"I hit the release catch when I was stuck between the cars," Queen explained. She was shaky, her skin ashen. "Then it—that—whatever it was."
"A deathclaw," Preston supplied. "How is it you don't—never mind. What did you shoot it with? What kind of poison was that?"
"Something of my own," she said. "I made it to kill supermutants with one dose. I didn't know there were worse things. I think I hate that armor. And I feel sick." She sat down on the crumbling curb and put her head down.
"But you killed it," he said.
"Everything Topside keeps trying to kill me," she said. "Days like this, I wish I'd never left the Vault."
"You're new out of your Vault?' he asked. "I didn't think there were any sealed Vaults left in the Commonwealth. No wonder you don't know what a deathclaw is. Still, you're doing better than a lot of Vault dwellers do, Topside. A lot of them can't handle open spaces."
"I can't handle heights or huge things trying to kill me," she said. "I'm not very brave."
"You were scared but you kept your head and you didn't run or falter. You killed it. That sounds like courage to me," Preston told her.
"Not from where I'm sitting." Her dog came over, whining sympathetically, and licked her face. "….Okay, King, I'm all right now." Raina got up and went over to the remains of the power armor, where she retrieved the fusion core. "I'm going to go get that fusion core from the basement. Then—where are you going?"
"A place called Sanctuary, about seven or eight miles from here," he told her.
"Really?" she cocked her head a little. "That's right over the bridge from my steading. I guess I'm going to accompany you home."
"Thanks," he put all the warmth he could into the word. "I truly wasn't exaggerating about all of us being weak from hunger and thirst. We left Quincy with nothing. There were twenty of us a month ago, before we lost the town. Yesterday we were eight. Now we're down to five." He could not keep the roughness from his voice as he said those words.
"But from Sanctuary," Mama Murphy said, "the common wealth of the Commonwealth will grow and spread."
"All right," Raina Queen said in the voice which meant, 'I don't know what's going on but I'm going to humor the old lady.' "I'm going to go and get the fusion core now."
While she was gone, he and Sturges looted the raiders' bodies for whatever valuables and ammunition they could find, noting while they did so that many of them had died exactly as the deathclaw had. Queen's poison was quick, ruthless and like nothing either of them had ever seen.
However, by the time she returned, they had a nice pile of caps and various bits and pieces gathered together, things like lockets, rings, and cigarette lighters.
"Here you are. I figure caps will always come in handy," Preston said as he handed them to her.
"Thank you," she said as she accepted them. "The quickest way to home from here is to go down this road…"
Seven or eight miles, in their condition, was three hours on foot, maybe more. As Preston trudged the long and weary way, he fell into a mental fog, like sleepwalking. Just one step after another, as the afternoon dwindled and night approached. It was full dark before he heard running water, heard Raina Queen say she would catch up to them, the town was just over the bridge but stick to the left hand railing, the right side was collapsing. Wood underfoot instead of asphalt, then asphalt again, then concrete. A chair.
He sat down. Someone started a cooking fire, but what was there to cook? Time was stretched every which way. Then a Mr. Handy was there in front of him, offering him a plate of food.
"Uh—what is it?" he asked.
"Scrambled eggs, sir."
"No, s'not. Eggs ar'n this color." His words were slurred with exhaustion. "Don' smell like this, either."
"Yes, they are, sir. Eat this up, and then there'll be a nice soothing mug of herbal tea for you. Just the thing before bedtime. Not that there's much in the way of beds…."
He ate. What kind of eggs were these? Not mirelurk, because they didn't taste muddy. Or radscorpion, which had a sour tang to them. They were real good, though. And better still, there was a great big fluffy mound of them. He drank something afterward, and then he woke up to a bright yet foggy morning, still in that same chair. Someone had put a blanket around his shoulders, a very fuzzy blanket of a material he had never seen before.
