I stopped by Megaton on this hot afternoon while on my way to the Capitalist town of South Fringe. At South Fringe, my company was going to deliver the guns we promised the mayor of the town, who was trying to arm his town against the Rats, a bunch of punk kids who liked to stir up trouble.
At Megaton, I stopped by Gob's Bar, were the kindly Ghoul worked with his old master now lying dead in the gutters. I told him I hadn't been to town since the war, and he told me that a lot had occurred since then. I told him I knew, since the walls stretched out much further, and even small houses were forming on the outer ring. He told me that section of the city was called the Slums, and it housed the travelers and folk who couldn't afford the expensive houses of the inner wall.
In the Slums, there were two major gangs of about twenty punks each. One was called the Iron Fists, and they were called that because the original three boys who made the gang couldn't afford guns, so they bought brass knuckles or lead pipes to fight off the others. The second gang was called Stan's Son, named after some guy from an old book they read once, named Stan I guess.
The two were always at it, trying to control the drugs that went into the city and out of it. But Gob controlled most of that trade, although he didn't do much to stop the kids, and what he didn't regulate the Red Eyes did. The two gangs were on a verge of a gang war, and the worst bit was that no one cared. Kids wound up dead in the Shade and the gutters every week, and yet no one looked into it. Jericho and Harden Simms were said to be too busy keeping out raiders to deal with these punks, so why pay them attention?
I left Gob's Bar and walked the back alleys of Megaton, looking for my small room my company had rented out for me. However, on my way there, I saw a bunch of kids ripping another to shreds, beating him with their fists. Blood was everywhere, and so I whipped out my 10mm and yelled at the gang. The four ran off, leaving the victim bleeding in the street. "Why'd you chase them off?" he demanded of me. "I was gonna be in the Iron Fists!" So that's where the've gotten to. In order to be with them, you need to take a blow. It was a classic raider technique.
That kind of technique was used by the Librarians, back before they were the Librarians. They see a guy walking the roads, they either kill him or he surrenders all of his possessions and gives into a beating. If he'd succeed, then he could live with them until they got hungry and wanted fresh meat. Dirty bastards.
When I got to my room, the Speaker called me on the phone. He told me that the Wanderer and the Warrior were out on the road, heading north and south to uncover any hidden news out there beyond the Capital Wasteland borders. Once Speaker's satelite is working better, he said he'd be able to broadcast as far as the Pitt. I hope he doesn't send me out there.