Fallout ✖️ The Pack

Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE

This New World

Sunshine passed through crooked blinds, unfiltered, into Mitch's room. The heat swelled up quickly in the air, providing a lasting suffocating density that would fuse into his lungs the next time he was scheduled to return.

Luckily for him, he woke up twenty minutes early thanks to Rob's careless morning shuffling downstairs. Rummaging through the refrigerator, the pings of Nuka Cola bottles poking at each other sharply bouncing off the inner shells of Mitch's ears. Coring out what he selfishly considered his share of pay from the register, bottle caps falling with metallic clicks into Rob's pockets.

When Mitch rounded down the staircase and made his appearance through the archway leading into the diner, the sudden slam of the register's drawer wiped the last of sleep out of Mitch's mind as he approached the counter.

"Good morning," Rob greeted in his best morning ghoul voice; which, despite still being horribly scratched and irreversibly hoarse, retained a sort of clarity to Mitch.

Rob's tongue nervously made rounds over his teeth as Mitch seated himself in a bar stool closer to the wall, its stem, now an unkindly rusted beam, is visible poking up from the dirt from being uprooted from the one remaining checkered vinyl floor piece.

Mitch fished into his pocket and resurfaced with seven caps in his grasp; five for another night in his room, two for a drink.

"It might just be five this morning," said Rob with a smile - well, as much as a ghoul could smile, which was very constricted and could just as easily ween itself into the assault category. "I'm afraid you might bust your ass sitting there."

"Whatever." Mitch mustered half-heartily.

The ghoul's eyes flickered at Mitch and popped over the blemishes in his sleep ridden face, debating whether or not to bring them up to keep the conversation kicking.

Then again, as Rob self consciously sunk his gaze to his own exposed arms, he would consider Mitch lucky to not look like someone haphazardly pasted strips of leather onto a skeleton.

A soft, airy hum trotting down the staircase brought both pairs of eyes away from one another and centered them on Shelby, who upon waking up didn't look beaten back to life like Mitch nor sourly puckered after a bath like Rob.

Her black hair was caught in a bun, mid-fall by the time she made it to her post at Rob's side. She made no attempts to reassemble it as she stood in shock at Mitch's miraculous presence adjacent of her, at sunrise, on a Saturday morning.

"Morning, Spikes." said Shelby with a warm smile, much lovelier and clearer than Rob's.

"Morning." responded Mitch.

"Beautiful day out. Looks almost like the nukes didn't drop."

She said this every morning.

And every morning it ticked Mitch's clock one small leap further toward wishing one of those nukes would have dropped closer to Tampa - or, better yet, one more would have landed on Montreal and swamped it in inescapable chaos. He'd be dead for a good four years now if he were born with such fortune.

As Rob disappeared into the back for Mitch's drink, Shelby took his place and sifted through the drawer of the register. Mitch watched as her eyebrows leaned inwards and she pinned her lower lip in between her teeth while counting the caps.

"We got four hundred last night." she noted.

"I think you had to put some of it in a bin, it got so crowded," Mitch said. He enjoyed collecting favors wherever he could get them, commonly from Rob.