The Ladies, Mutants, Busted Old Cars Of RAGE’s Wasteland

7 responses to “The Ladies, Mutants, Busted Old Cars Of RAGE’s Wasteland”

1. 

   AerintheADEQUATE

   October 27, 2011 at 7:26 am

   The “bombshell” is disturbing on so many levels…

   Reply
   1. 

      MrBS

      October 27, 2011 at 8:16 am

      I’ll go with ‘awesome’ myself 😉

      Reply
      1. 

         AerintheADEQUATE

         October 28, 2011 at 4:05 am

         Really? The proportions are so wonky that it kinda makes me grossed out to look at… those hips are not human 😛

         Reply
2. 

   warcroft

   October 27, 2011 at 7:34 am

   I see in the post apocalyptic world the guys look suitably ugly, but the chicks are still hot.

   Reply
   1. 

      Dave

      October 27, 2011 at 11:45 am

      So, basically the same as the real world.

      Reply
3. 

   PuppyLicks

   October 27, 2011 at 8:28 am

   I love how recognisable their art style is.
   Especially with their machinery design, you can see the similarities in so many these with the mechanical designs in Doom 3.

   Reply
4. 

   Badbraindamage

   July 30, 2012 at 1:16 pm

   Hello, I am a writer. In the Bethseda Forums I felt inspired and wrote a number of stories. Is there any way to contact Ben Olson, to at the very least show him what his art inspired.

