Chapter 6: Welcome to the Wasteland
The heavy oak door to the Overseer’s office didn’t hiss like the pneumatic bulkheads in the residential sectors, but it always carried a weight that made Lucy’s chest tighten. The emergency strobes had finally been turned off, leaving the room bathed in its standard, comforting amber glow, but the lingering panic from the lockdown still hung in the air.
Hank MacLean sat behind his massive mahogany desk, his fingers laced together, looking every bit the weary father of a very large, very unruly family. A half-empty ceramic mug sat near his left hand, the bold block letters reading World’s Best Dad facing away from him.
“Dad, you have to listen to me! There’s been a massive breakdown in communication!” Lucy practically threw herself against the edge of the desk, her fingers gripping the polished wood.
Her heart was beating a frantic rhythm against her ribs, her mind looping back to the image of Kenny sprinting down the auxiliary corridor with a stolen pack.
“Kenny didn’t understand the parameters of the drill. He thinks he’s on an official scouting mission for the Council! He went out through the lower service hatches, Dad. He doesn’t have a standard environmental suit, he doesn’t have the proper rations, and if the atmospheric scrubbers are actually failing, he’s breathing in simulated contaminants right now!”
Hank didn’t move. He didn’t blink. The soft, gentle crinkles around his eyes—the ones that usually accompanied a lecture about community gardens or the importance of a firm handshake—were entirely gone. His face looked like it had been carved from a block of Vault-issue synthetic marble.
“Sit down, Lucy.” Hank said, his voice flat and perfectly level. It wasn’t a request. It carried the absolute, unyielding density of a hydraulic press.
Lucy froze, her mouth slightly open as the sheer wrongness of his tone washed over her. This wasn’t the man who helped her practice her intermediate gymnastics routines. This felt like speaking to a stranger who happened to be wearing her father’s jumpsuit.
“I can’t sit down! We need to form a recovery team immediately.” She pressed on, her aggressive positivity flaring up to shield her from the creeping chill in the room. “If we get Chet and a three-man security detail to the lower airlock, we can override the local seal before he gets too deep into the sub-sectors. ‘A Lost Lamb is a Shared Burden,’ Dad. We can’t just leave him down there because of a misunderstanding!”
The door behind her clicked open, and the heavy, mechanical hum of the corridor leaked into the room. Marcus Conroy stepped inside, his broad shoulders practically filling the frame. He looked exhausted, his work jumpsuit stained with graphite grease, his face set in a grim, tight line that made him look a decade older than he was.
Elena followed closely behind him, her fingers laced tightly around a worn technical manual, her eyes red-rimmed but entirely dry. Even Norm had slipped in through the gap, hovering near the corner of the room like a shadow that didn’t want to be noticed.
“Overseer.” Marcus spoke first, his voice gravelly and thick. “The lower bulkheads are fully pressurized. The security logs are cleared up to the secondary terminal, but the external pressure valves on Hatch Three are showing a complete vacuum break. Someone blew the primary seal from the inside.”
“We know who it was, Marcus.” Hank didn’t look up from his hands. He leaned back in his leather chair, the leather groaning under his weight. “Kenneth has initiated a complete separation from the collective architecture.”
“Dad, what does that mean?” Lucy’s voice rose a fraction of an octave, her gaze darting between her father and Kenny’s parents. The word separation sounded so sterile, so corporate.
It didn’t sound like Kenny. Kenny was the boy who helped her calculate the soil nitrogen levels for the hydroponics bay when she was struggling with her homework.
“He’s just confused.” She insisted. “He told me the Council selected him because he was unassigned!”
“There is no mission, Lucy.” Hank looked up then, his eyes locked onto his daughter with a piercing, cold clarity that made her step back. “There never was. Kenneth Conroy is not a scout. He is a thief. He used a stolen high-level administrative keycard to override the main security protocols, accessed restricted archives in the sub-levels, and physically extracted himself from Vault 33. He is AWOL.”
The word hung in the amber light like a physical barrier. Lucy felt the room tilt slightly. Kenny wouldn’t do that. He was cynical sometimes, sure, and he had that dry, strange sense of humor that made him seem detached from the daily community cheers, but he wasn’t a criminal. He had a good heart. He cared about the Reclamation more than anyone she knew, even if he talked about it like it was some kind of complex puzzle to be solved.
“That’s impossible.” Elena spoke up, her voice trembling but fierce as she stepped toward the desk. “Our Kenny doesn't steal. If he took something, he had a reason. He’s been working double shifts in the filtration sectors for six months without a single complaint. ‘Every Cog has a Purpose,’ Overseer. You can’t just brand a boy a criminal because he’s trying to find his place in the wheel!”
“Your son purposefully sabotaged the central administrative database to hide his footprint, Elena.” Hank stood up, his towering frame casting a long, sharp shadow across the mahogany desk. The World’s Best Dad mug was pushed aside, forgotten. “He compromised the security of this entire installation during a critical transitional phase. He didn't just walk out either; he took an active weapon from the armory transit boxes. He chose to leave the community. And under Section Four of the Administrative Charter, that choice is final.”
“Then let me go get him!” Lucy pleaded, her hands slamming onto the desk again, her stubbornness finally hardening into something desperate.
She couldn’t let this be the end of the story. The manual said the outer world was a blank canvas waiting for their light, but Kenny was out there in the dark alone.
“If he has a gun, he’s terrified! He’s sixteen, Dad! If he’s running because he thinks he failed the G.O.A.T., we can explain it to him. I’ll go out to the threshold. I’ll use the auxiliary radio to call him back. He’ll listen to me!”
“No one is leaving this sector.” Hank’s voice dropped into that deep, authoritative register he used during the annual Remembrance day broadcasts, but the warmth was entirely simulated. “The external environment is unmonitored, toxic, and highly volatile. Initiating a recovery protocol for a single rogue element endangers the stability of the remaining three hundred and twenty-eight residents. The door is sealed. The variable has been isolated.”
“He’s not a variable, he’s my brother!” Mia’s voice cut through the room from the doorway. She had slipped past Norm, her small face twisted in a mixture of anger and terror that she couldn't hide behind her usual sass. “You’re just going to let him die out there? Because he broke a stupid rule? He’s smarter than all of you combined! If he went out there, it’s because this place is broken!”
“Mia, hush.” Marcus gripped his daughter’s shoulder, his hand heavy and steadying, though his own jaw was clenched so tight the muscles were twitching under his skin. He looked at Hank, a silent, tense understanding passing between the two men. Marcus knew the machinery of the Vault; he knew what happened when an airlock was cycled from the inside. There was no coming back.
