Treading Shaddows

Date: 9.2.2224
Location: South Houston | Buffalo Bayou | Dilapidated Refineries

The air’s thick tonight. Not with rain, not with wind, but radiation. My Pip-Boy picks up signals that hum like a buried wire—low, insistent, telling me something has moved through this ground long before me.

I’m heading east, following the dark. Out here, life doesn’t announce itself. Not one ounce. The smell hits first: dead fish, ancient and oil-soaked, stagnant and sharp. I took a swig of Rad-X, trying to flush my veins before the shadows do something worse. Hoping I don’t combust. Ha.

Hours feel like days as I move through the skeleton of an old refinery. Rusted towers scrape the sky. Collapsed warehouses loom ahead. My boots crunch on steel and shattered glass.

The Pip-Boy guides me toward the treatment facility near Vince Bayou. I pause. Silence the device. Break off a few carrot chunks Samson packed me. Chew slow. Listen.

That’s when I feel it. Movement beneath the rot. Not walking. Not running. Something creeping. Something wrong. The smell of decay deepened—something undead, sprung from years of sludge and dark water, dragging itself up from the poisoned ground.

I have no weapons. None. Only shadows and patience.

I move like water—low, quiet, folded into the steel and broken concrete. It drags past. My breath held. I am still. I am quiet. I am unseen.

I follow the pulse of my own survival and make it to a warehouse by the treatment plant. Old steel doors hang crooked. I slip inside. Lock it. Listen. The night holds.

I don’t know what it was. A mutation. Something that should’ve been dead centuries ago. But it knows I’m here. I can feel the intelligence behind the rot, the patient hunger.

For now… I survive. Night comes with a low hum and the distant drip of water through rust. Tomorrow, I will see what the road offers beyond this smell, beyond this silence.

Station secured. Systems monitored. Presence accounted.

Big Chief signing off.

— Big Chief Mike Marcel