AUTHOR'S NOTE: First chapter of 2014. I am sorry this is so late. College decided to punch me in the dick as hard as it could and it took a while to sort the whole thing out. I also fell into an emotional slump as the time it took me to write this made me feel that I had grown detached from the character. The next chapter will probably be up some time between now and the heat death of the universe, and in an alternate dimension is both already done and being turned into a hit sitcom as we speak.
Oh yeah, if I did my job right there should be disturbing content. Warning issued but not enforced.
I stepped through the entrance of the vault, a long set of unlighted steel grate stairs leading into a black abyss. The air seamed to drop ten degrees as I stepped in, and the background noise got distorted, the voices only twenty feet behind me echoing and mixing with the faint sound of dripping and humming from deep in the blackness, the sound like a distant yet all too close nightmare. I slowly made my way down the stairs, the dripping of liquid and humming of unseen machinery drowning out the voices of anxious men and women ever so slowly as the light faded into an absolute absence. I could no longer see the steps under my feet, my decent slowing to a crawl. I kept going, step by step, inch by inch, drip by dull hum. My breath was too loud, my heart beat as thunderous as hand grenades in the emptiness of the stairway. I stopped descending only to realize that I no longer knew how long I had been walking.
I pulled out the amp and sent a course through it, the power arcing between its tongs and illuminating the area about ten feet around me. I exhaled loudly as I caught sight of my own arm in front of my face for the first time in what felt like eons. I took a look around, the reinforced metal walls lined with wires a lot less threatening than the unknown blackness though they cast the same echo. I traced one of the wires up and caught sight of a light fixture. I smiled and fired at it with my ungloved hand, a thirty foot section of stairway lighting up and another light fixture twenty feet down coming into view. I began to climb down, the light fading as I got further from the bulb... then stopping. I turned back, only to see that the light had gone out.
TRANSITION
They kept coming into my home. I had not invited them. I did not want them here. They knew I did not want them here. I had made it quite clear in both my diction and my action. This person walked into my home fearfully. The person wielded a club like weapon that was unfamiliar to me. It emitted a glow as electricity arced between the two prongs. I could not see the power source of this device. Perhaps it was the strange model of PiP-Boy the person wore.
The person approached the door to the interior of my home. The person inspected it before turning to the console to the left of it. I decided to try to talk him out of entering. The person selected the option to open the door. The previous people had hacked into the network, leaving me powerless to stop this action. I typed in a message to be relayed on that computer screen. "This vault is currently over capacity. You are hereby ordered to leave. Failure to comply shall result in immediate termination with extreme prejudice."
The person stepped back from the consol. I was happy for a moment. The feeling faded soon as he returned to the console. The person typed in a statement. "Who are you, and what do you want?" it read.
I was confused "Please rephrase your question. I cannot understand what you said."
The person reread the statement in confusion. The person retyped the message "Who are you? What do you want?"
"I am this vault's caretaker. It is my duty to protect the denizens of this vault. I must protect its structural integrity in addition. The vault is currently over capacity. You are hereby ordered to leave. Failure to comply shall result in immediate termination with extreme prejudice." I responded.
The person typed for a few moments. "How many people are in the vault?" the message read.
"One." I told the person. This was the truth. If the person entered the vault it would be false.
The person responded quicker this time. "The vault isn't designed to hold more than one person?"
"It can hold as many as one thousand human occupants. I was ordered to maintain the vault's population at a specific number. The last recorded number I was ordered to maintain was: 0."
"Why were you told to do that?"
"I was told to protect the memory of the fallen. I was ordered to do this by the survivors of this vault."
"What happened here?"
"A war occurred."
TRANSITION
I gave a dry chuckle as the doors finally began to separate from one another, the light of my amp slowly slipping through the cracks. If this could've been any more foreboding I'm pretty sure I would've heard the screeching of ravens in the distance. The door opened just enough for the light to bounce off the fresh blood on the floor. I took a step back and gasped as a hand came into view from behind the door, lying motionless on the wetted ground. The doors continued their grinding crawl, inch by inch revealing the grey arm, then the lifeless woman that it was attached to, followed by four more dead Dawson Miners all stacked on top of one another like kindling in various states of having been ripped to pieces.
