Addiction is a miserable fucking companion, but once in a while it's almost worth having around.
If my body didn't need the next dose of med-x, I'd have spent my last days curled up at the vault door, out of my mind with fear and pain, clawing pathetically at the impassive steel while endlessly screaming Amata's name.
But I was hooked on the goddamned stuff, regardless of what the green medical texts told me. After hours—seconds, years, it hurt so much I couldn't tell the difference—the shakes started to set in, and my skin crawled.
Literally. I could watch goosebumps ripple up and down my fucking arms.
Maybe, the addiction whispered to me, if I take just a quick walk to see what's at the other end of the tunnel, I can find a little something to tide me over. Just until Amata gets the door open again...
I remember the first step away from the vault—it hurt so bad, a mass of guilt and loss and pain. I felt like I was losing her all over again, like I was giving up on her. The next thing I remember is waking up huddled against a rock in the middle of the wastes, covered in the sick sweat of withdrawal, shaking so hard my muscles cramped, all the while being watched by a strange man wearing goggles on his forehead, his two-headed cow, and his heavily armed companion.
"Told you she wasn't dead." Crazy Wolfgang, wasteland trader and my personal saviour, somehow managed to get me to the closest town, despite my inability to think, walk, or even stay in touch with reality. The trek there was a nightmare of a bad trip—the parched barren earth became a molten sea, the listing concrete overpasses leading to lost highways turned into giant tidal waves ready to crash over me, and the sun somehow directed it all as it roasted me alive.
Lucidity only came back to me when I woke up in Megaton, laying in a rusty metal shack owned by a crusty excuse of a doctor. He greeted me with the bill for getting me clean—a hundred caps for running an IV into my veins and dripping in a handful of chemicals! Oh, but don't worry about having absolutely nothing of any value to pay it with, after all, what's a little indentured slavery between friends?
The worst part is I didn't want to be clean. My body might not've needed the med-x, but my mind and heart burned for them. The pain never left, a sickening wave of guilt rolling through my veins as I scrubbed out bedpans, or sadness shattering my heart while I washed bloody sheets.
The gig with Doc Church barely lasted a week before he threw me out into the streets, falsely accusing me of stealing jet from his supplies. Suddenly I was faced with the problem of having no money, no source of food, no place to sleep, and no med-x to make my worries go away. In the ironic quirk of fate that bitch Luck loves throwing my way, I wound up crossing paths with the very person who got me kicked out of Doc's in the first place.
Leo Stahl, Megaton's dealer and number one addict all rolled into one. He taught me everything there is about addiction—how to lie, how to steal, how to sell, and how much a miserable junkie loves company, because when it's somebody else nodding out in the corner in a puddle of their own piss, you can look at 'em and thank Christ you aren't that fucked up.
I took any work I could find, even shovelling brahmin shit with enthusiasm if it got me that bit closer to my precious med-x. There wasn't anywhere to sleep in that damn town, everyone rich enough or old enough claiming the scrapheaps that passed as houses, those of us left to battle for space in the common rooms only as lucky as our numbers allowed. Being as there was only one of me, I never won that fight.
Finally, after being rousted from the back of every building in town, I got a little place to call my own. A broken stall in the woman's bathrooms, the toilet blown up or kicked out until only a stump of pedestal remained stuck in the floor. I stole a lock off a door, stole a door off a building, and managed to secure myself a space to nod off in during the day.
For some reason, nobody else wanted to fight me for the right to sleep on the shithouse floor.
I still don't know how long I lived like that in Megaton, chasing oblivion in my dark hole during the day, coming out when the sun went down to try earning, stealing, or begging enough caps to do it all over again. I feared the sun, my intolerant skin so badly burnt during my arrival I shed palm sized pieces for a week.
Most of the residents didn't look twice at me, just another strung out wastelander littering their town, my vault suit long ago sold for caps. Only one bothered with me for longer than it took to brush me away—Jericho, retired raider and functioning alcoholic.
One overly bright afternoon found me without enough med-x in my pocket, Leo's supply running frighteningly low. I needed something else to get me through the day. I wound up slamming back vodka in Moriarty's scuzzy tavern, my ravenous thirst attracting Jericho's notice. I got drunk off my skull, he got me back to his place, and I spent the entire time casing the place with my eyes while he got off.
Instead of a mattress to crash on and a few sticky-fingered momentos to swipe as I left, he shoved me out the door right after he finished. "Goddamn junkie. Don't even think about it."
I cursed him out through the rust-eaten walls of his shack, half-dressed and fully drunk, before shambling off to my stall to forget about his disrespect, along with everything else that made up the rest of my miserable excuse for a life.
What finally got me off the downward spiral of drug addiction? More drugs. Psycho, to be specific. I'd never tried it, and knew nothing about it. The say the army created it, and the vault architects didn't see fit to include the formula in their medical database.
No wonder—the stuff was like a missile of bliss rocketing right through your nervous system to detonate in your brain. It made everything feel so good it hurt, and turned pain into fucking nirvana. One hit and I was hooked. Med-x addiction was something I wanted; psycho was something I needed—completely, absolutely, and above all—right now.
