Dust and dirt and sweat and blood. Sometimes, it's all there is. Sometimes, she forgets there has ever been anything but red-brown grit blowing in her eyes, and the great howling of the wind through the barren wastes. Sometimes, she feels so alone, she forgets what she is. A woman, a daughter, a friend, a human being. She hasn't spoken aloud in so long her ears ring with her own silence. But she knows if she were to open her mouth and address the empty, forgotten wasteland, whether to scream and curse, or simply to mutter encouragement to herself, she would soon go mad. What was it she learned as a child, whimpering in fear, clutching the bed sheets over her head? Ah, yes. Never speak to your phantom. Never, ever. She remembers whispering to the dark room. Anxious queries met with heavy, ominous silence. The terror would increase tenfold. Never address your phantom openly; to do so is to acknowledge its existence.
Her body is rank with sweat and filth. Her clothing is worn as thin as paper, torn and stinking, the same red-brown as the dirt that cakes her body. Her skin aches, and sores fester under her layers of blood and grime. Now and then she swims, paddles silently through a river or creek of stagnant, oozing green water. Water so filthy that pollution gleams iridescent on its surface, and if she happens to touch her feet to the ground, they will be sliced open on the mounds of rusty scrap metal and broken glass that sit at the river bottom.
She doesn't swim often, because as good as the water feels on her sweaty, muddy skin, once wet, she will attract bloat flies from miles around. Great, stinking insects that practically drip bacteria.
So she remains filthy until the dirt begins to peel in itchy layers from her sun baked skin.
It was a while ago now that she cut her hair off. It had been matted and dread-locked with blood, dead insects caught in it, dried mud and dead skin flaking onto her shoulders. Her scalp had been greasy and crusted over with scabs, throbbing with sores. She had shorn her head bald.
Worse than the filth is the hunger. She is faint from it. Around midday she will begin to sway and ache. The back of her neck throbs. She is so hungry it drives her mad. She thinks about eating constantly. Even fantasizes about chewing the bark off of the trees. She can't remember what it felt like to have preferences where food is concerned. She will eat anything that won't kill her. Rats, roaches, flies, twigs, scorpions, and wild dog, when she can get her hands on it. And still there is always this gnawing ache in her stomach. She craves for the strangest things, dried cranberries, turkey, and lemon pound cake.
The very thought of steak is enough to start her eyes watering and saliva will fill her mouth.
The heat is just as bad as the hunger. Sweat pours from her by what seems like the gallon. Her clothing is soaked with it. Sweat used to run in her eyes until she couldn't see, until she ripped a strip of fabric from her shirt, and tied it around her brow. When she is out there on the barren, dusty hills, with no trees or rocks for shade, it feels as if she is being baked inside an enormous oven. The air ripples above the ground, and she begins to see things. The sun beats down, frying her skin, so bright that she must squint through her lashes or she would go blind.
It can't have been more than a year and a half, maybe two, since she left the vault. But it seems like ages. Like an eternity. Like the memories of her childhood have been created by her own mind to cope with the reality of life in the wasteland.
The first time she killed still burns in the back of her mind. Still comes back to her at night.
It was nothing like she'd thought it would be. Oh, she knew it would come down to killing eventually. She had prepared herself for that day, over and over. Mentally strengthened her resolve as best she could. She had only a .32 caliber pistol, with three rounds of ammunition. That, and an army issue combat knife, the blade rusted over, and the handle wobbly.
She had killed once with it before. A feral dog, wild eyed, frothing at the mouth, had leaped at her from atop a junked car. It had gone for her throat, but she had thrown up an arm to shield herself, and it's jaws fastened around her wrist instead, and shook, blood and spittle flying everywhere. She had buried her knife deep in its throat, purely out of instinct, and vomited over and over afterwards, clutching her mangled wrist, with the stinking body of the dog lying behind her, the feces of its fellows matted in its patchy fur.
It was not three days later that wound grew infected. It swelled and felt hot to touch, the skin turning red around her wrist. She had come down with a fever, shaking and goose bumped in the one hundred degree heat. She had dreamed strange things. Childhood friends and raging grizzly bears, her dead mother, the sky turning purple. She stumbled across the wasteland in a daze, taking refuge beneath the shade of the crumbling overpasses. She guesses the only reason she was not preyed upon by wasteland animals in her weakened state was that they could smell her sickness.
On the fourth day of the fever, starving and parched with thirst, she had begun to hallucinate.
she saw a rusty and dented refrigerator, in the middle of nowhere, empty plains of dust on all sides. It was surrounded by five people. Two of them were horrible, terrifying beings, rotting, nose less, undead creatures. The other three were normal people, dirty and clothed in rags. The rotting ones beat the healthy ones with lead pipes, until they lie still.
Then they turned to her.
"the water is ours" they said, in rasping, inhuman voices.
She had raised her pistol.
Then they both lie dead in a heap, crimson liquid pooling out around them, staining the dirt red.
It wasn't until the next morning that she realized it had not been a hallucination. Then she stripped the bodies, gleaning from them several stimpaks, a box of microwaveable noodles, three bottle caps, and a half empty bottle of pills labeled rad-X. She took the water from the refrigerator, what they had died defending, and left.
She applied a stimpack, ate the noodles dry, drank two bottles of water, curled up on the floor of a wrecked car beneath the overpass, and slept for three days straight.
And that was the first time she had taken life. Not just one, but two at once.
She had spent many nights in fear after that, terrifying images of rotten zombie faces, mouths agape, looming at her filled her mind.
It hadn't been too long before she realized that the rotting, raspy voiced people were among the least menacing creatures she would come across in the wasteland.
There were raiders, perverted sadists, not worthy of the title human. With their spiked jewelry and wild hair, and lairs full of human body parts; arms, legs, and decapitated torsos.
She had had a desperate battle with a group of four raiders on an overpass over the river not long after the zombie incident. She had barely come out alive, had only made it because one of her bullets flew wide and hit the gas tank of an army supply truck, starting a chain reaction of explosions. Six abandoned cars had blown up, a series of deafening booms.
After what seemed like hours she had gone back behind the raider barricade, and found the bodies blackened and torn limb from limb. She had been violently, explosively sick. Then she taken as many of their weapons as she could find.
She had brought away from that fight a Chinese pistol, a 10mm pistol, a hunting rifle, and a pool cue.
Weapons that she had all but wept in gratitude over, and had long since discarded.
Out in the wastes there is no such thing as sentimental value. She must constantly sort through her meager belongings, constantly discard the things that have the least use to her.
She feels like a skeleton already sometimes, dry and bare and silent, swept across by the hot, dry wind and loved by no one.
In two years she has never come across a safe place, never found anywhere to rest where there is nothing waiting until your eyes close to tear your guts out.
She has not truly conversed with another person in all that time.
At night she sleeps with one eye open, clutching her shotgun tight.