New Life C1: Trapped In Dumpsterland
I looked up, the shotgun I held moving in unison with my head as I scanned the surrounding area. My eyes were partially blinded by the sun, but I didn't dare block it with my hand. Moves like that were only made by idiots. I had gotten shot doing stupid things like that. Suddenly, I heard it. I jumped up, my feet pushing me off the rocks I had taken cover behind as I sighted my enemy. It was skinny, skeleton like, it was wearing little more than shorts, and as soon as I pulled the trigger, it's fate was sealed. The pellets sprayed from my shotgun, ripping through it's head with ferocity, forcing it's skull and brain to become one in a meaningless mess of blood and gore.
The feral was launched backwards, soaring five feet before hitting a pillar and finally landing. I listened carefully, before twisting to my side and firing off more pellets without even bothering to aim; the feral was quickly deterred by the bullets going into it's chest. It was still alive though, so I fired again. It's head was blown apart, much like the other ferals' had. I quickly went through the pockets that the mutated human had, and found six caps. Four caps on the other.
I kicked the corpses in anger, growling at my misfortune. Damn ferals wasting my ammo. I sighed in frustration and turned around. There she was, on the computer, still trying to hack the damn thing. "How you doing?" I asked, and she sighed in frustration. "Not good. If it weren't for these things resetting when you turn them off, we'd've been locked out long ago." I did another sweep with my gun, listening carefully, then decided I could divert the attention. I looked at the screen, and found she was right: just this time, she had already used up three of her tries, and she wasn't even close to figuring out what the password.
"So, what do you plan on doing if you can't get it?" I asked, listening carefully for the sounds of more ferals. Damn things were more annoying than dog packs, even if they were weaker. She gave a short bark of laughter. "Have you shoot it with that ComShot you've got?" I laughed the same bark of laughter, lifting the Terrible Shotgun I had gotten off that raider merchant that had tried to shoot me in the back. "That'd probably cause more problems than it'd solve. What about lockpicking it?" I remarked, following up with a question. She gestured to the lock on the door, and I saw that it had eight broken bobby pins in it, and she had somehow broken the whole thing. "Great. Well, I guess you'll just have to keep going at it."
She set her head in her hands as if she had a migraine, and I set a small box of mentats down, along with one of the bottles of purified water I had. She thanked me and quickly took a couple, before returning to the computer. Meanwhile, I reloaded the Combat Shotgun that she had so effectively called the "ComShot" and left the room, listening for more ferals as I searched the immediate room for barricade materials. After all, it didn't seem like we were going to be leaving for quite some time.
Suddenly, I heard them coming. I whipped around, this time holding the Chinese sword that I had looted off some old corpse I had found. There were two, one was a roamer. I hated roamers, tougher than normal ferals yet just as stupid. I held the sword out and swung a good strike at the first one, the normal feral. I slash cut off his whole arm, but he simply thrust his head forward and gave me a good hit to my noggin.
My vision blurred and the roamer was suddenly on top of me, grabbing at my arm and pulling with inhuman strength. Finally, I was out of my daze and I lifted my legs, pushing the roamer just far enough away from me to give me time to grab my 10mm pistol. I raised it and fired, unleashing the entire magazine on the feral and sending him to the ground. I held my arm tightly, groaning at the pain. He had probably cacked a bone or something, with was definitely not something a stimpak could heal just like that, even with it's unnaturally strong healing abilities.
Great. Another trip to the doctor. I pulled myself, testing the use of my left arm, and found that I could use it somewhat shakily. Still, it'd be better to stick to the one handed weapons, and to pump myself full of stimpaks when I needed to move something heavy.
Suddenly, there was a cry of triumph from the room behind me. I rushed to her side, and found that the door was opening. I instinctively raised the 10mm I was still holding, but it was unnecessary. I looked at the veritable oasis within; armor, weapons, ammo, it had nearly everything. I rushed inside and immediately began to run through everything.
Almost all of it was junk, broken, rusted, incomplete, but I was surprised to see that a lot of it was actually easily fixable. "Those idiots… All you have to do is salvage the air hoses from this suit here and connect it to the back and get some kind of gas canister to fill, and it will work perfectly!" I muttered to myself as I ran between three different suits of power armor.
She chuckled at my excitement, and that snapped me back to reality. I turned to snap an insult at her but instead charged at her, pushing her to the side and firing my pistol at the charging Feral Reaver. "Fuck!" I screamed in exasperation, watching as the Reaver basically absorbed the bullets. I slammed the console just by the door, and it quickly closed, denying the reaver access, if only for a few seconds.
