Brushing ash and soot from the knees of his trousers, the man stood and turned to face the light.
The sun was wan, pale. Its circumference obscured by a low-hanging haze of woodsmoke and eastern fog, so that it appeared as merely a brighter speck in the otherwise featureless grey sky. The man ran his fingers idly along the contours of his belt, battered dry leather studded with eyelets and an assortment of mismatched wing nuts and bolts. He loosened the clasp on a compact leather pouch, one of many about his waist, and produced his crumpled packet of Grey Tortoises. Around his feet, acidic rain pooled in alkaline patterns, filling the cracks in the dead earth, slithering into crevasses or trickling in rivulets over wind-worn stone. He opened the packet and poised the cigarette carefully between his gloved fingers, hands stiff, careful not to let the loose tobacco slip free from its paper sleeve, sheltering it from the stinging drizzle. He pinched off the end and lit it with a single precious match, cupping his hands around the flame to ensure his success. He inhaled lightly, savoring the flavor of the rare, stale tobacco.
Jack Deckard, newly widowed and temporarily childless, had been walking for longer than he cared to count. He knew the Pip-Boy around his wrist was tracking his every step. Every tired vmillisecond. He ignored it. The thing chafed, anyway. It weighed down his offhand as cupped his gloved palm under the battered wooden forestock of the stubby bolt action rifle, cradling it in his arms like a babe.
Shaun.
He put his son from his mind stubbornly. Now was the time for movement, tactical and deliberate. A slow but steady trajectory towards a place the settlers of this new world called Diamond City. The "great green jewel" of the Commonwealth. We'll see.
Once he got there, it would be time to talk. Time to ask the hard questions. There was no doubt in his mind that he was prepared to give way to cruelty, to rough violence, should the need arise. To get the answers he needed, he would risk all. He would find his son, and he would avenge his wife.
Nora.
Black bile in the back of his throat. A cold flickering flame that would not be quenched until he had faced her killer. He recalled the rough, dirty face. Seamed by weariness and war. Unchecked stubble beneath the impassive frown and uncaring eyes as he'd watched Nora die, only lowering his weapon when he was sure she wouldn't rise again. Efficient and detached. A soldier.
But not like him. He'd brushed away the possibility of there being any common ground between them. He pushed those thoughts aside, despite their persistence, even as he cut a bloody swath through the wooded regions to the southeast of Vault 111. Holding a stick-thin raider by a clump of filthy hair as he died, demanding answers as the man gasped red wet breaths. Ignoring his own interrogation, pleading instead for a final hit of jet through lips flecked with bloody froth.
He'd killed them all, picking his way through withering gunfire, past gutted sedans and makeshift barriers of shingle and steel rebar. Firing with quick and deadly efficiency, the Pip-Boy warbling mildly on his wrist to notify and remedy occasional errors in his positioning and sight picture. He'd swept through the hollow doorways of a half-dozen of their dens over the course of those first four delirious days, kicking over coolers full of narcotics to get at them, coldly executing survivors. A multicolored assortment of uppers and downers and glinting inhalers clattering across the floor as they bled out onto the rotten timbers and splintered concrete. His efforts proved fruitless. The raiders died with unanswered questions and protests of innocence on their lips.
On the morning of the fifth day he'd found himself on the fringes of the ruins of Lexington, studying a squat brown building. Hollow windows like eyes, ringed with the rust-orange sweat of corrosion. He'd observed the restaurant for over thirty minutes, his customary time. Crouched uncomfortably behind the gutted, windworn husk of an ancient police cruiser. No movement. He checked the Pip-Boy and side-stepped the hood of the car. As he paced forward he scanned his sectors in slow counter-clockwise sequence, swinging his rifle left to scan the uneven ground that sloped away from the skeleton of an army personnel carrier. Mangled tracks beside upturned plastic crates overgrown with dark wet lichen. He rotated. No threat from the right - the west - thanks to partial concealment from the main road via a windswept hedgerow draped by a stray tarp. The tattered nylon flapped against the brisk headwind, pale faded blue like a cyanotic ghost. He stepped beneath the shade of the canvas awning, pressing himself against cool brick. Crude markings above the door meant raiders. Skulls and jeering profanities. But these were old, flaky brown hieroglyphs mostly erased by time and the stiff salt breeze. He listened for a moment, then stepped carefully through the shattered brown glass of the front door, keeping his weight even so as not to disturb the jagged carpet of loose glass that dusted the faded rubber floor-mat which read "Sullivan's Bar and Grill". Rows of tables jutted up from the slurry of trash and debris, evenly interspersed by wooden benches padded with red polyester. Corpses sat slumped onto checkered tabletops or lay bundled around the bases of barstools rusted solid. His time in the army had taught him more than enough about corpses. The way they decayed, over time. Maybe it really had been two hundred years.
Two hundred and ten. He tried not to think about it. But these oxidized remnants, brittle bones wrapped in tissue-paper clothes, they had been here for a long, long time. Frozen in time where they'd died in a flash of atomic fire. He silently passed a row of cadavers dressed in their Sunday best, making his way over to the wide steel door that led to the kitchens. They grinned up at him blindly as he stifled a sigh and adjusted his grip on the rifle. Squinting into the murk beyond the threshold. A labyrinth of pipes bolted to the low ceiling, leading to a series of industrial sinks. Faucet hoses hung in a row, dripping irradiated water with inexorable rhythmic sureness. Like the exposed entrails of a desiccated steel beast.
