Nick left the Third Rail about midnight, stubbing out a last cigarette and saying "Good night and so long, Hancock. I expect we'll be gone before you're up and around."
"Yeah, Nick. Watch yerself." Hancock waved goodbye and returned to living it up. Except that it didn't feel so much like he was living it up these days. He was getting restless again, and it wasn't the kind of restlessness that any amount of chems could soothe. Well, that wasn't strictly accurate, because a really massive amount of chems would definitely cure him of restlessness, by seeing to it that he rested six feet under forever and ever. He wasn't ready for that yet.
He noticed the newest bloodstain on his cuff, a souvenir of Finn's passing. There were things you had to do when you were a mayor, and one of them was making sure Goodneighbor had the necessities, like food, water, chems, guns, ammo, and so on. Unless some miracle rendered them self-sufficient, they needed outsiders to come in and trade without fear of getting ripped off, ripped up, or raped. The irony was that in order to live without laws, you had to be honest, and some people just weren't capable of that. Like Finn. Or the Triggermen. They were really just raiders in better suits, and there were far too many of them in town for his liking.
Picking a canister of Jet off the bar, he shook it and inhaled deeply. One advantage of being a Ghoul was, you could do a lot more chems. The disadvantage was that you had to do a lot more chems, because they didn't have the same kick. Jet was made from the fumes given off by the manure of Brahmins fed on a special supplement, so basically you were getting high on cow farts, although most manufacturers did add something to make it smell better. It didn't do a lot for ghouls, although there was supposed to be a stronger version called Ultrajet made especially for ghouls, invented by a ghoul. He'd bought what someone claimed was Ultrajet a few times, but since there was no difference to the high, he figured he'd gotten ripped off.
He wanted a new chem, something he'd never done before, but there wasn't anything he hadn't done at this point, except maybe X-cell. Maybe he ought to get clean again and go without for a while so the same old, same old had more of a punch again.
Hancock dropped the now empty canister and swiveled on his barstool. One of the regulars, a female ghoul he knew, perked up and gave him a smile, but it was the kind of smile which meant, 'You have chems and I have a vagina. Let's share.' Which could be okay, if all both of you were looking for was a quick fix. Yet he found himself thinking about Raina Queen and her smile, which was warm, sweet, joyous and even a little goofy. It would be nice to see her smile like that again, especially if it was at him. He even harbored a thought or two about telling her she had really beautiful eyes, as much as because of what they saw as how they looked. Then the mayor of Goodneighbor grimaced. He must be drunker than he thought, getting all sentimental about a smoothskin who just walked in one day with Nick and who would walk out again the next and probably never return.
Then again, maybe he'd turn in now so there was a chance of being awake and not hungover by the time she and Valentine left in the morning...
Since he didn't sleep, Nick Valentine took a seat in the hall outside Raina's room. Before settling in, he glanced in on her. King immediately sprang up into a defensive stance, but relaxed when he saw it was someone he knew. Raina was fast asleep. He made sure to be quiet when he slipped the manuscripts for her booklets out of her pack. On the way to Goodneighbor, she had told him why she went to see Piper in the first place, and he had expressed an interest in reading what she'd written thus far. She took him up on that, and asked him to take note of wherever it could be improved.
Settling down in a chair, he began on the agriculture booklet. The fact that Raina had included the scientific name of every single plant made him smile and shake his head at the same time. Nobody would know or care what the plants were called in Latin except for the people she ought to avoid the most—the Institute. It was a lead pipe cinch that they would get wind of this sooner or later, but they didn't need to know they were specifically looking for someone that well educated and intelligent. The scientific names would have to go.
Going from the big picture to the smaller one for the moment, she had listed everything alphabetically. Okay, that was a legit way of organizing something, nobody could deny that. If, that is, you knew exactly what you were looking for. The people she was writing this for, the settlers and farmers trying to choose which of these new crops to grow, wouldn't. A better idea would be to divide them up into categories, like vegetables, herbs, fruit, and then all other plants, the ones which weren't grown for eating, like flax, indigo and cedar. Then there was her notion of giving everything away. It was a generous idea, but between the people who were suspicious and those who would be only too happy to play her for a sucker, it was bound to be a disaster. There were too many greedy bastards out there.
