"I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end."
My father had two favourite sayings; one he never spoke out loud, and one he repeated endlessly. If the beginning, end, and rest of my life with him were to be summed up in one neat little package, it'd be the second phrase, the repetitive soundtrack of our time together:
"We'll talk about this later."
The beginning of the end—or should I say end of the beginning?—started as the old fairytales do. With a damsel in distress, and a monster needing slaying.
The monster in this case was Butch DeLoria, a little shit who fancied himself the biggest asshole in the vault. He paraded around in a leather jacket he'd filched from some forgotten storage bin, with a snake he must've spent hours embroidering on the back. Called himself and his 'gang'—spineless tag-a-long Paul and brainless meat-head Wally—the Tunnel Snakes.
Idiots. The only snakes that used to live in the DC area, back when things like snakes still lived, were the harmless kind.
The three of them weren't much more dangerous than toothless snakes, simply a group of punks high on their own bullshit. For the most part we ignored each other—they didn't have much use for a pasty, sullen mouse of a girl, and I never could tolerate fools. If our paths crossed they'd call out lame insults like vampire or zombie.
It wasn't intimidating so much as laughable.
On the way to another Overseer-approved Waste Of Time—better known as the GOAT—I caught them harassing Amata. She was...
There aren't words to describe what she was to me. At the time she was my friend, the only person who counted in that closed-off world of recycled air and stifled ideas. The only one who listened, and the only one who cared. It didn't matter if my father spent all his time mentally masturbating in his lab, or if the people surrounding me were either crazy, morons, or a combination of both. Whenever it felt like there was no point to the treadmill existence of life in the vault, Amata was there to make it better.
She gave me more than just friendship – she gave me hope.
I found Butch blocking her path, drunk on his own press, leering down at her. "I'll show you a real tunnel snake," he said, hip-thrust and all. His back-up dancers, Wally and Paul, stood nearby and sniggered.
It was the first time I'd ever known true fury. Anger, hurt, annoyance – they all pale to the red-eyed rush of blood and adrenaline that hits, instinct and action suppressing all thought. I ran right at him, slamming into Butch and knocking us both into the hallway wall. Before he could deck me, I latched onto him and bit him in the neck.
Call me a fucking vampire, will you?
It took both of his friends to tear me off. Amata clutched onto my arm, the two of us stunned by what happened. Butch ran off with his buddies, hand clamped on his bleeding neck, swearing and moaning the whole time about diseases, stitches, and fucking crazy bitches.
"Thank you." Amata - startled as hell, staring in disgust at the blood trickling down my chin – still had the good grace and presence of mind to thank me.
Told you she was something special.
We wound up in the ladies' room, doing impressions of Butch in mocking girlish voices, laughing with nervous relief as the adrenaline wore off. She helped me wash up, wiping away the stray flecks of blood I couldn't see.
Mr. Brotch wasn't pleased when we finally arrived in the classroom, late to the exam. The dread Tunnel Snakes were already there – Paul and Wally trying in vain to claim ignorance of everything and everyone (not much of a stretch), Butch sunk low in his seat with his jacket collar flipped up high, trying to hide the crisp white bandage on his neck.
I couldn't help it – as soon as he saw me, I grinned at him. The widest, smarmiest, toothiest fucking smile in the history of smiles.
I swear I saw him flinch.
We didn't get lectured for being late, since Amata's dad was the Overseer. Mr. Brotch could hardly start the test without the boss' daughter in the room, could he? I felt like a champion when I walked in with her, everyone staring in wonder. Or fear. Or just plain curiosity.
It didn't matter to me why they looked. I spent the entire test grinning over my swollen ego, sucking on a piece of Butch caught in my back molars. It's not that he tasted very good, but the copper tang of his blood was like nectar to me. It tasted like victory.
The test turned out to be a joke. It didn't matter what answers you put down, you'd wind up in whatever job the Overseer already chose for you. Amata, being so sweetly sincere, nibbled on her pencil as she fretted over the page.
