Jeremy looked up tiredly. "Look, can I get a drink of water?"
"Sure." Nick put his notebook in his pocket and went over and banged on the door. A tiny observation hatch slid aside and a pair of eyes looked through.
"Yeah?"
"Little water here for my young friend, if you don't mind."
The hatch closed, then opened again a minute later. "Stand back where I can see you," the voice said. Nick moved away and the door swung open, revealing a burly, bald-headed cop with an open can of purified water in his hand. "Sullivan's back," he said, handing over the water. "Your chem-head pal got his stuff and now he's sleeping like a baby. You want I should bring him here?"
"No, let him sleep. We've got a while in here yet." Nick went to turn away, but the cop was still standing there expectantly. Nick frowned. "What is it?"
"You owe for the water, Valentine. Twenty caps."
"Yeah? Send the bill to the Mayor's office. Now beat it, I'm busy."
Jeremy drank the water thirstily then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Is this the kind of thing you want to hear?"
"Yup." Nick opened his notebook to a new page. "You keep talking, kid, and I'll keep listening."
-OOO-
Eva was right about one thing. Vault 54 was abandoned. But not in the way she thought.
The door opened into the Overseer's office. That's what it said on the sign outside, anyway. There was a big, circular workstation in the middle with a computer terminal on it and a table along one wall with some chairs and a couple of filing cabinets. Except for a thin layer of dust, everything was neat and tidy, like whoever had been there had cleaned up before they left. It even smelled empty.
The far wall was mostly window, like a viewing gallery. The room we were in looked out over a long, rectangular atrium with a mezzanine running around it on three sides. There were lights at each end, so while you couldn't see much, it wasn't completely dark. The abandoned areas we'd been exploring were mostly like that – just enough light to see where you were going but not enough to make out any detail. And lots of deep shadows where anything could be hiding.
Eva came up beside me and we watched for a while. It was the first time we'd ever seen a place that wasn't the Institute.
Below us, the atrium was empty except for a few tables with benches around them and what looked like vending machines or kiosks up against the walls. Turned out they weren't either of those, but I'll get to that. There was a row of doors down there on each side, all closed, with more at the far end including a set of double doors in the middle. There were doors off the mezzanine level, too, and a series of large, square panels, about six feet on a side set into the floor at regular intervals.
The most important thing is, there wasn't anything moving out there.
We dared not show a light anyway, just in case, but there was enough coming in through the window for us to go through the drawers and the filing cabinets. It felt sort of funny poking through someone else's stuff like that and I had to remind myself we weren't actually planning to steal anything, just find out where we were. It didn't matter anyway, they were all empty. I also tried to hack the computer terminal. There was power to it, but it was password protected and I couldn't get past the log-in screen.
When I looked out the window again, there was still no sign of life out there. It was time to move out.
-OOO-
"Stay back," Jeremy cautioned, motioning for Eva to keep behind him as he eased the door open. She ignored him, crowding up to peer under his arm. Seeing nothing, they stepped nervously out, moving cautiously and staying in the deepest shadows. As they approached the first of the strange floor panels, Jeremy realized it was a metal grill set into a large opening in the floor. He crouched down, trying not to make any noise.
"Some kind of ventilation system?" Eva whispered, bending over him.
"Maybe." He squinted down into the space below. It was completely dark. "Should we shine a light down there?"
"What, and wake up the monsters? Better not."
He grinned up at her. "Let's just keep moving, then. I imagine well find our way down there eventually."
He stood up and glanced over the railing into the atrium, then froze. "Eva, don't move," he hissed.
She stood stock still. "What is it?"
"Those things down there," he whispered. "They're old pre-War Protectrons. Security robots."
Eva turned her head slowly and looked down. From here it was clear what they were. There were five of them, two on each side and one at the end below the Overseer's office, all standing motionless in their domed charging pods. Mesmerized, barely breathing, they watched.
"Let's go back now," Jeremy finally said, his lips against Eva's ear. "Please let's go back. We're hardly any distance from the door. They didn't react to us before. Maybe if we're careful they won't notice us now."
She gripped his arm. "They might not even be turned on," she whispered back. "We could be running from nothing."
"That's what they're supposed to do. They just wait, and then when you trip their circuits, they come out and kill you. I don't want to die today."
"I don't think they do, necessarily," she said.
"Do what?"
"Kill you. I think lots of them just have electric shock wands, to stun people."
"That's not reassuring."
"Still safer than getting shot by a laser."
"This is crazy dangerous, you know."
