The trek back to his shack took him the greater part of three hours, because he stopped from time to time to rest his legs. So much walking, he thought, he'd be stiff tomorrow. He skirted the dry lake bed and walked along the rock wall until he found the ledge that led into it, where his shack was hidden by carefully maintained bushes and trees. Lionel hadn't lived this long to be eaten by ants or set upon by raiders.
Lilian's face rested in the forefront of his mind, her relatively clear eyes and half-smile spurring him on to the shack. But she wasn't there.
He let out a long sigh, and counted the days, slowly. Two months? He recounted, and with shaking hands, gathered and put her things into a sack. He shoved it underneath the bed frame in the corner of the shack. If she didn't return by the time he had to go to town again, he would sell them.
Lionel felt every bit his age, then. Without Lilian, he would be alone. Until his eventual death at the hands of a local or by his own hand, if he could ever get the nerve. He doubted he could, ever, but maybe things would be different once he started to lose his mind. He wasn't scared of the wasteland. He was scared of going feral.
Damn that woman and her foolhardy notion of true love!
He left the shack, slamming the door harder than he would have normally. A motion in the bushes around the rock wall caught his attention, and he drew his revolver. He aimed, before speaking.
"If you ain't a critter, you'd damn well better stand up!"
The girl in black, who'd watched him at Grayling, rose from the greenery. He kept the gun on her and motioned her out of the bushes. "Listen," he growled, "I'm not real friendly, lately, so you'd best get right on back to town."
She held her hands in front of her chest, palms out. "I just wanted to ask some questions," she said. "Couldn't catch you back there."
"Don't care." He lifted the revolver up to shoulder-height. "I will shoot you."
"You're Lionel, right?" she said. "Lionel Meisburg?"
His finger tightened on the trigger. "Who told you my last name?" No one should know that. He'd been "just Lionel" for over seventy years.
She smiled sheepishly. "Lucky guess?"
Lionel pointed the revolver at her feet and shot a round into the ground. "Start running."
She jumped and her hands went straight into the air, revealing a Pip-Boy on her left arm. He lowered the gun even further, squinting. "Look, I'll explain, if you'll let me!" she shrilled, pleadingly.
He stood there, thinking hard. The last time he'd seen a Pip-Boy, the kid attached to it had been stupid enough to run out onto the ant mounds in the dry lake bed. Lionel had not bothered to warn him and the ants; didn't like the boy's reaction to his appearance. He'd gone out and retrieved the Pip-Boy, and kept it for a while as a curiosity, before selling it in Grayling.
Who knew where these kids were coming from? The Vaults, all of them that he had heard about, were living prisons, horror stories for even the wasteland standard. This girl was about as screwed as that boy had been, but Lionel didn't to be the cause.
He snorted, sounding like a slingshot. Wasn't much he could do but give in to her. "Come inside," he grumbled, but kept the revolver on her until she'd gotten inside. He ordered her to sit in one of the chairs at the table.
Once seated, she lowered the hood of the monk outfit. Her hair was a messy tangle of brassy brown curls, eyes mud-colored and darting around the shack.
"Don't get any ideas," he warned.
"No, sir," she said.
Because he still valued whatever manners he had left, which he admitted might not be much, he opened the fridge and pulled out a Nuka-Cola. He thumped it down on the table in front of her. She jumped, then saw the bottle and thanked him. "Explain," he ordered, taking the seat across from her.
She smiled, hesitantly. "Well, uh... My name is Celia Landis," she said. "I'm recently of a Vault, sir."
Lionel had known a Landis, before the War. He hoped that she wasn't a relative. Cockamamie bastard.
"My family keeps a lot of records, dating back to the days before the Vaults. I am the unofficial family storyteller," she said, smiling proudly. "Anyway, my Vault sends someone out into the world to determine whether or not it's inhabitable, every few years. Been doing it since before I was born."
"This time, it was you." He rolled his eyes away from her. Better they stay put. It was shit out here.
"Yes." She looked a little embarrassed. "May... May I call you Lionel?"
"You can call me Babe the Blue Ox, for all I care," he said, dryly.
"Ah!" She smiled. "Paul Bunyan!"
His heart gave a weird little hop. He smashed it down, quickly. Behave, he thought. He'd not heard reference to the folktale in so long. "Lionel will do fine."
"Because I was chosen, I'm using what talent I have for storytelling to get around. The world definitely seems inhabitable, if somewhat... dire." She studied his face.
He ignored it, pointedly. "And that stupid boy, about five years ago? Had a Pip-Boy like yours."
"Bobby Perkins," she said. "Last of his line. Is he dead?"
"As a door nail," Lionel replied, gravely. "The ants in the lake bed are a problem, on occasion. You stay clear of them."
"Yes, sir," she said, positively, and pulled back a sleeve to activate her Pip-Boy. "I'll have to tell his parents."
Lionel watched nimble fingers fly across the display, wishing he had the agility she did. The radio filled the silence of the room with a sad tune. He stood and turned it off, then returned to his seat at the table.
"So," she said, hesitating. "...I was looking through my great-grandfather's journals, and I remembered he mentioned a friend named Lionel Meisburg."
"Joey Landis was not a friend," Lionel rasped, ferociously, then lowered his tone at her stunned look. "We worked together on yachts, out in Grand Traverse."
