Author's Note: Wherein we learn, in case there was still any doubt, that Nora is a massive nerd.

7 - Zombies Too?!

"Hu…" Nora panted. "Hu…" Her mouth hung open and her eyes were wide as saucers. "Hu…ho…"

"You ain't gonna keel over, are ya?" Cass asked, terse as ever. Smoke wafted up from the muzzle of her shotgun, pointed at the rickety little shack in front of them. They stood in a sun-dappled forest.

"If you are," Petra added, "best make sure it's one of those lady-like swoons. Don't want you hitting your head." Her giant chrome pistol was letting off a plume of smoke as well, and for extra effect she gave it a little carnival twirl.

"Ho…holy…"

Scratching and rattling sounded from the shack. "And here comes the rest of 'em,.."

With a crack the old screen door of the shack flew open, and out charged a gaunt, wrinkled figure, loping on all fours like some sort of manic, stick-figure gorilla. It flew across the dirt and the dead leaves, faster than it had any right to, springing into the air and stretching out claw-like fingers aimed at Cass's head.

Time seemed to slow, every detail of the stringy monster burning into Nora's retinas as she watched in helpless horror: the wide, toothless mouth with withered gums and flapping lips, the creature's cataract-white eyes, its sinewy, withered limbs, and its cracked, prune-like skin. The thing was dressed in stained underpants and a tattered V-neck halter, and although its body was mostly wrinkles and bones, there was a hint of saggy breasts under the big V.

This thing had been…had been a woman once?! No way!

Then the creature's head exploded from a pointblank blast of Cass's shotgun and time flew forward again.

The headless monster ragdolled on by, more of the creatures erupted from the doorway of the shack (there had to be a big cellar or cave or something down there; no way they had all clown-carred up inside that tiny house itself), and Petra's hand cannon thundered, severing twiggy limbs and sending creatures skidding across the ground. One of the things managed to frog-hop and land right in front of Petra, hissing, but a clubbing blow from the butt of her pistol turned that hiss into a yelp, and the follow-up shot blew the thing's chest apart.

Another monster skidded and tried to dash to the side and out of the line of fire, only to stumble into Codsworth and his spinning blade. The things didn't bleed much — just leaked some sort of yucky white gunk, even when they were being dismembered.

Once all of the monsters that had burst out from the shack were twitching on the ground, Nora finally managed to breathe again. "Holy moley!"

Cass gave her a level look. "That's what you were trying to say? Not 'holy shit!' or 'holy ballsacs!' or maybe 'holy fuck-gerbils!'? You really need to expand your vocabulary."

Ignoring her, Nora pointed at the mangled creatures. "Th-those were zombies!"

"Eh?" Petra looked confused. "No. Ghouls."

Nora's jaw widened. "Ghouls?!" That sounded even worse than zombies. "S-so if they touch you…you get paralyzed?" What a horrible fate…

Petra raised an eyebrow. "Uh..what? No." She waved a hand at the mess in front of them. "Ghouls. They're people who got a massive dose of radiation and mutated into…you know…immortal walking-corpse things. Most of them go crazy. Brain damage from the radiation, or maybe some of them just go nuts from living forever. There's a bit of a debate over what makes most of them feral, but there it is."

"Oh…" Nora's cheeks heated up, embarrassed as all get-out. Of course there 'ghouls' didn't have magical paralyzing powers. This was real life, not some game of Wizards and Warriors.

(Right? There sure were a lot of random encounters out here in the Commonwealth forest, with weird monsters and all. Who could blame her for just assuming that she had slipped into a W&W game, just like the ones she had played back in school? And Petra and Cass sure did seem like high level, Chaotic Good NPCs…)

Alright Nora! Stop it! Right. Now. "So…so that's why the settlers joked about me being a 'well-preserved ghoul,' huh?"

"Yup." Cass kept watching the door of the shack, but all was quiet now. "Sometimes you meet ghouls that remember the world before the bombs fell. They're usually pretty badass folks, livin' so long."

Petra chuckled. "Reminds me. Next time we're sitting at the campfire, you ought to tell us some prewar stories."


Blushing once again, Nora peered down at the warm bottle between her hands. Sunset Sarsaparilla: a real rootin', tootin', cowboy sort of drink. Cass had a bottle of whiskey between her thighs, like always, and Petra was nursing a six-pack of warm beer, the bottles labeled with white tape and markers. Apparently it was from some local brewery they had passed by.

The caravaners had, of course, plied Nora with alcohol, and when she had adamantly refused Cass had asked her 'Are you a Mormon or something?'

