FMS/Tales from a raider/FS-Leader1
From Create Your Own Story
It took a while to get the leader of the raider band that helped the town against the super mutants to talk, but eventually I was able to.
"Bitch," he said as I walked by. "I thought you wanted to fucking talk?"
I stared at him. Bitch. Bitch. That is all he called me. While I appreciated what he did for the town, he was still a raider, still scum. Even his help did not come without strings. They just wanted supplies, and as one of the only settlements in his territory, he had no other choice other than to have his band scavenge local plants and try to bring down local widelife. Exploiting a town was much easier. And, of course if the town had been wiped out by the super mutants, he and his murderous, thieving band would have had to figure out how to become farmers. But his "name" for me was really starting to get to me. Bitch bitch bitch. It seemed like that was the only thing he called women.
"Yeah, when you have learned to say something I care to hear," I shot back at him. I admit, I had learned to talk tougher, in order to get him to even talk to me. "Right now I just hear you yap yap yapping like a fucking feral mongrel."
He threw his head back and roared, his chest rippling with mirth, his eyes twinkling with it. He didn't even look friendly laughing. He just looked mean, ugly, and sinister. It was strange to see how he would react one way, when I expected something else.
After he stopped, he eyed me for a few minutes. I stood there, just watching his eyes. While he may not be a feral dog, his eyes darted around like one, caged. He was a wild beast, with human intellect, and the cage just helped accentuate it.
"Sit," he barked. At first I almost protested, being addressed like the bitch he had named me. Sit bitch. Good bitch. Let me scratch behind your ears. Or shoot you in the head to put you out of my misery. I bit my tongue, seeing that indeed, he did seem willing to talk. I had worked all this time to try to get him to open up that I bit it, and said nothing. Instead, I sat beside his cage, just far enough away that he would not be able to reach me if he tried to grab.
I sat, turned on my pip boy, and we started talking.
His parents were simple people, living in a small town, not much different from the one he and his raiders had saved. During the day, they farmed the land surrounding the town proper in groups, one person always standing watch for bloatflies, radroaches, feral dogs, raiders, and all other manner of creature out to kill them. They would work together, in small groups close to each other, so if something attacked, they could face it together, with the person on watch warning if something came too close. As a community, they survived. Attacks normally managed to be stopped or avoided. Sometimes people were hurt, but rarely did people die. Which was good, since their community was alone and isolated. They did not have an influx of others to help replace the few who did die.
At night, they would go within the walls of their town, hiding behind the barbed wire and scrapped timber, tires stuffed in holes to try to keep things from slipping through the cracks in the boards. The fences were more garbage than fence, but it created a wall to help try to keep invaders out. They would huddle together over the barrels, fires burning to warm their hands, to cook some meager meat, and to illuminate them as they talked with the other members of the community.
It was a hard life for a 6 year old. Working all day, with a little play at night while everyone else was chatting and huddling. A stick. An old piece of chalk, an old whiteboard in one of the rooms of the residence, what was left of a pre-war school. He was the only child in the community now, most others being dead or grown up. One woman was pregnant, but the old people often remarked that it seemed harder and harder for the women to get pregnant. Other couples tried. He could see them, tumbling around back in the old shed, or sneaking off with a quick kiss to find a secluded spot between the junk wall and a building. He had watched a couple here or there, the girl squealing, the guy doing something in her pants. The two taking clothes off, then moaning and spasming and kissing and all manners of strange, gross stuff. He didn't understand it. Girls were strange, and anyways, all the girls were old, like his mother. But his mother was his mother, and he loved her anyways, especially when she would sneak him some cookies or other sweet she had found. A Dandy Boy Apple she had managed to trade for, or a gum drop she had managed to find in the old ruins piles. A couple times, even a treasured Nuka-Cola. It was warm, and flat, but it tasted wonderful, compared to the irradiated water he normally drank. And it did not make him feel nearly as sick as the water did. But, that was the way life was, in this world. Everything made you feel sick. At least they had radaway. Once someone started puking, skin turning slightly grey, or white for the blacks, the town leader would poke their arm, hook up that bag, and give them a couple days. Greg remembered being so sick after drinking from a strange water that he thought he was about to die. It helped make him feel better, but he hated that poke to get it in him.
The leader of the first band interviewed. His parents dies to a supermutant attack when he was 6. He hid and watched it all, as they raped his mom, the other women of the community. As they ate his dad. His mom, eventually, after they were done with her, and her body was already broken and lifeless. He watched the same things happen to his neighbors. His friends. Three days later, the super mutants finally moved on.
He lived for two years alone, surviving off mud puddles left by the rain, bugs found under fallen tree branches, plant leaves. Random scraps of rotting food left behind by one group or another.
He finally was caught when he was 8, trying to steal from a band of raiders. They taught him a painful lesson, but then enlisted him as a member of the raiders group. He rose quickly, learning to fight, learning to kill. While he was young, he was swift and agile. And smart, figuring out ways to kill. As he got older, as he left puberty, he developed into a large and intimidating man. Soon after his 17th birthday, he challenged the leader of the band, and lost. He was cast out, but he had learned. He found stragglers, formed them into a band. Small at first, it grew until it was one of the larger roaming bands in the wastes.
He made the band tough, and pushed them hard, culling the weak quickly, to either die, be exiled, or be sold as slaves. Women he took care of. His band knew not to kill the women. The last member to kill a woman died slowly and painfully at his hands. Not because he cared about women. They could hurt them. They could make them cry, make them bleed. He didn't care. As long as they were capable of bearing offspring, and of being able to take care of themselves (So not maimed or crippled), he didn't care what his men did with them. They were nothing but bitches, there for breeding and release of sexual energy.