"Well, what did you expect it? Let's just explore a bit farther," she said, urgently. "Please? And if we see those things start to move, we'll turn around and get out of here, fast as we can. Okay?"
He nodded. "Okay."
Slowly, without making any sudden motions, they edged away from the railing and into the shadows by the wall. The Protectrons remained steadfastly unmoving. Reaching the first door on this side, they slipped into the room beyond. It was a lunch room or recreation centre, with two long tables down the middle and benches on each side, and a counter along one wall with what looked like a kitchen in behind, not much different from the cafeterias at the Institute. A pair of pool tables, the balls racked as if waiting for the next game, took up one end, and there were dart boards on one wall and a television in the corner with some couches grouped around it.
The room next to that was a standard hydroponics set-up, with rows and rows of tables and the faint smell of earth and growing things. But the plant trays were all empty and the shelves were bare. Nothing had grown there in a very long time. On the other side of the atrium was another hydroponics lab and a maintenance room with workbenches and supplies, and tools hung neatly on the wall. Here, as everywhere, the only signs of life were their own footprints in the thick dust on the floor.
Jeremy picked out a heavy, long-handled hammer. He swung it a couple of times, getting a feel for the weight.
"I don't think that will help us against those robots," Eva whispered.
"Yeah, but it makes me feel better," he whispered back.
"Good thinking." She picked out a short length of steel bar for herself, and a small, thin-bladed knife in a sheathe that clipped nicely onto her belt. Their courage bolstered, they carried on.
A stairway led down. The door at the bottom was heavy and barred on this side, but the bar slid back easily and Jeremy eased the door open a crack, peering out into the darkened atrium.
Eva pushed at him from behind. "What are we waiting for?"
"What if this sets the Protectrons off?" Jeremy whispered over his shoulder. There was nothing moving out there and the robots in their pods loomed large and shapeless in the darkness.
"Same as before," she answered. " We just poke our noses out and wait, and if they move, we can still run away. I promise, Jeremy. If they so much as twitch, we'll run for home and not stop until we get there."
He drew a deep breath. "I'll go first and see what happens, " he said. "You stay here."
Holding his breath, he took a careful step out of the doorway, then stopped and waited. Nothing happened, so he took another. Then another. He didn't know whether he was relieved or annoyed to realize Eva had come out with him, but he took a better grip on his hammer with one hand and reached back with the other. She took it in hers, and together they edged along the wall toward the closest Protectron.
The robots in the atrium neither twitched nor moved. Jeremy could feel his heart pounding, and the sound of his own breathing was deafening. The open door behind them was just a darker shadow in the gloom, impossibly far away. But nothing happened. No lights flashed into brightness, no sirens howled, no robots woke to life. And then they were there.
"Maybe they're shut down," he whispered. There was a status panel in the base which he bent down to examine, but the lights were all dark. Greatly daring, he rapped on the clear plastic face of the pod. There was no reaction.
He sighed with relief, wiping his sweat-soaked hands on his jumpsuit. Eva punched him lightly.
"See," she said. "I told you we were safe."
There was a row of small doors running down each side of the atrium and they tried the first one. It was thick and solid, made of metal and securely locked, with a small, barred opening near the top. He poked his light through the bars and swept it around the room. There were two narrow beds, one at each end, with a low metal toilet between them and a washbasin built into the wall next to it. The floor sloped slightly to a drain in the centre, while a set of darkened strip lights ran the length of the ceiling on either side of the grille. Otherwise, it was completely bare, and except for the ubiquitous layer of dust, clean.
"This must be some kind of detention level," Jeremy said.
"What's that there?" Eva said, suddenly.
"Where?"
"There." She pointed at the nearest bed and he moved his light over to it. The frame was sturdily made of metal, the mattress merely a thin pad, and welded to each end, head and foot, were padded shackles on the ends of short, heavy chains.
"What did they do here?" Eva said in a hollow voice. "What kind of prison is it where you have to not only lock people up, but tie them down, too? Was it for punishment? Or was this how they lived, tied down in here every night?"
Jeremy shook his head. "Eva – if half the stories are true, the Vaults were terrible places. And it's going to be just as bad Outside." He grabbed her by the shoulders. "I know you're unhappy at home, but at least no one gets locked in their room and tied to a bed there. And it's not like we can't come back. This place will always be here. We can plan and prepare, and then if we decide we can't stand it, we can just pick up and go."
