It was almost as if they were back to square one.
After Bianca had returned from her purposefully long, angry walk, she'd found Cait just sitting at the bar alone, her back turned as she finished off the wine. Bianca was perfectly fine with being ignored. She spent the rest of the night cleaning her weapons and re-bandaging the bullet wound on her side that she'd refused to stimpack for the sake of Dogmeat's memory. When it came to sleeping, she drifted off on the couch while Cait took the bed. They hardly spoke, and if they did, it was with discomfort and coldness.
The next morning, Bianca woke up still feeling angry. As she peered across the apartment at Cait, sitting on the edge of her mattress and injecting psycho into her arm as stealthily as she could, Bianca remembered the conversation that they'd had in the Galactic Zone. Cait had been a slave for five years, and even before then she'd been mistreated by her own parents. Beyond the period of slavery, she had spent three years fighting evil men and women in a cage. When the Raiders had taken over the Combat Zone, she'd probably returned to being beneath the feet of Commonwealth scum. She'd had people use her, hurt her, do things to her that she refused to specify. To Cait, sex was probably an instinctive urge, a way to connect without complications. That was what that aggressive kiss had been yesterday, all bluster and heat and desperate desire. Bianca knew it was likely that Cait had never known any different than violence in the bedroom.
As Bianca started getting ready for the day, her anger dissipated, and she began to feel sorry for Cait. Still, she had no idea how to bridge the gap in between them. The kiss had stirred something in Bianca and had very nearly made her want to take Cait right there up against the bar. But she'd been too surprised, too drunk to let herself get carried away. When she'd kissed Cait – that was when she'd insinuated that there were complications. And that was when Cait had gotten scared and searched for any sort of protection she could find.
Now, again, they were back to being... acquaintances.
After a quick breakfast during which neither of them spoke much, they set off to clear out the next park: Kiddie Kingdom. It was to the right of Nuka Town USA, opposite the Galactic Zone, and already rumored by several Raiders to be filled with feral ghouls. Bianca felt she was going to enjoy letting her anger out on them today.
Kiddie Kingdom was a park fenced in by a grey-brick wall, decorated with giant colored lollipops. Far within the depths of the park were jutting towers that Bianca assumed belonged to some kind of castle. They were about to enter her least favorite park by far – not just because of the stupid music she could already hear playing inside, or even the cheesy mascots and gaudy primary colors, but because it was the one park that was targeted specifically at children. And Bianca couldn't help but imagine her life had the war not happened: bringing Shaun here when he was older, a boy of about five or six; letting him pose for photos with his favorite childhood characters; holding his hand when he got too scared in the funhouse; accompanying him on his favorite rides while Nate smiled and waved at them from down below. Anything child-centric made Bianca think of Shaun. Since the Institute, she'd put so much effort into not thinking about him that any slight memory of what had happened made her stiffen with pain and anger.
Clearing out this park would be similar to a nightmare.
As Cait and Bianca cautiously entered the park through the giant colored entrance, they realized instantly that something was wrong: the air was a thick soup of green-tinted fog. There was a faint smoke drifting at knee height, and Bianca's Geiger-counter was quickly beginning to tick in warning, advising her to take some Rad-X to avoid the worst effects. Sighing, Bianca unslung one strap of her bag and dug out two injectors of the prevention drug. She passed one to Cait, and the woman just nodded her thanks, still maintaining her pointed silence.
YOU ARE READING
Open Season
Science FictionThe Institute, a very secretive technological society which once terrified the post-apocalyptic world above, is now gone, buried beneath rubble and water. Bianca DeLuca is alone and wandering the Commonwealth in search of the humanity she's lost. A...