Mutatis Mutandis 10
Sarah felt water lapping gently at her face. Cold ocean air filled her lungs, and she tasted salt upon her lips. She coughed and dug her fingers into the gritty sand, turning her aching body over onto her back. Sunlight lanced through her eyelids, turning them red. She squinted and turned her head away reflexively, listening to the steady toll of the buoy bells.
A sudden coolness on her skin told her that someone was blocking the light. She forced her aching eyes open. Sarah found herself focusing on the sky. It was black and broiling. Hundreds upon thousands of twisting, searching tentacles of smog pulled free from pulsating lumps in the morass. The macabre streamers wriggled their way along the bottoms of the clouds, only to find other nodes, and be slowly reabsorbed. The strange smoke covered the entire sky, save for one pinprick. A thin beam of light, which bathed her pitiful stretch of coastline.
A figure was standing over her, blurred, and defined by shadows. It was carrying a beaten sniper rifle, and staring down at her. She could make out the subtle shades of gray where two eyes should have been, but the shadows obscured anything more.
"Am I dead?" she asked.
The figure leaned down, finally throwing its own face into focus. The eyes were sunken and white with cataracts. The lips were cracked and stained with blood, caked with dried salt. Its skin was green and white, stretched back, showing the white skeletal frame beneath. The face was translucent and dead in places, as if it had suffered through scorching heat. Sarah could see the bones and muscle mass beneath, rotted and sour. Tendrils of the black fog seemed to follow it, exude from it. Whatever the apparition might once have been, it was a different creature now.
But she recognized it nonetheless.
Her lips parted slightly. "Gallows?"
The ghoulish reaper's mouth opened far too wide, like a devouring serpent, and it screamed at her in an unearthly howl, trying to imitate human speech with tools never fit for the task.
"WAKE UP!"
Sarah's eyes snapped open, and she took a heavy breath. Her lungs and nose filled with a familiar and unwelcome stench, and a heavy weight pressed down on her legs, trapping her in place. She coughed and stared up into the star-strewn midnight sky, the memories slowly flowing back from the abyss, into her pounding head. Something was poking into the small of her back.
She struggled, squirming a little. She searched for a handhold, and froze as her questing fingers touched a human face. She finally looked down at the weight holding her legs in place, and she grimaced in disgust.
It was Phantom, still wearing a lab coat. His left eye was missing. Only a black, star-shaped hole remained. Sarah began to struggle madly as her situation was suddenly made clear to her; She was lying on a pile of bodies. The Brotherhood's dead fighters. Familiar faces with vacant eyes stared up at her. The massive pile towered over the crumbled ring of detritus; all that was left of the mighty citadel walls.
She struggled madly, kicking the dead medic away. She clambered to the edge, her hands and feet slipping deep into the fissures, getting tangled in hair and hands and legs. She grabbed onto the shoulder of a disrobed scribe and pulled, at the same time pushing with her feet. She felt her toes slip across the face of an anonymous body, and found purchase against the open jaw. As she pushed she felt the hinge dislocate with a nauseating scrape, but she was able to push herself forward onto an armoured knight, and peer over the edge of the heap.
Night had fallen, and the sky was black as tar. The only light she had was the faint yellow of the mutant campfires which had been set up between the ruined fortress and the River. She could see the silhouettes of the camp guards, patrolling the perimeter of the citadel.
She waited until the nearest one had passed, and then pulled herself forward and tumbled down the heap of bodies, landing hard on the pavement. Just yesterday, the spot she was lying on had been the shooting range. And over there was the sandpit, used for sparring.
The heap shifted slightly, sending a second corpse rolling wildly down to land beside her with a crunch, the neck twisted in an impossible way. Sarah recognized the corpse. It was a black woman with cropped hair and a stern expression. The newly-minted Sentinel Cross. Her hammer was nowhere in sight, and she was missing an arm, though all blood had long since run dry, and the stringy stump was covered in sand.
Trying to put the woman's blank eyes out of her mind, Sarah looked to the rubble, trying to recreate the layout of the citadel. The med-bay had been there. An enormous chunk of concrete sat in what was left of the briefing room. The barracks were a mess, open to the sky. The mattresses having been flung across the entire area, and torn apart.
Sarah winced and glanced back at the pile of bodies. A part of her wanted to search through it. Her friends were in there. Her family. Where was her father?
But she stopped herself. This was Point Lookout all over again. Questions would only get her killed. Survival was key, and the first step… escape. Second step: Find weapon. Third step: find supplies. Fourth step …find Jason. Fifth step?
…Vengeance.
Avoiding the mutant patrols, and trying to ignore her aching head, she stumbled north toward the sewer waystation.
Rothchild's feet ached madly, but he dared not stop. A wounded scribe had fallen not four minutes ago, and their mutant captors had immediately put him out of his misery, their gunfire and laughter echoing down the train tunnel. Rothchild was marching in a strict formation with roughly thirty other downcast prisoners. He recognized a few. Some scribes, and a few knights.
