The lamps now glitter down the street;
Faintly sound the falling feet;
And the blue even slowly falls
About the garden trees and walls.

Now in the falling of the gloom
The red fire paints the empty room:
And warmly on the roof it looks,
And flickers on the back of books.

Armies march by tower and spire
Of cities blazing, in the fire;
Till as I gaze with staring eyes,
The armies fall, the lustre dies.

Then once again the glow returns;
Again the phantom city burns;
And down the red-hot valley, lo!
The phantom armies marching go!

Blinking embers, tell me true
Where are those armies marching to,
And what the burning city is
That crumbles in your furnaces!

-Robert Louis Stevenson

Pre-Introduction Introduction

I have no advice for you. I don't give a [censored] if you die in the desert this very night or spend the night in some swanky little palace with two beautiful women with low self-esteem. I'm not sure why I'm writing this. That's a lie. I'm writing this because my body is declining and my memory is fading. I want to remember who I am when I die. The good and the bad. As a result you won't like most of this. I couldn't give any less of a [censored]. I didn't write it for you. I'm starting to forget things. I don't know how old I am. I don't know how long I have to live. I'm not sure if I'm rooting for death or life at this point.


Introduction

You take your average waster...he's wandering around looking for his next meal and a safe place to lay his head right? Well eventually he's going to find one. He's going to settle down and start making friends and look for a pretty little wife and have some pretty little kids and that is going to become his new life. He'll get some job that he can do without too much effort and spend his life going between that job and his precious little family. Eventually his children will lose respect for him His body will start falling apart. His marriage will start falling apart. He'll keep on doing the same stupid things until he finally dies.

His family will put his body in a box and bury it in the sand and sooner than most of you would think they'll forget about him. They'll go on with life. Some of those kids will stay in town and start settling down all but immediately and just start the cycle again immediately. Some of those kids will wander off and eventually they'll find some place to settle down too. Soon enough they will all die and shortly thereafter they will be less than a memory.

Not for me.

They call me The Walking Dude. You might be able to guess why.

There was a time I was just another sap wasting his time away on this [censored] stain of a planet. The war changed that though. I worked at this company, you might of heard of it, West Tek. I helped work on the T-51b Power Armor for some time. I was even involved in the Pan-Immunity Virion Project before the government took control of it. Bottom line in those days I made mounds and mounds of cash. I was coming back from work when the bombs dropped. Half way home is a long way from home when the world goes from black to blinding white in an instant. The first blast came from the direction of Los Angeles. The next one came from the North. After that I was driving in a strobe light world. I crashed in the woods. I woke up years later.

The war hit and took my family from me. I cried...I grieved...I seriously considered suicide...more on that later....I did these things, I made a time for them. Even years later, I don't know how many...but even after however many years, a day to me, I made a time to mourn them. Did they survive? Unlikely. If they did were they still alive? Not a chance. This war took everything from me. Having nothing then I made a time for something new. I started walking. I haven't finished. I've changed in more ways then one. Sometimes I wish the War had never happened but sometimes...most of the time...I'm grateful. I lost my family and the world I knew in an instant but I inherited so much more.

I thought I'd just let you know that you are only allowed to have one fan fic at a time, same goes for Rp's.

Good Morning Sunshine


Clic-clack clic-clack clic-clack

No I didn't actually hear that, but that's the sound I assume must have woken me up.

I awakened slowly and all at once. That is to say I was scarcely aware that I was opening my eyes and actually alive. One second nothing, then this odd dream like experience, then sudden intense consciousness.

Nothing for so very long, only a moment for me of course, but such a very deep nothing. It worries me these days being as close to the end as I must be. I wonder was I dead but came back...if so why was there not a blinding brilliant light and troves of angels or at least a well dressed man in a sharp suit with a chesire cat grin. Anyway, a slow dream experience follows. The first thought I remember having after the accident was "Am I dreaming?" How nice it would have been if I were. Not if I were dreaming about the world as I found it mind you...but if I were dreaming about waking up instead of actually waking up. It is in this fugue state I become cognizant of my environment.

Leather seats shrunken and cracking apart. Remnant of seat belt laying across my right leg. Gear shift sunken into the body of the car. Dashboard peeling. Rat gnawing on the passenger's seat.

