Chapter 2: Vault 15—December 12th, 2161
After a long day of trekking, Ian's feet started to hurt. I had gotten used to the constant walking and foot blisters by now, so I had to slow my pace for Ian. Despite that, we were making good time. Maybe we'd find a water chip in Vault 15, bring it back without any difficulties, and then I could return home. Who knows? Maybe Ian could stay in the vault with us. I personally have already had enough adventure for a lifetime.
I woke up the next morning with Ian curled up next to me in a sleeping bag. Our fire from the night before seemed to have just burned out recently, given that the smoke slowly rose from the charred logs. I picked up my satchel, collected all of our belongings, and woke Ian up.
"Hmm, what?" he muttered, slowly waking up from his slumber.
"Sleep well, I'll assume?" I replied, gently nudging him with my foot. I finished packing and we continued our long hike towards Vault 15. It was the middle of December, and I didn't see any snow. There never was any snow. Not since the war. California hardly got it even then, but nowadays, I'd assume the rest of the world doesn't either. We continued our long, tedious walk towards our destination.
Midway through the day, we finally made decent conversation. Ian spoke up.
"You know, a Chryslus Highwayman would be really helpful right now."
I laughed, despite not knowing what a Chryslus was. I had to assume it was some vehicle. We made camp for the second night. We were making good time.
On the third day, December 15th, we finally reached Vault 15 (or at least, according to my map). There stood a small broken-down shack in front of us. Ian approached it and rapped on the door three times with his knuckles before kicking it down. Shooting him a surprised look, he gave a sheepish grin and shrugged.
"Mum always told me to knock first." Laughing at his joke, we peeked inside the shack only to find a ladder leading into the ground. Surely, this was our sister vault, Vault 15. Lowering ourselves into the darkness below, we ended up in a cave filled with rats. They didn't give us too much trouble, and we ended up walking right past them. The cave was dark, so I snapped one of the flares and held it in my one hand with my pistol in the other. Ian followed close behind, unaware of the rats nibbling on his boot. The gear-shaped vault door which I had seen on Vault 13 was unbolted and rusty, on the ground a few feet from the vault opening. Yup, this was definitely Vault 15. The whole vault was dark and nearly all of it was a dirty brown color from the rust. As we maneuvered deeper towards the vault, a faint musty smell grew stronger. I searched a nearby locker just outside of the vault's entrance doors, which contained a handful of flares. Ian took the honor of taking them and placing them in my bag. Suddenly, I saw something moving out of the corner of my eye and quickly turned towards it just in time to get thrown back into a wall. While I was subdued, Ian was loading clips into the beast's head until it collapsed and died. Getting up, I could feel my heart pounding. "Wh… What was… What the hell was that?!" I shouted loud enough for the vault to echo. Ian looked at the fresh corpse.
"Huh… Looks like a mole rat of some kind. Radiation must've worked wonders for their size." Leaning down to collect myself, I eventually picked myself up and went towards the medical room, opening a cabinet. I took out the handful of stimpaks and first-aid kit that were crammed into the cabinet. You could never be too safe. Ian picked up the flare that I dropped when the mole rat attacked me, and dropped it down a nearby busted elevator shaft. We both listened for a noise. About two seconds later, a "clack" was heard, and a faint light was visible down in the dark shaft, so I tied the rope that Seth gave me onto a nearby tile, and climbed down the rope with Ian following close behind.
Once we had reached the second floor, I picked up the flare and began to look around again. Sure enough, there was another elevator shaft, but this one also required a rope to climb down. We used all of the rope that Seth gave us, so we had no choice but to search the second floor for another coil of rope, or at least something to climb down. Long minutes of traversing passed, but we couldn't find anything other than spare bullets and overgrown rodents (which weren't threats, more like nuisances). Ian checked a small room and called for me. "Hey, Anthony! I found a locker, and they might have stuff in it. Help me pry the door off!" So, I took a metal bar and jammed it into the door. Due to the amount of rust already settled on the door, it was pretty easy to open. Inside was a coil of rope and a few articles of clothing—Namely, a leather jacket much like the one that Ian wore, black leather pants, a black t-shirt, and a pair of black boots. At that point, I had already assumed that leather was fairly popular in the wasteland. Ian grinned from ear to ear, giving me a nod. "Go ahead" he said. "Try it on".
After pulling the leather boots on, I sat up in my new outfit. If you asked me, I thought I looked pretty slick, and the clothes fit me decently, so I folded up my vault jumpsuit (which was getting pretty worn down by now), stuffed it into my bag, and continued on our trek. By the time I had gotten into the leather get-up, Ian had already tied the coil of rope to a tile on the elevator shaft much like I had with the one that Seth had given us. This time, Ian was the first to climb down the rope with me in tow.