While he read, he was also hearing sounds around the hotel without listening to them, like a couple having a fight on the floor above them, which then led to reconciliation and make-up sex. Someone much nearer to them was sobbing, heavy but muffled sobs, as though into a pillow. Then he heard ripping sounds, and after that, the sounds of chair legs scraping against the floor.
He started in on the animal care booklet. This one was simpler, as it only covered rabbits, chickens and briefly, bee keeping. He heard a chair fall over, then a gurgling sound and the staccato of uneven hammering on the wall.
At that point, all the audible clues added up. He dropped the pages and charged into the room next door, where a ghoul had made the classic mistake when trying to hang himself: too short a drop. His neck hadn't broken, and he was now dangling from the noose, trying to free himself with both hands but unable to because his weight had tightened the rope he'd braided out of sheets. He'd die all right, but slowly and agonizingly of strangulation.
Nobody ought to have to die like that, even if they wanted to commit suicide in the first place. Nick grabbed the man around the waist, lifting him up so the rope could go slack. The ghoul immediately ripped the loop away, gasping and wheezing for breath. Nick set him down, and the man crumpled against the wall. "Damn it," he said, raspy-voiced. "Another thing I can't get right."
"What's going on?" Raina appeared in the doorway, looking sleep rumpled and blinking in the light.
"This gentleman here tried something he now regrets. What's your name, pal?" Nick asked him.
The ghoul made a horrible gurgle of laughter. "Murray. Murray Mitchell. It's been a long, long time since anyone bothered to ask." He jumped in his seat, because King, with the instinctive sympathy of some animals, had pressed his cold, wet nose into the ghoul's hand. "Nice dog," he said, and petted the German Shepard.
"Well, Mr. Mitchell, what's your story?" Nick asked. Raina looked from one man to the other, picked up the kicked-over chair, and sat in it.
The ghoul gurgled again. "For two hundred years I've been going from place to place, not belonging anywhere. I got screwed over once, you see. Twice, in a way. I used to be a Vault-Tec rep, before the war. I worked for them for twenty years, going door to door, signing people up. The day the bombs dropped, I was working up in a suburb called Sanctuary Hills- -."
Raina made a very faint sound at that, but she didn't interrupt.
"There was a vault right there, 111. They wouldn't let me in. Twenty years of service, and I 'wasn't on the list.' Then the heat wave hit...and when it had passed, there were bodies all around me, and I looked like this. Vault-Tec screwed me by shutting me out. Death did the same thing. I've been so alone. So alone..." The last part came out as a painful moan. Then he went silent except for his wheezy breathing.
Raina spoke, her voice low and gentle. "Everyone in Vault 111 died. I live near Sanctuary, and a few weeks ago three of us went to see if there was anything useful in there. We found a tomb. It was a cryovault-the inhabitants were frozen as they entered. The staff were supposed to be let out after eighty days. They weren't. Journal entries on the computers told the tale. They ran out of food, Vault-Tec never gave the okay to leave, and the Overseer refused to break quarantine. The staff rioted. No one got out alive. The inhabitants slept on in cryostasis until the systems failed. Then they died too."
"That might have been a better way to go than this," Mitchell said, scuffing his feet on the floor. "Just dying in your sleep..."
"No. They didn't die in their sleep. They woke up and couldn't get out of their cryopods. It looked like a very bad way to die. Mr. Mitchell-," she began.
"Call me Murray," he said, sounding like he hadn't slept in two hundred ten years.
"Murray, then. I lived my whole life in a Vault, up until seven months ago. My whole family lived there, generations of us. I'm the only one left, but we were safe there. I'm here today, alive today, because of it. You, or somebody like you, somebody doing the same job, helped us. Perhaps it wasn't you, but I will never get the chance to meet them. So... Thank you, Murray. Thank you for saving my life."
She reached out and touched his hand, and the dam burst. He sobbed, hoarse, racking sobs. When he had himself under control again, he patted her hand and said, "You're welcome. Which Vault was it? 84? I hear they're still going strong."