Star-Paladin Glade was there, alongside Kodiak. The three of them would exchange the occasional glance or solemn nod. The mutants in the lead were carrying torches to light the way. Time and direction had become meaningless once they'd been marched into the train tunnels. There was only the long, slow progression, putting one foot in front of the other.
How had this happened? The mutants weren't intelligent. They couldn't plan. They couldn't think. That was the one advantage the Brotherhood had always held. One that no amount of numbers and fury on the mutants' part had ever been able to truly negate.
Rothchild wondered how long the mutants had been planning the attack for. He had been briefed on the mutant 'Brutus' by Owyn, but the intelligence had been sketchy at best.
Owyn Lyons…
In the dark tunnels, moments of reflection were plentiful, and Rothchild took a few to mourn the loss of his closest friend. If through some miracle, the Brotherhood survived this…
Things would be different. Elder Lyons had been the backbone of the Brotherhood, and when he'd been pulled out of the group of prisoners, Rothchild's last hopes for victory had been extinguished. No matter what happened now, the mutants had succeeded. The Capital Wasteland chapter could afford to lose the Citadel. Given how much the wasteland had calmed down recently, they could probably afford to lose Owyn Lyons, but not both. Now the few that were left, were nothing more than remnants. Like the Enclave. And if the dejected faces and slow march of the prisoners around him was any guess, their morale had been broken well beyond repair.
A mutant's roar echoed from further up the tunnel, and a few brutes jogged past the ragged line of prisoners, their bobbing lanterns making the shadows skip and jump wildly.
Something was happening ahead of them. As he continued forward, the reason behind the mutant's agitation became clear; they were entering a metro station. Not just any metro station, but Metro Central. A multi-leveled tangle of tracks leading in all directions.
Rothchild heard the few mutant guards behind them growl an order for the column to halt. The prisoners obeyed wordlessly, possessing neither the will, nor the energy to do anything else.
Watching from the tunnel exit, Rothchild squinted as the enormous concrete chamber was suddenly bathed in cold blue glow. A dozen floodlights turned it from a shadowy tomb into a brightly lit arena, making the mutants bellow in surprise and anger.
An enormous, power-armoured figure was standing at the top of the escalator before them. Rothchild's eyes widened as he recognized the enclave Advanced Power Armour Mark II. How long had it been since he'd set eyes on that particular piece of equipment? Twenty years? Thirty?
The mutant captors, two dozen in total, growled at the calm apparition as it hefted an enormous minigun, larger than any in the Brotherhood's armory. Another index card was pulled from the files of Rothchild's memory: C757 Avenger. High-speed motor. Gel-fin cooling. Chromium-plated bores…
A deadly weapon, and not from anywhere near the Capital Wasteland. A large white BOZAR assault rifle was slung across the armoured visitor's back, serving the same function for him that pistols and sidearms did for normal soldiers; a backup weapon, in case of emergencies.
The mutants began to growl and bellow obscene threats at their new target. It surveyed the chamber through those emotionless yellow eyeplates. Rothchild and the prisoners were pushed back into the tunnel as the mutants' leader waved its brand new super-sledge, forming them into a loose defensive line. The leader had acquired it from the cold dead fingers of Sentinel Cross, Rothchild knew. It had torn the poor woman's arm off to get it.
The armoured figure seemed to wait until there was a fair distance between the prisoners and the mutants, then it raised the minigun and opened fire, bathing their line in a deadly yellow spray of lead and tracer rounds.
As he fired, the mutant guards watching the back of the prisoner column abandoned their posts to join the fight. They were cut down in seconds along with their comrades. Those mutants smart enough to dive for cover did so, but the armoured attacker's aim was unerring, and within thirty seconds they were down to merely a quarter strength. Indeed, it seemed that the only thing which saved any of them at all was the sudden clicking noise as the Minigun ran dry of ammunition. The armoured figure looked down at his weapon, and then set it carefully at the top of the escalator, pulling out the white assault rifle in one smooth motion.
The scattered mutant remnants were moving too, and bullets began to ricochet off of the figure's impervious armour. It strode patiently down the escalator, paying the pitiful resistance no heed at all, and examining the battlefield with the yellow insectoid eyes. The figure shouldered his assault rifle as he moved, opening fire on the mutant positions, and sending a cascade of golden shells rolling down the steps of the escalator.
The visitor's ammunition had been heavily modified, and instead of creating bloody holes in the mutants, each shot tore entire chunks away, leaving Rothchild with the strange illusion that some ravenous invisible creature was devouring each target. The armoured man did not bother to mind his aim. With shots that powerful, he didn't have to. Each mutant that fell was missing arms, legs, ribs, sometimes the entire midsection would be blown out.
At last he reached the bottom of the escalator, the heavy armoured boots making waves in the growing puddle of mutant blood. After a few seconds, the figure ran out of ammunition once again. He reached backwards, pulled a magazine from a satchel at the small of his back, and began the process of reloading his weapon. The mutant captain bellowed a challenge and broke from its cover behind a pillar. It charged at the figure, waving Cross's supersledge.
