Chapter Text
John heard them before he saw them. John stood in his corner, a cigarette in his hand and a lighter in the other. He could hear their boots, good boots they must have taken from some poor drifter somewhere, or from dead corpses. He heard Vic laugh about something his buddy was saying. John tucked the cigarette back into his pocket and then hid the lighter. He didn’t want Vic to know he had a good lighter. Vic would take it.
Vic strolled into view, flanked on either side by his thugs. Vic leered at all the drifters standing around in the alleyway. “Why so glum looking,” he said with a leer. “You know what this is. Time to pay up.”
John already had the few caps that were out of his pockets in his hands. Vic sauntered up to John first and grinned. “Don’t frown, Johnie,” he said. “Ruins your pretty looks.” Vic’s smile fell. “I said don’t frown,” he said threateningly. John felt a dead smile lift his lips. Vic put his calloused rough hand on John’s smooth, dirty face. John tasted bile at the back of his throat. “Better,” Vic said. Then reached into John’s pockets, making sure to grope him as he did. Vic’s thugs laughed. John didn’t even blush. Not anymore. This wasn’t new anymore.
Vic pulled the good lighter and the cigarette from John’s pocket. He pressed the lighter into John’s hand. “Light it up for me,” he said.
John held the lighter in his hand and imagined, for an instant, taking that lighter and burning Vic’s face with it. But he couldn’t. He knew he couldn’t. They’d kill him and anyone else who said anything.
John flicked the lighter on, the flame hot near his finger, and lit the cigarette for Vic. Vic put the cigarette to his own lips, drew in a drag, and puffed it out into John’s face. Then he took John’s hand and burned the back of it with the cigarette. John tensed up. Vic’s goons laughed. Vic took John’s lighter from his hand, then his caps, and then finished the humiliation by patting John on the ass. Vic sauntered away to his next victim.
John felt the tension ease out of him a little. It had gone better than he expected. Last week had been worse.
Vic was done collecting his payment from a drifter who must have been anywhere from 40 to 70 years old. Most people looked older than they were here, especially after all the hard chems and hard times. There was a sour look on his face. He was new too, and John knew instinctively, his whole body tensing, that the idiot was going to say something that would get him killed, and hopefully only him.
John breathed out through his teeth as the drifter called, “Hey. You forgot to pat my ass too.”
Vic froze and his goons paused too. Slowly, Vic turned around and his icy eyes stared stone cold at the drifter. “What’d you say to me?” he said in a dangerously quiet voice.
The old drifter spat on the ground. “I handed over my caps. You’re supposed to pat my ass now too.”
Vic’s goons looked back and forth between Vic and the drifter. Vic spent another moment staring at the drifter before he snapped his fingers at one of his thugs. The thug punched the drifter in the teeth and the old drifter wailed and fell to the ground.
John felt cold all over, numb, just like all the other drifters, as another thug hefted a nail-embedded baseball bat up, preparing to take a swing.
The sound of a gunshot echoed and bounced from each brick wall. The thug dropped the bat and grabbed at his hand. A bullet had blasted his thumb clean off. He stared at the blood dripping from the stump of his thumb and then screamed in agony.
Vic whirled around on the street, his eyes wide and darting around at shadows. “Who did that?!” Vic shouted. “Which one of you fucks did that?!”
The drifters stared at each other, bewildered.
“I said which one of you fucks did—!?”
Another gunshot sounded and Vic grabbed at his shoulder. The shoulder of his leather jacket was grazed. Blood seeped from the gash. Vic roared in rage and agony.
The drifters fled. The older drifter who’d been punched scrambled away during the distraction. But John felt rooted to the ground, because he saw, and maybe he was the only one who saw, the man standing in the shadows near Kleo’s shop, the gun cocked in his hand still smoking in the dim light. He held up a finger to his lips as he stared at John.
“Which one of you—!“ Vic began to roar again.
“Really like the sound of your own voice, don’t you?” called the man from the shadows before he stepped back and eerily disappeared from John’s view.
“Show yourself!” Vic shouted. He looked terrified. John had never seen Vic look terrified. John was enraptured by the sight of fear on Vic’s face after seeing only satisfaction and greed there for so long. “I’ll fucking kill you! I’ll fucking slaughter you! I own you all, you worthless pieces of shit!”
“Can’t be too worthless if they’re your piggybanks.” The voice was coming from higher up, but closer, somewhere on an old fire escape or a window ledge. The thugs fired in that direction and John waited with bated breath for the sound of a falling body, but he didn’t hear it.
“Show yourself!”
A bark of laughter echoed through the city. “I’m not crazy.”
Vic’s eyes settled suddenly on John. Vic aimed his gun at John’s head. “Show yourself, or—”
Vic never finished his sentence, and John didn’t have time to even tense up in anticipation of the bullet. From the drifter hovel in back of Vic, a figure seemed to snap off from the shadows. Vic’s arm was grabbed, twisted, and the gun in Vic’s hand blew Vic’s brains out.
Vic fell twitching to the ground, his breath releasing in a haunting death rattle from his lungs.
Vic was dead.
Vic was dead.
There were a few seconds of confusion from Vic’s thugs before half of them made a beeline for the shooter and half of them shouted and dropped their weapons and ran. Three gunshots later, the bold thugs were dead on the ground, another three had retreated, and the shooter was standing there staring down at the dead with a blank expression on his face.
Then he looked over at Vic specifically. “I doubt he was anyone important?” he said to John in a questioning voice.
“Just the mayor,” John said.
“Oh, is that all?” the stranger replied, his voice slightly higher. “Well, fuck.” The blank look on the man’s face faded and was replaced by the first sign of fear. He was a few years older than John, but not by much, with amber brown eyes, tanned skin, a large arched nose that made him look like a bird of prey, and black hair tied back into a short ponytail. Now that he was standing closer, John could see his face was lined with exhaustion and his skin was waxy, probably from rad poisoning. He was wearing a dark radstag duster, but underneath it, John saw a Pip-Boy peeking out from under a sleeve and the blue flash of a vault suit.
A fucking blue vault suit.
A sick, tired, rad poisoned vault dweller had just taken out Mayor Vic of Goodneighbor.