It was then that I looked up and saw my first and last post apocalyptic horse. Our eyes met for a second. I kept my eyes locked expecting it to run. It did not. I let my eyes wander over it. That was a mistake. Patches of it's body were missing hair and in those patches the skin had become black and knotted. I jumped in the car at the sight of it. My legs hit the steering wheel just above the thigh and my head rebounded against the roof. The horse whinnied and took a few steps back. I met it's eyes again, as it turned I got a better look at it's face. She was a harelip and her teeth were bloodstained and broken.

I pressed myself hard against the chair for some time even after she had galloped away. I felt a slight pushing against my hand and looked down to find that rat sniffing some disgusting dead thing in my lap. Pushing away from another diseased putrid thing I open the door and roll into the dirt beside the road only to find the dead thing still with me. Shortly thereafter I realized it was my hand.

Coming to Terms

It ain't easy being green. I sat there on the side of the road for some time in shock. It didn't take very long to realize that something horrid had happened to my hand, but it took me a bit to realize that yes that really was my hand and no I wasn't going to recover anytime soon. I was not who I was driving home from work that night, I was a monster now. Rather fitting really as the world had undergone much the same change. That change would dawn on me gradually for the next several years.

I sat there collecting my thoughts. I had and have come to the conclusion that something strange had come to pass in the intervening hours, days, months, and possibly years between my accident and my reintroduction to this world. In my travels I have met many others like me. My conclusion is a piece of bitter irony. These weapons, atomic that is, that we used to bring to death to so much of the world kept me alive. They scoured cities, collapsed buildings into their foundations, turned men, women and children to ash...my family among them...but to me and counted others they granted a new life.

I didn't know it at the time of course. All I knew was some considerable amount of time must have passed and that while I retained conscious thought and sanity my body had been corrupted. I surveyed the damage which wasn't hard as my clothing lay in tatters. If this were a nice Hollywood movie I would have a torn shirt, tattered pants, and some nice modesty saving loincloth like bit around my nether-regions, but life is not kind like that. My shirt was in tatters but my pants and undergarments had rotted away entirely leaving a pool of bio-goop on the seat of the car. This gift or curse that brought me life had destroyed my body. I was all thin muscle, bone, and sinew...and these were all visible. My aforementioned nether-regions were gone, having joined in the pool that thoroughly soaked the driver's seat and foot mats. I counted myself cursed at the time, only later would I discover how lucky I was to have kept my limbs and eyes.

In those days I harbored the small secret hope that perhaps my family lived still. I knew it not to be the case in the way that people know these types of things, but I protected that hope. That hope was what got me through the bad times in the beginning, those just might have been the worst days of my not inconsiderable life. How many lives were lost for the stupidest of reasons shortly following the war? I don't know. Incalculable numbers no doubt. I don't even know how long passed between that dark day and the moment I woke up, how many might have been lost while I slept...but in the days to come so many of the people I met would die...and that was before the Vaults ever even opened.

Aussie_made


Yeah thanks for the info. Thanks for closing my two other topics too.

Small Towns

In the days after my rebirth I wandered aimlessly...truthfully in the decades after my rebirth I wandered aimlessly...but in those first days I ran into few survivors. Keep in mind now this was not all that long after the bombs dropped. How long precisely I can't say, but it would still be years before Vault Dwellers came out into the wasteland. It was enough time then for those who were lucky enough to survive the flames of atomic war to begin grouping around whatever shelters were left standing. The first group I met was gathered about a Big Boy burger joint. Big Boy was burned white by the blasts but was about two-thirds intact.

That was when I realized that the fact that I was still a human being didn't really matter. The wasteland is a hard enough place, looking like a zombie well it hasn't made things easier. Especially not in those days. They spotted me coming from pretty far away. By the time I had run across them, the first live humans I'd seen since rebirth, I had traveled from the coastal areas into the mainland. I was heading South though I didn't really know why, it was probably just the direction I was facing when I woke up...hell I don't know.

When I got within shouting distance they let me know in no uncertain terms that they were armed. Bats, knives, and pieces of metal torn from buildings. These sods had tried to keep to themselves to avoid stirring up any trouble. Just wanted to raise their children and get by. In return the raiders looted what few amenities the small town had and left them in a dust bowl. The raiders had preyed on them for a time but soon moved on to greener pastures. Their isolationism, and lack of anything worth stealing, had saved them. They made it plainly evident they didn't want me around but we still got to talking a bit, the jilted conversation that was so common in those days, strangers looking to see how they might take advantage of one another. They were trying to develop some agriculture but the ground would give them nothing. I had no advice to give them and nothing to offer them and so I continued on.

