In the Darkness Ahead

Aight! Gonna Kick off my profile with one of my first finished pieces posted on DA, complete with a little story accompanying it (hopefully this is ok, as the primary focus is the illustration itself)!

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The smell hit him the worst. Rust, decay, tepid water, and dust mixed into a persistent miasma engulfing the area around him.

Fear, blood; these stung the back of his throat with each inhale and whiff. Above him, cries of the injured trickled down over the bellowed calls of his fellow crew mates fighting to quell fires and move rubble. He wasn't needed up there. Finding anyone trapped in the collapsed and flooded subway was his focus. The life clock was ticking for any trapped survivors.

Claws scraped painfully loud in his metal skull as he leapt onto a crushed conduit pipe, dripping filthy liquid from belly and leg feathers as his head lifted to shine the flashlight from his brow. Behind him the murky glow of the gaping hole he came in through failed to reach all the way around the bend of the damaged tunnel he faced. Haze from young fires above trickled in, causing his one eye to reflexively squint from behind the protective lens in an effort to focus despite the electronic scanner occupying the reconstructed socket on his right side.

Elisk shifted his weight on the slick metal surface, rubber padding on his prosthetics maintaining their grip with his weight bearing down on them. The radio crackled in its holster on his medipac, the voice of his crew leader coming through as he reached with a mechanical forelimb to hook it free with his grasping talons.

["You'll want to move quick Elisk. We've uploaded the maps, and contained the fires for now, but we don't know the extent the explosion caused in any cracks further down the line under the water."]  A soft beep on his free forelimb activated his holomap unit, scrolling data on one side of the hazed screen of inputs from the rest of the USAR team, and a map filling the main part of the screen showing his point of entry, and the submerged subway stretching into the darkness ahead.

"On it Captain… Looks like the train was split in two during the explosion, with the front half missing. We've already got water in here, but hopefully the main car fetched up on some rubble.." The search square on his screen still showed blank, hopefully they won't need to mark any bodies in the records.

The cyborg archosaurian pushed off his perch into the dark water, slicked iridescent with pooling oil and brake fluids from the crumpled rail cars behind him. Around him, the walls loomed in the faded glow of his artificial fins, a mockery of the feathers he used to sport when the race that pulled his own tattered body out of a similar situation replaced the parts they couldn't mend.

It was part and parcel of his job to be always at risk of personal injury in saving others. Hopefully today he'd only need to drag a waterlogged driver from the main cab before the water came above his shoulders, and the door.