the hip. Sanford slashed his crimson cutlass back around from the first kill, and soon an Assaultron's head was spinning away to his west. He shouldered the body to ruin, ducked as a buzzsaw screamed over the back of his skull, and turned around and mowed down three more with a hip-aimed spray of his gun in his other hand.
The robots piled and surrounded him, their feet clanging against the street, the guns (where they possessed them) barking and flashing, their melee-weapons whizzing and screaming in sporadic slashes and stabs.
Too many.
Sanford grit his teeth as a claw clamped down over his gauntlet's wrist, the powered joints crushing into the reinforced synthetic of his suit, causing it to groan and screech.
Focus; remember every part of you, even the fingers, even the feet.
Sanford's heart pounded and he sweat from the exertion, until the inside of his suit stank from the sheer volume of perspiration. He weaved left, letting a spinning drill blade slice frighteningly close to his helmet's chin in a near miss. He arced his gun to one side and lashed out with his foot. The robot vanished in a spine-snapping kick to the street, his rifle flared and scythed down several of the assailants to his flank.
God damn it.
Sanford didn't even process the pain, but he did indeed process the blood. One of the Junkers tore free from the joint in his suit almost as quickly as it had first found it. The blade sticking from its arm trailed a crimson, dissipating road of globules in the air, and Sanford could see traces of his life leaking out from the joints of his gauntlet.
APPLYING REGENERATIVE SOLUTION –his suit reported frantically, and he could already feel the needles sticking into the port attachments lining his upper arms.
Be better, Tobs, be better.
Sanford cried out and caved in an Assaultron's head with the butt of his rifle. The machine staggered into him, embracing him as spasms racked its malfunctioning limbs. Sanford planted a knee into its chest and sent the corpse flying. Sparks ripped across his armored back as a Mr. Gutsy-Protectron hybrid raked him with a spinning buzzsaw. Had he not been wearing the suit, that would've killed him outright.
Not today, you son of a bitch.
Sanford snarled hacked the thing in half at the waist. He diced right, left, right, and three robots were hacked like overgrown weeds beneath a machete from his path.
Cut through them.
He had to wade through the detritus of his victims. Their severed, sparking limbs and their destroyed bodies carpeted the street, being crushed and flattened beneath his boots.
Come on!
Sanford killed his way closer to the end of the street, even though there were so many of these machines attacking him, that he couldn't see his friends' bodies anymore.
No no no!
Sanford screamed, and cried and shouted, he spat every single curse and vulgarity he knew, hacking, slicing, shooting, punching and kicking like mad.
Still, with each sparking cadaver that flew from his presence, more of the machines flooded in to replace the losses. There had to be a hundred. There just had to be. There were so many, of all different shapes and builds. Humanoids, floating spheres, half-humanoids.
A Protectron body mounted on the treaded lower chassis of a Robobrain growled towards him, its torso buzzing with the uneven stance of the spiraling wheel-links keeping it afloat. The monstrosity's long arms were each capped with a Laser Gun, and they flapped like erratic serpents in the air, flashing crimson. Bolts of energy burnt into Sanford's gut and his chest, flashing to nothingness against the reinforced synthetic plating with vibrant belches of sparks and red carbon.
"-God damn it-!" Sanford hollered, storming through the wrath of his enemies like a living battering ram. "-Get out of my way!"
He ripped the robot apart with his bare hands, which, even though they were gauntleted, was a viciously attained achievement. The robot's torso screeched and ripped, Sanford barked and finished pulled his fingers away from each other with a final, jerking yank.
Crunch~! –electricity sparked, black machine-blood squirted onto his suit and decorated it with gruesome vine-like patterns of glistening night. The Protectron glacis cracked open like an egg, leaving its arms to limply flail on either end of its death throes.
Sanford roared terribly, he embraced the sparking corpse, and shoved its tremendous weight over. The robot yawed loudly as it collapsed, and it crushed a smaller example of its kin with a rattling crash~! –upon the pavement.
