Chapter Ten.

To her surprise, the mini nuke was where she had left it, along with her tools. She had gone out in the evening to retrieve them and hurried back to Megaton with the intent to work on the bomb behind her shop counter the next day. She couldn't afford to keep it closed another day, and she suspected the people in town who needed supplies were getting antsy.

I'll just keep it out of sight, and the sheriff won't yell at me, she thought.

Moira had little time to work on the mini nuke, as she had customers in for much of the day and she was the only one working. Her time off had caused a back-up, but few people bothered to ask where she had been.

Towards the day's end, the small trickle of people dried up and it was closing time. After she locked the door, she set to work on the bomb, remembering vaguely what she had discovered about its inner workings the other day. It seemed that the conventional explosives were disarmed like anything else, which made the uranium unable to do its fission thing.

Or was it fusion? Moira thought.

Either way, she now knew how to approach the big nuke at the center of town.

She went to bed, telling herself that once the bomb was defused, all of her extraneous efforts would be bent towards finding a decent supply of Mentats. The cravings were getting less frequent, but were stronger each time.

Lying on her bed, looking at the ceiling, she wondered if the Talon Company really would come after her like Tenpenny had implied. The more she thought about it, the more it seemed they would be after Tenpenny or Mr. Burke, but realized such people had ways of shifting blame.

Moira didn't sleep well with Tenpenny, the Talon Company, her shortage of Mentats, and the nuclear bomb she had to defuse weighing on her mind.

***

Her breakfast of cold iguana on a stick wasn't sitting well in her stomach. Her shop was open and Lucas Simms walked in. "What happened?" he asked. "You were gone too long the other day."

She told about the day before with the Talon Company and what happened at Tenpenny Tower.

Simms didn't believe her at first, but after telling the story a few more times and showing him the lump on the back of her head, he bought it.

"Looks I won't have to take care of Mr. Burke after all, unless he shows his face around here again," Simms said. "I take it you still want to defuse that thing?"

Moira nodded. "I've got it figured out," she said. "A normal bomb sets off the…"

"Not interested," Simms said. "If the real thing is too far removed from the one you're working on, forget it. We can build a fence around the thing if we need to."

"Won't the church…"

"They'll be mad regardless of what we do, which is why you're defusing it at night when they can't see," Simms said.

"Ah, okay," she said, wondering if that hadn't been her original plan all along. She supposed it made sense, as few in the town would be keen on the idea of anyone messing with the bomb.

"Don't screw this up," Simms said, reaching into his duster pocket. He pulled out a small, battered box of Mentats and threw them on the counter. "Don't say I never gave you anything."

Simms hadn't laid a hand on the door knob before Moira had the box open and two Mentats in her mouth. They hit her quickly, as though her body absorbed them faster due to the fact it had gone without for so long. She felt her mind begin to unclog, and wondered how she had been able to manage for so long with her brain in such a state.

No wonder I keep getting kidnapped, she thought.

***

That night, her feet wet with the irradiated water that collected in the crater around the nuke itself, she quietly removed some of the out plating and began looking around inside with a small flashlight. To her relief, the big nuke was built almost exactly like the mini nuke.

"What's that?" she whispered, seeing something familiar which she didn't like the look of at all. It was small, rectangular, and wired haphazardly to the bomb's detonation system. Moira popped a Mentat, and carefully removed it, noticing one of the wires connecting it, the blue one, to already have come off.

It was the same sort of device Mr. Burke had given her when they met, the one that when activated, would detonate the bomb after a certain amount of time. The timer on the device she held still had five minutes left on it, and it made her skin grow cold.

Licking her dry lips, she set the device down and went back to the bomb. Her already overwhelming suspicions were confirmed; by looking at the dust stains, the bomb had been opened up and tampered with long before she had gotten to it.

Looking behind her once to make sure, she continued her work, removing the conventional explosives that worked to detonate the uranium load, which she also removed.

"There," she said, lumping the important parts of the nuke into a bag and closing the shell back up as carefully as she could so as not to make it look like anyone had been tampering with the bomb.

She went back to The Craterside Supply, where she locked her door behind her and slid a stool against the door knob. The bag of nuke parts, which she knew were quite irradiated and hazardous, she set inside a led lined cabinet she kept for such things and went to bed.

Moira didn't sleep. Her nerves were on edge from defusing the bomb, which she expected, but now there was the question of who had rigged it to explode. Had it been Mr. Burke? If so, why where they kidnapping her and telling her to rig it when it was already rigged? Was someone else altogether trying to blow up Megaton?

She popped another Mentat, and wondered.

To be continued…