Celia woke to the radio playing a jaunty tune. She blinked at the light that poked through the holes in the corrugated metal wall of the shack, confused at first as to where she was. Her neck was stiff, from having slept on the floor, and she felt hollow.
When she finally sat up, she was dizzy and faint for a moment. Her stomach protested that it hadn't had food for quite some time. Celia sighed to herself. It had been almost a whole day since she last ate. She got the feeling that would happen often, outside of the Vault.
Lionel was cooking something over the stove. Even though she'd had some truly awful food outside of the Vault―who ate dog meat, anyway?―she felt so hungry she could have eaten her shoes. "Good morning," she said. He didn't reply. "May I please have something to eat?" she asked, hopeful.
The ghoul made a noise like two pebbles clicking together and gestured to the table. Two places had already been set. She sank into the chair and waited patiently, wondering what was the cause of the gravelly voice that he had. He made some very startling noises. It was... interesting. Didn't know why, it just was.
Celia didn't start eating until he did, out of politeness. It took her some effort to not shovel it into her mouth as quickly as she could swallow. Lionel ate slowly, not looking up, so she examined him again, while she tried to match his pace.
It was certainly awful, this ghoul condition. She could see how he must have looked, before the change. There was a wide jaw, squared, leading to a thick neck. His head, without hair, was cut square, with no eyelids, nose, or lips. He had eyes that were blurred with starry cataracts, but a deep dark color on the rim. She liked those eyes. They were cold, but white-hot with emotions roiling inside.
His skin looked like it had peeled away from the muscles. Blue veins poked out of them, tracing patterns across what exposed flesh she was able to see. He was... sort of blue, all over, like those pictures she'd seen of Pre-War lakes. A very pale blue that made his simple t-shirt look darker than the stained off-white fabric had probably been, at some point. When she'd touched him, he was dry like a bone. Actually, she could see bone poking out of the back of his neck, when he turned his head to spit out a piece of gristle.
It looked like a living hell. But, she thought, if he's lived to this age―she did the math in her head, hazarded a guess of about one hundred and thirty―he's probably come to terms with it. She wondered about Lilian, if she was a ghoul, too. Wondered what she looked like, if it was different for women.
"You shouldn't stare at anything in the wastes for too long," Lionel grumbled, without looking at her. "You'll end up dead, or worse." He stabbed a fork into his food.
Celia flushed. "Sorry," she mumbled, and looked down at her plate. He'd acted like that before, when she first saw him. Guess he doesn't like being stared at.
A minute passed. "How far is it, your Vault?" he asked.
She shrugged. "Couple miles? I'll be okay, if that's what you mean."
Lionel jabbed a knife into the lump on his plate, and clenched his jaw. "Was thinking about the ants."
She fell silent. She'd seen them, as big as a person, crawling around on their mounds. She knew better than to go near anything like that. But Bobby... oh, poor Bobby. Mr. and Mrs. Perkins would be so devastated; they were still hopeful that he would be found.
Lionel cleared his plate, wiped it off and stacked it away. "Goes without saying, be careful. Can't trust anyone, even me," he rasped.
She looked up sharply. His back was still to her, a hand on the shelf. He didn't turn around or move at all. She swallowed hard, thinking. She'd met some... troubled people, in the world, so far. She understood. It made you crazy or tough, being out here. She wondered which one Lionel was.
Celia finished her food in a flash and cleaned up, handing him the plate. As she walked to the door, she stopped and looked over her shoulder at him. "Lionel?"
"Yeah," he said, looking at something on the shelf. He still hadn't turned around.
She faced him, wondering if he was testing her. No one else she'd met had turned their back to her, intentionally. "Thank you again for speaking to me. May I come back sometime?"
Lionel chuckled in a low tone. "Whatever floats your boat, kid."
She said good-bye and began the long walk across the wastes to the Vault entrance.
The dusty earth under her feet, the various types of shrubs, trees growing crooked through fissures in the rock, but growing nonetheless, even the sun shining down through a cornflower sky―it all seemed so pleasant, but made her very sad. Compared to home, it was a paradise.
Well, except for the ants. She made a face. She didn't much like the ants.
She reached the rocky outcropping that hid the Vault door, making sure she wasn't followed. Overseer Calhoun had been specific that they keep a low profile. She cast off the dark robe, adjusting the Vault jumpsuit she'd hidden underneath, and wound her way through tunnels carved into the hillside. It took her nearly an hour to find the door, since she was forced to backtrack a few times at dead ends. Dripping sounds echoed in the closed tunnels, making her nervous. Finally, the Vault door loomed in the distance, and she pried open the false rock that contained the door controls.
It wouldn't respond right away. Frustrated, Celia jabbed at the buttons wildly. With an ear-splitting screech, the door pulled away from the Vault and rolled to the side. Celia held up the identification that Overseer Calhoun had given her when she left, and advanced into the Vault.
Vault Security escorted her to the clinic for a precautionary checkup. Officer Pesaro, Head of Vault Security, kept a careful eye on anyone approaching her, in case she was contaminated. Celia suspected he would have done that even if she hadn't gone outside, since it wasn't the first time the white-haired authority figure had marched her through the hallways of the Vault.
Mrs. Perkins held her up before she made it to the Overseer's office. "Did you see him?" she asked, her breath catching on the last word.
Celia looked at the older woman, her heart wrenching. "I'm going to speak with the Overseer, first," she said, gently. "I'll come talk to you after."
She ducked into the cafeteria, came out the other side, and went up the stairwell to the upper level of the lobby. Across the catwalk, she could see Overseer Calhoun looking out the window of his office.
She knocked before entering, and opened the door when he called, "Come in."
"Overseer," she said. She moved to stand in front of his desk.
Calhoun sat behind his desk. He was about forty, with dark-colored skin and eyes that were nearly as black as night, and a short goatee trimmed neat perfection. Celia hadn't had a chance to see him up close, really. She normally avoided all authority―it would be funny if she didn't actually have a security record.
"How did it go?" he asked.
"Dangerously," she answered. "Apart from various land hazards, mutated creatures roaming about and low-level radiation around the outside door of the caverns... I was shot at."
Calhoun raised an eyebrow, frowning. She handed her Pip-Boy to him. "There are people? Or robots?"
"People and robots," she said. "I recorded as many life histories as I could. Some of them have had run-ins with various militant and non-militant factions in the area." She paused and cleared her throat. "Some people have banded together to raid towns."
Calhoun pressed his lips together and flicked a finger at a knob. "Government?"
Celia shook her head. "Not wide-scale. The mayor of the closest town, called Grayling, says that government is localized and varies by the official."
He asked a few more questions pertaining to her notes, then asked if she had anything to note that she hadn't written down.
"Well," she said, thinking about Lionel and his condition, "some of the people who were outside of Vaults when the bombs fell... didn't die. I met one of them―he called himself a ghoul." She made a pained face. "It's really something you have to see to believe."
"No one could have lived that long," the Overseer said, but looked at the notes she'd taken and raised his eyebrow again. "It sounds impossible."
"Like I said, you have to see it to believe it." She shifted her weight. "May I be excused? I'm sore from sleeping on a metal floor, and Mrs. Perkins is waiting for me..."
He waved her away, engrossed in the Pip-Boy and her reports.