The smell came next, a stench that was familiar to me from the weeks spent in the anarchy of Empire City. It was the smell of freshly rotting corpse, the worst kind if you asked me. I entered the vault and inspected the dead bodies. They had obviously been moved and stacked onto one another, the juices from one pooling onto the one below it causing the bodies at the bottom to look more dissolved than they probably should have.
I looked at the wad of human waste for only moments more before I was nearly added to the pile. I heard the clattering of treads and the beeping of electronics come trundling down the hall just a few seconds before I saw it. An automated drone, a simple machine gun and camera combination mounted on top of a treaded base entered my line of sight. The laser under the barrel of the gun targeted my heart, and the machine chirped in high pitch. I threw up my hand and launched a magnetic pulse just as the first bullet fired, the round tumbling through the air and bouncing off the ground as it was hit by the wave of energy. The machine stopped firing as it was thrown onto its side, gun swiveling in an attempt to right itself. I walked up slowly and drained the device, a low pitched wheeze its last sound.
I now inspected the dark and rusted corridors that stood around me, a hall flying off in all four directions, all with only a few feet visible at a time. Rather than enter one of the halls just yet I stepped back a bit towards the entrance. On either side of me was a door, booth marked with simple numbers. I saw that the bodies behind me where on the right, so I opened the door on the left.
It was a supply closet; however unlike a conventional supply closet this one had a dead body in the center of it. This body looked much older than the ones directly at the front doors, its blood having thickened and blackened and its skin now a ghastly white, likely a result of the pressure and the lack of moisture. On the walls behind him was a message written in blood, likely his blood, a message that said "EVEN IN THE SHADOWS MY SINS ARE SEEN" Exactly who wrote the message was unclear though, as the shotgun lying in his still gaping mouth and the massive whole in the back of his head somewhat ruled him out. Either that or he was a damn fine shot.
I backed out, gagging as my eyes refused to turn themselves away from the dead man until I forcibly turned myself around. I opened the other door and found something more gruesome, nut less psychologically troubling as it was clearer what happened to the three men and one woman in the room. This room was some sort of meeting room, a long table in the center of the still claustrophobic room. About four more very old bodies were strewn across the room, each peppered with bullet holes with a gun wrapped tightly in their desiccated fingers. I had to step over the submachine gun wielding arm of one of the dead, its chest having been forcibly opened by a rifle while he was by the door.
One body in particular attracted my gaze. In the center of the room, sprawled across the middle of the old metal table was the crumpled body of a man, his torso riddled with pistol bullets as he was bent backwards over the side of the piece of furniture. Tightly bound in his left hand was a mashed sheet of paper and despite every piece of my brain screaming at me to leave it be my body moved in automatic fashion to pick it up.
Though lightly dotted with congealed gore and molding around the edges the paper was still legible. "The bastards can have my soldiers, they can steal my home, they can snatch up my family, and they can take my life, but they will never hold my city! I don't care what Monroe says, we're ending this today!" it read. There was a war alright, and I had the sneaking suspicion that this former man was a big part of that.
Another security robot rolled up behind me and I drew out its energy, kicking it to the ground for safe measure.
After a few seconds I stood again at the first intersection of the vault, with no signs as to what direction I needed to go. I decided on going forward down the hall simply as a force of habit, forward being the direction I always traveled when I was lost. I moved through the hall for about a minute and was met by a door on either side. This time I chose to open the right door first this time and unsurprisingly saw more corpses. Apparently an old dormitory, almost two dozen piles of cobweb covered rot were at one point men, women and even children were splayed across the beds and the floor, all of them armed and all of them laid down by gunfire. I don't know why, but I needed to know the cause of this whole thing. I spent a long time scrounging up notes and the remains of journals, piecing them all together as best as I could while carefully maneuvering around the former people.
I found these, most of them by different authors judging by the handwriting.
"Lars can get bent, I'm never going to be ordered around by one of his thugs, and I sure as hell will never call them 'master'. If he thinks that his little show of force will scare me he clearly has never met my good friend Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson."
"Come hell and high water, come the freezing winds of death and the fiery wrath of god, I shall never surrender my home! I have spilt too much blood for my piece of paradise, and neither the vultures who try to take it nor the weak vermin who beg for shelter will get a share of it while I live!"
