» Fri May 27, 2011 9:48 pm Some people didn't have that luxury. On the stretch of riverside concrete that once belonged to a city, one such unfortunate was crouched behind the remains of a bone-gray wall, already cracked and now splintering even further as bullets peppered its reverse side. Alice Walker, age 19, didn't have the time or the means to curse; besides, her father had always frowned on that kind of behavior.
Sparing a moment to wonder what her father would think of her now, Alice did her best to ignore the shooting pain in her leg, adjusting her grip on the sweat-slick gunmetal held with both her hands, and edged closer to the moment where the protective wall would end.
There was a pause in the fire, the bright tracers that had lit the night pausing for a moment, and Alice's ears - trained by hard experience - heard the familiar ch-chnk of multiple assault rifles reloading. Gritting her teeth and swallowing a wince, Alice forced herself from her hiding-place with barely a gasp, blocking out the burst of pain and the sickening crush of bone to place three bullets, one after another, in what she hoped were three separate Raider heads before ducking back around the corner.
Alice didn't get to admire her handiwork, although the abruptly-stifled war-cries told her that she'd hit her mark. Three down... Four more to go. Alice gripped her rifle, brought it across her chest as she'd learned to do, ready to lean out again, but the Raiders had proven they were slightly more intelligent then the Super Mutants. They gave her no time to emerge and shoot; there was no lull in the gunfire, and the sounds of violence ripped the silence of the night to shreds. As they pelted down around the lone (ex-) Vaulter Dweller, those pieces of night had the sound of spent casings.
There were no more bullets left in her rifle.
Now Alice cursed, verbally no less, although her explosion was unheard beneath the sounds of the approaching gunfire; Alice had no ammunition left, and now regretted setting out across the Wastes with so little ammo. She'd made the mistake of trusting the Wasteland, which had always provided Raiders and Slavers and Mutants as Alice required them, unobservant and stupid and apparently all too willing for Alice to slip in close and pick them off one by one; she's always been able to find what she needed, food and weapons and even chems, in the camps of the scum that roamed the wide open spaces. The Raiders, especially, were always good for chems.
But she'd gotten careless this time, been so caught up in her own determination that she hadn't realized the sun was beginning to set. That she hadn't recognized the signs her own senses were giving her, at least not until the bullets began pinging into the fractured ground around her feet. She wasn't far from Rivet City, Alice knew that she could see its hulking shape in the distance, but at this rate...
In the way that seconds can feel like a lifetime, all this passed through the mind of the escapee from Vault 101. Some called her a hero; Three Dog called her a Savior of the Wastes. Alice herself wouldn't go that far, but heroes always managed to pull through in the end, right?
Shifting her rifle to one arm, Alice's other hand rummaged through her clothes at a rate that would be frantic if it wasn't so forcedly calm. Fingers, scarred and burned by injury and wear, closed around a hard, cylindrical shape in the depths of a vest pocket, rust and old paper rubbing off under her hand.
She'd never been good at this sort of thing; she'd never even made it onto the Vault Little League team, and there'd only been about dozen kids to choose from... But she'd practiced, since the last time she'd traveled, and right now Alice could only hope that all those hours spent chucking rocks at banged-up tin cans had improved her aim.
As fast as she could manage it, Alice pulled the makeshift pin and leaned out just enough to get a good view of her attacks, then snapped her arm forward and released. A rusty can wrapped in yellowed paper hurtled through the air, turning end over end and causing the Raiders to, briefly, lower their weapons in confusion as it passed them by. Briefly, mind you, because a single shot rang out from Alice's 10mm, and the can exploded into a blue-laced orange star.
Crouching behind the much-battered wall, Alice covered her ears against the blast as best she could, the rifle now at her feet as the canol lit up with a fire that was, for a moment, as bright as day. An arm skidded towards her over the cement, part of a head and what looked liked a lower jaw, and most importantly she couldn't hear any more gunfire.