   The Great Bath Salt Flats Rampage

   When I was a child we lived in an old missile silo that was bombed out, tarps and shredded animal fur were all we had to keep out the sand storms. The place was spooky even during the day, old warehouses full of secret weapons broken and rusted closed. For a kid it was heaven. One of those places you know you shouldn’t be. The base used to be called “White Sands Aerospace Testing Range: Keep out. Trespassers will be shot by order (1946.1798361) NO WARNING SHOTS!” My mother was burned from an accident as a child, one of those accidents your step father does to you when your mother isn’t home. My mother was a good woman, she was always afraid. A door could never open with out her closing her eyes and breaking into tears. Its sad to see a person with a heart of gold that makes infants cry and neighbors shun them. So she wore bandages and a shroud, looked like the mother of god from old religious inscriptions. We were from a tribe called the Scorchers, a ethnic minority that is persecuted in the wasteland. So in turn my people are savage fist fighters, carry machetes once we reach manhood and wear the war paint of the great god from the sky Apophis. I tried to fit in with the tribe, but i didn’t. Id rather play in the ruins of “Flying Fortress” air craft, pretending i was manning the machine gun turret in an air-raid over Tokyo or Dresden. One day things got sour real fast. Some of the men brought back old crusty bags of Bath Salts, they had them by the truck load. So much that every one was smoking the stuff, star-craving mad lunatics were climbing the satellite towers and pulling wires out, falling from 350 feet onto tents killing babies. Scorchers are natural firebugs, a whole tribe of arsonists. Before long the edges of our camp were burning, then there was a sound. Like a growing beast, shrieks. People were being torn limb from limb, blood ran in the broken concrete like Fallujah. Eyes chewed and spit out were in my mothers room, hand prints of a bloody struggle made the place look like a Vietnam massacre. I ran scared, avoiding adults. I had a big monkey wrench i used to play with, was rusty and heavy. Hiding in dark blast shelter I saw a man run by, in his hand he had a spinal cord and in the other hand a pillowcase with the unmistakable form of broken infant limbs. He ran past and paused, listening. He glared into the dark, his eyes reflecting light like a cat. He ran off, but behind me i thought i heard rustling. I was still as i could be. I saw something moving in the dark. Air vents high above in the missile silo let in dirty blue light. I was scared to breathe. There is a level of fear when dealing with animals in the forrest at night, or even abusive people that might kill you for fun that i cant explain. Its like paralysis, you notice every move of your diaphragm. Something did hear me. From the garbage and bones on the floor a shape darted at me with a menacing hiss. I froze, steel claw like fingers tore my face to shreds, i tried to lift my wrench but my small arm was pinned. The breath of my attacker was fetid, a stench like rotting meat or smokers cough. In horror I saw the usually loving face of my mother twisted. The burns on her face twisting into a lion like snarl, her eyes took on a yellow jaundiced look like a junkie with HEP C on the verse of liver failure. She leaned her head back in a howl of insanity. I pushed her away but she put her fingers down my throat, her other hand was squeezing my eye. SHE WAS TRYING TO BLIND ME. Unable to take it, an unconscious attack came out of me. I leaped my knees up hitting her in the breasts, grabbing her shroud off her head exposing sores on her scalp and bludgeoned her with a bottle near my hand. In fear and shame she recoiled, pitifully whimpers. I called to her, she almost had a look of realization that she knew me. She beckoned me to come close. It was my mother i was so afraid i just wanted comfort. She held me tight. She tensed up and pinching my skin she bit off my nose, chewing, she bit off my cheek. Her face ferociously pecking and tearing my flesh. I was hysterical, my face felt hot, sharp searing pain engulfed my whole body, she was killing me. I felt death coming. In auto pilot i punched her in the ear over and over, no reaction. I still held the bottle, feebly allowing my self to be mauled. I broke it on the top of her head. Using the edge to carve her face, a wide tear opened in her face, long slice. So deep it didn’t immediately bleed, he fat cels and muscle raw. She had wide eyes, not of pain, or fear but rage, hate. She was so much more ugly, like a demon or a witch preparing to cook children in a stove. I couldn’t bare eyes that looked at me with love and adoration once; leering at me with hunger for vengeance. I stabbed her mouth, stabbed her nose (what nose she had was almost flat from her childhood burns). Again and again ripping her flesh, opening her hands and arms. She leaped on me with a heavy attack of a wolf, clawing, biting. My bottle passed through her jugular, no reaction. Her drug fueled euphoria of blood lust was so total when i broke the bottle in my hand, cutting me. She grasped my hand up in the blink of an eye, sucking blood and broken glass like a goat chews a tin can or an infant suckles a tit. In a desperation i tore away, retrieving my wrench. I bashed her head, like a balloon slowly deflating her head changed shape. Blow after blow I smashed her brain in at first then in the splintering bone her brain rolled down her neck like snot down a lip. The nasty pink slime of a brain is nasty, like canned liver or hot dogs boiled for hours until they burst and turned to something like a squid if you ran it over in the road (weird to consider, but the wasteland has octopuses that creep across the road at night. A painting of a land squid is on the cliffs between the arc and the hagar settlement!). Her skin purple and blue, a lone eye still looked at me, i hated it, in that moment i just wanted that eye to burst, but with every swing it rolled out of the way, mocking me, defying physics of my momentum and the inertia of the swing. Splat, crack, squishy sounds, bone cracking knuckle sounds, water balloon bouncing sounds. It was done, my horrible deed. My mother, or what was left of her hollow and imploded, Arms reaching from a rib cage open like an autopsy, her shroud ripped. Her nudity disgusted me, I disgusted my self. Silent in shock i looked at the ceiling, the fan above hypnotically turning, each revolution making my pain fade. I was like a opossum in head lights, walking in circles. High on endorphins. Seeing the wretched mess of my mother i felt sad, alone, guilty, hateful, disgraced, dead inside. I didn’t just kill her, I killed my love, my memories, my safety, my warmth. I heard shuffling, teeth gnashing a turned and smashed the face of Rufus. The clever old wino who painted picture of the old world in return for coins or whisky. His alarmed eyes betrayed, light fading. More people had arrived. The massacre out side seemed to have never happened. I was the miscreant, i was the star-craving lunatic. THe tribe didn’t have rules about killing. Honor killings, cannibalism, brothers murdering each other were accepted. In fact my father killed his brother to take my mother. My father came ever once in a while and looked at me like a stranger, no hate no bitterness just nothing. The law of the clan was you bury your own dead. In a walk of shame i carried the body of my mother. So heavy to my 10 year old arms, I had to make several trips to get every thing that burst out of her body. Rufis I couldn’t drag, some of my friends helped me hack off his legs, bisect the torso. His gold toothed skull still sits beside the road. I didn’t bury him because we weren’t family. My mother rests in a mighty tomb i constructed from broken stone and slabs. I used all my creative energy to erect a tomb worth of a god. Due to the horrific nature of my assault l became like a king of the scorchers. They would relive the story at camp fires, taunting prisoners of my cruelty before i decided their fate. But in the burned out world of the wasteland there is only one judgement. Vivisection for meat, you fight us you get served as prime rib. In my solitude I would thing of my good mother. No one believes she was high on bath salts. They all say i was dusted to the eyes on drugs and turned on my mother, its not true, it cant be true. Could i have dreamed the whole thing, did i butcher my neighbors, was i the drifter from the wasteland that gave every one bath salt. Am i even 10 years old, in minutes it felt like 10 years passed, i was tired, broken my time and injury. To honor my mother I covered my self in old airplane diesel. Burning my skin to resemble my beloved mother who tried to eat me, or no, the innocent woman i turned on in a drug filled psychosis. Now I serve as the executioner, the beast of the badlands. The burned face beheader, and every one in my territory knows to hide when the Devil himself, the incarnation of death, the boatman of hell looks your way.

