The noise from that damn vault being dug had robbed me of months of sleep.
Well Vault-Tec paid back that debt, anyway.
With interest.
Aside from one ugly little interruption, I slept for more than 200 years.
And I guess I should be grateful that I didn’t dream.
I’m not a big fan of dreams.
I got thawed out just to watch some bald bastard execute my wife and carry off her baby, then went right back to chillsville.
Oh right. My son. Call him that, it’ll make me more sympathetic to your readers.
I’m not sure if Mister Personality and his pals sabotaged the other pods, or if it was shoddy workmanship, but when I was dumped out of mine, all the other -- what did you call us? Vault Dwellers? -- all the other Vault Dwellers were dead, so I got to find my way out of that roach-infested hellhole by myself.
Only to discover the whole goddamned world was a hellhole now.
OK. I’ll admit it. My world was a hellhole, too.
But it was clean, and the plumbing worked.
Guess I should have paid extra for the home maintenance upgrade for Codsworth, because Nora’s ridiculous status symbol was still puttering uselessly around the ruins of our old house. And you know what the first thing it says to me was? “As I live and breathe.”
As. I. Live. And. Breathe.
It’s a fucking robot, it doesn’t do either. General Atomics engineers may have been brilliant, but their programmers were apparently a bunch of dipshits.
Shame that demented robots wasn’t the worst of it.
Or the weirdest.
Because as soon as I head across the bridge toward Concord, I meet a dog. A purebred German Shepherd. Looked like he’d just come from the Westminster Dog Show.
There’s a story for you, lady, who the hell, in this godforsaken, post-apocalyptic mess… seriously who the hell is breeding German Shepherds? Is there some robotic puppy mill out there somewhere?
I’m not sure if the dog stirred them up, or I did, but it turns out there was a nest of some sort of ugly-ass giant rodents under the filling station.
Tunneling ugly-ass giant rodents.
Good thing I found a lot of ammo in the vault.
And then I stumbled into a firefight between a gang of some sort and a lunatic Revolutionary War reenactor.
I would have liked to take a minute to size up the situation, but Rex the Wonder Dog went right for the throat of the nearest one, and then I’ve got a whole flock of shitbirds coming after me.
I gotta admit, after the last few hours, I was ready to kill somebody who could appreciate the fact that they were getting killed. Giant mutant vermin are just annoying pests, doing their giant mutant vermin thing, but a proper enemy is a lot more satisfying target.
Of course, there wasn’t much proper about this enemy. They were just a mob of untrained, ill-equipped idiots, and after my time in Alaska, they really weren’t much of a challenge. Gunfights in the street aren’t my preference when it comes to a fight, but I knew the neighborhood, and it was pretty easy to straggle them out and pick them off. Especially with Rin Tin Tin keeping them distracted.
Inside the old museum was much more to my liking. Poor lighting conditions. Distracting noises. Plenty of cover. Perfect place for knife work.
Turned out Johnny Tremaine had himself a few civilians he was trying to protect, and my blood was up, so before long I was up on the roof, looking at a rusted old T-45.
I really don’t like power armor. See this old burn? That’s what happens when the optics system shorts out. And I got lucky, most folks lost an eye or two when that happened. But that T-45 would give me the strength to handle the Rockwell minigun that was also up there, and might even protect me if the damn thing misfired. And the odds of a misfire in a 200-year old, mass-produced weapon throwing a truly stupid amount of lead were really high, but like I said, my blood was up. Hell. Just a few hours before, I watched some asshole blow half my wife’s face off, and here was a fresh batch of new assholes just begging to be ripped apart five millimeters at a time.
Saying that now, I’m realizing that I’m probably exactly the right kind of crazy for this fucked-up world of yours.
Anyway, stupid as I was for even thinking of pulling the trigger on that thing, the clowns in the street were even stupider, because they didn’t run away when I started spraying away at them with God’s own gardenhose.
The thing you’ve gotta understand, Miss Wright, is that I’m not a berserker. Berserkers don’t last long. They can be really useful as a distraction, and sometimes they can do some good damage before they get themselves killed, but ultimately they’re doomed idiots.
I have always fought smart. That’s why I came home with all my important bits intact, and a relatively small collection of scars.
But not that day.
No. That day I went berserk.
I jumped right off the roof. Three fucking stories.
I knew a T-45 was built for that, but it was two hundred years old and completely unmaintained.
I didn’t give a shit.
I jumped off and charged headlong at the nearest asshole.
And they still didn’t run.
And they didn’t even run when God-freaking-zilla burst out of the ground and started killing them too.
Liberty Bill must have had quite a show from the balcony as Larry the Lizard and the Tin Woodsman merrily ripped through the pack of poor bastards from opposite ends of the street.
I’m not sure what I expected when the two of us met in the middle, bits and pieces of dead dumbfucks scattered all around--a handshake and a couple cigars? Who frikking knows? But what I got was my ass knocked clear back to the steps of the museum.
It had to have been sheer luck that I landed where I did, because there’s no way there are any angels looking out for me, but there was the Rockwell, right where I’d dropped it when I Geronimoed.
The last fifty or so rounds in the magazine blew out the back of T-Rex’s skull as it came to finish me off.
I lay there for a good twenty minutes, half buried under a thousand pounds of dead lizard.
You’d think Yankee Doodle and his pals would have come and dug me out, but no. They stayed in the museum until I used the last juice from the fusion cell to heave that carcass off of what was left of my own carcass.
So I staggered inside, and they’re sitting around the lobby, arguing about some nonsense or another. Sergeant Preston of the Commonwealth Mounties thanks me and hands me a pouch full of bottlecaps--Bottlecaps? What the fuck is wrong with you people?--hands me this shit and asks me for more help.
Seems that they’re heading to my old neighborhood to make a new start. Based on a vision of some sort from this old hippie lady.
What the hell.
Sure.
At that point I was ready to get back in my pod and let the Elvis impersonator try to re-freeze me.