"Ah, good morning, Mr. Garvey! Please allow me to introduce myself. I am Codsworth, and Miss Queen has suggested that I should acquaint you with the neighborhood and help you settle in. She has also invited all of you to her homestead for breakfast, once you are all awake. Mistress Murphy is the only one still asleep at this time. If you could follow me this way, I can show you what there is in the way of toilet facilities…"
Codsworth led him around the cul-de-sac of houses, most of which were still standing and intact, explaining who had lived where before the war. Only one house was off-limits as far as living in it was concerned, according to the friendly robot—the house his family had lived in. According to Codsworth, Miss Queen and her Mr. Handy had helped him tidy up in exchange for his help with her place, which explained why there was so little debris and trash around. All of that had been piled up in a heap atop a collapsed house, ready to be salvaged as necessary.
Along the way he met up with Sturges, who confirmed that this was about as good a place as could be found in the Commonwealth, especially since the only neighbors, Raina Queen and her people, whoever they were, were friendly. The Longs had found some melons growing wild and were weeding the ground around them, a good start. Eventually they wound up back at the house where they had started out, and Mama Murphy was awake, shuffling around in the way old people did in the mornings when their joints were stiff.
The fog roiled around them as they crossed the bridge. A small herd of radstags were clustered around a tall green wall, and Preston unslung his musket, bringing one down. Now they would have meat for a few days, and he could make Queen a present of a haunch of it. It didn't come anywhere near close to saving their lives and killing a deathclaw, but it was a start. He and Sturges picked it up to carry between them, lashing the legs together.
Then they grew close enough to see what the tall green wall was. It was alive, a hedge of plants at least ten or twelve feet high, green as the landscapes in pre-war paintings, and it was studded with hundreds of pink and white flowers which spread a spicy-sweet scent in the air.
"Where did this come from?" Sturges asked, reaching out to touch the leaves. "Ow!" He drew back his hand. "Careful, it bites."
Mama Murphy said, sounding wistful, "When I was a little, little girl, I found an empty bottle in an old house that said 'Toilet Water'. It didn't smell like a toilet, but my mama told me it was what they used to call perfumes that ladies put on when they went out in evening gowns. It still smelled sweet inside, like this."
"Well, we're not getting any answers standing here like this," Preston said, and raised his voice. "Hello? Ms. Queen?"
"Hello, there!" A Mr. Handy, not Codsworth, but a shiny chrome model in better condition, popped out of a gap in the hedge they had not seen until then. "Right this way. I am Jonny-say-Quoi, assistant to the Queen family. Mind the roses; they have thorns."
Roses. So that was what they were… They followed Jonny through the gate, and stopped dead in their tracks, all five of them, because if the hedge was amazing, what was inside of it was nothing short of overwhelming. Green. Plants. More plants. Still more green, still more plants, different shades of green, punctuated here and there with flowers, fruits, vegetables such as they had never seen. All Preston had ever known in the way of food crops were the same few plants that everyone grew—corn, carrots, gourds, melons, razorgrain, tatos and mutfruit. Everything else was extinct.
Not in Raina Queen's homesteading. Here there were golden flowers the size of dinner plates, tiny plants with little red fruits peeking out from under their leaves, big glossy purple black fruits hanging off of bushy plants, lush green leaves, more and more miracles sprouting from the earth. Tiny insects flew back and forth, rooting around in the flowers. They were a little like stingwings, but not aggressive and with tufts of yellowish fur on their midsections. There was a pen where small long-eared animals nibbled leaves and carrots. In another pen, birds pecked at grain and strutted about, fluffing themselves.
"Are those chickens and rabbits?" Marcy Long asked.
"I think they must be," Sturges replied. A cow lowed—at least it was a normal two headed Brahmin.
"Right this way. Miss Raina awaits you in the house," Jonny-say-Quoi pointed to the truck stop in the center of this paradise from another time. "Breakfast this morning is pancakes with honey butter, a compote of fresh fruit, and rabbit sausage. I hope you brought your appetites, because we've made plenty!"
"What did I tell you?" Mama Murphy prodded Preston's ribs with her elbow. "A verdant garden where milk and honey flow freely."