I hope that makes you sad. I hope you are reading this at some point so far in the future that you will think me now perhaps a bit cruel and that you will come to despise me. This will be a recurring theme. In holo-films there was always something the hero could do to set things right always some kind of closure. I don't know what happened to them. They probably all died. I know that I walked away from them and never went back. I encountered a good few similar settlements on my trek west. These days were some of the worst. Not enough time had passed that travel was really safe, radiation hot zones still existed. Not enough time had passed that any sizable militias had formed to protect, or extort, the people. Not enough time had passed that raiders had formed any kind of alliance, rather than one large group acting as a parasite to communities several small groups would prey on them one after the other until only bones were left.

That's it for this section. No particular happy note to end on. That was how it was in those days. I hope that in the day you read this you have the luxury to have morals and hope and all those nice little theologies that made life so beautiful in the days before. But were I to guess I'd place my dollars on you living in no more enlightened a time than I, assuming man still walks this god forsaken planet.

This is really, really good. I would you are probably showing exactly what post apocalyptic life would be like

Base Humanity

The first decent sized town I ran into was shortly north of what was once Ventura. A brief history of that town is probably in order. Beginning after the war of course, anything prior to that is by and large irrelevant....

After the dogs of war turned the countryside into so many bonfires there were few buildings left standing and a surprisingly large number of people looking for shelter. Standing guard over the smoldering ashes of that small ocean side town was a large white building. Oval windows with shards of stained glass reflecting the sun, thick wooden double doors with a circular knocker, and a dominant white cross standing atop it all. Many saw great meaning in this building surviving the holocaust thrown down upon us, many more just realized it was a good opportunity for shelter. This town built up around the white building and the tenants that were once taught inside it.

A nice thought right? Now I'm no bigot. All religions I've encountered have their foundations in supporting the development of society. The same basic laws are repeated in these different theologies with little changing but the figurehead. They have survived these thousands of years of mankind because of their support of society and despite their contradictory teachings. They have survived this devastation for one primary reason, that belief in a higher power gives consequence to one's actions beyond this life.

(Censored)

This society was brought up on those tenets. A cult? I suppose, in that all belief systems are a cult until they are dominant in their own region. These however were good people. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Atheists, Buddhists, Hindus...no doubt others I have forgotten or never known. They grouped together due to belief in something beyond this life and lived in a matter reflective of such. They showed me kindness despite my appearance and shared with me what little they had.

How rare is that now reader? Is it common now? I truly hope it is. How very rarely have I seen such kindness, one such as I in a land such as this. Oh but it is so beautiful when one gives of oneself. I was like that once. I mean I was greedy too, but I had my moments. In those days though, in the midst of some of my worst days were some of my best.

When I came across this town I was starving. Yes, ghouls still eat. My metabolism has slowed down exponentially but the laws of nature are not so flimsy that a bit of radiation will break them. I had been walking for some time and passed a few small towns which would not even give me the time of day. These were my good Samaritans.

How must I have looked that day. Stumbling toward town in a daze, head hanging, little more than scraps of clothing. I had nothing to offer these people. Nothing material at least. They sent a young boy to greet me. A young boy...to greet me. He saw my face and barely reacted. He gave me bits of jerky and helped me into town. They trusted me, a complete stranger, from the very first moment we met. They took me in and set me up in their town center, the church. Things were too good. I had read stories like this.

It being late they set me up with a blanket and a pillow. Wool blanket and a Ziploc Gallon bag filled with tattered cloth and duct taped shut. I laid on a pew listening to hushed conversation among the few others in the chapel. Conversations being exactly what one might expect. How could this happen. How could God let it happen. Is this the end times. Those questions lead to deeper more theological ones. Ones I will not address now because I have no doubt I will address them several times as I go on. They are very much a part of me now.

I laid there in this wasteland oasis listening to strangers sharing their fears, their hopes for the future, their theological wanderings. The conversations looped as they tend to do and in time all settled in for the night. Coarse blankets scrapped audibly over huddled bodies. Some time later I rose from my pew and approached the lectern. It held several holy books. I had no use for them.

Treading carefully I moved alongside the walls to the other side of the church. Floor boards are less likely to squeak if you tread where they are strong, might save you one day. On the right near the entrance is a small door, I check it. It's locked. I make my way back to the lectern with a strong suspicion. I run by fingers down the side of one of the books trying to feel out any difference. It takes me a few times as I've lost some feeling in my fingertips but I find it. Matthew 11:28 and a key.