"Do you really think it's that easy?" she said. "Once we graduate, we'll have our jobs to do. They'll make us get married. And not to each other – I heard my parents talking about it. And then what? Do you really think they'll let us go wandering off by ourselves?" She squirmed out of his grasp. "I'm not saying you're wrong," she said. "But I'm not going back without at least seeing for myself. I'll understand if you don't want to come. But there's a door around here somewhere that leads up to the surface. And that's where I'm going."
Jeremy sighed. "You know I could never let you go alone." And it was true. Once Eva's mind was made up, most people simply found it easier to follow or get out of the way, and he had been following her for too long to stop now. "C'mon," he said, "let's have a look at the rest of this place."
They checked the rest of the cells, just in case, but they were all the same. A set of double doors at the end of the atrium opposite the Overseer's office led into a wide hallway. There was a pair of swinging doors on each side about halfway down, and at the end it opened out into an antechamber with another set of swinging doors on the far wall, flanked by a pair of long windows looking into the room beyond.
"Medical facility," said Jeremy, peering through the window of the right-hand door. He pushed it open and shone his light around. It was a surgery, with a pair of examination tables arrayed beneath large overhead lamps on moveable booms. Cabinets against the walls proved to contain drawers of surgical instruments and other supplies, suggesting that whoever had been here intended to come back. A computer terminal on a desk was powered off and resisted all attempts to bring it to life. But there was something else – and emergency first aid kit.
"Stimpacks," Eva breathed delightedly, opening the case. "Four of them. And Rad-Away," she added, holding up a bottle of radiation sickness pills.
"Do you know how to use that stuff?" Jeremy asked as she stowed them away.
"I took that med rotation, remember? The one you skipped out of. These stimpack things are fantastically expensive, but they'll heal almost anything." She patted the case. "I know it's stealing to take them, but they're literally the difference between life and death."
The other room was quite large, with half a dozen wheeled, padded, tables in it, each in its own space complete with IV poles and instrument stands and various other pieces of medical equipment. Floor-length curtains were tied back against the walls but could be drawn around to provide some privacy for each station.
Jeremy shone his light at the nearest one. It looked like a long, reclining chair, with a raised back and armrests, and at the front a pair of raised, padded supports that swung out from either side.
"Delivery tables," Eva said. "They're for having a baby. " She shone her light on it, too, pointing out the details. "You lie back there, see, and put your legs up on those things."
Jeremy made a face. "That can't be comfortable," he said. "What about those? " His light picked out adjustable cuffs attached to each of the leg and arm rests, and a wide, heavy strap that pulled tightly across the table at what would be about chest height.
Eva shook her head. "Oh my God," she said. "Why are those there? They're for restraint, obviously, but why would Vault-Tec build something like this?"
"Maybe it was an asylum," Jeremy said, shining his light around some more. He got to one of the other tables farther back and stopped. The cushions were slashed and torn, and stained a dark, reddish-brown. One of the stirrups was bent almost flat, and more stains splashed across the walls and dripped onto the floor around it, and on the wall next to it was the clear imprint of a bloodied, human hand.
Eva bent over and retched, her empty stomach heaving a thin stream of bile out onto the floor. Jeremy, too, felt his gorge rising as he stared, unable to wrench his gaze from the scene of horror before them. After a moment Eva straightened up, pulling herself against him and shaking uncontrollably.
"I guess now we know why they tied them down," he said, grimly, putting his arm around her. He fought to control the heaving of his own stomach. "Have we seen enough yet?"
"Yes," she said in a small voice, her face buried against him. "Let's get out of this awful place."
The room at the end was a nursery, with a dozen or so empty bassinets laid out in a neat rectangle in the centre, in front of the large windows that looked back to the ante-chamber from which they'd entered ("A viewing room? " Jeremy asked quizzically. "For who?"). There was a nurses' station at one end with supply shelves and a set of tall filing cabinets behind it, and on the other, change tables and a pair of old-fashioned rocking chairs.
Jeremy began rifling through the supply cabinets in search of anything useful. More of those stimpacks would be nice, he thought, not to mention antibiotics. Or weapons. If they were going Outside, they would need weapons. And food, a rumbling in his belly reminded him. Finding nothing, he was trying to hack into the computer terminal at the nurses' station when Eva called him over.
"Come look at this," she said. She had one of the filing cabinets open and was leafing through some of the files.
He came and looked over her shoulder. "What are they?"
"Baby files, I think. I suppose that makes sense. We're in a nursery, right?" She held one up. There wasn't much in it: an index card labelled "To-01" with a list of typewritten statistics below: date of birth, sex, birth weight and length. "Healthy male / good breath sounds" was scrawled at the bottom. It was clipped to a split-print photograph showing a chubby, new-born baby on one side and a life-sized set of infant footprints in ink on the other. The only other thing in the file was a long form filled with cryptic medical notations ("Some of this is DNA-related, I think," Eva said, "but I don't know what it means"). "REJECTED" was stamped across the bottom in big, red letters, with a date scrawled in pen beneath it.
