PROLOGUE
Infinite burn ... the year 2288.
Ylena clicked the RobCo Industries speak-write off and slumped back in the seat from an ancient airline terminal, holding her left arm out on the pitted chrome armrest so the plug wouldn't pull out of the government green monstrosity on her wrist. She sat back up and pushed the dirty ivory plastic back to ON, and leaned on her forearms in front of the insolent microphone rearing its head up from the desk.
That's time now. Just a broad daylight infinity. I'm sitting in lobby of a hotel on an airport seat, and it's like the sun is refusing to go down. Then I go back into the sewer grate below the basement.
Click off again.
Think, Yla, think! What would mom and dad do?
On again.
Ok. I'm back. This will be my first holojournal. And calendar. Far as I can remember lately, it's been three months at least. More soon. Not leaving any time soon.
Off again.
Hours earlier
"You gotta put in some road time, m'dear," the guy said as he opened the first metal cabinet on the wall, revealing a rack of several oiled pistols and rifles.
"What th'hell does that mean, exactly," Ylena gestured off and put the same hand on her hip. And do you ever eat anything around here, I wonder? I'm freakn starving!
He chuckled, pulling the slide back on a heavily-modded ten millimeter.
"Wells ... you can't exactly hop in yer '61 Stratoliner and fill up at the nearest Red Rocket any more."
"Yyyyeaah! I had an ... Izumi, man, single seat three-wheeler," she spaced off, blinked back at him. "An Izumi ... Mockingbird."
Click. "I mean," he twirled the gun surprisingly fast and extended it's grip to her, "you're gonna needta learn something about yer new environs, comprendes?"
Ylena took the pistol quickly and held it down by her side, then motioning off in the air with its muzzle. The ambient motor run down the tunnel had stopped some time ago, and she was starting to notice the heat again.
"I'm gonna go use the terminal upstairs," she muttered as she turned around and walked
towards the basement ladder with the loaded gun raised.
Early 2077
"Just a secon, mom," Ylena called out as she munched another bite of Jake's Pad Thai. The buyout of the Cheesefest Drive-Thru worked out just in time for her freshman year, and it went so much better. A dude from Freejack City had an in with the Atlantic fisheries, a smuggler in the best kimchee and supermondo Carolina Reaper on the top.
"Nowwwwww, Yla! Your father and I need to talk to you!"
She had heard the reports on her HAM radio kit for a week. Yet another warning from central about preparedness, and not without fifty Vault-Tec commercials from the telly every hour.
Whatev.
2287
She itched at the collar of the thick polyester blue Vault jumpsuit and squatted down next to a cargo container partially sunken into the earth. From her vantage she could see downhill past the chainlink gates hanging on hinges at the overgrown road leading towards town.
A shot rang out in the distance, and Ylena flinched, drew back further behind a ragged hedge. The windows to the old Buyworth department store were boarded up. She looked around the street, Plissken Esplanade, the commercial drag for employees and families associated with TransAtlantic Hydrology. She caught herself after a nanosecond, remembering ice cream cones right down the block at the old New Wave Grill.
She pushed slowly at the front doors to the store. The metal plates at the stops and frames to the former glass were still there, but mostly just an open air to the street. She crouched and slid towards the nearest checkout counter. The floors were thick with broken pieces, and she had to control a fall onto her palms, feeling a bite of something digging into her right hand. She gritted and exhaled through her nose in the near darkness. Very little moonlight made it into the expansive first floor showroom, and she could see only the glints of overturned clothes racks among the shadows.
After banging her head four times on this or that and pulling a piece of glass painfully out of her palm, she made her way into a lot of clothing bins and still-standing shelves. In the dark she felt her way to pairs of boots and shoes. That's good, she said to herself. These Tec rubbers are gonna give me one big blister.
Sitting against an immovable surface, possibly a counter, she caught her breath and pulled the soft high-top trainers on her feet, slightly loose, better than too small. Ylena had run her hand over the toe and heel in a blindfold measurement per se, and grabbed out at what felt like shirts and jackets as she crawled through the refuse pile that had been Buyworth's main gallery. She tore at what felt like a tee shirt and wrapped the soft cloth around her oozing right hand after spitting on the wound she had pushed against her thigh to stop the bleeding. Sitting there, ready to pass out from the cryogenic sickness and general disbelief, struggling to process the last few hours, she forced herself to remember basic biology after hammering a cockroach the size of a raccoon before exiting the vault. She wished she hadn't dropped the torque wrench, now that she could hear the clank of a soda can outside on the street.
