I kept scrubbing. The cloth was dirty and gritty and chafed away at my fingers but dammit the blood wouldn't come out. It was just stuck under my fingernails and stayed there, like it had finally come home after a long journey through someone else's veins. Light was bad, flickering and swinging back and forth, mirror all cracked. Sweat was dripping into my eyes, stinging, stinging-

Why wouldn't it come out? Smelled sweet and dry, like rust. Wasn't my blood, wasn't me. Wasn't part of me. So why did it stay? Wrong, wrong, the fucking blood was all wrong-

The door swung open, squealing on rusted hinges. I jumped back, tucking my hands close under my arm pits. I squinted into the light, breathing heavily.

"Kid."

I gritted my teeth.

"Kid," he said again, closest thing to concern that had ever touched his voice, "just... let it go."

But the blood wouldn't let go, why should I?

His name was Sparky.

Not Bloodhound, or Red Reaver, or anything even close to that. The son of a bitch who had slapped that collar around my neck...

His name was fucking Sparky.

And that's all I heard the entire fucking way to the slavers' camp. That he had finally caught one, hot damn. Without even using a mesmawhatever. Without raising a damn finger. So this assclown drags me along after him, and really, all I could do was follow. I was dying of dehydration, my stomach was full of dirt to keep me from passing out altogether, my eyes were so sunstrained once it was dusk I couldn't see a thing. But Sparky didn't mind, no, slaver Sparky the great hunter was too overjoyed to tell me to speed up or stop tripping over everything in my path.

I don't know how long we walked. Time didn't make sense to me anymore. The only thing I really remembered was the feel of the inside of my mouth. Felt like the inside of a dry, hollowed out ribcage. Was so dry I couldn't move my tongue or even feel the scurvy for as much as it hurt.

I fell down a few times. Sparky would always help me get up, sometimes half-carrying half dragging me along. He stopped being so overjoyed once he noticed that, huh- I was almost dead.

By the next morning, at any rate, we finally came to what Sparky called home. If you're insane enough to call someplace in the wastes can be called home, anyway. A had-been strip small, fortified with a wall of cars, scrap metal, random pieces of buildings, debris, sand bags- you name it. An ordinary junk fortress. At the sheet metal gate was a single desk, a guy sitting behind it cleaning a rifle obsessively. I was so out of it I couldn't even tell what model of rifle it was.

Sparky yelled something to the guard, and without looking up, the guard pulled a chain hanging from a pulley. A whole lot of grinding and whirring and machinery moving around later, the gate was open and Sparky dragged me into the camp. Great. Just fucking great.

Where do I start? You get a cage. Rusted chain link fence, frosted with razor and barbed wire.. Five square feet of sand. Not even a rusty bucket to shit in (because, I guess, one might try to drown themselves in it to escape their fate), but I hadn't eaten anything but dirt so that wasn't a problem. Oh, but I was lucky. See, most of the cages had three or four unlucky souls crammed in them already, but me- I got my very own. I didn't know whether that was good or bad. I didn't really care. All I did was sit in that fucking square and stare at the clouds and bake in the sun. I didn't even want to die. By that point I was gone, I was back in Vault 101, playing baseball with Butch and Amata or capping radroaches with Jonas or talking about anything with my dad, dear old Dad.

My gear? I don't know. They took all of it. My knife was already gone so I didn't care. It was too hot for clothes anyway. At night I wished I had them though.

Fuck the collar was itchy. There was blood and rust and pieces of dry skin in it and it would scrape against my Adam's apple all wrong. I could hear the circuits in it, just waiting to blow up. I thought Jericho had been kidding about exploding slave collars. That is, until he broke some raider's legs with a piece of lead piping, snapped a collar on him, and detonated the poor bastard's skull to clear it up for me. I don't think I ever got over that. You don't get over stuff like that. The eyes rolled around for a while.

Sometimes I got food. Or whatever got chucked at my cage and went through the chain link. Already chewed gum, a bit of gristle or skin off a Brahmin, glowing mushrooms that made me see painful colors and vomit dirt (they laughed when I did. I stopped eating those.), any random unwanted crap you could think of. But it was a battle to chew, to force my body to digest. Sometimes I'd stop breathing and have to squeeze my eyes shut and mentally scream at my lungs to give a damn.

That son of a bitch Sparky dropped the most food. Maybe because he was proud. The other slavers couldn't stop slapping him on the back or spitting in his face less than usual. He wore less armor and leather than the rest, so I guessed that he was the new guy. Couldn't have had more than seven years on me. I didn't hate him. Hell, I could barely acknowledge him.

