shock; [shok] noun
1. a sudden and violent blow or impact; collision.
2. a sudden or violent disturbance or commotion.
3. a sudden or violent disturbance of the mind, emotions, or sensibilities;
4. the cause of such a disturbance.
5. Pathology: a collapse of circulatory function, caused by severe injury, blood
loss, or disease; characterized by pallor, sweating, weak pulse, and diminished
blood pressure.
0
The vehicle's door wails a rusty complaint for the kick, white-hot pain shooting up your leg. You kick again, changing the angle of attack. Again, until the hinges give way and you can scramble elbows-and-knees from the smoking cabin. Sharp metal edges catch on your clothes, scraping jagged papery whispers along your jumpsuit's seams as you tug free. You kick the door aside for good measure, face hot as the breath leaves your chest in shuddering anger.
You throw an indignant question into the night air, beating your fists on the hood of the car like a primate incensed. There is no answer in the hollow dark of the wasted landscape. Silence. An intemperate wind changes direction, then dies. The rubble twenty paces away reveals a dark, wet smear where your visitor had been, before he or she had lobbed some sort of explosive at you. Particularly, at the car you had chosen to shelter in - an old government limousine to which you now owed your health.
The first human being you have seen topside, and their immediate attempt was against your life. Anger, full and clear and rejuvenating; man's great survival mechanism. You hate, very suddenly, everything. All of this, the entire stretch of flat, open, monotonous urban decay. You hate the moon, so alien and bright and indifferent; the vast dizzying sky it hangs itself in. You hate the insects both large and small that follow the ammonia pattern of your sweat to bite and sting and drink and whine.
Slipping on the bits of gore as you vacate the blast area; the night is dark enough that you can't sympathize with human remains. Most horrific of all, perhaps, is the smell. Fecal matter and coppery blood, sure, but also the burnt calcium of bone and the heady, almost savory aroma of cooked flesh. You vomit through clenched teeth, a sharp acidic burn through your nostrils. A brief panic that you might drown in your own viscera, as the bile rattles backwards into your lungs with a raking cough.
You crouch over the mess, retching until your ribs ache. Finding a bare patch of cement on hands and knees, you curl over to berate the situation, as if your Vault rested just below all of this, as if the people within could turn their heads up to listen.
1
You are _ Jameson. You breathe, you scream.
Well, look at you! Catherine, it's a boy!
Your father's voice is the first thing you remember - his eyes, two bright spots in dark circles under the fluorescent of the surgical room.
Something's gone wrong, you can't - James - your mother, nothing more than a panicked whisper, something that would haunt you whenever the wind blew too hard through the rubble of D.C.
Get the baby out of here! Catherine? Catherine!
"C'mon over here, champ. I want to read you your mother's favorite passage."
You are a somber child, often frustrated by your own physical limits and undeveloped vocabulary. Sentiment is a piece that does not yet fit in the puzzle of your thoughts and you wander over to the toy chest and pull out a book, stubbornly averting your attention.
"I know, you're probably tired of my lecturing. It's important for you to know, though, that someday things will be different."
Iou clutch a tiny handful of the pristine white fabric of his labcoat and tug. A pen falls out of the pocket and is lifted from your eager reach before you can do any harm to the dull metal walls making up your entire waking world.
"Heh. Come on, let's go find your friends."
The lighting of the bulwark is so bright, it reminds you of the circles above your mother as she died.
"You turned the lights on too fast, you blinded the poor kid!"
"Happy birthday, champ!"
"Hey there young man, ten years old already, my, my! Goodness, I remember like it was only yesterday when you and your father came - "
"Did we surprise you?"
"You're an official member of the workforce, now."
"Happy birthday, buttbreath."
"Betcha can't guess what I got you for your present! Go on, guess." Amata has finally cornered you from all the well-wishers. You are uncomfortable, you remember, because the lights really had been startling. It was like losing your mother all over again, vivid and unstoppable.
