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“You comin?”
Her ears are still ringing from the gunshot when Lucy leaves Max with only a kiss on the forehead goodbye and takes her first steps after him. She tells herself they’ll find eachother again, as she rips the pendant off her mother’s corpse. Takes an apple off the table and shoves it in her pocket before she begins along the weathered stairs to follow him down.
She almost trips over the first body.
It’s massive, the metal suit leaking blood. A hole the size of a baseball is punched through just below the chest plate, like it's made of tin. She’s seen that fire power before.
A thump thump thump in the air is getting louder. A hand grabs her left arm. She raises her gun in the other and finds the Ghoul, two steps down.
It puts him at her height. “Unless you wanna meet his friends, you need to move vaultie.”
Lucy nods and lowers the gun.
The Ghoul doesn’t let go. Tugging her along, only to shove her roughly against the rising side of the stone staircase, into the elongating shadows. There’s a look on his face that she doesn’t know. “Stay outta the light,” he hisses.
It's getting darker overhead. For a moment, Lucy thinks the sun is setting. It's not. A shadow that goes on and on and on stretches over them like a hand, reaching out to snatch her up.
The Ghoul pulls on her arm and she goes with him, trying not to stumble in the gathering dark. There are bodies in mismatched armor here and there, cut down by something massive, shredded with so many little holes.
They descend further still, and Lucy does trip then because she can’t see her own hand in front of her face. The Ghoul lets her go with a swear, flicking an old metal lighter. The spark is nearly blinding, and the golden glow shows what she’s fallen on as Lucy pushes herself to her knees.
The room they’re moving through has chairs and couches, tables with fresh food. A communal space of some kind, like their recreational room back home, minus the foosball table. Two women lay unblinking on a couch. Blood drips in massive sprays and arcs down the wall behind them.
At her feet is the ghoul who waved at her when Lucy walked in through their main field. The one in the falling apart suit, like he just left a formal dance, the kind she’s only seen in films. He’s not armed. No one in this room is.
“Why?” Lucy wheezes, fighting for breath.
“Because they could,” he snarls as he pulls her to her feet. “Because bodies are easier to search. And if you don’t keep moving, you’re gonna join em.”
Lucy nods, drying her face with her empty hand. It's the same one he’s holding the arm of.
Bootsteps echo above them, some of them metallic and thunderous.
The Ghoul keeps the lighter out and pulls her along again, picking up the pace. They run through a maze of rooms until they find a door, once rusted shut and newly wrenched open with what she suspects was a small charge, or a very large gun.
He pushes her through it and steps in after her, shoving the lighter into her hand. “Hold this. Don’t move.”
Lucy does what he asks, breathing heavily in exhaustion as he fishes something out of his strange bags. The Ghoul pulls the door shut, spinning the odd wheel at its center until it clicks, like one of the manual doors to the emergency generator back home.
From a metal tin, he smears something along the edge of the door, snatches the lighter from her hands without asking. It glows a brilliant white. Sizzling and snapping, but Lucy doesn’t see what it does because Cooper is striding forward with his hand around her arm again. “That won’t stop ‘em for long!” he snaps as pulls so hard she thinks her shoulder will jerk from its socket.
She breathes past the bile heaving in her chest and makes her legs go faster.
They make so many turns she can’t keep track, water pooling under the soles of their boots. The air gets staler, and her chest starts to hurt a little worse. The walls are damp and slimy when she touches one as they go around another corner, and she retracts her hand in disgust.
But finally, there is light, faint but there in the distance. It grows wider and wider until at last they pass through it.
Lucy flails as the ground drops out from under her, but manages to land on her feet. Balance is made easier as the Ghoul lets her go to pat the dog on the head, who is barking joyously, tongue lolling out of her mouth. “Shh, easy girl. We’re in enemy territory now.”
The dog quiets before she pads slowly over to Lucy. Lucy kneels, not sure what to do, but she holds her hand out cautiously to inspect. The dog sniffs her once, gives a quiet whine, and headbutts her hand. When Lucy doesn’t do anything, the dog stamps one front paw and headbutts her again.
The Ghoul is grinning down at her when she looks at him, his happiness so plain that it's the strangest thing she’s seen from him yet. “She wants you to pet her.”
“Oh!” Lucy does, gently, down her head and through the ruff of her neck. Twice. A third time and the dog licks her hand and pads back to the Ghoul’s side. The fur is so much softer than she expected.
