ALBA

by HL TRUSLOVE

  * * *

  Stay grounded and pick them off – Turn to 20.21.

  20.8

  Time for a full-frontal assault. You snatch all the bullets still on the ground and make your way down the hill, tripping slightly with the speed you’re going.

  A couple of raiders spot you approaching, but they don’t have time to react before you’ve shot them in the head. Screams pipe up from scared and confused people, but that only helps you aim. Here, you really can make more effective work of your bullets, and when the raiders who die have weapons on them, you can snatch up more ammo to keep firing.

  This isn’t to say you don’t get hit a couple of times. You feel a nasty graze on your shoulder, and between shots you turn to find it bleeding. A young, wide-eyed boy stares at you with his own rifle in his hands, terrified you’ve noticed him as your assailant, and you put him down with a bullet through the eye.

  Soon, the camp is silent.

  There’s only one place left to go.

  Dagger’s door breaks down with a slam of your foot, and you fire two bullets into the guards either side of her – they were too slow to even react. Dagger stares at you with wide eyes. You’re a good fifteen feet away, and she has no long-range weapon except her dagger; even then, she only has one shot. You look down the scope at her – she’s completely at your mercy.

  “Don’t kill me,” she says, and there’s an element of vulnerability you’ve never heard in her voice before.

  Kill her – Turn to 20.22.

  * * *

  Don’t kill her – Turn to 20.23.

  20.9

  Stuff it. You don’t even know if they have any prisoners; you’re probably just getting too much in your own head. You rummage around in your pack as quickly as you can, until you find your kit. Quickly mixing together something nasty from the resources you can find there, you dump it into the steaming cooking pot. For good measure, you also add some to whatever open jars and cans you can find in the larder to make sure there’s enough for everyone. Then, you scurry out of the building and out of the compound until you’re safely back on the top of your hill, hidden away so you can watch the outcome of your actions.

  It takes until evening to get a payoff. It’s slow going, with the weakest of the raiders going down first, collapsing to their knees and reaching out with desperate hands to those who rush over – until they begin to double over, too. Even with the electric lights of the compound, you can’t make out a lot of what’s happening through the darkness.

  You know the effects, though. People will be coughing up blood, feel an awful pain that starts in the stomach and echoes throughout the body, before blacking out due to the most intense pain they’ve ever felt, never to open their eyes again.

  You fall asleep to the sounds of horrified screams.

  You wake with the dawn the next morning. You didn’t put up your tent, just in case someone was still alive and spotted your little encampment, so you slept in your bedroll under the stars. This means you wake up with a small layer of frost over you, making you sneeze. You wince, worrying the sound has drawn attention, but the raider camp is still silent.

  You pack your belongings and slowly head to the gate. Nobody is moving around inside, not like yesterday morning. Instead, frost-covered corpses litter the ground. You enter, uninterrupted, and shake a couple of the bodies with your foot. Whether it’s from rigor mortis or the cold, they’re frozen in place.

  You take a while to pick through the now silent camp, taking anything of use. You’re a bit disappointed – for a raider headquarters, you’d expected more interesting things. You take a few cans of unopened food, but everything else is either too big or you don’t really know what it is. It’s all mechanical remnants of the Old World.

  The last stop you make is Dagger’s building. You have to shove the door open and quickly find the cause – the body of one of her guards is lying in the doorway, his heavy corpse acting as a doorstop. Dagger herself sits in her chair, a limp hand pointing down towards a spilled bowl on the floor. You smile, knowing that nobody was missed.

  The only items of note you find in Dagger’s chambers are the map from her wartable marked with a few nearby places of interest, and the dagger at Dagger’s waist. You take it from her body and give it a couple of spins, appreciating its heft and weight.

  You can see why she liked the thing so much.

  You put it in your pack, then you leave the compound without looking back.

  END.

  Add Dagger’s Fate (E.15) to your character sheet.

  Add Instability to your character sheet.

  Add Dagger’s Dagger (O.13) to your inventory.

  Add The Metro (Chapter 22, L.22), The Windmill (Chapter 23, L.23), and The Caravan (Chapter 24, L.24) to map.

  20.10

  You pause for a second before mixing something together. It’s nasty, yes, but it shouldn’t kill anyone. Feeling a bit better about yourself, you tip the concoction into the steaming pot, as well as a couple of open cans and jars you find – to make sure the problem persists. You grin as you slip out of the kitchen, thinking about all the trouble you’re about to cause.

  You return to your hill and watch for a while. There’s only a trickle of people running to the privies at first, and then a stream, and then it seems everyone at camp is fighting to get to the few toilets they have. The sound of your laughter fills the air as you watch them double over and vomit, but the worse the sickness gets the grimmer it is to watch. Feeling a little unwell yourself, you turn around from the camp and start heading towards the fields on the opposite side of the compound, gagging a little bit at the smell that follows you on the wind.