"No. Our Vault didn't have a number. We had a symbol, a seedling against the sun. It was an Envirovault." Raina told him.
"An Envirovault...there weren't many of those. Mostly they were attached to universities. You said you live out around Sanctuary. I tried staying around there at first, but that was two hundred years ago. Didn't that crazy Mr. Handy drive you off?"
"Codsworth? I have a Mr. Handy of my own-well, he was my family's Mr. Handy and since I'm the last one, he's mine now. Jonny was able to talk to him bot to bot, and that helped. Then when we confirmed his family was gone, he asked we use the reset codes that came with him so he could bond afresh with the community. It seemed a drastic measure, but he wanted it that way. He's happier now."
"That's good. It was a nice place, a nice community. I remember there was this young couple with a baby-they were the last ones I signed. I'm glad you have a home," he said. "At least you have one. A young girl like you, it would be really rough on you. Nobody wants to take ghouls into their settlements, for fear they'll go feral. Nobody wants a ghoul with two hundred years of Vault-Tec experience"
"We need to get rid of the word 'ghoul'," Raina said with disgust. "Negativity is a vicious cycle. You're lucid...so, I'm calling you a lucid."
Amused, Nick asked, "Gonna change the whole entire language by yourself, kid?"
"The revolution starts here," she riposted. "Anyhow, what's wrong with Goodneighbor? It seems very inclusive,"
"It is, but it's not exactly my kind of town," Murray said. "I'm a salesman, not a con artist. I can't shoot worth a damn and I hate violence. There just isn't any work for me here."
What he had said sparked an idea in Nick's neural circuitry. "You say you're a salesman. A good one?"
"Best in my area," Murray said with pride. "Hah, best in the entire state, and that's not just me bragging."
"Good. Hire him," he told Raina.
"Hire him?" she asked as the ghoul-no, the lucid-said simultaneously, "Hire me?"
"Come spring, you're going to have more on your hands than you realize right now. It's true I'm no settler, but I can tell you this: You're going to need someone who can help people make informed decisions about what to plant. They'll have to keep track of who's planting what and where. They may have to do some traveling to see for themselves what kind of land people are planting," he told Raina.
To Murray, he said, "Our young friend here is reinventing the mail-order seed catalog company with some seeds and things from her vault. She has plenty of know-how when it comes to growing crops, but no business experience. She needs someone who can help her achieve her goals without her getting ripped off. This is one of those coincidences that makes you wonder if there really is such a thing as serendipity."
Raina looked thoughtful. "If you think so, Nick... It's a couple of months until people will be planting again, and in that time, I could educate Murray about soil types and so on...but all of that is details. Would you be willing?" she asked the lucid. "There's plenty of room in Sanctuary, and I know Preston, who's more or less the leader of it, has no prejudice against ghouls."
"You're serious?" Murray said. "A job and a place to stay, somewhere I'd belong? Hell, I wouldn't even ask for caps."
"Now don't go saying anything foolish," Nick counseled him. "Raina is enough of an idealist for three people put together."
A/N: I figured the Vault Tec rep needed an actual name, so 'Murray Mitchell' it is. Reader Darman Skirata pointed out that Raina did not mention what happened to Shaun and his parents. Yes, they (meaning Raina, Sturges and Preston) found that two pods had been breached and their inhabitants shot, and records showed that a baby was missing, but Raina left that out at this time. It seemed like too much detail.
Huge snowfall all weekend where I am, so maybe I'll be able to knock out another chapter.
Guestman: Worse than a Pair of Handcuffs is very good, and thanks for turning me on to it. You're giving me ideas pertaining to Covenant and curare. I don't like that place. I truly don't. Why not write them? (Your fics, that is). I live in the DC area so I really have to play F3 at some point. I plan to have her meet Danse and the BoS in Cambridge in a couple of chapters. Mac will wait until her next visit to Goodneighbor. And I am in complete agreement with you regarding acceptance. Everybody play nice, okay?
Hyperventi: Thanks! I can tell why you chose your name. ;)