“Lucy, return to your quarters.” Hank said, turning his back to the room to stare out the reinforced glass window toward the quiet, empty atrium below. “The lockdown is lifted, but you are restricted to residential Level Two until the Council reviews the security logs. This matter is concluded.”
Lucy stood there, her hands curling into fists at her sides. She looked at Kenny’s mother, whose shoulders had finally slumped into a quiet, devastating grief, and then at her father’s rigid, unmoving back.
The aggressive positivity that had guided her entire life—the absolute belief that every problem had a structured, happy solution if you just worked hard enough—felt like a fragile glass dome that had just been shattered by a hammer blow.
Her father wasn’t going to save him. The Vault wasn’t going to save him.
She turned on her heel and walked out of the office without saying another word, her boots striking the floor with a rhythmic, sharp finality. If Kenny was out there in the world, then the world was just going to have to make room for the two of them.
At least until she could bring him back home.
…
The little green line on my compass was a dirty, filthy liar.
I leaned my back against a rusted-out pre-war sedan that had half-melted into the asphalt, my lungs working like broken bellows as I tapped the cracked screen of my Pip-Boy. It didn’t matter how many times I smacked the plastic housing with the heel of my palm; the local map was a joke.
A massive, pixelated expanse of absolutely nothing, with a solitary, mocking green icon sitting at the bottom edge labeled Vault 33. I’d tried hovering my selector over it a dozen times already, hoping against hope that my stupid gamer system would give me a Fast Travel prompt. No dice.
Survival mode can bite my ass.
And fuck did it leave me in a bad spot. Here I was, Level 12, running on pure adrenaline and a stomach full of recycled Vault oxygen, completely blind on the surface. My perception was a solid four, meaning the local markers only popped up when I was practically tripping over them.
According to the internal archives I’d memorized back in my bunk, there was supposed to be a municipal medical center somewhere along this stretch of the coast. A nice, structured building where I could scavenge some Rad-Away, find a clean mattress, and figure out how to survive the night without getting my face chewed off by a mutated hound or something.
The local marker finally flickered into existence on my HUD, a blocky little cross icon that gave me a brief, pathetic surge of dopamine. I scrambled up the embankment, my boots skidding on the loose gravel, my Agility 1 ensuring that every single step looked like an elaborate, uncoordinated dance routine.
My body felt like a shopping cart with three broken wheels and a loose brick in the bottom basket. I had the raw endurance of a pack mule, but trying to move with any kind of tactical grace was just a statistical impossibility.
When I finally crested the ridge, the triumphant music playing in my head cut out hard.
The hospital wasn’t a building. It was a crater. A massive, jagged bowl of vitrified earth and shattered rebar, plunging deep into the bedrock where a tactical strike had turned two hundred years of medical history into a glowing, radioactive soup. The air above the pit was shimmering with heat haze, and a dull, heavy click-click-click began to thrum through my Pip-Boy’s audio receiver.
“Great. Perfect. Five stars, Vault-Tec. Excellent urban planning.” I muttered, pulling my aviator glasses down the bridge of my nose to stare at the wreckage.
The heat was already baking through the thick fabric of my jumpsuit, the sun acting like a physical weight pressing down on my shoulders. Back in the Vault, the temperature was a constant, pristine sixty-eight degrees. Out here, it felt like the sky was actively trying to fry me like a rad-egg. I needed shelter, and I needed it before the sun dipped below the horizon and whatever lived in the dark came out to play.
That was when the radio crackled.
A sharp, static-laced hiss erupted from the Pip-Boy speaker, making me jump half a foot in the air and nearly lose my balance on the edge of the crater. It was a rhythmic, pulsing signal, cutting through the ambient dead air with a mechanical persistence.
“Emergency broadcast... Sector Seven... civilian refuge initialized... please seek immediate…”
A stash.
It had to be. A logistical supply cache, or at least a reinforced bunker that hadn't been vaporized by the bomb. If the system was picking up a radio signal, it meant there was still a functioning reactor or an auxiliary generator running down there. My Intelligence 9 brain immediately started mapping out the probabilities—a pre-war emergency refuge would have sterile water, medical crates, maybe even some high-grade combat armor that didn't smell like a rusted sewer pipe.
I tracked the signal strength, my Pip-Boy’s signal meter ticking upward as I navigated the crumbling perimeter of the crater. The source was a reinforced concrete stairwell that jutted out from the side of the collapsed hill like a broken tooth. The heavy blast door at the bottom had been warped by the blast, left hanging open just enough for a guy with my exact lack of coordination to squeeze through.
The air inside the stairwell didn’t smell like sage or baked earth. It smelled like wet copper, damp rot, and the kind of heavy, suffocating dust that hasn't seen a breeze since the late twenty-first century.
I drew the 10mm pistol, the cold steel of the grip sweat-slicked against my palm. I didn't have a flashlight attachment—because why would the Vault-Tec armory include basic tactical utility?—so I had to rely on the sickly green glow of my Pip-Boy screen to illuminate the corridor. The walls were lined with cracked tiles, covered in dark, peeling stains that I desperately tried to convince myself were just ancient water damage.
The radio signal was deafening now, a frantic, electronic shriek echoing off the concrete. I followed the sound into a sprawling, subterranean basement that looked like it used to be a laundry triage center. Massive industrial washing machines lay overturned like dead metal beasts, their drums choked with calcified linen.
I found the source of the broadcast on a rusted metal desk near the back wall. It was a compact, military-grade transmitter, its red indicator light blinking with a steady, mindless rhythm. There were no supply crates. No weapons caches. Just a neat, orderly row of skeletons lining the wall, their ribs caved in, their jaws locked in silent, ancient screams.
And then, the radio signal changed.
The automated voice cut out, replaced by a low, wet, rattling sound that didn’t come from the speaker. It came from the shadows underneath the collapsed ceiling support beams.
A shape shifted in the green gloom. It didn't move like a person. It was fast, spasmodic, a frantic scuffle of raw flesh and tattered rags sliding across the concrete floor. Before my brain could even process the threat matrix, a figure lunged into the light of my screen.
It didn't have a nose. The skin on its face was a mottled, sloughing mass of leathery, radiation-burned tissue, its eyes wide and milky with cataracts, burning with a mindless, predatory hunger that made my stomach drop into my boots. It let out a high-pitched, guttural shriek—a sound that was entirely devoid of anything human—and threw itself at my throat.
