The Tale of Nora Rigg -/- Chapter One

I feel like I can't breathe. I must have been unconscious, and while not being able to breathe is hardly the worst way I've ever woken up (the day after my senior prom, my honeymoon, and the day after Nate got back from Alaska all come to mind), it certainly sucks. I feel a pull from the air, it rushes across my skin, and all the air or gas or whatever around me rushes down to my feet. It passes my face pulling very down and suddenly I can get air in my lungs. It feels like some hold over my ability to think has been released, and suddenly the fog clears enough for me to realize that I'm cold.

Really, really god damn cold.

The world seems to expand around me, and I fall to my knees. There's some kind of alarm blaring, and a very distant part of my mind catches the words 'evacuate immediately', but despite the alarm and the suffocation and the bone deep horror right in front of me, all I can feel is the cold.

It burns.

Across all of my skin, from my hair to my feet, even my insides feel like they're burning from the cold. Nate was always talking about how cold it had been in Alaska, in his letters he joked during winter for like three years about how some of the guys would go out of their way to find Chinese flamer units, just so the burn they felt was something other than their nerves shutting down. At least I thought he was joking at first.

It took exactly one winter for me to figure out that these weren't jokes. Nate was IS a good man. I took me one whole winter to realize the jokes were a coping mechanism and that several of his friends actually committed suicide by Chinese flamer in order to feel something.

Of course this thought is just my brain trying to distract itself from shock. Or maybe it's the shock directly? It's not terribly surprising I would turn to examples of suicide in order to deflect from what I'm seeing. Can you know you're going into shock?

Finally I get a shaky breath in, and that god awful screaming stops.

Oh Christ, that was me.

Breathe in. Hold for a count of four. Breathe out. My count to four is a lot faster than it should be, but the exercise I used to use in the office to stop from shouting at Jon Widmark serves me well. It's almost enough to hide me from the horror that been steadily leaking in at the edges of my thoughts since I woke up.

I bring myself to my knees, a patter of water splashing the back of my neck and wetting my hair. The water brings more cold, but it beats the hell out of the floor, which feels like it's drawing whatever heat I have straight out of me.

I almost can't do it. I don't want to. With extreme reluctance I straighten my back and draw my eyes up the... pod thing (?) in front of me. I have no idea why we didn't fucking see it coming in. Seeing a Chinese nuke hit what had to have been West Roxbury is enough to scare the wits out of anyone, it's hard to hold it against myself, but what would have been different had we known? The pipes should have tipped us off, or the huge containers of gas, or the fucking frost, fuck its cold!

He's in pod C6, and if the red warning label is to be believed, evidently I should stand clear. The cursed thing has a four foot swing. I pull my eyes up across the warnings and the labels and all of the shit, and I rest them on his face.

As rugged as the day we married at that stupid fucking gazebo in the Boston Commons of all places. His mother was so insistent. "The last green in the city that wasn't radioactive", she said. God rest her soul now, I suppose. It's hard to look at him. I wish I hadn't thought of our wedding. I got my lipstick all over the side of his mouth, tripping on those idiot three inch heels when he lifted my veil, and looking at the red leaking from the side of his mouth just hurts.

I close my eyes and concentrate. I can't feel my toes, and those whole 'feet' things are also a bit shaky down there. With a lot of effort I get them underneath me, and I can feel every joint in my body pop as I stand up.

I say stand up, but I can't lie even in my own head, the hunchback of Notre-Dame would look at me and feel bad.

It gets a bit easier to move around the more I do it, but my hands still feel like they're in mittens as I scrabble at the control panel next to his pod. The big red lever is right there, but my fingers are too dumb to get at the thing. It takes me a minute, but I get my palm at the right angle and put enough of my weight behind it to push it up.

There's a big release of pressure, and I can hear gas rushing back through pipes to the container above me, I watch the gas flow down to the bottom of the pod and chunks of ice flake off the edges as the door pops, automatically rising out of the way.

Now the only thing between me and the man I love is my unwillingness to recognize that he's dead. I step in front of him, and, honestly, I watched it happen but I'm still having a hard time believing what I'm seeing.

His eyes are closed, his head listing to the left. I have to resist zipping his jumpsuit the whole way. He used to do the same thing with his army fatigues. He always thought the touch of chest hair made him look manly, I thought it made him look like an idiot. It was a normal argument that I usually resolved by buttoning his shirt for him and convincing him he was roguish enough without the chest fuzz.

Now, I just don't want to touch the hole the bullet left in him.

I saw this enough when I worked with Captain Widmark, a .44 magnum at close range.

I will fucking see it again too, on the man with the scar across his eye.

I took his hand. I could see the ice crystals across the surface of his skin. My body was warm enough to melt my own, but he would never be warm again. He would never be anything again. My stupid useless fingers teased his ring from his hand, and by some miracle I managed to get it into a pocket without dropping it.

Nate's brother used to pay a hundred dollars a month into a cryogenic fund. When he died they were supposed to cut off his head, and store it for him. One day in the future, they said, we'd have the technology to bring a head back to life.

I've seen robo-brains. I didn't buy it.

I couldn't help the watery chuckle that left me as I pulled the red lever on the pod's console back down. Maybe one day in the future we'll have a cure for 'bullet wound in the chest'. The joke is the only thing holding me together.

I have to hold it together.

Somewhere out there a dead man has my son.

With only a little stumbling I begin to make my way out of the room. I don't want to do anything, and my legs feel dead, and my body feels dead, and it's so goddamn cold I can still see my breath, but Shaun is out there. And more honestly, I need to go anywhere not here.