Distantly, they can hear shouting, echoing down into the valley. The Ghoul squints at something in the distance. “Brought the whole fucking batallion for one fucking fort,” he grumbles, quietly enough that Lucy isn’t sure she’s supposed to catch it. “Keep moving, we need to put the skillet commandos in our rear view.” He stalks off toward a small shack, completely at odds with his orders.
She quickly learns why - search parties. From the berth of the behemoth hovering in the sky, smaller flying machines pour forth. The three of them race from one point of cover to the next. A house here, an abandoned trading post. It is slow and terrifying work as the sky continues to darken. She keeps waiting for him to make camp, but the Ghoul doesn’t. They keep walking until the buzzing of flying machines fades away, until there are no remains of buildings left to find. There’s a forest ahead, and in the hills between the trees, the Hollywood sign. Until this very moment, she always assumed it was another movie prop.
The observatory is one large light in a sea of white glowing specks until the whole city goes black.
“But I—”
The Ghoul puts a hand over her mouth and shakes his head. “Not here,” he whispers.
Lucy wants to scream. She bites her lip, then switches to the inside of her cheek when that doesn’t help. How could Maximus smile so sweetly, kiss her so gently, then kill innocent people? Then again, her father is a kind man too, generous and fair. And he’s done so much worse. Someone could have the same generous smile she offers to so many, and slaughter within the next breath. A small part of her knows this is a fact, but that doesn’t make it any easier for the rest of her to accept.
The dog headbutts her leg, and Lucy reaches down and tries gently scratching her, like she saw the Ghoul do moments before. The nuzzling of soft fur as the dog tries to get closer is her only anchor in the storm, and she’s never been more grateful that the Ghoul took the dog along after all. She takes a chance and falls to her knees, wrapping her arms around the creature, who whines and licks at her face. Lucy can’t help but laugh.
“If you’re done your little waterworks, we’re not out of danger,” the Ghoul snaps. “They fly far faster than we can move, so the only choice you have if you wanna stay alive is keep walkin. That’s why you need to get up, right now.”
Lucy doesn’t question him, doesn’t argue. The Ghoul has done a lot of horrible things, but he’s never deceived her. The only time he’s shot someone unprovoked, unarmed, was a kindness given alongside a favorite memory.
She pushes herself to her feet, and when Lucy sees his gun is holstered she does the same. “Sorry. It won’t happen again.” A smile tugs at her face in reassurance, but it stops halfway. A fake smile is the last thing anyone needs. Unless she has to, she’s not doing it anymore. Instead, Lucy lets out a breath that hurts, and lets her expression fall where it may. “Which way should we go?”
His face softens, like it did when he’d given her the choice to join him. “For now, we go north. You hurt at all? Catch a stray in that bloodbath?”
“No,” she shakes her head. “No, I got there long before the Brotherhood. When it was still…nice.”
“Good, cause if you slow us down any further, we gonna have a problem. You don’t want us to have a problem, ya hear?”
Lucy nods. “I hear.”
“Don’t wander too far, darker it gets the more all manner o’ beasties come out to play.” He turns and walks through the trees, along a path she can only barely see now that the Hollywood sign has gone dark. The dog huffs at her and follows after him, nuzzling his hand before trotting ahead.
Lucy wishes for water and follows suit, forcing her legs to move faster, take longer strides. She can’t match his pace, but she manages to stay only a few feet behind. As she walks under the lengthening shadows of trees that are still a novelty to her, she tries to remember everything she was taught about her mother growing up. Rose was born in Vault 33, married her father who was a trade from 31. And she died in the plague of 2077.
Except she didn’t, and her father knows it. How did he get away with that? Where did he find access to a bomb? Did her vault have more bombs still? Or was it a trick of the overseer. A communication with another vault, perhaps designed just for this purpose.
However he did it, he bombed a whole city just to kill her mother.
Though it was still Lucy who took the final shot to end her life. She wishes she had more time, the ability to give her mother what the Ghoul had given a distant friend—something nice to think about before taking her last breath.
Rose MaClean seemed far worse off than Rodger, though. Perhaps she didn’t know what was happening. She hopes so; her mother deserves that much.
Noises in the underbrush startle her out of her reverie. She doesn’t realize the Ghoul has stopped until Lucy nearly walks into him. His hand held out keeps them from colliding, leather glove oddly gentle against her hip.
The dog snarls, pounces, and comes back with only the head of a massive rat.
“No sharin’? Really?” The Ghoul huffs, taking his hand off his gun.
The dog whines and bites down on an eyeball until it bursts in her teeth.
“Alright, suit yourself,” he shakes his head. He turns over his shoulder. “Keep a sharp eye.”