Feral Ghouls.
My memories had told me they were faster than walkers, but seeing a rotting, two-hundred-year-old corpse move with the speed of a sprinting cheetah in a confined space was a completely different kind of horror. I panicked, my Agility 1 kicking in as I tried to pull off a tactical backstep. Instead, my heel caught the edge of a discarded laundry basket, and I went down hard, the back of my skull cracking against the concrete floor.
The ghoul slammed onto my chest, its hot, foul breath smelling of ancient decay and iron hitting my face. Its clawed fingers tore into the shoulder of my jumpsuit, the thick fabric the only thing keeping its yellowed teeth from ripping out my jugular.
“Get—off—me!” I roared, my Endurance 9 taking the brunt of the impact as I jammed the barrel of the 10mm directly into the creature’s sternum.
I pulled the trigger. The blast in the enclosed basement was deafening, a flash of orange fire illuminating the rotting horrors of the room for a fraction of a second. The ghoul’s chest cavity collapsed in a shower of dark, viscous fluid, the kinetic force throwing its weight off my body.
But the noise was a dinner bell.
From every dark corner of the basement, from the ventilation shafts and the collapsed elevator pits, the shadows began to howl. It was a chorus of the damned, the scuffling of dozens of bare, calloused feet slapping against the concrete as the rest of the pack woke up.
I scrambled backward on my elbows, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs as three more ghouls burst from the shadows. I didn't have VATS. I didn't have a targeting reticle. I just had a heavy iron sight and a pair of hands that wouldn't stop shaking.
I fired blindly, the heavy 10mm rounds tearing chunks out of the concrete walls, shattering the glass of an old vending machine in a spray of sparkling shards. One of my shots caught a charging ghoul in the knee, the bone shattering instantly and sending the creature tumbling head over heels into a metal pillar. The other two didn't even slow down. They vaulted over their fallen pack-mate with animalistic agility, their jaws snapping.
I rolled to the side, a low-hanging pipe tearing a deep gash across my forearm as I scrambled to my feet. The pain was a white-hot spike, but my brain was already operating on pure survival logic. I couldn't outrun them—not with my physical stats. I had to use the environment.
My eyes flicked to a massive, overhead steam pipe that ran along the central ceiling support, its ancient valves rusted shut but the pressure gauge still trembling near the red zone from the geothermal pocket below the crater.
I aimed high, steadying my grip with both hands as a snarling ghoul closed the distance, its fingers inches from my face. I pulled the trigger twice.
The brass jackets slammed into the rusted valve assembly. The pipe didn't just leak; it exploded. A deafening shriek of superheated, pressurized steam erupted from the breach, a white wall of blinding heat blasting across the center of the basement. The two charging ghouls were caught squarely in the torrent, their rotten flesh peeling away from the bone as they let out synchronized, agonizing shrieks before collapsing into the boiling moisture on the floor.
I didn't waste time watching the XP notification pop up in the corner of my vision. I turned and lunged toward the warped blast door, my boots slipping in the puddles of dirty water and ghoul blood, my chest heaving as I practically threw myself through the narrow gap into the blinding, beautiful sunlight above.
I collapsed against the concrete stairwell, my breath coming in ragged, sobbing gasps as I stared up at the vast, uncaring blue sky. My jumpsuit was torn, my arm was bleeding, and my Pip-Boy was still clicking a steady, ominous rhythm.
Humanity was dead, and whatever was left out here was hungry. I wiped a smear of black blood from the lens of my aviator glasses, my fingers trembling so hard I could barely slide them back onto my face. The tutorial was definitely over.
…
The world outside the heavy, gear-shaped seal of Vault 33 didn’t look like the beautifully illustrated lithographs in the Reclamation Day Preparatory Syllabus. It didn’t look like anything she had ever been trained to expect.
Lucy gripped the canvas straps of her standard-issue welcome pack, her knuckles turning a stark, clean white against the blue fabric. The sun was an absolute, terrifying revelation—not a gentle, localized grid of simulated sun-bulbs that dimmed at twenty-two hundred hours, but a blinding, weeping eye of pure gold that seemed to burn straight through her corneas.
She stumbled slightly as her boots sank into the loose, warm sand, the sheer, staggering vastness of the horizon threatening to tilt her entire sense of gravity. There were no walls. There was no ceiling. Just an endless, terrifying dome of bright, pale blue that made her feel incredibly, beautifully small.
But Kenny was out here. Somewhere in this magnificent, sprawling canvas of the new America, Kenny was waiting.
She crested a low dune, her heart swelling with an aggressive, defiant wave of optimism that entirely drowned out the lingering echo of her father’s stern warning. Her father just didn’t understand. The Vault had been a cocoon, but they were meant to be the gardeners of the surface. If Kenny had been brave enough to take the first step without a syllabus, then she would just have to catch up and provide the structure he was missing.
A narrow, muddy stream snaked its way through the cracked asphalt of an ancient, ruined highway below the ridge, trickling toward the massive expanse of the distant ocean. Lucy’s eyes lit up.
Section Two, Paragraph Three: Identifying Local Hydrological Resources.
She scrambled down the embankment, unzipping her pack to pull out a pristine, vacuum-sealed glass sampling beaker. The water looked slightly gray, a thick crust of yellow foam bubbling lazily along the muddy banks, but she smiled nonetheless. Nature just needed a little bit of Vault-Tec ingenuity to get back on track.
She knelt by the edge, dipped a finger into the slow-moving current, and brought it to her lips to perform a standard olfactory and palate baseline test.
The reaction was instantaneous.
Her eyes watered, her throat convulsing in a violent, involuntary heave as she spat the liquid back into the sand. It didn't taste like water at all. It tasted like an industrial chemical fire mixed with concentrated table salt, leaving a oily, metallic film on her tongue that smelled distinctly of a rotting, sun-baked whale carcass.
“Oh, goodness.” Lucy gasped, wiping her mouth frantically with the sleeve of her pristine blue jumpsuit. She adjusted her grip on her pack, her optimism faltering for a fraction of a second before she firmly pushed the disgust aside.
Clearly, the localized filtration index was severely degraded. A thorough application of charcoal-sediment layers would fix that right up once they established a permanent camp.
A sudden, sharp crunch of gravel behind her cut through the rushing sound of the wind.
Lucy spun around, her face breaking into a wide, radiant, diplomatic smile before her brain could even register the absolute nightmare of a silhouette standing on the ridge above her. It wasn’t Kenny.