I quickly lifted the Terrible Shotgun from my back, aiming at the door and waiting for it to open. It opened, and as I expected the reaver charged forward, but I didn't allow it to attack me. Without pause, I fired the shotgun five times, tearing the Reaver up.
But it was still alive somehow, and I was had to fire yet another round into it's head to finish it off. I continued to aim at the supposedly dead ghoul for several minute, waiting for any kind of sign it might still be alive. Thankfully, I finally determined it wasn't, I quickly closed the door again.
I turned to her, and she immediately got the message. Over the next hour, we barricaded the door, making sure that only high level explosions such as several rockets would be able to breach the wall. Then, she tended to my wounds, most specifically my hurt arm.
Luckily, nothing had cracked, just one of the muscles had been stressed out a bit much. It was nothing serious. So, I began to pass the time by putting together the various weapons, armors, bots, and other assorted junk throughout the series of rooms.
As I searched through all of these, I found no sign of an exit, which was depressing; there was almost no chance that we'd be able to fight our way back to the surface the way we had come. If only we had brought Fawkes! The giant super mutant could have torn his way through the ferals like nothing, being even tougher than super mutant overlords!
Even if his zen mindset got annoying sometimes, it was a hell of a lot more preferable than dying here! I stopped moping about not bringing Fawkes and finally resumed my simultaneous search for an exit and for junk that I could turn into useful things. I saw at least three dozen things I could have turned into functioning robots with nothing more than a days time, and yet there was it was all dumped in this giant government trash bin.
Even if it weren't for the Enclave, I could tell that Americans were just plain wasteful to have let all this just sit around rotting. Well, I would need at least a week to build robots good enough to let us through the Ferals, and even then that wasn't assured.
Finally, after collecting about four hundred pounds worth of things in a giant tarp, I slowly made my way back to our 'base camp' in the trash can of the American government. It was in a small 'clearing' near where we entered, where you could walk on the ground instead of junk, and she was sitting by a fire she had apparently made, cooking what looked like radroach meat.
As I approached, I saw it really was radroach meat, which repelled me greatly. But, I was hungry, and radroach meat was first on our list for the "the order in which we eat food if we need to ration" so, radroach it was! I approached and she offered the radroach meat, and I quickly tore through the meat, hating the taste but forcing myself to eat it.
Radroaches didn't really have any real meat, it seemed more like some kind of solid bug-juice or something. In any case, it was absolutely horrid to the tongue and the stomach. I remember when I had first came out of the vault, for the first week, I puked every time I tried to eat radroach meat. Then, for the rest of the month I gagged and nearly threw up. It wasn't until I had been periodically eating radroach meat for about three months that I could eat it without nausea, and now it was simply a horrid taste.
We ate in silence, until finally I had eaten three of the things. "Where'd you find them?" I asked, because I knew she would have hit me if I tried to eat more than two in one meal on normal circumstances. "They were just scurrying around, so I killed a few." She said. Great.
That meant that we'd be eating nothing but Radroach for quite a while. Why did she always have to be so careful about food supplies, money, ect ect? It was just so annoying having her watching my every move. Only place I was free was with my own money, my weapons, and any junk I wanted to mess with.
She was good with medicine, math, computers, and people; I was good with the other things, like shooting, fixing stuff, and muscle work. Of course, if you wanted shooting things, you should get Jericho or Paladin Cross; if you wanted muscle work, the obvious choice was Fawkes; really, I was the only mechanic type guy among our circle of friends.
I put these thoughts out of my mind and finished my 'food', before looking at the barricaded door. I didn't turn back to her. "So, have you got a plan?" I asked, listening to the sound of the ghouls attacking the barricade. Even if they did that relentlessly, it would take weeks. "I give those robots you said you could build some AI?" She asked. I thought about that. I could make some decent AI, but it was still basic stuff, like what they put in protectrons. She could probably make AI that was better than mine. I accepted her proposal via two words: "All right. But, I want to go to sleep, my arm is killing me."
I laid my head on the blanket behind me, glad that she was smart enough to bring these. Blankets sure were useful in situations like these. Soon, my eyes were getting droopy, and my mind was beginning to get foggy. Then, suddenly, I was asleep, and my mind wandered in a lucid area close to a dream. The mind was foggy, he was walking, and then, he was falling down a deep black, murky hole.