Full body numbness awaits Carolyn as she slowly blinks into consciousness, cold and consuming like an unforgiving winter frost. Her limbs ache with the simplest movement, a grip of her fist, and a full body shift in an instinctual need to relief the discomfort. In a single sharp breath, the beginnings of a hard yawn, the crisp and stale air catches in her lungs like noxious smoke, her chest feels constricted, crushed with an invisible force. Her initial breath is exhaled in rejection, coughing as she tries to gulp mouthfuls of oxygen that isn't there. The panic sets in, a simultaneous struggle for air and ragged process of trying to recognize her surroundings. She recalls in a general sense what the pod looks like from the outside, only a brief glance through the shock and numbness of trauma that didn't register anything permanent in her memory. The inside is just the same, but she knows where she is, that realization allows her to process what it is that she has to do next. Her arms are weak and almost lifeless at her sides, but all the same she reaches forward, blinking through the blur in her vision, and presses against the pod door, staring out through the frost clouded window to the outside where across from her she sees the pod where she last saw her husband.
Nate, where she saw the pod door open and strangers reach out for her son, taking him from her husband with a single shot to his chest that threw him back against the padded support. It's a haze, like a dream, a nightmare, only a nightmare because nothing that cruel could ever happen in real life, not to her.
Carolyn presses hard against the door, the balls of her jumpsuit boots pressing against the bottom where it lifts up, she kicks with increasing ferocity, with adrenaline fuelled panic, gasping and coughing until finally the crack of ice and the rush of warm air floods the chamber like warm honey and she pushes herself forward to urge the door up. It makes a mechanical hiss, her only support lifts away and she falls forward, tumbling in a heap to the metal floor at the foot of the opening with a painful slap.
Her entire body cramps at once, her air starved lungs try to expand through her racking coughs. The rush of blood pools in her head with in uniform headache that encapsulates her skull with pain. She squeezes her eyes shut, curled in a ball on the bitter flooring trying to concentrate on breathing.
There is a sudden warm hand on her back that startles her immediately, she flinches away from it and the soothing voice that follows, "Hey, hey, it's okay, just breathe."
"Nate?" She gasps hoarsely to address the man's voice, identifying it immediately as her husband flutters hope and joy in her chest until she finds the strength to turn and look at him.
A narrow feminine face, pale and highly contrast to the black both in his narrow eyes and in his hair. It alarms her to see someone so visually different than Nate that she doesn't recognize him at first, but when he smiles light and reassuring, her mind finally clicks. It's Nora's husband, "Don?"
"Yeah..." His answer is solemn.
Carolyn opens her mouth to ask urgent questions she hasn't yet fully formed internally, but she's interrupted by a sickly pleasant and automatic voice that mimics the same tone as the voice in her pod that spoke to her moments before her mind fell to sleep, one she only remembers in a jolt as it speaks overhead.
"Critical failure in Cryogenic Array, all Vault residents must vacate immediately," It echoes across the room to demonstrate its mechanical emptiness, what it says makes no sense to Carolyn, because as far as she knew, the pods were supposed to decontaminate them.
She looks down to her hands, her forearms wrapped in a bright blue and yellow jumpsuit, and focuses in on the sheen of water lying in puddles around her palms. The cold she experienced while in the pod, it was some kind of Cryogenic freezing? Why on earth would Vault-Tec freeze them to take them into the Vault?
Carolyn lurches forward, scrambling to her feet with a sudden urgency at the thought of what effect this is going to have on her husband on her infant son, the effects could permanently damage Shaun's delicate and still developing lungs, he could stop breathing, or choke, his heart might not be able to handle the stress.
"Hey," Don quickly stands with her as she sways with vertigo, "You really shouldn't-"
"Do you know how to-?" Carolyn stumbles over to the pod directly across from the one she'd just come out of, gripping the door with both hands to rest her weakened legs. The glass is frosted over and covered in some kind of dark smear, "You know how to open this?"
He stands stationary, looking at Carolyn with a mixed expression of sorrow and sympathy as he hesitates to answer. Pure and unmitigated fear strikes through Carolyn's heart and she presses for immediacy, "Don!"
Without answering, he quickly marches over to the panel sitting between Nate's pod and the one to its left. A square box with a bright red handle switch that he grabs and pulls downward to lock in place, bracing himself palm down and ducking his head in hesitation as the pod emits a hiss and showers ice flakes at Carolyn feet moments before she backs away.
When Nate comes into view, her pounding heart suddenly comes to an unforgiving halt.
He's laying back against the pod cushioning, his body slumped slightly to the right with a mild bend in his knees, his bright blue matching jumpsuit is covered in a layer of frost not yet melted, his face is slack, hanging down so his brunette bangs hide his eyes from immediate view. Carolyn's gaze drags over, a shock fuelled languid turn of her head that focuses on a wound sitting almost perfectly center on the left side of his chest. Where one would usually see a large red commercial heart painted to symbolize love is now a large oozing deep scarlet chasm flaked in small bits of ice.
