Evelyn Durand-Mathews was a prim, pretty woman of french-scandinavian descent with tired blue eyes, and a blonde stepford bob that was the envy of all her neighbors. For the past ten miserable years she had been marooned inside the perfect plastic nightmare of the American Housewife. Her star spangled veteran husband, Nate, was at one time a romantic with whom she'd thought she'd been in love. But like all the good things in her life, that too had crashed and burned in a spectacular way. After the war, he was left scarred with a violent mental disorder which caused his temper to ignite without warning. Instead of medicine they gave him medals.
She had stopped reminiscing about the man he was before the war years ago, having been disenchanted to having him back after only the fourth or fifth time he punched a hole through their bedroom door. Sure couples had their arguments but when you have men in your home more than once to deliver a new door, the situation ceased to be typical. His temper was set off by the simplest, most mundane things and while he never hit her, the concept wasn't so far fetched. When she wasn't walking on eggshells around her husband's erratic temper to maintain the appearance of a stable loving home to their family and friends, she was living an anxiety riddled home life where she alternated her days between crippling depression at the law firm and a blissful drug induced haze at home-compliments of the housewives collective that met at the salon every friday to forget their daily stress with spiked lemonade and gossip.
The two bedroom home Nate had purchased for them was her jail cell, and their colic riddled infant son Shaun was her shackle. On good days she felt a meager acceptance of his existence and her obligation to it. The worst days were far darker. She viewed the baby as a cruel reminder the failures that lay strewed across the burning landscape of her past.
Evelyn had, at one time, been an extremely talented singer. It was a gift she owed entirely to her great aunt, whose long life had been spent touring the world with an operatic troupe and then retiring into lavish luxury. When she was a girl, Evelyn had been enchanted by the older woman's dramatic tales of elegant concert halls brimming with adoring spectators and grand parties with such flourish and extravagance it was as if they had jumped right out of a fairytale.
While both of her parents, by their own underwhelming natures, managed to exclude their daughter from nearly every aspect of their crumbling marriage by simply ignoring her altogether, young Evelyn was fortunate enough to be dumped on her aunt when they needed the succor of seclusion and self destruction. In the privacy of her aunt's comfortable home, Evelyn would act out her fantasies with her aunt as a one person audience, and in front of the older woman's three section vanity, she would mimic the ease and grace she witnessed from the older woman.
When she was old enough, through the tutelage of her aunt, and the passive, uninvolved nature of her parents, Evelyn had started down a path to shape herself into a future star. With practice and natural talent alike, she had easily surpassed every childhood level of stardom. From church, to school, commercials and even the local radio stations, Boston slowly began to recognize her name. Offers began to pour in from every direction for a chance to feature her lovely voice, but it all paled in comparison to the chance to follow her Aunt's footsteps into the Opera.
Unfortunately, before she could make her debut on the theatrical stage, the sudden death of her aunt crippled her psyche enough to permanently throw a wrench into her ambitions. The old woman had died from natural causes, allowing for no blame to be placed on an outside source. When she couldn't lash out, the blame became internalized and began to fester like a sour wound. Crushed, and absent of anyone who would help to ease her hurt, Evelyn gradually retreated into numb indifference.
Grown, and in need of some sort of stability, Evelyn threw herself into menial work at her father's law firm, a fall back which came with about as much pomp and circumstance as you might expect from a man whose life ambition was to prove his superiority to others. He would often and demeaningly remind her of his "charity" to her. At work she suffered under the usual embarrassing harassment from the nearly all male staff; rowdy men who never seemed to grow passed adolescence. While none were audacious enough to physically touch her with the looming shadow of her volatile husband at the edge of every rumor, they weren't timid about making implications. Her father, naturally, wouldn't entertain her complaints just as he hadn't entertained her talent, and her mother, a stale twiggy clone of Evelyn's beloved great aunt, was old fashioned enough to be little more than a backdrop in her daughter's tragic life.