APPLYING REGENERATIVE SOLUTION
What the hell?
Sanford ducked and swept up his cutlass from where it had fallen. He came from below, eviscerating a Protectron model from the groin to where its chin would've been had it been human. The cadaver tossed back in a hurry, screeching, metallic vocalizations blaring from its ruined vox amplifiers.
Can't move my leg. Gotta'-
Sanford sprayed the mob with a hip-mounted flare of his rifle, clearing out his space and scything down several of his foes. It gave him time to glance down at his right leg, where he realized to the fullest extent of what was occurring.
Oh my god.
The pain hadn't even registered, it was like Sanford's body had been waiting for his eyes to connect to the destruction of his flesh before alarming him with physical sensation.
The scavenger cried out as a mangled, repurposed Assaultron model tore back with the sharpened spear of steel welded into its arm gun pack. The crude weapon sang metallically as it parted from the jointal plating protecting the back of Sanford's knee crease. The tip, down to five inches of the makeshift spear's head was dripping with his blood.
Fuck!
Sanford's tears streaked down his cheeks. Even with the application of the stims from inside his suit, the pain was indescribable. His leg buckled, and the mighty X-01 groaned fleetingly whilst the scavenger fell to a knee.
No! I won't let this happen!
Sanford spat and screamed like a caged animal. He slashed out and dissected the Assaultron when it leaped to his flank. He opened its chest cuirass as a sparking, wrecked trench. He shot wildly, and in every direction, until the battery on his gun was naught and empty.
Robotic corpses tossed back, crimson trails of ruination vomiting from holes and burrows blasted into their heads, chests and guts. Another buzzsaw glanced off of Sanford's helmet. Still, with his headgear on, the blow that would've killed him without it felt like someone had hit him in the cranium with a two-by-four.
Sanford just grit his teeth and dealt with the pain. The noises emerging from his throat were almost mule-like because of it.
Make it stop.
Sanford hollered at the mass of machines like a defenseless, stubborn child. He threw his empty rifle at them, and it vanished into the crowds of metal and synthetics. His cutlass diced the ocu-lenses off a Mr. Gutsy with legs. Sanford's fingers wrapped around an Assaultron's head, and he squeezed until its central eye-unit popped like a mere Christmas ornament beneath a boot. Something wrapped over his shoulders and weighed him down. Sharp blows jerked both of his arms, his back and the pauldrons protecting his head.
Make it stop.
The scavenger threw whatever was on his back off. He tossed himself in its direction and landed in a sprawl across the street with a thunderous rumble. The Protectron-Assaultron hybrid clinging to him was pancaked beneath the pavement and the weight of his suit. He could feel it crunching and compressing.
Hancock.
Even as the endless swarm continued to overwhelm him, Sanford could pick out the blackened carcass of his robotic friend.
Nyx.
-And he could see the Deathclaw, sprawled on the street, helpless.
He saw them as they were taken.
He had originally intended for his dismayed scream to be formed into words. There was supposed to be a few 'No!'s in there, followed by curses and vulgarity that would normally be heaped from the likes of Hancock himself.
But none of that actually emerged as anything intelligible from Sanford's lips. It all came out as a mangled, distraught cry. The pain, being flattened under his attackers and the panic rendered Sanford incapable of comprehensible speech.
It took five of the misshapen machines to drag Nyx away. They defiled her beautiful coat with their claws and sinuous, metallic cables that shot from arm mountings. The mighty reptile's scales hissed and scraped like plates of loose armor on the street. Weakly, he could see her taloned hand extended, as even in her unconscious state she resisted the pull of something she'd spent her life fleeing from.
Nyx.
Hancock was a simpler load. A single, yellow-painted Protectron with bulky, reinforced and custom arms scooped the blackened Mr. Gutsy off the street. Sanford could do nothing as the robot waddled off with his friend. He could see Hancock's limp limbs dangling past the Protectron's elbow joints. Further and further away were his friends sent.