   “Necrophiliacs in the Temple City Mausoleum”

   A nasty stench wafts in the air, blue light shines in the putrid eyes of a recently dead teen. Her crypt is full of mementos, pictures, flowers, notes, a locket with a young couple expecting a baby both warmly cradling the round belly of the girl. She could have been any ones daughter, sister, mother even. Her plaque reads ( Joy Autumn Died giving birth to a beautiful baby girl, we miss you with all our hearts). Used to be the dead were left for the vultures, at some point the religious and god fearing began to bury the dead. That was when mutants were a scary story, no one saw one in the light of day. That was until the people began to bury the dead in the towns, a mistake they would regret forever. A leader in temple city was Josephus Niro, a prophet, healer with the power of his god, spoke in tongues and invented a new language to write his communion with the angels’ “because he was illiterate, he created something like hieroglyphs and bad english mixed together”. Josephus was a man of vision, began to keep the sick in huts on the edge of town, made the water supply clean by dumping weapons grade bleach in. One of his follies was bringing the mutants below the streets. Temple city was built on the ruins of a great american metropolis, an early settlement on the same site ended in a murder suicide of 50 families, no one knows the details, but carvings in the area and fields full of hundreds of skeletons leave grim clues. Bones were every where, in the trees, in the grass, in the ponds. The broken buildings and infrastructure became a forrest filled with strange statues, bridges and remnants of buildings that now looked imposing, sinister in the shadows of the trees.

   50 years later a band of hungry cultists came and found what they thought was paradise. The great network of tunnels was used to carry fresh water since all sewage was keep away from the ground water. Kids playing in the tunnels were found savagely mauled to little resemblance of human beings, some of the family members going to search for the kids were ambushed and torn to pieces. The militia napalmed the sewers, diverted the drinking water and poured so much cement to block up the tunnels they took a whole mountain down to provide the rock. In this time they decided to keep the dead safe in crypts, sections of tunnels with the roofs caved in, where you could see down from the town were used to keep the dead. A whole movement of worshipping ancestors sprung up. You had sculptures of death faced angels, death faced mothers, whole families in stone, all with hollow skull faces. The town became a tourist attraction because the great cemetery in the town spilled into the streets and in pits and ravines tombs where covered with bridges, houses above where the families could watch the mausoleums for vandals and mutants coming to devour the deceived. Mutants were rare again, an industry of “Mute Skin” rugs and good luck charms made the mutant menace a manageable problem. The bounty on mutants made many rich men. But as new families arrived a sour element moved in too. Some people just look strange, have bad luck with the ladies, ugly is a curse.

