"Wasteland Tales" drabbles by Jonathan Mills

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Fist of Rage

Wasteland Tales #51

The night hangs heavy over the ruins of the Wall, still and silent as a shroud. The Hole, that seething rip in the fabric of reality, broods over its endless vigil.

The rage machines stand motionless. One mind with a thousand eyes, they wait, their anger stilled.

They don’t expect further attack. The last was so blunt, so futile as to be an aberration, a mere statistical freak. Nonetheless, they stand ready to fight. War is their nature. Instinct shapes them, a thousand hands clenched into one fist.

They wait.

The earth shakes as explosions tear the night to shreds.

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Worthless

Wasteland Tales #50

“Why… why a kid’s face?” Witch feels cold horror press around her. “Who’d do… that… to a kid?”
“I have a feeling.” Lizard’s hands tighten into fists. Anger, she thinks? Can he even be angry?
“Share?”
“No.” His voice is flat, his jaw clenched. “Speculation. Worthless. What we need is an attack plan.”
“Attack… that?” She can hardly credit the words. As well fight the moon, and see where that got you.
“Yes. She won’t stop. She’ll just make more puppets until she runs out of corpses. Then they’ll make more corpses.”
It’s true. She knows it’s true.
“Any ideas?”

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A face to the monster

Wasteland Tales #49

“Well,” says Witch as the Fury reaches for another corpse, “That explains some things anyway.”
“It explains nothing.” Lizard studies the scene, coldly fascinated. “It… makes some things obvious. But putting metal in a dead body doesn't make it walk around afterwards.”
Witch is silent. Her augmented gaze finally falls on the Fury’s pale, hateful face.
“It’s face…” She can't believe what she sees. It has to be imagination, the poor light playing tricks…
“Yes.”
So it’s real. The spidery limbs, the seething, silver jelly of the body…
And the child’s face. Smooth, obsidian eyed porcelain.
Twisted with unending rage.

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The Fury Within

Wasteland Tales #48

The sky seethes with darkness. The air chokes with the ashes of a burning world. Beneath their feet, the earth lies cracked and broken, a lifeless husk.
And then they see her.
On a hundred spidery legs, she reaches for the dead. They lie heaped before her, tribute from her grisly children. She holds the corpse to her with gruesome tenderness, and her arms tear into cold flesh, stitching metal to bone and skin almost at random. And it’s over. Her creation joins its impossible brothers.
And all the while, she screams her hate. This monster, this defiler.
This Fury.

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Basic Incompatibility

Wasteland Tales #47

Witch looks him over, expressionless. The gaping hole in his chest is starting to rebuild itself, but she can see coarse black dirt through the place where his spine ought to be.
“Does that hurt?”
“Does what hurt?”
She snorts. “I still think it was a stupid plan.”
“It guaranteed an acceptable level of success. You weren't detected?”
“No.” She disappears. She reappears. “That's why you gave me a cloaking field.”
“There were hundreds of them. They’d have spotted you without a distraction.”
"And you don't have one because...?"
He sighs. "Hardware incompatibility."
“Whatever. There’s stuff you need to see.”

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Words of the Father.

Wasteland Tales #46

Not a hero.

His creator’s words echo in the blackness behind his eyes. Distantly, he feels movement. He waits.

Not a hero.

Not that he’s ever thought of himself as one. He looks like a man but that doesn't change what he is. He’s a machine, created for one purpose.

Close the eye we gave the world.

A strange quest. But it still binds him.

Not a hero.

He waits.

A survivor.

He opens his eyes. Witch stares down at him.

“Good morning.”

They've brought him where he needs to be. Inside the Hole.

No need to play dead anymore.

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The Ruins of Anger (3)

Wasteland Tales #45

He is strong, but it is stronger. It is fast, but he is faster. Each fight to turn their advantage into victory.

Steel hands as big as doors claw the air. Lizard backs off, searching for a weakness. He sees none. His rifle cuts a burning hole through the mechbeast's chest. It only roars, enraged, and presses its attack all the harder.

