The Tale of Nora Rigg -/- Chapter Three
As I wake up, three things occur to me.
One, I have no toothpaste here, in the post-apocalyptic future.
Two, the odds of me getting toothpaste, a toothbrush, and water without (what I can only assume to be) terrible radioactive particles are slim to... Who am I kidding, the odds are fucking zero.
Three, I absolutely, completely, and without any kind of reservation, cannot stay here.
The bed sucks, the stupid tiny cavern sucks, the stupid uptight robot who I didn't like 200 years ago sucks, and honestly this whole fucking neighborhood with its dead futuristic planning can kiss my ass. There's also that evidence that weird old Mr. DePietro had a lot more going for him than any of us thought. The two bars of gold that each felt like they weighed five pounds, and the two stacks of notes were each good clues, so I feel like even more of an ass.
I can't even look at this stupid fucking doomsday shelter without thinking about the time Nate and I got to look at this place and laughed ourselves silly over how small and stupid of a fallout shelter this would be.
If I stay here for one more fucking minute I am going to burst into tears for only the fifth time in fucking two hours.
So I don't.
Putting through the houses around here gets me solid evidence one of my neighbors was a drug dealer, and five more stimpacs. Also a bottle of Day-Tripper that I definitely did not put into my backpack, and definitely do not plan on taking later tonight once I find a nice secure little cave.
I definitely am not banking on taking that later tonight, getting high off my ass, and avoiding feeling things about how fucked my whole situation is. A part of me feels like making this kind of idiotic decision is a bad thing, but the majority of my inner voices are telling that other part of me to get stuffed on account of both the end of the world and the fact that I am now alone in said ended world.
It's possible I'm not handling this well.
By the time I'm done looking around the town I've got a few more magazines, and a few more bullets. Also a few more chems courtesy of my former good friend, the drug dealer.
So.
Day one after I fixed my goddamn feet I was nearly ready to set out, before I got the stomach rumblies and I realized a few things. I need water. I need food. I need shelter. I would prefer pure water, non-irradiated food, and reinforced concrete shelter. I have a strong feeling that long term I'm not going to end up with any of these. I have some preserved food, and I have a few liters of purified water for now, but none of its gonna last.
I have to move on somewhere and do something. Sanctuary Hills sure as hell isn't going to cut it.
What the fuck am I going to do.
I don't think of it as a question, because it's not a question. I'm near-on completely fucked no matter what I do, so charging blindly ahead it is.
My feet lead me to the entrance to sanctuary, to the idiotic wooden bridge that Nate and I both argued against when it was first made.
Concrete was a better idea, we said. Of course the same wooden bridge being mostly there fucking two hundred ten years later says we were wrong, but in the face of the apocalypse, let it be said that I stuck to my guns, the wooden bridge (with big broken down segments!) is still a dumb idea.
On the immediate other side of the bridge I encounter a dead man, evidently bled out, and a terrifying dog with big patches of fur missing and a tire iron stabbed straight through it's chest. It doesn't take a crime scene analyst to figure out what happened. The dog died first, and the guy was too wounded to make it out, and with no stimpacs...
From the blood on the ground, it wasn't quick.
I still have a lot of questions, why Codsworth didn't hear and come by, why nothing worse did...
I don't want to know. It's better if I don't know. With an effort I turn my head away.
As far as I'm concerned just two weeks ago I was looking at something a lot like this in a pit near that Dunwich quarry.
Fucking Dunwich.
I walk carefully down the road towards the Red Rocket station, sticking to the right and trying my best to not show a profile to anyone against the huge rock outcropping there. No sense in rushing, going fast will just get me tired, and probably noticed by insane irradiated mutant chinchillas and fucking aliens. Who knows.
There is a good time to take stupid risks, and the fuck awful politicians from the pre-apocalypse filled the entire human race's allotment if you ask me.
As I reach the station a terribly familiar, and at this point fucking anachronistic, sounds reaches my ears. The whining of a dog.
Because that's not fucking terrifying.
I've seen exactly one dog since the apocalypse, and it had its jaws buried in some unlucky fuck's thigh.
I should curse less.
Fuck it.
There's a green station wagon rusting in the road, which I press my back against. The dog is probably thirty or forty feet away and I can still hear it's disturbingly deep whine.
It's... quiet out here.
As if I needed more evidence of the end of the world.
I crouch to keep my profile low, and try to be as stealthy as I can. There are a troubling number of mutated plants around me, but thankfully none of them have dropped dry twigs. I look down at my feet to be sure I'm not about to break a twig, and I learn something even more troubling. It isn't that there aren't twigs, it's that horrible future mutant twigs have the consistency of rubber.
Cool, I guess.
The Red Rocket station is missing its D, C, and T. A not insignificant part of me is disappointed that the remaining letters don't spell something dirty. It's a shame reality doesn't share my sense of humor.
And holy shit, a German shepherd the size of a small horse is sort of scrabbling at one of the supports of the Red Rocket overhang. (!) It has a lot more fur than the last dog I found, which may or may not be good. There were a lot of folks that thought radiation would make people all Grognak-y, and there were a lot of folks that correctly pointed out that radiation induced genetic mutation was much, much more likely to just give you four or five different kinds of cancer and allow you the pleasure of wasting away slowly while filled to the brim with tumors.
So far it looks like a bit of both?
The dog continues to scratch at the post, whining in a low tone. Were there nuclear dog treats up there or something?