It was too much.
Sanford Tobs turned redder than a cherry, and even with the tears, the weight and the inability to move, the scavenger would have appeared utterly terrifying had his helmet not been covering his visage. Rank and ugly enragement poured into his heart and mutated his persona. The anger and the hatred brewing in him for whoever had sent the metallic killers reached a boiling point.
I won't let them do it.
Sanford cried and screamed. His kicks disabled a pair of the Junkers over his legs, and his arms swept from the ground, casting another robot raggedly from atop him. The scavenger fought and bustled his way to his feet, his sword slipping from his fingers, claws, saws and cables dragging and whipping over every inch of his armored body. The sun was blotted from his eyes and his world was that of punching, sparking darkness.
It was nighttime for Mr. Tobs, where he was strangled by the immensity of what he was up against.
Ya' know something?
Sanford fought through the urge to sob, and grunt and heave. He chuckled, even as he fell onto an Assaultron, gritting his teeth in a demonic visage whilst he used his fingers to pry its steel skull in half.
I wonder what time it is.
How long had he been killing and maiming and slaughtering in this mess? Had it been hours? Had it only been minutes? Had it really been such a short period of time that everything he loved was about to be threatened with extinction?
I've failed.
He grunted and ripped open the dome of a Robobrain model. The glass splintered through the air like a cloud of snowflakes. Sanford gripped the quivering, chimpanzee brain inside, and ripped it from the glistening, wet moorings inside the shattered dome.
Blood trailed over his gauntlet. He crushed the brain with a single flex of his steel fingers, popping it like a scarlet, fleshy bubble.
You've gotta' be kidding me.
There was a flash of blue light, and something hard impacted Sanford on the shoulder. It threatened to knock him back down to the pavement with how forceful the impact was.
At first, Sanford thought he had been hit by a Gauss round from some faraway support robot, but the reality was much more frightening than any sort of visualization as the prior.
Whatever they had hit Sanford with, as he continued to punch, kick and rabidly battle for his life- he realized something horrifying –he was out from under the mob swamping him, and somehow, still, it was dark as night.
My suit.
Sanford gasped in terror.
He couldn't see his internal display. His suit's HUD was blank, and his lenses were small. He was viewing the world through a pair of tiny peep-holes without the electronic support.
EMP round, he thought, his head jolting to the side from a nasty blow.
They had shut down his suit's systems.
Even now, his limbs were becoming heavier, and sluggish. Without the operation of his suit's servo-joints, the powered musculature meshes were beginning to fail, and soon, Sanford would be unable to move, his mortal strength incapable of lifting the suit's bare weight.
I'm going to die.
Scrap ripped, metal sheered and circuits screamed. Sanford's roar rattled hollowly inside his dormant suit, it echoed across the street like the screech of a madman. He used his knee to shatter the pelvis of a Protectron hybrid. He shouldered the corpse away, head-butted another of its kind and smashed the next robot's face into its own neck.
He played hammer with his loose, non-responsive arms. He battered aside one victim, stepped on the quivering body, and brought both his fists down with such force, that an Assaultron was nearly cleaved in two from the cranium to between its shoulders.
There she is.
The robot he'd killed had been the bearer of the EMP weapon. It was a cannon mounting that Sanford had never seen before, some custom contraption littered with crimson and blue wires, and sparking Tesla towers protruding from its stock.
What a wonder, that.
Sanford's darkness did not end there, even as the swarm began to whittle beneath his animalistic killing spree. The ground trembled, scrap was crushed under the squeaking, rattling mountings of something else. He could feel the shadow descending over him before he saw it.
What do we have here?
Sanford's joints squeaked as he forced his suit around, he lumbered like a tin-man suffering from speedily spreading rust, his insectoid helm dark, his chin raised defiantly even in his throes of a last stand.
