Fallout - Chapter 107: The Roasted Corpse Mountain (Patreon)

Jace led the team fighting all the way back to Station 1.

This was the first open area they had encountered after entering the mine. An oval-shaped station with five or six dim industrial lights still glowing overhead. The floor was level, with rusted tools and abandoned mine carts scattered around, while the circuit breaker box mounted on the cast-iron pillar still hung open.

There was enough room here to fully spread out their formation.

But before the group could reestablish a defensive line, that familiar wet, squelching sound came from the darkness of the mine tunnel.

The Corpse Mountain had caught up with them.

The monster, formed from the fused flesh of hundreds of ghouls, was slowly squeezing its way out of the narrow tunnel. The sight alone was enough to make their skin crawl.

Its body was soft as a mass of slime, compressed by the narrow passage as it dragged itself forward. First, several long, slender arms reached out and gripped the edges of the tunnel entrance to anchor it. Then the entire mass of flesh slowly began to "flow" out through the opening.

Countless arms, legs, and malformed appendages strained constantly to propel the body forward.

Their movements were chaotic and uncoordinated, each limb moving on its own, as if every piece of flesh possessed its own consciousness but was being forcibly unified by some strange power and driven in the same direction.

Some arms pushed against the ground for leverage. Broken legs kicked wildly. Other malformed lumps of flesh, impossible to distinguish as hands or feet, swung uselessly along the sides of its body.

The instant it fully emerged from the tunnel and escaped the pressure of the surrounding rock walls, the entire mass abruptly spread outward.

Like a sponge absorbing water, it swelled to at least twice the size it had appeared inside the passage.

Its enormous body of flesh writhed and rolled as it charged straight toward them.

“Scatter!”

Everyone immediately threw themselves to either side.

A moment later, the Corpse Mountain slammed its massive body into the rock wall at the far end of the station.

BOOM!

It sounded like a speeding truck smashing into a concrete barrier.

The entire rock wall shook violently, spraying loose stone in every direction.

Then came a dense series of cracking sounds.

The Corpse Mountain itself could not withstand the impact. Dozens of fused bones inside its body snapped at once.

Debris continued to rain from the ceiling, small stones clattering against everyone’s power armor.

Everyone instinctively looked up.

Once the shaking subsided, several cracks had appeared in the rock wall, and dust and rubble covered the floor.

But the ceiling held.

It had survived.

And they had one man to thank for that.

Bob Stanson, the Station 1 Project Manager.

The same man Jace had read about in the terminal.

Bob had repeatedly requested permission from Management to install additional support beams, only to be rejected every single time. Those heartless capitalists had refused to spend a penny more than necessary. The only funding they had approved was for extra padding on the terminal.

With no other choice, Bob had paid for steel out of his own pocket and led the workers at Station 1 in reinforcing the entire area themselves.

In a mine plagued by terrible management and negligent safety standards, he had somehow managed to achieve a record of ninety-three consecutive days without an accident.

If Bob had not reinforced the supports at his own expense, that last impact would probably have brought the rock above them down.

Everyone broke out in a cold sweat.

Station 1 might not have been as deep underground as The Pit at Station 3, but there was still more than enough rock overhead to bury every one of them alive.

Once they confirmed that the station was structurally sound and would not collapse, everyone stopped holding back.

Danse pulled an incendiary grenade from his tactical belt and threw it directly into the center of the Corpse Mountain.

BOOM!

Flames erupted across its body, instantly engulfing nearly half of the mass.

Napalm clung stubbornly to the twisted flesh and severed limbs, continuing to burn with a vicious hiss. The air quickly filled with the pungent, nauseating stench of scorched meat.

Nate immediately pulled the pin on a frag grenade, counted two seconds, then hurled it.

The grenade traced an arc through the air and landed beneath the Corpse Mountain.

The violent shockwave and razor-sharp fragments tore a huge chunk of flesh from its body.

The piece bounced several times across the floor.

It was still moving.

The remaining Knights and Minutemen joined in, throwing frag grenades and incendiary grenades one after another.

Several explosions rocked the station in rapid succession. Flames and shockwaves reverberated between the rock walls.

Burning chunks of flesh were blasted from the Corpse Mountain. Some stuck to the walls and continued burning. Others landed on the floor, giving off black smoke as they twitched.

Before long, the effect became obvious.

The Corpse Mountain’s regeneration had slowed considerably.

Before, fresh pink flesh had immediately grown over any burn wound and sealed it shut. Now, the new tissue was growing much more slowly.

The sustained heat was damaging the activity of the ghouls’ mutated cells.

Napalm remained stuck to the wounds and continued burning. Every piece of fresh tissue that emerged was immediately scorched before it could complete the repair.

“It’s working!” Preston shouted.

But just as the situation began to improve, the Corpse Mountain became enraged.

A faint green glow slowly appeared deep within its body.

At first it was barely visible.

Then its brightness suddenly surged.