There were four of them. They looked like they had been assembled from the scrap heaps of a nightmare, their bodies draped in tattered leather, rusted metal plates, and dried, sloughing animal hides that smelled faintly of old blood and rancid grease.
The largest one in the front had a jagged piece of a pre-war stop sign strapped to his chest like a breastplate, his face entirely obscured by a terrifying mask made from the skull of a hornless goat. He held a rusted iron pipe wrapped in barbed wire, his knuckles covered in crude, dark tattoos of stylized serpents.
The raiders stared down at her in a heavy, suffocating silence.
Lucy didn't run.
Running would violate the core tenets of the Inter-Community Integration Protocol.
Instead, she took a deep, steadying breath, smoothed down the front of her jumpsuit, and reached into the side pocket of her pack to pull out a crisp, glossy, brightly colored brochure titled Your New Neighbors: A Guide to Co-Operative Resource Management.
“Good day to you!” Lucy announced, her voice ringing out across the barren highway with a bright, clear, cheerful authority that seemed to startle the rocks themselves.
She marched right up the embankment toward them, her hand extended in a perfectly firm, professional greeting posture, holding the pamphlet out like a beacon of civilization.
“My name is Lucy MacLean, and I’m an official representative of Vault 33.” She introduced herself. “We are currently initializing our surface-level integration phase, and I would be absolutely delighted to schedule a formal sit-down with your local council to discuss a structured chores rotation, basic sanitation guidelines, and emergency medical sharing! I know the transition can be intimidating, but we’re here to help!”
The four raiders didn't move. They didn't speak. They just stared at her hand, then at the glossy brochure, and then at her pristine, unblemished face with an expression of such pure, unadulterated bewilderment that it looked almost comical. The one on the left, a gaunt man with a mohawk held together by dried mud, slowly lowered his rusted hatchet, his jaw literally dropping open as he looked at his leader.
The goat-skulled leader slowly tilted his head, the empty eye sockets of the skull staring into Lucy’s wide, hopeful brown eyes. He let out a low, wet grunt, his fingers tightening around the barbed-wire pipe.
He had most-likely spent his entire life killing for water, fighting over irradiated meat, and evading the brutal hierarchy of the wastes, and now a clean, smiling girl in a bright blue suit was offering him a colored piece of paper and asking about a chores list.
She could imagine it was a little baffling. But all new things have a rough starting patch.
“What the hell is it?” The mohawk raider muttered, his voice a raspy, gravelly hiss. “Is it a synth? Is it one of them automated ghosts from the boneyards?”
“It’s too clean.” Another one whispered, stepping back a pace as if Lucy might suddenly explode into a cloud of plasma. “Look at the teeth. Ain't no real person got teeth like that unless they’re a demon.”
“I assure you, I’m entirely human!” Lucy laughed, a bright, musical sound that made the raiders flinch as if she’d pulled a pin on a grenade. “And we have an excellent dental hygiene program in the residential sectors! If your community is suffering from a lack of fluoride, we can absolutely integrate that into our initial trade agreements.”
The leader slowly reached out, his thick, dirt-crusted fingers pinching the edge of the glossy pamphlet. He pulled it from her hand, turning it upside down, staring at the cheerful cartoon vault-boy waving from the cover, and then promptly shoved it into his mouth, chewing on the high-grade paper with a thoughtful, bovine crunch.
He spat the chewed pulp into the dirt, his hidden eyes locking back onto Lucy.
“High-value lunatic.” The leader growled, his voice deep and raspy behind the goat skull. He raised his heavy pipe, pointing it directly at her nose. “Don't kill it. The boss pays good caps for the ones that're entirely out of their heads. Wrap her up.”
“Oh, wait! I don't think you understand the parameters of a diplomatic encounter—” Lucy started to explain, her hand reaching into her pack for the intermediate conflict-resolution guidelines, but before she could finish the sentence, a heavy, grease-stained burlap sack was thrown over her head, plunging her world into pitch-black, suffocating darkness.
Rough, calloused hands grabbed her arms, hoisting her off her feet with a brutal, uncaring force that made her gasp. She didn't panic—not yet—but as she was dragged backward over the rough gravel, her head bumping against a rusted metal fender, she couldn't help but think that the surface-level orientation program had left out some very important details.
…
My vision was swimming in a static-laced sea of neon green.
Every time my heart beat, a dull, throbbing ache pulsed behind my eyes, and my teeth felt loose in my gums. I staggered through the rusted, corrugated metal gates of Filly, my Agility 1 ensuring that I looked like a textbook zombie, dragging my left leg slightly as I navigated a walkway literally paved with pre-war garbage and compressed license plates.
The place smelled like a tire fire inside a rotting fish market. Flies the size of golf balls buzzed around stalls selling unidentifiable, charred meat on sticks, and the locals all looked like they’d been aggressively scrubbed with sandpaper and dipped in dirt.
My health bar was a horror show, and the flashing [RAD] icon on my HUD was aggressively eating away at my maximum HP. That basement full of ghouls had cost me more than just ammo.
I practically collapsed against the counter of a shop that looked like a violently upcycled shipping container, the sign above it reading Ma June’s Sundries in peeling, hand-painted letters. A woman with a face like a dried plum and an expression that could curdle fresh Brahmin milk stared at me from behind a reinforced mesh screen, her hand resting casually on the stock of a double-barreled shotgun.
“You’re bleeding on my counter, Vaulty.” Ma June said, her voice sounding like two bricks grinding together. “And if you’re looking for a handout, the only thing I give away for free is a buckshot colonoscopy.”
“I’m not looking for charity.” I croaked, my throat feeling like it was lined with broken glass.
I fumbled with my pack, pulling out three tarnished, gold-plated pre-war wristwatches I’d violently pried off the wrists of the ghouls in the basement. They were covered in ancient grime, but the internal mechanisms were still ticking away with an eerie, atomic precision.
“Real gold. Sealed casings. No rad-leakage.” I appraised, before making my offer. “I need Rad-Away. Clear IV bags, yellow chemical solution. Two of them.”
Ma June narrowed her eyes, reaching through a small slot in the mesh to snatch one of the watches. She bit the edge, scratched the glass with a dirty fingernail, and let out a disdainful snort. “One bag. And that’s because I’m feeling neighborly. These things are junk outside a major settlement.”
