Just A Face In The Crowd

I put my lips around the red inhaler, press down on button and take a deep breath. I feel my eyes widen as the Jet did its magic.

Brilliant thing, Jet. It provided a remarkably quick high, short but oh so memorable. What it actually did was 'speed' up the neural path ways, making processing raw information so much easier. Or maybe it didn't.

I couldn't exactly be called an expert on the subject, I was just a junkie raider. What did I know?

I can only describe Jet as…time slowing down. Dead useful in a gun fight, especially considering how useless I am in one. It was also surprisingly pleasurable for recreational use. The only downsides being what it did to one's mental organization skills.

The mind starts rushing and thinking about so many things all at once, until one single thing is picked out. The Jet user will then focus on it stubbornly until the Jet wore off. Which to everyone else appeared to be ten seconds, but to the user might as well have been an hour.

I suddenly realise that I am not a very smart person. Well, that was obvious. I'm a raider for god's sake. My mom would just be so happy! Can you sense the sarcasm?

Hmm, I've always wondered why I did that. It starts out as me talking to myself, but then I end up 'narrating'.

It's weird, thankfully it's no more crazy then any of the other guys around here.

What was I just thinking about? Oh, yes, my mother.

Just like that I'm twelve again. I'm home, a farm.

Me and my mom grew carrots. It was mind numbingly boring, but it was peaceful. That was until the bastards attacked. Funny thing, people usually thought I was talking about raiders when I told the story, but no.

Ferals.

They ripped her limb from limb with their teeth.

I grab another Jet and inhale again. Why did I remind myself of that? I still hear her voice, the last thing she ever said to me.

"RUN MIKE! STAY ALIVE!"

I did, ma. I'm still here when everyone thought I'd die.

I abandoned the farm for a number of reasons. It reminded me of mom, it was where she died, there were fucking ghouls hanging around…I ran like a bitch, wandered around for a while, desperately trying not to die.

Luckily, and I use the term loosely, I ran into this group of raiders. They took the piss out of me, constantly, but it was a sure source of food. Even if I had to kill, steal and kidnap, it was better than dying right?

A question I've asked myself before. I stopped asking, I didn't like the answers.

With raider groups it's all about carving out a place for yourself. Why are you here? What do you bring to the table? So to quickly go over myself…basically nothing.

I can't shoot for shit.

I might as well be a dammed genius when compared to these morons but I wasn't 'smart' in the sense that I could do anything useful.

I don't have a keen eye for details.

I lack upper body strength.

I'm a magnet for bad luck.

So why am I not dead?

Somehow, I am the only person in this whole group who can tame dogs. I know, it's crazy. But that's why they tolerated my using of their food and chems.

There are wild dogs all over Boston. Sometimes I can 'convince' them to join us. It's…impossibly silly.

Our group now had three dogs, two of them were of the vicious and highly deformed variety and one looked like a dog from one of those pre-war books. They were useful security, if anyone came into our 'base of operations' one of them would notice and wake the entire building up. The others would start attacking and or distracting the intruder.

Gives someone enough time to line up a clean shot.

Thanks to my mad dog skills I've got a place to sleep, and I would never lose it. I was the only one that could feed the dogs without risking a finger.

I wasn't happy though. How could I be? I was raider. I've done terrible things and I'm going to keep doing terrible things. It's not that I care about any of that, what I do tends to rub people the wrong way.

Either I'm going to die by someone seeking revenge or someone hired out of revenge. My odds of dying of old age were non-existent.

Which was probably the explanation for the last ten hours.

It had been a normal day. Just because we were raiders didn't mean we spent every single second out in the Commonwealth spitting in the face of human decency. No, sometimes we just sat around the base and chilled, for lack of a better term.

But this wasn't normal chilling, this was raider chilling. Which basically meant that depending on who you were you had very narrow relaxation choices.

Some brewed some terrible quality home cooked Chems. The sort that promised a shortened lifespan. Sure, I'm a tried and true junkie, but I only use the good shit. I got no time for the crap that raiders mislabel jet.

The boss of the operation would spend this free moment to think on what we should be doing next. Should we kidnap someone and force a ransom? Or should find a small settlement and ransack it? Or should we spend a day scavving? These things were decided by the boss, which was impressive considering just how low his IQ was.

I'd fairly sure that my dogs are smarter than this guy, not that I'd ever speak that out loud. Guy had the best gun in the whole gang, a combat shotgun, and I wasn't stupid enough to be on the wrong side of it.

Besides myself, the rest of the gang spent their free time dick measuring. Which is to say, they were fighting amongst themselves to figure out who was the toughest. That usually involved daring each other to do dangerous tasks, or straight up fist fights.

I didn't take part in such activities for a simple reason. I liked not waking up the next morning in agony because of the amount of bruises I would have gained. Stimpacks could only do so much.

So where was I? In the basement, fiddling with my pipe pistol. I don't claim to be a master of gun maintenance, but then again pipe guns weren't the height of complexity.

Well deciding whether my pistol should have a scope or not I heard the faint sound of smashing glass and the roar of fire. I vaguely recall rolling my eyes, the dumbasses must've started throwing Molotov Cocktails around, right?

I knew something was up when I heard my dogs growling. They only did that when there were enemies around, or they were hungry. I'd already fed them at that point.

I started to panic. I don't like firefights! I've survived those fights before, with major injury and I don't want a repeat of those events.

So I hid.

I can still recall the voices of my comrades screaming above me.

They started with arrogance, "This isn't my first fire fight, rookie!" or, "I'm gonna skin every last one of ya!"

Them some fear started creeping in, "Shit, I think they're using stealth boys." And, "Die already!" were common.

Then they started dying, "You killed him! I'll make you-"

Cut off every time.

Sure, I didn't like any of them. Honestly I won't lose even a moment's sleep over their deaths, but in that instance, well I was hiding in dark in a basement well my gang mates were dropping like flies, it was terrifying.

I waited for hours, eventually the noises stopped but you couldn't be sure, not with the stealthy sort that apparently attacked us.

Eventually, god knows when, I ventured out from the basement. Whoever attacked us hadn't killed us all. Our group had been twelve strong without counting the dogs, now we were five and minus three dogs.

Hearing that my dogs were dead hurt, I loved those vicious little bastards.

The boss was dead, though I use the term loosely. Dead is supposed to mean no longer living, so technically it should be applied here. But considering that the boss was a puddle of green goo on the floor, I don't think 'dead' is quite the right word.

Anyways, considering that said boss was no longer available, that meant someone else had to step up to the task…it was at that point that I returned to my basement.

I put an inhaler full of jet to my lips, breath in, thinking that I'd be able to forget the recent events.

But instead I relive it all, in quick speed. Fantastic.

The rest of the gang was fighting upstairs, seeing who was going to be the new leader. Whoever got it was going to be the toughest person we had, which meant no matter what I was screwed.

I'm the bloody dog tamer. No dogs meant no reason for me to be here. Which probably meant three things could happen.

They don't call me on it, they do call me on it and send me out to get more dogs, or they just kill me. Each was about as likely as the other.

I take another puff of jet. I'll deal with that later…

Just for fun, this guy's SPECIAL is: 3, 3, 5, 6, 5, 4, 2