Peering around the corner, Alice noted with some satisfaction that all four of the Raiders, as well as the bodies of their friends, were now rapidly-shriveling husks of what had once been (somewhat) human beings. As the sparks began to die, the blackened corpses hissing gray smoke into the darkness, Alice reflected that they were now hardly recognizable as people.
Of course, she'd have said the same thing when they were alive.
Before the last of the charred flesh had completely extinguished, Alice had already bent down with a grimace and slung her rifle over her back; she needed to patch herself up, at least for as long as it took to reach Rivet City, and after what just happened she wasn't sure she wanted to do so in the open. She managed to drag herself to the next ruined overpass, where she was pleasantly surprised (if somewhat depressed) to find a makeshift lean-to in the shelter of the concrete overhead. It seemed as though someone had been there fairly recently; a fire was still crackling away in a metal trashcan, but there was no-one in sight. Normally Alice liked to ask before she made herself at home, but this was the Wasteland; if the owner wasn't back by now, he'd probably never be.
Easing herself onto the colored rugs piled over the cold cement, Alice did her best to work in silence as she set her rifle by her side and pulled out her medical supplies from the brahmin-skin satchel at her waist. Surgical tubing and strips from the rug stopped the bleeding and braced the bone, which turned out to be less broken and more fractured, for all that was worth; two Stimpaks helped her stay conscious, although her adrenaline was blocking some of the restorative's effects. Alice bent the needles of the empty syringes and tossed them into the trash-can, where the plastic popped almost instantly with a sound too hollow to be gunfire.
Knees drawn up to her chest, she wrapped her arms around them and curled into herself, trying for a little bit of warmth in the night that had turned absolutely chill; mist rose off from the water in thick banks, creeping over the boundaries of the canols as though the mist were alive, but Alice's eyes - peering dark and bright over her long-sleeved arms - were only looking for the stirring fog that meant Mirelurks, or Raiders, or sometimes Talon mercs. She'd only run into those guys once, but it had been a firefight... or a laser-fight, on their part... that she'd been lucky to get out of. Finding that contract for her head on the leader's body hadn't helped Alice's peace of mind.
Time wore on, and hours passed, and Alice's eyes ached to close. But she could stay awake; she had to, just because it would be too easy to fall asleep in the cold and the dark. As she was, the was almost hidden in a corner of the little half-shack, her back to a shadowed crevice in the man-made stone, and there was nothing she could see beyond a five-foot radius in front of her.
Not for the first time, Alice caught herself wishing that she'd never left the Vault, where they'd never seen sunlight but also never worried about Raiders or Slavers or mutated monstrosities, or about dying alone in the godforsaken dark. Tears threatened to overflow, jabbing at her eyes with red-hot needles and demanding some form of release, but Alice bit them back and concentrated on the cold, on the pain, because she already knew how dangerous it would be to give in. Tears obscured your vision, and grief made you drop your guard - The Wasteland took advantage of those who couldn't pick a better time to feel. And even knowing this, Alice recalled despite herself the familiar faces she'd known growing up, Amata and Mr. Brotch, Jonas and old Mrs. Palmer, and even Paul Hannon, not to be confused with his dad. Alice couldn't reconcile her old life with what it had turned into just before she'd left... Before she'd been forced to leave.
She wondered if it had been like that in all the vaults. If any one of them had actually saved... anyone at all.
Alice, if anyone had been there to see her, would have looked like a statue more than a human being, her body totally still, her face carefully controlled. This was something she'd learned to do after she'd left the vault, after she'd learned that growing up in the vault wasn't the same as growing up in the Wastes, and she'd had a lot of catching up to do. Her head began to droop, and from a pocket in her pants Alice fished out a battered metal tin and popped a blood-red Mentat into her mouth, then checked her Pip-Boy's glowing green clock.
Only five more hours 'til dawn.
Notes: It may or may not be the first of a series; I just had to take a break from the game for a bit and bash this one out. Reviews, critiques, whatever... I'd like to hear your opinions, and if you'd care to see any more.