“One? Are you insane? My cell structure is actively liquefying right now!” I leaned heavily against the mesh, trying to channel whatever video game barter logic I could muster, but my Charisma 5 wasn't doing me any favors out here in the dirt. “Two bags, and I’ll throw in a handful of pristine copper wiring from a Vault service hatch. You know how hard it is to find un-irradiated wiring out here?”
She stared at me for three long, agonizing seconds before grunting, reaching under the counter, and slapping two dusty, crinkled IV pouches filled with chemical sludge onto the metal tray. I snatched them up, popped the seal on the first one with my teeth, and practically forced the chemical cocktail down my throat.
It tasted like battery acid and liquid aluminum, but almost instantly, the aggressive green tint on the edges of my vision began to recede, replaced by a violent, full-body shiver as my cellular degeneration stabilized. I leaned against a rusted support beam, letting out a ragged breath, finally feeling like my maximum health wasn't a stiff breeze away from zero.
That was when a theatrical, booming voice echoed from the center of the muddy town square, cutting through the ambient misery of the settlement.
“Step right up, citizens of the waste! Gather ’round and feast your eyes upon a tale of absolute, unadulterated madness!” A man standing atop a stack of rusted oil drums shouted, waving a cane topped with a brass doorknob.
He was wearing a shockingly crisp, albeit heavily stained, black velvet tailcoat and a dusty top hat that looked like it had been chewed on by a molerat. A small crowd of scavengers and drifters was already assembling around his makeshift stage.
“A localized phenomenon! A vision from the pre-war heavens!” He proclaimed, as if declaring doomsday during the apocalypse. “Not an hour ago, out by the salt flats, a scouting party of our very own Vipers captured a living, breathing ghost! A woman clad in the pure, unblemished cerulean blue of the ancient underground bunkers!”
My heart stopped. My hand instantly dropped to the grip of my 10mm pistol.
Lucy.
The absolute idiot had actually done it. She’d walked right out of the Vault into a den of literal human recyclers. My brain ran the numbers at light speed—Vipers meant chem-addicts, raiders, the kind of low-tier scum who didn't keep captives for company. They kept them for ransom, or worse, dinner.
I shoved my way through the crowd, my heavy, clumsy boots trampling the toes of a couple of angry-looking scavengers as I forced myself to the front of the stage. The snake oil salesman caught sight of my bright blue jumpsuit—even under the layers of ghoul blood and grime—and his eyes lit up like a pair of pre-war neon signs.
“Well, speak of the devils and they shall appear!” The salesman bellowed, pointing his cane directly at my nose. “Another celestial traveler! Tell me, friend, are you looking for your lost little angel? The Vipers have her, yes indeed, and they are currently dragging her off to their altar of doom!”
“Where are they taking her?” I demanded, trying to project an aura of calm, heroic authority. I leaned heavily into my Charisma 5, putting on the best confident grin I could manage while sweating through my uniform. “Look, friend, I’m a high-level representative of a major regional power. If you cooperate with me and give me the exact coordinates of that raider camp, I can ensure that your establishment receives top-tier mercantile priority once our trade routes are established. You’ll be a king in this sector.”
[Speech Check Failed.]
The salesman blinked, looked at the crowd, and then let out a theatrical, screeching laugh that had half the drifters joining in. “Trade routes? Regional power? Oh, bless your shiny little Vault-born soul! Caps speak louder than fairy tales, boy! Information isn't free in Filly, and your imaginary kingdom doesn't pay the rent!”
The grin slipped off my face.
Fine.
No more Mr. Nice Guy.
I stepped closer to the oil drums, wrapping my fingers tightly around the grip of the 10mm in my holster, letting the heavy steel click audibly against the rivets of my leather belt.
I narrowed my eyes behind the aviators, dropping my voice into what I hoped was a terrifying, psychopathic growl. “Listen to me, you glorified clown. I just cleared out an entire hive of feral ghouls with nothing but this pistol and my bare hands. If you don't tell me where she is right now, I’m going to use your top hat as a wastebasket, with your skull as it’s very first content.”
[Speech Check Failed.]
Damn it!
The salesman didn't even flinch. If anything, he looked mildly amused. Two incredibly large men carrying rusted tire irons stepped out from the shadows of the oil drums, their faces hidden behind scrap-metal welding masks.
“Intimidation? In my theater?” The salesman sighed, shaking his head with a look of profound disappointment. “A tragic performance. Truly subpar. Now, unless you have something of actual, tangible value to offer a man of my esteemed stature, I suggest you take your little pop-gun and waddle back to your hole.”
I bit the inside of my cheek so hard I tasted copper. I didn't have caps. I didn't have high-grade weapons. My hand dug into the deep utility pocket of my jumpsuit, my fingers brushing against the cold, smooth plastic of the item that had started this entire nightmare.
The Master Keycard.
To me, it was a useless piece of plastic now. Vault 33 was dead to me, a locked save file I could never reload. But out here? In a world obsessed with the shiny remnants of the old world? I pulled it out, holding it between my index and middle finger, letting the gold-plated circuitry catches gleam in the dirty California sunlight.
The salesman’s breath hitched. He leaned down from the oil drums, his brass-knobbed cane nearly slipping from his fingers as he stared at the red Vault-Tec logo stamped into the polymer.
“A skeleton key.” The salesman whispered, his theatrical persona slipping away for a fraction of a second, replaced by pure, unadulterated greed. “A master administrative token from the Old Gods. A genuine, un-compromised artifact of the vault network.”
“You want it?” I said, keeping my voice entirely flat as I gripped the card tightly. “Tell me where she is, and it's yours. Try to lie to me, and I’ll snap it in half before your boys can even lift those tire irons.”
“Why, the Sunken Pier, of course!” The salesman practically fell off the oil drums, scrambling toward me with his hand outstretched, his eyes locked onto the plastic card like a rabid dog chasing a steak. “Follow the old highway south for two miles! Where the asphalt drops into the ocean, you’ll see the skeletal remains of the old amusement park! The Vipers use the lower arcade structures to secure their high-value stock! They’re meeting a buyer there in less than an hour!”
I tossed the card at his chest. He caught it with both hands, instantly pressing it to his face as if he could smell the pre-war air still trapped inside the plastic.
“An excellent transaction! A historic compromise!” The salesman cheered, instantly bouncing back into his showman routine as I turned on my heel to leave. “And wait! Good sir! For a man of such undeniable valor, might I interest you in a bottle of Professor Pembroke’s Invincible Elixir? A miraculous tincture of pure vitality, guaranteed to render the user entirely immune to ballistic trajectories, laser abrasions, and the common cold!”