The armoured man's head swung around to take in the new threat. He dropped his rifle and took up the fighting stance of a professional boxer. Rothchild noted the gleam of twin spiked power fists built into the armoured gauntlets. The mutant swung its sledge in a diagonal arc, aiming for the armoured helmet.
The man stopped the deadly blow in its tracks, using his left hand to catch the mighty hammer just behind the head. His right hand delivered an uppercut to the mutant's chin, the powerfist's added force causing the supermutant's head to explode and fountain backwards in a loose cloud of brain matter and skull chunks which landed on the concrete, making dozens of little craters in the wet dirt.
The armoured man turned to the last two mutants and tossed the supersledge. The hammer spun towards the angry creatures like a tomahawk, and there was an ugly crunch as a mutant's chest cavity was blown inwards, the ribs shattering, and tearing the monster's heart and lungs to shreds.
The mutant fell without a word, and the armoured man was already moving, kicking his white rifle up to his waiting hand. He slapped the magazine all the way in and pumped the bolt back. Then he opened fire, bracing the weapon against his hip and cutting the last mutant down.
Silence fell over the concrete tomb, punctuated only by hissing as the ever-growing puddle of mutant blood reached the hot, golden piles of spent shells.
The figure turned in the silence and tilted its head slightly, regarding the shocked line of ragged prisoners Rothchild reacted first. Taking charge, he pushed his way to the very front of the line and examined their rescuer.
"Thank you." He said.
His armour clicking and whirring, the armoured man marched over to him. He stared down at the rough knotted tightly around Rothchild's wrists, then slung his rifle over his shoulder, reached out with two enormous armoured hands, and ripped the thick rope apart with ease, freeing the Elder scribe.
"Go North." The imposing figure intoned. "The way is clear. Friendship heights, then the National Guard Depot. Arm yourselves."
"We've been to the depot." Rothchild said, "We've never been able to get into the armory."
"Door code is Five Seven Four Six."
"Where did you get that?" Rothchild demanded.
The armoured man didn't answer. Instead he turned and began to march towards escalator.
"Wait!" Glade rushed past the scribe and reached up, grabbing the enormous newcomer by the shoulder. "Where are you going? Help us!"
The figure looked over his shoulder at the Brotherhood paladin. It's voice was cold, the suits intercom system adding a strange electronic undertone to it. "I just did."
It walked away, firing one last shot at a humming generator as it passed. The floodlights cut out, engulfing the Brotherhood remnant in darkness, and the last sound Rothchild heard was the gentle plink of the golden shell hitting the floor.
The room was dark. Nearly black had it not been for the faint torchlight. Just enough to give the shadows some definition. Brutus was a nightkin, and darkness was his cloak, his retreat, his home. The chamber's concrete walls were slick with green ichor. A bag of flesh lay in the corner, alongside a large tub of water. Blankets were scattered haphazardly across the floor.
A figure lay in the center, hugging itself in the fetal position. It was only slightly larger than a well-built human. It shivered constantly, and every so often it would let out a soft whimper. Its skin was forest green with grey streaks along the back. It was garbed in a primitive leather loincloth, and it stared up at Brutus with jaundiced green and yellow eyes.
Clearly the Good Doctor had understood his work. The FEV II virus' progress was astounding. Only two days ago, it had been a human mercenary, and now…? If they all grew this fast, changed this fast…
"You are beautiful, aren't you?" Brutus asked, smiling down at the huddled figure. "The next step. Our child. Our freedom." He watched the new mutant slowly uncurl, responding to the sound of his voice. "A product of the only true gift any human has ever given us."
He stepped forward and began to pace around the inert abomination. "What shall you be called, new one? Not Adam, though the metaphor is appropriate. That is human mythology. Human ideals. We must make our own."
The thing whimpered.
"I pray that if anything survives this revolution, it be you." Brutus whispered comfortingly, leaning down. He gently lifted the smaller mutant into his arms and coddled it as a parent would a small child. The thing didn't resist. It did not have the strength yet.
"You are Alpha." Brutus said, rocking it gently. "The first of a new breed. A better breed. After you finish growing, we shall have no need to fear the humans. We shall have a symbol. A beacon of hope for this world. No need of weapons. No need of armour. No need for war or fear."
Brutus reached down to its loincloth and gently twitched a fold aside to reveal the fully formed and functional human genitalia beneath. His smile widened. "And no need for human converts any longer. We may thank the Good Doctor for that."
He covered the creature up again and laid it gently on the floor, pulling a blanket over it to keep it warm.
"Sleep, Alpha." He said. "I will find you a mate."
It pained Brutus somewhat to know that in time, even he would be cast aside; the discarded remnants of a butterfly's cocoon. The last skull. The last body, paving the way for the future. True Utopia would come at a heavy cost. But it was one he'd spent one hundred and seventy years preparing for.