This is my first and likely only Fallout Fic since I usually fire off one idea for every category I go into. I hope you enjoy the story and grow to love the characters.
Prologue
The girl looked about her, dazed and dreamily. Everything seemed to have slowed down to the flow of smoke off a cig. Or a cigar, the kind that the Sheriff Simms had enjoyed so much, she had always warned him about smoking, it was bad for you, killed and warped lung cells and made it harder for your body to process oxygen.
He always retorted that he was likelier to die from a bullet to the head, or having his brain melt because of radiation.
Speaking of which, she felt really light-headed for some reason.
Oh, yeah, she'd been shot badly.
The girl opened her eyes as wide as they could go in an effort to stay awake and looked at the people around her.
The ghoul next to her was pressing into her stomach as hard as she could, sobbing, trying to stem the flow of blood. Tears were streaming down her ragged, radiation burned face.
She couldn't remember this ghoul's name, thought the girl. But the face, was familiar. Every part of discolored, torn, indented skin, every glassy pigment mutation of her now kaleidoscope eyes, the non-existing stub of a nose she had.
Everything about her, she knew, but she just couldn't pull a name.
She smiled at the ticklish pressure on her stomach, the impromptu nurse wrapped her up in gauze and then pulled out some duck tape and was working it around her stomach and waist.
She stroked the she-ghoul's head, the same looked up and the girl crying and latched around her neck hugging her as hard as she could.
The creature had always been an affectionate, gentle soul.
The girl looked at the others that were there; a giant with no lips, a ghoul with gloves, and a knight with a cloak.
All were firing at someone in the memorial, or rather a group of people in armor with glowing white eyes who were firing back red splinters of light.
The ghoul was taking paused shots with his two pistols firing with good accuracy at the enemy, his arms were singed in several little streaks where the lasers had grazed him.
The giant was fumbling with its own gun, a hefty, cylindrical thing connected to a backpack which was disproportionally small to the creature's back. It waited for an opening to fire back, roaring as it did, his volley shredded one of the tin men's face, the ghoul with gloves opened fire at the tumbling foe.
The man with the glowing eyes dropped to the floor, rubies dripping from the holes in the armor.
The knight was firing sparingly, he seemed frustrated and angry. He grasped at his belt and he threw something at the other glowmen and everyone close to her braced themselves for something.
There was a flash and a boom.
Another of the glowing eyed men was dead, the others were holed up in a corner from which their big guns could protect them, if only for a time.
The girl squinted at the hall where her strange friends were.
Time
They were short of that, but why?
The knight came running to her and took off his helmet, he was saying something to her, but she couldn't make it out. His face looked so familiar, his unassuming, unimpressive, sweet face.
It all came back to her in an instant, they were at the memorial and the G.E.C.K was installed, however, they needed to activate it before the pressure inside the facility destroyed it.
"Eureka! We need to push the general and his shock troopers out! We are running out of time!" he was saying loudly to her over the sound of gunfire.
His name she couldn't remember but his face was as familiar as her own. The knight, he would speak loudly when he had to, but he never raised his voice, neither in anger, nor in joy, or in urgency.
Eureka latched onto his outstretched hand in order to prop herself up with the ghoul's help, then, through the door on the other end of the small landing, the door bent and was kicked open by Enclave power armor and a band of surviving soldiers edged out in an instant. Their plasma and laser weaponry trained at the giant with no lips, the ghoul with gloves, at the crying, gentle she-ghoul, at the hooded knight and at her.
They say, that before you die, your whole life flashed before your eyes.
Eureka saw, felt, smelt, and tasted everything that had transpired in her life over the past year in her mind, a trickle of thought as she saw her life in retrospect in her subconscious within a fraction of a second.
She might have wondered why it was that she had absolutely no recollection of Vault 101 in her flashback.
Perhaps it was because this was the only part of her life, one out of nineteen parts that would ever mean anything to her.
If only for a year out of her short life, she hadn't merely coasted along in life; she had lived.