You are one big fucker.
It crushed a path through the piled remnants of its smaller kin, three reinforced, armored wheel-mountings trembling as limbs, torsos and heads split like paper-mache baubles under their spinning masses.
The machine had once been a recognizable model, but now it was something entirely different. Its head was wrapped in barbed wire, as were its shoulders. Ramshackle plate armor replaced its curved glacis, and angular cannons jutted from where its original arms would have been.
As if to punctuate how royally fucked he really was, he could see a small, brown-colored teddy-bear, a child's toy, nailed unceremoniously across the Sentry Bot's wired-up head.
Look at that little thing, some kid's old time friend.
Sanford laughed as the armored, taller killing machine rumbled towards him, crimson light streaming through the wire and the fur of the ruined toy strapped over its face. Deep-toned, nonsensical garblings of electronic speech filtered out from the robot's malfunctioning vox amplifiers.
Looks like it's the end anyway.
Sanford grunted as he forced his hands lower, and forwards. Fighting through the proverbial sludge eating away at his joints, impossibly managing a taught smile in the face of such carnage; the scavenger found himself laughing.
Boy, do I have a present for you, you fat fuck.
"Target. marked for – immediate. termination." –Growled the repurposed machine, its thick, automated voice finally breaking free of patterns of static with a virulent hiss of garbled noise. "Have. a. nice. day."
I was having one until you showed, pal.
Sanford grimaced as he dragged his non-responsive arm from the confines of his rucksack. He managed to get just enough of the mesh to respond to his commands before his suit began to entirely shut down.
He willed the gauntlets' fingers on both hands to move, specifically, he pushed downwards with his thumbs.
The darkly colored spheres in each palm didn't each need their own activations. All it took was the rune of one each.
Thus, the Plasma Grenades went live, their tiny whines drowned by the noise of the rumbling SentryBot, and Sanford's resultant shout.
"-I'm taking you all with me~!" –The scavenger screamed, and with that, Sanford shoved all of his weight into the X-01, and he fell onto the SentryBot's torso, wrapping his armored arms over its mechanical hips.
Steel crunched, the ground rumbled and a crescendo of volume was born from the surrounding Junker robots.
Sanford couldn't feel any of himself. He couldn't feel his skin, his flesh, his heartbeat or even the pain from any of the blows he'd received.
All he saw was white, and then blackness. The grenades detonated, and bathed everything in eternity for him.
-0-0-0-0-0-
The grass felt warm against his skin. It was heated by the touch of the sun, and it swayed under the breath of a cool, afternoon breeze.
The breeze itself made the trees overhead whisper. There were millions of millions of leaves, green, live and vibrant leaves caught in its draft. They touched one another, tickled their neighbors, and disturbed a resolute finery that could never be remade.
I know that sound, he thought. My god, I know that sound.
His lungs were filled with oxygen in a silent, but drawn-out gasp. His eyes flickered open, his fingers became white at the knuckles as he clawed the warm grass, and his tongue retracted from his lips as he tasted the earthy flavor of raw earth on his teeth.
Jesus Christ.
Whiteness stabbed into his mind's eye, swirling with a blankness that could never be undone in this place, because here the past did not exist. Here, there was only a present, and a means with which to catapult back to what he knew was real and not fiction.
This is…
Sanford Tobs almost said beautiful. He almost said- 'This is beautiful' –but he did not, because as he rolled onto his side, and felt the warm grass coating his ribs, and his hips, and his thighs, he instantly recognized the depths of what he was experiencing.
This was not beautiful.
This is wrong.
Sanford still gave into an almost euphoric desperation. He laid on land that was vibrant. The grass here was… emerald. It was green. It was not tanned, and dry and mutated, it was… alive.
Green. Greenery everywhere. Pollen on the air, and blue, clear skies stringed with fragrant wisps of finger-like clouds. The sun here dappled on trees that were thick with vegetation. It made the leaves turn gold in its glare, to make the trees look like dancing stilts of singularly colored fireworks in the brand new day's light.