The door opens before me and a sense of dread fills me to overflowing. I look upon a cellar door.

I break open the door as quietly as I can in the night but still make altogether too much noise. Stepping down into darkness my vision is reduced to zero until my eyes can adjust to the stark darkness. It is then that I see them. Piled atop one another in heaps.

Base Humanity Cont.

Books. Just books. I could almost see the mutilated bodies I expected to find. Could already begin to put together some strange horrible logic for the cannibalism I had assumed was in practice here. Some reversion back to ritual killings to atone for sins. My suspicions were wrong. The priest found me down there and explained a bit about it. The church had had a history of burning books deemed offensive or sinful, but this new iteration wished to gather as much knowledge of the past as possible that it might not be lost on future generations. Holy writings, scientific writings, theology, psychology, sociology, mathematics, physics, blueprints, classical literature, and dozens upon dozens of biographies. They had built up a warehouse of knowledge of the world that had existed.

I stayed with them for a few weeks after this had transpired. I hunted with them catching whatever small prey we could find, gathering canned and dried goods, looking for patches of still edible vegetation. They were kind, generous, and open. They were everything the wasteland was not, even in pre-war times they would have impressed. I left them with a heavy heart. Their joy and hope made a poor salve for my wounds. Continuing my walk was bitter but helped to distract me from all that I had lost. This oasis shrunk behind me as I continued South along the coast.

Weeks later I would hear mention of that town from another wanderer. Word of their goodness has spread. The town took in many new travelers and benefited greatly from the trade that brought. These individuals, the founders and those who joined them, sought to elevate the wasteland around them to form a haven for mankind. Their lofty goals had only one obstacle, base humanity. In time the wrong people heard of these trusting kind people and did what such men tend to do. Seeing something beautiful they tore it apart. The chapel that had withstood atomic hellfire was set aflame by greedy jealous men. It held what may have been the greatest gathering of knowledge on the entire west coast. It held what may have been the gathering of the greatest people on the entire west coast. Ashes now all.

Strength

I wish I were a stronger man.

I wish I were strong enough to hope.

I wish that man could rebuild so that whenever it is you are reading this there is once again hope in the world.

In my travels and really just because of the times in which I have lived I, like all the others, have had to make one real primary decision which would affect how I would live the rest of my life. I do not know if I have made the right one...I don't think I could have made the other.

The decision is the simple old question of "Is the cup half full or half empty." Doesn't get much more Philosophy 101 than that, but in a world like this it can make all the difference. I erred on the side of empty. That might strike you as sad. I know it would have struck me that way before the war, but that was before I saw what hope can do to a man.

Have you ever heard of Los Angeles? No? Well in it's time Los Angeles was a massive hub of humanity. Looked up to by the creative and criminal types of the United States and looked down on by the rest of society. Los Angeles was a mixing pot, much like New York, of all the different cultures that made up the United States in the days before the cataclysm. Unlike New York, Los Angeles had resisted the arrests and purges of the McCarthy trials.

It was burned from the face of the Earth in the first moments of that cataclysm. In a city so big however there were still plenty of burned out husks standing in the streets. This city was the stuff of nightmares. Blackened torn buildings reached toward the sky amidst the rubble of those that had fallen. Innumerable bodies littered the streets. Clad in suits, jeans, hats, dresses, gowns, overalls, and some with their clothes burned off or stolen. Beheaded, bisected, broken, burned, shattered, shot, stabbed, and starved. The bodies displayed for all the world to see. This was where hope and the disappointments that it must bring took their toll on those who survived the bombs.

The city actually looked bigger in those days than it had in the time before. With many of the buildings destroyed or in tatters you could see further down the streets and were given a wider panorama. It was a panorama straight out of Dante's Inferno. I ventured into it nonetheless. I was fortunate that I had taken it as a given that my family was dead, I some small hope of finding them at first...but if I were to really think about it I knew them to be dead. The first few days in this city would drain me of whatever inkling of hope I might have held on to. I was in such a state from the beginning as to not truly feel the impact of the city. I mean I was struck by the scene no doubt. It is easy to look at such a scene from a distance and feel disconnected, but up close and looking at a small charred corpse in the back of a minivan or finding the more recently dead...it is much more personal. I didn't care much if mankind were gone, but I did care when I found the individual bodies.

I learned to switch that off quite quick, and really perhaps that switch is more important than the "Half empty or half full" question...though really that all ties into hope.

