G
Guest
Guest
The holocabana>>
B-pen: (looks to the camera) Can you say redundacy?
CowLord: Redundanzi.
Crawler: Why are we posting a fic that had already been posted?
B-pen: But it wasn't posted HERE...
Crawler: Oh. (reads fic) What the hell? Where are the all the steamy sex scenes? You promised me those!
B-pen: I did? Damn.
Sparks: It's a brooding-as-hell type fic, mon. You'll lose your rep as a happy fun fun writer if you keep on doing dese..
B-pen: The coffee machine was broken.. Half my brain began to shut down..
Gummert: I'll fix it. Then we can get back to the good stuff.
*they are all swept away by a tide of Mocha.*
********************************************************************************************
Black Fires
by bluepencil
Warning:
Draft fic sign! It is born of a reaaly really late night without caffeine..
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Before me lay gaping metal ruins, jagged shards that opened up to the dank air of the tomb, praying for someone to wipe away the blood on its walls, or for death to come and cleanse all of its memories. Streaks of dried blood sparred the teal walls, and the stony ground, so much like a child's first attempt at drawing a coherent picture. Blood, blood, of the innocent shed, and out of respect for them, I took care as I stepped through the ruins. Their bodies had long been carted off by sterile trucks, to be dumped in some incediary..
I walked carefully around the sharp shards of ripped metal. The edges can cut and wound as deeply as any Ripper Knife, but I had no reason to fear that. I feared instead, the touch of cold steel, still echoing with their cries. The burnt-out shell of machinery and lost human technology lay open before me, and I entered it uncertainly.
I made my way to the sunken pit in the middle of the level, where the Vault Dwellers had fallen helplessly into, like broken dolls, twitching and convulsing as they were riddled mercilessly by our burning bullets. They danced like stringless puppets, and I felt only revulsion at the feel of the cold steel barrel of my Gatling Gun, by which I had moved down their number mere minutes before.
The other memebrs of the 'firing squad' had relaxed in their off-duty hour, taking off the tops of their helmet assemblies for a smoke, or a good breath of sickly-sweet air. Johnny had brought out his deck of pornograpic playing cards, and was hawking for people to play against. They ignored him, preferring instead to ruffle through their stacks of magazines, the limited editions of Cat's Paw and Guns & Ammo.
But I felt myself helplessly drawn here, like moth to a candle-flame, to this scene of inexplicable carnage. My fellow soldier had no other wish than to leave this godforsaken place, once a proud Vault, the home to many, now a just another empty execution site.
I thought back to my childhood, before I became just another face in a mindless armada. I had a grandfather, and old, old man, with a voice that seemed to echo like it was passing through a hollow trunk of wood. He was old, and lived to see many things. And he told me of this, of what happened before the Great War. Before the world died, screaming like a madwoman.
Magnificent was the workings of man. The suit that I wear, it was a wonder of modern technology, but granfather scoffed at it like so much doggie shit. Back them, man created thing just for the hell of it, for the beauty and preciousness that it brought to our lives. My suit was thing designed to end lives and he hated me for that. He was a soldier to the bone, and he knew just how ugly war can be.
At his heart, my grandfather was an artist.
He told me the day the sky became as blood, and how the sun was taken out from the sky by wings of ashen flame, casting the world in a somber shadow. The heavens roared that day, and died forever. Never again would the sun be the same. It was no longer cheerful yellow, rather a muted shade of burning orange, tinting everywhere a kind of sick pallor.
It was after the war that he caught upon the name. The name of which I bear. He was an educated man, and made sure my father was, too. But they fought through that great ugly war, and he liked to tell me about how in the middle of the night, amidst the thrown Molotov coktails, and the sharp hiss of their flamethrowers, he would see the dead rise up from their grave, poking stark white bones out the shallow sandy soil. They had taken down hordes of rioters,
of soldiers that betrayed their honor, and reveled in the harship that
they needed to endure.
The land was dotted with the flames of their essence, the dark fire that burned upon the ichor of spirit. And so he came to etch upon his soul the name of Blackfires.