I burned through my pitiful stash of caps in one night, winding up broke and desperate for more come morning. Chasing my high, I went to the first place I could think of with enough untraceable junk to hawk to make it worth my while—Jericho's. While he drank his breakfast at Moriarty's I broke into his shack and robbed him blind, so goddamned proud of myself for my clever revenge.
Even a child could follow the trail I left behind, selling all of his shit in one go, jittering from one foot to the other, my legs exploding in sparks while the psycho wore off. I ran to Leo, handing him everything I had just for another hit...then another, and another. Even when Jericho burst in on us— hiding in the back of the water treatment plan, shooting ourselves full of chems—I didn't care about anything more than the next hit.
It turned out to be a left hook to the face, Jericho hauling me to my feet just to knock me right back down. I was so out of my mind with psycho I simply lay there and laughed, finding it hysterical when he called me a fucking junkie bitch before storming off.
Come morning, I couldn't find anything remotely funny about my life. Huddled in my filthy stall, pressing my bruised face against the cool stump of the toilet in an attempt to get the swelling down, I realized just how far I'd fallen, and how much lower I was willing to go in the name of psycho.
In a rare moment of lucidity I saw the full power of the drug, and it terrified me.
Nobody could handle that kind of euphoria, especially not a wasted addict who barely knew what regular happiness felt like. Just like that, I decided to get free. I figured it'd be real simple this time around—after all, I finally wanted to kick the habit, right?
I became the largest headache in that shithole of a town, huddled in my little 'home,' moaning and screaming and crying all hours of the day and night. The women wanted to get me out so they could take a piss in peace, resorting to yelling when sweet talking didn't work. I told them all to fuck off whenever the tremors stopped long enough to ungrit my teeth.
They summoned Doc Church, wanting him to fix me with another needle and a different drug. No way would I owe anything to him again. As soon as his hand snaked under the stall wall, I stabbed it with a shard of broken porcelain and threatened to cut his balls off if he came near me again.
"I can't fix crazy," he snarled to the interfering bitches as he rushed off. Nobody bothered trying to help me after that; they'd either hurl insults at me, punch the walls I hid behind as a lame threat, or treated me with no more regard than a stray turd in the corner. Kind of appropriate—I felt worse than shit and smelled twice as bad.
The turning point came when a pair of heavy boots reeking of stale cigarette smoke stomped up to my stall. He didn't say anything, just kicked a little gift over to me and walked right back out.
A syringe. Filled with med-x, laying right there by my knee, positively begging for me to pick it up.
It must've been an hour I stared at it, huddled in a ball as far away as I could get, beating my fists into my legs as temptation and paranoia battled for control.
Maybe I could wean off it? Only have a little, just enough to shrink my addiction to half its size...that'd make it easier to quit, right?
But what if it's a trap? Why would Jericho give it to me, if not revenge? What could he be planning that he'd want me strung out and docile? Was it just to get me to quit moaning and shut up? Was it kindness? Was it a sick joke to him?
Anger carried me most of the way from my temptation, but hope swooped in at the end, saving me from faltering at the last moment. Half-clean for the first time in ages, I finally dared to think of Amata. She'd sent me out of the vault for her, and what had I done with my life? What kind of reward would it be, to find me a pathetic excuse of an addict, with piss-stains on my clothes and track marks up and down my arms? Was that the kind of life I wanted to welcome her to?
"Fuck, no." Snatching the syringe up with twitching fingers, I staggered out into town. People actually walked the other way when they saw me coming, holding that fucking needle like a dagger, covered in all sorts of stains and sickness, face twisted in a psychotic snarl. I dragged my broken ass all the way to the trader, slammed the med-x on the counter, and sold it.
I might not be able to do it for myself, but I could do anything for her.
In what seemed like a really good plan at the time, I took that handful of caps to the saloon, trading them all in for a bottle of vodka. The room in the back quickly became my private area, everyone clearing out rather than tolerate the reek of me. I sat in the darkest corner, pouring myself sloppy shots, trying not to groan too loudly and risk getting kicked out.
"You're really fucking serious about this." Jericho plopped himself down across from me, took the bottle from my trembling hands, and poured the vodka into my glass rather than all over the table. "Relax, kid. I'm here to drink and stink, just like you."
We didn't bother talking, because there wasn't anything to say. I drank until I couldn't feel the alcohol anymore, then he dragged me to the puddle of water surrounding the bomb in the middle of town, made fun of that crazy Confessor Cromwell with a joke about baptizing me in the glow, and proceeded to swish me around in it until I was cleaner than the scuzzy water. Afterwards he took me back to his place and screwed himself to sleep.
That night I slept on a real bed for the first time in a very long time. When I woke up, I found him sitting on a chair, smoking a cigarette and watching me. "What're you thinking about, kid?"
"Abso-fucking-lutely nothing."
"Hell, yeah." He handed me his cigarette, rested his shit-kicking boots on the table, and lit himself another smoke.
Just like that, I was off the drugs, had a place to stay, and even managed to make a new friend. Things were finally looking up for a change.
Real fucking simple, huh?