Do I want to fight a fucking gigantic dog? What does a treat for a post-apocalyptic super dog even look like?
I pop open a pocket and retrieve one of the key supplies I was able to scavenge from Sanctuary Hills, a box of Salisbury Steak, I pull the foil pouch and tear it, exposing the still disturbingly juicy and fragrant contents to the air.
The dog immediately perks up, abandoning the support it was scratching at (are those claws marks in the steel!?) and bouncing happily over to me, tail wagging.
"Hey boy, what are you doing out here all by yourself?"
It continues its happy trot over to me, and sits at my feet, nose twitching constantly at the obvious and appetizing smell of two hundred year old steak. My own stomach twitches slightly as well.
Surprisingly good manners for a wild dog, I catch myself checking for a collar, but why would there be a collar? Like wasteland's got some kind of animal registration board?
"You seem like an okay guy."
I rip a piece of steak off and set it flat on my palm, letting the big fella take a sniff and decide what he wants to do. I've seen feral dogs before, and they wouldn't be wagging their tails like this. With a surprising dexterity, the dog takes the scrap from my palm and scarfs it down.
"Okay then, let's stick together. What do you say?"
The dog sneezes, and looks me up and down. Tentatively I offer my hand, and he gives it another sniff, and then he proceeds to lick all that terrifying Salisbury juice off my palm.
Cool!
I've made my first friend in the irradiated, and probably Chinese, post-apocalypse!
Dog tenses up, and I can feel his growl reverberate in my chest, prompting me to draw my hand carefully away, and bring it to the gun at my thigh.
"Eeaaasy, boy, eeaaasy."
Pleasedontbitemepleasedontbitemepleasedontbiteme-
Except Dog isn't looking at me, he's looking around, at the ground, and he's backing away too.
Then I hear it. Scrabbling beneath the ground, from all around me. I can't place it, three sources, maybe four?
And then the fucking ground explodes into giant mutated naked molerats.
So, you know, neat.
Dog pounces on the one closest to him, crushing it beneath his bulk and sinking his jaws into it's throat. My gun won't pull out of my makeshift holster, which tells me that not only do I not remember my training from those 'end of days' camps very well, but I also can't improvise a holster.
Two rats jump for me, I manage to kick the first one away but the second chomps on my arm, and christ on sale does it hurt. I can feel my bones bend against its bite, and that tiny piece of me in the back of my mind that stays lucid in times like these notes, quite correctly, exactly how screwed I would be if I broke an arm right now.
The rat manages to knock me on my ass, but thankfully the time it spends scrabbling at me to do so gives me a moment to fumble my gun out of the holster. I put the barrel to it's side and try to vaguely aim for something important, I pull the trigger three times and am rewarded with blood splashing all over my hand and it letting go of my arm.
Dog has killed two, and is well on his way to number three, while the one I kicked in the head is regaining its wits.
And then time slows down to a crawl.
I'm standing awkwardly in an open air gun range in the Catskills somewhere. Hubby drove, and I fell asleep. My feet are awkward, the gun feels heavy and awkward in my hand, and I love him with all my heart but Nate came back from Alaska a little different than he left and this is one of those things.
He comes from behind me, gently kicking my heels until I've got something vaguely correct going on. He's muttering about police standard positions and mozambique of all things, I'm definitely not following. It's not until he puts his arms around mine and raises the gun for me that I really put everything together.
"Be firm, and consistent. It's a tool, like a hammer or a wrench or a pen, it does only what you tell it to do, so command it like anything else. Line the blade with the notch, keep it firm and steady, then put the pumpkin on the post, and squeeze the trigger."
Of course I'm sitting on the ground now, and I only have one hand on the gun, the other is clutched to my chest and bleeding slightly, still, the principle is the same. The gun barks three more times, and Bitey McBiteface over there has three holes where his face used to be.
The gun shakes in my hand as I jerk around, looking for the next target. A scraping to my right gets a bullet, and before the ejected casing even hits the ground I put another shot into a suspicious bush on the other side of the Red Rocket's lot.
Movement right in front of me brings the pistol back around, but it's Dog. Dog stands up calmly, and slowly, and he walks right over to me. He lays down, putting his thirty pound head gently on my leg, and he whines a bit.
Okay.
Dog is scared.
As the shaking in my gun hands sorts itself out, I realize that this is a reasonable position for Dog to take. I just shot two molerats, I am currently covered in blood, and most recently I managed to murder a suspicious bush and a traffic cone that fell over during the fight.
Dog licks the hand of my injured arm.
"I was right, you are an okay guy."
His ears perk adorably.
"We're gonna be friends," I shift my arm and grimace, "Right after I use another stimpac."
I have a moment of fear, and looking at Dog carefully I ask a very important question.
"Can you overdose on stimpacs?"
(!) I love Dogmeat. I hate that Dogmeat is named Dogmeat. You'll catch on to that pretty quick I think. In any case, my interpretation of Dogmeat is based off a piece of fanart I saw on Reddit, created by a very good artist on Deviantart who goes by the name Tench. The art has since been remove from their profile, but I saved it when I saw it and so everyone knows what I'm referring to please go to | imgur dot com slash a slash XdEaD |
For reference, every non-feral dog encountered in this story, like the ones available for purchase and the attack dogs used by raiders, will all be along this same line. I'm choosing to believe that radiation has made all not-sick dogs awesome.
Also for reference, trying to share a link on this site is very difficult, or I am very stupid, but probably a bit of both.