I didn't think of the after-War anarchy, or the soldiers of the past that drove these people into the safety of these Vaults. No, I was thinking of the dead, and of how they spoke to my grandfather, their voices all at once clear and lilting. We had laughed at him then, as he told us of why he called the walking dead the Black Ghosts, as they reminded him of the way bodies burned on a funeral pyre. Al at once alive, surging with energy, yet filled withe decay, of agony, of smoldering chaos. His mind forever slipped into the never-ending spiral of insanity, and he never stopped talking of ghosts that burned with darken
flame, how they came to be so, in spite of their bones remained a bleached
white.
Kicked aside absently was a circuit board, and I half-wondered wheter the part could still be taken and savaged for use. The act of doing so was no more concious a thought than was breathing. It was ingrained into us, this virtue of conservation. The world had died, and all we can live on are the limited relics of the past. It was all I could do to keep on going forward, thinking of my granfather's words, and of his portending of doom and destruction that had already happened, and still yet he tinged hem with bitter lacings of hope.
The edge of the sunken pit was reeking of putrid metallic oil, and crumbled earth clung to it sides. As I looked down with horror, I mentally replayed my reasons for doing this sickening act. National Security. Freedom from Anarcy, Communism, Godless Capitalism. The Ever-Continuing Quest for the Superior
Human Stock. None of us really knew what those words meant anymore, but felt them, the life these slightly-changed people were trying to force upon
all
of
us.
Each and every night, and of this moment, I thought of these people and asked myself, how could they be any worse than us? and I looked down upon their ruined carcasses and as usual, had no answers.
It was a gentle sound, barely percievable. I just caught it at the back of my sound receptors, a faint cry, like wounded animal reaching out in distress or pain. I turned and saw a little girl, no more than ten, her clothes spattered, her hair black and matted. Her face was smeared with oil and grease, and she stank of blood...
She was crying softly into the parms of her hands, and I heard her not only in my ears, but it echoed into the vey well of my soul, like a frantic ghostly genie, rummaging through a haunted house for a long-lost item.
"What's wrong?", I asked her, not noticing that my lips hadn't moved.
"I'm scared...", she sobbed softly, her voice trembling.
"What are you scared of?", I asked her.
"You..", she said.
My metallic head nodded in assent. It was true, she had every reason in the world to fear me. I took my hand and slaughtered with dozens of her people, my grim determination to kill had fader a scarce few hours ago. Had she been watching from some hidden cranny in the Vault? If she had been in the firirng line, I would have gutted her too, without the slightest hesitation.
Perhaps I had.
Was she one of those who fell into the deathly pit, loaded into a truck, then climbed out again to torment me? Will she be my judge, who wil take the scales of my life and weigh it, pronouncing me as unworthy.......
"Don't be scared of me..", I said in a little voice. "You have no reason to.."
"You're going to hurt me.."
"No. No, I won't." I unstrapped the latch to my gatling rifle and threw it down the pit, hearing a metallic clang as it ended its arc and slammed against a still-fleshed skull. "I would never do anything to hurt you.."
"Then why did you hurt my friends..?"
What shall be my answer? I looked down again at the corpses and felt the flimsy thread of my own mortality. "Because then...my Commander would have hurt me, too."
"Who is the Commander?", she asked in all sincere innocence.
"My life and death...", I replied softly.
"Why?"
Children..are the very wisest beings on Earth. We were adult, burdened with knowledge, and we killed the world we lived in. They were the children, the little folk who would turn aside a bent grass stalk because it 'didn't seem right'. Or would free a trapped frog, would plant flowers all around, and laugh excitedly as a butterfly came to play. Their questions, oh, so simple and so profound. In them we see the crass stupidity of the decisions we take.
A sigh escaped my lips, and my suit gave a sharp hiss as my coiled-up electro-muscles relaxed. "I..don't know...I just don't know.", I said. "I cannot answer.."
"What's wrong?"
"Everything. And I am...grieved...sad. So very sad."
She looked up to my metal-masked face and said, her fear now long gone. "Did you come here to be sad?"
"Yes."
She continued to look up, and inched closer. "You're afraid. Why are you afraid?"
"I don't want to die.."
"You don't have to die.. And isn't dying better than standing out here, all alone. You can't be said if you're not alone."
"I'm scared of Death."
"Don't be scared."
I turned and looked into her bottomless dark pools, that she called her eyes. "I come here, and I hope that the dead would rise up, and tear me to pieces. Let them kill me, and so my crimes will be avenged. Let me die, and get this all over with."
