I heard reports of ghouls having taken up residence in an old abandoned National Guard training facility. “Taking up residence,” as if they did it on purpose. Anything radiation-sick enough to be called a “ghoul” only does things out of a primal sense of survival – eat any nearby prey and hide from larger predators. They band together because it’s safer in groups, not out of any genuine sense of community.
Why the automated turrets at the base didn’t put them out of their misery I’ll never know, but as soon as I got near enough to hear the mechanical whirring of the old defense systems I also had an up-close and personal run-in with the savages. Who knows how long it had been since they lost all semblance of humanity or cognition, how long they had wandered the wastes before finding shelter in the burned-out silos and barracks of a world long-forgotten. I’m no doctor, but I know ghouls can live a long time, if they’re fed well enough.
That sure wasn’t my day to become their meal, at least. Took a few scrapes running away across the training field, surprised those rubber tires held up so well after so long, but nothing that would be problematic later. I’m not very interested in exploring the depths of that base, even if they are now short a few dead-heads. Every structure, settlement, town, and traincar is a risk versus reward judgment. There’s probably a lot of reward down there, but the risk absolutely isn’t worth it.
Someone asked me what i thought about Synths – those robotic human android things that seem to have been causing such a stir lately. I’m very much of a “live and let live” mentality, when it comes to things that aren’t out to eat me, but I have to say that the ones without skin, those mechanical skeletons, those freak me out. The ones that pass for human? All the better for them, I say.
Something tells me, long after humanity has bowed its final curtain call those Synths, and maybe the occasional ghoul, will be the only “living” things left in this blasted place.
