I ran, pushing myself to go. My ears pounded in time with my footsteps as I followed the crowd into the Metro tunnel. The Vaults were closed and the warnings were sounded. It was beginning.

I squeezed down the stairs in the thick of the throng of people. Some people stopped to look up in the sky. Dumb fucks, no one wants to see the shit when it hits the fan. I continued down, pushing past those who stopped and following those who had the good sense to keep going.

I held my backpack against my chest. No-one was getting my supplies. I followed the people down to the depths of the tunnels. I sat and waited, wondering what happened to Jessica. Her family did not get into a Vault, we were supposed to meet in this metro.

My cell phone rang. It surprised me a signal could get through with everyone else using their phones. I removed it from my pocket and looked at the caller ID. Jessica!

"Jessica!?" I answered the phone in a rush.

"Yeah! Jason!?"

"Jessica? Where are you?" I held the phone close to my hear trying to hear her above the murmuring of people and the near endless wailing of children.

"I'm by the entrance to the Metro! I can't get through! A fight's started and it's blocking up the way!" I heard her shout loudly at somebody.

"Jessie!?"

"Yes!?"

"Stay there. I'll try to come and get you." I closed the phone.

I slung my bag on my shoulder as I jumped up, attempting to push through the oncoming crowd.

"Move!" I shouted at everyone in front of me. Not like they heard me any damn way. I pushed through the crowd. Progress was slow as fuck. A man bumped into me and started pushing me back. I slugged him in the face and left him to get trampled by the stampede.

I reached the Metro entrance and saw the fight Jessica had told me about. There were at least a dozen people in this little riot. People were trying to squeeze past without getting caught in the fray. I spotted Jessica's chestnut head in the midst of everyone and tried to struggle past the fight. I grabbed Jessica by the arm and pulled her.

One of the people in the fight got pushed into my legs and knocked me back on the stairs. I kicked him back down, causing a domino affect. Jessica grabbed me, in an attempt to get me to my feet. I shoved her to the bottom of the stairs.

"Go! I'll catch up." She turned back to me but got caught in the wave of people and carried away. "Go!" I shouted to her again.

The man I had kicked got up and threw a punch at my legs. I sidestepped and kicked him back again. Another man came at me from the side. I caught his arm and threw him down the stairs.

The things that happened next were rather blurry. Probably because some fuck decided to hit me in the back of my head. After the intense pain in the back of my head, and my blurred vision I heard several screams, followed by a loud explosion. A wave of heat covered me like a blanket straight outta hell. After that, I blacked out.

If it wasn't for the fact that my eyes opened, I would've sworn I died. Then again I probably did because all I was seeing was blackness. I was being smothered by something. I tried to push it off of me. What ever it was it, it was soft but really fucking heavy. I managed to push it off me.

A faint light hung above me. My eyes adjusted and I looked around. "Holy shit!" I crawled out from between the bodies and sat on the ground facing them. What the fuck was I doing in a pile of dead bodies?

I tried to stand up but my arms could not even help me get up. I crawled over to the wall and used it for support to stand up on my legs. What the fuck is going on? Am I still in the metro?

I leaned up against the wall and inched to the door. I opened it and stumbled through. I was greeted immediately by a subway car. I looked left. The tunnel was collapsed in that direction so I turned right. I used the wall and limped through the darkness, until I came to a station. I saw a flickering light on the overpass above the tracks.

I made my way to the broken escalator and used the hand rail to help drag myself up the stairs. The moment I reached the top of the stairs, my ears were met with the most high pitched, annoying fucking scream I had ever had the displeasure of hearing.

"Shut the fuck up," I said to her. She couldn't hear my weak voice above her screams anyway. I tried taking a few steps toward her and then blacked out again.

I awoke to see the cracked ceiling of the Metro above me. A fire in a drum can to my right provided the only flickering light in the darkness. My eyes adjusted and I twisted my head to look around. I saw some people backing me talking to each other and tried to call to them but nothing came out. My throat felt really dry.

I tried to sit up and accidentally knocked over a can next to me. The two people behind me rushed over to me and helped me sit up. There were some weirded out looks on their faces. The man on my right walked away and called to some-one sitting on the ground.

I saw someone jump up and run over to me. My eyes had taken forever to clear and it was only when she sat next to me that I realised it was Jessica. She looked at me with a strange look on her face, almost as though she was afraid of me. I reached out to her and she pulled away sobbing. I tried to say something. Something did come out this time but it was only a hoarse rasping.

