Chapter Four
Dead street.
The vertibird sped through the night sky to the south. It's roaring engines scaring small herds of brahmin whenever it passed over one of their many grazing points between Victoria's former city, and the city that used to lie due south of it. That place, Iowa City, had been home to hundreds of thousands of people before the war, ranging from everyday citizens, to world class doctors at the university hospital. It had been a huge college town, and it's football team regularly appeared on television sets around the nation during bowl games. Bowl games, were a thing that she had always taken for granted.
Merriment and mirth had always filled the stands at the stadium, with fans adorning the colors of gold and black in honor of the team garb. The logo of the team, a sytlized hawk head was emblazoned on every shirt in the crowd, and faces were painted in two hues. Victoria herself had attended a few games at that stadium in question, where she too had worn the colors of the proud college team. That had been over two centuries ago. Now, as she piloted the vertibird towards the city that once played host to cheering crowds and busy night life, her heart began to sink ever downward. She landed the airship just outside of the blasted boneyard that was the city limits, and checked her internal map once more.
It had not just been the initial destruction of the nuclear bombs that had decimated all the structures of the world. Society had fallen apart, quickly, and violently. Men fought each other for food, water, and worse. Subsequent battles had left most of the old world in shambles, and with no proper maintenance all of the gleaming skyscrapers tumbled down to the streets. With no infrastructure, the streets themselves caved in and gave way to the elements. These streets before Victoria, were completely foreign to her. It seemed to her that there had been one of two massive earthquakes in the area after the bombs fell. Land had shifted, streets were broken and completely disjointed from where they should have been. Large sinkholes had also overtaken the land, and the entirety of the largest shopping mall in the area had been swallowed up. Now only the broken corner of a rooftop access could be seen poking out of the foul mire that had eaten up the building.
Victoria unstrapped herself from her seat and went about her task. She had decided that it would be best to gather some first hand intelligence on the people of the wasteland. Upon reading the Enclave's database, she happened to find that a new settlement had risen from the ashes of Iowa City. The new town was called Nicksta, and it housed perhaps Three hundred people at any given time. The settlement of Nicksta was a hub of merchants and travelers that were looking for a place to sleep, or a place to sell some scavenged goods. She could easily fit in with the crowds of survivors with just a few modifications to her appearance.
The first modification was easy. Victoria simply messed her hair up a little, and dirtied her face with some oil and grit from the vertibird. The next was a little more tricky, her clothes were not of this age, and they were not in the typical condition that most articles would be found in. She was able to find a few extra Enclave jackets and pants in the supply chest of the vertibird, and she fashioned from them a dirty and torn jacket that she wore as a makeshift dress. A leather belt around her waist cinched it all together, and within mere minutes she found herself looking the part. She ripped off the badges from the jacket, and put one of the scientist's hats on her head and looked in a reflective surface on the back end of the vertibird. One last look of scrutiny, and she was off.
The doors of the vertibird opened, and Victoria grabbed her large backpack full of supplies as she left out of the airship. The doors clanked closed behind her, and the barefoot girl turned around to make sure they were secured. They made a loud clank again, and she was off. Traversing the wasteland on foot was much different.
Aside from her bloody and violent reintroduction into the living world, and her small excursion into the ruins of Rockwell aerospace, Victoria had been stationary for well over fifty years. She had always powered on every forty to fifty years or so, just to run diagnostics on the vault and to check on her humans. The times between when she walked the halls of the vault, and when she immersed herself into the neverending simulations had grown increasingly shorter with each episode.
She missed interacting with people, that was a certainty now. In this, Victoria was not like a true artificial intelligence, or a mindless robot. Both of which she had been accused of being in her time. It had been her family, her real family, that had convinced her to believe otherwise. She had been truly loved by her Mother and Father, even through her roughest times of childhood, after she had been returned to them. Altered and somewhat... askew, at times. The days of her youth, leading up to the millenium, had been golden times. People were usually friendly, civil towards each other, at the very least they were respectful.
It wasn't until that particularly nasty development sometime back in 1995, that she didn't believe that things would always be so rosey. The day that she herself realized that she was not the same, really not the same as anyone else. For as much as she loved her family, the knowledge of her differences to them made it impossible for her to ignore their constant aging. Victoria had looked at a family picture that year, and the at the family picture from the year before, and had seen the horrible truth of what the future would provide for her. She had reasoned out on that day that she would not die in any natural sense- that had been taken from her. She thought that she would go on never knowing the ravages of time as her family members did.