  At least nobody’s dead, you suppose. And they won’t be causing any more trouble for a while.

  END.

  Add The Open Fields (Chapter 21, L.21) to map.

  * * *

  Go to The Open Fields (Chapter 21).

  20.11

  Even if you just tried to make these people sick, there’s a lot that could go wrong. All you need to do is accidentally add too much of one ingredient and suddenly you have the death of dozens of raiders on your hands…

  But fire will solve the problem in a much more efficient way.

  There are a few hessian bags of grain in the pantry. You can’t imagine where the raiders got them from – actually, you can, probably some poor villagers they either exploited or killed – but as soon as you put a match to them, they go up a treat. In fact, the fire spreads so quickly it surprises even you. The ferocity of the flame toasts your face and makes you squint against the heat.

  You were wondering if you would need to set alight more than one bag but you’ve clearly done enough. You quickly scramble out of the kitchen and back through the hole in the fence.

  When you get to your spot on the hill, panting for breath, you turn to see the fire has spread more quickly than you could have imagined. The whole of the building is up in flames. Raiders are running with buckets of water, but the fire is far too strong and they have no way to quell it. You’re smiling at the scene when a thought comes across you.

  Where are they going to replace the food?

  They won’t suffer to starve. Won’t they just go out to more villages and pillage them, taking food off of hard-working families?

  Perhaps you should have thought this through better...

  There’s nothing to be done now. You turn away from the burning building and head towards the open fields opposite the compound, the smell of ash clinging to your nostrils as you try not to think too much about the consequences.

  END.

  Add Instability to your character sheet.

  Add The Open Fields (Chapter 21, L.21) to map.

  * * *

  Go to The Open Fields (Chapter 21).

  20.12

  “I’m a new recruit. Was told to help out with fixing the guns.”

  You reply to their question with a smooth and steady voice, not betraying your worry that he won’t b
elieve you. The raider slowly looks you up and down before shrugging. A weight is lifted from your chest. He clearly doesn’t care enough to ask you more about yourself.

  “Come on, everyone’s being called to some sort of demonstration. You coming?”

  From his tone, you get the idea that although it was posed as a question, you don’t have much of a choice. Your eyes dart from him to the door.

  Make an excuse – Turn to 20.24.

  * * *

  Follow him – Turn to 20.25.

  20.13

  You open your mouth as if to speak and the man raises his eyebrows, ready to listen. You take advantage of his gullibility to leg it out the door you entered through. The man shouts as you go, but you don’t stop; you ignore the strange looks you get from other raiders as you dive through the hole in the fence, pushing your pack first, and wiggling your way after it.

  You wanted to stop on your little hill and survey the surroundings, but you can hear there’s a commotion coming from the compound behind you. As you breach the hill and scamper down the other side, you hear a bullet thud into the soft peat and you don’t dare to slow down in case the next one actually catches you. You can’t imagine they’d be best pleased when they get their hands on the person who wrecked their armoury.

  Especially Dagger...

  No, don’t go there.

  You run as far as you can until you can no longer hear the sounds of raiders behind you. Looking around, you find yourself in an open field, oddly calm and quiet. Relief and exhaustion overtake you; you sit down heavily on the soft grass to catch your breath.

  You can’t help letting out a wild laugh at the success of your plan. You feel you’ve done a good thing today.

  END.

  Add The Open Fields (Chapter 21, L.21) to map.

  * * *

  Go to The Open Fields (Chapter 21).

  20.14

  You grab one of the guns. It won’t shoot bullets, obviously, but it still packs a punch when you ram it into the man’s face. He yells and falls back, clutching a bloody nose, and you bring the butt down again. His head goes back and cracks against the floor, and he passes out where he lies.

  Looking around, the other room appears to be empty, leading to some sort of desk which you imagine is where raiders come to pick up their weapons. That means they’ll probably notice quite quickly if he’s not there. You throw the bloodied gun away and grab him by his feet, dragging him awkwardly into the armoury and shutting the door behind him.

  You quickly check to make sure he’s still unconscious before running out of the back door. Your work took some time and it’s getting closer to midday now; most of the camp is out. A few raiders look at you strangely as you come running out of the building. but you don’t give them time to inspect your clothing and identify you as an outsider.

  In hindsight, you should have just walked calmly out of the building and not given anyone a reason to suspect you. But, once again, that’s hindsight, and you’re committed to this now.

  Thankfully, it’s only after you’ve wriggled through the hole in the fence that you hear shouting. You don’t ease your pace as you run over the hill you’ve spent so much time sitting on, cresting it and running into the open fields beyond. The commotion dies down and nobody comes after you.

  You slow to a jog, then a walk, then come to a complete stop and allow yourself to fall to the ground, exhausted. Your heart hammers in your chest, but you can’t help but allow yourself a little laugh in triumph.

