Survivor's Guilt (Fallout New Vegas Fanfiction)

Chapter Two

Sandra leaned to the right and slammed the door of the shack. "Peter, how many times do I have to tell you to keep the door closed?!"

It was the next morning, and Sandra was in the middle of her usual stressful routine of getting her three children ready.

"Mom, my dress doesn't fit!" came a whine from the bed. Sandra looked up to see Deborah sitting on it, her blonde hair tangled and a blue dress halfway over her head - somehow she had managed to get one of the straps stuck around her neck.

"Oh, hold on!" Sandra snapped. She paused from pouring water into a bowl of instant chicken noodles, wiped her hands on her worn capri pants and trudged over to the bed. She slid the strap back over Deborah's head and pulled the whole dress down.

"Now, go find your hairbrush. Your hair looks like a crow's nest."

"But I don't know where my hairbrush is!"

"I know, I said go find it!"

Deborah groaned while her mother made her way back over to the oven and opened the door of the shack. Hot, irradiated sunlight shone down mercilessly on her eyes.

"Boys, what do you want for breakfast?" she yelled, blinking away the glare. The older children were playing checkers with bottlecaps, and looked up at their mother's voice.

"Gecko, please!" Peter replied, his black fringe falling into his small brown eyes.

"And Zack?"

"I'll have whatever, Mom," the teenager shouted, his gaze fixed to the checkers board again.

"Right," Sandra yelled, then shut the door again. She poured the rest of the water, which she had heated over the bucket fire, into the noodles and served them to Deborah with a fork that Sandra had done her best to scrape rust off of.

Ignoring Deborah's complaints that the bowl was too hot, the middle-aged woman swung her blonde ponytail to her other shoulder and grabbed the salted corpse of a giant gecko from the wooden crate next to the broken, doorless fridge. She soaked it in another bucket of water next to the oven while she retrieved four skewers from a metal locker on the other side of the shack, then sliced up the meat and threaded it onto the skewers.

"Boys! Breakfast time!" Sandra yelled, pouring a bowl of Sugar Bombs for herself. She knew from reading books that pre-War people ate cereal with milk, but she had never found milk in the wasteland that was still edible so they just ate the two-centuries-out-of-date, irradiated cereal dry.

Sandra sat on the bed next to Deborah, the springs creaking as she did so. The little girl still refused to eat her noodles, and the bowl was leaning against her leg.

"Oh come on Debbie, your noodles have to be cool enough now," Sandra coaxed, brushing sun-coloured hair out of her daughter's sea-blue eyes. She's like a little copy of me. A perfect, beautiful little copy. Aside from the fact that she's one of the most stubborn people I've ever met...

"No. They're still too hot."

Sandra reached over and, despite Deborah's protests, plucked a noodle from the bowl and popped it in her mouth. "They're just warm, Debbie. They're fine, I promise."

"No they're not."

"Yes they are."

Sandra sighed. "Would you prefer I made your noodles with cold water then, like last week?" she said with a cheeky grin.

"What? No!" Debbie exclaimed. "They were too cold!"

"But I thought you liked them cold!"

"Not that cold!"

Sandra shook her head, sighing again. She spooned a few Sugar Bombs into her mouth just as Peter creaked open the shack door; Zack shoved past him, his roughness clearly intentional - judging from his smirk.

Ignoring his brother's irritated yell, Zack walked over to the oven where the skewers were sitting on a chipped enamel plate, loaded with raw meat waiting to be cooked.

"Gecko?!" Zack said indignantly. "I hate gecko!"

"You said you would have whatever!" Sandra said, exasperated. She felt her dirt-stained capris dig into her skin as she adjusted her position on the bed, the bowl of Sugar Bombs relievingly cold in her hand. She scraped her tongue along her teeth irritably; her eldest son may be taller than she was now, but sometimes he acted like he was the height of her knee again. He had just never managed to outgrow his whininess.

"But I wanted a different whatever!" Zack continued, starting to grin through his annoyance as he realized how childish he sounded.

"Stop complaining, Zack," Peter said as he grabbed two of the skewers.

The older boy's smile grew wider still. "Oh, I'll get you for that!" he threatened, and grabbed his own pair of skewers off the plate. He jumped back and stuck the skewers out like swords. Peter did the same, laughing.

"En garde!" Zack shouted. Sandra had bought him a pre-War book on fencing for his thirteenth birthday, and he had been in love with swordplay ever since.

"Pret!"

"Allez!"

The two boys clashed skewers, jumping this way and that and yelling enthusiastically; Sandra watched with a kind of exasperated fondness until two chunks of meat fell off one of Zack's skewers and were lost to the dusty wood floor.

"Okay, battle's over," Sandra announced, her tone humourous yet firm. "Go cook your breakfast, and don't drop any more. Food is hard to come by in the wasteland, and we're lucky to have it."

"Yeah, Mom," Zack groaned, and led the way over to the bucket of fire. He and Peter crouched down by it and started roasting the gecko meat over the flames as Sandra continued encouraging Deborah to eat her noodles.