Man, they were some freaking looking fuckers; looked like a bunch of mutants from some B-rated horror flick. They wanted food and I wanted out, so I let them have the rest of the supplies and got the hell out of there. When I got to the surface, the ol'
Anyway, not all of the city was completely wasted, but the whole place was infested with all kinds of mutated fuckers. I'm not saying I paid much attention back in school, but I'm pretty damn sure that real radiation doesn't do that shit. And it sure as hell doesn't throw up the flickering green wall that swirled around the ruins of the city, screaming like the tortured dead. I guess if I'd realized back then that it really was the screams of the dead, and all the shit that mean, I'd probably have crawled right back into my fucking hole. Good thing for the world I didn't, eh?
Well, there were several groups of survivors living around in the ruins, trying to scavenge themselves a living. I teamed up with one group and we lived by kicking other people's asses and stealing their shit. Didn't take long in those rad-soaked ruins before I started to feel different. Guess I was one of the lucky ones, I didn't grow a third eye on my right ass cheek or turn into a man-snail, I just no longer needed to eat as much, which came in handy considering the lack of food. I was leader (being the least ugly) of my little rag-tag band, which is probably the only reason we didn't join up with the Grendel Cult (at that point, I'd had enough of cults).
See, this cult was running around, worshipping some damn monster they called Grendel. Big, nasty mother that lived in the remains of the old Tropicana; the thing looked like Godzilla's baby or some shit. The cultist fuckers took to rounding up anyone who didn't play ball and feeding them to Grendel, or just letting the fucking thing loose to terrorize. Well, I wasn't going to be part of another cult, but I sure as hell wasn't going to end up as the bony bit in a monster shit pile, so I bailed on the gang and hoofed it for the ruins with all the food I could carry.
I lived on my own out in the bad parts, right on the edge of the Maelstrom (that's what everyone called the whirling green wall), stretching out supplies as best I could. Eventually, I ran out of food and was tired of fighting off the really badly mutated fucks called Trogs. I headed back into town, hoping to grab some more food and maybe a better weapon or something; I figured I'd lay low and avoid the Grendelites, run if I had to. Turns out that they weren't in charge anymore.
While I was gone, this fellow named Silas Rasmussen had taken over. He showed up out of nowhere and personally killed Grendel. Not with a gun, but with green nuclear fire summoned up from... somewhere. He was preaching a new religion, where a god that was actually a nuclear thing called the Glow, even had his own saints and everything (bunch of physicists and shit), preaching how the mutants were the chosen of the radiation god and humanity was a doomed species. Just another cult, right? Wrong. Because this Cult of Doom had real fucking power, and a willingness to use it. Better yet, they could teach others.
I jumped at the chance to join up. Silas was recruiting like mad back then, trying to build a powerbase, and he needed every rad-slinger he could get. I had to memorize some mumbo-jumbo that was supposed to let me "tap in to the power of the Glow" and all about how humans were doomed and muties would rule the Earth (apparently with the good-looking muties on top, go figure). It was all bullshit, and I could tell Silas knew it was bullshit. He had the same look in his eyes I'd seen in every asshole jock who has just realized he's big enough and mean enough to be in charge. But I didn't care, because underneath the rhetoric, there was real fucking power, and I was tired of taking it on the chin from this new fucking world. At the end of the "initiation," each of the new recruits would try to harness the power of the radiation and hurl a bolt of nuclear fire at a target. If you left a scorch mark, you passed.
I blew up the whole end of the building in one incredible explosion of nuclear fire and fury; my very first Nuke miracle. [3]
I was in.
[1] [Estimates by the Guild Historians place the Founder’s exit from the bunker sometime around the end of March, likely near the old holiday of Easter.]
[2] [Analysis of records from the Last War shows that the bombing of
[3] {T – I wasn’t the only one to do so well. Joan, that little hippie cutie that became so well-known later did pretty damn well herself. Not a blast of fire, mind you, but every tree in the area suddenly sprouted new leaves and grew like mad. Joan never was much for violence. Nice ass, though.}
