This is part eight of the Vault Dweller's Diary; again, I must caution you that if you haven't been reading this from the start, you should click the appropriate content link on the right-hand side and start from the intro. Otherwise, have at it.
Let me give you a piece of advice: If you ever get the urge to visit someplace called Minefield, ignore that urge.
After spending Sunday in bed, recovering from my most recent gunshot wound (who said that the Wasteland would be dangerous?), the Doc came to me. He took a look at the pharmaceuticals and made some kind of medical gel out of them. He says it's like a super bandage. Near as I can tell, it's some kind of coagulant, a topical analgesic and I suspect some sort of stimulant (like Jet or something). All I know for certain is that after he applied some to the bullet wound I got at the Super-Duper Mart, I was right back on my feet and ready to go. I'm changing my mind about the Doc. It might be worth it to pay his fees in the future.
So by this morning, I felt good enough to take on Moira's next task: Going to the center of Minefield and bringing back a landmine. In retrospect, I'm not really sure how I ever thought this would be a good idea.
When I set out this morning, the weather was very nice. The sun was out, the breeze was mild and not too irradiated, and I think I even heard some kind of mutated sparrow singing. Well, less singing and more rasping, really. It sounded a bit like what I imagine Gob would sound like if he tried to whistle. The walk there wasn't bad. I only had to kill two mole rats. The larger of the two made for a pretty good lunch; it turns out beating something to death with a baseball bat is a little like tenderizing it. Plus, Moira's food sanitizer seems to work, so I think my Rad-X supplies should last a bit longer than I had initially planned.
My appetite sated, I continued on toward Minefield and hit there around 1400. It seemed like it would have been a nice little neighborhood before the nukes. Now it was littered with abandoned cars and careful inspection revealed more than a few mines hidden between them. This is great, I thought I mean, even if one of the landmines didn't kill me, the explosion could likely set off one of the micro-fusion cells in those cars. So there were two ways I could get blown to hell.
As I was creeping around, trying desperately everything that Moira had told me about mines and disarming them before they exploded, a bullet went right past my head. I ducked behind a car and kept my head down for a minute; just as I was peeking around the right side of the car, everything went to shit all at once. I saw light glint off of something glassy, the flash of a rifle, and then a mine exploded, all within about a heartbeat. Fortunately, the mine that went up was on the other side of the car from me, so I didn't get hit by it; unfortunately, that meant that the car's engine did. I poked my head up again to see the extent of the damage and saw flames crawling around the hood of the car, working their way deeper into the engine.
I know a lot of words. I know a lot of curse words, too. And I yelled them all as I ran desperately away from that car; mines beeped warnings behind me and bullets whizzed past me as I ran. I took a bit of shrapnel in my left leg from one of the mines that went up as I ran too close by. The pain was extraordinary; I didn't think I'd be able to make it, but I managed to sort of fall behind a low, burnt-out wall. Just as I was getting under cover, the car decided to go up. It wasn't the first time I'd been pretty close to one of those when it exploded, but it was the first time I had been focusing on it when it did. It took me a minute to regain my eyesight. I don't know why anyone ever designed that micro-fusion bullshit. Those things are dangerous.
After the spots had stopped swimming around in front of my eyes, I took a Stimpak out and jabbed it directly into my calf muscle. It had the desired effect; the painkillers and the adrenaline took effect a minute later with a sensation like warm water being pumped directly into my bloodstream. I knew I was only going to damage my leg further, but I could get up and move around again. Not that I wanted to, since there was someone in a sniper's perch waiting for me to move.
Keeping the large rifle foremost in my mind, I started crawling along the rotting wall where I had taken cover. I got about twenty feet before I ran out of wall; I just had to hope that this guy wasn't good at keeping an eye out for his target. I poked my head around the wall carefully, keeping it low so he would be less likely to notice it. Sure enough, he was crouched near the edge of the open third floor of a crumbling concrete tower, a big old sniper rifle in his hands. He was looking through the scope, pointed where I had been hiding a minute ago. I took the opportunity to dash out from around the wall and move even further out of his field of view. I got across the street and under the cover of a mostly intact house, presumably without arousing his suspicion.
I started searching around desperately for a weapon better suited to those ranges than my pistol or my assault rifle. The first floor had nothing of use, so I ran upstairs to the second floor and started throwing furniture around, checking under things. Sure enough, under the bed, I found an old hunting rifle. I worked the action a little; it was in really bad shape. I might have one shot, maybe two, before this thing would work no more. That's assuming it worked at all. I didn't really have the time to test it out before I took my shot, though. I crouched as low as I could and made it to a window on that side of the house, peering out toward the sniper. He had taken his eye away from the scope and was looking around, not sure if I'd run off or just hidden. I breathed as lightly as I could and moved slowly and smoothly, loading a single round into the chamber and locking it in place with the bolt.
That was the single most important shot I have ever made in my life. I could feel my heart slowing as I lifted the rifle to my shoulder, aiming down the shitty, crooked iron sights and straight at the man's chest. I breathed in slowly, listening to the blood swirl turbulently around in my ears, paused for a moment, then exhaled even more slowly. I let my finger tense by itself, not wanting my arm to jerk away from the recoil. I couldn't anticipate the shot. It needed to come on its own.
Just before my finger had finished tensing, he looked around, past me, then stopped. His eyes turned back and I swear to you that they fixed directly on mine for just a second. He didn't raise the gun, he just stared me down over the length of my own rifle's barrel.
Then the gun went off.
The round struck him squarely in the chest, throwing him backwards off of his ledge and onto the concrete below. I'm pretty sure the shot wasn't fatal, but the fall certainly was. I had all the time I needed to get over there. On my way, I moved slowly, disarming mines carefully and storing them in my bag. I made it past the little playground in the center of the circle, over the carousel, and around a whole group of mines at the base of the tower, right at the most convenient entrance. I crawled over a pile of rubble up to what would have been the second floor and found the man's corpse. He was older - maybe in his forties or fifties - and covered in scars. His clothes were ragged, he was desperately in need of a bath and he was wearing a weird leather collar with some kind of electric dongle on it. I routed through his pockets and turned up a few extra bullets for his sniper rifle, took his collar and his sniper rifle, then bounded up the stairs to his nest. He had a little bed under one of the few remaining pieces of roof; all around it was food that he must have collected from the remains of the town nearby. In a footlocker nearby he had more food and a couple of bottles of whiskey. By a column closer to his perch, he had some extra mines and ammo stashed in strongboxes. It was a pretty good haul, all told.
The way back was uneventful. I think I might be losing it, because I found myself not only singing along with every song that popped up on Galaxy News Radio but responding aloud to Three Dog in between songs. I guess the loneliness of my existence is starting to get at me. It was late by the time I got back to Megaton, so Craterside Supply was closed. I'm going to pawn this stuff off in the morning. Maybe someone can tell me something about this collar; I can probably make a few caps selling it for spare parts. For now though, I think I'm going to have Wadsworth help me out with this shrapnel wound, pop some painkillers and get some sleep. Doc can look at it tomorrow.
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