No, the merciless march of time had affected her. It took her Father first, and then her grand parents. Her Mother, her sister, more and more she lost them, until at last she buried her older brother. At last, she the girl who had been born a normal healthy child, stood stoically at graveside- as a chilling confirmation to the horrors that would await those that were foolish enough to try to attain eternal life. Victoria, or as she was called back then, Vicki, began to learn all too well about time, life, and the inevitable human fate that was death.
Vicki, still a child even back then, knew that there was no such thing as eternal life- there could only be prolonged existence. The ground that Victoria climbed across now reminded her very much of those graveside services, so many centuries ago. The deafening silence of the dearly departed, it was present here too. Even all these years later. She stopped and scanned the horizon as she climbed one last hill that used to be part of an interstate off-ramp.
Victoria flipped her scan data back and forth between infrared light, thermal vision, and her low light level vision sensors. Despite all that she had read about in the Enclave's database, she found herself alone. She hoisted her backpack up on her shoulders again, and continued onward towards the settlement known as Nicksta.
Being alone had become a real problem, and it was likely the reason that Victoria had become increasingly addicted to immersing herself in the simulations within the vault of her own making. There was real misery to be had in real life, but there was simulated happiness to be enjoyed in the dream like worlds of the super computer's programs. Getting away from the simulations, facing the wastelands, maybe it was better for her. It would certainly be better for the wastelanders. There were injustices in the world, and that was one thing that Victoria could fix.
She did not implicitly enjoy killing the men who had murdered the defenseless merchants that she had read about in William Hotchkiss's journal entry, but she did feel a very strong sense of direction and purpose with the collective termination. Victoria felt that it had been a 50/50 chance that men like those from the Enclave would have been the first to find her vault. She had hoped however in all truth, that it would have been several more hundred years before she and her humans were first discovered. That would have given the wasteland time to flourish.
This place, looked like it might never see a healthy blade of grass again. She crossed the mire that she had seen from her vertibird and finally saw the lights of the settlement ahead. Victoria had to be careful with how she approached the settlers, her one initiative was to blend in with the survivors, and learn about the wasteland at the ground level. Hopefully she could obtain new information about the social orders and the societal changes which had taken hold. She clamored over a few destroyed buildings and hollowed out shells of automobiles, and then made her way further into the ruins of the college district. Her attention turned to a burnt out large bus, sitting haphazardly in the middle of a nearby street crossing. Something or someone had made a noise from within the metal wreckage.
"Hello?" She asked, trying to sound friendly. The something or someone remained silent. Victoria scanned the bus with her thermal sensors and spotted two humanoid figures, hunched over on the inside. She calculated that if the two inside the bus were waiting to ambush her, they would have done it by then. Under cover of darkness, they would have taken most people by surprise quite easily. She stepped forward towards the bus, her footsteps echoing on the pavement below as she drew near. "I'm not going to hurt you, you can come out. Come out, and say hi." She said. Her response was an exasperated sounding hiss.
A horrible looking pair of humans, that looked very much like reanimated shambling corpses burst through the windows of the bus and stared down at Victoria. The larger of the two hissed at her again and then backed away from her, while the other smaller one sniffed the air. The small one stepped closer to her, still sniffing and snorting, until it was just a few feet away. The larger one hunched over once more, breathing heavily, releasing it's foul breath into the air. Victoria had not read about this in the Enclave's database, or in Hotchkiss's journal. She held her hand up to the rancid looking creature, palm up.
"Hello.~" She said again to it. It hissed loudly and ducked down from her hand, snapping it's jaws wildly in aggression as it back away from her. Victoria frowned. Her scan of the creature was conclusive- what was before her was indeed a human being. A human being, mutated into what could only be described as the walking dead. Desiccated flesh hung off of the face of the smaller dead faced thing, and it's left eye was purely white. It hissed again and made a guttural sound. "I'm sorry that this happened to you." Said Victoria. The creature leaped towards her with malicious intent.
"Stop!" She demanded, as the smaller creature ran towards her, frantically waving it's broken hands at her in an aggressive display. The other creature followed suit, and let out a loud yell of sorts. The smaller one went to bite Victoria on her shoulder and she quickly dodged it's teeth. Her internal sensors started to flare up, and Victoria could see that all around her more and more creatures were closing in. The larger creature also ran up to her, arm raised up and ready to claw her in the face. "I'll have to hurt you!" Said Victoria, as she brought her hands up in a defensive position.