“I can’t see in the dark. Can you?”
“Then you best stay close,” is the only answer she’s given.
They keep walking, and maybe she’s imagining things, but she swears he slows his pace, if only a little. Trekking down the dirt path through the trees, she stays just a few steps behind. The dog goes back and forth, sometimes ahead of the Ghoul, sometimes behind Lucy. It only snarls a few more times, and she’s grateful all it finds is more critters, and not more people.
Her legs start to cramp as the trails goes from flat to elevated again, and she tries to think about anything else but the shooting pain that zings through her when the elevation grows in pitch. The warmth of the sun she knew as a child, perhaps the clearest memory of her mother. The way Max looked so at ease in Vault 4, so perfectly at home. And as much as the forest frightens her, these trees that could hide anything all around them, Lucy is so glad it's not another lake.
“Did you know the gulpers are part of an experiment?” she whispers. Isn’t even sure what brings her to say it, but the words are out before she can rein them in.
“Are they now?” he drawls back.
Lucy guesses it’s okay to talk now. “Yep. Vault 4. It was run by scientists. They were breeding people with irradiated animals. Gulpers were the end result.”
“Huh,” she’s not sure why she expected him to be a little more surprised. “Figures I leave you alone and the first thing you do is go back underground. Like a gotdamned woodchuck.”
“I didn’t go there on purpose!” she snaps back, refrains when she swears she can see him grinning in the dark beside her. “There was a hospital, I was trying to find supplies. Then I fell. Max was already there when I woke up, injury perfectly treated. They’re nice now. Apparently they overthrew the scientists, so now they just get to…exist.” She leaves out the part where she was asked what her experiment was. Because since then she’s started to put the pieces together, and Lucy doesn’t like the picture it makes.
He “hmms” in reply.
Lucy isn’t sure what else she expected. “What about you? What did you get up to since the Super Duper Mart?”
They follow the path out of the trees and into patchy scrubland. The Ghoul doesn’t answer for a long time, watching the dog whose ears are up and tail oddly pointed. The dog looks back at them, takes a left when the trail ends, and the Ghoul follows. He makes a sort of clicking sound with his mouth, and it takes Lucy a second to realize it's not for the dog, but her.
She looks up at him and hopes she doesn’t look too annoyed.
“Walk where I walk,” he says softly.
“Okey dokey,” she says and does her best to step in his footprints. It's no easy feat in the dying light. She has to say so close she can hear his breath just to do so. It’s too dusty here to leave much tracks.
After a few minutes he says, “I met the president.”
“You did not!”
There’s a sound like a huff and a wheeze, and she’s almost certain that's what passes for a laugh.
“Seriously?” She stops for so long it takes her a minute to find his tracks again.
“He claimed to be the president of gov’mint. Spelled with an I.”
“That’s not at all how that works.”
“No kiddin.”
“What did they want with you?”
“Filly, among other things. Seems there was a change of management since I was last through. Nothin to fret over now.”
Lucy stares at him so hard she toes a rock before she catches her footing again. “But in Filly you were just after the bounty. Is that not allowed in Filly?”
“Oh, it's allowed. They weren’t concerned with right or wrong sweetie, not like you. No, it's all about power to folks like them. And you get that by maintainin’ order.”
Lucy scoffs. “But how can anyone maintain order up here?”
A grin pulls at his scarred face under the pale moonlight, and his tone shifts to something she’s heard only once before. “Now you’re gettin it.”
The way it settles in her bones and warms her from the inside out feels a lot like pride. Like the time she bit his finger off.
She thinks about why that doesn’t stop making her warm for so long she can’t figure out anything else to say. The Ghoul doesn’t offer anything else up either. The only sounds until the sky starts to lighten are the huffs of their breathing, the crunch of dried earth under their steps, and the panting of the dog zipping back and forth with more energy than Lucy believes should be possible.
The rising light behind them illuminates fields and a smattering of trees for miles and miles. The horizon ahead is not flat; its jagged. Peaks jut up and fall back at impossible angles.
Lucy puts her hand over her mouth to cover her yawn, and it turns into a cough. Her throat is nearly as dry as the earth beneath her.
“Keep your wits about ya,” he says a few feet in front. “Miles to go before you sleep.”
Lucy groans. She’s never walked this long without rest before, through one day and into the next. But if he says they need to do it, they need to do it. He can’t be enjoying it anymore than she is. So she nods, fights the urge to smile like she was trained to do even when she didn’t want to, and says “Okey dokey.”