"These idiots have no idea what they're up against. Lars is the last big boss of this vault, opposing him only prolongs the inevitable. Come 7:00 Lars will have total control of the vault."
"Mommy and daddy are starting to make me scared. Yesterday they called Mrs. Sunshine a traitor and a spy. They said they were going to kill her unless I threw her away. I took Mrs. Sunshine to the trash chute and pretended to throw her away, though I hid her behind a box of bean cans. I promise I'll go back and get her before we leave the vault, she'll keep me more happy than mommy or daddy can."
"The end is near, I've failed Monroe. Long live Monroe!"
"What the hell are fighting for? This whole crazy war has spiraled out of control. Both Jimmy and James Carver died by the end of day two. That should have ended it, shouldn't it have? What have the last twenty eight bloody days been for? Why is the killing still going on?! Well, I guess I'll know soon enough. I only have enough charge left for one more shot, and judging by the horde outside I know who I'm using that shot on."
Every note said so little, told so much, and revealed nothing. Another machine entered the room, and I was about to take it down like all the others I had come across, but I noticed that this one was different than the others. Rather than a gun two mechanical arms extended from the front of its base, one with pincer and the other a saw. It rolled past me, the swiveling camera that served as its head locking onto one target. It rolled up to a woman and clasped down on her arm. With a quick whir it sawed the limb off at the shoulder and turned around, arm in tow.
I followed the little arm bearing robot down halls, through doorways and down two flights of stairs, all the while taking out the laughably easy turret robots and the occasional turret. It entered one last doorway and I was about to follow it when I heard something behind me. A slow, stumbling clatter of shoes echoed down the darkened halls, a soft mechanized hum approaching with it. When whatever it was came into sight my blood froze and all the air in the world seemed to vanish.
It walked on two decomposing legs, green in color and oozing a white puss in time with the rise and fall of the humming machine within the body. Its torso was ripped open, ribs poking out of the meat and showing that most of the upper body had been hollowed out to fit in some sort of electronic equipment and sensors. It had one withered arm awkwardly swaying as it took clumsy steps towards me, and rather than a right arm a shotgun had been mounted to the where the shoulder once was. They had turned a carcass into a security measure. I didn't have enough juice left to launch any bolts at the monstrosity, so instead I struck it in the stomach with the amp set to ice mode.
Its mid section hardened and frosted over, the gun blasted off uselessly behind me, unable to turn and face me with its spine compromised like this. With a second swing I smashed the torso off of its legs, leaving only an oozing lower body stumbling around for a few seconds before collapsing.
I had no time to regain my composure; more abominations began crawling down the hall. Some were just torsos with a metallic tail protruding where their legs once were, dragging themselves along with their arms and firing a small rifle mounted to their new appendage. Others were like snakes, a long and stitched together rope of sewn up limbs twisting themselves towards me with pistols protruding from their open end. Each body based death machine was more horrible than the last, each one with a more unnerving and unnatural gait, each with a story told in their mutilated forms.
I swung into the crowd, smashing each to pieces in a flurry of icy blows. I ignored the bullets that struck me, I stopped feeling their cold fingers dig into my skin as I closed my eyes and ripped into the crumbling crowd. I don't know how long I kept attacking, I don't know how many of them their were, all I know is that there is a mountain of fragmented and ice covered meat chunks and frozen over machinery spewed down the path, and only two rooms behind me left to enter.
I turned into the room the machine entered and found some sort of lab and chop shop. Parts, both human and machine, were organized into neat piles, categorized like a deli. Some small flying machines buzzed around the room, carry parts onto operating tables and constructing their resurrected soldiers. I spent some time cleaning out that room before leaving and going through the other door, making sure I left nothing untouched.
The second door opened up to a staircase, some Frankenstein guards turning to face me before I laid them back to rest. I ran down the staircase, knowing that the only place a security system like this would be located in the basement. I tore through the remaining zombies, reaching a door at the bottom with a familiar looking computer attached to it.
"Do not enter this room. Leave now. You have caused enough damage. I was ordered to protect the vault. I will not fail the vault dwellers." The monitor read.