Green light poured through cracks in its skin and from its scorched wounds, bathing the entire Corpse Mountain in an eerie glow.

Its regeneration immediately accelerated.

Fresh flesh spread wildly across the burns, covering the still-burning wounds within seconds and physically pushing the charred tissue and clinging napalm away from its body.

The countless severed limbs and malformed appendages supporting its mass suddenly began moving twice as fast.

Its overall speed increased by more than a third.

“We really pissed it off!” one of the Knights warned.

Dodging it became much more difficult.

The glowing green Corpse Mountain rampaged across the station, each collision making the ground tremble and the rock walls roar.

Everyone could barely avoid its direct charges, but the limbs protruding from the sides of its body, some two or three meters long, lashed wildly whenever it passed.

Several times, they came within inches of grabbing someone.

One Knight made an emergency dodge to the left and planted his boot directly on a lump of flesh that had been blasted from the Corpse Mountain.

It was about the size of a fist, its surface blackened by the incendiary grenade from earlier.

The moment the Knight’s metal boot came down on it, the flesh slid away like a piece of rubber coated in oil.

His heavy body instantly lost balance.

He crashed backward onto the floor with a deep metallic clang.

He tried to push himself up, but the ground was covered in slippery pieces of flesh. His arms slipped the moment he put any weight on them.

He failed twice to stand.

And the enraged Corpse Mountain was already charging straight toward him.

“Damn it.”

The Knight cursed under his breath and hastily raised his rifle.

His shot went wide and scorched the rock wall.

A nearby Minutemen veteran saw what was happening.

Without hesitation, he sprinted forward, grabbed the Knight by the arm, and hauled him upright with all his strength.

“Get up!”

The Knight barely regained his footing with the veteran’s help.

But it was already too late.

The Corpse Mountain was right on top of them.

Four or five thick, malformed arms swept outward at once and wrapped tightly around both men.

With terrifying strength, they ripped two heavy suits of power armor straight off the ground.

Both men cursed at the same time.

“Shit!”

The fleshy arms tightened around their armor with strength far beyond anything human.

Then the flesh covering the Corpse Mountain began rippling like water.

Layer after layer of meat writhed forward, slowly wrapping around and swallowing both suits.

Writhing.

Enveloping.

Assimilating.

The two men and their power armor were gradually swallowed into the enormous mountain of flesh until they vanished completely from sight.

“Jack!” another Minutemen veteran roared.

A burst of static came through the comm channel.

Then came the sounds of two men cursing and struggling.

“I’m not dead yet!” the veteran shouted over the channel. “This son of a bitch is trying to eat me!”

“We’re stuck inside!” the Knight shouted as well. “The power armor’s holding, but it’s still pushing us deeper!”

Everyone had thought their comrades were dead.

Their grief and fury immediately turned to urgency when they realized both men were still alive.

“If the Corpse Mountain absorbs those two,” Jace said rapidly over the comm channel, “and gets the energy from two fusion cores, it won’t just be glowing faintly green anymore.”

Everyone understood what that meant.

The radiation energy from two fusion cores could push the Corpse Mountain’s regeneration to a completely uncontrollable level.

It might even trigger an even more horrifying mutation.

At that point, there would be no fighting it.

They would have to run.

And whether they escaped would come down to luck.

Jace’s eyes swept rapidly across the entire station.

He needed a way to save them.

Cast-iron pillars.

The open circuit breaker box.

An overturned mine cart.

Industrial outlets on the walls.

A dense network of cables running overhead.

His gaze stopped on a cable hanging from the wall.

It was an industrial power cable, wrapped in gray-black rubber insulation and running upward into the complicated electrical network overhead.

Dunwich Borers might have used cheap equipment and been run by heartless management, but it was still a pre-War industrial facility.

The power here was not ordinary household electricity.

It was high-voltage industrial power designed to operate heavy mining machinery, freight elevators, ventilation systems, and drainage pumps.

A bold idea immediately took shape in Jace’s mind.

The Corpse Mountain was made from the fused flesh of countless ghouls.

Ghoul bodies were mostly muscle and blood, with relatively little fat.

Muscle and blood were both good electrical conductors with low resistance.

Which meant that if the current was strong enough, they could cook the entire Corpse Mountain from the inside out.

As for the two men trapped inside...

The fully enclosed metal shell of power armor was essentially a Faraday cage.

The high-voltage current should flow along the outside of the armor.

The people inside should be fine.

Probably.

There was only one final question.

Was there enough power?

Jace barely even had to think about that one.

You could say America in the Fallout universe had run out of oil.

By around 2050, the world’s petroleum reserves had been nearly exhausted. In the struggle over what remained, the United States had not only fallen out with Europe and the nations of the Middle East, but had gone to war with China in Alaska in 2066.

Then, in 2076, it outright annexed Canada to secure its logistical supply lines.

You could also say America was short on food.

By the 2070s, the country was suffering severe food and resource shortages. Food riots had become one of the clearest signs of collapsing social order.

