Dr. Victor Von Oppenheimer backstory
Its funny what one remembers, across the expanse of years. Its been a very long time since "Old Vic" could even remotely be considered young. A nuclear physicist from a nuclear family: spoon-fed propaganda with his daily bread. And like any good child of the 2040's Victor Von Oppenheimer was a patriot: drinking his Nuka Cola with a smile on his face even as the world began its slow decent into the flames. He was American: and therefore better than all the "towel-heads" and "euro-trash" busy blowing each other to pieces overseas. Everything was all right, and to think otherwise was treason: so he didn't, not at first. A technical prodigy, he took a position in the Los Alamos R&D labs. Proudly working to save the world even as every advance in fusion was put towards military use, as all the "deterrents" they built brought the world one step closer to annihilation.
He never did quite understand what she saw in him, but they built a life together. She baffled him and astounded him and a thousand other things. But above all else she was Susan and his life would never be the same. Their wedding day was the happiest day of his life, supplanted only by the births of their three children over the following years. They were the light of his life but outside the world was growing ever darker. The Chinese had invaded anchorage and you didn't have to be a genius to see the way the wind was blowing. When a Man In Black offered to secure the Oppenheimers a place beneath the Rockies in exchange for his service Victor jumped at the chance and so came into the Enclave's service.
At first it might have seemed a dream job, but it wasn't long before the bargain proved Faustian in nature. The Enclave had no care for frivolities such as morality or sanity: only results at any cost. Though not the worst among them, Victor was far from innocent: exposing tens of thousands of "communist sympathizers" to intense radiation in order to better study it's effects. While his superiors laud it as a roaring success: earning him a promotion and his own research team dedicated to inducing the radiological abnormalities the troops colloquially refer to as "zombification". For Victor it was a cadmean victory at best: the nightmares of which haunt him to this day. Still he pressed on, knowing that an instant of hesitation would condemn his family to a fate with which he was now horrifyingly familiar. Yet seeing his son Mortimer, barely walking but eager to follow in his father's footsteps down a path no man should tread, was too much for his long neglected conscience to bear.
Victor broke down there, in the darkness, wondering if the hell to which undoubtedly awaited him in death had anything on the one mankind was busy making of earth. And then Susan was there: the moon where his sun had fled and he knew that while he was damned, that if he was a monster: at least he wasn't alone. And so a plan was made, for their family and all the families forced to watch as their husbands and fathers returned home from work a little less human. One day soon the bombs would fall: with the annexation of Canada that much was clear. Until then Victor would work on the bomb the brass wanted with a few surprises thrown in for good measure. And when the war turned nuclear he would initiate the lab's emergency containment procedures and detonate the gamma bomb with his superiors trapped inside.
He'd been at bomb tests before, but even shielded by half a mile of rock the great war was the loudest thing he'd ever heard, the deep thrumming of the gamma bomb a mere pop in comparison as he added traitor to the growing list of addendums to his name. Incinerating the schematics with the butt of his cigarette he ascended to the civilian quarters to face his peers. Susan had done her job well, keeping the peace with all the charisma he lacked. And for a time they were as happy as any community sealed in a mineshaft after a nuclear war could reasonably expect to be. But no words could cover up his falling hair and peeling skin. He knew what the symptoms heralded, that it was only a matter of time before his kids saw him as a monster, or he saw them as food. So he left, kissing his children goodnight one last time before heading out to look for America amid the ashes.
He doesn't know how he survived his first few months in the wastes: his minds eye blinded in a haze of agony as his flesh began to slough off in sheets. The steel grip of his service laser a source of cool reassurance and grim temptation alike. On starless nights he wondered if he truly survived at all, if it was all some sick purgatory he'd been cursed too for his sins. But under that tattered flesh lay steel: Victor emerged from that crucible a changed man, battered and broken but alive. The full force of his pain honed mind consumed by one imperative: Survival. So he wandered the wasted world: with only the ferals for company. One lonesome road looks much like another as the decades roll by.
Lacking the means for research, Victor fashioned himself as an apocalyptic historian: looking for the ghoulified spirit of the nation he loved. Taking it upon himself to learn the stories of the fallen, to speak for the dead even if there was nobody left to hear them. Burying what bodies he could, and cremated where ammo permit: leaving a trail of cairns from sea to shining sea. Victor knew a thing or two about ghosts, being undead himself, and though he could not bring peace to the voices of his past there was a measure of peace in helping the dead rest easy. He preserved what knowledge he could find, delving into forgotten bunkers to find the last words of a million souls crying out before their eternal silence. Victor had always heard that no-one was truly dead until they were forgotten and so he kept their memory alive. wrapping himself with the cloth of ten thousand shrouds and with each one a name rescued from eternal silence.
Victor watched as humanity emerged from its nuclear hibernation, the bunkers opened and bubbles of civilization formed atop the seas of sand and rust. There's always courier work for a man who knows the wastes. Victor drifted in the wake of battles new and old, until at last he returned to where he began: finding a thriving town outside the mine he'd once called home. It wasn't the first time the stories he wrote were personal. The Alamos facility had been pulverized by a direct hit, his university a charnel house of bodies curled up beneath desks that could not save them, but nothing could have prepared him to find his family's graves next to an empty plot that bore his name. Victor had known, on some level, that he was well past his hundredth birthday and could easily last a hundred more. Mangled flesh, malnourishment, and occasional bullet wound aside undeath had treated his body better than life ever had. But longevity was no blessing, the raw mass of memories bringing him to his knees.
He woke to strangers wearing familiar faces and for once his words didn't fail him. As Victor embraced his grandchildren for the first time it occurred to him that he had found, if not a home, then at least a place to rest in peace. But no dream can last forever, his lonely vigil called him forward. A gravedigger's work is never done, until the day he joins his flock beneath the shifting sands.