"I wanna show you something.", she said, and grabbed one of my fingers. I was too weak to resist her gentle pull, and I soon found myself being hauled into a dark corridor, leading deep into the dungeons of the Vault. she closed her eyes as she ran, I felt my own eyelids get heavy. Suddenly, all sense of weight deserted me, and I found myself landing gently into an open field, covered with fresh green grass, and the domed blue sky above.
The barren caves, and the rusted metal that I had been standing on were gone, and Icould only look on in amazement. I saw puffy white clouds chase each other, birds sang, and a cheerful grove of trees encircled me. At first I thought it was just a holographic projection, then I drew in a breath, and in that sweet, refreshing scent, I knew it was all real.
"What is this place?", I asked.
"This is where we live..", the little girl said.
"Who?"
"Me. My family. My people.", said her voice that reched out and rang musically in the air.
I looked around in wonder. "Are you all...dead?"
"No, silly. We're all alive. So beatifully alive..", she sang as she danced around me. I looked beyond her and saw, seated on a carved wooden bech, people in blue Vault suits, laughing. They waved to me, and I felt a pang stab my heart. I didn't belong here. I was an Outsider, even if they cared to accept me.
I turned to the girl , thinking that she could help me, but the mass of rusted, jagged metal she should have been on was empty.
My headset rang.
"Oh-twelve-hundred, Le-yootenant Blackfire!!!", came the bellowing voice of my Squadron Commander. He barked out orders harshly, and my ears felt wounded even in listening to them. It was time. Time to leave. Time to got to another Vault and another firing spree.
Am I wrong? I no longer think so. I stood with my team, facing the slowly turning door that proclaimed proudly the number13. I looked at my Commander proudly in the eye, and as he gave the orders to fire, I shot him. His head burst like an overripe melon, and I dived between my squad and the helpless Vault Dwellers. I emptied my gun into the men I had so long served with, and joined my people in the long line of Death, and with the burning courage, strength, and boundless joy that could only be attained by staring into the burning black fires of the Abyss...
-----------------------------------------------------------------
put this on..
http://uro.topcities.com/bluearmor.gif
~cause I can get a little cranky....without moi daily dose oh coffee!!~
-it's the freakin' bluepencil!
~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^
B-pen: (looks to the camera) Can you say redundacy?
CowLord: Redundanzi.
Crawler: Why are we posting a fic that had already been posted?
B-pen: But it wasn't posted HERE...
Crawler: Oh. (reads fic) What the hell? Where are the all the steamy sex scenes? You promised me those!
B-pen: I did? Damn.
Sparks: It's a brooding-as-hell type fic, mon. You'll lose your rep as a happy fun fun writer if you keep on doing dese..
B-pen: The coffee machine was broken.. Half my brain began to shut down..
Gummert: I'll fix it. Then we can get back to the good stuff.
*they are all swept away by a tide of Mocha.*
********************************************************************************************
Black Fires
by bluepencil
Warning:
Draft fic sign! It is born of a reaaly really late night without caffeine..
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Before me lay gaping metal ruins, jagged shards that opened up to the dank air of the tomb, praying for someone to wipe away the blood on its walls, or for death to come and cleanse all of its memories. Streaks of dried blood sparred the teal walls, and the stony ground, so much like a child's first attempt at drawing a coherent picture. Blood, blood, of the innocent shed, and out of respect for them, I took care as I stepped through the ruins. Their bodies had long been carted off by sterile trucks, to be dumped in some incediary..
I walked carefully around the sharp shards of ripped metal. The edges can cut and wound as deeply as any Ripper Knife, but I had no reason to fear that. I feared instead, the touch of cold steel, still echoing with their cries. The burnt-out shell of machinery and lost human technology lay open before me, and I entered it uncertainly.
I made my way to the sunken pit in the middle of the level, where the Vault Dwellers had fallen helplessly into, like broken dolls, twitching and convulsing as they were riddled mercilessly by our burning bullets. They danced like stringless puppets, and I felt only revulsion at the feel of the cold steel barrel of my Gatling Gun, by which I had moved down their number mere minutes before.
The other memebrs of the 'firing squad' had relaxed in their off-duty hour, taking off the tops of their helmet assemblies for a smoke, or a good breath of sickly-sweet air. Johnny had brought out his deck of pornograpic playing cards, and was hawking for people to play against. They ignored him, preferring instead to ruffle through their stacks of magazines, the limited editions of Cat's Paw and Guns & Ammo.