And the small white blanketed bundle last in his arms is nowhere to be seen.
Carolyn takes a step back, her foot attempting to hold the weight of her move but failing to follow through and it collapses her right back onto the ground. The haze she had recalled as nothing but a nightmare had not been what she thought, it had been all somehow so horrifyingly real.
She'd witnessed the entire scene, a man and woman had approached Nate's pod, opened it and tried to take her baby from his arms. He'd refused, snarling in protest only moments before the man with the scar had shot him. The gunfire had shocked her ears, ringing in complaint to the sound as the cries of her infant son retreating had slowly come through. She can't recall anything more than the look of the man's face as he's come up to her pod to look in, calling her 'the backup' as though killing Nate had no more adverse effect on him than losing some kind of caged animal.
Breathless, Carolyn folds her arms up like she was holding Shaun against her chest, patting his back to ease air from his stomach after a feeding, the soft, warm, impossibly tiny person so dependent and delicate. Her stomach twists with the sudden awful realization that someone had taken her son, someone opened her husband's pod and shot him dead to do so, people who don't look like Vault-Tec, people from somewhere else.
It's not until Carolyn exhales a sob that she registers how hard she's crying, her nose burning, her throat aching. Her pain is the only sound echoing around her that she can hear, but her moans of denial sound like they're coming from the very room around her. Someone took her baby.
Don stands by the switch to watch in dire confliction, not saying a word. He elects to close the pod door once again to hide the body from her view, as if doing so will somehow help to ease her grief.
"I'm..." He starts to speak but hesitates as if to figure out what he could possibly say to convey his sympathy. Carolyn can't even manage to stop rocking her body, let alone register he's even still in the same room. So with light receding footsteps, he allows her to express her grief in privacy.
For what feels like a long span of time, Carolyn alternates between hoarse cries of painful grief and soft gasping sobs that ease as she holds herself. Eventually after what feels like an hour, she's gently rocking with the roll of her heels as her forearms brace her head while it rests limp against her knees. Tears and snot are drying on her face and a stark shiver from the chill of the room is crawling up her spine without regards to her process. It's not long after she stops making any noise at all that Don comes back into the room.
"Hey," He says gently.
Carolyn's hand is curled up against her head, gripping a handful of hair to ground her mind, but she says nothing to Don and only continues to rock herself with the intent to stay just as she is.
"I, uh... it's safe here for now, I took some time to clear the place out before I woke you up," He motions behind him, "But we can't stay, not for long."
She shakes her head; she doesn't want to think about anything else right now, she wants Don to leave her alone. She's trying so desperately to disassociate from this nightmare, to be somewhere else where nothing bad ever happens, she must have died because this is the closest to hell she can conceive from her own imagination.
Don approaches her after a moment of silence, "Carolyn, I..." He hesitates, "We need to get moving, we can't stay here."
"No," She whimpers.
"Look, we have no idea what kind of trouble we're in right now, or what's going on topside, frankly I don't even know if I want to find out, but we need to get our bearings, okay?"
Carolyn peaks up at him fuelled by irritation and the desire to be left alone, "What are you talking about?"
He shrugs to emphasize his own uncertainty, "Well, I kind of hacked into the Overseers Terminal when I woke up, I only have a relative guess as to how long we've been in here, but according to the records, we way surpassed the mandatory shelter period."
"What?" Carolyn asks, "How long has it been since...?"
"Well, mandatory shelter period is about two hundred days," He explains, "But considering the remains... I think it's been at least a decade, maybe more."
"A decade?" Carolyn gasps, "That's impossible, there's no way- we couldn't have been-"
"Hey, we won't know until we get out of here, I mean, I can't carbon date the remains of whoever else here wasn't frozen immediately, I'm not into that kind of science, none of the terminals recorded the passage of time either, I tried that," He rubs his neck, "I'm a lot better with machines, so it's all guesswork."
"We were frozen, why?" She demands.
"According to the Overseer logs, they were testing out long term effects of Cryogenic stasis, I guess," He sighs, "Post-bomb drop is kind of a shitty time to experiment if you ask me..."
Her head shakes in disbelief, "Why would Vault-Tec do that?!"
Don speaks plainly, "I don't know."
"But you worked for them," Carolyn accuses with a choke, "Why are you still here and not-?!"
She can't say his name, either of their names, so her outrage falls short. Don doesn't appear to take any offense, but his voice lowers as he speaks.
"Because they froze me too," He admits, "I had no idea what was going on, I was in here doing maintenance on the door controls, I was nowhere near this machinery, I had no idea what they were really doing, I didn't even find out about Nora until I... checked the logs and... she didn't..."