Could be wind, or maybe something else. First food and water, and this hand.
The crack of glass or whatnot came from within the store near enough to have her start and forget scavenging in the black. It progressed nearby, some unknown source in her right ear, something, animal? She breathed in and kept still, hoped it was a feral cat.
The blade cut into her left forearm as she flung herself backwards, falling on her back and making on all fours, then pouncing upright in a stance she had made instinctive. All those lessons mom and dad had made her take on the mat there in the TAH family compound when she was growing up, blindfold fighting was one of the last.
The breathing came near enough, and Ylena reached both of her hands out and grabbed out at the floor, seizing a rough, heavy object in her left hand and hitting the crouch. A deafening ring pierced her ears. The flash from a firearm lit instantly and faded across the black space. She tucked and rolled to her left, stifling thoughts of the barbs and stings in her back and limbs as unseen debris poked and dug at the jumpsuit, springing up again with the chunk of whatever in her left hand and right hand with fingers flexed.
"Whatta we have here, huh," the contemptuous voice shot from her right, off a ways. "Got some nerve, sista! Why dontcha just give it up now?"
Another shot hit her eardrums like a skewer. The source didn't seem any nearer as the footfalls over broken bits and taunts continued, and she continued to circle opposite.
Ylena stood up as the first illumination from the dawn street made it in. The hooded figure lay where she had dropped it with blows from the concrete she had in her hand. She kept her left hand on a deep cut in her right shoulder as she pulled the goggled gas mask off a man in his early twenties with badly burned skin and many missing teeth. Reeling from sleep deprivation, hunger, and dehydration she searched his pockets and took the heavy automatic pistol from his dead hand. He had a plastic holotape and a sealed, dirty plastic packet in his fatigues, and a few ten-millimeter bullets in his pockets.
Over on the floor she found his combat knife, and slashed at the sealed plastic.
Go to the stadium. Details on tape.
She folded the paper up and shoved it in her jumpsuit side pocket, and turned back towards the store's gallery trying to remember where things used to be. Buyworth's had been a midscale department store with its own small supermarket and pharmacy sections, although mostly clothing and consumer items like televisions and radios, so she scanned the wreckage of the former first floor for any path that might lead her to the store's other wings. Pushing piles of shopping carts and cardboard boxes to the side, she made a path towards a set of elevators, and yep, the doors askance meant exactly what could easily be assumed, there was no electricity to the buttons.
Ylena unfolded the bundle of clothes she had selected from scouring the first floor, and spread out the items on the checkout counter nearest the elevators. She had found a pair of jeans and a shiny blue bomber jacket in her size, both intact and clean since they were in their original plastic cases, and a better fit for her shoes, silver high-top Kwais imported from Seoul.
Sooo wanted a pair of these, heh, funny this.
She folded the jeans and jacket with a white tee shirt still in its mylar into a jelly roll with an oilskin trenchcoat, the last an afterthought since she could not recall many days on the Esplanade being anywhere cold enough. Still, there's no telling what this place would throw at her, so she tucked the clothing under her left arm and started up a set of stairs next to the broken elevator. The pistol hurt against her throbbing right palm. Ylena used the pain to focus her attention on the shadowed stairwell. After she had walked up the first flight to the second floor, natural light had dimmed. She resumed crouching and sliding her feet carefully over the debris, and moved slowly as she scanned and listened for signs of her attacker's buddies.
She sat on space of dusty linoleum floor behind a counter at the far side of the fourth and top floor of Buyworth's. Several hours of exhaustively hiking the aisles and open store rooms had produced a backpack Ylena filled and a box of items to spare, and with waning sunlight through the broken upper story windows she braced herself and called it a day. Other than getting lucky with a few unopened packages of apparel, she had found nothing resembling clean cloth anywhere, but had pulled one seemingly unopened military-grade foam mat from a box, so that would be bed. Sitting there against the wall, she pulled the tab on a can of Planet Ocean purified water and paused, sipped slightly, coughed. She absently arranged the extent of food she had been able to find on the floor to her left. Three Zesty Maid Salisbury steaks were still in their unbroken boxes, although heck if she knew what they'd taste like minus a microwave oven.