The man who had called Jessica to me brought some water. He broke the silence just barely when he said in a low voice, "Here drink this."

I grabbed the bottle from him, glad for something to drink. After I finished the bottle I looked at Jessica again who was still crying next to me. I finally looked around and noticed that all eyes in the Metro were on me. "What's wrong?" I directed the question at Jessica. My voice sounded different; raspy as if my throat was still dry.

Jessica said nothing but stood up and backed away looking down at me with tear-filled eyes. The man broke the silence again. "Son, I'm Doctor Cartwright. If you'd give me the time I'd like to ask you a few questions."

"Listen Doctor... Cartwright, you said? I'm the one who should be asking the damn questions here. Like what the fuck was I doing in a pile of dead bodies?"

The Doctor released a sigh. "Well you see, when the bombs hit..." I zoned out for a while. The bombs hit? My mind flashed back to the top of the stairs where the wave of heat hit me. "... many people died who didn't make it far enough into the Metro. We tried to move some of the bodies but had to move because of the radiation."

"So I was... dead?"

"We thought so, but it seems our assumptions were incorrect."

"Assumption my ass. How the fuck can you not tell when a person is living?"

"Well you see...," the man paused. I could see from his eyes he was looking for the right words. He released a sigh.

"Do you have a mirror?" he asked a woman to his right. She shook her head.

"I do," the woman next to her said. She removed a mirror from her suitcase next to her. How the hell did she get a suitcase down here with all these people? I asked in the back of my mind.

The Doctor took the mirror from her and held it up to my face. I looked in it. What I saw creeped me the fuck out. I grabbed the mirror from him. "WHAT THE SHIT!!" I screamed in my raspy voice. Everyone was definitely looking now.

My skin was charred black; well what skin was remaining. I could see the muscles in my face with some of the separate ligaments. My eyelids were still there. Lucky me, I could still blink. A good deal of my hair was missing. I reached up to feel it and more of it dropped out.

"DOC, WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING TO ME!?"

The Doctor took a deep breath, obviously perturbed by the facts he was about to tell me. "You were on the stairs when the bombs hit, meaning you were almost on the surface. The wave of heat and radiation has apparently caused your body to mutate slightly..."

"SLIGHTLY! ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME! DOES THIS LOOK LIKE SOMETHING SLIGHT TO YOU!" I pointed at my face to emphasise the point.

The Doctor took another deep breath and continued. "Most people usually die from such intense exposure. We don't know what other side effects could've been caused by your mutation other than your change in outward appearance." I would've started to cry, but it seemed my tear ducts weren't working.

"Wow. You really are from when the war started," the kid said to me. One of the few humans actually allowed in Underworld; that guy from the Vault.

"Yup," I said taking another drink of the Scotch in my hand. Since Azrukhal got wasted by Charon, prices have really dropped, meaning more drinks as I tell my story to whoever wanted to hear it. "Being a Ghoul, to me, has its ups despite what other Ghouls say. For one, you could out live all those bigot smoothskins on the surface. Two, we don't have to worry about radiation. Of course being a Ghoul from the war has its problems."

I finished the Scotch and decided to change to Whiskey as I ordered from Daisy, the Ninth Circle's new proprietor. When she handed me the drink I continued. "I watched everyone in that Metro die of either radiation, starvation, thirst, and those lucky enough, of old age. Jessica, poor gal, took her own life. The note she left behind said she couldn't bare to see me the way I was." I pulled Jessica's old necklace from beneath my shirt and held up the small pendant attached to the end. "I must be the only Ghoul still clinging to the days before the war, even though I know they're never coming back."

The kid looked at his Pip-Boy. "Well Ahmed, I better get going."

"Yeah, no problem kid. You're welcome in Underworld anytime."

I watched him rise and motion for Charon to follow him as he exited the door. I turned back to the counter. "Hey Daisy."

"Yes?" she said in her raspy voice. Despite the overlapping dryness from her being a Ghoul you could still tell she used to be a lady in the Wasteland at one point.

"Any time that kid's in Underworld, you can put his drinks on my tab." I went back to drinking, still holding the pendant in my hand. For the first time in two hundred years, I felt like crying.

Author's notes: Just something quick. People would notice the difference in names between the Ghoul and what he's called in the story. I noticed that Ghouls changed their names as if to forget their life as a human.