"Jan 30, 2267," Eva read out loud. "Ten days after his birthday. What does it mean?"
They looked at each other. "It means it wasn't just Vault-Tec that was using this place," Jeremy said slowly, voicing what they were both thinking. Together they went through the next dozen files. They were all like the first one: a photo, a card and a form with "Rejected" stamped across the bottom. All but the last two.
"Je-01," Jeremy read, holding one up. "And Ev-02a. Eva…?"
Eva shook her head. "Oh God, Jeremy, look at their birthdates," she breathed. "How can that be?"
"I see that. They're us. These babies, they're us. They're you and me."
She shook her head again, harder. "No. They can't be. My mother's told me a hundred times about the day I was born, how much I liked being where I was, in her belly, how the doctor made her take long walks up and down the stairs to get her labour started, and then how she held me in her arms afterward." Her breath caught. "I know how I was born, and it wasn't like this."
Jeremy pointed to the baby picture. "Look at her birthmark, just up high above her ear. It's your birthmark, exactly. She even looks a bit like you." He took her hand. "This is you. And that other one there is me. And this place is where we were born."
-OOO-
It was a baby factory, I guess you'd call it. We started working our way through the rest of the drawers, pulling files here and there. The oldest ones dated from back before the War. There was a big gap just after that, then they started up again about a century ago. By then it wasn't Vault-Tec anymore, it was the Institute. After that, there'd be a new set of files every ten or twenty years. Until us. We were the last ones.
They didn't give them names, just numbers. Most of the babies were rejected, all but two or three from each group. Sometimes all of them. What happened to them? And what about the ones who made it, like us? Were they all brought into the Institute? Given to pretend parents and raised to be good little slaves? I guess they must have been.
We found the mothers in the other cabinet. They'd bring them in in groups – ten or twenty at a time, over the space of a few months. It never said their names or where they were from or how they got there. Just their initials and the date they were brought in, their age, height, weight, and a description. And their test results. They tested for all sorts of things: IQ, reflexes, vision and hearing, genetic drift, you name it. Sometimes there were pictures, and they were all pretty. And healthy-looking: good teeth, no radiation scars or deformities, no sign of disease. It didn't much matter, most of them were stamped "Rejected" anyway.
It was a hell of a pyramid we sat on top of. Of sixty-three women brought to Vault 54 in the winter of 2266, only thirteen gave birth, and of those, only two babies were adopted to families in the Institute. I suppose I should consider myself lucky.
Of course, as soon as we found the mother's files, we went looking for our own. It didn't take us long. E.V. and J.E. – you'd think we could have come up with a less obvious way to name children. There weren't any pictures of either one. Eva was disappointed about that, but from the type-written description, they could have been sisters. They were almost exactly the same age, and I didn't need a photograph to know the way her hair would have fallen around her face, or her nose tilt up at the tip, or how her eyes would have flashed when she was angry. Mother and daughter would have been two peas to the pod.
There was a bunch more stuff in there for the women who actually conceived: fertilization dates, conception dates, test results, miscarriages. Eva's mother had given birth to twins, it turned out. I'm not sure how we missed that the first time. Ev-02b. Her form was stamped "Rejected".
After that we just sat on the floor together, all those old files scattered around us, not saying anything, just sitting with our backs against the cabinet and my arm around her. I was thinking about how many times Eva told me she wished she'd had a sister.
Finally, she got up and started putting everything back the way we'd found it. I helped. We both knew there was no going back home, now. How could we, knowing what we did about those poor women and the things that must have been done to them here? I suppose it's possible the Institute paid them handsomely for their trouble and sent them back home. But I didn't think so.
It took us a while to work through the rest of the Vault; I won't bore you with the details. Once we stumbled on a squad of Gen-2 security robots all standing at attention. That was a bad moment, let me tell you, until we realized they were covered in dust just like everything else. Same with the Miss Nanny nursing robots we found in a side room off the nursery. There were barracks-type rooms as well, with beds and lockers, but they were stripped bare and the dust was thick on everything. I don't think the Institute used many humans in their breeding program.