And that's not counting how old these things might be, Ylena thought.
The meager collection included a rusty can of Cram (that nasty compressed meat product with enough salt to boil boot leather), five more cans of Planet Ocean, and the marquee moment ... a package of her beloved Moshimoshi dried noodles with its included satchel of seafood bouillon powder. Yet that was it, and on a cursory attempt at finding a working power outlet for the Camp'o'Rama 55 hotplate she had found still in its mylar-sealed box, and even plugging the thing into one that didn't look entirely dangerous, she resigned herself to a cold can of Cram for the night.
Before eating, she opened a white aluminum medical box with its green cross that she had filled with the contents of two more, the prewar regulation safety kits that would have been in the bathrooms of all businesses, public and private. There were three stimpak syringes, a strong broad-spectrum antibiotic combined with a mild stimulant and anaesthetic. From those three there were also a packet of Radaway and two of Rad-X for the treatment and prevention of radiation poisoning, respectively. Other than that, nada. The pharmacy had been gutted of medications and usable supplies, that is if one didn't want to apply brown gauze to an open wound. She had picked up a surgical scalpel laying out on a tray since the edge was still sharp enough to slice paper.
Ylena winced as she pressed the stimpak into her right shoulder, and then felt the warmth of its contents spread down to her hand. She sipped at the can of water and tried to eat a few spoonfuls of salt meat, and passed out.
Later in 2288
Curso Diaboleek.
Swampspeak, the language of the Swampkind who had stayed in the coastal lowlands and lowered areas flooded by the atomic melt.
"A curse," Ylena asked.
"No," Riv replied, "at least from that weird English you speak, no. Curso mean run in Swampspeak."
"Run what?"
The gambler cracked a wry smile.
"A boat race. Been run since the Steelies put in their big naval base, I dunno, musta been a century ago. Friggin rumrunner s'what it is."
"A ... boat race?"
"Ayyep. And a bloody one at that. Average year sees twenty-five, thirty percent go down to raiders, waves, rad storms. 'sbout finishin, gettin back alive. Some years half or more are never heard from again."
Ylena rolled her eyes and sighed.
"See, ya've already met the Deuce. It's his land, but not everythings out there with him, follow?"
"Um, no. Could I get a smoke?"
He snorted and tossed a gray box of Decas at her.
"Look. It ain't no run for the Deuce, it's Steelie and it's raider, and swampkind, all of them. Shoin they still got it."
"Why not just get down to some medtech and get a shot, huh," Ylena exhaled. "I'm sure someone still synths hormones ... "
"No artificial paradise here, luv," he chuckled, "no hundredweight flamejob on no hull gone hold back the tide. They's jus atoms still movin fast."
"Boys with toys," she smoked.
"Heh, boys runnin the Deuce, even what he can't control."
Ylena thought about the gambler's last statement as she finished her cigarette.
"I gotta go," Ylena said as she adjusted the bandolier around her shoulder, "gotta contact about that."
The gambler smiled as she walked out of the radio bunker.
WELCOME TO NEW SOUTHLANTIS
Ylena pulled the slide back on the 10mm. They each took a side of the mansion door with backs to the façade, crouching and aiming at the street. No movement, the sound of an approaching storm.
She hit the pip-boy light. In the green glow there in the space beyond the door it was the smell first. She instinctively waved at the cloud of flies that itched her face and fought off the urge to retch. Several piles of what appeared to have been human beings at one point splashed across the grand hallway, a yet extant arabesque tracery of the carpet amidst the choking motes of dust, plaster shards, dried blood.
"A week or two," Rick said emotionlessly.
"Wha," Ylena grimaced, turning to him with the gun still aimed down the hall.
He had straightened up and stood with his pistol down at his left side. She just noticed that he was lefthanded, and shook herself out of it. So what, she wondered.
"They been dead a week or two," he repeated in a monotone. "Human, not yet ghoul."
"Man," Ylena let the ten drop slowly, keeping her eyes on the hall, "I would ask you ... "
"Yes?"
She blinked at the scene.
"I would ask you what kind of world you live in, buuuuuuut ... "
"It is the year 2289, February 4," he replied, "we are in the middle of New Southlantis, approximately 32.5 degrees north latitude and 79.5 degrees west longitude."
"I didn't ask for a geography lesson, or history for that matter."
Rick turned his head slowly and gave her a slight smile.
