2 The Beginning of the Story Second
Begin recording
"Is this thing working? All right. This is Emily Mason of Sanctuary, recording for Scribe Ellison. You already have three full holotapes of everything I can remember about prewar technology including how I think our clothes washer worked. What do you want to hear about this time?"
"The scribes at the library want to hear how I arrived in the wasteland? How I woke up, you mean. I think I have enough drinks for that. Tom! 'Nother dirty wastelander! All right.
I woke up. And fell forward out of the 'decontamination' pod. I remember my hands hitting the floor, which was slick with chemical slush from the cryogenics pods. The room was wet, dripping and clammy.
And I felt awful. Feverish, cold and hot, my head full of memories of the bomb and the strangers who killed my husband and I wasn't sure which of my memories were real. I sat there on the wet floor coughing air back into my lungs while god knows what soaked into my pants.
When I could finally stand up the first thing I did was check on Nate. I'd seen him get shot but maybe that was a dream, maybe.
But he was dead. The pod was halfway open just as I remembered and he was lying there dried out, almost mummified like being frozen had pulled all the water out of his body. I wanted to get him out of there, let him rest somewhere with more dignity, but at the time I could barely stay on my feet. The only thing I could do was take his wedding ring and string it with mine on the chain around my neck. I still wear them.
I almost climbed in next to him. The cold probably would've finished things quickly enough, but even then I couldn't do it. I gasped and cried some, and fell down and had to stand up again, and finally I moved on. I tried to open the other pods but just got a malfunction message. I could see my neighbors, crumpled and mummified too with frost on their skins. The Callahans, the Abels and Old Mr. Russel were dead.
I stumbled out of that tomb and found only another cryo chamber and another set of bodies. Nobody answered when I finally thought to call out, and the only sign of life was crawling on one of the pods: a cockroach the size of my hand. I looked at it for a minute but thought it was a hallucination.
I remember it took ages to open the door into the rest of the vault. My fingers were too stiff to move the lever. On the other side at least it was warm. I could see through the observation window into the reactor room and something big was clinging to the window: a roach the size of a skateboard. I think I yelled and jumped and then… sort of decided they weren't real. I mean, giant roaches? What the hell, right?
I guess I realized they were real later on when I met some and bashed them.
It's kind of a blur what order things happened. I shuffled around, looking for people, for help—for hours, it felt like. I remember drinking at a sink, I was parched. I remember finding bodies, just skeletons in vault suits.
Then I must've activated a motion trigger because a cheery recording began, "Vault residents, please form an orderly line to receive your revival medical check and medications."
I followed the voice to a terminal on a table that I must've walked past a few times without noticing it in my fog. I remembered the table as being covered with wrapped vault suits. Now it held some kind of icebox containing twenty sets of injectors—like stimpacks but for different medicines.
The recording continued, "You may experience side effects such as dizziness, fever, disorientation, hallucinations, nausea..." Check, check, and check, except for the nausea. I was ravenous.
"...please administer the three revival cocktails at one hour intervals. Please see vault medical staff if you are unable to administer injections..."
I picked up the first dose, which was clearly labeled. I'd used stimpacks before, for aches and pains, so I knew how to use one. But in my current state I wasn't sure I wanted to. My husband was dead, my baby was probably dead, my neighbors were dead, the world was dead…
Nate said, "Oh no you don't. Em, you have to keep going."
It was Nate's voice, it really was. I actually looked around to see if he'd come to help me.
"Nate?"
"You have to find Shaun. So take that medicine and then look around this place."
I was hallucinating, of course, and part of me knew it. When Nate came back from the war I read all the government issue books on shellshock and the effects of trauma. I'd probably have been hearing things even without how sick I was.
But I took Nate's advice and sat down and gave myself the first injection, betting on the fact that it had been frozen just like I was so it should still be safe.
And a few minutes after taking it I did feel a bit better. My head cleared and my hands stopped shaking and I felt like I could pay attention to the world a bit better.
"Nate?"
"Right here sweetie. Let's find you some food and a bed."
So the disembodied voice of my dead husband and I explored the rooms of Vault 111. There wasn't much. The two cryogenic tombs, a small area for workers who were meant to remain alive to watch over us while we were frozen, and the overseer's quarters. Nate pointed out the gun I used to shoot my first radroach. He reminded me when it was time for the second doze of medicine. He said other things too. When I didn't think I could stand to get anywhere near the giant roaches he reminded me of our afternoons at the range where he and his army buddies taught me to shoot until I was as good as any of them. Nate got rid of his gun when Shaun was born, said he didn't want it in the house. He was right of course, but I missed shooting a gun I knew.
I found the best thing on a scientist by the vault door. Pip-boy, still working, measuring the nonexistent vital signs of the skeletal arm that wore it. I put it on and it reported I was suffering from the aftereffects of cryogenic suspension and needed medical attention. No kidding.
As I searched the rooms and even the bodies for anything useful I heard Nate's voice less and less until it just sounded like my own thoughts again. I missed him, but like a dream I couldn't call back the hallucination.
The thing I was really searching for was food, and there wasn't any. The storage area was empty. Records on a terminal revealed what happened: the vault was only supplied for a few months, and the radiation levels outside were still high when the food ran out. I guess the staff was looking to leave anyway before they starved and the scientists didn't want to expose the vault to irradiated dust. Not sure how it all turned out, but there were a lot of bodies. And no food. Until I broke into the last drawer in the overseer's desk and found a few cans. I ate one while I laid out everything useful I'd found in the vault. Pistol, ammo, a security baton, as many bottles as I could find, filled with water, some stimpacks. A couple of clean vault suits, though the cryo-slime tested as nontoxic. I'd had to take shoes off a corpse since I'd been wearing heels on that last day and whatever was outside heels probably weren't the correct footwear. I found a backpack in one of the staff lockers and packed everything up, after a long internal debate about whether to put the gun in my pack or in a pocket where I could more easily access it? If there were giant bugs, what else was waiting outside? Or would there just be nothing, miles of bare rock with no life?
By now so exhausted that I couldn't really be afraid, I crawled into the overseer's bed and fell asleep without even taking off the Pip-boy.
I woke up early, as I usually do but this time there was no baby crying to be fed or husband shaving at the bathroom mirror, just the cold silent vault. The vault's water system still worked so I showered and put on a clean vault suit and boots to be ready for whatever I might find outside. I felt better today, physically healthy again and able to think clearly. Mourning for Nate was a vast ocean of pain inside me but I wasn't drowning in it. I could mourn by spoonfuls while I kept myself alive. The first step was to get out of here, find a place with food and life. See what the outside world was like. I hesitated at the terminal that activated the elevator to the surface.
And then I heard Nate's voice one more time. I was thinking I didn't want to leave him here in this terrible place and he said, "Shaun needs you, Em. Don't look back."
"I'll find him. I'll find out who did this to us, and I'll get him back."
So I stepped onto the elevator and watched the door crack open above me as it carried me up into the sunlight.
