Jericho never forgave me for the way I gave him the good news.
It wasn't fucking funny, he'd tell me over and over again. Each time he bitched me out, I'd laugh at him all over again. I wish I'd seen it—Jericho standing in the middle of Tenpenny Tower's courtyard, being watched by the security guards both on and off duty, flicking his lighter at the exact moment the bomb in Megaton detonated. The noise scared him so badly he threw his favourite lighter away with a yelp, his sudden movement prompting every guard to draw their guns on him while shouting at him to put his hands up and get down on the ground.
Instead I was dozens of stories above the wastes, up where the stink and grit couldn't reach, watching the explosion to the backdrop of whiskey toasts and murmured adulation. Maybe I should have felt bad about it, but I didn't then and I still don't—that town never did anything for me, and the only person from it worth giving half a shit about was down in the courtyard, having his life threatened by Tenpenny's highly strung security detail.
Law of the wasteland, kid—kill, or die. Ain't no in between.
Those Megaton assholes might not've pushed the button on me, but they would've pulled the trigger, or simply watched me succumb to starvation and thirst. I'd seen it—hell, I'd lived it, wasting away on their streets, just another worthless junkie cheming her life away.
Besides, you could tell by looking at him that Mr. Burke was a man who got what he wanted, one way or another. Even if I'd said no, he'd have found somebody who'd say yes, and then I'd be the one waking up to the brightest fucking nightlight in the world.
Instead I was on top of the world, rewarded for my part in furthering the path of 'progress' with a penthouse suite, clean sheets, and pure water. Not just filtered water—this was the real deal, free of chemicals, radiation, or any other contamination. No longer did I have to swallow a monthly dose of Rad-x, to have my insides burned out as it stripped the radiation from my cells. I never acclimated to it, shitting dark blood for a week after every dose, but better that than suffer the horrors of rad poisoning.
Finally, I had a place to call home, the exact opposite of that hellhole of a vault I crawled out of. Up in my suite I had access to breezes and the night sky, freedom and luxury. I dreamed of Amata every day, spending my share of the caps we pried from the wastes on things I thought she'd like for our place. I'd rattle around the walls of the suite, hiding from the sun and re-arranging knick knacks while Jericho sat out on the balcony, indulging in his favourite hobbies—drinking and stinking.
"Who the fuck is she?" he demanded one booze-saturated afternoon. "You keep going on about where she'd like the goddamned poster. What is she, your sister? She at least hot?" Chuckling to himself, he raised the bottle of whiskey to his lips. "Won't matter where you put it; 'cause when I'm done welcoming her, she won't be able to see straight."
"Don't even think about it!" Blood boiling with fury at the idea of Jericho doing anything to my Amata, I didn't think—I just snatched a pistol from the table and pulled the trigger.
The bullet shattered the bottle, showering him in a torrent of booze and glass shards. "What the fuck?" He leapt out of his seat, trying to keep one eye on me as he shook the slivers off. "You're outta your mind! Christ!"
He stormed out of my place, disappearing into the wastes for almost a week. I apologized when he eventually came back, but I wasn't really sorry, because my little outburst worked.
He never breathed a word about Amata again.
Luck, fickle whore that she is, seemed to finally be winking my way for a change. At long last, I'd found a safe place to bring Amata when she got free—well, an almost safe place.
Only one last obstacle stood in the way of our happiness, in the deadly combination of sweet tits, a nice ass, and an empty bobblehead of blonde hair. Susan Lancaster, Tenpenny Tower's resident working girl, took an immediate loathing to me. Not that her opinion was worth a radroach fart, but it greatly mattered whose ear she whispered it in—none other than the indomitable Mr. Burke.
She wanted me out, and I wanted her dead. Problem was, if I gunned her down in the quiet, clean corridors, I'd still wind up thrown out on my ass.
Life can be so unfair.
"Boo hoo. Cry me a fucking river, kid." Jericho, the wastes' most practical asshole, didn't have much in the way of sympathy for my troubles. Especially not when sucking back a smoke in a post-fuck stupor. "Just mix a bunch of shit together in a syringe and stick her with it."
"Yeah, sure. And when they ask who got her the chems, they won't suspect the ex-junkie on the top floor. You're a goddamn rocket scientist."
"Then make sure they can't find the body," he retorted, slapping my ass as he eased out of bed. "Jesus, there's more than one way to make a person vanish in the wastes."
"Really? Tell me about 'em."
Which is how I wound up forging a love letter, inviting Susan to a secret meeting with her powerful fuck buddy in the ruins of a greengrocer just south of the tower. Jericho added his own touch to it, bickering with me over the wording.
