CHAPTER 1: DAWN

The crows, sitting on the now defunct telephone wires, caw for the morning sunrise. Its devastating golden beams of light stretch across the wastes with an unrelenting ferocity, driving the mutated cockroaches nearly as big as two pairs of shoes, back into their dark hiding, only to rise again during the night. On the side of the torn road, next to an abandoned nuclear powered car, lays a Raider, a lone, self satisfied, everyday Raider.

He puts his hand over his face trying to block out the glimmering rays of light, warming his body and blinding his sight, as he gets up he's both happy and surprised, not a single living thing in site and he has all of his equipment intact. As he pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his back pocket with his other hand and leans against the nuclear car, he puts his hand down, now that his eyes have adjusted to the light. Minutes go by as he keeps dragging on his cig and he can't help but feel like this day, even though how beautifully it had started, will end just as it always does, with less ammo and more radiation sickness.

In the wastes, it wasn't common for people to survive and even more uncommon for them to be survive reasonably well, especially alone. But the wastes had never bothered Daniel, people called him a Raider for what he had done in the past, for what they expect him to do, for what they fear he's going to do but the fact of the matter for him is, he's just trying to survive like everyone else, even if it meant that he had to do more drastic things to accomplish everyday life. It wasn't that he hated people that kept him away from the many small towns, small cities and plenty of other municipalities covering Maryland, or, at least all those places within the area surrounding Washington, no, for him it was something he deemed a higher importance, something no one but him would be able to fathom.

Daniels movement suddenly froze while he was digging through his pack looking for a decent breakfast, and his heart began to flutter briefly, as he had un-mistakenly just witnessed a Death-claw out on the overlook he was perched upon. In an instant he had dropped to the ground, fumbling through his gear to try and reach his rifle. Against a Death-claw, it would probably only annoy or agitate it, but it was the strongest defense he could grab in a moments notice such as this. He had now realized on the bottom of his pack he had a couple grenades stashed away but reaching for them now would surely catch the Death-claws attention.

If he had noticed it sooner he would've been able to hop over the car, run to the forward hill and be gone before the beast had even looked his way, and if it had seen him, it would've taken the beast a good amount of time to come up the hill, over the guard railing, and then up another hill. He had feared he would run into one of these eventually in his travels again, he had been scarred for life when he had witnessed one stumble into his own small town he once had lived in. It was unmerciful with its targets, children, the elderly, the sick; the demented creature even went after dogs and animals. It was a monstrous kind of creature, the ones only thought to exist in nightmares but oh, they existed alright. They stood over eight feet tall with talons as big as a mans forearm and horns twice as long as a bulls, and pale scraggy leather-like skin to top it all off. The only time he had ever witnessed or heard of someone killing one of these things was when it had attacked his town. His father had been one of the town's patrolmen and he and his father had been hiding as it ravaged the block where he lived. When the creature had thought it had mangled everyone with its claws, it began to twist and turn looking closely at the buildings and streets to see if anyone had managed to survive the trauma caused by its appendages. The creature had noticed a straggler on the streets and immediately diverted its attention and with that opening moment, Daniels father was already heading to his safe where he kept a single fragmentation grenade. That was the day Daniel learned the cruel lessons of the waste, no one was spared, not even his father, as he father marched out of his house and eyed the Death-claw without any sense of desperation in his character, and it was almost heroic if it had not been so in vain. Daniels father had the diverted Death-claws attention from the struggling women, and began to charge at Daniels father who had quickly pulled the pin on the grenade, and after it had reached him and grabbed him, pulling him straight off his feet into the air, his father yelled out:

"Run Daniel, run!"

But Daniel was too shocked by his fathers' actions to do anything, he had watched that monster butcher everyone he ever knew and now he saw his father run out to face it, it was like in one of his comic books where at the very end, the hero met face to face with the dragon or whatever fairy-tallish thing that harped on the hero throughout the story until the final match at the end where one would die and one would live. But this wasn't a comic book or a fairytale, such monsters do exist, but such hero's don't live to tell such tales, as with those last words that had come from his fathers mouth had finished, the grenade went off. The sight was abominable for such a young child to witness, his dad sacrificing himself, exploding in a violent and appalling manor with the Death-claw's entire upper half body being torn to pieces by the shrapnel and sudden explosion. But he had saved Daniel, a 13 year old boy.

The memories all flooding through his mind now, it had filled him with aggression and dismay but his aim never ceased from the Death-claws head, he only had one shot before the Death-claw would notice him and then come charging at him, which at that point, fighting would be futile.

A nerve struck in Daniels heart, like a dagger piercing his lungs as he saw the Death-claws head pivot straight to him, from over a hundred yards away. All the sense in his mind said to pull the trigger, but he seemed frozen, it was like he was 13 again in his old town when he had first seen it. But then, something strange happened, the Death-claw noticed him and gave him an aggressive look and then turned away, continuing to tread along it's own path. It was as if it had known of his intentions before hand and said to him with that single look:

"Are you sure you want to do what your about to do?"

Daniel now gasped for air, the whole ordeal seemed to stop his breathing for a while, it was quite an awful shock to start the day off with to say the very least, something that could've ended his life in a heartbeat. Now with calm nerves, and taking a sigh of relief, he leaned back against the car and had a quick quiver run through his body from all the adrenaline of the moment. He grabbed the instamash peeking out of his pack, grabbed some nearby foliage, and threw it into the makeshift fireplace from last night and lit it with the cigarette dangling from his mouth.

As the sun rises and Daniel finished his breakfast, he tries to make out what time it is, for if you remain too long in a single area, there's bound to be more things wander through, things that aren't as noticeable as Death-claws. It is noon and Daniel begins to repack his makeshift bed, food, his weapon, and his cooking instruments, he's not sure of which direction he wants to head but he knows not to follow the direction the of Death-claw. He takes out a dollar coin from his pocket, a trinket he had always kept with him, something his dad gave to him on his tenth birthday, which his dad also got on his tenth birthday and so on. He gave tails to the south, which crosses the path the Death-claw went, but not in the same direction, and north to heads, which would be up the hill on the other side of the road he was camped out on.

He tossed the coin up in the air and caught it as it came down to about his mid chest height then plopped it on the back of his other hand. Before he lifted his hand, he thought about what was in each direction. He'd been nearly all over the wastes now, except south, if he went back north he'd encounter more Waste Landers and settlements, which isn't a bad thing as he needs more resources such as water, as he wouldn't dare risk drinking from any natural reservoirs or anything such as water fountains or fire hydrants, he's heard way too many stories of people leisurely using those sources too often and turning into ghouls and getting radiation poisoning, he would only use those sources as last ditch efforts. But south, he wasn't too sure about what was south, he'd seen a good number of buildings, the remains of raised highways, some patches of dead trees, but the terrain was too rocky and too hilly to be able to tell much from a distance. If he went south, it would be a gamble.

He casually raised his hand, flipping his hand in a way to send the coin into the air catching it, putting it back into one of his zipper pockets, strapping his pack to his back, pulling out his .32 caliber pistol, with a somewhat uneasy look in his face. South it is.