Chapter Text
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Allen Ginsberg, Howl
“D’you think—”
Lucy clamps her mouth shut. Her voice rings too loud in the dusty quiet, hoarse with a pain that no one wants to share.
She’s not in the vault anymore. No one here cares about her woes. Especially not her traveling companion, a man that she, up until a few days ago, would have called her enemy—maybe even her nemesis.
Lucy snorts to herself. Nemesis. But melodrama seems to fit them: she’s chewed off a piece of him, and he’s sliced off a piece of her, cutting her finger the slow, indolent way one cuts a canned peach in the warm lamplight of the corn fields. She wonders if he still has it.
“Do I think what?” the ghoul prompts her, singing out each letter. He’d have a nice voice, Lucy thinks, if it wasn’t always used for quips and barbs. He is watching her with his eyes half-shut, peering out from underneath his hat.
The words tumble out before she can stop herself: “Do you think my mom knew I was there? I mean, of course she didn’t see me, because she didn’t have eyes, or ears, or anything, but if she had—do you think she would have been able to recognize me? Even in that state?”
She’s taught radiobiology to entire classes of bright-eyed children, but given everything else that those textbooks lied about, she can’t be sure.
A light flashes through the dark. Lucy is about to inform him that cigarettes are cancerous, before she realizes the point is moot.
“You’re asking me if your mommy was still around,” the ghoul deadpans after a long, smoky exhale. “If you murdered that last part of her, when you put her outta her misery? After all, a mercy kill’s still a kill.”
Lucy’s stomach closes itself tight. She nods.
The ghoul clicks his tongue. “Well, I’ve seen some fucked up cases of feralization in my day, but I ain’t ever seen one as far gone as Mrs MacLean. Trust me, vaultie. That thing was dead long before you shot it.” He lets the weight of it settle before he adds more acerbically: “Of course, you didn’t kill her for her peace of mind, anyway, but for yo’ own—you wanted closure. Were you gonna drag mommy’s snarling corpse all across the wasteland? Take her back to the vault on a leash, and hope she didn’t maul anyone? Better to end it and get on with your life.” He holds up both hands at the look Lucy shoots him. “Geez, you asked.”
“You’re a bastard,” she declares quietly. “But—thank you.”
The cellar he found for them to crash in is damp and infested with spiders the size of her palm, but at least it has a door that locks. One flesh-eating monster is enough to handle tonight. It’s definitely stupid to sleep across from an undead cannibal, but Lucy is too tired for safety regulations. If he wants to make jerky out of her ass cheeks, he will.
But he probably won’t. Lucy has noticed that something has been decidedly less callous about his behavior, ever since she saved him. The fucker has gotten golden ruled.
She should drop the subject, but now that she’s gotten talking she doesn’t want to stop. It’s her main coping mechanism, her way to make sense of the world—and the ghoul, for all his cruelty, is the only one she can ask.
“How did it happen, d’you think?”
He seems to have expected this question, because he immediately responds: “Who’s to say? But let’s posit that it was the big blast o’ 2281 that got her. Your mother was most likely in a very near vicinity. The rot either happens slowly to a fella, with prolonged wasteland exposure,” he gestures sardonically to himself, “or it can happen faster than a speedin’ bullet, if you’re close enough to get yo’self fully doused in gamma. That nuke probably killed her instantly, in every way that matters.”
Lucy lets out a shaky breath. Rage surges through her, searching for someone to blame, someone other than her father, because she can’t think about him without her heart breaking.
“So you’re saying she’s been like that for all this time? Why the heck would Moldaver keep her around, then? What kinda crackpot keeps a feral ghoul chained up at their dinner table for over a decade?!” She has raised her voice, which never does any good. She levels herself again with some effort. “Was it as proof? To taunt my dad with it when she finally got to him? What?”
The look he gives her is not quite pity, but not far from it.
“Why do you think, sweetheart? People do stupid things for love.”
Lucy is far from placated. “If Lee Moldaver really loved my mom, she should have ended it long ago! She should have let her rest in peace!”
“That only tells me that you’ve never loved. But what else should I expect? You left your boyfriend to bleed out on the floor. I don’t even want to imagine what you’d do to him if he went feral, you heartless girl!”
For several moments, Lucy is stunned speechless. Is she really being lectured on ethics by the bounty hunter who sold her to an organ dealership? It’s so absurd that she lets out a teary huff of laughter.
“Maybe you’re right,” she admits at last. “I don’t know Maximus well enough to love him, not yet. But I’d like to think that I would honor his memory by sparing him any indignity in death.”
“O’ course. A knight’s dignity ain’t no small thing,” the ghoul nods, mock-solemn. Then he signals the end of the conversation by dropping his hat over his eyes, as if to sleep.
For over ten years, her mom may have been trapped in the ruined husk of her body, unaware of everything around her, except Lee Moldaver’s hand in hers. It’s not much by way of comfort, but it’s something.
Lucy curls up on the floor and sighs herself into an uneasy slumber, too tired to cry. The dog pads over and lays her soft head against Lucy’s cheek, as if she knows.
***
As dawn spills down the staircase, the ghoul throws something at her. Lucy reaches into the cobwebs behind her to find a can of oats.
“Is this for me?”
She remembers when this same man poured his last drops of water into the sand rather than let her have it. Now he’s literally throwing food at her?
“As I recall it, little vaulties have gotta eat if they wanna get big and strong like us surface-dwellers. And we have a long way to walk today.”
The oats are long since expired and smell kind of off. She should make a fire and cook herself some oatmeal, but hunger overtakes her. Lucy eats the oats raw right then and there, fervently licking the last grains off her fingers. The ghoul’s weathered skin cracks into wrinkles when he smiles, watching from the open cellar door.
“You’re like a feral rabbit,” he remarks.
“Are there feral rabbits?” Lucy asks at once, scientifically intrigued.
“There are beasties of all kinds on this godforsaken earth, Lucy MacLean. Remember that,” he says importantly, tipping his hat at her.