But I felt myself helplessly drawn here, like moth to a candle-flame, to this scene of inexplicable carnage. My fellow soldier had no other wish than to leave this godforsaken place, once a proud Vault, the home to many, now a just another empty execution site.
I thought back to my childhood, before I became just another face in a mindless armada. I had a grandfather, and old, old man, with a voice that seemed to echo like it was passing through a hollow trunk of wood. He was old, and lived to see many things. And he told me of this, of what happened before the Great War. Before the world died, screaming like a madwoman.
Magnificent was the workings of man. The suit that I wear, it was a wonder of modern technology, but granfather scoffed at it like so much doggie shit. Back them, man created thing just for the hell of it, for the beauty and preciousness that it brought to our lives. My suit was thing designed to end lives and he hated me for that. He was a soldier to the bone, and he knew just how ugly war can be.
At his heart, my grandfather was an artist.
He told me the day the sky became as blood, and how the sun was taken out from the sky by wings of ashen flame, casting the world in a somber shadow. The heavens roared that day, and died forever. Never again would the sun be the same. It was no longer cheerful yellow, rather a muted shade of burning orange, tinting everywhere a kind of sick pallor.
It was after the war that he caught upon the name. The name of which I bear. He was an educated man, and made sure my father was, too. But they fought through that great ugly war, and he liked to tell me about how in the middle of the night, amidst the thrown Molotov coktails, and the sharp hiss of their flamethrowers, he would see the dead rise up from their grave, poking stark white bones out the shallow sandy soil. They had taken down hordes of rioters,
of soldiers that betrayed their honor, and reveled in the harship that
they needed to endure.
The land was dotted with the flames of their essence, the dark fire that burned upon the ichor of spirit. And so he came to etch upon his soul the name of Blackfires.
I didn't think of the after-War anarchy, or the soldiers of the past that drove these people into the safety of these Vaults. No, I was thinking of the dead, and of how they spoke to my grandfather, their voices all at once clear and lilting. We had laughed at him then, as he told us of why he called the walking dead the Black Ghosts, as they reminded him of the way bodies burned on a funeral pyre. Al at once alive, surging with energy, yet filled withe decay, of agony, of smoldering chaos. His mind forever slipped into the never-ending spiral of insanity, and he never stopped talking of ghosts that burned with darken
flame, how they came to be so, in spite of their bones remained a bleached
white.
Kicked aside absently was a circuit board, and I half-wondered wheter the part could still be taken and savaged for use. The act of doing so was no more concious a thought than was breathing. It was ingrained into us, this virtue of conservation. The world had died, and all we can live on are the limited relics of the past. It was all I could do to keep on going forward, thinking of my granfather's words, and of his portending of doom and destruction that had already happened, and still yet he tinged hem with bitter lacings of hope.
The edge of the sunken pit was reeking of putrid metallic oil, and crumbled earth clung to it sides. As I looked down with horror, I mentally replayed my reasons for doing this sickening act. National Security. Freedom from Anarcy, Communism, Godless Capitalism. The Ever-Continuing Quest for the Superior
Human Stock. None of us really knew what those words meant anymore, but felt them, the life these slightly-changed people were trying to force upon
all
of
us.
Each and every night, and of this moment, I thought of these people and asked myself, how could they be any worse than us? and I looked down upon their ruined carcasses and as usual, had no answers.
It was a gentle sound, barely percievable. I just caught it at the back of my sound receptors, a faint cry, like wounded animal reaching out in distress or pain. I turned and saw a little girl, no more than ten, her clothes spattered, her hair black and matted. Her face was smeared with oil and grease, and she stank of blood...
She was crying softly into the parms of her hands, and I heard her not only in my ears, but it echoed into the vey well of my soul, like a frantic ghostly genie, rummaging through a haunted house for a long-lost item.
"What's wrong?", I asked her, not noticing that my lips hadn't moved.
"I'm scared...", she sobbed softly, her voice trembling.
"What are you scared of?", I asked her.
"You..", she said.
My metallic head nodded in assent. It was true, she had every reason in the world to fear me. I took my hand and slaughtered with dozens of her people, my grim determination to kill had fader a scarce few hours ago. Had she been watching from some hidden cranny in the Vault? If she had been in the firirng line, I would have gutted her too, without the slightest hesitation.