Something clattered. The clumsy crunching of bootsoles on loose glass. Jack ducked low and padded across the wax-stripped linoleum floor. Heel-toe, trying to keep his silhouette small. Hunched between rows of dull aluminum fryers and battered coolers. Like it wouldn't be a fucking turkey shoot for an intruder if they rounded the swinging double doors to the store room before he had managed to cross the room. The ground was littered with debris, shreds of yellow newspaper and silver serving foil rattling around his ankles in swirling eddies like dead leaves. The tile was pocked with ragged holes of various size, black and lumpy, the laminate marred by a dozen cooking fires. An empty can of Pork'n'Beans clinked across the floor as it brushed his boot. He stopped cold, lowering himself to a crouch. Feet and ankles really starting to ache now. He hugged the butt of the rifle to his shoulder and swept the skeletal iron sight along the passageway. Beyond the translucent plastic windows of the twin doors, a single fluorescent bulb threw hard shadows against a stack of rust-eaten steel vats. He straightened up, still straining to hear. There was no other sound besides the faint metallic flickering of the ancient light ballast. He pushed through the twin doors into a concrete washroom. Grimy mops padded at the handle with packaging tape, frayed adhesive rendered black by filthy, tired hands. The dangling mop heads brought forth images of a raider camp in the Concord woods, desiccated heads in a ghastly row. He shuddered and stepped over a coil of hose, listening and pressing slowly against the half-open steel exit door.
Grey steel clapped against his forehead. A white flash, room suddenly askew. Jack gritted his teeth, hand instinctually rising to clasp the side of his skull. The rifle hung slack in his other fist. The door swung wide, a massive form filling the blinding frame of sunlight. Hulking and bristling with metal. A gauntleted fist struck him center mass, winding him. He doubled over, wheezing, his rifle swinging free by its tattered sling. He felt for his pistol, fingers scrabbling for purchase, as a boot rose to meet him. Leg sheathed at the shin in corrugated aluminum, the kind they used to use for tool sheds and budget housing. Lengths of steel rebar askew at every angle. Brutal and effective. A size fifteen steel-toe connected with his gut like a box truck. He rolled over onto his back, gasping but not really breathing, sucking air and clutching at his holster. Please god please fucking fuck. Get the clasp open, get the gun up before this freak knight in roofers' armor decides to finish the job. He glanced upward through a fog of pain and paused.
His assailant stood an easy eight-foot-plus, green-skinned and broad as a Corvega. It held a length of nail-studded plywood as long as Jack's leg. The flickering light from the hall behind him illuminated the reddened eyes. Intermittent and fleeting glimpses into slitted pools of madness. He raised the pistol, cocking the hammer back as the Pip-boy beep-beeped cheerily for him to readjust. He lowered the sights slightly and squeezed the trigger. The weapon bucked in his fist, barking hot fire a dozen times, brass clinking into the grimy drain below the hanging row of mops. Jagged dark holes stitched the unadorned mass of scarified muscle across the beast's torso. Tendrils of black blood oozing from the taut green tissue. More like candle wax than the red spray of blood that typically resulted from pegging a raider. The armored giant staggered back, loosing an inhuman bellow from its ragged, lipless mouth, teeth gnashing like tombstones. It clutched at its chest and lowered its gaze, piercing him with animal eyes. Only hate lay behind the constricted black pupils.
"Stupid human! You are weak." It straightened and hoisted its club as Jack scrambled backward, empty magazine clattering across the pocked concrete. The thing came at him like a wall of flesh and steel.
"Your kind will die with you. The Commonwealth is ours!"
Jack slapped a fresh magazine into the pistol and loosed a trio of rounds into the beasts knee. It howled again and clutched furiously at its leg as Jack crammed the 10mm back into its holster, grasping the splintered wooden stock of the rifle and bringing the stubby black barrel up to bear. Marigold light enveloped them for a fraction of a moment, filling the closet like a flashbulb camera. The monster collapsed to its knees, sinking to the cement with a groan. The smoldering hole in its cheek didn't bleed, even after it struck the floor face-first with a shudder. Jack stood shakily and brushed himself off. He stepped through the thin tendril of blue smoke and out into the stark overcast glow of the Commonwealth found a concealed spot a block north and set up a temporary camp. Leaning against a broken jersey barrier and exhaling a thin puff of nicotine smoke. The tobacco had been jostled about in his hip pouch during his encounter, so he had to hold it at the right angle. When his mind strayed, it tumbled out onto his lap in ragged shreds of black and yellow-brown, eliciting a soft curse. He shook his head, then winced, nestling back against the cool, rough concrete and cupping his swollen forehead in his hand, pressing the supple leather of his glove against the bruised flesh. His Pip-Boy had identified his attacker as a "super mutant", after some fiddling with the knobs and buttons that studded the surface of the wrist-mounted computer. Some sort of mutated humanoid, initially developed by the military and evolved over centuries to rise to the challenge post-nuclear life. Brutal and unfettered by intellect or advanced problem-solving skills. Raw, unadulterated strength, carelessly patented two centuries ago by none other than Uncle Sam. Jack drew on the crooked cigarette and exhaled the smoke with a tired sigh. There was more to this post-war Boston than met the eye. He was a stranger here. A relic of a gentler age. The rest of this world had a considerable evolutionary head-start on him, it seemed.
He flicked the yellow cigarette butt into the pitted dirt of the median and stood, retrieving his rucksack from its makeshift rebar peg. He ducked into the dim sunlight from beneath the drooping orange tarp, turning an eye upward to the cloud-smeared sky as he adjusted his leathers. His gloved fingers paused briefly as they brushed the bolt studded padding on his right shoulder. An ill-gotten raider camp souvenir. He cracked his knuckles and worked the bolt of the rifle, brass checking it. A glint of brass from a .308 cartridge, like soft gold in the stifled midday light. Satisfied, he swung the rifle up over his shoulder and set out along the ruined highway towards Diamond City, the hushed crackling bars of Chopin's No.2 Nocturne drifting softly ahead of him along the tarnished blacktop.