"His journal is... colorful," she said, carefully, "but he considered this Lionel a friend, and mourned his passing in the days after the War."
Lionel exhaled, long and forced. She looked up sharply at the sound, then, opened her mouth and quickly closed it. "What?" he snapped.
"Well―" she stopped herself.
"Well, what?"
"How did you live this long?" she almost whispered.
He laughed, a mean laugh, and it filled the uncomfortable silence of the one-room shack. Slapping a hand down on the table, he shook his head in disbelief. "You've never seen a ghoul before," he spat.
"I am not... familiar with that," she said, quietly. Nervous eyes watched him.
Lionel laughed again, and tried to stop himself. Cherries, all of them! He'd give his left arm for that kind of innocence, if even for only a day. The girl made a note on her Pip-Boy as he managed to wind it down.
"This, girl, is what happened to a lot of us who weren't so lucky to be trapped in those living prisons they call Vaults. You," he jabbed her arm roughly, "are a smoothskin. I am a zombie."
She looked at him in confusion, then frowned and glanced down at her Pip-Boy. "May I... May I take notes on your appearance? For the Vault?" She managed a brief smile. "For the record, I don't think you're a zombie. Just different."
"Whatever. Knock yourself out," he rasped, waving a hand and letting it drop roughly to the table.
Celia stood, and walked around him, typing furiously. After a few minutes, she reached a hand out to touch him, and stopped herself. "Uh," she said.
"Whatever," he repeated.
She touched his arm, palpating the muscle, ran a finger along the edge of skin that remained. "Soft tissue damage and skin loss," she murmured, a curious tone in her voice. Lionel endured it, feeling uncomfortable. It had been a long time since a smoothskin had dared to touch him, even gently. "...And hair loss."
"I was bald, before," he said, trying to dispel the feeling, "lost the hair on my entire body though. Lilian did, too."
She shined the light from the Pip-Boy into his eyes. "Who is Lilian?"
Lionel snapped his mouth shut. He shouldn't be talking to this girl and he shouldn't have mentioned Lilian, even if she hadn't come back yet. If she were to find him here, with a girl who wasn't one-eighth of his age... He squinted against the bright light. He wouldn't be talking to her if Lilian hadn't gone away, anyway. It wouldn't hurt him to answer a few questions.
Celia continued the examination, without comment. She asked to see his hands and feet, and he sighed as he removed his boots.
"Did you―"
"I lost my toes on the bay," he rasped, "before the War." He wiggled his remaining three toes at her. She snickered a little, then covered her mouth.
"Okay," she said, and sat back down. "You eat perfectly fine, I saw that. Can you tell me anything else?"
He focused his eyes on her, critically. "The radiation caused this―" he held out a hand, showing his ragged palm. "It heals me. Makes ghouls go... feral."
"Feral?" she asked.
He sighed. "Look, you stay out of that Vault long enough, you'll run into some real zombies."
"But they're still people," she stated. "Like you and me."
"About as much as a wolf is a dog," he said.
She scrutinized him with big doe eyes. He felt self-conscious under her gaze, that innocent stare. "You know a lot about Pre-War animals?" she asked, wondering.
"Used to be, people would go to zoos to see them," he said, off-hand.
"I would like that," she said, softly.
The room went quiet, each of them thinking their own thoughts. Lionel was curious what she was going to do with all the stories she'd collected from the people of Grayling. It seemed a useless pursuit.
"Tell me about your Vault," he asked, in a rare moment of friendliness.
"It's dark," she said, with a sad tone. "Darker than this room, and cramped." Her face took on a distressed look. "The air is bad, because the filters can't get rid of the toxins that build up, and fires break out in the wiring every week. People die. A lot of people."
"That's why they sent you out," he muttered. She nodded, blankly. "Go home. You're safer. It's certain death, out here in the wastes."
"Everyone said that," she mumbled, sounding sad. She sniffled a little, looked away.
"There's no room for hope in the wasteland," he rasped, a hard edge creeping into his voice.
She grabbed up the Nuka-Cola, uncapped it, and took a long drink, then set it back onto the table. "I'll go home," she said, passing it to his side of the table. "Thank you for talking to me."
He grunted at her as she rose. She went to the door, opened it, and paused. Darkness had fallen. Lionel swore, mentally. Of course, and he'd have to play the gentleman, let her stay the night. Couldn't afford to have another dead kid on his conscience, especially since this one was a hell of a lot nicer than the boy had been.
"It's too dark," he said. "You should wait until morning."
"I couldn't impede your sleep," she said, but shut the door.
"What?" he asked. "Never mind―if you're staying here, you're sleeping on the floor." Lionel picked up the soda cap, put it into his pocket, and put the bottle into a box by the door. "You won't be able to see what's coming for you, in the dark. Might get eaten."
"I get the idea," she muttered.
Lionel unhooked the lamp, causing the room to go black. He quietly stashed the bottle cap on the top of the fridge, just in case, and sat down on the mattress. Stared across the murky room for a moment, thinking about Lillian. Missed her. Wished she was home. Couldn't sleep good without her around.
He laid down, with his back to the wall. He probably wasn't going to sleep anyway, with a stranger in the shack.
"Good night, Lionel," she said, in the gloom.
He only grunted and squeezed his eyes as tightly shut as he could manage.