The larger creature brought it's arm down and Victoria caught it with her left hand, stopping it's momentum dead. The creature was still intent on snapping it's teeth on her face however, and it moved in for the kill. As quickly as she could, Victoria ducked under the horrific person and tried to bend it's arm behind it's back in order to bring it to it's knees. Instead, the stringy flesh of the arm gave way to her minimal amount of pressure and it popped off at the elbow. She inspected the arm and was quite surprised to find that the creature was unaffected by any pain or loss of limb. The smaller creature had meanwhile come running up behind her and had clamped it's teeth around her backpack.
Victoria spun around and leaped into the air, delivering a powerful spinning kick mid-air to the hungry zombie. Half of it's chest went flying off onto the ground, spurting horrible black and green goo as it skidded to a stop. She landed and then spun again on her heels, quickly sweeping the legs out from underneath the larger hostile one-armed corpse. It's knees could not handle the power of her kick, and the creature fell apart at the legs, it hissed and growled as it fell backwards onto the broken pavement. Victoria stood and turned again to face the smaller of the two creatures, and looked on in genuine shock as the creature, with it's chest opened and bleeding, and it's head sitting at an unnatural angle to it's body, advanced on her again.
More hisses and screams filled the air, and in an instant twelve more of the creatures were racing out of the darkness towards her. She raised her fist up to stop the advance of the broken smaller creature, and was taken by surprise from behind by the legless one-armed corpse behind her. It grabbed her right ankle and pulled itself towards her leg, snapping it's jaws and snarling. She brought her right leg around, swinging it up towards the smaller off balance creature, smashing the two of them together in a gooey mess. The two fell into each other, writhing and still hissing, with broken skulls and missing limbs. Victoria shook her right leg violently, to dislodge the creatures hand hold on her ankle. The arm finally let go, and it flew up into the air, landing at the feet of the advancing hordes. The twelve had become twenty, all within a matter of seconds.
Victoria calculated that she could likely withstand an attack from these creatures, so long as they weren't any more powerful than a normal human being, but with twenty or more hostile creatures, it was very possible that she might be torn apart. That would be very annoying, and worse, if she were constantly to have her body chewed upon by the hungry zombies it would make self repair very difficult to complete. She weighed her options and then in the blink of an eye, turned on her heels and took off at full speed towards the glow of the lights.
The horde followed her, hissing and scrambling over the burnt out trucks and cars that littered the street that they and Victoria now raced down. Victoria ran at a speed far too high for the creatures to keep up with. She hopped over an entire semi trailer with little effort and continued onto the pavement without any loss of momentum. At a top speed she could reach above forty miles per hour, enough to outpace any human being. Human beings got tired of running, but as Victoria turned back to see, the corpses did not lose energy so easily. They scrambled and fell over the trailer, sloshing around on the ground before returning to their feet and continuing the chase.
She turned and raced towards the lit up sky, near the ruins of the college district. Victoria could not understand why these particular threats had not been spoken of in the Enclave's database, and she began to wonder what other mutations might still be unknown to her. Perhaps even, there were worse things in the wasteland besides the ever present deathclaws? Her bare feet smacked against the pavement in rhythmic bursts, and her backpack rattled with her movement, but above all else the screams and hisses of the masses behind her was what filled the night air. Victoria rounded a bend, and came across the charred and half eaten remains of a human being.
She ran by it and quickly stored the passing image to her memory, taking in all of it's details as she continued her escape. It had been a young woman, just into her teenage years- probably not much older than fifteen or sixteen years of age. That was a very troubling detail, if someone so young had been left out in the wastes to die like that. She stopped in her tracks and turned back to the corpse of the dead girl. Somewhere, someone in the wasteland- and probably nearby, mourned the death of the young girl.
The hisses and screams came around the bend too, and soon the horde would be upon her. That didn't seem to matter as much now, not to that remaining human part of Victoria's brain. She walked back to the girl and looked into her opened and dried eyes, that stared back past her, somewhere off into distance. Victoria knelt down and took off her back pack, and opened it's main pocket. She pulled from the pack a very ornate blanket, a blanket that had been presented to her some two hundred years ago, and she placed the blanket over the corpse. She slowly and carefully began to wrap the girl in the blanket and then tied off the ends. Victoria rose to her feet just in time to see the first zombie like human come running down the street.
Her hope had been to avoid violence altogether. To only administer physical pain to those factions that perpetuated suffering in the wasteland, to only terminate those who themselves had terminated indiscriminately. Even these poor monsters running at her, they had once been human beings. What had happened to them was not their fault, but in the end they too would have to be removed. It seemed to Victoria, that the wasteland would not allow for peaceful resolutions, for an escape route for anyone. Whether they ran from tyranny, or from monsters, the people of the wasteland would never get away fast enough.
