User blog:Lazarus Grimm/Barghest: On the Prowl

BARGHEST

On the Prowl

It was evening by the time they reached the outskirts of the building complex. Some old processing plant from before the war. Through the blown-out windows they could tell, from the faint flickering shimmer that danced on the concrete walls, that someone had most likely set up a small makeshift campfire on the second story.

Griggs motioned for his four companions to halt. They had been tailing this bastard for almost two days now, but had never gotten the opportunity to get the jump on him. It was almost as if he never slept, and God knew they needed it. But now it seemed as if he had finally decided to call it a night. This was their moment. Just in and out. Take him out cold when he was sleeping, and then they could all finally get some rest of their own.

Truth was that Griggs wouldn’t have minded to just go in there and roughen the stupid sod up a bit, to teach him a lesson, but leave him breathing. Two days just to drop someone dead was hardly worth the effort. And now both parties were tired. But Mr. Rowe wanted this guy dead, and he had offered up a huge pile of caps for them in order to do so. Apparently the reason for this was that the target had offended Mr. Rowe in one way or another. Refused an offer that Rowe more than likely took as a slight, as he would.

The fucking gangster…

Descriptions of the target’s physical appearance had been vague however. Not even Mr. Roach had gotten a good look at him when they had met in person. All the description he could provide them with was “a man in a long coat, hooded, with a face shrouded in wraps.” Apart from that there was little to go on. Mr. Rowe had never seen the man’s face, but apparently had interacted with him enough to warrant a death wish upon this poor bastard, whatever he had said or done.

He had also told them that he was armed with a sniper rifle and that he had an “odd way of walking”. Something that they had indeed noticed as they had followed his tracks. He walked with a slight hunch, with his shoulders expressively moving from side to side as if he imitated some sort of predatory animal. He had a subtle skip to his step as if he never quite put his entire heel down. It was odd for sure, but Griggs and his men had chased after worse and weirder.

And now they were finally here. The end of the line. Once this was done and over with they could finally start planning for the journey back to Diamond City. He definitely didn’t like being this far out into the city after dark. Gunners, Raiders, Super Mutants, Triggermen, and whatnot. It was urban warfare around the clock. One group taking out the other, before another group moved in to take out that one, and on and on it went. Gunfire lit up the sky and among the skyscrapers and fallen buildings shots echoed constantly throughout the night.

“So how are we doing this, Griggs? We taking this guy out or not?”

Griggs observed the young man with some skepticism. Damn rookie…

“You that eager to get yourself killed, lad? Knock yourself out and prove your worth then. Tell you what, you go over there and try to sneak up on him. Find out just what we are dealing with. Is he armed? Is he alone? Anything. Then report back here and we will deal with him.”

“Gotcha, sir”, the young man said as he clumsily saluted him. “I’ll be back in a jiffy.”

''What’s he doing that for? We are not the fucking Gunners or the Brotherhood.''

The boy scurried off and into the shadows, scurrying his way all over to the source of the light. And as he did so the group remained behind and watched, and waited. The minutes slowly started to turn into half an hour and it wasn’t long after that Griggs noticed the light of the campfire fading and the building turning dark.

“What the hell?” he murmured.

The boy had yet to return, but if he had gotten himself into some sort of trouble, surely they would know by now? Griggs got out his custom made pipe pistol. He had been hoping that he wouldn’t have to use it, but he reckoned that if the boy was in danger somehow, he would have to get his hands bloody – even more so than usual. He motioned for the rest of them to move onward, weapons in hand.

As they approached the building it was all quiet – too quiet. Even the young lad was nowhere to be seen or heard. Griggs had a bad feeling about the whole situation. If the boy had been taken out by their target, then they had clearly been mistaken about his potential. And maybe that was the case why Mr. Rowe wanted him killed so badly?

Griggs stepped inside a vault where a door of steel and glass had been ripped halfway of its hinges. A set of concrete stairs took them to the second floor. It was all dark and showered in a shade of blue and gray. Griggs signaled for two of his men to take point, and as soon as all of the five men were up, they saw him sitting there at the end of a hallway. The boy sat with his back slumped against the wall, his head hanging with his chin resting to his chest. Even in the darkness they could tell that he was still breathing.

What the hell…

“Boy!” Griggs hissed, looking around as if he expected an assault. The floors above them had holes in them, and he couldn’t quite shake the feeling that they were being watched through one of them. “You alive?!”

He could hear a faint groan at the end of the hallway. He steadily sent two of his men forward to bring the boy to him, but as soon as they approached the young lad seemed to come to his senses. In a mix of desperation and terror the young man screamed at him.