"Uhh... a date with Freddy Gomez?" Those closest to you and Amata in the crowded diner go silent. You aren't sure at this point if they were simply curious over what Amata had gotten you, or if you had said something disturbingly precocious again.
"Ew, no... he smells like soup." A suspicion fading to a hopping adolescent excitement. "I got you Grognak the Barbarian! First issue, no missing pages!"
A comic book. You were more excited to receive the PipBoy task-manager from her father, though it weighed heavily on your skinny arm and was the out-of-fashion 3000 model. (You would later give the comic book to Freddy Gomez, embarrassed by its cover-page nudity.)
"Thank you, Amata." You lean over to tuck the book into your father's labcoat pocket. He chuckles and shoves you gently forward, a wide warm palm between your shoulder blades.
"You're so weird." Amata dimples. "So tell me; how do you like the surprise? My dad made me invite Butch and them, even though I tried to tell him you don't have very many kid friends." She leans in to whisper this news as if it would hurt the feelings of the trio of classmates perched at the diner's furthest table. You stare down at the scuffed and faded linoleum, a red and white checkerboard pattern painted with fresh yellow safety lines. "Well, uh, I'm going to chat with Daddy. You should mingle, it's a party!"
The first adult nearest is Officer Gomez, and it is true that you find his company better suited to conversation than that of the snickering group huddled at the furthest dining table. You attempt to mingle further, but after making the rounds with the usual line-up of preferred company, it is Stanley Armstrong who is given an uncomfortable position of honesty when he tells me you should at least try and have fun. For your father's sake.
This notion of fun is pointed squarely at your classmates, who bristle even as you approach. It's no great feat of instinct - children are unabashedly cruel. The tragedy therein remains that childhood is the template with which one's entire life is painted - and if you are surrounded by cruelty then you have no choice save that of retaliation. Butch's mother drank, and did violence to her child, who in turn does violence to you, who in turn would grow up to do violence to your own victims, and so on and so forth.
Later in the day, you would shoot your first gun. You would take the first life in a long list of many - though it were only an insect, your aim would be true and you would cradle the BB gun as if it were a recovered limb. This is also your earliest memory of Jonas sparing more than two words for you. Jonas, your father's mysteriously silent medical assistant. Jonas, young and cheerful and perhaps a little intimidated by your full sentences and overlarge vocabulary and steady, curious stare. Jonas, alive and breathing behind the camera as you posed with your father over the brown shell of something no longer alive and breathing, a horrific foreshadow.
2
The metal pipe sinks through the back of the man's head with disturbing ease. Arms weak from the impact, you let the weapon drop with the twitching corpse. Turning your back on it, you try to work up the nerve to rifle through his - its - possessions. Coughing up grit and dust in a thick gob, which turns out to be blood.
You are starving, face and hands burnt from prolonged exposure to sun and irradiated wind, and you have just killed a man over a plastic decanter of silty, discolored water.
You had swung as he was walking away, with the intent to simply knock him out for a few hours, and now he sprawled face-down in a pool of dark blood - balding crown caved neatly around the weapon. Couldn't save him if you wanted to, and his was such an unwashed wild-eyed visage that you can't even muster the regret. Tall, lean frame and the patched dirty jacket is filed neatly beside your memory of the masked bomb-lobber. How about a dance partner for all the waltzing you get up to across your nightmares, Bomb-lobber? Bob. Bob Lobby and Crazy Longshanks. If you had the energy and the resources, that's what their headstones would have read. "Longshanks and Bob." you frown over the lip of the decanter, kicking at a heavy leather boot.
Something rattles within, and upon loosing the footwear it appears to be a clutchpurse of ... soda bottle caps. The currency, apparently, of the mad hoarders that dotted this landscape. How insane. You could start up a random currency if you wanted to. You could collect teeth, and demand nothing but teeth for your wares, and pay for everything with teeth. Or toenails.
God, but you had to get out of this sun.
3
"I remember the sky." Your voice at sixteen is smooth and cultured, the likeness of your father.