Finally, we found the intake area. It was like the detention level – an open space with a gallery looking down into it. But it was smaller, and instead of cells there were big, open cages along both walls, like the holding unit they had me in here at the police station. There were Gen-2s up there, too, but they weren't moving and we ignored them. Off at one end was a decontamination unit. There were bins there with cast-offs in them – clothes, boots, blankets, personal gear, things like that. It was all pretty poor stuff. Probably they salvaged anything worth keeping and this was just what was left over. But it was better than wandering around in Institute jumpsuits, so we picked out the best we could find and changed into it.
We made one lucky find – a full rucksack, tucked underneath a bunch of other stuff. It must have just got overlooked. Whoever it was, they'd been pretty well supplied. There were some freeze-dried rations – that stuff lasts forever if the seal is good – and a few cans of purified water, which we drank some of right away as by then we were pretty thirsty. There was also a decent sleeping bag rolled up tight and stuffed in the bottom, along with some matches, cooking gear, a canteen and other bits and pieces. It was all stamped "US Army" and looked pretty new. Maybe they'd stumbled across an old military cache. But the best part, there was a gun and ammunition. It was just an old piece of pipe wired onto a wooden frame, and it wasn't much to look at. But it was dead simple to operate: just feed in a cartridge, pull back the slide and pull the trigger. And it was better than nothing.
I thought about the woman who'd owned it. There was no way to tell who she was or how she'd managed to hang on to it. Maybe she'd kept it hidden then stashed it out of sight when no one was looking, hoping she could make a break for it later. Maybe it was my mother, or Eva's. It didn't matter. In the manner of mothers everywhere, she had reached down across the years and given us a precious gift, and in my mind I thanked her for it.
At the far end of the intake area was an oversized elevator, one of the few things we found in there that had power. And at the top of the elevator we finally found the way out.
-OOO-
Eva took Jeremy's hand. "This is it," she whispered.
The elevator opened into a large, high-ceilinged room, roughly cut from virgin rock and clearly at one time a natural cavern. Panels in the ceiling cast a harsh, actinic light over the room, which contained stacks of crates and heavy machinery of the lifting, moving and excavating kind. The uneven floor ended in a deep chasm that split the room in half. The exit door was recessed into the rock wall on the other side. It was about twice the height of a man and shaped like a wide-toothed, steel cog. The hub was painted yellow, with the number "54" stencilled across it, and it opened onto a narrow metal platform with a control panel in one corner. A similar platform extended across the lip of the chasm on this side, with the stub end of a retractable bridge poking out from it. On it was a raised panel with two keys, one labelled "Bridge" and the other "Door".
Jeremy took a deep breath. "I'm ready if you are."
She kissed him, then, long and soft, standing up on her toes to reach his face. His lips opened to meet hers and his arms wrapped instinctively around her. He closed his eyes, pulling her closer and losing himself in the taste of her, the feel of her body and the smell of her hair and skin. The universe shrank until it held only the two of them.
An eternity later, he tasted salt and felt a wetness on his face. Pulling away, he looked down at her in alarm. Tears spilled from her eyes, etching twin tracks down her cheeks.
"It's nothing," she said, laying her head against his chest. "I just didn't realize it would be so hard to say good-bye to everything."
He stroked her hair. "I know." They held each other for a long time, standing there at the edge of the unknown. Finally she giggled, incongruously.
He raised his eyebrows in surprise. "What?"
She giggled again. "Wouldn't you know it? The moment we've both been waiting for, and the most comfortable thing around is the seat of an earth mover."
He blinked in puzzlement, then comprehension flooded his face and he laughed out loud, waking the echoes around them, and so she did, too, and before they were done they had collapsed to the floor, holding each other tightly and shaking with laughter. Afterward, they stood up, wiping tears from their eyes.
"I wouldn't want to do it here, anyway," he said, seriously. "Too many bad things happened in this place. Besides, we'll have lots of time for that." He took her hands and looked into her eyes. "My whole life, if you want it."
"Mine too," she answered, and it was done. They turned the keys together, then watched as with a clank and a rumble the bridge slowly extended itself to latch onto the platform on the other side, and then with a hiss, the door sucked back into the wall and rolled away, revealing a smooth, dark tunnel leading steeply upwards.
She reached out her hand to him and together they crossed the bridge.
-OOO-
Far below, a green light on a control panel winked out suddenly. It stayed dark for a moment, then began to flash an insistent red. A technician consulted the thick manual in the drawer beside her, then reached out and flipped a switch. A view screen lit up. She watched for a moment, then picked up a communicator.
"Sir?" she said. "You'd better come down here."
All across Vault 54 status lights blinked on, and one by one the eye lamps of the Gen-2s flickered to life.
-OOO-