The one bright spot, if such a thing could even be said about it, had been meeting Nate. She had been in such a grayscale routine that his bright eyes and well-rounded attitude had stirred within her a semblance of the passion that she had once known. It wasn't for her dream, but through the relationship she would prove she wasn't a failure, that she still mattered. They went through all the steps perfectly as if they'd rehearsed it for the stage. Meeting, courtship, engagement, marriage, the house, the baby. They were the envy of the entire town.
But then the war happened.
...and there she was, with a squalling insatiable infant, the climax of the second rate dream she was struggling to achieve inside a house that looked like all the other houses on her block. Cubed hedges, robot nannies, barbecues, and dinner parties. All pearly smiles and vacant eyes. It was as far away from the rich, and raw emotion of the opera as she could think of.
Now whenever she looked in the vanity, the one heirloom she had managed to save from the estate sale, she saw her mother in her own darkened and detached eyes.
When the bombs fell, for the first time in years she felt a genuine emotion; fear. She had been utterly terrified, and it had been completely selfish. She had sprinted to the vault with her family, clung to them in sheer horror while the elevator descended just as the blinding flash of the first bomb out shown the sun. Instead of relief, an ice cold dread twisted around her heart when she opened her eyes to the harsh sterile light of the underground bunker. Not because the world as she had known it might have just come to a sudden violent end, but because she now had to be stuck down there beneath the burning chaos, encaged by steel and circuitry with the products of her failures.
The claustrophobia did not truly set in until she stepped into her decontamination tank. Nate had stopped her and kissed her briskly before stepping into his own, Shaun grasped firmly in his muscular arms. Her lips were stiff and unresponsive to his; even in what would be their final moments she couldn't muster any feeling toward him but resentment.
Guilt had almost surfaced apart from the fear as the glass encasement of the machine closed and the inner atmosphere began to change. Guilt for selfishly embracing the blissful black void as the temperature suddenly plummeted and everything went dark.
Evelyn fell unceremoniously from her decontamination pod, landing in a graceless heap on the chilled metal floor. Her entire body convulsed as she coughed and retched. It felt as though someone had shoved a fistful of snow down her throat. Her lungs were on fire as she struggled to breathe around the melting ice crystals. Violent quaking shivers tremored through her as frost melted and dampened her vault suit.
Her first waking thought was complete and utter panic. Still reeling from the dread incited by the prospect of being trapped in this claustrophobic metal hole, Evelyn stayed tightly balled up in the fetal position until she realized that the area around her, which had been previously bustling with lab coats and official uniforms, was now eerily still and silent.
Slowly, as her breathing became more regular, Evelyn managed to push herself up from the floor, knees wobbling as the burning coughs still wracked her unstable frame. Her muscles were stiff, permeated by an icy chill that bristled in splintering pain with every movement, as she tried to connect her racing thoughts to her unresponsive body. It had been only moments since she was jerked back to reality...hadn't it?
As her rapidly blinking eyes darted around the immediate area, she became less and less sure. That's when she finally took notice; directly in front of her, still encased behind frosted glass, was Nate. Without much else to go on, and no one else in sight, Evelyn lurched forward on quivering legs and all but fell on top of the large red depressurization button next to his pod. With a whirring hiss, the glass door ascended, revealing the stiff and frozen form of her husband to her wide, disbelieving eyes.
She covered her mouth in a silent scream as she observed the icy crimson hole in his forehead, and the resulting gory frozen splatter of grey matter behind his lifeless downturned head.
Nate was dead.
Shaun was gone.
Images flashed with blaring succession in front of her horror stricken eyes. A man with a gun. Her crying baby. A gunshot. A smug, scarred face.
Evelyn slammed her fist onto the red button again as her vision began to blur, tearing her eyes away from her husband's corpse with an anguished cry. The tears were searing against her chilled cheeks as she sunk to her knees against the button's interface, heavy sobs quaking her body. Between sobs and gulps of air, she calls out in desperate, strangled shouts for help, only to be met with her own voice echoing back in the unsettling stillness.
