A man's voice came over the intercom.
"You'd kill an innocent man in cold blood? I have an offer for you that you might be interested in. Board the monorail, and come to Nuka-World. We'll talk."
He spoke to an empty room.
The last Gunner crawled away from me, leaving a trail of blood as he went. He was muttering desperate pleas for mercy, begging me to spare him. The usual.
He had a knife at his belt. I leaned over him, plucked it from its sheath, and planted it at the base of his skull. Bullets were more valuable than he was. Poor boy twitched before he shit himself and died.
I stood on a section of overpass, standing sentinel at the base of the mountains that surrounded the Nuka-World theme park. From there, I could look over the whole area, take in the whole park in a single glance. It was night, and the park lay shrouded in a darkness penetrated by a few dim lights at its base.
Raiders.
I couldn't tell in the darkness how many there were. I didn't care. The dead man had said hundreds. I'd killed hundreds of raiders. I fingered the grip of my revolver lightly, letting the coarse material send a shivering sensation through my skin that made my breath catch in my throat. I'd killed thousands.
Maybe these would be different, maybe they were a tougher breed than the whacked-out pussies in the Commonwealth. There was a thought to light a fire in the cold. Maybe, after all this time, I'd meet my match. Someone tougher than me, someone meaner. A real son of a bitch to throw me to the dirt and kick me while I was down. Someone that would kill me; someone that could kill me.
But then again, the lights only covered part of the park. Nearly all of Nuka-World was still dark, as empty as the day after the bombs fell. If they couldn't even take their own backyard, they wouldn't be able to take me. I wasn't sure if the thought relieved me, or disappointed me.
Fuck. Maybe a little of both.
Laughter broke the dense silence of isolation. It sounded like me, but I don't remember laughing.
I was going to go down there and try to murder all of them. And maybe, if I was lucky, I'd die.
I didn't.