Pandora's Box
His name was Shaun. It wasn't his real name. The old name would have been anathema to the new neighbors, to the prissy busybodies at the Super-Duper Mart, to the fourteen year old kid who thought he knew it all that bussed the pumps at the Red Rocket up the street. Even to her superiors, who'd put the kid in her life.
She remembered the operation; one more desperate, pointless spook job to try and make friends and ease tensions with the people that had their fingers on the ICBM buttons. This one was for a Russian, a diplomat who knew a man, who knew a man, who supposedly knew the Chinese supply lines the way a Protectron knew its directives. Help him, get his new baby boy out of the line of fire, he'd give everything he knew up to the Americans. Didn't matter to her. A job was a job. That's the mantra she kept in her head, the whisper she told herself on the city border of Moscow, the crinkling photograph clenched sweaty and tight in her hand before she destroyed it. Couldn't risk exposure. All the materials had to go before insertion.
The face in the photograph was clearer to her than the reality ever was. A good-natured blonde in a heavy duty flak helmet, with a broad nose and the dopey smile of a man who was trying to make the best of a bad war. She'd seen him across a mess hall at the German barracks once, on her way to the handler that would get her through the roughest patch of the north, through the ice and snow to the heart of enemy territory. Singing along, corny and off-key, with Atom Bomb Baby. She had an eye for faces.
He didn't sing anymore, and the photo was long gone. The op had taken six weeks, more than a few nights of it spent with Natalia and Anatoly and the other girl she couldn't remember the name of, and the pretty young man who'd sold her a loaf of bread and the countersign to the safehouse. Not a bad life. Not a bad way to say goodbye to it, to give herself up to the last job and pretend she'd only ever had what Mother and Father America called a 'normal' life.
Codsworth was her play, one last ditch effort to keep a piece of herself buried inside. She didn't know why. Just a Mr. Handsy, really, but she'd arranged for him a couple of psychological upgrades. Codsworth knew the score, kept the peace while she and the now-quiet, withdrawn soldier pretended they'd had family in Sanctuary Hills for years. Until the fiction started to become the reality. The boy was four months old now. His name was Shaun. It had never been anything else.
Pieces of her crawled inside her skin at night, flickering bullet fire. Bullets don't woosh or ping through the air in her dreams. They crack. That's how she knew they were aiming dead for her. Woke up every morning in the new world, trying to remember the old, trying to remember her name was Mommy now.
He woke up, too, she realized finally. The soldier. He had the same dreams. Every morning. She saw them in his eyes when she shifted her head across the soft cotton pillow, too soft for her head, knew by the tightness in his cheeks that he heard the same cracking noise. He'd seen Anchorage, too. After.
It wasn't love, but after that, they fucked enough in the glittering pre-dawn of most mornings to make up for it.
. . .
She forgot the Vault-Tec mook almost the second after she closed the door on him – almost. She still had that eye for faces, but Shaun was screaming in need and her name was Mommy now. The prices of peace; she knew why they rated a place in one of those ridiculous Vaults, but her guts knew a few things about mistrust. The word through the tradecraft lines said the President and his coterie weren't with VT despite that loving PR note that seemed to find its way into almost every RobCo news database. They'd made their own arrangements. Made an Enclave.
Told her a few things, but beggars weren't choosers and Father America had a bad habit of letting his soldiers beg. The nightly news made her uneasy. Fifteen years doing company work, working the trade as far as her smarts and her charm could take her. She was certain it meant nothing now. She wondered about the Russian man who'd given away his son for a chance. Wondered if it had hurt when his comrades blew his brains out in the pretty tiled square for being a spy. She looked down into Shaun's eyes and saw dead men. He blinked and smiled, so she smiled back down at him as Codsworth hovered nearby. The boy hadn't been touched by any of it. The boy was part of something else. Something new. Maybe, if the Capitol could keep their hands out of their war-hungry pants, part of something better.
. . .
Not a sound anyone ever wants to hear. The way it spins up, from the first low vrrrmmm into the unearthly, sustaining shriek that foretells the coming of the dead. It goes low into the gut, crawls up through the throat to snare fear through all the pores in the skin. It didn't matter. Nothing from the past mattered. The soldier scooped up the boy and they ran from the end, watching it pierce the sky. Watching the fire explode into a storm. The last storm, maybe.
When they froze her, her eyes fixed on the soldier and the boy in the cryo receptacle across from her – oh those dirty fucking liars, those Vault-Tec fucks and fuck the President, too - her last thought was maybe we deserved it.
. . .
They killed the soldier. They.
She put her finger on the frozen hole in his blue jumpsuit suit, not sure if she felt ice or flecks of bone. Red flakes of freeze-dried blood peeled off the cushioned interior as she stirred the air. Who the fuck were they?
They killed the soldier and took the boy. His name was Shaun now. His name had always been Shaun, and the man who had taken him had a particular, balding, hungry face. She marked it well, held it in her mind's eye like a cheesecake pin-up. Her mind was otherwise cold, full of those sharp, thundering cracks that told the eternal tale of a shootout and her face felt like it was stuck in the snarl of a mad dog.
It wasn't about some buried maternal instinct. She understood that as she went above and saw what her war had done to the world. This was the world she'd help make. The soldiers and the spies, the leaders and the corporations. This was their great and glorious new Earth, where the air smelled hot and infected and the sky itself was turning green as an unnatural storm approached from south of the city.
The boy had been innocent, sold away by a condemned man to her bloody hands. Hands that trembled now. There was a gun in the security shack set next to the Vault's gate, rusted but serviceable. She'd pried it free from the brittle skeleton, watching its arm snap apart like a bird's bones against her strength. Slapped it into a makeshift harness at her hip, leather and chain, both of which were falling apart. She'd find better later.
The boy was supposed to be safe. He was a piece of hard-kept hope, something pure, a promise from the new world. Not this world, but the better one they were supposed to make. That they'd failed to make. The radiation storm crackled through the air and she smelled its deadly acrid stink and considered where to take shelter before going on the hunt. That was the job, and a job was a job.
Shaun was the last survivor.
All she ever was, was fury.