On the way up, James' thoughts had vaguely drifted to wondering what the outside of the vault would look like. Nothing could prepare him for the shock of it all.
His gaze crossed over a land of unchecked overgrowth and rusted equipment from his vantage point until his eyes fell to what had once been Sanctuary Hills, his home.
For some time, all he could do was stare. In the neighborhood below the hill, the houses were in a state of disrepair - obvious even from where he stood. Though most houses survived and were still standing, they were little more than hallowed out shells.
James turned from the cliff and stole glances from his neighbors, who were every bit as speechless as he was. Around the lift, he could see the ruins of the Vault-Tec compound.
Elsa Kovacs was the first to make a move, throwing her arms around her mom. Without any hesitation, her father joined the embrace. In the face of devastation, they still had each other after all.
That was the moment when it really hit him. When it properly daunted on him. James caught himself staring at the scene, then suddenly he couldn't take it anymore and stepped off the elevator. It was almost like he had lost the ability to breathe for a moment when his boots touched the soil. His life gone, his was son missing, and his wife was dead.
James ambled across the desolate, rubbish strewn property towards the path that led down to Sanctuary. His gait was labored, and he stumbled every now and then. For some reason, the energy he felt trying to get out of the vault had suddenly disappeared.
The sheer shock of seeing what this place had devolved into sure didn't help.
As he passed by the gate, James came across the dusty skeletons of other former neighbors that didn't make it and the National Guardsmen identified by their tattered fatigues. Most of them looked to have mercifully died when the blast reached their position, though some, judging from the poses of their remains, were not as lucky.
Down the path, he looked around for signs of recent activity; footprints on the dusty trail, movement through the overgrowth which threatened to hide the path from both was a futile exercise, and he found nothing to suggest that man or even animal were here recently.
He came to the footbridge that marked the outer edge of the neighborhood. Where he remembered the bridge being made of stout maple, it now creaked under his weight.
Beneath it though, the water flowed just as it always had. He stopped and found himself looking down for no other reason than to notice the almost normal sight of the water flowing into the Concord.
Up the hill he reached Sanctuary Hills proper, with the others following from a distance. The path from the vault ended where Liberty Street merged with Monument.
Vault-Tec had planned the neighborhood, so that the path to the vault would originate in the heart of Sanctuary for the sake of participants like himself who had been pre-approved for housing.
The community itself was built along Liberty and Monument streets with a Cul-de-Sac on each. On the northern end, the modular futurist houses gave way to a handful of farmsteads further up Monument.
On the Southern edge, Sanctuary Park and its functional community center, stood across from the Visitors Center for Minuteman Park on Liberty.
Now though, it was surreal, seeing the decrepit houses lining the streets and wrecked cars dotting the disused road. He did however, find the lack of any small litter and general debris rather surprising.
If the ground above Vault 111 was any indication, bits of rubble should have been everywhere, and yet, the streets were eerily pristine save for the hulks of rusty cars parked along the curb.
"As I live and breathe..."
James Rodgers stopped in his tracks. He hurriedly swung around, turning to the source of the familiar voice. It was none other than his Mr. Handy who had been busy trimming a neighbor's hedge.
"Codsworth?"
"It's... It's REALLY you!"
"Codsworth, If, you're still around..." James stated the obvious in the most dumfounded manner possible, searching for words.
"Well of course I'm still around," the robot interrupted him without realizing it. "Surely, you don't think a little radiation would deter the pride of General Atomics International?
He recalled that General Atomics shielded all their creations as a general practice. Though his body had obvious signs of wear, his functions seemed higher than he remembered. That was when he thought to ask.
"How long was I in that vault?"
Codsworth perked up. "Well, according the old chronometer, it looks like you're... erm, two hundred and ten years late for dinner. Yes, two hundred and ten years, heh heh! I should whip you up a veritable feast to compensate, Mr. Tyrell! You must be just famished!"
"Two hundred and ten years... Bullshit!" He stammered in disbelief.
