(Was gonna do the whole thing in one post, but figured I would roll out the start and then finish the rest and post later.)

[img]http://fc06.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2014/200/e/8/waves_against_the_current_by_aaronmk-d7rfluo.png[/img]

Waves sloshed against the gravely beach. The foamy roar rising into the wind. Muffling the other sounds in a foamy wash. Stretched out ahead, miles of desolate beach stretched between rocky hills and ruinous thick forests, and the foamy green ocean. Distant clouds bellowed on the horizon dark and looming. The sky itself darkening as the light waned.

The beach itself was whetted stone and graying sand. Pieces of eroded glass twinkled in the dimming moonlight, and shone brighter in the pools of blood as the corpses of shelled, hulking creatures lay slumped all down the water front. Their gray bodies dripping with drying salt-water. Burns, gouges, partial dismemberment. Where the blade had met soft tissue, it had bit.

Sweet Gin stepped over the heavily shelled creatures as she scanned frantically up and down the beach. Her face drawn pale, more so than usual. Her eyes wide and her hair stuck up wildly from the blood caked into it. Hung over her shoulders her tattered merchant's coat clung to life, the burns from Logan not mixed with large gashes that mixed with the android's blood. Her pack hung from a single strap on her shoulders and she stumbled down the beach scanning the dropped bodies with a hand held over her side, blood dripping through her steel fingers.

It had happened so fast. They were not twenty-yards from shore when the rickety raft they rode in shook under them. Water splashed up as these... creatures burst from the frothy green sea grabbing for them with chittering claws. With the insect-like faces and hardened shell they were no beast Sweet Gin had ever seen. Nothing that looked like it should live as tiny clawed arms held onto the wood and their weight threatened to topple the raft whole-sale.

Quick blasts though from Sweet Gin's pistol had made short-work of the initial attackers. Their insect faces exploding inward into a darkened hole of white spastic flesh and gooey green blood.

It wasn't long since that first wave that she and Dinah had been forced ashore. The creatures attacked them violently, without mercy. Like rabid dogs. Dinah had called them Mirelurks. They fit the name.

The raft had capsized somewhere out at sea, spilling them out into the cold waters of the ocean and they were forced to swim to shore, or float as somethings were. Sweet Gin found she could not swim, merely sink as she flailed with clawed hand and foot. It was Dinah's saving presence that had rescued her and dragged her up and close enough to shore they could wade.

Simply getting to land though had not rescued them. To Sweet Gin's terror the monsters could walk. Well in fact, terrifyingly well. Like a man whose back was one massive shell, solid like steel. With Dinah's golf-club and a revolver from Springville they had fought off the swarm. But it had been in that fight the two got separated. And now Sweet Gin was in a panic as she combed over the field looking for her.

She had no bullets left for her pistol, and her rifle. She didn't even know if it had hit anything. It had been fired from the hip. She wondered if hope was enough to carry high-caliber rounds to something.

“DINAH!” Sweet Gin screamed, trying to keep herself drowning in fearful tears as she scanned over the beach. She shot feverish looks to the sea. Nothing arose from its tides. It swelled in its own nature and stewed up a salty and sulfuric brine that it consumed as soon as it was vomited up.

Sweet Gin staggered over the body of one of the creatures they had laid to waste. Sweet Gin looked down at it in grotesque fear. It was more a man in shape than the others, complete with long clawed and webbed fingers. Its beady black eyes starred up to the stormy sky with a blank expression, its head split clear down the middle from the impact of a golf club no doubt. Its brains and blood spilled out into the sand from its opened skull. Already flies were beginning to swarm around the now vacant cavity of its head.

“Dinah!” Sweet Gin called again, more meek. Her throat was soar. She brushed her hand up and down her arms. Hardened claws had dented – and even cracked – the metal casing in a number of places. It was a wonder they still worked. A testament to the Institute no doubt, no matter how sour it made the android.

Scrambling over a wider array of split and broken creatures, their shells split open or faces smashed in she grew weak in her fear that her companion had been dragged to sea. She chewed on her lip as she wove between the patch-work bodies, over brass shell casings and splattered pools of multicolored blood in the pebbles and sand.

“D-Dinah...” she said weakly as she turned about, looking out to sea. Hoping morbidly to at least see a body floating in the froth. She felt dry at the fear she was lost already. “Di-” she went to say again, but her panic shot up her spine and froze her as she heard a weak cough from behind.

She rose her sword, turning sharply in the sand to the noise. Her breath hung on her lips as she readied to be swept to the sand with a hard cross hook from a massive claw. But what she found instead was the limp body of Dinah leaning against the rocks of the hill side. At her side her golf club lay in the sand bent and twisted in a hundred places. Blood dripped down from her forehead down her leathery, aged face.

“I be done'm good.” she coughed weakly, smiling as she lay against the stones.

“D-dinah.” Sweet Gin stuttered, feeling tears, “You'r-”

“I done know, I done know.” Dinah laughed, “Be shttin' me, I done d'ink I be hurt like d'is before. But I took-a lot of da fucks out. Deh all dead now, sweetie.”

Sweet Gin ran over to her side, falling on her knees as she leaned over her. Her dark skin was caked over in blood, it was hard to tell where her's flowed and other blood splatter. Dark bruises lingered just under her coffee flesh.

“I-I, we c-, I can fix this...” Sweet Gin muttered.

“Like fuck'n shit you can.” Dinah laughed weakly, resigned, “You be a sweet girl Gin, but I don' d'ink you know how to patch me up any'ding.”

“Then... Then...” Sweet Gin said softly, looking up and around. Down the beaches, into the hills... “I'll find someone!” she said insistently.

“Like who?” Dinah asked.

Sweet Gin breathed deep. She wondered who exactly as she looked up over the hills, inland. Rising out over them the softly rolling hills marched on, north-west to south-east. And on the perch of one of the tallest she had her idea.

“There...” she said, nodding to the hills. Sitting atop a building stood, illuminated with bright golden yellows and oranges against the dark stormy sea. Spires rose out of the building. “Maybe someone there can fix you.”

“I can'a see it.” Dinah said. She grimaced as she tried to turn.

“I'll carry you. I'll find someone there. You'll be fixed. Just, just bare with me.”

“Shit, I shoulda got Med-X.” she groaned as she allowed the android to pick her up. The pain that shot through her was strong, and she groaned in protest. Somewhere on the edge of a scream.

Hoisted over the young android's shoulder she went up the hill. Deep down she felt it'd go poorly. But maybe like so many things it'd be a quick death. For the two of them. Illuminated houses were never good in her experience...