  You did it.

  The raiders won’t be causing any more trouble – not for a while, anyway.

  END.

  Add The Open Fields (Chapter 21, L.21) to map.

  * * *

  Go to The Open Fields (Chapter 21).

  20.15

  Annoyingly, the balloon building is very busy. It seems like there’s added security around it now, raiders with heavy guns and fierce faces. They really don’t want to risk anyone messing with their experiment. That makes things a bit more difficult.

  You hide yourself against a wall and consider everything you know.

  To get the balloon out, the top of the building must either be removable or non-existent. That could help. Soon, you’re forming a plan, but it’s definitely a dangerous one.

  It’s not hard to find bottles of alcohol around the camp. Sometimes you have to walk close to raiders, trying to pretend to be one of them, and use nimble hands to snatch a whisky flask out of their back pockets – once, you also snagged an old-fashioned lighter, which can only be helpful.

  Other times, you’re sneaking into buildings to look around, striking gold when you come to a kitchen area with three bottles of low-quality cooking wine on the side. Soon, you have over half a dozen sources of booze. You work quickly to stuff the tops of them with cloth and soak it through.

  The next part is a little more difficult. You have to get on top of the building. There’s a pile of crates next to the wall, just frail wooden things, but they only go high enough to get your fingertips on the roof… it’s an awkward scramble to get up there, with at least three falls to the ground. On the third fall, you hear one of the bottles break and you curse. You can’t be that complacent again.

  Finally, you haul yourself up, finding a crag in the wall and hoisting yourself, and roll over onto the roof. It’s a blessing nobody has noticed you. You take a moment to catch your breath before looking at your surroundings.

  You’re lucky you didn’t roll over any further. As suspected, the roof either has been knocked out by age or opened intentionally – either way, all you know is that you’re looking down into the balloon room. People are flitting about between control panels and discussing things you can’t quite hear. Nobody seems to have noticed you.

  There’s no point in waiting. You reach into your bag and retrieve the lighter you pilfered earlier. You set the cloth of the first bomb alight and drop it in.

  The impact is instantaneous. Whatever the balloon is made of, it’s flammable, and it goes up immediately. The raiders around it begin to panic as you drop in the second bottle, and the third, and the fourth. Soon, the whole room is blazing.

  You can hear panicked screams through the thick smoke billowing upwards. You don’t want to stick around for the aftermath – luckily the grey plume helps act as a shield as you slip off the roof and back to the ground. It’s a rough tumble, and you’re pretty sure your ankle is at least bruised from your awkward fall, but you have no time to stop and check it, instead you take advantage of the commotion around the entrance to the camp to sneak back to the hole in the fence and wriggle through.

  You only allow yourself to slow down when you return to what you’ve fondly begun to think of as your hill. The fire is still going strong, chugging out ugly black smoke into the otherwise clean air. The wind has picked up as the day has gone on, and the sky is beginning to turn grey. Not wanting to stay and breathe in too much smoke, you turn and head towards the open fields which lie opposite the raider base, happy to put some distance between you and the flames. You feel proud of yourself. Without that balloon, the raiders won’t be able to pose an airborne threat. You’re sure you’ve done a good thing today.

  END.

  Add Balloon Sabotage (E.20) to your character sheet.

  Add The Open Fields (Chapter 21, L.21) to map.

  * * *

  Go to The Open Fields (Chapter 21).

  20.16

  You don’t know much about these machines, or any machines really, but you do remember something from when you were small, when you and a friend were playing around in the vault’s engine rooms. You weren’t really meant to be down there, but children have a way of getting into places they aren’t meant to.

  The two of you were messing around with the machines. You were drawing at the time, too, bright garish things with coloured pencils. When you heard footsteps approaching, the two of you hid behind an engine. At a loss for what to do with your pencil shavings, you threw them into one of the motors.
To your horror, the thing stuttered and broke, alerting the adults to your hiding place.

  The memory, though a bad one, does give you an idea. This workshop contains not only large machines but also what seems to be a woodworking workshop. With a lot of sawdust.

  You gather up as much dust as you can in large handfuls before shoving it into the machines’ engines. It takes you a bit to figure out where the motor is, but you find some blueprints haphazardly thrown onto a worktable which help you with your task. Soon, there are no wood shavings left, all of them shoved away into the vehicles. You dust your hands off and feel smug about your accomplishments – but you only have a moment before you hear raiders approaching the building. You scamper out through the back door, the raiders none the wiser to your meddling, and head straight for the hole in the fence.

  You only slow down when you’re back on your hill. Looking back, you can’t see any movement in the camp that would suggest unrest, but you know what you’ve done. With a smile, you turn on your heel and head away from the raiders, towards the open fields near the compound, feeling glad that you’ve done a small but significant thing.