“No, don’t!” he called out. “I am…”

A little too late did the two men approaching him realize that the boy had been booby-trapped, and around his chest he had been rigged with caltrop mines. When they got too close the mines detonated all at once. The young lad’s torso was torn apart in a cascade of crimson, and spikes flew towards the two men, piercing their bared necks. The sound of the explosion had been loud enough to cause a ringing in Griggs’ ears. He groaned in pain and fell to one of his knees, covering them. It pounded inside his head. Once the pain had started to dim, he just became aware that three of his men were dead, and that their target was still at large.

“What the hell?!” shouted one of his two remaining companions.

“Griggs, for fuck sake! Let’s split! This shit isn’t worth it!”

“What? Are you suggesting we should just let the bastard go after dropping the hammer on us like that?! Fuck that! We going for the kill now!”

Griggs nodded. “Aye”, he said, casting a glimpse over at the unrecognizable corpse of the lad and the two dead men in the hallway. He felt a tweak of bitterness bite his conscience. “We kill this bastard. Marty, you and Tom take the top floor. I will go on ahead and see if he is still lurking around the campfire.”

“Be careful, Griggs”, Marty warned. “The fucker got the drop on the boy and rigged him with fucking mines. Who knows what he is capable of?”

Griggs nodded with a snort and moved forward, regularly checking the walls for any signs of other mischief as Marty and Tom continued up to the third story. He occasionally cast a glimpse up through the holes in the floor above him. He couldn’t quite sense the presence there any longer – which was either a good sign or a very bad one.

He was careful enough not to step in the puddle of innards and blood the boy had left behind. There was nothing that could dampen his mood today than watching a harmless young lad getting himself killed for the sake of a few caps. But he had known what he had signed up for. They all did … or at least that’s what Griggs wanted to believe. The truth was that they never quite knew when they would finally land the job in which they would all bite the bullet. And so far this job hadn’t really gone their way.

Three dead… he reflected. The man’s a fucking ghost…

As he made his way into the makeshift camp he cast a suspicious glance around his surroundings. Opened steel cans had been tossed all over the floor, the campfire had gone cold. A bedroll had been placed in the corner of the room. He lit a dim flashlight as he tried to find tracks of where the culprit could’ve gone. What he found made him even more puzzled than before: not a single footprint; at least no human footprints. Plenty of tracks from paws however. Did this guy have a guard dog loose? That couldn’t be the case. He hadn’t had one with him from what they had seen. Something didn’t quite add up here.

Griggs didn’t have more time to reflect on that however as he heard some commotion from upstairs. Gunfire. Marty and Tom screaming as they fired in all directions, all before their shots went silent and the last of the shell casings dropped to the floor. Griggs readied his gun, breathing heavily. They were dead. He knew it. And he would be next if he didn’t kept his senses keen and his guard up.

He aimed his gun down the hallway he had come from, changing his focus to the window, to the holes in the floor above his head, not trusting any direction. He knew by now that whoever their target was, they had clearly messed with the wrong fool. It wasn’t long now before he heard the sound of footsteps shuffling just above. He fired first. Sending a couple of rounds into the floorboards in the ceiling. He couldn’t hear any sounds of a body collapsing and so kept firing until he was all out. He quickly grabbed another magazine from the back pocket of his duster and slid it inside his pistol, ready to have another go. But before he had the time to realize what was going on, he heard the thud behind him, and became aware of the shadow looming over him. The bastard had jumped down from one of the holes before he even had a chance to react. As he spun around to fire a bullet in the shape at point blank range, his arm was seized by a firm grasp. He felt a searing pain in his forearm as his flesh was torn.

''Claws? ''He remarked before he was knocked out cold.

When he came to his senses again, he felt a pounding ache in his head. Not just from the punch he had received but also from all the blood rushing to his skull. He was hanging upside down, his feet tied to a rope in the ceiling of the top floor through a hole of the second floor’s ceiling. His nose was bloodied and dripped with blood. He snorted and had a hard time breathing through it without inhaling his own bodily fluids. At the far end of the room there was a shape crouched and observing him in the dark. Something was clearly off about their target.

“Who are you, meat?” the shape asked with a dark, hoarse voice: halfway between a growl and snarl.

His voice reminded Griggs of that of a smoker’s, if the smoker had been choking on his own phlegm for a decade.

Meat? He thought and wondered whether or not he should feel insulted.

“I am … I am Griggs.” He saw no reason to dodge the target’s question. Maybe he would be tortured if he did so.

“And why is it that you are following me, meat?” the shape snarled and got up from where he was sitting, steadily approaching Griggs from the shadows like a stalking predator.

Griggs could catch the glimpse of a pair of gleaming eyes underneath a hood. “We were hired”, he groaned, still thinking about the poor lad’s death.

“Hired?” The voice sounded interested as a hand reached out for Griggs’ neck.