Emboldened by my earlier triumph, I put down whatever answer I thought would piss her dad off the most. To say I hated the man would be an understatement – I thought he was a sub-human monster. Where my dad paid no attention to what I did, Amata's father watched her to the point of obsession. She defended him during our whispered discussions of his problems, trying to make excuses for his controlling nature. Like the proverbial whipping dog, she still idolized him despite the way he ruthlessly dominated every aspect of her life.
The only reason he tolerated our friendship was my lack of a penis. She got along fine with the other girls, but I was the one she told her secrets to. I'm the one she shared her dreams with. I'm the one she confided her crushes to. We grew up together, and we were as close as friends could be—no, closer. We were like sisters.
All the good memories I have of the vault were the ones she made. She always looked out for me, more sensitive to slights against me than I ever was. When I didn't get invited to Butch's birthday party—not that I noticed—she actually threw me a surprise party for my birthday to make up for it. Her dad didn't help her at all, and seeing as she was all of fucking ten years old at the time it wasn't much more than party hats and some streamers, but it still stands out as the nicest thing anyone ever did for me.
Little wonder I'd happily bite a thousand jerk-offs like Butch to defend her.
Mr. Brotch took our tests from us, the careless way he handled them confirming what I already guessed—they didn't matter to anyone. Our future jobs—our future lives—would be doled out to us in a couple weeks time. Nothing to do but rattle around the slate coloured corridors of the vault until then, following the same monotonous routine of trying to thrive, with no more reason to keep breathing than because you could.
After the test Butch hightailed it out of the room, slinking off in a cloud of embarrassment. Amata, on the other hand, positively glowed when we left the classroom. Still riding a giddy high from my 'chivalrous' defense of her honour, and flushed with thoughts of acing the test, she suggested we go spelunking before my dad caught up with me. She'd seen what I hadn't—the perfect corners of Butch's bandage, folded with the meticulous care only my father bothered to waste on gauze.
It didn't matter how many times I told her not to worry about him—my father neither praised nor punished—she always looked out for me like that.
I don't know what it was about her on that day, of all days, but something warm in her smile, something soft in her eyes...it inspired me to new heights of boldness. Still working that piece of Butch out of my teeth, I grabbed her hand, pulled her along after me, and led her off towards the stairwells.
Life in the vault isn't like life on the outside. In the wastes, nobody pays attention to anybody else's business unless they think it'll interfere with their own. But in the vault, everybody's lives were the Overseer's business. We were his fucking puppets, and he watched us dance all day long. Cameras infested the vault, worse than the damn radroaches. Cameras in the halls, cameras in the common rooms, cameras in our quarters, cameras in the damned bathrooms—there wasn't anywhere you could go to escape the ever watchful eye of him and his security goons.
Or, more accurately, the places you were allowed to go never let you out of their sight. And it wasn't like they could watch the whole vault at the same time. Only so many monitors, and only one pair of eyes actually looking at them...it didn't take a genius to figure out if you knew the pattern and timing as the cameras flickered on and off screen, you could move through the vault like a ghost.
And I knew them. I'd spent hours sitting in the atrium on an uncomfortable bench, pretending to read a novel for the thousandth time, watching the watchers through the security room glass. Whoever set up the programming all those decades ago was a logical bastard—the images would cycle through the levels, sweeping from one end to the other. The trick to not being seen was to simply stay one step behind the images. It only worked one way though—on the third level you'd have to go east to west, but on the second you'd have to go west to east, or else you'd get caught in the sweep of the lenses.
Amata didn't know how I did it, and I never told her the secret—in case her father got too curious and demanded the knowledge from her—but she loved the game. We called it spelunking, pretending we were explorers plumbing forgotten caves for treasure and adventure. Mostly we'd wind up in the off limits areas where the vault architects didn't bother installing watchful eyes, hiding in the depths where the boilers and generators shared space and hissed steam at the ceiling, the grinding of their gears like the screams of the damned. Stanley would bitch about having to go down there to work on the machinery, saying it was like stepping down into hell, but for us it was a private little piece of heaven.