His voice wavers and cracks, unable to finish his sentence as he turns and runs a hand over his face with a wet sniffle. Carolyn suddenly gasps in recollection, "Oh my god..." She covers her mouth in horror, "Oh my god, Don, I... I'm so sorry, she was right behind us and... Everything was happening so fast and the bomb went off... I wanted to help her but-"
"It's okay," He holds up a hand to stop her from continuing, "I know she was always really selfless and... well, we don't even know that surviving the bomb was a good thing, so... silver lining I guess."
Silence erupts between the two, unsure and shaky. Carolyn thoroughly hopes her crawling defence is wrong in implying that Don offered both Nora and Nate's deaths as being something of a good thing. Nothing about either of them dying was anything close to being alright, not even to the ever optimistic mechanic she had the pleasure of getting to know through Nora's loyal friendship.
Carolyn uncurls herself and stands on shaky feet, avoiding the confrontation eagerly waiting to erupt; she can't afford to accuse Don of something like that when he may be the only person who can help her, "Did the computers mention a baby?"
"A bab-?" Don's face suddenly melts from confusion into dismay, "Oh shit, did Nate...?"
"Don," She urges, "Did they mention taking a baby out of one of the pods?"
He shakes his head, "No, no... all the records stop sometime after the mandatory shelter period ends, and that's when I suspect everyone down here died of... whatever happened. Odds are it wasn't Vault-Tec who... look, I'm sorry Carol."
She quickly nods, blinking back a new onslaught of tears. She doesn't know if she should be relived or horrified that it wasn't Vault-Tec after all. On one hand, she knows there's still a chance her son is alive; on the other hand, she has no idea who took him and why, "Okay... what do we do now?"
"Well... to start, I found a Pip-Boy in one of the bathrooms, a little dusty, but it works, it should be able to open the Vault door. I found it on one of the bodies," He smiles a little hesitantly, "All of the flesh decomposed and left the skeletons behind, so it's safe to wear. I'm sure."
Carolyn's stomach twists at the image Don painted for her. A reaction that beckons a cold rock to drop right into her throat, "Is there a bathroom around?"
"Yeah," He doesn't register her discomfort, only motions her to follow, "The plumbing still works pretty well, but the water tastes a little stale and metallic, as you can imagine, come on."
Carolyn follows Don all the way passed the rest of the pods, glancing through the windows of some to see most of them still occupied, not a sound of life coming from any of them. Silently she wonders how it is that both her pod and Don's managed to survive longer than theirs. Perhaps she ought to think carefully of who she's supposed to trust, as it stands, she should not have trusted Vault-Tec at all.
At the door, she pauses and glances back over her shoulder to Nate's pod. She hesitates; a new deep encircling fear twists around in her stomach like an eel. She wants to make some kind of remembrance, to properly mourn, to bury him in a grave with his uniform and flag. There's no time, not while her son is missing. So, Instead of sending last thoughts, making any silent prayers or promises, she continues to follow Don.
Don brings her through what remains of the Vault, parts she hadn't seen initially, and leads her to the Overseer's office. The Vault isn't nearly as large as what she'd expected to see, not like those advertized by Vault-Tec. It looks like it was never meant to hold more than a dozen people. This was all premeditated to an extent that she's afraid to consider.
Everything is abandoned, the lights hang almost too dim to be of much help, and the supplies look to have been plundered until there was nothing but empty tin cans and bottles remaining. They pass a cafeteria, a bunk room, a few offhand offices and storage rooms. On the way, she steels herself to step over the still clothed forms of dull grey skeletons that litter the ground at varying points, sprawled out in death. Were they killed, or did they die? Both considerations are horrifying in their way, and by the time they make it to the Overseers ensuite bedroom and personal bathroom, Carolyn rushes to vomit into the toilet.
Nothing but stomach acid, she quietly recalls not yet having the chance to eat breakfast the morning of the bomb drop, not a single thing. Much to her gratification, Don is right about the plumbing. But the water tastes nothing but sweet on her tongue as he washes the acidity from her mouth. Her eyes itch however, from the contacts she'd put in during her beauty regiment. Her glasses, small, delicate, and pretty sat abandoned on her bedside table that very morning. Hesitantly, she makes the decision to remove them, leaving them on the rim of the sink. She isn't supposed to wear them for more than twelve hours at a time. Considering she has nothing to store them in and she has no idea what to expect at the end of the day, it's impractical to hang on to them.
Using the gritty mirror stained with age, she stares at her tired reflection. She looks older, greyish almost even though she hasn't physically aged. Her cheeks and eyes are blotched red from her earlier grief; her hair hangs in damp blonde clumps on either sides of her jaw and in her face. It feels like hours ago that she was looking into the mirror to carefully apply her makeup and scrunch her soft curls to hold the shape, as bright as her wedding day, smiling and deciding to wear her favourite dress.
