Escape from Dread
by Piper Wright
South Boston – As I walked from my rented bungalow at The Castle to Gwinnett Restaurant to meet a CBO player, I noticed that the breeze broke over the coast, drawing out the salty swell of a time gone by.
In my lifetime, there has always been the dread of it all: the settlements, the death, the rotten corpse of an earth once teeming with life and intrigue. The capsized statues dot the landscape across Boston of 500 years ago. That, too, was a time of change, of an infant country just broken free from the chains of its captor.
We here in the Commonwealth have a thousand stories about the dreadful lives we’ve led. My sister Nat Wright-Kowalski and I experienced the unfortunate murder of our father by a man looking to load his pocket with caps. Blue, known to all as Nate Howard, saw his wife murdered, saw his child kidnapped, and woke up to a world he could not recognize. We all suffer tragedies, that dread, but the hope of this new Commonwealth has infected us.
When I walked into Gwinnett Restaurant, there were new experiences from the old. Fresh grilled meats from the land and sea invaded my nostrils, to go along with the strong scents of served brews from the nearby Gwinnett Brewery. Chirps of young, excitable wastelanders made a buzz, not of an infestation of bloatflies, but of that same newness that gives us all a jolt of energy.
He was sitting at a corner booth in the restaurant, tufts of curls from a haircut overdue poking from the edges of his ballcap, an emblem of Commonwealth dread on the front in the old Gunners logo. He stood upon seeing me, a 6’3” godling of muscles and bashfulness all packed into his tight-knit plaid button-down. He smiled and waved and looked like he never knew the dread of the Commonwealth at that moment. We exchanged greetings and then sat down to talk about dread, to talk about hope, to talk about life and baseball.
“I never thought I would see this day,” he started. This day is the early Friday afternoon of game day. The second game of the season is to take place in just six hours. His team must meet at the stadium in two more hours. On this day, he and I are sharing a plate of fried corn and tatos and skewers of grilled radstag. I’m having a Gwinnett Pale, he a purified water.
Just one night ago, this player, Andrew Nuka, the left fielder for the Quincy Gunners, experienced his first professional regular-season baseball game. His team lost 5-3 to the Goodneighbor Hancocks at Third Rail Stadium at South Boston High School, but Nuka led his team in hits, going 2 for 3 and hitting a double.
You see, this day was a lot more special because it was the exact opposite of the dread Nuka experienced in his young life. “It was ten years ago,” Nuka said. “I’ll never forget it.” Nuka is not from Boston. He’s from out west, a place we now know and love as Nuka-World. He lived right in the heart of the park in Nuka Town USA. That was, he lived there until dread showed up, a monster of devastation sweeping right through the “cheeriest place in all the world.”
In 2286, three gangs called the Pack, the Disciples, and the Operators teamed up to overtake a peaceful trading settlement and turned it into their own twisted playground.
“I remember when they rolled up,” Nuka said. “I was helping my mom load our stall in the market. Suddenly, you could hear the ‘tak tak tak’ of gunfire and people screaming. It was just chaos, but people were yelling ‘Run!’ My mom and I didn’t hesitate, but my brother and sister and dad weren’t with us.”
Nuka and his mother fled the market and ran until they reached a small settlement. He could not remember the name of the settlement, but remembered it was about 30 minutes of constant running from Nuka Town USA. They rested there before moving farther away from Nuka World to escape any roaming groups of raiders.
“I heard later that [the Raiders] killed some people and slapped slave collars on others,” Nuka said. “My mom and I got away, but we never saw the rest of my family again.” Nuka’s mom got radiation sickness a few months later after they escaped and passed away, leaving the still 14-year-old alone.
Nuka returned to Nuka World in 2289, looking for his remaining family. He had heard about Nate Howard slaughtering the raider gangs and freeing the slaves of Nuka Town USA, so he went looking for the rest of his family. Although he searched the area, there was no sign of his father or siblings. Some of the locals who knew his father before the takeover mentioned that he was never seen and definitely wasn’t a slave in Nuka Town USA. They didn’t know anything about his siblings.
“My brother was only 9 years old. My sister was 11. I know the raiders and the things they would do. I know it’s sad to say since I have no idea what came of them, but I hope my brother and sister got killed right away if they couldn’t escape. I just can’t imagine what might have happened if they became slaves to those brutes.”
Nuka gave up his search and accompanied a group of travelers to Boston. There he made his way farther east in pursuit of seeing the coast. He eventually made his way to Kingsport Lighthouse in 2290, where he settled for three years working at Longneck Lukowski’s Cannery making mirelurk cake cans. Later, he made his way to Bunker Hill where he got work helping to repair service robots.
He first heard about baseball in Bunker Hill. “A caravan passed through and there was a group of 10 guys who said they were on their way to play baseball. I know Deb had some baseball equipment at her stall, so I asked those guys if I could play, too. They agreed, I spent half of my money buying myself baseball stuff, and the rest is history.”
Nuka did not know it, but in 2294 he had joined the Boylston Club Boys, the Commonwealth’s first traveling baseball team. They had been playing since 2288 and played travel ball until 2295 since the CBO was set to start this year.
“I joined Boylston and we did nothing but play ball during the day and travel and talk at night. I never even knew that I could sleep on a cart getting pulled by brahmin. But I slept like a baby every night. It was my new joy. You could say it was like an escape…”
Nuka hesitated, not sure how to finish his sentence. “From dread?” I asked.
“Yes,” he smiled wider than when I first walked up. “Playing baseball was an escape from dread.”