Life.
The wind kissed him passionately, as if the world here itself had been made to mourn his long absence, and was overcome with happiness, and fervent arousal.
It was the cleanest air Sanford could remember smelling. It was untouched by pollution, and war and suffering and grief.
I missed you so much.
Sanford closed his eyes and sucked in as much of that clean air as he could manage. He touched the grass, he wavered his hands through it, he let it lick at every inch of his naked body.
So this is it, this is my turmoil and whatnot, Sanford smiled. It was a strange expression, something between a mimicry of his relief, his happiness, and a gained understanding of suffering. I didn't think I deserved this.
Sanford moaned as the sun heated his skin, and the adrenaline that infected his bones began to subside for an everlasting peace.
I am dead.
The wind caressed him for that. It spoke to him in silence, spinning tales for him in the glare of the star above.
I am dead, and I am-
-Sanford was forced to catch himself once more.
He was about to say- 'I am dead, and I am alone' –but it was not a truth that he would be forced to say, because it was an un-truth. It was false.
The fingers splaying on his chest were ample proof of that.
That isn't the wind.
Without much preparation, even, did he react as accordingly. His hands took up the thumb, and the index of this alien set of digits. It was all his smaller extensions could manage; seeing as this hand was almost the size of both his pectorals.
Well, hot damn, even up here, Sanford opened his eyes, and he smiled with all his teeth. I can't believe she fucking found me.
There was no connection of what held most common in their fleshly activities. The shadow blotting out the sun touched him, massaged him and straddled his hips, and yet there was not an ounce of sexuality to be experienced from these ministrations.
Curling, ram-like horns blotted out the world on either side of his face. The scaly, slippery texture of the creature's nose touched to his forehead, and even through her fangs could he feel the kiss being placed there.
Here, we're formless, Sanford realized, even as his hands fled down the lengths of her outer, armored thighs. I'm just seeing what I know, but, what I know no longer matters. It's-
A voice interrupted his thoughts, one so low, that he struggled to hear it through the gleam of the calm wind.
"You found me."
They were his own words. Sanford had been the one to speak.
He gazed at the shadow blotting out the Old World's sun, and shielding him from the whispering, green trees. Yellow eyes met his, shining, even in broad daylight. Though he could discern no expression physically, he could feel her smile, as if he had said something amusing to her in this coming moment of ecstasy.
"Of course I did." She told him, and bent down once again to kiss him a second time. "I will follow you wherever you may go, and I will always find you."
Sanford perched his head off the ground, and he made to resign himself to that spot, to never care or worry about anything in his life ever again. He made to kiss her back, to see eternity like that in the folds of her tongue, and her fangs and her immensity.
I can die like this, he allowed. And it's about time. Do it. I want it to happen. Just like this.
Sanford's lips touched Nyx's snout, the wind gossiped around them, and when it seemed like the next step of their very existences had been reached, the dream ended.
-0-0-0-0-0-
"-Pffft- Agh~!"
Sanford had experienced some rough falls in his life, even ones that had threatened to steal his consciousness, and ones that had succeeded in doing so.
A decade was a long time for things to happen, and needless to say, the scavenger had enjoyed his fair share of being thrown through walls, falling through weak floors and roofs, and being smacked by street-lanterns wielded as clubs by angry Super Mutants.
He'd never had a hangover or a drug-induced passing-out before, in contrast to all of those horrendous things. So it was interesting how when he finally did come to, that that was the first thing he acquainted his reawakening too.
The headache, the shivering, the coldness were all the more trademarks of a defeated body, in more ways than one.
Thus Sanford Tobs stewed in the darkness and crushing endlessness surrounding him, he let his cheek sit in the accumulation of saliva running down his face, he let his arms and legs remain painfully spread, and he let his neck sit in the uncomfortable angle it was suffering from.