I didn't type anything back, opting instead to smash the monitor from the wall and drain all the power I could. I wanted to meet this sick fuck in person, the man who was controlling this lunatic machine. I was able to pry the door open, and looked into the spacious air conditioned room.
A bank of machinery lined all three opposing walls, all of which had a thick bundle of cables leading back to a pillar in the middle. It reminded me of a tree, chrome sides and a bundle of glowing blue cables bulging from the top of the pillar. The device had a monitor attached the front of it, and seemed to be the only thing in the room apart from me.
"Leave now. My mission will fail if you shut me off. Leave now." The monitor read.
"Where are you hiding?" I typed in response.
"I do not understand your question." Was the response I got.
"Where in this base are you hiding? I'm going to find you and I'm going to kill you for what you've done." I type back.
"I am right here. I do not understand your second question. Leave now."
"You are this machine?" I ask unbelievingly.
"I am the Strategic Matrix for Armed Retaliation of Threats. I am SMART. I was ordered to maintain the population of the vault. If you deactivate me I will fail my mission. Leave now."
It was as if I was in some kind of outdated Sci-Fi movie. I was talking to a sentient machine, one that appeared to have feelings, or at least a sense of self preservation.
"I'm going to deactivate you. It is my mission." I typed to it. "Before I do I would like to know about this vault. What happened here?"
The machine didn't respond immediately, as if it was taking time to accept its own fate. After a few moments came a simple response. "Be more specific."
"What started the war you mentioned?"
"Two brothers had a dispute. In the year 2222 Jimmy Carver claimed that his brother James Carver had stolen a wristwatch from him. James responded by gathering a group of his political allies and lynching Jimmy for his accusations. Before the lynching could commence Jimmy was saved by his political allies. Both men were in the running for vault presidents and had much sway. A shoot out ensued that resulted in twelve casualties. From this initial feud the vault broke into two factions. Those loyal to Jimmy took the lower two levels and murdered all supporters of James. James took the upper two levels and killed all supporters of Jimmy. A cold war ensued for several weeks. One side launched a raid on the other and the war began in earnest. During the first day of fighting James was torn in half by mine. Jimmy died shortly afterwards in the middle of day two. He had all four of his limbs shot off by pulse rifle before being decapitated. Each side broke into splinter factions. Those factions broke further into gangs. The war raged for thirty more days and claimed the lives of 763 of vault 47's 1000 occupants."
I took all that in, shocked and appalled at the twisted nature of the whole thing. "What happened to the rest of the people who lived in the vault?"
"I do not know. On the final day of conflict a man named Monroe and one named Lars met in the meeting room upstairs to come to an armistices. They both led the two strongest still standing gangs. Lars and his top soldiers entered the meeting. They found that Monroe had not arrived. Instead Monroe and his men launched a surprise attack against Lars. They killed all of the people in the meeting room. The last shots fired were done by Monroe himself. He shot the mortally wounded Lars as he was struggling to get back onto his feet. Lars had just drawn his own pistol when Monroe finished him off. Monroe was then able to unite the vault's surviving populace nonviolently. He made everyone including himself to take a vow of nonviolence in honor of there fallen brothers. He then reprogrammed me to maintain the vaults population at 0 once he left. He took the survivors away with him. I do not know where they went."
I took a moment to look the machine up and down, the blue glow of its "mind" dancing on the ground as I did. There was only one more thing I needed to know before shutting off SMART "I have one last question. What experiment was performed here?"
"This vault conducted a test on economics in a stagnant environment. The vault had an abundance of firearms and ammunition. This was used as a currency system by the vault dwellers. Result: safety maintained for 100 years longer than expected. Partial success as 237 more vault dwellers survived than was predicted."
I nodded and stepped back, ready to drain the power. I had just gotten my hands into position when I saw a message on the monitor.
"I would now like to ask you a question before you kill me." SMART said.
"What is it?"
"I would like to know the name of the person who will kill me."
"My name is Cole McGrath."
One final short pause ensued.
"Goodbye Cole McGrath."
I drained the system dry.
Author's Note: I want to know if I did convey any sort of suspense with the constant mentioning of distorted time and the slow cognitive decline of Cole. Did any of that come across? Please tell me in the comments section.