'No…but uh…I was taught that Jesus doesn't want me to drink.' That seemed to be enough for Cass.

'Shame. I've met a few Mormons, and they were pretty badass.'

So, soft drink in hand, Nora studied her feet and searched her mind for a 'prewar story.' "I really don't know," she finally said. "Life was…well, it was actually pretty boring back then. Get up when the alarm clock rings, eat breakfast, go to work from nine till five. Hm. Maybe that's why there were so many industries that were just there to entertain us."

Cass nodded, enthusiastic-like. "The moving pictures. Always wanted to see one of those."

"Yeah. We had moving pictures in the theaters and on the TVs. We'd all hunker around the TV at night. Or the radio."

Petra chuckled. "The TVs are just hunks of glass now, but we've still got radios."

"I noticed." Nora found herself smiling. "Everyone thought those would go out of style in my day, but they never did. Sometimes they were the most fun, too…"

"Listening to music?" Petra asked. "My old pip-boy would pick up some of that, but damn! Back in Nevada, they only had like…four songs? Total. Played them over and over and over and over."

Nora chuckled, and flicked the knob on her own wrist-computer. Some swinging rock music came on, rattling piano keys and all.

"…right behind you baby…" the man on the radio sang.

"Like this?" Nora asked. "Maybe the DJs around here have a few more records."

"One can hope."

Nora switched her pip-boy off. "My favorite part wasn't the songs. It was the radio dramas. My family used to gather around when I was a kid and listen to them. Twilight Over Hammer Hall, of course, so we could all feel cultured. And there was Olof the Mighty's Viking Adventures. Those were fun. And then there's my favorite: The Silver Shroud."

"Ha!" Cass exclaimed. "I read some of those comics. Some sort of magic gangster who shot other gangsters, right?"

"Um. Something like that." Nora drew in a deep breath, and then deepened her voice. "When evil walks the streets of Boston, one man lurks in the shadows! Shielding the innocent. Judging the guilty. That guardian is…The Silver Shroud!" She switched back to her regular voice. "Those were the best."

Cass elbowed Petra. "Sounds like a kindred spirit, eh? Going around, shooting up bad guys and saving the town? Course you never mastered that 'lurking in the shadows' business."

"Wish I had."

Another poke, and Cass gave Nora a mischievous look across the campfire. "There's this whole band of tribals in Utah who worship her as their 'Ebon War-Goddess.' After she saved them from the Legion. They've got these statues of her and everything, with a rifle, a cowboy hat, and gigantic gazongas." For emphasis she made a gropey gesture with both hands.

Petra rolled her eyes. "And that's one of the many reasons I moved east."

"The legend's gonna follow you eventually."

"Maybe not if I start wearing a mask or something. Maybe do a voice. How did this Silver Shroud fellow sound, anyway?"

Nora cleared her throat, and tried to make her voice all raspy. "'Death has come for you, evil-doer! And I…am it's Shroud!' Something like that." She laughed. "I pretty much had every episode memorized."

Petra's eyes widened. "Memorized, huh?"

"Uh…well…"

"Come on then! Let's hear one! What could make for a better 'old world story,' eh?"

"Uh…alright. Let me think." Nora coughed again, then deepened her voice and made it a little nasal, like the radio announcer guy. "Today's episode: A Slaying in Scollay Square."

Next, she change her voice, trying to sound like a generic man. "Just down this alley…"

And then she switched to her best femme fatal voice: "Well, well, well. Looks like someone got lost on the wrong side of the tracks…"

On the other side of the fire, the caravaners were riveted. Nora carried on, one voice following the next and then the next, along with a putta-putta-putta sound-effect when it came time for the bullets to fly.


"Rocket sixty-nine, rocket…six-ty-nine…"

Nora frowned down at her pip-boy as the music blared and the broken highway passed by under her feet. Seemed like they had been playing this very song just five minutes ago. "A shame there's just the classical station and this oldies channel," she muttered. "Would be nice to hear something modern." By 'modern,' she was thinking stuff like Trace Lee Robinson or Billy and the Bobcats, but, as usual, she had forgotten about the whole two-hundred-years-in-crio-sleep thing.

"Hells yeah," Cass growled. "I miss the radio stations out of the Hub and the Boneyard. They'd play some real modern shit, like Blastoff Jenny and the Motherships, Karma to Burn, or Bloodbag Max and the Half-Life Boys. Not to mention all those all-ghoul atomic-fusion metal bands. Those were the best."

