1
Starving, travel becomes difficult. The lead pipe is heavier than it looks, and you've stuffed the pockets of your jumpsuit and heavy leather jacket with the carryall items of your most recent victim - the jangle of bottle caps and bullets sway-thunk against the top of your thighs. Your boots scuff litter and stones, scatter dust-bellied breezes. You might as well be walking on the bleached surface of the moon. The sun glares at you from every corner, radiating light off boulders, wreckage, things you can't parse one from the other, small bright glints of plastic and glass and natural mineral in the dirt. The first puddle of water you find is cradled placid in a green-black scab beside a pitted cement path; it smells like the underside of a coolant tower, and the scent is warm in your face.
You had tucked the empty plastic bottle down the front of your jumpsuit, and now dig it out with a hand gone bloated and red, elbow creaking. You'd been walking with that hand swaying down in a lope, blood collecting in your fingertips, circulation less than par your entire thin, computer-glow life. The water melts the lip of the bottle, plastic curdling even as you withdraw it.
Fuck.
By sundown, you've done nothing but stare at the Pip-Boy fused to your arm. The arm that carried the lead pipe. The arm that had kept the pipe balanced over your shoulder. The arm, which you had not taken the time to study, on which there was a Pip-Boy, on which there was a screen and below that which lay a compass, on which there were small, hardly noticeable, triangles. Triangles which, once you consulted your Pip-Boy's user manual screen, were identified as significant collective signals of transference involving ardonal salinity, molecular reverb, exchange. Triangles that pointed to gathered biomettic signatures and measured the clash of particles at set distances to determine functionality.
Mammals, and the salt in their blood.
Robots, and the signal in their veins.
Life, and the noise of it.
Collectively, in triangles. You choose the brightest triangle, the nearest structure, and in the dark, swish thunk rattle against the top of your thighs, you walk.
s
The shack is nothing more than a door propped up against a collapsing wall, tin slat scales exposing wood ribs. You follow the light through the clear indifferent dark of nightfall, bright wet yellow streaks in your vision, nestled between leaning mounds of rubble that perhaps an initial nuclear blast had shoved up along this road like a pile of blankets shoved up by a waking toddler. There is music within the shack, a static burr floating scrape-heavy beside a curse. The signal, radio in its noise, goes sharp and shrieking before a final click announces silence.
fuckin' piece 'a shit
You stand in front of the scarred slat of wood with its dark smear of a doorknob, breathing shallowly. Listening. Your eyes lose focus. Time passes. Your knees go cold and stiff. Your feet feel as if they're sinking into the very molten center of the earth. The voice inside the shack (masculine, nasal, profane) sniffs and rustles and exhales in pleasure.
oh, fu c k - y eah, that's where it i s
You don't know what the exclamation could be in reference to, though it's a tawdry tone of voice you'd once heard a drunk award good liquor. A tone of voice, that, in its victory, you'd heard from a violent mouth. A set of words that might belong in a pornographic script.
tha t's the fuckin' s t u ff
An hour passes. You wait. Blood pools in your limbs. The wind stirs your hair, and you can hear every slide and scrape of each hair follicle one against the next, a roar like a toppling crowd. The door folds in on its hinges.
Your boots are clumsy in their tired shuffle, fingers stiff and unhurried at the knob of the gas lamp propped on the small folding table within.
"Andy - s'that you?" The voice is slurred, affected, unarmed.
"Not Andy," you rasp, voice whistling through your dry throat. The flame of the lamp goes bright, then dims, then dies. There is a man on the cot against the cleanest stretch of wall, a grown man, healthy, but sluggish. Drunk, perhaps. Concussed. Something. You aren't thinking, exactly, because maybe you are going to get killed or maybe you are going to have to kill someone, though really you'd rather the more passive option at this point.
"Well, 'Not Andy'," the voice careens steeply from unaware to bitingly sardonic. "Mind shuttin' the fuckin' door? Gonna let in a bloatfly."
"Water." Your legs are worse than wood - they're petrified. They're stone. Your pipe hits the tabletop with a solid, single tone, as if it too has given up.
Out of the corner of your vision, the man in the shack on the cot with the voice groans, rolls toward the wall. "Told you already, man, I just got the irradiated stuff. You gonna barf, go do it somewhere else."
You look around the shack, in the gloom, moonlight bathing the bleached landscape just outside the drunk tilt of the doorframe. There is a shelf beside a bucket with some foul leaving, and a canvassed circle on that shelf that, when fingered, when taken up and shaken, proves heavy. Your knees can't bend, hip crashing into the wall as your fingers make gummy, ecstatic slaps at the canteen until it's open, tilting your face skyward because the muscle in your jaw and mouth and throat can't work out a swallow, just letting the water sluice down your gullet to splash into your empty belly, hitting every rib on the way down.
fff -
An hour passes. You have raided the shack for morsels of jerky, a few bottle caps, a dry cake of noodles that you bite into with jaw-creaking chews, supplementing the water that you have yet to throw up.
There is a scattering of hypodermic needles just under the lip of the cot that you don't inspect too closely, and the man atop the greasy mattress is as nobody you've ever seen in your entire nineteen years of miserable animation. Here you expected all encountered in this wasted landscape to be gaunt, hysterical mimics of people. This man was healthy. This man likely had a career in labor, by the swell of muscle under an off-white, dirt-stained undershirt. Nobody back h - nobody in the vault could boast a career that saw such physical definition, except maybe the cartoon prize-fighters and comic-page barbarians.
The genome aberrant of red hair. You'd always wondered what that looked like, wondered how many generations of in-breeding the vault community would have to go through to see its emergence.
Your blood sugar was going to spike, then crash. You know this, you are preparing for it. Eventually, you think you might sleep. You poke the man twice in the back of the head with your lead pipe, to which there is no cognitive reaction. You could kill him. You could swing. Down. Arm, heavy pipe, soft skull bone, brittle like the eggshells in the anthropology display. Wet, crack, easy. Roll the body off, take a nap.
Something.
You could do it.
"Fuck off - !" the man blurts, scaring an extra ounce of pain into your screaming arms. The man slaps around behind his head and kicks at the wall, a delayed reaction to physical input.
You've dropped the lead pipe, heart hammering against your sternum. Sugar crashing. System over-taxed by strife, hard travel, denial. A nasty shock, just then, interrupting a delicate moment of private, hidden, ugly thoughts. Your body can't digest the food you've given it and keep your limbs mobile at the same time. Before the swimming darkness overtakes you in the faint, knees on gritty wood planks, you do manage to close the shack door, guarding against bloatflies.