Burn [Oneshot]

[Cheesigator]

Ears. Ears were always, always, constantly ringing. It never stopped.

Same with the blurry vision; neverending. Persistent. The headache pounded, growing into a migraine before slowly ebbing back down only to swell up again later.

It never.

Fucking.

Stopped.



Cold water splashed onto a spluttering face and the screaming continued.

"EITHER YOU'LL GIVE US THE CODES WE NEED OR I'LL CHOP OFF ANOTHER BIT, YOU HEAR ME?"

A woman, probably in her mid 40s, designated to Good Cop, leaned against the corner of the room with her arms crossed over her chest. Her right tit was missing. She'd long since lost interest in this case, because their captive never responded. No, that piece of filth just sat there, bound to that chair so tight the blood flow couldn't circulate into the tips of their fingers. The rivulets of cold, swampy water dripped off the stubble on their chin and into their lap, ran down the sides of their temples--but their eye never stopped burning.

She recognized that flame, that fire. Pure burning hatred and the sheer stubborn willpower that told entire epics on how they would never give in. This was a pointless waste of time.

"Just kill him." She snorted finally after she watched her partner smack the kid around some more, blood splattering on the floor after the Pilot spit it out.

He sneered as he looked at her; too riled up to listen to reason. "Throw him back in the brig--one more try tomorrow, I'll rip his fucking tongue out and then we can watch him bleed out on the floor if he don't answer. I got a meetin'."

He shoved past her and she let out a slow sigh, a few guards stepping in after he left to help her sedate the captive once more and drag the unconscious body back to his cell.

He'd been here a week or two too long as it was, and gave them nothing. What a waste of time. But orders were orders, even if she stared at him through the closed bars, a crumpled and crippled pile on the floor, and wondered what the point of keeping him alive at this point even was anymore.




The ringing was so loud, the aching, raspy groan was completely drowned out despite its soft echo in the cell. There was a loud boom and another tremble, but the Pilot slowly rolled over, face down on cracked dirt and cement floor, unable to feel any of it. Unable to hear the screams, the roar of fire and the smell of smoke slowly wafting in.

Eventually they were able to crack one eye open long enough to slowly push themself up off of the floor, wheezing, ribcage aching and stabbing them with pain with every breath. They watched and waited for the floor to stop swirling, for the room to stop spinning and finally settle.

Except it didn't. The floor kind of felt like it was vibrating but they couldn't tell if it was their imagination or not, all they could just think was that's odd.

Nobody was dragging them from the cell yet.

Suddenly a wave of heat blasted through the cell and then they were laying on something that wasn't the floor. Just cracked plaster, hot, burning, smelled like fire, fire. It seemed so familiar. Their skin burned and itched and the room was still spinning and they realized they were either on the wall or the ceiling, one of the two. Probably the wall, with how their leg was twisted beneath them.

Stumbling they flopped back to the floor and saw now that everything was bright, blooms of light blurring their vision to oranges and reds and yellows and whites. It was so bright. They flinched and screamed as they remembered the bright flash of light but no, no, they were still awake. What was this?

Their eyes refocused enough as they rolled onto their back, coughing and wheezing as they saw the door, the door--the bars, they were gone. Big pieces of debris. That one might have almost smashed them. But--their gaze flickered to a piece of rebar lying across the floor. Their head was pounding as they stared at it, watched it quiver and move, rattling a bit against the cement. There was another explosion, more screams and for a moment they lost their concentration.

Come on, come on now, now would be nice, now was their chance--

With a metallic and clattering SHRRRING it flew towards their leg and they used it to stand, another explosion throwing them into the wall but this time they stayed up. The ceiling was starting to crack and everything was falling around them, and it was now or never.

Hobbling, dragging themself out of their cell, they were in a hallway engulfed in flames and fire. They couldn't feel any of it licking their skin, and the scent of burning flesh hadn't stopped filling their lungs ever since the flash. It would probably never go away.

With strained yelps and wheezes and pants they started to hobble and run, the smoke billowing around them as they moved. Skittered around corners, hid from running Wastelanders, and with every single step things moved into more clarity and focus. And oh god how they wished it hadn't.

Every muscle, every bone, every inch of their skin hurt. It ached, it pounded, their head was screaming at them to stop, their ribs, they could barely breathe and they couldn't tell if it was the smoke or their own body trying to smother them into the silence of death.

They wanted it to.

More explosions almost sent them teetering back onto their face, and succeeded once or twice, until they threw themself out of a blasted window and rolled and fell down a dirt hill. Metal and rock and chunks of concrete bit into their skin as they tumbled and skidded, and as they lay there at the bottom, curled up and screaming with the pain, they cracked their eye open and saw a truck.

