Everyone living in the vault suffered from the claustrophobic oppression of daily life, all of them infected with some form of insanity. Surprisingly enough, I wasn't the one who broke first.
My father did.
He'd been running his experiments for years on the sly, doing who the hell knows what for hours on end. The man shared nothing with me, choosing to confide it all in his lab assistant Jonas. Perhaps I should be grateful—thanks to my dad, Jonas wound up shot through the head when it all went sour.
I slept through it, nightly ritual of med-x chasing away the demon thoughts hounding my every waking moment, allowing me to lose myself to dreamless sleep. I wasn't an addict, oh, hell no. According to the ever-knowing green text on my console, a person was clinically addicted if they used 1cc or more on a daily basis.
I only used 0.9, so I was just fine.
Amata managed to do what the alarms and flashing lights could not, rousing me from my drugged out slumber. She shook with fear and carried a pistol—I opened my eyes to see my secret lover waving a fucking gun around my head.
"Your father got out!"
Out? I had no idea what the hell she was yelling about. There was no out to go to—had he gone out of his mind? Come out of the closet? Nothing made sense in the numbing fog of med-x.
Slowly she got through to me, invigorating bursts of icy fear and rage shooting adrenaline into my system, driving the soft blur of the drug away. He'd gotten out—out of the vault, out into the wasteland beyond, out of my life.
And he left me behind, to suffer for his mistakes. With the confusion, the alarms, and the blood on the floor, the crazy residents of Vault 101 went right out of their minds. The Overseer wanted to see me—Amata didn't say why, but judging by the gun in her hand and the things she couldn't bring herself to tell me, I figured he wanted to kill me in my father's stead.
The gun wound up passed between us, until I finally forced her to keep it. I had my BB rifle and a baseball bat—what the fuck I thought I could do with them, only the med-x knows—and with the main lights out, the radroaches swarming out of the pipes, and the residents going off their nut, I figured she needed it more than I did. She ran off with promises to meet me in her quarters—it wouldn't be safe for us to travel together, in case the guards caught us both.
Med-x, thinking, and memory do not play well together. Only snatches of the trip through the vault come to mind, distorted sounds and blurry shapes—red lights flashing off the metal walls, Butch DeLoria screaming like a girl down the hall, the clatter of a thousand radroach feet crawling through the rooms, and me sneaking through it all, armed to the teeth with an idiot's choice in weaponry.
Luck, always the fickle bitch, decided to cut me a break for once. A large hand seized the scruff of my jumpsuit as I slithered up the stairs. Before I could scream the other hand clamped over my mouth.
"I know you can keep your mouth shut," Officer Gomez growled in my ear. He was furious, frustrated, and worst of all, scared—none of which had anything to do with me. That terrified me the most, seeing this man, someone who I'd thought to be the stronger of the both of us, quaking in his boots over the shit falling down around our heads.
We moved through the rest of the vault, hiding in plain sight; him the successful security officer, me the meek prisoner. Nobody stopped us and nobody questioned him. Gunshots echoed through the atrium, shouts turned into curdled screams of pain, all of it accented with the pulsing red glow of the emergency lights.
"I always liked you, kid." Officer Gomez unhanded me at the hallway leading to the Overseer's suite, where Amata waited with a plan to get me to safety. "Now get the fuck out of here, and don't ever come back."
I moved down that hallway crouched over, bent double to stay hidden out of sight from the damn windows littering the corridor. A thousand times I'd walked its floor with Amata at my side, and now I slunk across it like a guilty thief, utterly alone.
Almost at the end, a girlish shout of defiance knocked my heart to my throat. Amata, my Amata, cried out that she'd never tell.
I popped right up like an idiot, ready to take any number of bullets to the head in order to see her. She sat in a chair on the other side of a fish-bowl window, red-faced and crying, her father and one of the security men looming over her. With the coldest, most heartless fucking expression on his face, the Overseer nodded at the guard.
He swung his hand, cracking Amata in the side of the head.
Everything got really loud—I screamed, she screamed, a gun went off—it turned into a goddamn madhouse. Not thinking straight—not thinking at all—I beat myself against the locked door, yelling to her and trying to break down the metal through force of will.