He held up a dirty glass bottle filled with a cloudy, yellow fluid that smelled suspiciously of industrial turpentine and brown sugar.
“A steal at only fifty caps!”
“Keep it.” I yelled over my shoulder, my boots already churning up the mud as I sprinted toward the southern gate of Filly.
My internal clock was ticking. One hour. I had one hour to cross two miles of irradiated wasteland with an Agility stat that made me move like a pregnant sea turtle, and if I didn't make it, Lucy was going to become a permanent fixture of someone else’s inventory.
…
The sun was dropping below the Pacific like a bloody, radioactive egg, painting the skeletal remains of the Sunken Pier in violent shades of orange and neon purple. I crouched behind the rusted chassis of a pre-war ice cream truck, my chest heaving as I tried to filter the salt-crusted air through my filter mask, which was really just a piece of cloth I wrapped around my face.
Two miles.
Two miles of sprinting with an Agility stat of one felt like a personal insult from the universe. My thighs were burning, my joints felt like they were packed with coarse sand, and every time I took a breath, it sounded like a dying vacuum cleaner choking on a sock.
I checked my HUD. The little hidden bracket brackets on my screen weren’t even trying to close. I was crouched, sure, but my stealth meter was basically screaming [CAUTION] in a flashing neon font. I was about as stealthy as a falling refrigerator.
Dragging my heavy Vault boots through the loose gravel, I crept toward the lip of the collapsed boardwalk, peering down into the skeletal lower arcade structure. A fire was crackling down there, fueled by ancient, treated wood that gave off a sickly green smoke. I readied my 10mm pistol, my sweating palms slick against the grip, bracing myself for the sight of blood, cages, or worse.
Instead, I found a classroom.
“Now, the key to avoiding lockjaw isn’t just wiping the blade on your trousers.” Lucy’s voice drifted up through the rafters, bright, clear, and dripping with that aggressive, kindergarten-teacher enthusiasm that usually accompanied a lecture on recycling. “You really need a three-to-one ratio of boiled water and distilled alcohol. If we look at the pitting on this edge, we can see where the microscopic bacteria are colonizing!”
I blinked, pulling my aviators down my nose to make sure the rad-sickness wasn't making me hallucinate. Lucy was sitting cross-legged on a rusted metal cooler, completely unrestrained. She had a massive, serrated combat knife in one hand and a dirty rag in the other, gesturing wildly to a group of four heavily armed, leather-clad Vipers.
The raiders weren't mocking her. They looked entirely paralyzed, staring at her with the hollow, shell-shocked expressions of men who had completely lost control of their own hostage situation.
“Why is it still talking?” The leader growled, his voice raspy behind his hornless goat-skull mask. He was rubbing his temples with his dirty knuckles, his heavy barbed-wire pipe resting uselessly across his lap. “We put the sack on it. We tied the knots. How did it get out of the knots?”
“The knots were a standard square-hitch, which is actually heavily covered in the basic survival youth elective!” Lucy explained, beaming a radiant smile right at him. “It’s highly inefficient for securing a cooperative civilian. Now, if we look at the chores chart I sketched out on the back of this flyer, I’ve assigned ‘Scavenger basic’ to the gentleman with the mud-mohawk, and you, Mr. Goat, are on latency-latrine duty!”
The raider with the mohawk slowly looked over at his boss, his jaw slack. “Boss, I don't want to be Scavenger basic. She said if I don't wash my hands after I gut a rad-stag, I’m barred from the dinner rotation.”
“Shut up! Just shut the hell up!” The leader screamed, leaping to his feet and violently kicking a rusted oil drum. The sheer absurdity of the encounter had reached its breaking point. He drew a jagged, rusted Bowie knife from his belt, his eyes burning with a manic, murderous frustration behind the skull mask. “That’s it. Caps be damned. I don’t care what the boss pays for clean stock. I’m putting an end to this circus right now.”
He stepped toward her, raising the knife.
My brain didn't register fear. It didn't register my pathetic physical stats or the fact that I had never shot a living person before. My gamer instinct—the hardwired, systemic urge to protect a high-value companion asset—completely overrode my survival programming.
I lunged out from behind the ice cream truck, my foot immediately catching the rusted edge of a collapsed guardrail. I didn't gracefully drop into the arena; I violently tumbled over the lip of the pier, falling ten feet through the air and landing flat on my back across a row of cracked plastic arcade cabinets.
The sound of shattering fiberglass and groaning metal echoed through the entire cavernous structure. My health bar took a visible dive, a sharp spike of agony shooting through my ribs as I rolled off the ruins of a Red Menace machine, coughing violently.
“Kenny!” Lucy squealed, her face lighting up with absolute delight, entirely ignoring the four raiders who had instantly spun around to aim their weapons at my broken body. “Oh, thank goodness! Look, everyone, this is Kenneth! He’s the one I was telling you about with the poor posture! Kenny, you’re just in time for the dental hygiene seminar!”
“Get up, Lucy!” I roared, scrambling to my knees as the mohawk raider leveled a pipe shotgun at my head.
I didn't have VATS, but my Intelligence nine brain instantly analyzed the geometry of the room like a tactical grid. The raiders were standing directly beneath the main structural support beam of the upper pier—a massive, rotting timber held together by ancient, salt-corroded iron bolts that were dripping with orange rust.
I didn't try to aim for the raider. I raised the heavy 10mm pistol with both hands, ignoring the shaking in my fingers, and fired three rapid shots directly into the primary tension bracket of the support beam.
The heavy slugs tore through the brittle, oxidized iron. The bracket didn't just snap; it exploded under the immense weight of the upper deck. A massive section of the wooden boardwalk above collapsed with a deafening roar, a chaotic avalanche of splintered timber, rusted metal, and ancient sand pouring down between the camp fire and me.
The leader and the mohawk raider screamed as the floor beneath them tilted violently, forcing them to leap backward into the lower arcade stalls to avoid being crushed by a falling pre-war skee-ball machine. The collapse created a perfect, smoking barrier of debris, isolating the main pack of Vipers on the other side of the structure.
But I wasn't out of the woods. The third raider, a gaunt woman with scrap-metal plates wired to her shoulders, had anticipated the collapse. She lunged through the dust cloud, her face twisted in a feral snarl as she swung a rusted tire iron directly at my head.
My low Agility made a dodge impossible. I tried to raise my arm to block, but she caught me squarely in the flank. The jagged, rusted edge of the tire iron tore a deep, brutal gash right through the side of my Vault jumpsuit, slicing into the flesh above my hip.
