FREV Chapter 08 (Patreon)

Cindy’s Point of View

“Fuckin christ! How did it turn out like this?” I got most of the information we were looking for but me asking questions and paying for the information got more eyes on me than I’d have liked. By the time I left the building, I spotted several eyes following me. I made my way through the junk-filled streets of the city, looking back it seemed to be four people. 

The guards, if they noticed weren’t going to interrupt. Walking down an alley all four approach and as they approach the end they meet a dead end. I managed to sprint down the alleyway and climb up some boxes to make it onto the rooftops. As I thought I managed to get away I heard one of the guards on the snipers perch overlooking the city yell down. “Hey, you! Get off the roofs!”

Sprinting to the opposite side of the building I looked for something soft as a warning shot hit near me. The drop down is about twenty feet and while I was in good shape I wasn’t a physical machine like my two companions. A twenty-foot drop onto concrete would fuck me up and two of the people who were chasing after me crawled up onto the roof.

I ran along the edge of the roof as more shots growing closer to me were fired while also being split and fired towards the two bandits on the roof with me. Jumping into a pile of trash, I rushed towards the exit in a full sprint. A guard tried to stop me, most likely assuming I stole something but I just blew straight past him as he pulled his gun out the two robbers who were chasing me cut off his line of sight.

It was too much of a hassle for him to care as he turned back towards barking at a person trying to haggle the cap cost to enter the city. I kept running until I knew we were far enough to not draw any attention and quickly stopped to catch my breath. The two bandits weren’t in the best shape. Compared to me, someone who had three square meals a day and actively ran on the treadmill to stay in shape both were heaving for breath.

One shakily held his gun in my direction as I unclipped my recycler and fired off three clean shots. I wasn’t the best shot either but when I could fire every other shot for effectively free. The one on the left fell down a large chunk of him turned to ash while the bigger one with the gun drawn fired three shots before falling. I took a few controlled breaths as I tried to keep my adrenaline in check and not freak out that I just killed two people.

I’ll have to go back to the previous base location and hide to ensure I wasn’t followed. I doubted I would be, they seemed… Unskilled. I was told that the outside world had very few smart people outside but it was clearly an understatement. From what I could tell, most people outside the vaults were dumb as rocks.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

I checked the remaining islands as I had to kill a gigantic crab monster. It would have been difficult if my weaponry didn’t rip right through its armor, killing it in five shots. The dozens of smaller human-sized crabs took more ammo than the big one did. It was still saddening, if I knew these existed I’d have left them alive but the moment I crawled onto the land from the water she emerged from the other side. If I knew I’d have left her here to keep defending the warehouse.

Starting the auxiliary power and water supply was trivially easy and designed to be functional at the press of a few buttons. It could have gone horribly wrong if I hadn’t read the signs and started the water before opening the filters, clogging the pipeline permanently and letting radiation begin to seep into the vault. I could have also overtaxed the electricity causing it to explode rather than begin to provide power but I had plans for the vault other than purposely sabotaging them.

They were my people, some of the last remaining survivors that radiation in the atmosphere hadn’t mutated. It was going to be very simplistic to accomplish my mission, come back for debriefing, and murder all the remaining higher-ups before taking the base over as the de facto leader. I had no qualms about allowing someone else to lead the wasteland reconstruction but if someone hadn’t done it by now then no one ever would.

We didn’t know if another country was slowly rebuilding right now. Australia could have not been targeted and grown there army up over the next hundred or so years and was now ready to take over the world. There was an almost zero percent chance of that happening but… Maybe another country like Russia or Germany, but more likely Japan or India survived the bombs and are looking to expand and America is the biggest threat against that.

A united nation will tear through a divided America so fast that people won’t even realize they are speaking Hindi or Japanese. That being said, I doubted it… I did have aspirations of uniting the world, but my goals were lofty and I might give up on them if it became too difficult. I’d like to reunite the world and make a name for myself in the history books but if it took too much effort I’d rather just conquer North and South America.

That seemed easy enough, I was part of the secret Cabal so I knew that America hadn’t recovered much, at least until we lost contact with the outside. Unless someone truly amazing came along I doubted there were more than a few commonwealths united. No, chances are most commonwealths would still be in a chaotic, orderless, kill everyone you see because they might be enemies on sight system that most survivors would have had to use to stay alive after the bombs.

I still needed to see the big picture to know for sure. If there was a leader of all of Canada, it would be harder for my plans to go forward and it might have been better to head back into America, build up a powerbase then come back and take Canada by force. I’d have to wait and see though.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

“So from what you’re saying. In almost two hundred years nothing of importance has happened. Big fights considered important like the fight for the vault were forgotten and the last big event was an American aircraft carrier slamming into the right side of Canada that began to spill out robots who killed everyone on sight?” My sister ate some jerky she found in the raider camp she destroyed as she questioned Cindy.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. No command structure to speak of, if the Overcity was built, they had no contact with the Undercity, and the few groups trying to keep the peace or fight for territory are few and far between.” It was hard not to hold back my smile as my plans began to shift. If that aircraft carrier was one from the war and I could get them to view me as the leader of America… I’d have a ready-built army that would never tire at my beck and call to sweep over Canada.