She eased her way up the right side of the dual staircase leading upward from the entry hall to the second story. The stairs were piled high with plaster and nails but completely intact, and unlike the prewar houses she had crawled through so far were set into solid marble, making no sound. Through the near darkness her light revealed a metal sconce set into wainscoting, a row of crooked frames still hanging and showing original gilding.
Musta been nice, she quipped silently.
Ylena pushed the last door open slowly with the muzzle of her gun and set her elbows. It was the emerging light source that first caught her attention. Blue radiant light, electronic.
"Postwar. Way postwar," Rick explained. "Microprocessors like that weren't around until at least the 2200s."
"How ... oh, never mind," she told him tiredly, eyeing the kingsized bed with several pillows on the other side of the room.
"Perhaps you should get some sleep," he suggested, motioning to the bed. "I'll stand watch."
When Ylena awoke, Rick was still standing in the same spot by the computer, pistol drawn. Feeling the hunger claw at her ribs, she fumbled in her backpack and got out a can of Planet Ocean and unfolded the bandana with her rations. She sat crosslegged on the new, relatively clean brocade spread and contemplated the campfire roasted squirrel meat on a chopstick. What I wouldn't give for some soy or wasabi, she thought and managed to chew the stuff.
"Mmmmff," she talked through a mouthful, "did you sleep at all, man?"
The same slight smile.
"No. Come here, look at this," Rick pointed at the terminal.
Ylena walked over with the can of water, glad that her stomach was holding out. The CRT was definitely some new make, although without any recent consumer report all she could go on was the trippy shape of the screen, an asymmetrical frame jutting out of the surface with some sort of infused element that glowed like the bluish letters against the background.
"I can't decipher some of the language," he continued, "perhaps you know what this is about."
"Lemme take a look."
Ylena sat down in the burgundy leather upholstery. The cursor blinked ahead of two prompts.
[JOURNAL]
[STAR TREATS SECURITY KEY]
"Somebody's got a sensa humor," she laughed, clicking on the journal.
Saturday 18 Jan 2289
Gotta tell Earl ease up on the visitors. Those last four coulda been good at the races.
Ah well, he keeps my contacts with the supers going.
She clicked on the second prompt to a screenful of code.
'&#' ($_#' *$_FIRE :_$ '$?
&$ EATS (# _ : *& '_GE
'$_# )* &?$ ?,:_' TS)&_
"Um ... you know this code?"
"No, not at all. Thought you might, since you're Vault."
Ylena laughed and sat back in the armchair. "My prewar ex-perience," she answered, "was limited to and up to a year at PCIT. I ... "
"The Pancoastal Institute of Technology," Rick interrupted.
She stared at him. "That's right. You been there?"
"That would be a little difficult in current conditions."
"What's that?"
"It's underwater. Sunk by the deluge."
"Explain?"
"Which part?"
"Oh," Ylena flipped her hand, "you and your cryptic speak. Underwater? Deluge? Remember I'm am outta the ice box, man."
"Yes, a Vault-Tec dweller freed from cryogenic sleep has the tendency to some amnesia to lived experience, and oftentimes disoriented perceptions based on ... "
"Oh, cut it! I know that! I need to know what happened ... to PCIT! I had friends there!"
"The Great War of the late 2070s ... " and he continued in to a numbing rundown of failed treaties, famous battles, blast radii, and civilian casualties. Then: "It didn't happen immediately. The global atomic release took time to circulate on the world's weather patterns, inform geological movements, change biological data ... "
Data, she thought, he's calling that two-headed deer I saw DATA.
" ... the combined effects of radiation storms and generally increased temperatures resulted in catastrophic coastal flooding around the world. Ice caps at the two poles of the earth are almost completely gone. Rainfall in New Southlantis typically reaches twenty-four inches in a day. Your Pancoastal Institute of Technology had been purposely built near the coast, as the name implies, and has long since disappeared along with the territory and infrastructure surrounding its locations."
"Okay," Ylena stood up quickly and paced, stopping and pointing at him, "there's something going on with you. I find you hanging out and watching Evening in Kyoto episodes and somehow you have international oceanographic data from two centuries ago in your head. Who are you?"
"Name's Rick," he replied.
She threw up her hands and walked stiffly back to the chair, plopped down and stared at the code onscreen.
