Fallout 3 - Beautiful Stranger

Chapter 12 Part 2

From the doorway, they turned right, keeping low to minimise the effects of the smoke. They reached the ticket barriers first and found a skeleton reaching up, a ticket in its hand, pointing towards the ticket slot. As gruesome as that was, Patience had seen worse. The hallway swept around to the right and started to slope downwards. The air began to clear, somewhat, as they descended, the smoke lingering above their heads now. Keeping to the sides, Patience moved forward towards an archway that led to the underground concourse and the source of the smoke.

Before entering the concourse, Patience and Vincent both roved the muzzles of their rifles into the space opening up beyond the archway. This was a raised walkway, above the main platform of the station. Parts of the roof above had caved in, leaving mounds of rubble piled up at several points. And, further down, almost in the centre of the walkway, a large bonfire blazed, sending smoke rippling into the air.

Most of the smoke escaped from the holes in the roof, but some bounced and trickled back downwards, causing the miasma in the entry way they had come through. If not for the holes in the roof, the station would have been impassable. Patience wondered what kind of fool would build such a big fire inside?

Vincent indicated he'd not seen any movement and slipped into the walkway area, ghosting away to the right, even as Patience slipped in and peeled away to the left. Valrie held Gia back, for the moment, the young girl struggling to join up with Patience. Navigating the mounds of rubble, Patience came upon the first signs of who could have started the fire.

Lined up against the parapet wall, she found several dirty, stained mattresses. One, a smaller one, still had an old teddy bear placed, with great care it seemed, at the top end of the mattress next to the only pillow. Someone had brought their family down here. To escape raiders, or Super Mutants, or any number of other things, Patience didn't know. With the fire still burning, it wasn't that long ago, either.

The fire was too big for cooking, or keeping warm. It was for protection, built high to fend off things that didn't like heat, or, especially, light. She passed the line of mattresses, heading closer to the fire, passing other signs of habitation. Fresh, emptied cans, boxes of breakfast cereal, bottles of water, cracked and dripping their contents. A suitcase, flipped onto its side, looking like the maw of a toothless monster, and clothes thrown around on the floor, ripped and shredded.

And then she found something else. An arm, still in a dirty brown suit jacket, laid on the floor. Patience could see bite marks in the material and on the skin of the arm that she could see. Bite marks and scratches. The arm, ripped from the body, had blood pooling and congealing around the tattered end where a piece of bone poked out as if searching for the shoulder to reattach to.

A little further around, Patience found another body. This one, she assumed, must have been the mother. A cute, but filthy, summer dress with blue flowers superimposed on the yellow material. Patience would say the dead woman was lying face down, if she had a head. Where the head should be, Patience only saw a creeping pool of blood. The rest of the body had the same bite and scratch marks as the disembodied arm.

And still no sign of the child. In her sad reverie, she almost missed Vincent waving for her to join him. She moved fast, keeping low, and joined him at the other side, near the escalators. He used military hand signals again. Look over, downwards. Over ten enemies, spread out. They needed to go down the escalators, double-back and go through the south tunnels. Patience nodded. She understood.

She took a glance over the parapet and caught sight of her first feral ghoul. Laid atop a broken down Metro carriage, seeming asleep but twitching its legs and arms. It looked gaunt, ravaged. Its skin thin and parchment-like, a strip of cloth, that may once have been clothing, draped over its groin. Fingers like claws. She took an extra second and looked around. She saw several more of them in various places, laid or sat down. Almost dormant.