I shot them. I shot them until they died, and then I shot them again, again, and again. I shot them until I ran out of bullets, then I fought them with tooth and nail, hand and foot. I fought them until they died. I fought them across the wasteland, across what was once the city of Boston, across the Commonwealth. I fought them over the edge of humanity, and fell with them into the bloody darkness beyond reason.
I fought them until I went insane. This is what happened next.
The man sat shivering and whimpering on the ground, leaning against a garbage can overflowing with decayed refuse carried out of Nuka-World two centuries ago. I fleetingly considered, not for the first or last time, the irony of trash being the most enduring artifact of our civilization. But as the thought entered my mind, so it left, pushed out by suspicion and primitive canny.
He was clutching at his side, pawing at it really, and I caught glimpses of wet blood on his palm. His face was fleshy, but pulled taut in a pallid grimace. His stringy, yellow hair clung to his scalp in damp clumps, undisturbed by the groans and curses that shook the rest of his limp body. By all appearances a man headed quickly to death's door. Of course, the same look could be replicated by some watered-down red paint and a bad case of jet withdrawal.
I looked around the dark terminal, hunting for some hint of deception. Nothing. Nothing but bones. Taking a few steps towards what must have been the ticket counter, I thumbed open the clasp on my holster, took the .44 in my hand. The hefty gun used to be reassuring, used to make me feel like I could take whatever the wastes could throw at me. I fingered the scar that ran along my jaw, chin to ear. Now it was the weakest weapon I dared carry.
"Hey, lady, I could use some help," were the man's first intelligible words since I entered. I turned on him, saw his eyes pointed at me warily. I met them, doing my best to project none of the weary malice that seethed beneath my skin. Whatever this man wanted, whatever he needed, I didn't want to give it to him. I didn't want to spare a stimpak, or some Med-X, or whatever the fuck he was going to ask me for. I wanted to put a bullet in him, and then see if there were any caps in one of the cash registers behind the ticket counter.
"Lady?" He grunted, the question more implied than enunciated. I approached him, my gun held loosely at my side, ready. Ready for what? Was I going to murder this guy because he was pathetic? Yes, I thought. I wanted to. My trigger finger twitched. His pale lips quivered, caught between pain and fear. Fear of me. Good, something in me whispered. He should fear me.
"Who shot you?" I asked. I sounded numb. Or dead. Fuck, maybe I was. The man shook his head, and shuddered a barking laugh.
"Raiders. Goddamn raiders. Thought there were traders… Goddamn raiders," he said. I didn't respond, but dropped to a crouch, my gun slanting casually across my knee. I watched his eyes go from watching me, to watching my gun. The pain must not have been that bad, because I couldn't see it anymore. I must have been some ugly witch, because he was getting scared. Scared, of me. 200 years ago, that might've made me laugh. I didn't laugh much anymore.
He coughed, no blood, and continued. "Up at Nuka-World, there used to be traders. Me and my family, we've got a farm not far from here. We'd do a little trading; good caps in it, you know? But this time, there weren't any traders."
Again, rough coughing. The sound echoed through the terminal, down the dark tunnels that led to Nuka-World.
"They got us, coming off the monorail," he said, not very convincingly. I could already fill in the rest of his story: raiders kidnapped his family, he tried to escape, got shot, made it back here alone, he could pay me if I rescued them. He didn't have much, but I was welcome to whatever he had. I'd heard it many times before. And a couple of times they'd been telling the truth.
"They took us, held us in these cages… like animals. I managed to escape, but when I was trying to get my family free-"
"Shut up," I interrupted, raising the .44 to his head. He shut up. He wasn't so limp anymore. Now he was tense, pain overridden by fear. It was a setup. I knew it, knew it in my bones. It was a setup.
I pried open his mouth with the tip of my gun, and forced it into his mouth, down his throat until he gagged on it. Slowly, deliberately, I pulled back the hammer. When it clicked, the fucker might have pissed himself. He was crying now, not the fake sobs from before, but a steady stream that made his face glisten in the faint light. I'll make him cry, I thought.
"This is a setup. Try to get me on the monorail, try to get me to Nuka-World. That train probably lets off it a building with no exits, some kind of death trap. Lure people there with stories about traders, traders with money. Unless they look like real juicy marks, then they get the sob story, right? Those Gunners I had to kill to get in here, were they with you? Blink once for yes, twice no."
Twice.
"Are any of your friends around here?"
Twice.
"Do you have any idea what I'll do to you if you're lying to me?"
Once. Liar.
"Are they at the other end of the monorail?"
Once.
"Can I sneak past them? Run the monorail empty, then hitch a ride on the second through?"
Twice.
"So you've got some system rigged up. Alright." I pulled the gun out of his mouth, and wiped the thick saliva on his shoulder before pressing the gun against his forehead. He writhed under it, gibbering weak protests of innocence.
"Give me a number. How many are you?" I demanded. My hand didn't waver, the gun was steady. The trigger was so sensitive, all it would take was a little pull…
"At least two hundred, maybe more," he sobbed. He took deep, shuddering breaths, all remnants of his earlier gambit crushed by animal terror.
What he said startled me. It was probably false, although the capacity for deception seemed well beyond his present faculties. But if it were true? A single raider gang, numbering a few hundred strong? They'd be the biggest player in the Commonwealth. Impossible; they'd have conquered half of Boston already, and be marching on the other half unimpeded.
By my best estimate, there were somewhere around six thousand people between Wilmington and Roslindale, or what had been Wilmington and Roslindale. The biggest settlement was Diamond City, and there couldn't be more than eight hundred people living there. I'd never heard of a raider gang with more than fifty guys.
But that was a problem for later. I had to deal with the man beneath my gun.
I shot him and left his body where it lay.
-Fair Warning: I didn't rate it M for nothing. Proceed with that it mind.-