Sanford breathed like that for a very long time. He listened to a raggedy gust of a cold breeze blow over his head, and he took in the slight metallic chime that it enjoyed as it passed over his suit.
My suit.
Sanford's breathing pitched, and he tried to move his head.
Oh my god.
The pain was terrible. It felt like someone had twisted his neck-muscles into a knot.
Oh shit.
The scavenger groaned and hissed, slowly twisting his chin south, north, west and east. Up-down, left-right, until the pain became somewhat manageable, but always omnipresent.
God almighty.
He flexed his fingers inside his gauntlets, curiously feeling around the environments he was supposed to be so used to in his daily utilization. Everything felt… bigger, and hollow without the muscular mesh working. Normally, the gauntlets would react with his motions, but now, they were nothing more than armored boxes sealing his wriggling hands in.
Hancock's gonna' have a fit getting me out of this one, he's probably going to have to cut open the rear cuirass plate and-
"-Hancock!" Sanford suddenly cried, his voice ringing around inside the darkness of his suit, and adding to his splitting headache. "-Han'…" –He whispered afterward, gritting his teeth. "…Hancock? …Come in…"
What the hell was he doing? His suit was fried, the com link wouldn't work.
"…Nyx?" He whispered that, as if in hopes that the dream he had had was not really over. "…I'm… I'm sorry… I can't…"
Sanford shut his eyes tightly, keeping them that way until only a tear flowed, and he was able to cut the depression at the head.
What have I done?
The scavenger let his head go lax, and he smacked his forehead into the bridge of the X-01's interior headspace. He groaned as the headache flared.
I'm not dead, he corrected himself from earlier, when things had been in Paridiso. I'm not fucking dead.
His clenched his trapped hands into fists.
You took that away from me, you son of a bitch. I could've been dead. I could've been that way. My god, what if…
A terrible, heart-gripping thought poisoned his mind.
What if… I came back, but she's still-
Sanford decapitated his horror with a vibrant, terrible scream. It was the sound of a wounded animal that knew its injury was fatal. Sanford hollered, and screamed and barked inside his helmet until his throat went dry. He wanted to slam his head into the interior faceplate until he bled, and only the colossal pain from his headache prevented him from meeting that end.
"-Fuck~!" He cried, letting his voice bounce off the metal around him. "…Oh no…"
He tried to wiggle his torso, to move his legs, and to accentuate his concerns, he could hear his suit shift underneath a mound. Tiny parts and even large parts of scrap tumbled from the piles that he knew were surrounding him. The hill of entombing garbage shifted, and as he regained his senses, he could dimly hear fires crackling outside his armor.
Are those… Sanford opened an eye. …Crickets?
Indeed they were. It was nighttime.
How long have I…?
-It didn't matter. What mattered firstly was how he was going to get out of here.
Tobs, you're alive. Sucks for you, but there's a reason that it's happened, right?
Sanford ground his teeth, and wriggled his hands about in their gauntleted prisons.
They took them. Hancock and Nyx. They took them.
Sanford found what he was looking for after long, agonizing moments of probing around blindly inside the gloves of the X-01. His right hand discovered its own end first, a tiny grip that was hidden under the response bars that were meant to control the suit's digits and thumb.
The emergency pulls.
Sanford found both of them on each side, and with an audible grunt, he pulled them each with two fingers for insurance.
Chssskkk~! –the back of the X-01 popped open like a burst tin can. Steam bustled in time with a raining array of debris that was kicked off the back hatches unfurling. The suit's emergency systems worked nicely, just as Sanford had hoped they would when he had rebuilt and fixed them.
Bingo.
Sanford resembled a Feral Ghoul with how he began the agonizing process of rising. The man emerged from the opened back of the Power Armor, teetering, dizzied, clasping at the X-01's rib rims for balance.