The other captured wasters were in far worse shape than me. They didn't have clothes, their ribs were poking through, their muscles had decayed and bellies bulged because their abdominal muscles couldn't hold the organs in anymore. I think some were dead. One kept trying to talk to me, though. I couldn't her him. Or her. I just heard a loud, distant ringing. Maybe I had some sun in my ears. I'd clean them out once I found a bobby pin.

The other slavers didn't acknowledge me and I preferred it that way. They just sat around and smoked and ate and popped chems and squabbled, maybe knocking some teeth out or breaking a nose or some fingers. They all seemed on edge, like at any second they might feel a collar of their own being snapped on. They never stood with their backs to one another, and always had one hand on their weapon. Pistol, rifle, knife, whatever they could carry. Sometimes they'd drag out one of the female slaves and try to rape her but she'd just lay there and they'd get angry and hit her and each other but use her anyway until she bled and throw her back in her cage and she'd just sit there. I felt the same way, inside my head.

I didn't sleep. I just laid, sat, whatever- in complete stillness, maybe moving to breathe now and again. And eat. Sparky would bang on the chainlink, ask me if I was going to make it through the day. His mouth moved, his brown worn-down teeth clacked, but I couldn't hear him. Maybe he was too far away. I tried to scratch my neck to get at the mutant fleas but my fingernails would just scrape at the collar and get splinters of scrap metal stuck in them.

They started to give me water. When the small bottle came through the fencing, I looked at it for a while. When was the last time I had drank? A week? A month? Was that how long I had been roasting in there? Time didn't make sense to me anymore. There was just bake and freeze, bake and freeze, shake and bake and freeze when Sparky banged on the chainlink. Bastard.

They took me out. I barely noticed. They dragged me out of that cage, a bit of my soul snagging on the barbed wire. They put me in a room with a table and pulled out the stitches in my shoulder and holy shit blood and pus was everywhere. So the had this- not a doctor, a... field medic... I guess... clean it out with bleach and detergent. Hurt so bad I could almost feel again. They stitched it up too, and when they threw me back in my cage I couldn't move my left arm for a day. I thought they had broke it.

My leg didn't hurt. I didn't do much walking. My right ear hurt though. Ear-hole... thing. Bled sometimes, not much. Sand would get in it and itch and sting but I didn't mind. But I could feel, that was an improvement. I wanted my knife back, my hands felt hollow without it. Fingers kept twitching, feeling for the rough wire-wrapped handle.

They kept taking me out, taking me to that room. Might've been a clinic if it had been made to make people feel better. Pills, water, shots that made me numb and woke me up. I could feel pain again, but I still couldn't care. The medic smoked a lot, made my eyes water and made me cough. He laughed. I took his cigarette and ate it. I laughed. He was sad and punched me. I punched him back and the pain was sitting in my head telling me to kill him and I said okay why not-

But they dragged me back, the chems wore off, I dazed off. Hell, I was losing it. I had lost it. My mind was gone.

Until some other guy came up to my cage. Wasn't Sparky this time. Was a lot worse.

Cheetah-print suit, shiny black shoes, tons of gold and silver chains, so shiny I couldn't look at them. He wore a cheetah-print hat, dark sunglasses, and had a funny pointed beard. He was backed up by four girls wearing tight leather that showed more than it protected. He was smoking, looking down at me thoughtfully. He looked inhuman, so was so clean and hair all tidy.

"Zis iz yor luhcky dey," he said warmly. I had no idea where the fuck that accent came from. Or if that even was an accent- maybe it was some sort of speech disorder. Born without tonsils.

I didn't say anything.

"Von-hondrad caps. Von-hondrad!" the slaver master threw up his gloved hands. "You haf mad me a verhy reich mahn."

By that point, I had had enough food, water and chems to be slightly sane. So I did the sane thing and ignored him. His beard was oiled, that's how it stayed pointed. Slick with blood.

"You don vant talk? Zat is uhnderstondable," he said, clapping his hands, rings clinking together. His bodyguards moved around him and opened the gate, dragging me out onto the main of the slaver camp. Part of me jumped to life just then. An opportunity to leave. I could stretch my legs! Spread my arms out all the way! Take more than two steps!

My clothes were thrown at me, all the buttons and zippers ripped out. My boots didn't have laces, and they took my socks. Whatever, I didn't care. I had my crappy tattered rookie duster that had seen me through my every gunfight. That was something.

The slaver master saw me out to the gate, where he waved me off. "Hayf fun! Savf travals!" his leather-clad bodyguards stood behind him, unmoving. I wondered what happened to them.

I took a few wobbling steps back into the wasteland, looked up, and Sparky was waiting for me, a detonator in his hand. He grinned sheepishly.

Son of a bitch.