"Joe, don't start. Not right now. I have to study."
"I remember seeing an insect, like in the books. It crawled on my leg and I panicked and my father came to the crib, and - "
"That was probably a Radroach. Shutup already."
"I'm a type 7a cognitive, these memories are real! I'm not just making it up to annoy you."
"Mmhm. I liked you better when you were bothering me to make out with you all the time."
"Jesus, Amata, I'm serious."
"And I'm serious, too! About passing this calculus exam."
"Just cheat off me." The baseball started a rhythmic thunk against the dull metal plating of the wall. "If I was born in the vault, how could I remember the sky?"
"If you weren't born in the vault, you wouldn't BE, in uh, let's see, THE VAULT. This isn't a hotel, it's not a park or a shopping mall. It's a sealed, subterranean VAULT. You couldn't have just waltzed in, they never open the door! Maybe you just... I dunno... dreamed it all up." She is scowling at her homework. "And get off my bed before my dad gets home."
"Right, right riiight. All right." you swing your legs off the flower-pattern bunk. "Don't want the Overseer to have another excuse to alienate me."
Amata scoffs. "You are an alien."
"...Yeah, maybe. Sometimes I think I am, anyway."
Amata's eyes shift uneasily. "So is Butch still giving you trouble?"
"Butch gives himself trouble. I just happen to get in the way." You had been hoping she'd be polite enough to ignore the shiner darkening your right eye.
"Butch needs to choke and die."
"Fair enough. You ready for the G.O.A.T. tomorrow?" The baseball resumes its thunk, this time on the small metal desk on which Amata is working.
"Shit, is that tomorrow? GET OUT of here so I can study!" For a girl, Amata is fairly strong. You find yourself propelled into an empty metallic hallway, laughing. You toss the ball idly at the door that had been slammed after you - it bounces wrong and rolls further into the residence sect.
It is in retrieving the errant baseball that you look up to see Paul Hannon (Jr.). You grin, leaning against the doorway to effectively block his route.
He shifts from foot to foot, crossing his arms. Though he wears the black denim gang jacket, he is without Butch and his posse. Often left behind for being a bit of a softie, a bit dull and a bit of a queer. You can tell by the way his eyes are constantly tracking the, ah, alpha males of the pack. You pointed it out to him once, this primitive social behavioral pattern. He just apologized.
"Can you uh, let me pass?" His voice is soft and deep and you are, at sixteen, in love with him.
"I could... but I don't want to." You toss the baseball up, catching it without breaking eye contact.
Paul swallows audibly, glances away. He is tall and dark and quiet and you can't resist bullying him. This is worsened by the fact that a normal sixteen-year-old boy's idea of romance is to shower his object of desire with noogies and arm-punches and crude jokes. You shower Paul with sarcasm and lectures and sheer sexual intimidation. He is going to have to push you out of the way or squeeze by you to get through, and you both know it.
Instead, Paul retreats back into the residence halls. Your laugh echoes after him, and your chest aches with the hollow victory.
"Dad, I am sick. I'm sick of the endless gray in this dreary metal tomb."
"Waxing a bit poetic, aren't we? As far as I can tell, no teenager has ever been hospitalized for being jaded." As your father inspects your eyes through the pinpoint of the optometer, you inspect your father. His pores are overlarge, and his beard is starting to go gray - as if the colorless walls around you were bleeding him at last. There are wrinkles you had never noticed before, stress lines and dark circles under his eyes. You've overheard him and Jonas late most nights in his office, hushed whispers and stifled arguments. You are terrified it is your fault.
"They are going to give me a really pointless job, which I will be stuck with for life." You would repent for kissing Jonas, if it meant sparing him his job.
"You're taking that test. It's the way of the Vault."
"Yeah, I know. I was born here, and I will die here. But what is supposed to happen to me in the meantime? Surely not janitorial duty."
Your father laughs, "Surely not! You're a bright kid, I have faith in you. Now, off you go." He cuffs your arm gruffly.