Perhaps I had.
Was she one of those who fell into the deathly pit, loaded into a truck, then climbed out again to torment me? Will she be my judge, who wil take the scales of my life and weigh it, pronouncing me as unworthy.......
"Don't be scared of me..", I said in a little voice. "You have no reason to.."
"You're going to hurt me.."
"No. No, I won't." I unstrapped the latch to my gatling rifle and threw it down the pit, hearing a metallic clang as it ended its arc and slammed against a still-fleshed skull. "I would never do anything to hurt you.."
"Then why did you hurt my friends..?"
What shall be my answer? I looked down again at the corpses and felt the flimsy thread of my own mortality. "Because then...my Commander would have hurt me, too."
"Who is the Commander?", she asked in all sincere innocence.
"My life and death...", I replied softly.
"Why?"
Children..are the very wisest beings on Earth. We were adult, burdened with knowledge, and we killed the world we lived in. They were the children, the little folk who would turn aside a bent grass stalk because it 'didn't seem right'. Or would free a trapped frog, would plant flowers all around, and laugh excitedly as a butterfly came to play. Their questions, oh, so simple and so profound. In them we see the crass stupidity of the decisions we take.
A sigh escaped my lips, and my suit gave a sharp hiss as my coiled-up electro-muscles relaxed. "I..don't know...I just don't know.", I said. "I cannot answer.."
"What's wrong?"
"Everything. And I am...grieved...sad. So very sad."
She looked up to my metal-masked face and said, her fear now long gone. "Did you come here to be sad?"
"Yes."
She continued to look up, and inched closer. "You're afraid. Why are you afraid?"
"I don't want to die.."
"You don't have to die.. And isn't dying better than standing out here, all alone. You can't be said if you're not alone."
"I'm scared of Death."
"Don't be scared."
I turned and looked into her bottomless dark pools, that she called her eyes. "I come here, and I hope that the dead would rise up, and tear me to pieces. Let them kill me, and so my crimes will be avenged. Let me die, and get this all over with."
"I wanna show you something.", she said, and grabbed one of my fingers. I was too weak to resist her gentle pull, and I soon found myself being hauled into a dark corridor, leading deep into the dungeons of the Vault. she closed her eyes as she ran, I felt my own eyelids get heavy. Suddenly, all sense of weight deserted me, and I found myself landing gently into an open field, covered with fresh green grass, and the domed blue sky above.
The barren caves, and the rusted metal that I had been standing on were gone, and Icould only look on in amazement. I saw puffy white clouds chase each other, birds sang, and a cheerful grove of trees encircled me. At first I thought it was just a holographic projection, then I drew in a breath, and in that sweet, refreshing scent, I knew it was all real.
"What is this place?", I asked.
"This is where we live..", the little girl said.
"Who?"
"Me. My family. My people.", said her voice that reched out and rang musically in the air.
I looked around in wonder. "Are you all...dead?"
"No, silly. We're all alive. So beatifully alive..", she sang as she danced around me. I looked beyond her and saw, seated on a carved wooden bech, people in blue Vault suits, laughing. They waved to me, and I felt a pang stab my heart. I didn't belong here. I was an Outsider, even if they cared to accept me.
I turned to the girl , thinking that she could help me, but the mass of rusted, jagged metal she should have been on was empty.
My headset rang.
"Oh-twelve-hundred, Le-yootenant Blackfire!!!", came the bellowing voice of my Squadron Commander. He barked out orders harshly, and my ears felt wounded even in listening to them. It was time. Time to leave. Time to got to another Vault and another firing spree.
Am I wrong? I no longer think so. I stood with my team, facing the slowly turning door that proclaimed proudly the number13. I looked at my Commander proudly in the eye, and as he gave the orders to fire, I shot him. His head burst like an overripe melon, and I dived between my squad and the helpless Vault Dwellers. I emptied my gun into the men I had so long served with, and joined my people in the long line of Death, and with the burning courage, strength, and boundless joy that could only be attained by staring into the burning black fires of the Abyss...
-----------------------------------------------------------------
put this on..
http://uro.topcities.com/bluearmor.gif
~cause I can get a little cranky....without moi daily dose oh coffee!!~
-it's the freakin' bluepencil!
~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^
