Fallout 3 - Beautiful Stranger

Chapter 10 Part 2

They continued northwards, hugging the outskirts of the derelict remains of the city. Patience found that she had little memory of the place. Nothing seemed familiar, not helped by the fact that few buildings remained untouched by the devastation that the nuclear war had wrought upon them.

Some buildings were only shells of their past glories. The insides collapsed and dangerous. Others had entire faces torn from the rest of the building, leaving the buildings looking like they suffered vast, gaping wounds. Concrete and steel skeletons with wood, concrete and metal organs on show and festering. Still others were mere mounds of rubble with little to show of the structure that had once stood in its place.

Further up the northern side of the river, they passed a gathering of Mire Lurks. Patience marvelled at the creatures. Large, bulky things with thick shells upon their backs, deadly looking pincers and single eyes, hooded beneath the outer edge of the shell. The Mire Lurks saw them, but only watched as the party passed by them. Too much distance between them to be of any bother. Still, Vincent trained his rifle in that direction until the creatures dwindled into the distance.

"Do you think we're going the right way?" Patience hung back from Vincent, watching him as she spoke to Valrie. "I just can't find it in myself to trust him."

"I have no fucking idea. Most I've seen of the D.C. ruins is down to Rivet City, in the south." Valrie nodded towards Vincent. "As far as he's concerned, it's not him I don't trust. It's the rat bastard that employs him. Until he proves different, I see Vacant as just an extension of the Irish fucker."

"Vincent!" The bodyguard turned, almost with a sigh, as if he expected more insults and rebukes, raising his eyebrows in questioning fashion. "We go much further north, we'll be heading out of the city altogether. Isn't there a more direct route."

"Sure, if you don't mind wading through a shit-ton of Super Mutants, tangling with remnants of Enclave soldiers in electrified power armour, fire-breathing giant ants, having to crawl through Metro tunnels to climb into more Metro tunnels, through flooded service tunnels, into yet more Metro tunnels to get to another above ground section filled with more Super Mutants ..." He raised his hand to offer to continue. Neither Patience or Valrie said anything, so he dropped his hand and slung his rifle onto his shoulder. "Look, this way we only have to pass through two Metro tunnels and we're far away from the worst of the shit in Downtown. So, yeah, there's a more direct route, it's just shit."

He waited for a few seconds and, when he met no response from Patience or Valrie, returned his rifle to both hands and carried on walking north. Patience and Valrie exchanged glances.

"A simple yes or fucking no would have been fine." Valrie shrugged and set off after Vincent, her eyes making constant sweeps of her surroundings, searching for salvageable materials.

Before moving, Patience caught a glimpse of something in the distance, back the way they had travelled. A glint of sunlight on a piece of metal. She raised her rifle, staring down the sights to get a clearer look. It looked like a metal ball, bobbing and weaving in the air, several metal antenna thrusting out from its rear casing. A robot of some kind. It didn't seem to be moving in any one direction, snaking from one direction to another, then another.

She dropped the muzzle of the rifle. She considered that it wasn't anything important. Only a malfunctioning robot wandering around. Still, she decided to keep an eye over her shoulder every so often, just in case.

After a while of travelling north, Vincent took an almost ninety degree turn, heading east, following a wide section of broken up road. Many burned out cars and trucks littered the highway, causing difficulty in walking in a straight line, forcing them to zig-zag between vehicles. Here and there, Patience caught sight of burned bodies. By the look of their clothing, these were post-war deaths, though what had caused the fiery demises, Patience couldn't tell.