After reaching the third floor of the abandoned bunker, we immediately noticed that it was crawling with more giant rats and pig-rats than the population of Vault 13. As I reloaded my pistol, Ian twirled out his knife and jammed it through the skull of an incoming pig rat. Hacking and slashing our way through the sea of beasts, we ran into a large room only to find more of the damned vermin and a small box of ammo. After leaving the room, Ian spoke up. "Let's split up. We'll get more ground covered that way." We gave each other a quick agreeing nod and traded off some flares before we went our separate ways. I came into a room with two lockers. As I was about to shoot the lock on the door of the first one, I felt a sense of déjà vu while a blur in the corner of my eye knocked me to the ground and out the doorway. Scrambling to grab the light that I had dropped, I saw that the thing that attacked me was yet another giant mole rat. Luckily, my loaded pistol was still in my hand, and so I fired a couple of bullets in its direction. It growled a bit, so I had assumed that at least one of the shots hit, however I heard a "ping" or two coming from the wall behind it, indicating that some of my shots had missed. The beast crawled towards me at a surprising pace, but just as it was about to gnaw my legs off, I grabbed my knife and stuck my hand into the creature's mouth, jamming the knife into its brain. The monster's mouth snapped shut with my arm still inside it, causing me to scream in pain. Ian heard my cry and came running to my aid. Using all of his strength to pry the mole rat's mouth open, he took a quick look at my right arm. Thank god I was left-handed. "Hmm…" he muttered, opening his first-aid kit. "You seem to have no broken bones, but…" He took his finger and pointed to some deep wounds that ran up and down between my wrist and my elbow. "There are some deep bite marks here and here" he said, opening up the first-aid kit and taking out some rubbing alcohol, cotton swabs, and a roll of gauze wrap. After fixing me up, he helped me to my feet and looked towards the room that he was just in with a sigh. "I didn't find anything except some old broken computers. What about you?" I shrugged my shoulders.
"Maybe. There were some lockers in the room that I was exploring, but sadly Tiny here got a bit hungry before I could open them" I said, gesturing to the dead mole rat. "Thanks for that, by the way."
My friend smiled at me and said happily, "That's what friends are for." We walked back into the room and shot the lock off of the first locker, causing the door to fall off its hinges. Inside was an electronic explosive and a few grenades. I'd figured if nothing else, I can at least use these explosives to clear out a cave-in if some rocks decided to collapse in front of a door or something. By the time I was done stuffing the explosives into my bag, Ian already had the second door off, pulling a sub-machine gun out of the locker. The ex-guard began to grin sadistically. "Hmm… A 10mm SMG…" He began to analyze the gun as if he was an expert. "This should be able to use our standard 10mm rounds; so basically, this is just like what we have, 'cept it has a rapid-fire function. This could prove useful." Wow… Ian really knew his guns. Surprisingly, he turned the gun over to me. I began to stutter.
"Uh… Why are you giving me this, Ian?"
Ignoring my question, he responded, "Hand me your pistol. I'll use two pistols, and you can use the SMG." I gave him a horrified look.
"Are you nuts? I can't shoot to save my life!"
At this he laughed and responded, "Neither can I, but you're a far better shot than me!" We shared a laughed and agreed that his set-up was a good idea. However, what we saw in the next room put us in a shitty mood for the rest of the day.
There, in the doorway, was a massive mountain of rocks and tiles. There was no way in hell that we could ever get into the main room of the vault even with the explosives that we had collected earlier. The rest of this vault was completely buried in rubble. "God dammit!" I yelled, falling to my knees. Ian gave me a solemn look and sat beside me as I pounded the ground angrily.
"Look," he said. "There must be a water chip somewhere in California. Don't worry, Anthony. We'll find what you're looking for." He gave me a smile to boost my spirits. "Now come on," he said, standing back up. "My expertise in travelling gives me a few places that I know of that we can start searching—Namely, The Hub and Junktown. Let's just return to Shady Sands for a few days to relax, and then we can visit Junktown. Sound good?" I gave him a nod and stood back up. It was a quiet climb back up to the surface, but by the time we got outside the shack that led to this dreadful vault, it was already dark, so we set up our bedrolls inside the shack and slept for the night.
After packing up, we left the very next morning and started walking back towards Shady Sands. Ian didn't complain about his feet hurting as much as he used to, so that was a good sign. The first night on the way back went by uneventful, but on the second night, we ran into a caravan with several armed guards. As I was about to go talk to the Asian trader, whose name was apparently Duc, I heard one of the guards shout towards Ian.
"Yo, Ian! What's up, man? It's been a while."
Ian looked in the direction of the voice and waved, calling back, "How've you been, Tim? How's the wife and family?" As Ian and Tim the guard were talking, I was busy trying to haggle Duc for a deal on stimpaks, to which he eventually caved. Parting ways, Ian and I continued on our journey west until we saw the walls of Shady Sands off in the distance.
...
A/N: More or less, this is where I began to continue writing. So, yeah. New content! Wooo! ._.