"You do recall that 'bullshit' is not the nature of my programming."
James did, though Codsworth had become snarkier than he remembered. He wondered if that was part of the sentience algorithms that some AI's were known to develop. If two hundred years had truly passed by without maintenance, then it would explain much. "Thanks for reminding me," James conceded wearily.
"You sir seem a little worse for wear," Codsworth observed as the neighbors reached the street, and began to diffuse towards thier homes. "Best not let the missus see you in that state. "Shall I ring the misuses?"
"She's... in a better place." He looked around at the devastation as he spoke. "Strangers broke into the Vault and just... murdered her. They've taken Shaun away somewhere. I've... I haven't seen him since." It took everything he had in him to keep his voice from cracking.
"Sir, these things you're saying, I think you're suffering from hunger induced paranoia. Shall I whip up a snack?"
James was taken aback. It would also seem that the Mr Handy had gone insane at some point. "Codsworth...are you okay? You seem...nuts."
The robot hovered in place and kept silent for a moment before he spoke. "Oh, sir, it's been just horrible." Codsworth sounded as if he were on the verge of breakdown. "Two hundred of them with no one to talk to... no one to serve!" The hood over Codsworth's eye lens narrowed in slightly. "I spent the first ten years doing futile housework to occupy myself, trying to get the nuclear fallout out of the woodwork, thinking that you would all return from the Vault any moment now, but a quick look at the geiger counter dashed my hopes like nothing else! Why, after all the bombs dropped and everything happened, I thought for certain that you and your family were... dead!"
"Focus Codsworth." His voice nearly broke as he barked out the words. "We need to find Shaun. Did you see a group of suspicious men stumble around town on the way to the Vault recently?"
"I'm afraid I know nothing of the sort, sir," Codsworth said in his polite British butler personality module that he found endearing for some reason. "No one's been around here lately, though I should say that our first step should be the neighborhood itself. Should I accompany you as we search for Shaun around, or at least evidence to his whereabouts?"
Before James could answer, he heard a scream from a neighbor. He saw Mrs Whitfield whack something he couldn't see from where he stood.
"Let's do it." He solemnly nodded.
The next ten minutes where a blur as they inspected the neighborhood, incinerating oversized insects in every other shell of a home that made up the suburban part of Sanctuary.
"Nothing here... again." Codsworth was morose in his tone. "Sir, I don't think we could find anything we could use to better locate Master Shaun anywhere in Sanctuary! His kidnappers, dastardly villains they were, had been quite the professionals indeed."
"I guess we'll just have to head into town for more information." James sighed, dreading to imagine how a nice town like Concord looked now. "Come on, buddy. Let's head over to Concord."
"Sir...? Are you sure?" Codsworth's eye fixtures whirred off to the side. "Concord isn't as friendly as the town we used to visit back in the day. The people who have taken residence there beat me with sticks and some even shot at me a few times before I floated off back to Sanctuary." The robot paused. "And there's the issue of my rather doubtful usefulness to you in combat. I'm afraid I'm just a lowly Mister Handy, sir... you'd certainly get more mileage out of a Mister Gutsy over poor domestic me," he glumly added.
His eyes drifted to the house across the street, and saw Baker looting the vacant structure. "You know what? I need some time to myself, some time to prepare then I'll go. Why don't you look after the house?"
"I shall prepare the home for young Shaun as best I can," replied Codsworth in his usual chipper voice.
James entered the house, and couldn't help but wince upon passing the front door. Appliances had gone to rust, wooden furniture was badly weathered. Despite this, he saw plenty of signs that Codsworth's cleaning subroutines had been running regularly. The floors themselves were well sanitized among other things.
After staring for a moment at the surreal horror of his living room, he made his way to the utility room. Within, he uncovered the door to the crawl space.
The crawl space had three major partitions. In the centre was the shared space where he and Jenny stocked up on survival gear. Here, they had managed to cram enough MRE's to feed a family of three for at least four months and that included purpose made baby food. Everything else was camping gear, which fit the theme nicely.