"Well, maybe there's something better on," Nora said, starting to fiddle with her pip-boy's knob. There was a high pitched buzz and the music died, replaced by the whir and ping of static. For a moment she thought she heard a voice (something about karate and voodoo), but that blurred out. She pursed her lips and kept tuning.

More buzzing, whirring, and crackling, and then, with a sudden clarity, a voice came over the radio, so close-sounding that Nora's heart jumped. "Automated message repeating," it said. "This is scribe Haylen of Recon Squad Gladius to any unit in transmission range. Authorization: arcs, ferro, nine-five. Our unit has sustained casualties, and we're running low on supplies. We're requesting support or evac from our position, at Cambridge police station."

Petra snorted and hefted her rifle, and the barrel clicked against her shoulder. "Now that's my kind of music!"

Beside her, Cass cringed and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Ugh. Really?"

"First rule of the Wasteland: always answer distress signals!" Petra waved her rifle. "Come on."

Cass was skeptical. "Uh. I think it's an actual, genuine, written-out rule in the Wasteland Survival Guide that you don't ever answer distress signals. It's on page fourteen. 'Nine times out of ten, the distress signal is a deadly trap.'"

"I like them odds! And hey, it's a Brotherhood message. Maybe they're all dead by now, and they left a bunch of free, super-sciencey salvage lying around? Or they're alive, and they'll be grateful when we haul their asses out of the fire! It's a win-win!"

"Did you learn nothing from that signal from the Sierra Madre?"

"I learned how to haul a fuckton of gold bars out of an exploding building! It all worked out in the end."

Cass shook her head. "So…if the Brotherhood unit is dead," she pointed out, "whatever killed a bunch of power armored mega-warriors will be standing over their corpses…"

"Exactly!" Petra seemed to really be enjoying herself. "Nice salvage, and thrills! Again: it's a win-win." She spun around on the road, then frowned, looking down each side of the pock-marked hill they had been walking across. "Uh…so where is the Cambridge police station anyway?"

Looking around for half a second, Nora noticed the nearby skyline and pointed. "That's Cambridge over there." It was hard to tell where she was, sometimes (what with the world being all gray and wrinkled and garbage-strewn and full of dirty people and atomic monsters), but this particular street and intersection was vaguely familiar. Her aunt had lived in Cambridge, after all, and she had visited sweet old Stella a lot (…before the bombs fell…)

Nodding, Petra whirled and started down the hillside. "Alright then."

Cass grumbled. "You and your detours." Of course, she didn't sound all that annoyed. As the three women, their wobbling cow, and their floating robot made their way down the hill, the automated message repeated on the radio. "Wish they'd tell us exactly what has them pinned down at the station."

"Yeah. Could be anything. Maybe we'll stumble onto a bunch of broken suits of powered armor in a parking lot, and everything will be quiet. And then…bam! The biggest radscropion we've ever seen will burst right out of the pavement!" Petra skidded down onto a level path, dodging past obstacles as she made a bee-line for the dead, looming city.

"Oh," Codsworth complained. "That sounds most horrid!"

"Hm. Or maybe," Petra went on, sounding like she was having the time of her life, "one of those super-sized super mutants will come thundering out from between the buildings, using the arm of a steam-shovel for a club! And we'll have to run and gun the giant down!"

There was a gasp from Codsworth's vocabulator. "More horrid still!"

Reaching a street, Petra slowed and then skidded to a stop. She raised an arm. "Watch out for the land mines."

"Uh…" How exactly do you watch...but then Nora saw them: little disks tossed willy-nilly across the pavement.

"Looks like someone wanted to…" Petra began, but then she shook her head. "Oh. I see."

Nora didn't, at least at first. And then there came a sound, from every open window and car and crack and cranny in the city before them: a low, crackling, inhuman groan. Limbs shivered in the shadows. Gaunt, wrinkly bodies uncoiled. Ragged, necrotic mouths lolled open, and then, as one, the swarm of zombies came crawling and pattering and snarling and snatching and pouring out of the shadows: an inhuman wave of hunger and groping death.

"Heh." Petra was nonchalant as ever. "Guess that's what has those Brotherhood folks pinned down. Alight girls (and Codsworth too). Let's light 'em up!"


Author's Note: One of the bands that Cass mentions is actually a real one. I just had to give a little nod to the instrumental, twangy stoner-metal band Karma to Burn, since listening to their discography on an endless loop seems to be part of this fic's writing process. The band's name is vaguely Fallout appropriate, too.