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The storm wasn’t particularly a surprise. The humidity had been so thick that walking felt more like swimming through cotton candy. Especially in the Forest Grove Marsh.
“Oh Jesus, Mary, and fucking Joseph,” Cait had growled. “Look at that!”
Boston was looking in a steamer trunk for anything valuable. They were on the top of a gun store he remembered well from the pre-war days. The rest of the development was flooded up to their asses in both swampy stagnate sludge and ghouls. Grunting, he looked up at the horizon. Thick, dark clouds were coming from the south and quick. Thunder and green lightning. He’d expected the storm, but not that it would be coming from the Glowing Sea.
“Shit,” he grumbled. Raising a scope, he scanned the nearby ruins. There was nothing solid enough to weather something like this out. But, if he remembered correctly, “There. The Lock,” he shouldered the rifle, and grabbed this pack. “Come on. Place should be concrete and insulated, as long as we don’t go near the reactor. It was gone to shit before the world went to hell.”
Thankfully, whoever had been this way before had stretched walkways across and between the buildings. As the sky started to darken and the ominous crackling thunder could just distantly be heard, along with that eerie, howling ghoul sound those storms always brought with them, they were able to leap down to relatively dry ground and hoof it double time towards the dam.
They’d just managed to reach it there before the storm crashed over them. They shut the heavy metal door and headed down the ladder to the operation level. Checking his pipboy, Boston confirmed that the rads in here were elevated, but not to a deadly extreme. At least, not for as long as the storm was likely to go on.
He secured the hatch, and while Cait did a quick look around to secure the place, rummaged in his pack for some rad-x. He took a couple, just as she returned with a bloody bat over one shoulder and a molerat by the tail.
“Don’t say I never did nothin’ for ya,” She grunted, putting the fresh kill on one of the desks.
“You’re a peach,” he muttered, tossing her the bottle of meds, pulling out a hunting knife and sharpening it.
“What’s that, then?”
He waved her off. “Pre-war shit.”
For awhile, he concentrated on getting the thing gutted and cleaned. Cait found a good place for a fire and got it started, setting up some cooking kit. He half watched her pull out some tatos they’d traded for back at Abernathy Farm and started to fry them up with some of the wild garlic he’d found and pointed out to her. Without a lot of time to properly prepare it, there wasn’t a lot on a molerat to safely eat. So, Boston tossed what was good into the pot, and tossed the rest into the hatch to the reactor level, which he shut again quickly when his geiger counter went wild. After he washed up, he managed to scavenge some mugs. He poured some Bobrov’s Best Moonshine and Nuka-Cola into them for a kind of whiskey and soda that could make you go blind. Dinner and cocktails. Nora would be proud.
Dinner was consumed in a relatively moody silence; it had been a long day, cut short by a violent rad storm raging over their heads. Boston put out sleeping bags for them both. The storm got worse. Neither the concrete nor booze could keep out the visceral reaction to thunder and lightning pounding above them. The screech of the ghouls was either real or imagined, but they sometimes chased the storms, and it was creepy as fuck. All and all, it didn’t make for a restful evening.
Maybe it was the weather, or this office like a bunker. He didn’t know, but something brought a dream within a dream. Waking up from a nightmare, seeing Nora holding Shaun. The storm that had woken the baby was raging outside the windows of their pretty house in Sanctuary Hills. It woke Boston, too. Thunder, lightning, like artillery rounds being shot off. Only missing the panicked “INCOMING!” But no, that wasn’t happening. He wasn’t in Anchorage anymore.
Then, the sirens went off, sounding too slow. The lightning, the thunder, the bomb. He watched Nora, smiling that same smile she’d worn on their wedding day. She turned to him, speaking her most loving, pretty voice, the same way she spoke on the holotape she’d left for him that Codsworth had found. Except what she said was, “I’m not giving you Shaun!” And then she disintegrated in nuclear fire.
Boston started awake. “Fuck,” he growled, pressing his arm over his eyes. Still the office. The rad storm was raging above them. Thunder so loud it shook the building.
It hadn’t all been dream, really. Well, it was a dream, but also a memory. Coming home, laying in bed, waking up from a nightmare, and seeing that the storm had woken Shaun, and Nora was comforting their son. He’d sat up in bed, watching her sway in a “baby-soothing-dance”. She was softly singing.
Like magic, the baby was calming. Shaun fell into a sleep with a snuffly sound. She turned, saw him sitting up, and smiled at him, her pretty, tired, but content smile.
“Got to teach me that trick,” he whispered.
She chuckled softly and shushed him. Nora tried to put Shaun back in his bassinet, but he started to fuss again.
“Here. Can I?” He asked.
She brought Shaun over and laid him in Boston’s arms.
“Teach me the song?”
Nora had kissed his cheek, laid her head on his shoulder and began to sing her soft voice.
From beside him, another noise made him move his arm and look around. For a second, he wondered if he was back lost in the dream. A soft sound. A scared sound. Like Shaun, frightened awake by the thunder. But, obviously, Shaun wasn’t here, and the sound was too close and too real for it to be an audio hallucination.
He sat up a little and looked. The bottle of moonshine was empty, and he was damned sure it hadn’t been when he’d made them drinks earlier, so Cait must have finished it off after he laid down. That meant that she was out for the night, but in her thick, deep booze sleep, she was talking. Well, not talking, not the vulgar, but in a cute and creative pirate kind of way of her waking hours. But whimpering, sobbing, a little girl voice, lost in 18 years of hellish abusive from her parents and the 5 worse at the hands of the Raiders.
He didn’t know what to do. For a second, he felt like he was on a battlefield, staring across at an injured soldier, unable to reach them, and even if he could, unable to staunch the bleeding that was sapping their life before his eyes. He didn’t touch her. He knew that much. But he got a little closer.
Cait turned. He braced for impact, expecting a fight. He didn’t expect her body would curl into his warmth. Shaking. So strong but so small at the same time. Her whimpering got a little quieter, but he could tell she was still sobbing softly; sounds of fear and hurt. The thunder rolled above them, she cowered and twitched.
Swallowing, not sure if this was the right move or not, he put a tentative hand on her head. She didn’t bite, punch, or kick him in the balls, so he started to very gently stroke her hair. “God dammit,” he muttered quietly. Then, he began to sing, feeling like a goddman fool for it. But the lyrics were on the tip of his tongue anyway, and so, he supposed, was the need to sing them to bring comfort.
“Baby mine, don’t you cry.
Baby mine, dry your eyes.
Rest your head close to my heart,
Never to part, baby of mine.
Little one, when you play,
Pay no heed what they say.
Let your eyes sparkle and shine,
Never a tear, baby of mine.
If they knew all about you,
They’d end up loving you too.
All those same people who scold you,
What they’d give just for the right to hold you.
From your head down to your toes,
You’re not much, goodness knows.
But, you’re so precious to me,
Sweet as can be, baby of mine.”
He didn’t know if it was the fact that the storm seemed to roll by them, or the soft touch, or the song, or just the booze making her sink deeper, but Cait’s whimpering and shaking subsided. She gave a sigh and rolled back over to her own sleeping bag again, as if she hadn’t moved at all and started a soft slight snore.
Boston, watched her for a bit, then rolled back over on his back and stared up at the ceiling. “What the fuck?” he whispered to no one in particular. He didn’t find sleep again that night.