Bang! Bang!

The pistol bucks in her hands, a sharp click echoing as she slams a fresh clip home. The barrel swings like a pendulum, tracking shadows that twitch and scuttle in the gloom. Every shot's a dinner bell—ring it, and the mutants come crawling out of the woodwork, all teeth and hunger. Riley's lost count of how many she's dropped today. Ten? Twenty? It's a merry-go-round from hell, and she's strapped in tight, no exit in sight.

She tells herself they're not human. Can't be. If they were, her finger wouldn't find the trigger so easy. Back in the before-times, Professor Wilkins—God rest his sanctimonious ass—would've droned on about "justifiable force" and "exigent circumstances," his voice nasal enough to cut through a lecture hall. She can hear him now, haunting her like a ghost in a tweed jacket: "Miss Jovahn, the law bends under duress, but intent matters." Intent. Sure. Her intent's to not get eaten alive. Case closed.

These things are beasts, marinated in the world's poison—water gone sour, air thick with fallout. Generations of it, twisting them into something unholy. Shame their meat's a no-go; one bite'd turn your guts to sludge. Ricky, bless his reckless soul, tried anyway once. Skinned a mutant weasel, tossed it in a pot with some scavenged spices. Smelled like a tire fire doused in regret. "Gourmet apocalypse," he'd called it, grinning through the stink. Nobody took the bait. Hunger's a bitch, but not that desperate.

Bang! Bang!

A raccoon—rabid even before the world cracked open—crumples mid-leap, its claws scraping air. Those fuckers were always a menace; now they're nightmares with fur, eyes glowing like embers. Riley's gaze flicks upward, locking on a shape perched atop a wrecked sedan—its frame rusted to a skeleton, tires long rotted away. A survivor, maybe, or just another corpse waiting to tip over. Pale as bone, slumped against the windshield. Alive? Dead? Flip a coin, call it in the air.

"Hey!" she yells, voice cutting through the wind's low moan. "I'm coming up—don't you dare roll off, 'cause the welcoming committee down here's got teeth!"

Rats scurry everywhere beneath the wreckage, their forked tails flicking like little devil whips. She's pretty sure the respirator dangling around the stranger's neck is just for show—three years since the plants blew, and everyone's lungs are already a lost cause. Fallout's the great equalizer; no mask's undoing that clock.