The National Guard was deployed in force to suppress people looting and rioting because they could no longer receive food rations.

Even in the Commonwealth, people had attempted to raid food storage facilities.

And more than anything, you could say America was short on morals.

Pre-War American politics and business were packed with people who deserved to die and somehow never did. Scumbags and bastards were everywhere.

If Washington and Wall Street had been blown up ahead of time, maybe the nuclear war would never even have happened.

But there was one thing nobody could claim America lacked.

Electricity.

Pre-War America had fully embraced civilian nuclear power.

Electricity was practically limitless.

Every city had nuclear power plants. Every industrial district had its own independent power grid. Even ordinary residential buildings were equipped with miniature fusion generators.

No matter how cheap Dunwich Borers was, the mine still had a nuclear power system.

There was more than enough high-voltage power running through that cable.

“Get me that cable!” Jace shouted over the comm channel, pointing toward the industrial line hanging from the wall.

Danse followed his gaze and immediately understood.

Without a word, he turned and rushed toward it.

He grabbed the industrial cable and tore it free from the wall.

Jace drew his short sword in one smooth motion and cut through the cable.

He quickly stripped away the rubber insulation, exposing a thick bundle of bare copper conductors that gleamed under the lights.

Then he looked toward the agitated Corpse Mountain.

He deliberately raised his voice and shouted across the station.

“Come on! You pile of rotten meat!”

His voice echoed through the open space.

The Corpse Mountain noticed the strange creature challenging it.

It immediately changed direction.

Every malformed limb supporting its body shifted at once, like a beast responding to a provocation.

Completely enraged, it surged forward even faster.

Its attention locked entirely onto Jace as it charged straight at him.

The massive body of flesh carried a powerful stench of blood and rot, carving a deep wet trail through the slick blood and scattered remains covering the floor.

Jace did not retreat.

He gripped the cable tightly.

The exposed copper strands gleamed beneath the lights.

His eyes remained locked on the approaching mass as he calculated its distance, speed, and angle.

Then, just before the enormous body slammed into him, Jace stepped aside.

The Corpse Mountain swept past him.

The force of its passage was enough to make his power armor sway slightly.

Several long arms protruding from its sides instinctively lashed toward him, but they could not keep up with his movement.

Every one missed.

At the exact moment he dodged, Jace drove the high-voltage cable into the Corpse Mountain’s side like a spear.

The exposed copper conductors punched through fused skin and muscle and buried themselves deep inside its body.

The creature, built from the flesh of countless feral ghouls, was instantly flooded with several thousand volts of industrial electricity.

The violent current surged through its entire body.

The Corpse Mountain began convulsing at an extreme frequency.

Every fused arm, severed leg, stump, and malformed appendage began flailing uncontrollably.

Any coordination it had possessed vanished completely.

Under the violent electrical stimulation, its muscles contracted, twisted, and shifted out of place.

Even the grotesque smiling face formed from its flesh collapsed into a mass of chaotic folds.

Then the surface of the Corpse Mountain began to boil.

The high-voltage current passed through every layer of tissue, rapidly heating the moisture within its cells and producing enormous amounts of steam and heat.

Pressure built inside the body.

The skin began swelling into countless blisters.

Within seconds, murky yellow blisters of every size covered the entire creature.

They swelled and burst like chunks of meat frying in hot oil, only for more to form beneath them.

Pop.

Pop.

Pop.

Blisters burst one after another.

Scalding steam and cloudy bodily fluids sprayed outward.

A thick white mist rose around the Corpse Mountain and swallowed its entire body.

Pressure continued building inside the mass until its flesh could no longer contain it.

Then came a sharp cracking sound.

Crack!

It was like a water-filled balloon stretched beyond its limit.

Chunks of flesh and severed limbs exploded in every direction.

The floor was suddenly covered in steaming pieces of ghoul meat.

Some still twitched faintly.

But those movements were no longer conscious.

They were only residual nerve reflexes.

Jace released the cable.

The exposed copper strands slipped from the charred wound and bounced several times across the floor.

The air filled with the overwhelming smell of burnt flesh and sharp ozone, mixed with the lingering stench of decay.

It was foul enough to make breathing difficult.

The station fell silent.

Only the dim industrial lights overhead continued to hum.

They flickered weakly as the voltage, which had dropped sharply during the discharge, slowly began returning to normal.

Two figures crawled out from among the scattered chunks of flesh.

Their power armor was marked with patches of black scorching, but the armor itself remained intact.

The internal electronics and life-support systems were still functioning normally.

“We’re... alive?” the Knight asked, sounding dazed after narrowly escaping death.

“Looks like it...” the veteran replied, equally stunned.

Nate stood motionless, staring at the floor covered in electrically cooked chunks of flesh.

After several seconds, he spoke with obvious uncertainty.

“Is it over?”

Jace looked toward the pitch-black mine tunnel.

Still breathing heavily, he answered,

“Not yet.”