Nora returned to the waking world with a gasp. Her lungs felt like they were burning as she swallowed down air amongst a fit of coughing. The hatch to her pod swung up and outwards as alarms sounded while a robotic voice droned over speakers somewhere. "...all residents must vacate immediately."
She carefully placed one foot on the cement floor outside as she exited the pod she had been placed in. Water dripped from the ceiling covering the ground in puddles and the air had a dank and musty feel to it. Nora carefully placed her steps as she tried to keep her shoes from getting wet while moving towards the pod containing Nate.
Nora fumbled around the hatch cover with stiff fingers that didn't respond quite right as she looked fur a button or switch that would open the machine containing her husband. She had almost given up when she spotted what looked like a control panel off to the side. There were a few dials measuring something in psi and a red switch beneath them. Nora grabbed the switch and pulled it upwards. There was a hiss from the pod and the hatch to Nate's pod swung open.
His head had slumped to one side and his skin and clothes looked like food that had been left in the freezer too long. She could see frozen blood on his face and jumpsuit from where that bald man had shot him as well. It was almost certainly an exercise in futility but she had to make sure the man was actually dead before leaving. Nate's skin was icy to to the point that her fingertips stung just from touching it but there was no pulse in his neck.
She shook her head disdainfully at the corpse, her voice contemptuous "You idiot. All you had to do was let go of the brat and you'd still be alive. But you didn't and all it got you was a bullet." Nora sighed to herself as she pulled her wedding ring off and dropped it at Nate's feet. "Such a waste. We had some fun times before the accident." And with that, she turned away and continued trying to avoid the puddles as she walked away from what had been her husband.
All around her was the hum of machinery running somewhere and the lights were still on but there was no sign of the people who had brought her here. Nora stopped to look through the viewport of the other occupied pods. The first person she checked on was just as freezer burnt as Nate but she didn't see any blood on her remains.
Nora lifted an eyebrow after checking the other pods and finding that everyone else had been turned into a human popsicle. All the other people from Sanctuary Hills who had made it into the Vault were dead. She shrugged, to herself really since there wasn't anyone else to see, before leaving the pods and their occupants behind.
The hallway past the pods was empty save for a few things that had been knocked to the floor. She aimlessly kicked a traffic cone as she walked along. The door was a heavy hatchway that she wouldn't have been able to open on her own but fortunately there was still power in the vault. The two parts of the door pulled themselves into the floor and ceiling letting her through. This room was as empty as the others but there was a window she could see a working power generator through. She watched the electricity arcing between the coils at it's top for a few seconds longer before turning away.
Seconds after her back was turned there was a loud thump against the glass behind her making Nora jump, her heart climbing up into her throat. She spun back around but there was nothing in sight. An involuntary shiver ran through her and her hair began standing on end. Something had made that sound but she had no idea what it could be other than it meant she wasn't alone in this cold mausoleum. Nora began backing up but kept the window firmly in view until she rounded the corner between it and her.
There was a table in the next room and she found a security baton atop it. Nora was quick to pick it up, the weight of it in her hand reassuring her. It was just in time too as the sound of something skittering on the stone floor made her blood run cold.
A cockroach the size of a small dog was crawling along the floor towards her. The thing didn't have any eyes but it's antennas were both aimed at Nora and it's mandibles chittered as it flew off the ground at her. She swung the baton, it's tip solidly connecting with the insect dropping it to the ground whilst a yellowish gunk splashed towards her. "God damn it." She grimaced and wiped at the stain on the front of her jumpsuit but only served to get the fetid smelling goo on her sleeve. There were more cockroaches past the next door and she tried to keep them at bay when killing them but the damn things were brimming with that noxious juice and it kept getting on her clothes.
Nora gagged at the smell as she headed past the generator. She came to a halt at the sight of another person lying on the ground. Or more accurately, that person's skeleton. Every soft bit of flesh and sinew was gone leaving only a white skeleton dressed in a blue jumpsuit behind. A morbid curiosity drove her to bend over for a closer look and she saw what looked like small bite marks on the bones themselves.
The next room had a carpeted floor and a discolored desk in the center. Behind it was another skeleton lying on a tipped over chair. There was a gun and small box of bullets next to a computer on the desk. Nora picked the gun up, a clear look of distaste on her face, as she gingerly held it between her thumb and index finger. She had never liked guns but there could be more of those cockroaches and Nora was already beyond sick of getting covered in whatever the hell this yellow crud was.
She tried to open the next door but it refused to budge. Nora kicked it once in frustration before her gaze fell on the computer as she looked around for something that might help her get out. There were a few entries on the terminal but she skipped past the operating manual and overseer's log and selected 'Open Evacuation Tunnel'. The door opened and Nora found more cockroaches on the other side. She aimed the pistol with an unsteady hand and pulled the trigger once. Her bullet went wide of the nearest insect and sending small stone flakes flying when it hit a wall. The pistol's report was magnified by the stone walls of the corridor she was in and the deafeningly loud crack only served to attract the attention of all those bugs whilst bombarding her ears at the same time. Nora tossed the gun to one side as she clenched the baton in a tight fist. Going deaf or getting covered in more of that gunk wasn't a pleasant choice but it was an easily made one.
