Deuces Are Wild

1

With a sense of dread he placed his outstretched hand on the door pushing it open. In spite of two centuries of decay the door only barely creaked on its hinges but it was the only sound in the whole building.

MacCready wasn't a scavver, or so he reminded himself because here he was picking through a pile of garbage. He sighed. No sense acting like some work was beneath him. The caps were good. These old pre war buildings gave him the creeps, though.

Nasty things lived in the dark. Roaches the size of dogs, raiders blazed on chems pissing themselves with excitement for the moment to kill you and take everything you had.

And ghouls. Feral ghouls. Nasty shambling zombies. But zombie was a word from those old -what did you call them- motion pictures, and comic books. But zombies are dead people raised back to life by some evil magic and they shambled to snack on human brains and ferals- well MacCready could no longer think of them as irradiated humans. The whimsical characters of Grognak might think radiation was a kind of evil magic. And they wouldn't be wrong.

The room was empty though, only motes of dust greeted him in the dappled sunshine that shone in through where chunks of wall had been crumbled not by time but some kind of impact. Raiders or super mutants playing with grenades most likely. Then the stench reached his nostrils. Not so much reached as assaulted, bored deep and stuck like glue. It was some horrible combination of mildew, the stench of decay where an animal had gotten stuck in an air duct or something and some humans had been using one of the corners of the room as a toilet.

Well, there was nothing to do about it. Drawing his scarf over his nose helped a little. That was when he heard it. Someone was moving around inside, shuffling papers. His finger had been on the trigger guard of his sniper rifle but now it was on the trigger. Scavengers of the human variety did not like sharing, either.

MacCready didn't blame them but they didn't have to be so rude. Most of them were cowards who would run at the first whiff of danger like radstags. Someone fancying himself a gunfighter would always try then the others hoping to score points of badassery would join the fray and like as not end up wasting much of their ammo.

Cautiously he peered around the corner, poised to fire at any moment. It was a person, alright. Small, though the telltale proportions and sloping shoulders indicated this was not a child. A woman, then. Likely a woman or else MacCready had finally met a man smaller than him.

She -if a she-was dressed in something more akin to a uniform than scavver rags and piecemeal armor. Black pants with no holes, boots that matched and a tactical vest over a dark blue sweater. Most of her head was shaved but for a ponytail and there was a small gash above her left ear where blood had saturated the ink black fuzz. He heard the whisper of paper as she moved it into the light in a gloved hand, squinted at it then put it back where she found it making an indignant noise.

Then she looked right at him.

MacCready had slithered back around the corner by now. He strained trying to hear footsteps, a gun being picked up, anything. He strained and strained, nobody was that unearthly quiet. He began to back out the way he came, head on a swivel watching all corners. She'd seen him. She must have.

"There's nothing here."

She wasn't armed, just stood there with her thumbs under her backpack straps. He peered at her with suspicion not bothering to lower his gun trying not to show that she'd taken him by surprise. He hadn't come to chat. She didn't seem afraid or threatened. Just as well. MacCready wasn't above shooting first and asking questions later but the uniform gave him pause. She clearly wasn't some junk dealer who wouldn't be missed she was part of something- a mercenary group, maybe. Shooting people in uniforms led to investigations, which led to bounties which would be a danger to his continued breathing.