The moment Barb appeared in the doorway, he let go of Janine's hand. She wiped it, front and back, on the fabric of her vault suit.
"You said I wouldn't have to touch—that," she glared accusingly at the Ghoul and then at her mother.
"Technically speaking, he is your father," Barb pointed out.
"Thanks for nothing," Janine retorted. "Tell me I'm done here. I want to go shower for a whole week and then take some Radaway."
"You can go now," Barb told the girl. She whisked her way out of the room, giving her mother another glare.
Her mother sighed.
"So, what is she?" the Ghoul asked. "A clone? Or one of those, what d'ya call'um—synths?"
"Don't say that! Especially not here!" Barb said. "She's my daughter. And yours."
"But not Janey. I'm guessing you thawed out and used my tadpoles from when I submitted a sample back in the days I believed in you and your friends." He stated, pulling out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.
"Yes." She still would not meet his eyes.
"That still leaves me with a question. Where the fuck is Janey?" He didn't say it loud, but with all the menace and anger burning below the surface, like a coal seam afire underground. "If she's alive I'm going to see her, and if she's dead, I want to see her grave."
"She's not here." Barb's voice trembled.
"That didn't answer my question." He shook a cigarette from the pack, put it in his mouth slowly and deliberately, lit it and dragged until the end glowed like lava.
"This is your fault, you know. If you hadn't taken her with you, she wouldn't have been so far away from our vault. If she'd been with me, she would have been fine!" Barb finally looked him in the eyes, disgust and fury battling it out in her face.
"Oh, we're gonna do this now? We're really gonna do this now? What happened to controlling the situation? Knowing when the bombs were coming, so you would have been safe in your Vault already?" he roared back.
"We were caught off guard! The Chinese weren't supposed to be the ones to take the initiative!" she defended herself.
"Wonderful! Did anyone happen to tell the Chinese that?" he shouted.
Someone knocked on the door. "Overseer Howard…um…I don't want to disturb you when you're in a meeting, but…"
"I…I'm sorry," she told the person outside. "We'll be quieter." She sank down into Janine's chair.
"Janey was caught in the blast, like you. They were going to put us into cryosleep right away, but by the time you got her to the Vault, she'd been exposed to too many rads. The Geiger counters were screaming around her. I bargained with the Overseer, so she wasn't rejected outright. They did everything they could—flushed out her system with Radaway, treated her with Rad-X, chelation therapy—but it was no use. Geiger counters still chattered around her. Then, like you—." Barb stopped.
"She started turning, didn't she? So, Janey, our Janey—she became a ghoul. Bet she made the cutest little ghoul ever." He said grimly, took the cigarette from his mouth, looked at the glowing end of it. "I'm sure that whoever was the Overseer of your Vault wasn't too pleased at having a little ghoulie running around his nice, clean Vault."
"I pleaded for her," Barb said. "But it wasn't the place for her."
"Really now?" the Ghoul closed his eyes for a long second. "What did they do? Did they throw her out of the Vault? Put her to sleep, like Roosevelt? Dissect her? Or was it vivisection?" The irony in his voice could not conceal the anger building up underneath it.
"None of those!" his ex-wife cried out. "I mean, she was still my baby! We were going to be put into cryosleep anyway, so I said…. I said, put her into cryosleep, keep her, and then later, when you have a way to undo ghoulification, you can wake her up and cure her." Her voice wavered.
"Uh-huh," the Ghoul said. He could feel the fury trying to fight its way through the Calmex. "But here you are, all awake and everythin', and if Janine is nineteen as you say, you must have been thawed out—what, twenty years ago?" He studied her face. "Maybe more. Yeah, I can see the traces of the work you had done on you. Got good plastic surgeons in your Vault, do you?
"But you're still tryin' to evade my question. Where is Janey? Still asleep, waitin' on that cure? Or did they use her as a test subject and kill her—or worse?"
"She's in another Vault." Barb said. "I gave up a lot to keep her, but my bargaining power…They refer to it as the Junk Drawer of Vault-Tec."
"Full of the stuff that's too good to throw out, might come in handy some day? Like the Allen wrench you get when you buy furniture, or a set of disposable utensils wrapped up with a paper napkin?" he scoffed.
"Something like that," Barb was back to not making eye contact again. "She was my daughter too. I couldn't protect her, but I didn't…they wouldn't let me keep her."
"You could have gone with her. Lived outside. Gave her back to me. A whole lot of things you could have done. But you didn't. Instead, you let them thaw you out, and went and made yourself another Janey to replace the one that got broken. Beats me why you used my semen, though."
Barb studied her hands. "It was because yours was frozen from before. Guaranteed to be uncontaminated. Most of the men in our Vault had taken some degree of radiation damage, and their chromosomes were affected. Children were being born defective or dead. I wanted a healthy baby. When she was born, she looked so much like Janey….and I named her Janine."
"And once you had another baby, your first one kinda fell by the wayside in your heart, didn't she? All right. You give me a map with directions to that junk drawer Vault, and I will clear out of here. You've got your daughter, and I'll go find mine."
She took a map from a filing cabinet, marked the place on the map. "Sac-town area, huh? Been a while. If I'd known—but I didn't." He put it away in his jacket pocket. "I loved you once," he told her, that still-beautiful woman who had been his wife. "I fell in love with you because you weren't afraid to stand up for what you believed in.
"I guess you just changed what you believed in, and I didn't notice when that happened. That's on me. I always knew you were smarter than I was. Book-smart, that is. I didn't care. I was proud of you.
"But if the last two hundred and twenty years have taught me anything, it is that no matter how long you wait, and by that I mean you specifically, you sold your soul for a hole in the ground. You might as well have stayed frozen, because you are never gonna get to see that Promised Land. Good-bye, Barb. Have fun living under your rock."