It wasn't perfect though—nothing but metal grate flooring to sit on, the ambient red flashing lights of the machinery enough to make you dizzy if you watched them too long. The danger of getting caught always loomed high on our minds, dread preventing us from fully enjoying the luxury of privacy.
I'd been searching the vault for years—for my entire fucking life—always looking for something. A new locale, a new face, and as time wore on I searched endlessly for a way out. The others thought I was a little off—I heard them when they whispered behind my back, calling me obsessive like my father, among other less generous things. It only spurred me to look harder. They were the crazy ones, not me—how could they not want to know what lay outside the metal blast walls and layers of rock?
The obsession paid off in the sixteenth year of what passed for living in that monotonous hell hole. I'd checked every wall, scrutinized every ceiling, and finally worked my way down to the floors. In a little used generator room, where the back up units slumbered and the broken pieces came to die, one of the metal squares of grating lifted up to reveal the greatest thing I'd ever known.
True privacy.
Back when they built the vault they must've used the squat tunnel as a sort of crawl space, or maybe they left it for pipes and cabling that never got installed. It didn't matter why it was there—just that it existed, and it led to an even more magical spot—my secret world.
A natural cavern, barely tall enough for me to stand hunched over, just long enough to stretch out on the bumpy floor. Everything I could think of got squirreled away in there to make it better—a dim lantern hung from the ceiling, the vodka I stole from Butch's drunk of a mother, and a mattress that damned near killed me to get in there. Pushing it though the crawl space I wound up wrapped in it, stuck so tight I thought I'd die of starvation before I could get free. It got pissed on in fear, but somehow I scrambled out of it, later managing to get it all the way through to the cavern.
Despite using every type of cleansing product on it, I never could get the smell entirely out. Not that it mattered—when I was in my little cave, air growing thick with carbon monoxide and scented with stale urine, I was the fucking Queen of the vault.
Because I found a way outside.
It was my escape, my fortress, my only defense against the grinding dullness of daily life. I never breathed a word of it to anyone, not even Amata, for fear it would be discovered. If the Overseer knew he would seal it off, and the thought of losing the only thing I really considered mine terrified me. I couldn't risk it—and I didn't, not until that fateful day, when Amata looked at me like I really was the Queen of the fucking vault, and I found I liked it.
Proud and cocksure—strutting like I had a real pair wagging between my legs—I led her down to the maintenance room and swore her to absolute secrecy. When she promised not to breathe a word, not even to her father, I tore the square of grating up so fast it clipped the edge of my forehead.
The whole situation blew her mind. She laughed, she gasped, she tried to soothe me as I clutched my throbbing head and swore—she came alive. Fully alive, nothing like the robotic drone her father wanted her—and the rest of us—to be. She was so goddamn beautiful in that moment, so sweet and happy and kind and innocent. She was everything a person should be—everything I wanted to be, but knew I never could.
Reaching the cavern set her off again, minutes passing before she finally stopped running her hands over the walls and finally settled down on the mattress. It might have been a lack of oxygen in the small space, the both of us sucking back air and sneaking sips of booze as we mimicked Butch's retreat over and over again, but we laughed until we were light-headed.
"Want to see my tunnel snake?" Amata joked, kneeling on the mattress and thrusting her hips at my head.
"More like tunnel worm." The face she made set me off again—she was always too fun to tease. "And didn't you want to see it? I thought you had a crush on Butchie Baby."
"Don't be gross," she scolded, flopping down beside me, "I haven't liked him since I was nine." She sighed, a whistle of noise I knew meant she was thinking about something difficult—often something her father didn't want her questioning. "Do you ever think about the future? We're all supposed to marry, for the good of the vault and the continuation of humanity...well, who would you marry?"
"I won't be here." She didn't believe me, smacking me in the arm with admonishments to be serious. I meant every word. "I'm getting out of this place. There's no way—no goddamn way—your father will ever make me fuck somebody like Wally Mack just so he can watch."
Amata gasped, warning me not to talk like that. She always pretended to be shocked by it, but she loved it. I could say the things she didn't dare think for fear of her father finding out. She'd say I was too brave, but she never noticed it was only around her, and only in private.