''Is that fur? ''Griggs tried to take note of the details as best as he could. With what little chance he had to escape from this situation, it was best to keep track of what he was up against in case he could somehow get his revenge in the future.

In the light of the moon he could tell that the hand was covered in fur, some of it was pale and some of it was dark, possibly gray. His fingers had claws instead of nails. What the hell was their target? Some sort of ghoul?

“Speak up, meat”, the hoarse voiced snarled and squeezed Griggs’ neck. “Speak up or I will tear your jugular out.”

Griggs panicked. “Mr. Rowe!” he exclaimed. “It was Mr. Rowe!”

The furred hand let go of his neck. “Mr. Rowe, eh?” the target scoffed. “Looks like I underestimated that cunt’s patience with me … just like he underestimated my tolerance. I won’t have any meat sacks strangle me in my sleep.”

“Please”, Griggs pleaded. “Look, we … we didn’t come here to kill you! I just wanted to rough you up a bit! Beat you senseless! That would have been totally fine with me, alright? Mr. Rowe wouldn’t even need to know! So … please…”

Griggs began to realize how hopeless the situation was, but if there was the slightest chance of him escaping this with his life intact, he swore to himself that he would never go on bounty hunts again. He would start collecting Nuka-Cola caps, maybe even become a scavenger. Anything. Just as long as he got to live. And to survive, he would tell this … freak whatever he wanted to hear.

“Would you let me go?” Griggs asked.

The voice grumbled in the dark. “Let you go, meat? Why the fuck would I do that? Why would I let some would-be made man get away scot free?”

Griggs tried to swallow, feeling the taste of blood in his mouth. “You killed my men, pal. I am no match for you. You could slit my throat and be done with it. But I am asking you to … you know … show mercy. Show me that there is something human in you.”

The voice gargled, and it would take a long time for Griggs to realize that the noises the target made was that of laughter, though it sounded painful – almost forced. More like an incurable and animalistic cough.

“Human”, the voice tasted on the words and stepped out from the shadows.

Griggs first intention was to reach for his gun before he remembered that his hands had been tied up behind his back. Their target finally got out into the light and revealed his form and from toe to top, Griggs finally got their first true look of what they had been up against this entire time.

His feet were paws, which would explain the tracks he had found around the campfire. He stood up on hind legs. He wasn’t wearing any boots, as he had no need for them. He wore a thick leathery coat with a hood. And out from the shadows of the hood a snout in white and gray was sticking out, a pair of sharp, gleaming, predatory eyes observing him from within.

Their target was a fucking dog – or some freak of nature that God haw saw fit to give the form of both man and beast.

“What the fuck…” Griggs muttered under his breath as he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

He had seen his fair share of fucked up things in the Wastelands, especially the Commonwealth, but this just took the grand slam. This man-dog had been their target the entire time, but just what was he? He definitely wasn’t a ghoul … or a Super Mutant…

“Human?” the dog-man snorted. “I’d take that as a compliment, meat, if it wasn’t for the fact that I just beat the living shit out of you and your kin.”

“What the hell are you?”

“The name is Shanks”, the dog-man snarled, his rows of canine teeth showing in a twisted grimace. “As to what I am, it’s none of your fucking business, meat. Now, say that I show you some undeserved kindness and let you off the hook. What will you do, meat?”

“I’ll go”, Griggs said sincerely. “Go as fucking far away from here as possible. You won’t be seeing shit of me again.”

“Damn right, I won’t”, Shanks chuckled. “Especially if you fail my conditions.”

“What conditions?” Griggs asked worryingly.

Shanks pulled out what looked like some sort of homemade grenade from a pocked of his coat, he pulled out the sprint and jammed it in-between Griggs’ jaws, locking it violently in there. The bounty hunter grunted and groaned as he did so.

“Choke on it, like the little bitch you are”, Shanks growled lowly. “I will be off now, meat. If you somehow manage to survive this, I’d say that you’ve more than earned your freedom and someone else can have your life.”

The dog-man started to pack his camp together while Griggs dangled around in his rope with the grenade still in his mouth. The bounty hunter tried to call out to Shanks, but his voice was muffled by the thickness of the explosive tightly stuck behind his teeth. And once Shanks had packed his things together and got ready to head out again he turned to Griggs one final time.

“But as of now, meat, I really couldn’t give two shits about your mercy”, he shrugged. Make your own mercy for whatever the hell it is worth.” I sure as hell had to.”

With those words the dog-man headed out, flinging a bag over his shoulder. Griggs called out for him with muffled screams and cries for help, but was ultimately and completely ignored.

Looks like I have to head back to Diamond City, Shanks reflected. And have myself a little talk Mr. Rowe again…