It slid open, Amata racing out, clutching the gun to her chest, as I stumbled in. The officer lay dead on the floor, blood trickling out in the lazy flow of a silenced heart. The Overseer, face white with bloodless rage, moved to go after his daughter.
I jumped him. Despite the massive size difference—me a scrawny, strung-out girl, him a giant fucking asshole—what I lacked in strength I made up for in sheer insanity. Trying to get me off was like trying to get the stink off shit.
"You'll get nothing from me," he shouted, so goddamn sure of himself, "I'll die before I see the safety of the Vault compromised again!"
We went down in a tumble of off-kilter balance and unbalanced sanity. His back crushed me against the floor, while my limbs held him in a vice grip.
"Let her go, or so help me I'll fucking kill her!" I snarled the words in his ear, scaring myself with how much I meant them. Better for Amata to die—for all of us to die—than suffer his soul-crushing oppression a moment longer.
"My God, you're a cold blooded little shit, aren't you? I think you'd actually do it." The fight went out of him as he surrendered. He lay stiffly on the ground, allowing me to scramble up, training my goddamn BB gun at his eye—what the fuck else could I hope to injure with that thing? "You should run like your coward of a father."
He didn't have to tell me twice. I found Amata in the living room, perched on the edge of the couch, clutching herself and shivering as she stared at the pistol on the coffee table. I dragged her along but left the gun, thinking it would help if she didn't have to see it while I tried to talk her out of her shock. I didn't have anything to give her, too stupid with med-x to think of picking up any supplies from my father's stash. The only thing I had to medicate her with was the damned baseball bat.
Halfway through the Overseer's escape tunnel, I strongly considered it. Just a little tap, enough to distract her, maybe get the adrenaline flowing...
She came back to herself once we reached the vault entrance, but she didn't stop shaking. My arms never left her as she punched in the code, grasping onto her shuddering frame, feeling her heartbeat racing too damn fast through the fabric of her jumpsuit.
Sirens went off, so loud they rattled the floor, making us both scream in terror. Warning bells whooped as the giant mechanical arm creaked into motion, wheeling the massive metal door—cog-shaped and several feet thick—out of position.
"It's open. It's finally open! Amata, come on, we have to—"
"No."
That no hit me like a slap to the face. Everything we'd dreamed of in our secret cavern—getting out, getting free—lay right within our grasp. "What the fuck do you mean no?!"
She meant no. Didn't matter how much I argued, pleaded, cried, or begged. She wouldn't budge, just standing there clutching onto the metal railing by the door controls, shaking her head and shivering. "My father needs me—"
"FUCK YOUR FATHER!" I couldn't accept it, couldn't handle the idea she would choose him over me. She held onto the railing with all her might, and no amount of struggling with her could make her let go.
"I can't go without you," I sobbed into her shoulder.
"You can't stay." Already the heavy sound of armoured boots could be heard past the shriek of the sirens. "Go," Amata urged, finally letting go of the railing to shove me towards the door. "Go!"
I stumbled, blinded by tears, scared shitless at the thought of losing her.
"Go, for me," she broke down as she begged me to leave, sobs supplanting any further words. We cried at each other, for each other, for all the wasted opportunities and plans that would never be.
The security guards broke up our departure, kicking open the door, waving their guns around and shouting. Amata screamed, jumping in front of them with her arms spread wide, blocking them from a clear shot at me.
I had no choice. I ran. Half-blind with tears, body shaking with too many emotions to name, I managed to scramble over the notched door frame. One of the guards got to the controls, setting off a round of sirens as the door moved back into place. Another guard squeezed a couple of shots off at me, one striking the rock wall so close a chip flew off and bloodied my cheek.
"Amata!" I dropped down to my hands and knees, trying to see her through the quickly narrowing sliver of space as the door rolled shut. "I'll come back for you! I promise!"
I couldn't tell if she heard me—she lay on the floor at the feet of a guard, either passed out or knocked down.
"I love you!" I screamed to her right before the vault door clicked into place. Just like that I was suddenly cut off from everything I'd ever known, and the only thing that mattered in my life, with nothing more than the jumpsuit on my back, two useless weapons, and a handful of clean-picked skeletons to comfort me.
For all the pain and hurt I'd ever known, nothing could have prepared me for what hit me then.
And the best—worst?—part of it, is I had my father to thank for it all.