I've rambled quite enough.

Suffice to say then that entering into this city every traveler must make a decision. Turn that switch, empty your glass half way and note that it is empty, abandon all hope...or take on the sorrow, the heart ache, the thing which man has no real word for, that results from such an event. I didn't want to face that. To look into every face, skull, and pile of ash and feel the loss of possibility of unknown futures. If I were stronger perhaps I would have made the other decision, but if I had perhaps I would have ended up as so many of those who first ventured into the heart of Los Angeles did.

/hooked

Keep up the good work!

Hopeless in Los Angeles

I came into Los Angeles like I have came into so many towns in this life of mine. Tired, broke, and with nothing to my name. If things have changed about as much I expect them to, which is to say minimally, then I assure you you've never seen a city this large. I don't exaggerate when I tell you that in the days before the war this place held more people than other entire states. It stretches as far as the eye can see. I came in and found first a small suburb behind which rose the remains of the once great skyscraqers.

It was known then as Adytum. You may have heard of it if the story of the Vault Dweller still makes its rounds. This was before the Cathedral, the Master, and all of that. Funny thing, in this town there was a second group that sought to preserve knowledge. The Follower's of the Apocalypse they called themselves. It was with a group of them that I ventured into the heart of the city. They were looking for more literature to add to their library, I was looking for a good death I suppose, I had no real reason to take the risk. They had been recruiting members to venture into the city for sometime and were happy to have another, lucky me.

It was in the midst of the city that I saw the horrors I have attempted to describe. We pushed through countless corpses sometimes getting hooked by errant limbs, we climbed through piles of rubble and rebar encountering the most well preserved of corpses as they peeked out from within their graves. We move carefully trying to avoid shuffling our feet or stepping down too hard as each step raises ash into the air. I wonder then how much of this ash is human debris.

As we push through this dreamscape they tell me about their beliefs. Secular but quasi-religious they believed that as much evil as man had done he was capable of doing even greater good. By collecting these books they hoped to start there in Adytum a new civilization, a new world. One of the brothers, Gregory I believe though perhaps Gregor...or just Greg...or maybe James. Anyway one of them was particularly confident in their ultimate success. He described how they hoped to grow in Adytum, how they were even now gathering up materials for a hydroponic farm. He had high hopes that they might clear the dead streets of Los Angeles and turn it into a massive agricultural project. It was a nice idea.

As he finished up his story we came across the building that would be the death of Gregory/Greg/whatever and the majority of the rest of the Followers who had accompanied me. Another library, what are the odds.

Funeral Pyre

We stepped into the library and out of our innocence. That may be a bit of an exaggeration. We were all pretty aware of what the world had become. It's hard to go more than a day or two in this world without knowing exactly what mankind had been reduced to. If the crumbling buildings and sight of distant smoke weren't enough of an indicator chances are your first encounter with another living human would be a dead give away.

So perhaps it wasn't the end of our innocence but it was a release of all hope. One would think it would take something incredible for one to loose hope so utterly. I heard hell, no I'm not religious how could I be these days, described as the absence of all hope. It's a fitting description I think.

Not at first thought maybe. Not until one has really delved into what hope is and what it means to man. That idea was never more true than in these days. To cry out into the night and know, to truly know, that there is not one out there to relieve your pain. To walk without hope of coming to a friendly door. Not a truly friendly door. They may offer you food yes. They may even allow you to live with them...though I know how rare that is. They will expect something for it though. They will come to take that something and it is always more than you wish to pay.

Hell is giving up hope for a resurgence of mankind. I can pray for it still, yes. But prayer and hope are quite different. Particularly when one does not believe that his prayers are doing anything nor going anywhere. No. My prayers are not heard by divine ears. They are heard by only my own. They are spoken for only my own. Only that I might know that once perhaps, things could have been different.

Gah. But I digress once more.

We stepped into the library to discover that it was a children's library. Our loss of hope was not that the books were worthless children's books. There were amassed there the bodies of children in vary stages of decomposition. Somewhere in that world lurked a child killer. A serial one at that. Of the small percentage of mankind that had survived, among it somewhere, was one who would find and kill what few children had survived and pile their bodies here.

I will not speak any more of them or what was done to them. Their is no acceptable cause of interest, in a matter such as this any interest is prurient. We left that building quietly and returned to our own library. A few days later I returned and set fire to the building. It was one of many flames solitary in an endless expanse of wasteland. I watched it's smoke rise that night until sleep took me.