To the left, was Jenny's private storage. To the right was his. Here they kept their secrets from one another, in unspoken agreement.
He entered his section of crawlspace. His section, James frowned. The word just didn't have the same meaning anymore. The whole house was his, the crawlspace was his, even his wife's secret space where she used to and still probably held some things he'd rather not know about, even after he'd gotten her to go clean.
Near his side of the room, a small amount of clear space amid the tightly packed supplies that functioned as his private office. James planted his ass in the swivel chair and pressed the power button. Nothing happened.
He should not have been surprised that there was no power in the house thanks to a lack of a working grid. But then again, he wasn't exactly in his right mind at the moment.
Frowning, he put the N99 that he had been holding all this time down on the desk, and fiddled with the pip boy until he found the flashlight setting. Using the light, he moved a few boxes of MREs that had no doubt lost all flavor even in the cooled environment. Behind the stack nearest to the desk was a Universal Electric fusion cell generator.
He plugged it in to the surge protector before snatching a fusion cell from a false bottom in one of his desk drawers. The shoebox sized generator came to life after he popped the battery in and flipped the switch.
This time he hit the terminal's power button and was rewarded with the single beep as the boot process initialized. James logged into his private terminal when he saw the credential prompt. On his screen, he scrolled down the interface, until he found the option for door control which he had marked as "Sesame."
He selected the unlock command, which disengaged the mag locks on the door he had jury rigged, and stepped in. To his surprise, his stockpile of valuables was better preserved than he had anticipated. That included military grade hardware (some of it technically illegal in New England for a private citizen to hold.)
The small room, which was the size of a walk-in closet (though with a lower ceiling) somehow had enough space for a reloading bench, a Gunsafe, a bookcase, and a steamer trunk.
His first move was to unlock the gun safe to his left. Within the safe, was his meager collection of firearms.
Within the safe on the far right, was a Winchester bolt action chambered for .308. To its left, was a 12 gauge hunting shotgun, and finally, a commie bloc assault rifle built for 556, that he'd come into possession of during the evacuation of Pusan. Lastly, there was an N99 10mm, lying on the floor of the safe.
Without hesitation, he grabbed the assault rifle and slung it over his back. If any of the guns could work perfectly after all this time, it would be that one.
Unlike most communist arms used by China and their allies during the war, the weapon was of Soviet manufacture. Russia was reluctant to export arms to anybody too close to China, but North Korea was Comrade Kirov's exception to the rule.
Then again, Kirov like his predecessors probably didn't take that country and their loony leaders seriously.
Nearly five years after the invasion of Alaska, The DPRK teetering on the brink, saw their chance to strike. Within two months, the Korean People's Army was outside Pusan on the verge of swallowing the South Korean Junta whole.
With military resources stretched thin at Alaska, The Philippines, and Indochina, the army's presence in Korea was only at brigade strength with only 4,000 soldiers when they blitzed into Seoul. At Pusan, they faced an army of 60,000 and three times the size of their local allies.
If that wasn't enough, there were plenty of partisans operating in the shadows of the beleaguered city.
Despite this, mercifully few of their number would be left behind, either dead or taken prisoner thanks to heavy reliance on traps, and various automated defences set up by engineers such as himself.
"Seems fitting doesn't it," James muttered to himself, as he turned around to the other side of the room where his reloading bench stood. "Had it about as long as you." At the foot of it was an ammo container which he marked 'Service caliber'. It was the heavy duty 55 grain Full Metal Jacket version, with a handful of tracers thrown in just because.
The gun itself was issued to some North Korean agent tasked with putting out hits on anybody too friendly with Americans. He'd had wounded several civilians under escort and killed one of their translators, before trying to bug out.
James, by sheer luck, was in the assassin's escape route at the time, and punched his ticket then and there. First man to die by his hand, at least directly.
That was also the day he met Jenny. In the aftermath, he'd stabilized her with a stimpak while the actual medics saw to the nastier more urgent casualties.