Her jaw clenched as she pushed forward and began swinging at the oversized insects in her path. The jumpsuit was more yellow than blue by the time she had made it to the vault door but Nora couldn't smell it anymore thankfully. There was another pair of skeletons here and she stopped next to the one by the controls. It was wearing a white lab coat and one hand had been ripped off. There was some kind of computer on the wrist and she reached down to pick it up, the bones falling out as she did so.
There was some kind of jack that matched a connector on the device she was holding. Nora plugged it in and hit the red button. Sirens began blaring, the lights started flashing and she heard that robotic voice speaking again. "Vault door cycling sequence initiated. Please stand back." A massive mechanical arm moved forward and pressed into a hole in the door's center. The gears inside threw out sparks and she could hear the sounds of metal grinding as it pulled the gigantic vault door inwards then rolled it off to one side.
On the other side was the elevator that she remembered descending on in order to escape the nuclear explosions. It couldn't have been more than an hour from her perspective but those skeletons had looked awfully dried out to her. The elevator settled into the ground and Nora climbed aboard. She hit the switch and began rising back to the surface.
The lights of the vault disappeared and she was in pitch blackness until the hatch above her opened and the sun's bright rays blinded her as she arrived at the surface. As her eyes adjusted to being above ground she took stock of the area around her. During that panicked run to the vault the trees had been covered in reddish orange leaves and the grass had been a vibrant green and the vault had been surrounded by construction equipment and cars.
But now the barren trees looked like lifeless husks and the grass had been replaced by sad looking brown bushes. And all those construction vehicles and cars had turned into husks riddled with rust. Just how long had she been down there? Nora had realized that those things were some kind of cryo pods but she had no idea how long she had been frozen. The sight of all that rusted out metal was enough to say it had been a while however. She idly tapped the baton against her thigh as she headed down the path towards the town where her house was.
Sanctuary Hills was a generic looking suburb full of identical dull looking houses and populated by even duller people. But that wasn't the case anymore as the neighborhood she remembered had turned into a ghost town. Several of the houses had outright collapsed into piles of rubble and the rest were deteriorating husks of their former selves. The pristine green lawns had been overrun by weeds and hedges full of thorns were consuming the fences that were still standing.
A robot with a few dings and intermittent patches of discolored metal was floating in front of what had been her house, his buzz saw spinning as it trimmed the bushes in front of her house. Nora put a hand on her hip as she came to a stop nearby "Codsworth? Is that you?"
The Mr Handy machine spun about his eyes focusing on her. "As I live and breathe! It's really you Mistress!"
"What happened Codsworth? These houses look even shittier than they used to. How long has it been since we left?"
"A bit over two hundred and ten years mistress, give or take for the earth's rotation. Will Sir and the infant be joining us? You're late for dinner and I dare say you could use a good snack."
Nora frowned as she listened to the robot speak. He still sounded as British as ever, but his limbs were a tad twitchy and his voice was wavering more than it normally did. "Have you had any maintenance done? You said it's been two hundred years, let me take a look at you."
"Of course mistress, your tools are in the house. It'll be good to get the old gears properly calibrated."
After Codsworth was hovering in standby mode, Nora was able to use her newly found Pip-boy computer to connect herself to the robot. She checked for any detected errors before doing anything else and saw a round zero. The date's counter read 2287... Codsworth wasn't wrong. Over two hundred years had passed.
It was a staggering thought. Two centuries gone in the blink of an eye for her. How much had the world changed? The last thing she remembered seeing before entering the vault was a nuclear explosion. Was there anyone still alive out here or had everyone died? She had no idea but one thing was clear. The world she had known was gone... and so was anyone who had known her.
Nora cycled to the emotions tab to check on the robot's variables. She frowned at the readout, Codsworth's values were indicating he was depressed and generally unhappy but nothing else of concern. She thought about manually editing his values to try and bring him out of it but she had never been very good at tinkering with Codsworth's emotional variables. It would be safer to just reset his emotions to default and be done with it. Nora also briefly considered wiping all of his memories but there was no telling what he might have learned while she had been frozen during the last two hundred years. She did delete two entries however, Nate was dead and Shaun had been taken so there was no need for him to remember them. The last change was editing the name of the file associated with her from Nora to Alice Thomas.
She saved her changes and exited the bios disconnecting her cable as he rebooted. He turned back towards her once his operating system had loaded. "Ah, that feels much better. You've always had a knack for software mistress. Is there anything you need?"
Alice smiled slightly at the flattery "Is it safe here Codsworth? I ran into some giant insects on my way here and I don't feel like dealing with any more right now. Can you make sure there aren't any nearby?"
"Right away mistress." Once more her robotic butler's voice sounded like what she was accustomed to, that unrelenting British cheer. He floated out the door and towards the nearest house, buzz-saw and flamethrower at the ready.
By the time Codsworth had returned, flamethrower smoking and saw colored yellow, Alice was seated on the couch, naked as the day she was born, the noxious vault suit nowhere in sight. A shoebox with the word 'necessities' written on the side was lying open at her feet. She crooked her finger at the robot, beckoning him closer with as she spread her legs apart "Time for one of my treatments Codsworth."
"At once mistress, we can't have you getting feverish now can we?" He floated to the box and lifted a slender black rubber cylinder that tapered at one end out of it. Alice smirked as the 'treatments' Codsworth had been programmed to administer began. In days long gone now she had always been forced to keep quiet while living in this house. But now she went out of her way to make sure her neighbors could hear her shrieks of pleasure even though they had been dead for over two hundred years.