I'm going to tell you a little story about time spent in the Capital Wasteland. I have many like it (and some that are worse), but this one…this one will let you know precisely why DC is considered one of the worst parts of the wasteland.

As usual, the message popped up on my pip-boy at a most inopportune time. Said moment was while I was cowering behind a tin shack as Jericho traded shots with a small band of raiders.

"Help me! I was exploring a house in Minefield and fell through the boards! I'm trapped in the basement, and I think one of my legs may be broken!" the rather nasal voice squeaked." If you help me, I'll share some of the loot I found."

Jericho shot me a rather dirty look, as if to say (or wheeze, in his case) "now it not the time." I sighed, checked my assault rifle, and decided to "spray and pray," as they say. I heard a yell of "I'm hit!" and another of "you'll pay for that!" as a splatter of gunfire rippled across the tin siding of the abandoned shack.

"Kid, d'ya have a grenade?" Jericho asked. I nodded and handed over several plasma grenades. He turned, muttered something about having to do all the work, and tossed one over the side, in the general direction of the gunfire, whoops and yells.

The raiders' various cries were cut off by the sound of an explosion. The blue-green fire lit up the area, and I soon found pieces of wayward youths raining from the sky (they fact that I, myself am a wayward youth of similar nature is unimportant). Jericho lit up a smoke, took a drag, and blew smoke in my face. "There ain't much money in bein' good, kid, but there IS a helluva lot of trouble." He took another drag. "If I'm gonna keep putting my ass on the line for you, you gotta make it worth it."

I thought for a moment, then clapped him on the shoulder and said "Jericho, if we help that woman out of that basement, she will, out of gratitude, pay us. You get to keep whatever she gives us." He (surprisingly) thought for a moment.

"And if she gives us junk?" he asked.

"If she gives us junk, we kill her and take anything worth taking. Sound good?"

"Hell yeah! Sounds great, kid. Good to see you're not pussyfooting around."

"Then let's go, before she gets out herself."

I tracked her radio signal with my pip-boy. The signal was new, but seemed to be on an automatic, repeating loop. My suspicion aroused, I told Jericho to wait outside in case it was an ambush.

"Kid, if it's an ambush, you'll want me there."

"Slavers have been sighted in this area. It won't do us any good if we're both caught, and I'll need you to bail me out if they catch me." He snorted, grudgingly agreed to wait outside ("Don't run off with the goods, kid, or you'll regret it.") and promised to keep a look-out.

As soon as I stepped inside, I knew it was a trap. Was it the narrow corridor, with the two doorways blocked off? The bloody skull resting on the table at the end? The odd smell suffusing the hallway? No. No, it was the fact that, as soon as the door closed behind me, it locked, and I was unable to pick it. I heard a click, saw a canister jump through a gap in the blockade, into the corridor, and thought 'so this is how it ends.' Instead of fire and shrapnel tearing through my vital organs as expected, gas exploded out of the canister. I felt dizzy, my vision blurred, and I fell for what felt like forever in the comforting and soft embrace of unconsciousness.

I awoke with a dry mouth and a slight headache in a dark cave. My armor, my weapons, my chems – everything was gone. I tried to check my pip-boy, but it didn't reveal much. Location was nothing but static, but at least the light still worked, albeit weaker than usual. I worked my way around the cave, trying to find an exit. I didn't enter through the cave roof, that was certain; low-hanging stalactites crowded every inch of it.

I stumbled on a skeleton, a red light shone down and I felt pain, as if something was gnawing on my flesh. I stumbled away, and a note fluttered down before me. I picked it up, looked around, listened for sounds, heard nothing, and read it.

ARE YOU PREDATOR OR PREY?

I looked around, startled, but nothing came rushing out of the darkness to attack. Nothing, loads and loads of nothing, just darkness and silence, and I was afraid.

I felt the familiar kick of adrenaline, felt panic try to overtake me, and stalked from side the side, all around the cave, trying to find some way, any way out. I was, eventually, rewarded with a short, narrow tunnel that dead-ended, but not before several more notes had fluttered down and an equal number of bites had been taken out of me. At the end of the tunnel was another woman. My hopes soared when is aw her, and crashed when she didn't seem to be breathing. I checked her for a pulse, found none, tried to ignore the words PRETTY LITTLE FEAST carved into her flesh and the strange hunger I felt.

After this rather grisly discovery, a doorway opened up at the end of the tunnel. 'I've died,' I thought. 'I've died and gone through a Purgatory of some sort.' I opened the door, and found myself in hell.

Well, not really. I was inside an identical cavern, except I was literally swimming in blood, just, blood, everywhere. I felt like I was perpetually drowning. My lungs were on fire, I couldn't breathe, they were full of blood but I wouldn't lose consciousness. Somehow, I could see in it, through it, as well as I could with water.

That's when I noticed the bodies. All of them were naked, skinless, floating at the top, in between the stalactites. They all had my body, and the same basic facial structure. Each body's abdominal cavity had been emptied; the organs had been removed through a small slit, and inside each slit was a token. Collecting tokens from the half-dozen bodies floating (how is this happening they have no internal gases from decomposition they shouldn't be floating when I put my hand in the ribs I feel them all think I might be sick) yielded a copper key.

I found that, after much searching (top and bottom, side to side, where oh where is the exit?) the key opened a small model house, down on the bottom of the cave. The prize inside? A fresh, still-beating heart. Since everything was incredibly dreamlike (or nightmarish; depends on your tastes), I reasoned that whatever place I was in followed dream logic. With this in mind, I ate what was a clearly a still-beating human heart. Yet again, everything went black.