Jenny Jung as she was known stateside, was incidentally an even higher profile target in that group. She was a liaison of the Robco Pusan Office to the Army. Robco's support for the war effort had earned Koreans affiliated with the corporation a lofty priority on the shit list.
There was also the fact that her main qualification as a rep to the local brass, was her American father who happened to be a bird Colonel. That of course made her "hon hyeol", or "mixed blood" in racist local speak, which meant she would be a sacrifice to the god of third world nationalism with the coming of the reds; one that she nearly became.
Though she was never formally acknowledged by her father, Colonel Maxson was still one to look out for his blood no matter how much he got around. His machinations after all had seen them married within the week.
James detached the magazine from the gun, and proceeded to stuff it with ammo. When he finished, he snatched another .30 round mag wedged into the end of the container.
He moved on, past the bookcase to his chest that was his wardrobe. The chest held various items of clothing and some armor. James dug around until he found a proper utility belt with a holster, and a bandolier for more ammo.
James stopped by the box to fill the bandolier, before leaving his man closet. In the common area of the crawlspace, he grabbed a backpack from the pile of outdoor sporting goods. It took him a few seconds to find what he needed for the trip, which was anybody's guess at this time.
He broke open a case of MREs and took out a single package. From there, he snatched a first aid kit and a utility knife.
On his way out of the crawlspace, he powered down the terminal and generator, while taking the pistol he had been given in the vault. Surprisingly, it was in better condition than the one he'd bought from the local pawnshop.
He walked out of the front door stopping only to retrieve his wallet which he left behind in the haste to reach the vault. In truth, the move was out of instinct rather than conscious thought.
"I'm off now, Codsworth. Look after the Homestead will you." James addressed the Mr. Handy as he walked out the doorway.
"Mr. Tyrell, before you go, I found this holotape. I believe she was going to present it to you as a surprise, but then, well... everything happened."
"Thanks," James mouthed the words somberly, as he took the tape and put it in the drive for his pip-boy.
The walk down Liberty to the southern edge of Sanctuary must have been a sight with him armed to the teeth, because he could feel more than a few eyes on him.
"Where are you headed man?"
James stopped in tracks and with a turn of his head, set his gaze on Frank. He did not consider himself a social person, but Frank was probably the closest thing to a friend he had around here.
Frank Dipietro or "dippy" was a short barrel chested native of Boston from the North End and spoke with a thick Bostonian accent that was typical of the predominately ethnic neigborhoods near the waterfront. He had left the army at the end of his enlistment to join Boston PD as jack of all trades cop.
"To find my son." He looked ahead again and nodded at the taller buildings in the distance. "Might as well see what Concord holds too."
"Reuven told me about your boy. For all the good it does, you have my sympathy."
"Thanks Frank," replied James.
"Mind if I go with you? To Concord, I mean."
"I won't object. Hear there's violent people in that town now."
"Where'd you hear that?"
"My Handy."
Frank grunted. "Wonder why."
James merely shrugged and kept walking while Frank followed with his service pistol sheathed into a makeshift holster. Once they reached the Visitors Center, he took the path across the park to the Old North Bridge.
Minuteman National Historical Park, in his opinion, was easily the most interesting thing about Concord. The land he now walked was the place many considered ground zero of the American Revolution. It was on the North Bridge, where the first shots of the war had been fired.
They crossed the bridge, and James couldn't help but wonder how the Minutemen of old would think of if they could see the nation they helped conceive.
Would they be proud of the great power they helped inspire? Would they feel anger? What if they only felt sadness?
Though he'd asked himself the question a few times since seeing this place for the first time, the bridge which was a replica, was simply another victim to the state of decay that pervaded the atmosphere. Once again in sore need of a replacement.
They crossed the bridge which had collapsed in multiple sections, carefully weighing each step as though the creaky bridge were a minefield. Once across, they continued east until they reached the Red Rocket Station just outside the park.