"Okay, I believe you now. Jonny, where did all this come from?" Preston asked.
"From our Vault, of course. Miss Raina's vault was an Envirovault, intended to be completely self-sufficient. A small ecosystem all of its own, complete with pollinators such as bees. They were very tetchy about being moved, but now that they're here, they're producing quite a lot of honey."
"But…she saved—her family saved all of this? Who else lives here?"
"Miss Raina is the last of her family, sir. It is only she, King, and I myself."
They made their way along the path, still goggling at everything that surrounded them. "I wish—I wish our son could have lived to see this," murmured Jun Long. His face was streaming with tears.
His wife squeezed his arm, the first loving gesture Preston had seen her make since their son died. "Me, too."
There was a table set under the truck stop's canopy, and Raina was putting dishes of fruit at each place. She looked very young and radiant.
"Ms. Queen," Preston tipped his hat, an automatic gesture. "Uh—Thank you for your invitation to breakfast. Is there somewhere we can put this?" He patted the radstag.
"Around the back, there." She pointed.
"Thank you," he said, and he and Sturges went and left it there.
When he came back, he took a seat to Raina's left, across from Mama Murphy.
"It feels like I'm still dreaming," he said once he'd sat down. The dishes were reassuring, because they were the sort of old, mismatched and chipped plates and bowls one might find anywhere in the Commonwealth. "Ms. Queen—this is—. You're rich. You're the richest person I've ever met or heard of. Even in Diamond City, they don't have anything like this. Not even a tenth of it."
"Then you're rich, too," she said, looking around at the table. "All of you are rich, because everything I have here, I'm sharing with you. I'll teach you how to grow the things you don't know, I'll give you seed stock, chickens, rabbits—half or more than half of what I've got here. In the case of the rabbits, you'll be doing me a favor." She picked up a spoon and started in on the fruit.
Preston followed suit. It was, of course, amazing. The berries burst on his tongue, explosions of unfamiliar flavor. "How so, with the rabbits?" The others were eating too, with expressions of bewilderment.
"Ever heard the expression, 'At it like rabbits?' I thought I'd be able to trade them, so I let them breed. I've got dozens now." She picked up a pitcher of milk and poured a mug, then handed it to him to pass on. "You can eat them, but you can also comb them and make yarn and felt from their fur. I've got so many I could brush them all day and never get anything else done."
"What is this going to cost us, all this that you're giving us?" Marcy Long asked from down the table, her voice strident and belligerent.
"Nothing," Raina replied. "You'll have to do the work of growing and tending everything, but the seeds, plants and animals are yours for the asking."
"Why? Why be so generous? You don't know us. You don't owe us anything." The woman had a harsh laugh. "We owe you already!"
"Because," Raina's brow furrowed as she tried to put something into words. "We—my family—kept these things, but not to them hoard like a dragon sitting on a pile of gold. These things belonged to everyone once, and they will again. We kept them safe in order to give them back. My whole life, the lives of all my family, that was what we worked for. I couldn't keep all this or charge anything for them. It would be wrong. Just be as generous with what you have when someone else comes along who needs these things as well."
It was clear she meant it and believed it to the bottom of her soul. Maybe it was naïve of her, maybe it was stupid and foolish, but if it was, then it was the same sort of stupid and foolish that led Preston to join the Minutemen.
Thank you, Ms. Queen," Preston broke the stunned silence. "We will surely do that."
"Ah, but I haven't told you what I do want you to do to pay me back, yet." She flashed him a mischievous smile. "You travel around, don't you? Well, wherever you go, I want you to plant things. I'll give you the seeds and rooted cuttings. There is no ecosystem to speak of, no trees or undergrowth in the woodlands, and that has to change. Thank you, Jonny," she said to her bot, who was holding several plates of steaming food. "Please start with our guests first."
A/N: If you haven't reread chapters one, three, four and five, you'll want to. Big changes. Thank you for checking out my story!