This beast has no bones to break, no heart to stop. Dead, it cannot die. Now the other man/machines press around him, blocking his retreat.

It’s the end.

The great spiked tail tears through his chest like paper.

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The Ruins of Anger (2)

Wasteland Tales #44

He feels no pain in the human sense. Impact registers as data, injury reduces to a percentage. He's taking light damage, too much lead in the air to avoid it all. He estimates enemy casualties at 32 and rising every second.

A few hundred to go. Callum's Hollow was a big town.

Now a bigger threat registers. A huge threat. Analysis suggests maybe 6 bodies somehow melded into one, covered in metal and guns. He moves quickly to put it between himself and oncoming fire, turning its allies against it.

It doesn't even slow. Only screams and comes for him.

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The Ruins of Anger (1)

Wasteland Tales #43

This is how the man called Lizard sees the battle.

The world is mapped in a network of lines. Friendly units become outlined in green. Threats are highlighted LED red, weapons blaze yellow.

Right now, he sees a lot of red and yellow. No green.

His processors overclock. Time slows as his sensors speed up. Bullets crawl through the air, trajectory and velocity projected behind his eyes.

His weapon fires, targeting weakness with lethal precision. Enhanced reflexes dance him through bullet riddled air with frightening ease.

Suddenly there’s a lot less red to deal with.

So he deals with it.

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Broken Ring

Wasteland Tales #42

“I know where we’re going.” Witch’s voice is flat, empty. “Where they’re going.”
“There’s a settlement out here?”
Witch strains her optics. The sun’s setting fast, the air muddied with flying dirt and heavy light.
“No. A Wall.”
“Wall?”
She’s always surprised by Lizard’s ignorance of things every wasteland kid takes for granted. Being grown in a tube did have some downsides then.
“The Walls of the Wasteland. Holes in the sky. Fortifications against the stuff that comes out. Four of them.”
“And the defenders?”
She can see it now. The ring of stone, a broken ruin.
“Dead. And worse.”

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Chasing the Past

Wasteland Tales #41

She’s turning to leave when she sees it. Something she knows.
“Edera?”
Witch drops to her knees, wiping blood from a too familiar face.
Lizard watches.
“You knew her?”
“I… yes.” One eye stares, a clear, cool blue, the other dark metal smeared with grease. Neither see.
“Merchant’s kid. When the caravans came to the Hollow, we’d… play. Sometimes.” A ragged, bloody hole mars the girl’s forehead.
Witch put it there.
“So,” Lizard says. “They took the people, dead or alive. They did… this to them, somehow. Quickly too. Someone’s making an army.”
Witch closes Edera’s eye.
“We done here?”

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Impossible Dead

Wasteland Tales #40

Witch stares at the half-human corpses dispassionately. “Then what are they?”
“Impossible.” Lizard’s laser scalpel slices carefully through the body. “The organs have been dead for a while. The machine parts are just… random. They don’t keep the body alive, and they wouldn't keep it moving around after death.”
“They moved pretty well five minutes ago.”
“Yes.” The scalpel cuts through the skull with gory ease. “The brain was as dead as the rest. No intelligence.”
“They didn't fight like they were stupid.”
“Yes. And they screamed.” Lizard stands, scalpel disappearing. “They screamed their rage as they died again.”

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Something Worse

Wasteland Tales #39

The ambush comes from nowhere. Large, metallic shapes fill the silent sands with their screams, screams of rage undying, as they open fire.
They target Witch first. In her small frame, shrouded and hidden by her hooded coat, they sense weakness.
But Witch isn't there.
As her hologram fades, her bullets strike with a cobra’s speed from the quarter-mile distance she’s maintained the last two hours.
Lizard’s energy rifle fills the air with the smell of cooking meat and charring metal.
Soon enough, he stands alone.
“Other cyborgs?”
“No.” He studies the flayed flesh and twisted metal. “Something worse.”

