Dusty Old Stories

The cold after the fire

Quinn stuffs his hands under his armpits. His whole body shakes from the strain of heating his body against the bitter cold all around him. His boots crunch through the deep layer of snow. Already the top layer is starting to freeze together while yet another layer is being dropped upon it. The boots are about the only proper winter gear he has, and he stole them from a dead man. The rest of his apparel is painfully unsuited for cold.

He has to force his eyes to open so he can look around. A thin layer of frost had sealed them shut. In every direction he sees the same thing. White. The snow is endless. Visibility has been reduced to a few feet. And within that range the landscape has not distinguishable features.

More and more he shivers. A futile attempt to heat himself. It is getting to the point where the shaking will become debilitating if he does not soon find cover. Too many bodies have been found curled up in the snow for him to think he might survive a night out in the open. The only thing he is aware of is the crunch of his steps, the shaking of his body, and the howling of the wind. This is a cruel world.

To have survived the blasts that killed so many, and now to have to live through this winter. He envies those that perished in the flame. Many did not even have a chance to realize what was happening before they died. He has seen the corpses. Frozen in place by their baked bodies. Some seemed as though they simply sat down and waited. Others appear to have been trying to escape. Most appear to have been blissfully unaware. He wishes he were one of those. One of those who never saw it coming. Instead, he survived.

He had always been the prepared type. Ever since his return from serving in Anchorage, he expected retaliation. As soon as he got back to his little home outside of the nations capital, he built his bunker. He didn't tell anyone. To worried about them judging him, or attempting to force their way in once the bombs dropped. turns out he was right, of course, and someone did try and force their way in. They way they screamed at him. It was a woman's voice. She begged and begged, claiming that she was pregnant and that he was a monster for not letting her in. He had been one step away from opening the bunker doors and letting her in, when the earth shook and her voice vanished.

Now he is alive. Now he knows that by not letting her in he spared her a more gruesome fate. The wind catches his light jacket and tear it open, exposing his bare chest to the elements. His arms are so stiff that it takes longer than usual to pull it closed again. More shivers, and he can barely move his legs. More and more frost is covering him, numbing his whole body. The numbness is a blissful respite from the cold, but he knows it is bad. The loss of feeling means that soon he will go into shock. If that happens, well, he won't be alive any more.

That does not sound like such a bad thing anymore. He would almost welcome it. Yet his self preservation instincts force him to keep moving. To keep placing one foot in front of the other.

Up ahead a noise is carried to him on the wind. Again he forces his eyes to open and look about. Before him are two massive monoliths of creatures. The crash into each other, roaring and baying sounds of fury and hate. His forward movement stops as he beholds to two monsters battle. He has seen this before. Beasts both created and driven mad by the radiation all around. Even he has been altered by its burn.

The monoliths clash lasts on and on. Though time has stopped having any meaning to Quinn. Eventually one falls and the other throws back it head, roaring in triumph, but then falling and lying still itself. Both monoliths dealt killing blows, it came down to which could last the longest.

Quinn hurries forward with renewed hope. He reaches the first beast and searches the corpse until he finds a gash that is large enough. He reaches in and begins to scrape out all the meat and bone that is in his way. Anything that comes loose, or can be pulled aside, is. The still warm blood coats his arms and chest, renewing his energy. When a large enough crevasse is created, he takes a deep breath, and crawls inside.

Hours pass and slowly life returns to his stiffened body, even as the heat from the monolith dies away. Deeper and deeper into the beast he burrows, ever seeking warmer flesh. Eventually he is forced to leave as the corpse stiffens and he is no longer capable of going any further. Carefully he makes his way back out.

The wound he entered through is now buried beneath snow, and he is forced to dig is way to the surface. As he breaks through the last layer he is hit with the blinding brilliance of the sun reflecting off the snow. As his eyes adjust he searches for any signs of the other dead beast, but there are none. It too has been buried. With a heave he pulls himself the rest of the way out and stands carefully, testing the surface of the snow.

With the top layer frozen it most places, it is possible to walk its surface. However, there can be many weak spots, and he has no idea how deep some of them may be. Falling through could spell the end of him, and now that he has banished the cold from his body, his self preservation is now taking control again. He quickly descends back into the buried corpse of the monolith he sheltered in and finds a large bone. He struggles for several hours to break it from the corpse, but once he does he quickly returns to the surface of the snow.

As he climbs out fully, he uses the bone to test the ground ahead of him before moving. In this manner he moves slowly, but at least he makes progress.

Hours tick by and he begins to once more search for some form of shelter. He knows that he can burrow down into the snow to avoid the wind, but that will not stave off the cold for long. He has to find a place where he can build a fire, or something. Who would have thought that the worst part of the apocalypse by nuclear bombs would be a never ending winter? At least from here things can only get better. At least, that is what he hopes.


Quinn lifts the bottle of hard vodka towards his mouth, but stops halfway and sets it back down. With a heavy sigh he stands up and leaves the bar without paying his tab. Underworld. What a proper name for the place. It is a hole in a wasteland where the monsters, the ghouls, go to hide from the humans. What a slap in the face this is for all of them. Not only did the survive the bombs, the nuclear winter, and all the freaks created by the radiation, only to be shunned by those humans who somehow managed to not get mutated into ghouls or other abominations.

So here they all squat, hoping and praying that the world outside just burns itself alive, again. They don't even have an economy here. No one bothers to pay for anything. why should they? Not like their caps are ever going to be worth anything outside of this place. The money just keeps getting circulated between Tulip in the store, Ahzrukhal at the bar, and Carol at the hotel. Quinn is the only one who does any actual exchange, and that is always with the outside world. Of all the ghouls here, he is the only one with the balls to go outside and attempt to trade or do jobs for non-ghouls.

He reaches over and scratches at a dirty bandage around his shoulder from one of his more recent jobs. Those two assholes who often hang around here, Luther and Tyler, hired him to help them escort a caravan for a few weeks. They didn't mention that the place they were going to was being warred over by two costumed crazies calling themselves the Mechanist and the Antagonizer. He ended up being shot through the shoulder by a robot and his leg chewed by a giant ant.

Why he takes jobs from those two is beyond him. Maybe on some level he likes them, but mostly it is because they pay well, or at least they find the best paying jobs. That and they don't seem to have any problems with ghouls. Well, Luther tolerates them, but Tyler seems to prefer their company over other humans.

With a sigh Quinn sits down in a chair and rubs his chin. Some part of him wishes the nuclear winter was still going on. At least then he was left alone and didn't have to worry about making money. He shudders as he recalls the massive beasts that once roamed the land, and how he utilized them. The rest of the wasteland is lucky. They will never have to sleep inside a giant's corpse.