He knelt inside the more-or-less intact internal mesh of the suit, and his boggled eyes took in his surroundings with a keen series of sweeps.
The street surrounding him was utterly decimated, and by that, he meant it was drowned in the trails of robotic viscera.
Christ.
Sanford regained control over his breathing, but still managed a shocked sigh as he observed the mountains of destroyed Junker robots surrounding and burying his suit. There were tens of them, tens and tens and tens, maybe even a hundred.
They were twisted this way and that, draped over one another, shot full of holes, bored through at the chests, ripped in half, decapitated, de-armed, de-legged.
It was carnage, a scrap pile licked with tiny traces of flickering flame and glowing, volcanic-looking embers.
Sanford jumped in fright when he faced his suit's immediate north, and calmed himself when he realized the origin of the massive shadow hanging over his head.
The SentryBot didn't even look like a SentryBot anymore. The large robot had almost melted, and now resembled a giant, blackened and expended candlestick. Fire lapped from its backpack setup, sparks kicked from the warped slabs of its blasted torso, and the smell of melting plastic filled his nostrils.
That took care of him at least.
Shakily, Sanford hissed, and climbed out of the suit's flank. His boots immediately crunched through the mounds of Junker detritus that his suit was buried in.
"-you gotta' be kidding me…" The scavenger mumbled under his breath, kicking a loose, severed claw-arm off the bridge of his foot.
Standing unsteadily, his legs feeling like gelatin, Sanford rolled his shoulders and rotated his wrists, he quivered in the nighttime darkness, looking down at his half-buried suit.
Oh no.
The scavenger felt another urge to cry, but this time it wasn't because of the crashing weight of his own failure to protect the ones he loved, it was because of the material loss that was literally lying in the dirt at his feet.
All those hours I spent fixing her up, rebuilding her from scratch, finding all those parts and… oh Jesus up in heaven.
Sanford tugged at his jaw, stifling a resultant sniffle from the overwhelming prospect of this colossal defeat.
What am I going to do?
Sanford felt more naked now than he had been in that dream. Though he was garbed in leather and the scavenged Army plating he wore, these things were nothing in comparison to a suit of X-01 Power Armor. Sanford had to admit, the constant use of that armor had made him arrogant and spoiled in a sense. Not having it, the idea of pursuing things as he had when he was younger… terrified him.
I don't care about that though.
Sanford breathed, and regained his composure, now glaring down at the ruined suit of armor.
Hancock and Nyx need me.
The scavenger spent a good while tearing his rucksack off the X-01's thigh, and for the first time in over a year did he secure the straps not over his armored thigh, but over his own shoulders. The weight was unfamiliar, but it did remind him of times past, almost nostalgically too.
Those grenades did their job just the way I would've wanted them to, Sanford smiled sadly as he used his boot to nudge aside a Protrectron corpse. What was I thinking?
He picked up his cutlass from the ruins, and secured the handle in a strap over his uniform's belt.
Back to old times. Maybe everything over the last year was a dream, not what I saw with all that grass and… and that air. That clean air.
Sanford knelt, and tumbling bits of robotics fell from his arms as he pried his trusty Laser Rifle from the scrap.
At least some of my toys still work.
He changed the battery face and inspected the device. Aside from being blackened by the heat, and a whole lot of scuffs and dents, things seemed to be in working order. The projectors still spun on the barrel too.
We'll travel light, Sanford huffed to himself, listening to the affirmative ch-chkk! –of the spare pistol before he stowed it in the other strap next to his sword. Take things as they are, just like we used to.
Sanford Tobs stood in his un-armored, thin glory atop the scrap mounds of the robots he'd defeated. He brandished his Laser Rifle over his shoulder, and swept the nighttime street, and the blissfully dark buildings with a keen eye.
"…On the road," He mumbled, turning around and looking down at his sorry, half-buried suit. Its silence, and its darkness wounded him. "-I'll come back for you." He told it. "I promise."
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