Darkness,
She stared dazed at the ceiling in her dark bunk. She was completely stunned from being knocked violently out of her fitful slumber. There was nothing, she saw nothing, she heard nothing, she felt nothing. She blinked a few times and rubbed her dry eyes. Her brain raced as it tried to make sense of the madness that was engulfing her world, her nightmares mingling seamlessly with real world. As the nightmares began to fade and her breathing slowed, the first thing that hit her, the godawful stench. It reminded her of Mr. Summers, who had been a lively old man, too lively in fact. He "lived" himself into a stress induced heart attack. She was the first to find his already decaying body, in bed with his dog, and the last to see it as they burned his tough flesh.
The stench of death isn't what had woken her. She sat up and felt blindly for the blinds of her window, grasped them with a shaky, fatigued hand, and pulled up the blinds of the large oval window. White light streamed and she peered into the dimly lit hallway of the residential wing of the vault. A small cherry light that emitting a bright, intermitted red flash. It let out a small siren in cadence with the light.
At first she saw no one, then her neighbor from the vault facing hers, a young man, timidly poked his head out of his cabin. Dette rubbed her eyes as she watched him, pondering his next move. She was curious to see if he would follow proper protocol without being told to do so. She knew well enough that the alarm was most likely a false one, they hadn't had any significant amount of radiation leak it's way into the Vault for a few years, but the citizens still had to evacuate the area.
The young man was Kevin, Dette didn't know his last name. The only reason she even knew his first was because she had once knocked on the door, called by worried neighbors reporting domestic violence. When she forced her way in she saw Mr. Kevin Something standing over a bloody Mrs. Something, his even younger wife. But once Mrs. Something was taken down to the bowels of the vault to a makeshift security station and hospital, she recanted. She was seventeen, pregnant, and scared out of her mind. She fabricated that she had fallen while cleaning. Classic.
While Dette felt pity on the poor girl, she it was overpowered by the feeling of disgust. But that was the way it was down here. Babies, barely weaned, married other babies, and procreated. They had to repopulate the earth, since there were only roughly a few million inhabitants now, Dette guessed, those numbers were generous though. So propaganda was spread all around the vault about marriage and baby-making. It was drilled into kids in class that that was their only duty, and one day the children of the Vault would take back the earth. Dette had disagreed with this philosophy, at her mother's displeasure. Although she was offered many of times by dashing young men, she always declined. She preferred solitude, a place and time to think. But even so, when she felt the empty spot of her bed, a small frown crossed her face. Twenty-two years old and still no one to warm that side of the bed. She turned her attention back to the hallway, which was slowly filling up with bewildered vault dwellers.
They scrunched their nose at the stench and muttered nervously amongst each other. Oh, the stench! Dette's heart skipped a beat, she'd smelled it before, not just on the old man. They say that smell is the strongest memory, and Dette could contest to that as the memory of that smell hit her pretty strongly. When Dette was nine years old, the smell of death suddenly took over the upper section of the vault. After a bit of scrambling while the older dwellers grumbling nervously as they eyed their geiger counters, they found the source was a mutated rat that had found it's way into the vaults ventilation system. It had intruded it's way into the vault looking for a safe refuge from the harsh wastes. Unfortunately, it found only death. It filled the vault with not only the stench, but the radiation that came with it.
She lunged across the room for her Geiger counter. The security force all carried them nowadays, it that sat dutifully on the counter in her small almost cell like space. It was more accurate than the ones built into the Pipboy 2000 model she had, so it was her tool of choice. In the dark, she fumbled with the controls, almost dropping it onto the even darker floor. Finally she felt her finger hit the switch and a steady tick followed this. This wasn't unusual, when the world's super powers engage in nuclear warfare there is bound to be radiation everywhere. But in the dim light in the corner of her room wasn't enough to make out the small white numbers that were etched above the dial, she slowly walked towards the light, keeping her eye on the Geiger counter. By now she could hear clearly the sounds of the nervous vault dwellers outside her quarters. They conversed apprehensively as they attempted to determine if the alarms were just a drill so they could get back to their warm beds, or if they should really start to worry.
Dette's eyes grew wide as she reached the window and she could make out the numbers. One-thousand it read, the indicator wavering unsteadily. Those numbers could be lethal if exposed to long enough. She had half a second to ponder this. Then her ears filled with the sounds of a throaty scream from a young woman. That wasn't the last scream she'd hear in the next few hours, not even close.