I let out a ragged, choked scream, the white-hot pain nearly making me drop the gun. My Endurance nine kept me from losing consciousness, my body absorbing the horrific kinetic trauma as I drove the butt of the 10mm pistol directly into her jaw. The metal cracked against her teeth, sending her stumbling back into the debris cloud.
“Kenny!” Lucy was suddenly there, her small hands grabbing the collar of my jumpsuit, hoisting me up with a surprising, athletic strength that I completely envied. “You’re leaking! That’s a severe arterial risk code!”
“We need to leave! Now!” I gasped, clutching my bleeding side with one hand while using her shoulder to stabilize my trembling legs.
Behind the wall of collapsed timbers, I could hear the leader throwing his weight against the debris, his muffled roars promised a very slow, very painful death once they cleared the path. The gaunt woman I’d struck was already scrambling back to her feet, wiping dark blood from her mouth.
I didn't look back. I gripped Lucy’s hand, dragging her—and letting her half-carry me—as we stumbled away from the campfire light, plunging directly into the pitch-black, labyrinthine ruins of the adjacent neon arcade hall.
…
The damp gloom of the prize-ticket office smelled heavily of mildewed cardboard and two-hundred-year-old plastic, but to Lucy, it felt like a sanctuary. She kept her back pressed firmly against the metal doorframe, her chest heaving as she listened to the distant, furious shouting of the Vipers echoing through the cavernous arcade hall.
They were looking for them, throwing shattered prize wheels and kicking broken skee-ball machines in their rage, but the shadows here were thick enough to hide a whole classroom.
“Lucy.” Kenny’s voice was barely a raspy whisper, ending in a sharp, wet wheeze that made her stomach drop.
He had slumped against a stack of collapsed prize-crates, his legs stretched out awkwardly across the linoleum floor. His hands were shaking uncontrollably, his fingers twitching against the handles of his backpack as if he couldn’t quite make his muscles cooperate.
“In the side pouch.” He tried to convey. “The silver canister with the big plastic plunger. Grab it.”
“Oh, goodness, Kenny, let me look.” Lucy knelt beside him, her fingers flying over the canvas straps of his bag.
The sickly, neon-green glow from her Pip-Boy illuminated the jagged, ugly tear across the side of his jumpsuit. It was soaked in dark, heavy blood, the fabric shredded where that terrible woman’s iron bar had struck him. Her aggressive optimism, usually an unyielding shield against the darkest scenarios, felt dangerously thin.
She pulled out the strange, industrial-looking syringe, her hands trembling as she stared at the thick, amber fluid inside. “Is this a standard cellular coagulant? The manual says we shouldn’t administer unregulated surface narcotics without a baseline toxicity screening.”
“It’s a Stimpak, Lucy. It’ll work.” Kenny let out a low groan, his head thumping back against the crates as he tried and failed to lift his right arm. It hung loosely at his side, completely unresponsive, the muscle group visibly locked up from the trauma.
He swore.
She pretended not to notice.
“My arms are too shaky.” He sighed. “You have to do it. Just... press the nozzle directly against the margin of the laceration, clear the clothing bits first, and then hit the manual bypass on the top.”
The sheer clarity of his instructions caught her off guard. Kenny had always been brilliant—the smartest boy in their sector by a wide margin—but this wasn't just book-learning from a hydroponics manual. He spoke with the absolute, practiced certainty of a Chief Medical Officer supervising an emergency triage bay.
She carefully tore away the ruined, blood-soaked threads of his jumpsuit, her fingers gentle despite her frantic heartbeat. The wound was deep, a cruel, jagged line that made her teeth click together in sympathy.
“Hold the barrel steady.” Kenny guided her verbally, his voice dropping into a low, rhythmic cadence that somehow grounded her tumbling thoughts. “Angle it forty-five degrees toward the hip bone. Don't hesitate when you press the plunger. It’s going to hiss, and it’s going to hurt like hell, but the localized tissue synthesis needs the full pressure wave to expand correctly.”
“Alright. I’ve got it. Just breathe.” Lucy braced her thumb against the heavy plastic trigger, her eyes locked onto his pale face. She squeezed. The device hissed violently, a loud, mechanical pneumatic snap that sent the amber fluid rushing into his side.
Kenny’s entire body went rigid, his jaw clamping shut so hard she heard his teeth grind, but he didn't scream. Within seconds, the frantic, terrifying bleeding slowed to a crawl, the torn flesh beginning to knit together under a layer of rapidly drying, synthetic-looking foam.
It was a literal miracle of pre-war science, happening right before her eyes. She let out a long, shuddering breath she hadn't realized she was holding, her fingers lingering against the clean, uninjured skin just above his hip.
The immediate terror of the chase was fading now, leaving behind a heavy, suffocating silence in the tiny office. The distant shouting of the Vipers had drifted toward the far pier, leaving only the quiet, rhythmic lapping of the ocean waves beneath the floorboards. They were so close.
In the tiny, cramped space between the crates, she was practically hovering over him, the warmth of his breath brushing against her cheeks. The green luminescence of their twin Pip-Boys bathed his face in a soft, ethereal light, catching the sharp angles of his jaw and the quiet, intense focus in his dark eyes. He was looking at her, really looking at her, his eyes flicking down to her mouth for a fraction of a second before meeting her gaze again
“I can’t believe you came after me.” His voice hitched, and call her optimistic, which she usually is, but she thought it might’ve been from more than just a stimpack.
A strange, fluttering heat that had absolutely nothing to do with the wasteland or the raiders bloomed in the center of her chest.
“You would do the same for me.” Lucy whispered, her voice losing all of its structured, official authority, softening into something entirely raw. “You did do the same for me.”
She leaned in, her eyelids fluttering half-shut, her heart hammering a frantic rhythm against her ribs that felt entirely different from the panic of the lockdown. Kenny didn't pull away. He leaned forward to meet her, his breath catching, his lips just inches from hers, the world narrowing down to the absolute, beautiful certainty of this one single moment.
A deafening, metallic grind erupted from the corner of the room, followed by a violent, sputtering shower of blue electrical sparks.
“PRIZE COUNTER IS NOW OPEN.” A booming, cheerful, pre-recorded electronic voice roared through a rusted speaker, shattering the silence like a brick through a window.
A bulky, dome-headed Protectron robot, covered in a thick layer of sea-salt rust and faded red paint, juddered to life inside a glass display alcove, its hydraulic arms flailing wildly as its internal gears groaned in protest.