After running through the English words amid the grid of emoji jibberish three times, and getting locked out of the terminal after four unsuccessful attempts on the first two, the terminal sounded off an automated GOT IT and indicated the so-named Star Treats Security had been unlocked. With the mechanical thunk of bolts drawing back, a section of the cherrywood paneling across the room slid into the wall, opening to a small chamber with a blue and white vase on a stand visible just inside its darkened interior.
She clicked up on a plastic light switch as they walked into the concealed room, one with a turquoise Futurlite plate around it just like she remembered growing up. The bright fluorescent bulbs set into the ceiling jarred, yet nothing like the contents of the shelves floor to ceiling behind the walnut-framed glass doors. Ylena pulled at one of the shiny brass handles on the double doors, opened, and gawked at the likewise burlwood cases with their flawlessly clean glass.
"Un ... freakn ..," she trailed off.
"Don't eat those," Rick said from behind her outside the glass enclosure, "I've met peeps give up everything to search for more. They're highly addictive."
Ylena stared at the cases with their wisps of humidified air seeping through chrome vents, a barely audible electric humming issuing from an unknown source. It was a small room full of Star Treats snack cakes, thousands of the fuzzy shortbread rocket ships filled with marshmallow in neon pinks, lime greens, the ever-popular Orion Orange, all in unbroken clear plastic and arranged like cigars in tight formation.
She paced in disbelief. "What did you say," she mumbled abstractedly.
"Those snacks," Rick repeated, "are addictive, all the bioengineered flavors and colors. Bad as any chem. Bet they're boobytrapped, too."
Ylena shook her head back and forth, ran a hand over her forehead and scratched her kneck.
"Are you telling me Starties are ... like fucking wine here?"
"Well, wine is fairly easy to come by, and ... "
"Oh, puhleaase!"
Ylena shrugged and walked past the vintage poster in a pastel deco frame, a squarejawed man in a gatorskin cap with the headline Tallahassee.
2289 solo time
Ylena was too hungry to doubletake at the uncanny deejay drifting across another blasted street.
Weeeeee're back at you from the late seventies and early eighties!
W ... R ... A ... W ...K!
She walked in the open front door to Ghoulies Diner and took in the surprisingly full space. A figure in a goggled gas mask and rusty barbs head to toe tapped its spiked hand on the Musolectric jukebox right as "Switchblade Smile" began to trail out its opening riff.
"No door," Ylena asked the bespoke bartender turned towards the shelf of sodas and bourbon, flipping one of each high and ending arcs into a dirty glass tumbler without missing a drop, asking the question to keep her mind running in the present, a mental pinch to the leg.
"'d only hit yas in the face when it opened," came the coarse voice. The figure turned slightly and looked at her askance through withered eyesockets, lower edges visible beneath the rim of a raked fedora.
Ylena flipped three caps on the counter.
"Got moshimoshi?"
She eyed a cardboard composite glued to the wall above one of the chairs spelling out NO PROFANITY. The menu was then there behind the bar framed on all four sides with newspaper clippings.
MIRELURK PO'BOY 20
PULLED GUAI SANDYICH 35
CLAWFRIED POSSUM PLATE 5
CRISPY SQUIRREL BITS 5
SEA-OATMEAL BOWL 5
BLACKENED RADSHARK seasonal
Another in the railyard iron strolled over to the end of the bar and sat, taking a sip from the tumbler. This one had the goggles up on her hairline pushed through a starched spike of silver hair. She kicked a leg up on the next stool, showing the steel belting on the instep and toe.
The figure at the jukebox gave it an elbow and the music abruptly stopped.
The bartender flipped a chrome torch and lit, chuckling.
"Hooooooooweeeee," the sunburnt woman smirked, "gotta love them fancy Vaults." She ran her eyes up and down Ylena and swigged from the glass, setting it down and tapping the upper edge. A couple of folks at the booths slowly leaned forward over their plates.
Ylena looked straight ahead at the shelf behind the bar as she scanned the room from the corners of both eyes.
"Could I getcha comfy pillow wit that?"
The bartender raised his head from the cigarette. An ashen tangle of exposed sinew and muscle somehow made up a vaguely human face. Ylena noted the same distraught skin out the ends of the grotesquely clean pinstriped suit.
"Just a bite to eat and I'm outta here."
She felt the tumbler slosh over her forearm as it slid down the bar and drop over on the floor at her feet.
"Drink on me, cutiepie."
The booths started to clear.