"Put in something about her being his little love bird. Women love that shit." He nodded at his own suggestion with the smug confidence of someone who doesn't have a goddamn clue.
"What? No we don't—I hate that sort of crap."
He just laughed at me, stealing the smoke dangling from my lips. "Fuck, kid, you ain't a woman. You only look like one."
I left the line in, and the dumb bitch lapped it up. Fucking Jericho.
The plan started simple enough. Wait for Susan to show up alone, carrying the note, then turn her into a radroach buffet with a shot to the head. We'd gone out the night before, making a show for the guards of heading to the west, avoiding any suspicion. Instead we looped around in a wide circle to get to the shop without being seen, where we waited out the night in between the empty shelves, swiping smokes from each other and going nuts with boredom.
"Shame to waste a pair of tits like that," Jericho muttered, in between rounds of his favourite game—piss the vaultie off. "You know how much those would go for at market?"
Fucking Jericho! He waited until the last second before coming up with the perfect solution to my problem! If only we'd brought some rope...
We didn't end up needing it, Susan Lancaster turning surprisingly docile when faced with the choice of immediate death, or continued life somewhere far away. Besides, it was easier to march her through the wastes if she wasn't tripping over her bound feet with every other step.
"Let me handle this," Jericho muttered to me when we came into sight of Paradise Falls. At the first glimpse of the giant motherfuckers and their even bigger guns guarding the entrance, I suddenly lost the ability to use my tongue. He greeted the man at the gate like an old friend—turns out they really were old friends, once running together in the same gang years ago.
They bullshitted and laughed, negotiating the sale of Susan in between smokes and macho posturing. I chewed on my tongue and tried not to look too hard at anyone. No matter how badass I thought I was, with my rifle and my penthouse suite, as soon as I hit Paradise Falls I wasn't as important as the crap the runt of the slavers scraped off his shoe by comparison, and I knew it.
In one of those golden showers Luck enjoys pissing on my life, Susan fetched us way more than we figured. Surprised the hell out of us to learn she'd been through Paradise once before, and after an unapproved departure earned the ire of Eulogy Jones, leader of the slavers. He'd put a bounty on her, which we wound up collecting.
"What about her?" Jericho's buddy gestured at me. "There's always room in the pens."
"The kid? Nah," Jericho answered, unaware of the relief suddenly shooting through my veins. "You don't want her. She's just a crazy vaultie with bad aim."
"Holy shit." The other guard, who'd done nothing but flex his muscles and spit, suddenly goggled at me in awe. "It's Little Miss 101, the Vault Outlaw."
To call me surprised would be like saying nuclear armageddon was a wee bit toasty. After all, how could I know there was a bigmouthed asshole with a radio station talking all kinds of shit about me and the radioactive rubble that used to be Megaton?
Though that shock was nothing compared to the bomb the slavers dropped on me next; that same motormouthed DJ also liked to tell stories about the other escapee to crawl out of the vault—my father.
I'd never really considered looking for him before then. He'd run out of my life, and I'd put him out of my mind, but I always knew he was out there somewhere, as aware of him as a bad smell lingering in a small room. I didn't really care what happened to him, but since I had to pay a visit to this fuckwit of a DJ anyway, it couldn't hurt to ask after my dearest dad, right?
It hurt a hell of a lot just dragging our asses out to Three Dog. He broadcast from the downtown wastes, right in the middle of a super mutant clusterfuck. Fortunately we ran into a pack of uptight Brotherhood of Steel goons, who distracted the muties long enough to let us sneak by.
So I wasn't in a good mood when I finally arrived, ready to set the record straight. Three Dog wasn't too pleased to meet me either, until I mentioned my dad. As soon as I turned into 'James' kid' he was all smiles and praise, happy to listen to every bullshit sob story I fed him along with every lie proclaiming my innocence of the Megaton matter.
Nobody can lie like a junkie.
We walked out of there with info I hadn't known I wanted, and we left behind a little present for Mr. Dog. A generous bouquet—of grenades, rigged up by Jericho in a rarely used cupboard while I was talking to the loudmouthed asshole.
GNR went off the air less than a week later, in a surprise explosion gossip eventually blamed on a super mutant attack.
The trail my father left was so wide a blind mole rat could make it out. Eventually we wound up back where we started—leaving Tenpenny Tower after stopping for supplies, heading out to the west. With the characteristic irrationality that marked my father's logic, he'd crawled out of one vault just to crawl right back into a different one.
I should've taken it as a sign nobody ever really changes.