But what is this place, this Vault 101? Where are the previous hundred vaults, and what function do they serve? Nuclear Disaster. Humanity hiding away in underground vaults to survive the worst of their own destructive nature, waiting out generation after generation until the sky would clear and the grass would grow again. It has been six generations, and your vault has yet to open its door to the hell that surely awaits outside.
You can't imagine any small topside city from the past being very different than a vault - and if pressed, at that time, you would have probably said that you really did love your home. The small two-bedroom residence you shared with your father was familiar and comforting, and the idea of ever having seen the sky had been gently beaten out of your skull by the dull wash of time.
"What the hell is going on here?" You use your voice to your advantage; Wally Mack actually flinches as if they had been caught by an adult.
"I was about to show the Overseer's daughter here a real tunnel snake." Regardless of inconvenient upbringing at the hands of an emotionally unstable addict, Butch had also been born cruel - type 5b cognitive and the bone structure of the permanently aggressive, eyebrows stuck in a leery scowl.
You sidle up to the group surrounding Amata, using the gap left by a hastily retreating Paul Hannon, and drive your fist into the side of Butch's face. It is not a spectacular punch, and after the switchblades come out you break free of the scuffle to make a run for it. Amata is shouting something, the first time you ever hear her use that authoritative tone of voice. Apple, tree, distance metaphor.
There are sections of the rat-maze hallways that sometimes get closed off for cleaning or repairs, and you are hasty enough to get caught at the end of one such dimmed corner. Thankfully, the gang's stabbing urge has abated into a generalized brawling urge, though there are still three against one and are those boots standard issue anyway fuck someone should report them for that alone -
It is in spotting Paul's lone figure at the top of the grimy metal stairs that you only just start to feel hurt. He watches. You are not even worth the energy spent on violence to him, as it is not as if he were some pacifist (scarred the Kendall boy with a pair of nail clippers once). The 'fight' is interrupted by the appearance of an officer, who nudges Paul aside to shout down an inquiry. It is Steve Mack, the captain of the task force.
The psychology behind the silence of a victim has been explored in textbook... but even if you understand your own prognosis, there is no such thing as self-cure.
Officer Mack descends the stairs, pulling Butch upright and shouldering Wally and the others aside. He steps over your shoulder, heavy security boots punching a familiar rapport into the flooring, and types the code in the hall's access panel. The door to the long stretch of unlit vault tunnel swooshes open, a cool wind on your blood-wet skin. Officer Mack takes a long look at everyone present, except yourself. Officer Mack leaves.
While you had been watching Paul, who had been watching Butch, Paul Hannon Sr. - Security Chief - had been watching you. It isn't a scream, dragged over the metal grate into the dark. It is a silent, jaw-aching laugh.
end_prelude
Three years of this, though never a day so bad as the first incident (you are the doctor's son, after all, and they have their small hierarchies in the vault, they do), and you are what might be medically categorized as a Nervous Wreck. If asked, you would admit to no longer loving your home. The Generalized Occupational Aptitude Test, once you had recovered enough to actually take it, had pegged you as a technical engineer. You are at once familiarized with the Vault's computer wetworks - mainframe, life-support, educational operating systems, networked home computers and thus the personal logs of the Overseer himself. (The last more a perk than a necessity.) You have discovered (as per suspicion) you are not an original member of Vault 101; and that the Overseer really hates the elderly - which is irrelevant to future events but certainly painted him in an unflattering light at the time. You could go on about the awareness of Officer Mack's sadism, or the encouragement of the Tunnel Snakes' despotism, but it was obvious by now that nothing happened in the vault that was not already orchestrated in some way by the Overseer himself.
You, however, are one of the few that could successfully wield blackmail to your advantage. But just when you settle in this new seat of power, just when you thought you could stand to live the rest of your life trapped within the safety of the vault, every bit of the world reversed its spin - suffering motion sickness so severe as to vomit mishap and ill fate all over your shiny new life standard.