   Had they known some of the new residents living in the outskirts of town were bastard sons and daughters of mutant r#pes, or a couple were blatantly living with some relatives that had no business around humans. Now this was a secret. The new neighborhood was shunned, a ghetto for gypsies, thieves and bandit trash from the settlements. Had Josephus known that corpse violation and a dirty practice of the mutants “corpse marriages” was going on he would have sent the militia in and burned them all alive. But due to prejudice the non mixing of the communities was so total that the new folks didn’t even come to town to buy food. Seemed strange these plump, well feed but sickly looking people never grew any food, a few had pets but no live stock. These folks made a life out of death, they worshipped corpses, ate dead bodies, and as it seems claimed the noble citizens of Temple City as unwilling s*xual objects upon death. A rumor was around that Tombs were tampered with, no one opened one. One day Josephus was drinking all day, paranoid, hateful, making startling accusations about the dwellers on the outside of town. He found him self in the Mausoleum, piss drunk. He fell asleep beside some vines in a little alcove in the wall. Startled awake, too scared to talk he saw something awful. His daughter, whom he married off the year before had died in childbirth. In the light of the moon creeping in the roof of the tunnel he saw several young men having depraved relations with the corpse. His daughter’s happy face, ample body was being defiled by these malformed weirdos! He was petrified, staying completely still until after several hours of disgusting conduct with his daughter, they stole the corpse and the one adjacent, “Jopsephus mother!”

   In the morning when golden light made the dark world habitable for humans, he made his way through the lair of the deceased into Temple City, calling a meeting he gave a raving fire and brim stone condemnation of the corpse thieves. A posse was organized to see how many tombs were empty. Over and over the graves of loved ones were empty. Having enough the mob went and dragged the dwellers into the square, beating, dismembering many. It seemed not all the outlying families were involved. After stakes were burned with 7 people lashed to them. It became apparent that they needed to either kill every one, or find the scum who “married corpses.” More doors were kicked in, homes burned, parents hacked into pieces like a Rwandan raid against the tutsies. Then came a house, the house was a shell, the floor removed and a pit was discovered, too deep and dark to see. They burned it, another home the same queer mystery of a normal home that hid a breach in the tunnels. Not all the residence of Temple City could stomach the brutality, an exodus of 2/3rds of the town left only the mast angry. The militia arrived, smaller a regiment then usual. Seeing the charred corpses in the town, they were apprehensive, but following the intoxicating speeches of Josephus they too were sent into a rage. Now in mid day light shown down into the pits, much deeper then the old city pits. These were build by intelligent people, maze-like. The militia quieted down, from the pit they heard a chant. Mutants were down there, and it seemed unlike the usual mindless mutants, these had a calling. These mutants, half mutants, and human collaborators were in a massive hall. The towns people looked in from arches built like a stadium box seats in an opera. Down in the pit a hooded figure howled and gnashed lipless teeth of a vile mutant high priest!

   Horrified the towns people and militia saw hundreds of corpses of their loved ones being pawed and licked by ferocious mutants. Beast-like large mutants in the corners had several live woman chained to their bulky mutant armor. The high priest seemed to be giving a similar diatribe against the humans. His skinless face and horrible veined eyes bulging with hate. The language of mutants is as ugly as they are, mouths with chewed off tongues hissed and clacked teeth together in guttural subhuman mess of snarls and grunting chitter. The room was build around a collection of looted human statues of angels. Seems mutants enjoyed human artifacts, the holy faces of crying angels, rain stained faces looked on as the dead were “married” by mutants. It was satanic, the mutants had alters of horned gods, goats, wolves, snakes. They seemed to worship every thing Josephus preached against. Josephus was a great artist as well. He created rooms and rooms of hell scenes for his church, so many that no one noticed when some of them were stolen. The half-mutants had either misunderstood or liked the evil art better. They had even created imitations that had vile touches of mutant creativity. The writhing mass of mutant flesh, lusting after the innocent dead of temple city was more then some could take. Shots rang out, the high priest from his evil perch outstretched an accusing finger and snarl. The militia did not see that several thousand mutants were behind them in the tunnels, waiting for a sign. In the dark shiny, reflective eyes emerged from the darkness. A few people made it out, the depravity and slaughter became a legend. The city was abandoned, the militia was overcome in minutes. The horrifying thing to think of is, if the mutants could send spies into the human world, learn about art. What would happen to all those arms carried into the tunnels. Could the people of temple city have just taught the mutants how to use a rifle, and supplied them with a vast number? Some said the high priest personally took Josephus and tortured the secrets of the human race. Forcing him with shaking fingers to draw pictograms of the entirety of human history, science and relgieon. Does that ghoul bellow now possess the means to conquor the human race and subjugate us to slaves and “corpse brides” of mutant kind?

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