They grit their teeth and looked around for something, anything--the rebar was gone, but a few pieces of wood made do instead--which they found easier to move with anyways--and they ducked for the truck, sliding underneath it and entangling their remaining limbs into the framework underneath.

A glance downward and they saw another explosion as the building collapsed in on itself, bodies laying in the mud and dirt, others screaming and signalling to each other to retreat. An attack of some kind. They would never understand why, or what happened.

All they could do was watch it grow smaller in the distance as the truck rattled and bumped its way down a tread path, until the dark haze and smog diffused the light until it was no more.

[Cheesigator]

"Ugh."

She plopped down hard on a rocky outcropping, spitting some blood from her mouth as she settled the random metal debris she'd used not moments ago onto the ground with a metallic clang. She rested her elbows on her knees, knitted her fingers together and sighed, looking out at the wasteland that stretched before her with her one good eye.

She glanced over her shoulder, as if to double check that the bodies of the rogues behind her were still unmoving, and then her gaze went back down to her metal weapon: sharp, haphazard, created in a flash of a moment and now splattered with blood and a bit of uh... Scalp and brain matter. Nice.

What was she doing?

Turning back to the endless stretch of fuckin nothing she let out a long, slow breath through her nostrils as she let her heart rate settle back down. Wiped the sweat mixed with dirt from her forehead with a gloved thumbpad.

The thing with the Wastes was you really had no way of keeping track of how long you'd been there, or even really where you were, with any kind of accuracy, unless if you stayed in one place. And she couldn't stay in one place, that would defeat the very purpose of why she was here. And it wasn't really all that bad; part of her kind of liked the isolation, the solitude.

It really made her re-evaluate some things in her life, that was for sure. And that was probably the intended effect.

Like, for example, her previous relationship issues. Boy oh boy those seemed so easy and trivial in comparison to the neverending shitstorm she had to deal with now, hooooly crap. At least for her water wasn't an issue, but she still had to sleep in pieces here and there; still had to keep moving; still had to fight and scavenge and hunt for food.

Speaking of...

She stood up from her spot with a grunt and picked up her weapon again, slinging it through a belt over her back as she stepped over to the bodies and started sorting through their nasty long-since-soiled clothing for anything of value. Trinkets, tradeables, food, weapons, maps, whatever. She got some snacks, like a bit of dried jerky, and a few things worth trading. Their weapons were crap, though, go figure. Amazing they lasted as long as they did.

"Props to ya, mates." She said with a nod of her head as she stood up straight again.

Turning back to the outcropping with her loot in the bags strapped to her thighs she started to head down but then blinked and squinted.

There was somethin there, lying at the bottom of the steep incline that she hadn't seen when she was sitting. Maybe a stash? It was hard to tell with the distance. Well, might as well take the chance. Who knew, could be some decent treasure.

It took her a while to skitter down the side of the rock and dirt hill, carefully picking her way down. And yet as she got closer she blinked and gawked for a moment; it wasn't a stash, it was a person.

Cautiously she approached, and as she stepped closer she saw they were unmoving; oh, ok, somebody died. Yknow, surprisingly common. So she knelt down next to the body and started to search, but right off the bat she noticed two things: They had hardly any clothes (or limbs, for that matter,) and the body was still warm.

She froze, and watched carefully, and saw only the slightest, shallow wheeze lift the ribcage up and then back down. So they were barely alive, and as she kept searching, she found that they had absolutely nothing. They didn't even have a shoe. And while she'd seen plenty of strange things in the wastes, she hadn't seen someone like this--completely unarmed, completely barren, and so... Fucked up.

Sure people tortured each other but if it got to this point usually they'd just kill the hostage and finish the job. So how did this one escape? Why were they there?

She rolled the body over onto their back and saw shaggy, nape-of-the-neck length blonde hair, an angular jawline and sharp cheekbones. Hadn't eaten, and he had a helluva blonde five o'clock shadow and beard situation going on. One eye was completely gone, gouged out with the lids fused shut and burnt for sterilization. She could see where the lids sank in because the eyeball that should've been behind them just wasn't there. Eugh. Now that had to be messy.

Among other features their build was rather narrow, all visible skin covered head to toe in gouge and burn scars; his right leg was completely gone from mid thigh down, just a mere stump remaining. His clothing was ill-fitting, torn, stained and rank.

She wrinkled her nose and poked his hollow cheek.

"Oi, you in there?"