There was no sign of life except for a massive German Shepherd eating at something aside one of the station's coolant pumps. The dog's ears seemed to perk up suddenly, and he looked up at them.
The dog trotted over to him curiously, eyes and ears alert. James dropped down to one knee, extending his arm to stroke the dog's head, which pressed against his hand eagerly and wagged his tail. "Hey pal, you got an owner?"
The stray German Shepherd only whimpered. James tried to see if he could find a tag, but this dog wore no collar.
"You know," Frank piped up. "With all that's happened, I think someone could really use a dog. Just saying."
"What are you saying Frank?" James asked the man just a little too bluntly, head turned slightly to talk over his shoulder.
"Dogs are man's best friend. We all need friends, especially when our lives goes tits up."
"Therapy dogs, huh?" grunted James without emotion.
"My daughter died in January, while I was on tour. If not for my Bernese, I probably would have committed suicide last spring."
"Damn, that's horrible." James was beginning to understand where the man was coming from. "How… did she die?" he uttered, still facing the Shepherd, unsure whether he was crossing a line.
"Her mother got high on Psycho with some rat fucking jody one night." Frank's voice betrayed no small amount of anger. "She went to the penitentiary, he went to the stockade making gravel at Fort Leavenworth or wherever they send violent offenders these days."
Something in Frank's voice made James shiver. He'd heard plenty of whispers about experiments of questionable legality being performed on convicted servicemen. No doubt they had at least a grain of truth about them.
He also thought of Jenny. Though her painkillers addiction made him mad as hell at times, that was nothing to psycho. "How did you deal with it?"
Frank set his fists on his hips and gazed out to the side. "I was in Anchorage, part of the mop up at the time. Wasn't until a few weeks later our unit rotated back to Fort Irwin. It didn't really sink in until I came home and nobody was left. All I had was the family dog."
"We were still busy," he continued. "When they didn't have us training visitors in power armor survival tactics, we were getting called up to contain riots all over the Southwest Commonwealth. Still, I ended up getting shitfaced every chance I could find until I decided that just wasn't fucking enough."
"There a moral in that story for me?" James asked. He had an ugly feeling this would hit close to home pretty soon.
"There sure as hell is," Frank remarked. "Within a couple weeks, I was staring down the barrel of my pistol almost bent on ending it there and then. The only thing that stopped me was the look my dog gave me. Why would you do such a thing? She seemed to be saying. I looked her in the eyes for a while, and suddenly I just couldn't do it."
James continued petting the dog, who was now brushed up against the legs of his vault suit. When Frank finished speaking, he found himself staring down into those brown eyes. Eyes that almost made him forget the nightmare he was living in.
"Need a family, boy?"
The German Shepherd licked his hand.
"Come, we've got a trail to find."
Author's note: So a few things to address...
Apologies if the chapter felt a little clunky, but the infodump was inevitable for what is essentially a character overview phase one.
I should probably reiterate, that this story is not all "sunshine and bottlecaps," to quote Deacon. Sure there will be plenty of light moments, but this story will be pretty dark at other times. Also, some rather uncomfortable subjects will be touched upon. I want this story to showcase a multitude of grey moral elements as the devs intended (less of this dualistic Fallout 3 morality.)
After spending a fair amount of time on Google Earth, I came to the decision that certain parts of the map would make more sense with some reimagining on my part. After doing some research on Minuteman National Historical Park, I just couldn't see Sanctuary in the same light especially considering the role it will play in the story. Aside from the Concord region which was seriously condensed in the name of fitting in the worldspace without looking seriously awkward on the map (this will probably include a depiction of Hanscom AFB among other things) I'm going to try and avoid too much in the way of creative liberties for the more scaled parts of the map.
That being said, if you are from anywhere depicted in the Fallout 4 worldspace, or have spent a good deal of time in said area, I would absolutely love your input.
Special thanks to all my reviewers as well my consultants Alexiej, and Mandalore the Freedom. Even bigger thanks goes out to Pro Assassin for being my beta.
