Eve was notorious. She styled her black hair in the way of pin-up models she saw in posters and magazines left over from an older time. She wore bright red lipstick and rouge she had had found in an old department store on her soot-covered face. Some would say she had a dirty, sultry look. Certainly she was as beautiful as this post-apocalyptic world would allow. She spoke in a husky, dark voice that could only have been learned by watching the few old movies that had survived to modern day.
From town to town she went, shooting and sleeping her way to survival. That was always the way, to live another day.
Vault 101 could never hold her. They all knew this, even her father. Her little acts of rebellion and defiance, which only grew worse the older she became, were only her way of trying to escape. She didn't want to be a part of their world. The vault was too small to hold her, the walls too constricting.
Her father was never happy with the way she grew up. Around the vault she ended up being known as a loose girl, the sort of girl who got around and was the subject of many suggestive conversations. Boys would laugh and joke about what a whore she was, and all the while they eyed her curiously. None of the girls ever had much use for her.
She wasn't the sort you'd bring home to your mother, nor the sort for a father to be proud of. She was too cruel, too hard-edged. She would gladly jump into bed with a boy if she thought she could gain from it. Sometimes she did it just for the hell of it. Mostly she just wanted to piss her father off.
She had always liked to shoot guns. Ever since her father gave her a BB gun she had since fallen in love with them. There was something beautiful to the way they fit in her gloved hands, the pull of the trigger and in the sound of a bullet going off. Once when she was young she shot up the door to the Overseer's office with BB pellets when everyone was asleep. The guards had run to see what was going on. They never found her. She was skinny and lithe and slipped away easily into the shadows.
Her father had spanked her for that one. "Do you want them to know I gave you that thing?"
She had inattentively stared at the wall. "What difference does it make? I didn't get caught. I won't. They're too stupid to catch me."
That was the motto she lived by: people were stupid. It was no sin to take advantage of their stupidity. This was the thought that went through her mind as she mezzed people and slipped collars around their neck.
"You are one dark bitch," Grouse would say, handing her payment for another slave.
She counted the bottle caps. "Mm, yes. This is the right amount. Oh, thanks, handsome." She patted her hair to make sure it was still in place.
If paid the right price she would do anything you wanted. Sex, genocide, murder…the works. She had no time for love or compassion. There was none of that in a world covered in ruin. She saw herself as a mere extension of the harsh landscape, an animal out for herself.
Three Dog would come on the radio, extolling the crimes of "that brat from Vault 101". His voice would play over her pip-boy, as he spat insults, called her the "Villainess of the Waste" and the "Dark Bitch who I wish never crawled from out her nasty hole". She didn't let him bother her. She sort of enjoyed the attention. To be notorious was better than to be dead, after all. To be a whore was better than to be alone. To kill was better than to be killed.
As the radio playing chirpy tunes from long ago, and outside the wind blew over a quiet, dead landscape, she would wonder if there should be more for her than the haze of gunpowder and radiation.
But she was tough and would survive another day.