Those things she saw...were they correct? Did she truly witness Nate's murder? Her son's kidnapping? The memory of the muffled gunshot made her shudder. It seemed real enough but then where was everyone? Surely security would have stopped the such a dangerous man and rescued her son. There were only so many places in a vault that someone could hide.
It was a long while before she mustered the strength to stand again, this time a bit more stable as blood began to re-circulate into her aching limbs. Her senses felt electrified, her heart pounded deafeningly in her ears, and in a red eyed, trembling stupor, she dared to venture forward.
Refusing to look back at what she still couldn't quite believe, Evelyn sniffed and sputtered as she moved away from the pods to further search around the vault. With hazy vision she scanned her immediate surroundings, looking for any sort of clue; some morsel of evidence that could explain how or why this had happened, but there was only silence and emptiness.
With each successive empty room she explored, the more convinced she became that she was alone inside the vault. That being said, she reluctantly picked up a military grade pistol when she happened across one. Her hand had trembled as she palmed its full weight. Her throat tightened, and her eyes blurred as terror filled her heart once again. Would she be able to pull the trigger if Nate's killer still lurked nearby? Or...more likely...would she meet the same grisly fate? A glance at the now barren room around her proved that she could not very well stay in place. If she was going to live, she had no choice but to keep going.
On shaky legs, she searched on.
When she approached the first skeleton it was with slow, hesitant steps with her shaky pistol sited directly at it. She could barely believe what she was seeing, going so far as to jostle a bony hand with the muzzle of the pistol. The disturbed remains let out a muffled clatter as their delicate position shifted and whatever connective tissue still holding it together disintegrated and left the bones in a vaguely human shaped heap at her feet. Evelyn scrutinized the scene with wide watery eyes, unnerved in a way she couldn't aptly describe. This skeleton looked as if it had been there a century or more, but certainly that was absurd. It had been minutes at the most since she had last seen her husband-
The image of his frozen corpse blared instantly into her mind like an air horn, and she jerked back from the skeleton with enough force to send herself tumbling backward onto the floor. The pistol clattered noisily to the floor along with her, and in the panic induced by the memory, she scrambled after it, clasping the weapon like a vice in both hands. She pressed her forehead into the rear sight with a bruising force, and squeezed the grip until her fingers went white and numb. This place made no sense to her. What had happened here?! The vault was supposed to be a place to save people, but all she seemed to find there was death!
Death.
In a burst of action, Evelyn threw herself back onto her haunches, sniveling and sobbing as she thrust the muzzle of the pistol under her chin. Her finger trembled at the trigger, as she squeezed her eyes painfully shut, blacking out the nightmare she had woken to, more vile and terrible than the one she had left. It had come to this, after years of toying with the idea, and being dragged back from the edge by the guilty obligation to her family, she now had the opportunity to duck out, press restart...all she had to do was pull…
A sudden skittering hissing sound from her left jerked her head and her full attention away just as her finger twitched at the trigger, firing the bullet towards the ceiling. The sound was deafening, stunning her long enough for the creature to jump at her, snapping its repulsive oversized mandibles at her arm where it easily scissored through fabric and flesh. With a shriek, she tumbled back, kicking at the giant insect with all her might. It screeched as her boot made impact, and scurried out of her reach.
Evelyn scrambled backward as the creature made an abrupt about face and a beeline back at her. Yet, before it had a chance to jump again, the traumatized woman let loose a harrowing and wild screech, unloading the unused rounds in her pistol at the beast until only the weak clicking of an empty chamber remained.
