"That ol' shitpit Springdale, huh?"

I nodded, staring off into the cigarette smoke. "That's what it became to me. This... wasteland." I pushed the smudged glass of cheap stale beer across the counter to Jericho, unable to stomach any more. He gulped it down gladly,

"I don't- I can't understand it," I continued, clenching my hands into fists. "Just... piles of bones. Corpses strung up with chains, hanging on meathooks. Bodies just lying around in the halls, bloody footprints everywhere, body parts in lockers, desks, cabinets, random words written across chalkboards in blood..."

Jericho was peering into the empty glass, picking his teeth for grains of sand with a bobby pin. Even so, his mind seemed far away as he listened.

"And I heard them. Laughing, yelling, eating, fucking- like everything was fine. I just- I couldn't take it. I snuck back the way I came in, and ran far away as fast as I could until-" I stopped for breath,
coughed a bit- "Until I saw this place in the distance." I shook my head and dust fell from my beard. "How do they do it?"

With a grunt, Jericho put the glass down and scratched at a crack in the rim with a splintered fingernail. "They just do it, kid. Raiders don't... y'know, think. They let their balls do the thinkin' for 'em, and just follow along."

"That's insane."

"No shit. But, y'know, it's best you saw all that crap."

I chuckled dryly. "Right. The best thing for someone right out a Vault is to walk into a lair of homicidal cannibal maniacs. Yeah, great first impression."

Jericho puffed on his cigarette stub, uncharacteristically patient. "Now you know what's out there. What they can do, what they will do. Wish I learned as early as you, kid."

My hands were still shaking, even though it had been three days. But you never get used to it, never never never, all those headless bodies floating in the air on twisty turny chains and pointing at you with fingerless hands or stub arms and screaming get out get out get out but there's no voices but you can hear them and upstairs they're laughing and chewing on bone and fear and they can smell your fear and all the doors lead to the same classroom where good morning class good morning students lets start with today's lesson DIE

I blinked. And I blinked again, as a nightmarish face was peering down at me with clouded, bloodshot eyes. But he was smiling, and his teeth were sharp. Did he... file them, or something? Guess some raiders would do anything for the intimidation factor.

Okay. Surrounded by three of the most badass raiders I had ever seen, my only ally dead at my knees, and I'm having chronic flashback disorder.

Great.

"Good hunting."

Wait, what?

"What?"

The monstrous shadow raider looked at me, smiling still, but there was something else in his face- but behind the scars and bloody clay that had caked onto his face like a cracked second skin, I couldn't tell. "Even the strongest hunter does not simply walk through Amputee's Field," he explained. His voice was incredibly deep, so heavy with self-assurance and experience it seemed to echo. Made my ears hurt.
"So instead, you used your wisdom to defeat the snipers of the Field."

I stared at him blankly. Well, stared at his teeth. They were all yellow and brown and had bits of red stuck in them. Between those and the huge Brahmin bull skulls on his shoulders, I couldn't look at his face.

"Do think he's gone daft, gov," piped up the shadow raider pointing the Groza at me. What a weird accent, like the ones Mr. Handy's had...

"How..." my throat seemed drier than usual, if that was possible. "How..."

"How do we know you aren't one of the Field's mighty snipers?" the tall one finished, slinging his PK machine gun over his back as if it weighed nothing. "Simple, young hunter; your Mosin-Nagant is on the right side of your back. You are right-handed, from the way you are holding your knife. Therefore, the Mosin-Nagant is your choice gun. Of all the months we've hunted the snipers of Amputee's Field, we have never heard the crack of a Mosin-Nagant."

I continued staring blankly, but now my eyes were blurring with confusion. Was he... for real? I didn't have much time to think about it, however, as the eyepatched shadow raider with the OSV-96 rifle had stepped forward and pulled away my guns. I felt a flash of hopelessness as I watched Jericho's AKS-74U be pulled from my front. He turned to the fallen girl and bent to take her Dragunov, and in a moment of pure stupidity I stumbled forward and threw my arms over her body.

"No," I rasped.

Eyepatch raider glared at me with his good eye and sent me stumbling onto my ass with an elbow to the forehead. I grit my teeth and clutched at my leg, squeezing my eyes shut as I felt the wounds break open. As the raiders helped themselves to her guns and ammo, the leader walked up to me and yanked my knife from my weakened grasp. He looked at my duster in contempt. The mark of a rookie, I guess.

I coughed up dust. "Months?" No way.

"For seven months, we had assaulted that settlement. Weakling new meat would try to walk the Field, and die. We waited, and drove them to fear. We wanted to starve them out, but..." he looked down at me. Was he impressed, or enraged that I had stolen his rightful kills?

"Dead is bleedin' ol' dead," cut in the Groza raider.

"How many had ridden with your band?" asked the leader.

They thought I was an upstart raider. They thought I had gone in to kill those people. "Two," I whispered. What was the point of lying? They were going to kill me anyway.

"Two, eh?" chirped the grenade-strapped raider, clipping on the gray-eyed girl's grenades to his collection. "Nutty twat. Must'a been all sixes an' sevens."

My head was pounding, my leg was starting to spasm, and the sun was reaching its brightest. I must've looked like a corpse. Even so, the leader spoke to me as though I were an equal. "Of course, a lone hunter could never kill all the snipers of Amputee's Field." He peered at me closely, narrowed eyes bloodshot and milky but cutting right through me. "Still, for only two to bring down so many..."

"His name was Jericho," I said suddenly. The one with the eyepatch looked up from the girl's body. All three of them seemed to stiffen. Terror gripped me, and I felt the death blow hovering right over my head,
ready to fall if I breathed wrong.

The leader stopped smiling. His armor was rattling, bones and talismans and metal clinking together. I realized he was shaking with rage. "The fearless blood butcher Jericho," he hissed, "fought alongside you?"

"Um. Yeah."

The leader straightened, nodded to his companions, and without a glance backward they gathered up their loot and began walking west. The eyepatch raider had the girl's body slung over his shoulder- shit, shit, shit, of course they were cannibals. Dammit. But there was nothing I could do. So I lay there, staring up at a careless sun what are you looking at think it s funny to watch someone die you stupid ball of flaming gas when you die no one will be there to care. Something clicked in my head.

"Why... didn't you kill me?" I called after them, my voice cracking with the effort.

"We are killing you," called back the leader, his voice so faint I almost didn't hear him as I slowly passed out. My hands felt empty without my knife.