As if I could ever say that to the Overseer and not be doomed to a lifetime's work in the waste disposal section, shovelling shit for the rest of my days.
"What about you? Who do you want to screw on camera?" Stealing the bottle from her before she could hit me with it, my teasing didn't abate for a second. "Why don't we learn how to do that in class? How To Kiss 101—mandatory attendance for all by order of God, oops, I mean me, the Overseer. We'd put on a better show for him if they taught us something like that."
Amata ignored the comments, pretending she couldn't hear anything other than herself. "I bet Butch would be a terrible kisser."
"He doesn't taste very good, if that's what you want to know." Finally picking out the remaining bit of flesh with a fingernail, I flicked the little piece of Butch at the rocky wall. Amata shrieked when it hit, then shrieked again when it fell off and landed on the end of the mattress. She scrambled to kick it off, giggling so hard she couldn't aim properly. "Of course—going back to our improv pornography discussion—it'd be tricky when it came time for the practical lessons. There's no way your father would let you kiss any boy, least not any with his balls still attached. So...I guess we'd have to pair up girl-girl and boy-boy. Who do you think Butch would choose—Wet Wally, or Paul Hardon?"
"You're sick." Amata lay on her side, slapping the mattress as she laughed, tears welling up in the corners of her large eyes.
"Don't worry, I'd be your partner. Wouldn't want you catching anything from Christine, and Susie'd probably bite your tongue off." I capped off the vodka, setting it to the side. Amata didn't suspect a thing until I jumped her, rolling her onto her back and pinning her down. She turned her slapping hands on me, giggling her ass off as she tried to push me away.
"Am I supposed to say something seductive first? Oh, Amata, you make my blood run hotta. That do anything for you, sugarmuffin?"
"Eew!" Amata's defenses crumpled as a renewed burst of laughter rocked her body. It was like trying to hold onto an electrified radroach, the way she kept jerking under my hands.
"Don't worry, my sweet little Amatacakes. It's only practice. It's not like it's a real kiss."
"You wouldn't dare—" As soon as the words left her lips she went stiff, realizing she said exactly the wrong thing. Those words, whenever she voiced them when alone with me, were like a horde of raiders hollering through my reason, hacking it to shreds with my desire to prove her wrong.
"Just practice," I whispered, suddenly too goddamn aware of the space between my legs and the stifling heat of our little cavern. Before she could protest and I could lose my nerve, I kissed her—boldly, wetly, and altogether sloppily.
As far as first kisses go, it was an explosively hot, horrible fucking failure.
She tried to buck me off, her knee slamming hard into my inner thigh. Falling to the side with a yelp, I rolled onto her arm, accidentally spraining her wrist. We both moaned and cursed each other out until the pain wore off and the alcohol kicked in. Finally, after the bickering stopped, we managed to drag our sorry asses back to the stale confines of the vault, both suffering from our little misadventure into the outside world.
She didn't speak to me until I got her back to her quarters, along with a few stolen drugs for her wrist, filched from the stock my father kept in our rooms. Standing in the Overseer's suite—just like everybody else's boring rooms, only with a larger floor plan—Amata surprised the hell out of me for a change.
"Can we go spelunking again tomorrow?" she asked, before her cheeks suddenly turned the colour of tomato sauce. "No—not for more practice! Not that it was horrible, but it wasn't...I mean, I wasn't..." She squirmed, body wriggling to and fro, the glare of the lights making her blush look twice as bright. "Well, I mean, we could both use some practice, I'm sure, but we don't have to—"
"But if you wanted to..." I only managed those few words before heart-thudding anxiety slammed my throat shut. Maybe she didn't want to, but I sure as hell did.
"You should go, before your father finishes work." She urged me to the door, movements and voice jittery with nerves. Just before I stepped into the hall she blurted out the words that changed our lives forever. "Well, it is just practice, right?"
"Right." I nodded to her as the metal doors slid shut behind me. She had the largest, sweetest, most relieved grin on her face, and in that moment I was hit with a revelation the size of an atom bomb.
I was in love with the Overseer's daughter.
Or in other words—I was fucked.