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There is no fucking reason she has to be doing this. She, specifically, is not equipped for this, she knows it. She’s a teenager, she’d be in her first year of college if the world hadn’t fucked itself, but she got the bright idea to fucking save it, all on her fucking lonesome. Cause why the hell not.
Except, right now? She’s not feeling it. Before, she was - well, ‘comfortable’ would be overstating it, but she thought she had it in hand. She’d killed a wendigo, to get to Rose and Madigan’s ‘game changer’, so the one on the road wasn’t so bad. Getting through the Blood Eagles was a matter of sneaking around them, getting the motors and heating coils, getting to Harper’s Ferry for Abby, that all was manageable.
Repairing the scorch detectors didn’t sound hard. Shouldn’t have been, probably.
There’s a deathclaw in the road. She’d seen them before. Seen them tear people apart, into long, bloodied strips. She’d run from them, too. Not far, it wasn’t interested, and she’d put a river and some pre-war bots between them as fast as she could, but she’d faced one and turned tail.
There’s one between her and the next scorched detector. She really doesn’t want to fight it.
So she steps off the road, slinks into the grass. Los to the ground, eyes on the creature at all times as she slowly circles it. There’s a structure in the distance. Two-story, there’s a big sign out front. She can probably get back on the road, there.
So she crouches, she circles, the slowly approaches — and it tilts its head. She stops, barely breathes, as it opens its mouth, flicks its tongue, scents the air. She sees its head swivel, its body turn as if to face her — and she breaks into a sprint toward the building.
She’s not looking anymore, doesn’t care to check behind her, but she can hear it roar, hears it build to a ferocious peak. Maybe six feet from the parking lot, and she hears heavy steps follow. She has to turn to head up the stairs, and she sees it, big and black and sharp, and she forces through a shuddering heart.
There’s one door not boarded up, at the end, so she bolts for it — and trips on the corner. She gets up, doesn’t look, tries to open it, the picks the lock as fast as she can, like she’s never picked before.
She gets it open, then slams the door shut behind her.
She backs as far from the door as she can, scurries away till her back hits a shelf, then presses as close to it as she can. Her breaths, they come fast and heavy. She has to tear her face mask off, the visor’s fogging, tears pooling.
Her face is red and wet, she can hardly draw a breath. Steps like thunder stalk just beyond the door, just along the walk.
She’s in the Mire and she’s crying and there’s a deathclaw two feet away from her; there’s nothing but a fucking motel door between her and getting sluiced to death.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. They were supposed to rebuild America and bring back the glory of days gone past, but to rebuild America, they need to fix it into something workable, and that fucking falls to a god damned teenager, apparently, because no one else is doing it. Not that she’s going to be doing it for a while longer, or even that she was doing it for very long.
She’s nineteen and she’s dying, or this close to it, and there’s a jaunty fucking jingle in her god damned ear.
She searches around for the sound, tries to turn her pip boy off, but it’s not that. She scrambles, turns the dials, presses buttons, fucking sobs, the realizes there’s a radio in the closet, on a shelf between once-clean towels and powdered cleaner and clicks it off, and falls to a pile, shaking and harried. The footsteps have been gone for an hour, by her pipboy’s clock, before she decides to open the door, slowly, tentatively. It doesn’t open all the way, catches on — what she tripped on. A corpse, blue and gilded.
She doesn’t throw up, but that’s more for lack of projectile than lack of reflex, so to speak.
She puts her mask back on, when it comes to mind that the sting in her eyes and the burn in her lungs isn’t just the nerves. She trembles down the stairs, only talks to the robot at the door so it doesn’t call after her, doesn’t draw attention.
If she never sees the southern belle motel again, it’ll be too fucking soon.