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The Walk to Nowhere

Wasteland Tales #38

It’s not long before they find the tracks, hard packed earth marking the passage of many, heavy feet. Blood stains the dirt in blackening pearls.
“What could have done this?” Witch’s seen enough these last months to know raiders, and this was no raid. Slavers would take who they could and leave the corpses. Even monsters would leave rags and bones and hanks of gristle, not this single, brutally ordered path into nowhere.
“I don’t know.” Lizard’s flat tone might be commenting on the weather, but his hand tightens on his gun. “Be ready to fight.”
“Always.”
They walk on.

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Hollow Welcome

Wasteland Tales #37

Callum’s Hollow.
In a better world, it would be just another nowhere place. A few people would call it home, plants clinging to a withered oasis. They’d do their living somewhere else. Now…
“I thought you said this was a major trade hub.” The town walls lie at his feet, so much sun baked scrap.
“It… was.”
Lizard sees through Witch’s eyes, their software linked. But there’s nothing to see.
“Wreckage. Blood. But no bodies.”
“We move on?”
“No.”
“We need information. That means people.”
The town stands silent, accusing.
“We find people, we find information. One way or another.”

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A Stranger's Vision.

Wasteland Tales #36

“Sergeant?”
The vision is so clear that for a moment Reaper can only stand, fighting his way back to reality. His eyes focus.
“Sergeant? Are you-“
“Let him through.”
“But Sergeant-“
“Let him through, son.” Reaper’s eyes are locked on the man with the bone white hair and the pair of revolvers. “He’s got work to do.”
The stranger’s young-old face smiles tiredly. “As do we all.”
The Watchers of the Wall unbar the gate. But as the stranger walks through, Reaper grabs his arm.
“And I’ll go with him.”
The strange prophet only smiles his assent.

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A Last Stand.

Wasteland Tales #35

He’d always known it would end this way.
The Wall lies broken. Another takes its place, a triple line of men. Shotgunners crouching in front. Riflemen. Munitions.
You emptied your rifle. You handed it back, still smoking. Another was passed forward. Repeat. They die. Or you do.
A last stand. He’d known it would come.
You don’t live on the Wall. You only delay dying.
Reaper empties his rifle. Empties his rifle. Empties his rifle.
The darkness sweeps them away.
The gunman lowers his hand from Reapers forehead.
“That,” he says, “is what happens if you don’t let me pass.”

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Fighting the Inevitable

Wasteland Tales #34

Too many of them.
More of those deadly clusters, living meat shielding the fragile bomb creatures.
Improvise. Adapt. Overcome. Ancient words he’s lived his life by. He sights, fires into the chaos. One of the bomb things explodes as his round hits, its defenders reduced instantly to melting carrion. His snipers follow his lead.
Still, too little. Still, too late.
He counts five more bomb clusters, ten more, twenty, half lost in the charging horde. For every one killed, another two emerge.
Failure becomes inevitable. Defeat, certain.
Grimly, Reaper fights inevitability.
The Wall shakes.
To the last, he fights on.

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Darkness Swarms

Wasteland Tales #33

As the heavy turrets fill the air with thunderous lead, he’s already picking off his fifth target. Hordes of fast, light predators charge the turrets, instantly chewed into bloody pieces by the gunfire.
Something’s different this time. Monstrous bull creatures, thickly armoured and muscled, cluster around something dark and half hidden. Realisation hits him.
Charging the turrets- it’s a distraction.
He’s emptied half a clip into one of the bulls before it even slows. Too little.
Too late.
The dark creature explodes in a black shower, corrosive blood burning through the Wall like paper.
Out of the Hole, darkness swarms.

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His Own Brand

Wasteland Tales #32

Sudden movement ahead. His finger finds the trigger, tenses hungrily, waiting for the go ahead to fire. He ignores it.
It’s so slight that the frightened kid he used to be would have written it off as fatigue, poor light, nerves- fear.
The man he’s become knows better.
An endless moment. A moment he used to dread. A moment he’s learned to savour...
Then the Hole in the night opens and things pour out, manbeasts, abominations, monsters. He hardly bothers to identify them anymore. That can wait until later.
He slams the alarm and unleashes his own brand of hell.