Carolyn doesn't smile now; instead she reaches out with an elbow and strikes the center of her reflection. The mirror shatters, showering glass on the ground and into the sink, pooling around the drain. When she looks down at the reflective shards, she sees the disembodied and chaotic reflection of her eyes and face, something, she admits, that is far more appropriate to her state.
She leaves the bathroom to see where Don had run off to.
The Overseer's desk is void of much, but she does find a large and rather unattractive pair of glasses. Testing her luck, she puts them on and blinks into the prescription, able to make out the sign sitting across the room with relative ease. They're not quite as strong as hers, and the left side is a little weaker than the right, but she counts her blessings in the regards that they could belong to someone far sighted instead.
She leans on the desk to wait for Don, looking down at the skeleton clad in a while coat as he lays back on the over turned chair with his arms outstretched. Carolyn finds depersonalization quite easy, firstly considering his lack of human features to personalize with, secondly the fact that this man was at one point in charge of the experiment that killed almost everyone in the pods. He may even have had something to do with her baby being taken from her husband's arms. If she didn't have any respect for the dead, she may have already kicked the skull right off the neck bone.
After a few minutes, Don walks into the office through the door on the opposite end of the room, "Hey, I figured out how to open the Vault door, are you ready?"
Carolyn answers with a mild nod; though she doesn't know how to be ready for something so incredibly unexpected. If someone were to ask her yesterday if she were ready when the bombs dropped, she would have dismissed it as something that would never happen as long as she was living in the ever peaceful Sanctuary Hills.
Standing side by side at the base of the central door control consol, Don and Carolyn stare up at the gear shaped Vault door with encumbering uncertainty as it looms so massive and foreboding, sealed in place for god knows how long, and painted with the number '111' just like on the backs of their jumpsuits.
"What do you think we'll find?" Carolyn asks, even though in her mind she's picturing fire and black charred earth crunching lifeless under their feet.
"If we're lucky," Don responds, "People."
"And... if we're unlucky?"
Don looks down at her, "Something a little bigger than giant cockroaches..."
Carolyn tenses; she saw the bodies of those giant bugs, as large as small dogs, lying around in a freshly crunched muck as she was lead through the Vault hallways. A spider in the shower was her worst nightmare most days; however, what she saw when Nate's pod opened...
"Hey," He places a hand on her shoulder, "You know what? Don't worry about what we'll find, I'm a solider remember? I'll keep you safe."
Carolyn tries to smile at his attempt to reassure her, but cannot find the strength to do so.
"Together?" He offers.
She nods, comforted in the fact that neither of them had to do this alone, but the intruding thought that Don may have had anything to do with this is still on her mind, and the idea that she may at one point need to get away from him and continue on alone scares the hell out of her.
Don pulls a small device with a connected cord and plugs it into the small component on the left side of the control consol, with a glance to his Pip-Boy, the clear plastic box sitting over the large red button pops open. After Don plugs the device back, he huffs and rolls his head on preparation, "Here goes."
Carolyn sucks in a sharp breath as he pounds the bright red button, the lights overhead suddenly dim as orange lights flash and spiral to match the Vault alarm that announces the progression. The two of them jump away from the consol in surprise as the large hanging engine-like machine jerks with power and rolls forward on rails towards the large steel Vault door. It fits seamlessly into the middle and engages the locks, pulling them inward to release the door from its hold. The machine begins to pull the door from the wall and Carolyn and Don cover their ears as the screech of metal on metal fills the room. Sparks from the painfully shrill grinding fly in offshoot directions, air suction pulls loose papers, dust, and debris into the room behind the door, and finally the machine pulls right and rolls the large steel gear aside to expose the bright light of the opening.
They watch as the ramp extends to create a bridge between the gap caused by the height of the door and the deep lower floor flooded with water only half a meter beneath. The other end drops to offer a 45 degree ramp, and finally the gate unlocks and signals the end of the event.
The room is suddenly very quiet again, this time thankfully so. Carolyn wasn't expecting it to be that loud or extravagant; Don however, wiggles a finger in his ear and adjusts his jaw to compensate the ringing in his head, "Wow, it wasn't that loud when we tested it, but little bit of rust can have that effect, I guess."
Without another word, they skirt the rails and walk across the ramp into the next room where the large gear shaped elevator lowers to the base ready to carry them topside. They step onto the platform and stand rigid as it begins to slowly ascend to the surface, where anything could be waiting for them, something good, or something bad, Carolyn tries not to think of exactly what.
No matter what's waiting for her up there, she needs to know what happened to her son, if he ends up being alive like she hopes to God he is, she's going to get him back no matter what she has to do.