Fixture of Dakka
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Another short for the World In Ruin game. =P
Mullin let off a final salvo into their ranks as they retreated into the ruins. It’d had been a costly day, seven dead on there side and about three times as much for the enemy. They lay about him now in ragged heaps where they’d fallen. Already Danube, the squad’s flamer operator, was hosing the bodies of the worst mutated with ignitor fluid as troopers Derrin and Rysk stacked up the bodies.
Another day in the thick of it, doing what they could to thin their numbers and hope that they never had the balls to try anything like New Lyon again. The bigger ones were still crackling in the heat, but those that were still recognisable as men had been turned to ashes a half hour ago. Silo, the squad’s tracker, was calling him from atop the APC, both his hands gripped firmly around the handles of its heavy machine gun. He understood his urgeness to get going, they’d be coming back for their dead soon, their false prophets and apostles, to burn upon the pyres of their faith. He tossed his unfinished cigarette into the flames where it lost itself instantly. The big ones really did burn though he thought, gazing down at a distended talon so charred now that he could smell the marrow even through his breathing apparatus. The stench was terrible and it wasn’t just coming from the bleached husks of the once men. The howling would start soon, and he knew that if they were around when they came he and his squad would wind up on the sacrificial pyres just like all the others who had though they could outrun the horde.
The squad were playing cards by the time they made it out of the city limits and into the wilderness zone. All they had to worry about out here were the filth’s outcasts and the occasional group of bandits, neither group, if they were worth even that title, nothing more than opportunistic scavengers, no match for a fully tooled squad of Lazarius infantry in an APC. Derrin choked on his drink as Danube won the hand once again, cheating naturally. Scarred hills passed by as the team argued, Mullin lost in thought as he pondered what this place must have looked like before the war. A national park said the old maps he’d been shown back at base camp, but in the state it was in now that was hardly imaginable. He’d seen what those dead fools had called a park once, distended trees stretching for miles, a hungry carpet of mutated flora swallowing up whatever came near. It’d killed three of his friends before it retreated from their flames.
They were entering a canyon when he realised something was wrong. Silo had come down from the turret cupola as night had descended, where anything outside would be dead of frostbite long before morning came, and they were relying on the vehicle’s sensors to monitor their surroundings. The tracker’s readings had been off ever since they entered the defile, the narrow walls throwing the signal off. Rysk exclaimed, saying that she couldn’t she gak with the replacement gloom lights they’d retrofitted the APC with after the last one’s had been torn off by a pack of Wretches. She was right as he peered out of his own vision slit into the blackness that only ended a dozen meters from the carrier’s sides. Some loose rocks tumbled down by their side, no doubt dislodged by the weighty APC’s passing. Derrin slept roughly beneath his firing step. They all had the nightmares, some just took them better than most and Derrin was always waking in the night restlessly. He returned his eyes to the vision slit just as something vanished into the gloom. It had been there, running alongside the APC in clear view, watching him as he thought about Derrin.
He didn’t need to think twice about it, but one thought was all he got anyway. Before he could sound out an alarm something had slammed into the side of the APC and was forcing it to careen into the canyon’s side. Rysk tried for grip, but whatever it was that was pushing them from the outside it wasn’t going to let go that easily. Well we’ll see about that he thought as he primed his carbine. Silo was out in the turret cupola yelling something back into the compartment that was lost to a deathly chorus of shrieks. He opened fire then and the carrier immediately returned to the ground, but only after whatever it was outside had left a fist shaped dent, if hands were the size of manhole covers, in the metal wall beside where Mullin stood and throwing them all into a heaped pile about the floor.
When he came to his senses he could here a skittering perforating the hull. The sound he imagined of a horde of bone legged spiders uselessly trying to gain purchase on ice. He’d never even seen ice but in old travel books. Silo had come down from the cupola and bolted the hatch shut. He and Danube were priming the flamer as Rysk checked her carbine’s clip. She steadied him he tried to rise. His head ached, and where he pressed it his glove came away bloody. She began to tell him something, but he lost it as he focussed to the din of the scratching. He knew the sound, but couldn’t recall from where with his concussion. Rysk noticed the focus of his attention and spat words loaded with hatred as he tried to question her. All he caught from her lips were the words “...buggering Wretches.” as she stabbed him in the neck with an adrenaline shot and he relapsed into white.
They drew a firing line about the Carrier’s rear hatch, volleying their shots into the mass of foulness. They were depraved things, once men that scuttled about in the shadows just outside the range of the gloom lamps. They shot any that got strayed out of the murk into their sights, but new sooner or later it’d come down to bayonets and daggers. These things were pack animals, meriting little danger alone, but they still understood that the more there were of them the less chance that they’d be the one shot. So they waited in the darkness, testing them, waiting for the time when one of their number crossed into the light they didn’t fire. The inevitability of the matter didn’t faulter Mullin. He’d been in places like this before, where he was so certain that death was only a gunshot or the club of a mutated talon away. He’d go down fighting no matter what then he had decided. Take as many of them with him as he could, lest they grew confident from hunting in the dead lands and soon begin to raid Lazarian settlements. No, it wouldn’t come to that he though as he loaded his last clip and downed another beast.
Cesar the Greater watched as the Wretched tore at the last scraps of flesh from the corpses. They’d left few to be burned on the pyres, but the one that had remained had screamed for far longer than any of his recent offerings. That one had made a fine sacrifice, not turning his gun upon himself when the horde had finally made for the kill. He’d taken out a fair number of the beasts, and Cesar could respect him for that, though he knew with a rage like that he’d never have converted to the true faith. The Wretched could be replaced from the breeding stock down amidst the old metroways with little trouble, but the death of one of the Unenlightened’s champions was always a heavy blow to them. He raised the burned man’s skull to his legion of once men, proclaiming the day when all the earth was covered in fire just like these false matyrs had been today. Turning his eyes to the north he clutched the map he had taken from the burned man’s belongings in hand. New Bordeaux on the Parched Garonne, just inside the Lazarian border, that’s where he’d crossed into their lands. That’s where the Unenlightened would learn to remember the retribution of the fires of the end times.
Oh don't we like fire and thinly vieled motifs? ^^
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