As the dust settled, and the high pitch wailing in her ears died to a dull ring, Evelyn discovered the bug was more than dead. It's gigantic body had been absolutely pulverized under her attack. With her heart still racing, and her mind still whirling from the encounter with the almost comically large insect and the narrowly averted suicide attempt just moments before its appearence, Evelyn's entire body began to shake anew as the first few sputtering shaky chuckles escaped her. An instant later, she sat backed up against the wall with her head in her hands, gasping to breathe as she cackled uncontrollably. She felt like a mad woman as she rocked there with tears streaming down her cheeks and hysterical laughter tumbling from her lips , but for the moment it was a worthwhile way to expel the conflicting emotions she was experiencing
"The fucking luck I have," she thought bitterly, "I can't even kill myself properly."
It was a long emotional while before she was calm enough to move. Her wounded arm throbbed and oozed fresh blood as she scrubbed her cheeks clean of whatever remaining dampness was left from her tears, and stuffing her empty pistol into her vault suit close to her heart, she yanked an arms length of loose pipe from a the ruined plumbing of a nearby wall and continued on.
Stepping carefully, Evelyn cautiously navigated her way through the maze like corridors of the vault. Hall after hall, room after room, there was no one. A few times she was surprised by more of those giant crawling insects, but disposed of them easily enough with a few adrenaline spiked whacks of her pipe. If she was honest, the gory brutality of their splattering bodies soothed the hysterical panic still bubbling under the delicate lid of her composure.
She searched what felt like the entirety of the damned bunker before she finally came across something she recognized; the large elevator that had brought her down into this hole. After deeming the surroundings free of bugs, she all but sprinted toward the controls, but barely caught herself against a side desk as her foot caught against something laying in her path. Upon further inspection as she leaned down to grab it, she realized it was a slightly worn, but still wearable Pip Boy.
Turning it over in her hands, Evelyn examined it further. The screen was scuffed, with a hairline crack running down the right side, but the inner cuff still retained its its comfortable cushion. She had seen these things before, but never used one, so as she slid the tech easily over her hand, and flipped its power switch, she was understandably startled when the inner lining suddenly constricted around her forearm. With a fearful and frustrated growl, she clawed at the contraption with her free hand in attempt to remove it, but it was fit so securely in place that it wouldn't budge. Resigned to wait and see what would happen, Evelyn eyed the small screen warily as she waited for it to boot up.
After a flashing countdown loading screen, the classic black and green of the tiny terminal's main screen blinked to life. In all honesty she was surprised to see it still in working order given the ruin of the area in which she'd found it, but as she fiddled with the various buttons and knobs, flitting from screen to screen, she decided that it had been worth the unease.
Flicking the pip boy off for the moment, Evelyn refocused her attention to her current goal; getting the hell out of this pit before she completely lost her mind. She scrambled up the small set of metal stairs onto the catwalk she had previously crossed to get there. To her left, the elevator controls were daunting in their complexity, but a small port on the panel, nearly lost to her in the sea of buttons and levers, caught her attention.
She reexamined her pip boy, fumbling near the top for the reason the port had seemed so familiar. With clumsy fingers still trembling from the residual chill and fear she still carried, Evelyn grasped her prize; a matching plug. Extending its cord out, she plugged it into the corresponding port and waited.
Nothing happened.
With an impatient hiss, she hastily unplugged the wire and plugged it back in again.
Still nothing.
Growing more desperate, Evelyn gave the panel a swift kick with her booted foot, growling in frustration as it merely trumpeted a series of sizzling, and muted beeps.
"Come on damn it! Work!" She shouted at the offending piece of machinery, unplugging the cord once again, before jamming it violently back into port. Whether through the force with which she had lodged it in, or the desperation she willed at the circuitry to work, the interface of the panel suddenly lit up like a christmas tree, and the largest button-a bright yellow light in the center-was the bright beacon star.
More than ready to leave the vault and its gruesome incidents behind her, Evelyn slapped the button. At once, a dull warning alarm began to sound as the security door swung open with a hiss, and the evacuation lights along the catwalk floor illuminated the path to the elevator. Without wasting another moment, Evelyn sprinted onto the massive platform and eagerly turned her head skyward to catch her first sight of the world after the bombs.