She’s not sure how many miles they cover as the sun rises higher. Eventually the scattered trees vanish and the grass gives way to plants covered in spikes. Others have bright purple flowers that even the Ghoul steers clear of. The dog has to push her away from them more than once, especially when they veer left to pick their way through the prickly plants. There’s a sway to her steps that started a couple hundred yards back that won’t quit no matter how hard Lucy tries.
The Ghoul gets more tense the further they go, head on a swivel, hand never far from his gun. Lucy doesn’t know how he can avoid stepping into anything sharp without looking down.
She thinks she’s made a grave error when his hand grabs her shoulder and squeezes once. “Wait. Don’t follow me till I say.”
Lucy nods. When she’s safely dodged another set of spikes, she wipes the sweat from her brow and sees why they’ve stopped. An old shack, tin roof and crumbling walls made of what looks like dirt, sits on the side of the field. A small metal sign with a skull and crossbones is posted just a few feet beyond the open doorway.
The Ghoul saunters back through it with a smile, stepping in an odd pattern, almost like he's playing hopscotch. “We’re in luck, safehouse is still clear.” He scoops the dog up onto his shoulder. “Wait here, you’re next.”
Lucy yawns and nods, too tired to parse out what that even means as he carries the dog in, firmly tells it to stay.
He repeats the same odd pattern before coming back to stand over her, the wide brim of his hat blocking the sun from her face. It lets her see the color of his eyes more clearly than she has since their honest exchange. They’re green with flecks of brown, gorgeous and earnest and real. For someone who nearly sold her for his own survival, there’s not a hint of malice in them. “You ain’t got anything explosive hidden in that jumpsuit, do ya?”
Lucy shakes her head. “No, why?”
“Cause last thing we want is a chain reaction. No squirmin,” he points right in her face. Then his hands are on her waist and he’s hauling her over one shoulder like she’s a sack of fertilizer. A hand on her lower back keeps her pinned firmly in place, and he doesn’t so much as grunt under her weight. The funny steps jostle her stomach, but it's been running on empty since leaving Vault 4. Nothing left for it.
His hands linger on her hips as he sets her down, grip just enough to keep her from swaying too dangerously. The light coming in through the doorway brings out the gold flecks eyes, and she’s surprised to see he still has eyelashes. Something about the sharp lines of his jaw is terribly familiar, but she’s too tired to place it. “Easy now, no faintin’.”
Why would she faint? Because he’s just that scary? He’s really not, not for his looks anyway. Different, alarming at first, but not scary. “I won’t. I don’t faint.”
The Ghoul gives her a crooked smile. “Glad to hear it. Why don’t you have a seat before you fall over then.”
She nods and his hands pull away. Lucy tries to ignore the wobble in her steps, or the way she still feels the warmth of his touch through the vault suit. The earthen wall is cool on her back as she slides down against it. The Ghoul closes a metal door, also made of tin, most of the way. The small crack gives them just enough light to see by.
There’s an odd lump in her side when she tries to lie down; Lucy sits up with a wide smile as she remembers what it is. “Do you have a knife?” she asks.
The Ghoul gives her a wary look and must decide she’s not a threat (which is either an insult, a compliment, or both) and walks over to hand it to her, handle first. It's almost too big for her needs.
“Thank you,” she grins, and pulls the green apple from her pocket. It cuts in half so easily she has to watch her fingers. She balances one half on the wide flat of the blade and holds it out in offering. “Here, that half’s yours.”
He regards it skeptically for so long the dog gets up to investigate. “You already ate,” he tells her as he finally takes it.
Lucy takes a bite and groans. It's not poison, she wants to say. You can trust me. But she gets a feeling he doesn’t put much stock in words. “It's tart! I didn’t know apples were tart.” Even when it's gone, the flavor lingers on her tongue, sour and sweet all at once.
He gives her a look that seems fond, which means Lucy must be reading it wrong. “No apples in the vault either?” he asks.
“Not fresh, our crop was corn, not fruit. We only had them preserved.”
The Ghoul does not thank her, but he sits down on the wall beside her. When he finishes the apple, he offers her his canteen. “It’s clean,” he insists when she doesn’t immediately accept. “Got it from the govmint.”
Lucy doesn’t say thank you either, but she tries not to gulp too greedily before she hands it back.
Her eyes are already falling shut when he tells her to get some rest. Assures her that the landmines outside will blow anything apart that's stupid enough to try it, and for a moment of restlessness she’s not sure if that’s meant to be a comfort, or a warning. She curls up on her side towards the source of something warm. It must be the dog, but it smells like old leather and smoke.