Saturday, October 23rd 2077. It was the day that changed everything. In one moment, everything we knew was obliterated. It could have taken hours, or minutes. I would have been none the wiser. I was leaving work, it was a late night and me and some of the girls decided to camp out in the dressing rooms. The morning was unlike any other, saying goodbye as we filled our pockets with tips. We heard the sirens. We tried to run and find shelter. We were too late. The moment my hand touched the front door a light filled the sky. It was so blinding, burning, burning everything. The glass shattered, I was thrown back and everything went dark.

I don't know when I woke up but I knew I was trapped. Crawling around in the dark for hours trying to find something to give me light. It was agony. My skin felt like it was melting. Every inch of my body screaming in pain. I wasn't the only one. I'd felt the bodies of some of the girls as I passed, crying out and searching for light. Some of them didn't move. Some only wailed in pain. Inhuman, twisted sounds that haunt my dreams to this day.

Light was not the reprieve I thought it would be. It only illuminated the horror that I - we - had become. Trapped in a collapsed building with only the symphony of terror, I thought I would die down there.

I didn't.

I don't know if that was a blessing or not. I watched my friends either die or lose their minds. No matter how hard I begged and pleaded, talking to them… they were gone. They were shells of the people they used to be. I didn't have a word for it at the time, but they'd gone feral.

Days, weeks, months. There was no sunlight, no way to tell the time. How long I'd been in that wreckage I couldn't tell you. I did get out though. I dug my way out, I fought tooth and nail to escape that stone prison, and when I finally looked upon the world I wondered if I should have. The world I knew was gone forever.

Eventually I found people. Ghouls. People that had also survived the bombs. Surviving was hard, but sticking together we had a better chance than wandering on our own. The creatures hadn't started to mutate yet, so we scavenged, moved from place to place. Food wouldn't grow, so staying in one place was useless.

We didn't have a home until fifty years later, about the time we realized that we weren't getting any older. A group of scavengers came upon our camp. They told us of a settlement that was safe, protected. They had named the place Diamond city. It was a brilliant use of Fenway Park. It was the first real taste of civilization any of us had had in decades.

Soil finally became fertile once again. We had fresh food. The walls provided safety from the wastes as the effects of the radiation took hold of the land. We weren't the only things that mutated. It was a dream, like when you're a kid and have hope for the world.

Eventually the vaults started opening. Non-irradiated people started coming out into the world we knew and we became the outcasts. The freaks. We still took them in with open arms. Everyone deserved a chance. We didn't know this would be our downfall.

At first, they were grateful. They integrated into our society. With more people and settlements we created trade routes, farming boomed. We had regular supply of fresh food, and water. There was a slow building economy, and there was more time to enjoy the long lives we had been given.

We let the smoothskins build in the stands, seeing as the field was running out of room. It was sensible at the time, but it turned into a status symbol. We were being looked at differently. They were no longer grateful. We turned up our chins at them at first, it was in human nature to want a sense of superiority. Instead of skin colour or sexuality it had become radiation. We should have thrown them out. We should have done something… but we didn't.

A few generations later and they outnumbered us, two to one. Our people were no longer being elected into power, and we were shunned by them. Some ghouls were smart. They tried to warn us. We wanted to believe in that dream of peace.

We were wrong.

2229. The Broken Mask Incident. A man - a synth slaughtered many people. Just opened fire on the place. We didn't know what a synth could be until that day, and it was the beginning of the end. Mistrust for anyone that wasn't a smoothskin snowballed. We kept to ourselves as best we could, but it didn't stop the harassment. Some of the smoothskins were sympathetic. Plenty didn't openly turn us away but that didn't make us feel any more welcome in the home we'd built.

Mankind for McDonough.

The slogan that would fuel the flames of hatred and fear. We still didn't want to believe. We were stubborn, pig headed. We should have listened, we should have run. We should have done something. Anything. It was too late. He was elected in 2282. His inaugural speech outlawed us in the very city we'd helped build from the ground up. Even those who had been kind to us turned their faces so they didn't have to watch.

The smarter ghouls just left. Some even before election day. We didn't. We stood up to them, standing against them, demanding to be left alone. We stood side by side, arms linked as the Diamond city guards pointed their weapons at us. It was a massacre.

Those who weren't gunned down ran for the ruins. People that hadn't had to fight for their lives in over a century. Unarmed and scared. We had nothing. We were scattered to the wind. One man helped us, John McDonough. He'd been a friend to us ghouls since he'd first arrived in the city, and he'd stood along side us trying to keep our home. Guess family didn't mean much to the newly elected mayor. John got many families to safety, but the world of Goodneighbor was not for them. They too were lost to the wastes.

Many of them are still unaccounted for, and hope is in short supply. Ghouls that once harbored peace now fight for their lives in a world that they once nurtured. I've never been a praying kind, but maybe one day we will find peace again. Stranger things have happened.