Victoria reached into her back pack once more and pulled out an antique from days gone by. It's shining barrel had an enscription on it that read, '2049 national champion, Vicki Mitchell.' An ornate design of ribbons was etched into it all the way down to the spinning chamber of the old nickel colt. She gripped the gun by it's white ivory handle grip in her right hand, and spun the chamber open. She reached once more into her bag and pulled out a number of bullets, placing the heavy metal cylinders into the jacket pocket on her makeshift dress. She spun the barrel closed, and brought the gun back up to the advancing twenty corpses.
"I'm sorry." Said Victoria, as she took aim at the first six heads. The loud gun fire blasted throughout the area, and the nickel plated Colt SAA .45 LC, 7.5 inch sounded more like a high speed machine gun than a pistol. It had been customized by a man once honored as the fastest gun in the world, with his own patented coil spring mainspring installed into it. Victoria had won the 2049 shooting competition that had been named after the man, taking home first prize quite easily. The win had left a bad taste in her mouth however, as her cybernetic abilities were a definite factor in her shooting prowess. Her speed had gone unmatched, and her aim was precise. More precise than the android opponent that had gone up against her, much to the chagrin of Robco. Her rate of fire had not decreased with time, nor had her lethal precision.
The first six heads evaporated into a black and green mess, looking like shattered watermelons and balloons. Victoria popped the chamber open again, and reloaded the bullets quickly by dropping the bullets perfectly into the spinning barrel. The reload and subsequent second volley of fire took less than 3 seconds, and six more heads vanished. The hisses and screams were silenced completely, twelve seconds later. One last corpse limped towards her, over the pile of bodies that now lined the street. It had two heads, both snapping furiously and hissing, with two smashed together bodies that seemed to be stuck to each other. Victoria sighed out and emptied her barrel into the the last two heads of the creatures that she had met before.
Her first few meetings of the residents of the wasteland were not going to plan. She replaced her trophy gun back into her pack, and then closed it up again. She situated herself with her pack and jacket, and then lifted the corpse of the girl into her arms. Much of the girl had been eaten, but her face had for the most part been spared by whatever flames had touched the rest of her. She walked calmly with the body as big as her own in tow, trying very hard not to think about the obvious. The zombies wouldn't have cooked her before eating the parts that they wanted.
The walk to the gates of the settlement had been very uneventful thereafter. When she reached the town of Nicksta, she was met with the realization that Nicksta was a name made out of the remaining letters on Kinnick Stadium. The bright stadium was lit up, powered by an unknown source, and it's massive entrance ways had been blocked off. As Victoria crossed the parking lot, and passed a few last burnt out automobiles, a bright spotlight clicked on and focused on her. She looked back up into the light and saw five men in football helmets and shoulder pad armor looking back down at her. A huge mechanical door opened up at the stadium entrance, it had looked like a pile of metal and debris, but had in fact been a secured gate. It rose to it's open position and three more men in football regalia came out, with assault rifles strapped to their sides. The foremost man came trotting up to Victoria quickly and inspected her up and down.
"Who are you?" He asked, staring at her face. His expression seemed strange to Victoria, as if he somehow didn't believe in her existence. "Where did you come from?" He asked further.
"My name is Victoria." She said, as she handed the blanket containing the girl towards the man. "I came from Cedar Rapids." She continued. The man stuggled with the remains of the girl, but seemed to understand right away what was wrapped in the blanket. The two other football helmet wearing men joined them.
"Cedar Rapids? Where's that?" Asked the man with the girl in his arms. "Did you cross the dead road to get here? Are you okay?" He asked. Victoria nodded.
"Cedar Rapids is the city that was north of here." She said, pointing in the direction of the old ruins. She turned back to the man, who had opened up the blanket. He carefully inspected the girls face. "I found that body on the way here." Victoria added.
"Thank you." Said the man, with his voice sounding choked. He turned away from Victoria and started to run back inside of the stadium. One of the other men took his helmet off and looked down her bare feet and the black goo around her fists and jacket.
"Did the ghouls give you trouble?" He asked. "No one crosses the dead street at night... how did you get past them?" He asked, as the other man looked around the parking lot, seeming to become uncomfortable at the mention of the word ghouls.
"They chased me for a little while." Said Victoria. "Then they stopped." She added. The man with the removed football helmet smiled down at her.
"You must be pretty damn fast on those bare feet then." He said. He then placed the over sized helmet on Victoria's head, and patted it down into place. "Outstanding." He said.