Samantha woke up coughing and hacking from the thin air in the cryo pod that she and the other residents of Sanctuary Hills had been put into by the Vault-Tec scientists when the bombs fell.
The hatch opened and she fell to the ground, coughing up and spitting out the phlegm that came up.
Staggering to her feet, she moved to the pod that contained her husband, Nate.
Hitting the release next to it she waited for it to open.
"Come on, come on." She muttered to herself as the hatch slowly opened.
She checked Nate's body, but the .44 caliber hole in his forehead put paid to the notion that he was okay.
Taking his wedding ring, she closed her eyes.
"I'll find Shaun, for both of us." She said before closing the pod.
Turning to the exit, she left the chamber room, still coughing occasionally, her skin itchy and irritated from the material of her vault suit and underwear.
She wandered the corridors of the vault, grabbing a collapsible baton from a table and flicking it open with practiced ease. Entering what looked like the security office, she found a working computer terminal.
After reading the logs on the computer, she sat back in the chair in shock.
"Those bastards! They were supposed to be protecting us and they used us for their own sick twisted purposes." She ground out.
Quickly leaving the office, she headed through another door where she was confronted with a cockroach the size of a small dog.
Quickly killing it, she shook herself.
"Giant roaches, what the hell?" She asked herself as she went into the living quarters section of the vault. She observed the tossed beds and lockers in the sleeping area.
"What the hell happened here?" She wondered out loud as she left the living area and entered the generator room.
The arcing equipment fried one of the giant roaches, but there were still two in the room that had to be dealt with. Quickly squashing the bugs with her baton, she found a skeleton in a vault suit, a bullet hole in the skull.
"Must have been a mutiny. Hopefully I can find more information." She said as the door hissed open.
Dealing with a couple more roaches, she entered an office with a skeleton in a lab coat behind the desk. One the desk was a 10MM pistol and a few spare magazines as well as a couple of stimpaks. Grabbing them before rifling through the file cabinets, she found some bobby pins and more ammunition for the now two pistols in her possession.
Logging into the terminal, she discovered just how bad things were after the bombs fell. Locating the command to open the escape tunnel, she quickly triggered it before drawing one of her pistols.
Half a dozen giant roaches and a couple of hallways later, Samantha was in the entry chamber of the Vault. A pair of shots quickly took care of the last of the roaches and a quick check of the lockers netted her a few boxes on ammunition for her pistols.
Opening the door required her to relieve a corpse of its Pipboy, so far the only one she had seen in the Vault. Triggering the opening sequence, the room was filled with a horrible screeching sound of metal on metal as the giant gear shaped door was pulled out and rolled to the side.
As she exited the Vault, the elevator descended from the surface. She eyed it with trepidation, not knowing how long it had been since the bombs fell. Finally, she stepped onto the platform and it began to rise.
The sunlight was blinding after the darkness and artificial light of the Vault. Samantha stood on the platform waiting for her eyes to adjust, even when her instincts from her time in the Army were screaming at her to find cover.
Once her eyes adjusted, her jaw dropped as she beheld the destruction of her once beautiful neighborhood and the surrounding areas.
Carefully making her way down the path, she was able to re-enter Sanctuary Hills for the first time. What struck her was that several of the houses were completely missing from their foundations. From the wooden bridge that crossed the small stream, the two houses on either side of the road were gone, as well as the house that used to be in front of where she stood as well as the ones on the outside part of the curve leading to the roundabout.
Turning down the sidewalk, she saw a Mister Handy in front of her house.
The robot turned an optic towards her before going still. Then, in a flurry of motion, it turn to focus all three optics on her.
"As I live and breathe! Ms Samantha! You're alive!" It exclaimed in a painfully familiar British accent.
"Codsworth? Is that you? But how?" She asked, her voice raspy from emotion and disuse.
"You don't think that a little radiation could stop the pride and joy of General Atomics did you?" Codsworth asked with pride in his voice.
Samantha chuckled a bit before turning serious. "Codsworth, what happened to the houses here? It doesn't look like they were destroyed by the bombs." She inquired.
"Oh, uh, I'm not sure really." Codsworth replied nervously.
Samantha cocked her head to the side. A Mister Handy getting nervous? Truly nervous? That shouldn't happen, even after however long it had been since the bombs fell.
"Codsworth, how long has it been since the bombs fell?" She asked, fearing the worst.
Before the robot could reply, another voice spoke up.
"Two hundred and ten years to the date. Almost to the minute actually. Hunh, how about that?" A hauntingly familiar female voice said.
Samantha turned and was stunned by what she saw.
"Hey Sammy! How'd you stay looking so fresh?" The woman asked, smirking as she waggled her fingers at the woman.
Samantha's brain finally decided it had had enough and shut down, causing the woman to drop to the ground.