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They’d rolled in and taken over that coward Irwin’s farm without really thinking much about it. After all, he lived a little ways out of town. No family. No connections. Not nearly enough money to hire someone to retaliate. Certainly too weak or afraid or both to do much about them himself. Irwin was, admittedly, an easy target.
His farm had food and a well. A real, proper well, with good, deep groundwater that wasn’t irradiated much if at all. A modest little house of sturdy construction with all the fixins for a comfortable life, should they set themselves up right.
Jesse and his friends were raiders. He wasn’t proud of it, none of them were. Life is unfair, though, and this was the best they could manage to scrape together for themselves. He was hoping that with the blessing that was Irwin’s farm, they wouldn’t have to live like that any longer. They were gonna try, best they could at least, to straighten themselves out.
That’s why they didn’t kill him, Jesse thought. Though that morning, he wondered if it was truly worth it to start their altruism as early as that. Frankly, he thought it was hardly altruism at all. A quick death was mercy out here--they might’ve doomed him to a slow one, for little more than their own ability to sleep peacefully at night. None of them wanted to be the guy that pulled the trigger.
They got all their information on what was happening outside the farm through Leigh. She could walk in The Hub freely in a way the rest of them couldn’t. She was just so pretty and well spoken. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who wouldn’t want to talk to her, and just as hard-pressed to find anyone who’d put two and two together and guess who she was with.
Two days prior, she’d come through with news of some bastard from out of town. She’d heard that they’d come from a vault, complete with the blue jumpsuit that they supposedly wore underneath metal armor, but they couldn’t be entirely sure if that was true or not. That wasn’t the interesting part, though.
“They killed a Deathclaw,” She said softly. She got home late, she was the last person to eat, but they all sat at the dinner table and listened as she relayed what she heard. “They rolled into town, got some work from Far Go, left town for a day, and came back holding its head. ”
“You’re fucking kidding me,” Margot said.
“Serious as a heart attack. Everything else is just hearsay but I saw ‘em carrying it. It was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“They had to have been paid a fortune, right?” Rick said.
“No, I hear they didn’t even take their reward. They’re just running around trying to get their adrenaline high for the day, I think.”
“How’d they do it?” Jesse asked.
“Can’t be sure. They’re going around with two other dudes and a weird dog, so it wasn’t like they had big numbers or nothing. Could’ve caught it while it was weak, but…”
They all were quiet after that. It was good gossip, they wanted to think of it as just that, but unease suffused the coming hours and days. Somehow, knowing they’d take any odd job handed to them, no matter how abysmal the pay or how dangerous it was…
Well, it felt like bad news to Jesse.
He was proven right in the middle of the night, when that Vault Dweller kicked down their front door and shot Rick twice before he even had the opportunity to get his shotgun loaded. Jesse was alone in one of the bedrooms and found himself armed and on his feet before his brain could catch up to his instincts.
He flung the door open to be faced with a mangy little dog.
It skulked its way between the Vault Dweller’s legs, oddly calm, oddly confident, and wove its way towards Rick and Andy. By the time Margot and David were outside, the two men that were going around with the Vault Dweller had stormed in. The one in the leather jacket turned to see him, and cocked his gun without hesitation.
It was mostly a blur after that.
Jesse managed to get two shots in, but he missed the first in his panic. Before he really even had the time to react, they shot him once and down he went. He was slipping in and out of consciousness, either from pain or from blood loss. Maybe both.
His whole crew, his friends, his family was stomped out in a matter of minutes.
And every single one of them, he heard it, was taken out by that mutt.
“Good boy!” He overheard the Vault Dweller say, when Andy’s screaming finally stopped. “Ian, you reckon it’s a good use of our time to make sure they’re all dead?”
“Not worth the bullets,” Ian said, and grumbled out something of a laugh, “Our little killer got it covered.”
“See, Tycho?” The Vault Dweller said, “Told you he’d be useful.”
“You reckon he’ll eat any of them?” The man who must have been Tycho said.
“He might,” Said the Vault Dweller, and Jesse could hear the distinct click of Andy’s gun. Someone must’ve been fiddling with it.
His stomach turned. A wave of heat that could’ve been rage washed over him—Andy was the guy that saved him, after his parents died. He was practically another father.
Wiped out and looted, generally a Raider’s fate. Jesse supposed it was too optimistic to hope for any other ending for their stories.
“Heya boy! Check these guys to see if they’re dead,” Ian said, and then chuckled. He stopped laughing suddenly when it sounded like the dog actually started. It seemed all of them were surprised.
“Maybe we can start teaching him how to loot,” Tycho muttered. He heard the distinct creak of someone sitting down on the rickety chair at the table.
It wasn’t really their chair, nothing in Irwin’s farm was really theirs, but he’d be damned if he wasn’t attached to it like it was anyways.
In the relative quiet of the house, he could hear the tapping of the dog's claws on the floor, could hear its panting, it’s sniffing around. He heard the dog systemically shuffle through each room, before finally, it came to the room Jesse was in.
He held very still, and couldn’t help but look.
It wasn’t a big dog. In fact, quite the opposite, it was pretty damn small. It’s wiry brownish fur was falling out in patches, it’s skin scratched up and scarred. If Jesse had seen it out in the wasteland, he wouldn’t have been afraid. He might even feel pity for it.
But its muzzle was covered in blood, his friend’s blood.
It stalked over to Jesse and sniffed him. Up until that point, he’d never heard the thing make a noise. Not even a whimper when kicked. But it circled Jesse slowly, and as it made its way back towards his head, it towered over him and growled.
It rasped from the dog's throat like a file over wood and reverberated deep in Jesse’s chest. He’d been afraid in his life, he’d felt the visceral fear of dying, but that was like fire in the belly. It started up some internal combustion engine that had saved his life more than a couple dozen times.
This kind of fear was something he couldn’t even categorize. It rolled over him and sunk into him, made Jesse nothing but a conduit for its acute ice-water pain. He lay there paralyzed.
The dog bared its teeth. Huge, pointy, gleaming white teeth that stood out against its bloody muzzle. Those teeth tore out Andy’s jugular not five minutes ago.
He was staring down the grim reaper, it seemed. And the grim reaper was a scraggly little creature, not much more than a very large, glorified rat.
He didn’t know if he wanted to laugh or cry.
It barked twice and Jesse flinched without meaning to. Drops of its frothy spit landed on him. He heard one of them start towards where he was. He struggled to his feet in a last ditch attempt to save his own life, and if he was lucky, avenge his friends in any way.
But he should’ve known better. The Vault Dweller appeared in the doorframe, and as if on cue, the dog tackled Jesse to the ground, still snarling and barking.
The Vault Dweller laughed. “Good boy, Dogmeat!” The last thing he heard was the Vault Dweller’s voice. Not quite merry but certainly close.
What a horrible name for a dog.