“VALUED GUEST, PLEASE REDEEM YOUR TICKETS FOR EXCLUSIVE PRODUCTS. THREE HUNDRED TICKETS REQUIRED FOR THE GIANT PLUSH BEAR. NO EXCHANGES OR REFUNDS.”
Lucy froze, her lips literally a millimeter away from Kenny’s, her eyes snapping wide in absolute, unadulterated fury.
She had spent her entire life studying the historical archives of the surface, imagining the grand, magnificent ruins of the ancient entertainment hubs where the citizens of the old world gathered for community bonding. She had always wanted to see an arcade. She had envisioned the lights, the games, the shared laughter of a society untouched by war.
She had never, not even once in her wildest dreams, anticipated wanting to tear a commercial service automaton apart with her bare hands.
“I am going to destroy that machine.” Lucy said, her voice dropping into a flat, terrifyingly polite register as she slowly pulled away from Kenny, her fingers curling into tight, trembling fists.
…
Well. That was… interesting.
Not really how I expected my first day in the Wasteland to go… although, in hindsight, it probably should have been. I sucked the second I get out of the Vault in every Fallout playthrough I ever started. Why would the IRL game be any different?
We managed to slip out the back of the arcade while the Protectron was still loudly offering to trade a lifetime of memories for a plastic whistle, dragging our feet through the scorched sand until the Sunken Pier was nothing but a jagged silhouette behind us. The Stimpak had done its magic on my side, leaving the skin tight and itchy with synthetic scar tissue, but my muscles still felt like wet cardboard.
The sun finally dipped below the horizon, throwing a parting flare of bruised red across the charred remains of the California coast. It was a graveyard of twisted metal and bleached whale bones, completely empty of the sterile, brightly lit comfort we’d grown up with.
“Well, it’s a bit of a fixer-upper, isn’t it?” Lucy stood on a small ridge of black dirt, her hands resting on her hips as she surveyed the apocalyptic wasteland with the exact same expression she used when the vault hydroponics bay got a bad case of root rot. She wasn't discouraged. She looked like she was actively drafting a committee to paint the ruins.
A sharp, digital chime echoed directly behind my retinas. In the top-right corner of my vision, a clean, retro-green block of text materialized out of thin air.
[Lucy is now following you.]
My stomach dropped further than it had when the Vipers drew their knives. A solo game was manageable. A solo game meant I could do anything I wanted, whether that was hoarding enough junk to start my own landfill, or robbing store owners of the stuff they keep on display, and selling it back to them.
This wasn't a solo game anymore. I was locked into a permanent escort mission with an NPC who possessed zero situational awareness, a lethal amount of optimism, and absolutely no concept of the phrase ‘low profile.’ It was an escort mission that never ends.
“Yeah. Just needs a light dusting.” I grunted, checking the map on my Pip-Boy as the temperature began to plummet.
Night in the Wasteland didn't just bring darkness; it brought an oppressive, suffocating weight.
The silence was broken by things that definitely didn't exist in the Vault. Miles away, somewhere near the swampy edge of the ruins, a deep, wet, bubbling roar echoed through the sky—the unmistakable, throaty rumble of a Gulper hunting in the shallows. A second later, a distant, terrifying screech sliced through the air, followed by the heavy, thudding crash of a collapsing building. Deathclaws.
Or something worse.
We scrambled into the garage bay of a ruined Red Rocket station just as the last of the light died, the rusted overhead door groaning as I hauled it down to bar the world out. The interior was pitch black, save for the green glow of our screens. I unrolled my single, standard-issue Vault survival sleeping bag onto the oil-stained concrete, my bones aching for a rest that I knew wouldn't be simple.
“I’ll take the first watch.” I said, leaning my back against a rusted tire-balancing machine and cradling the 10mm pistol in my lap. “You sleep. The surface isn't like home, Lucy. Things move in the dark.”
“Don't be ridiculous, Kenny.” Lucy knelt beside the sleeping bag, her face illuminated by her Pip-Boy as she gave me a look of pure, unyielding maternal authority. “You were literally stabbed two hours ago. You’ve lost blood, your posture is deteriorating by the minute, and a lack of proper REM cycles severely compromises the immune response. We are sharing the thermal insulation, and we are both getting adequate rest. That is an order from the acting morale officer.”
I opened my mouth to argue, to tell her that I could skip a night, especially considering the circumstances. But she didn't give me a choice anyway, grabbing the sleeve of my jumpsuit and pulling me down into the narrow canvas bag before I could protest.
It was incredibly cramped.
We were pressed together from shoulder to hip, her clean, Vault-soap scent completely at odds with the ambient stench of old gasoline and dried blood. I could feel the steady, rhythmic beat of her heart against my arm, her breathing slowing almost instantly as she drifted off with the terrifying confidence of someone who believed the universe was inherently good.
I sighed, staring up at the cracked ceiling tiles and mentally selecting the [Sleep] prompt on my internal menu.
The Gamer System didn't let me experience a gradual drift into dreamland. The world didn't fade out; it simply ceased to exist for a fraction of a second as a dark, transparent box overlayed my vision.
[How long would you like to sleep?]
Eight hours.
I watched the little digital numbers tick down in a silent, thirty-second countdown, my consciousness suspended in a bizarre, artificial stasis while the simulation simulated my recovery.
When the timer hit zero, my eyes snapped open. The morning sun was filtering through the cracked glass windows of the garage door, casting long beams of dusty light across the floor.
My left arm was completely pinned. Lucy had migrated during the night, her head tucked firmly under my chin, her arms wrapped around my chest like a vice grip. She was snoring softly, a tiny, rhythmic puff of air hitting my collarbone.
I went completely rigid, my heart rate spiking for an entirely different reason than the monsters outside—until I felt a strange, heavy pressure resting directly on my sternum.
I slowly tilted my chin down.
Sitting squarely in the center of my Vault 33 yellow lettering was a Rad-Roach the size of a fat tabby cat. It was twitching its long, filthy antennae in perfect synchronization, its oily, chitinous shell gleaming in the morning light. It wasn't biting. It was just... sitting there, basking in the residual body heat of the sleeping bag like a loyal, horrific little pet.
“Kill it.” I hissed under my breath, my eyes widening in absolute horror as I tried to reach for my pistol without waking the human clamp holding me down. “Kill it with fire!”
“Mmm?” Lucy yawned, stretching next to me. “What are you talking abooo—AHHHHH!”
Whoops.