The door doesn't respond to my pounding on it, but the damn things are supposed to be pressure sensitive. One of the first cases I had ever tried was charging Vault-Tec on behalf of a construction worker that found out how their sensors worked the hard way when one malfunctioned and the pressure door blinked open long enough for his wrist to pass through.

I won the case, everything about Vault 114's construction was a shit show, but that's not a comfort right now. With an awkward jump I put all my weight down on the foot bar, and crack it open. I take the first doorway I find, and come into a room that looks about the same as the one I've left. Cryogenic pods all across the room, and what has to be coolant tanks everywhere.

The control bank near the door is dead. I flip a few switches idly and nothing happens. The room does bear some fruit, on a table a few feet away is a brand new jumpsuit, one that doesn't smell like mildew and twenty years of ass. As I shamble to the package, my attention is drawn to the blinking lights of a working computer on the other side of the room.

It takes me another minute to get there, every step feels like agony, but the agony is contained in my feet. The rest of me seems to be thawing nicely. As I hold the shrink wrapped Vault-Tec uniform under one arm I boot the system, and none of the information is good. I learn two important things.

I'm the only survivor, and this is not an accident.

Someone hacked into the vault systems remotely, which in fairness isn't that hard. Anyone who can read a magazine can access the old Termlink BIOS all RobCo machines are loaded with. In this case though they sent someone in to cause trouble manually. It has to be the work of Scar-face.

I make my way out of the room, and the blaring alarms calling for everyone to vacate the vault penetrate the haze of my thoughts. I need to get the hell out of here.

As I wander around looking for an exit I find the largest fucking cockroach I have ever seen, and in short order, I find a baton to defend myself from it.

I fucking hate bugs.

My wandering nets me fifty bucks and a stim pack. I have to resist the urge to inject myself immediately. My toes feel like fire with every step, and given that my fingers are well enough to operate door bypasses, I'm starting to get worried.

I have to beat a few roaches the size of my thighs to death, but I make my way to what seems to be the vault overseer's office and the only open path to the exit. As soon as I get the door open, I begin worrying. There's a skeleton in a Vault-Tec lab coat, spilled across a chair that has fallen back from a desk. On the desk there is a handgun, and an open box of ammunition missing one bullet.

Why did the overseer kill himself?

I page through his terminal, only to find the diaries of an asshole who had an unhealthy fascination with cryogenic stuff and a bad reaction to being put in charge. It doesn't explain why he offed himself, but I can at least stop feeling bad.

I fill the magazine on the handgun from the box on the desk, and pocket everything. His security lock-up gets me another pistol, and I head to his rooms behind the desk to see if there is anything else I can use. With four stimpacs I risk injecting one into each leg. The pain in my toes clears up a bit, but not enough to make me actually feel better. I need to get out of here, then I'll take a look. I feel like if I see the damage I won't be able to force myself to go on.

Most folks keep a spare stimpac in their medicine cabinets. So I head to the overseer's to see if I can replace the one I've used. Instead I find Rad-X and remember why I entered the vault in the first place.

The fucking communists dropped a nuke outside.

Is it any better out there than in here? Is my son out there in some radioactive hellscape!?

Breathe.

Scar-face had to have come from somewhere. I've found exactly zero evidence of any kind of tunnel breaching the vault. The whole thing was supposed to have been carved into bedrock anyway. There were other people with scar-face too, but my memory is too fuzzy to place anything.

He had to have come from outside.

I have no better ideas.

With the Overseer's console I open the route to the door, and move on. I have to put shots into seven or eight more roaches, and every time I pull the trigger I have to fight to keep tears from my eyes.

Nate taught me to shoot.

Nate knew this was going to happen. He was pushing me to buy a cabin he had picked out in the Appalachians. I humored him and we would go to 'Urban Survivalist' classes on the weekends. It broke the monotony before we had Shaun, and it was cheaper than a cabin.

Would it have made a difference?

The vault entrance held more skeletons. I've seen enough crime scene investigation photos to be able to generally figure one out, but the skeletons and overturned desks didn't give me much to work with. I have no idea what the hell happened in this vault, or why the hell I'm the only one left.

Scar-face called me The Spare.

Like that was supposed to mean something.

Were these people dead before that or after?

I realize that I don't feel like poking around skeletons more than I feel like figuring this out. My feet are still agony located at the bottom of a well of fucking cold.

It occurs to me that I may not be good at metaphors.

On the floor next to the door's control console is a pip-boy, which is the best development I've seen since I woke up. It has a dead man's severed arm in it, which I am much less enthusiastic about. Taking care to not touch bones (I tell myself it's out of respect for the dead, but it rings hollow. I really don't want to touch a dead guy.) I separate him from his fantastic wrist computer, and I strap it to my arm.

It boots with no problem, which is a relief. Vault-Tec may have hired shit contractors in Boston, but no one could deny their tech was cutting edge, and while 'Urban Survivalist' training taught me to wire a crappy generator from a field stripped car, repairs to micro-circuitry are well beyond me.

I flip through a few screens, it looks the pip-boy is interfacing with the Vault-Tec suit somehow, but I stop dead at the date.

9:01 am, October twenty-third, 2287.

I've been frozen in this hell hole for two hundred and ten years.

My legs almost fall from beneath me, a hand on the safety railing is the only thing keeping me up. Two hundred and ten years.

What the fuck.

Breathe in. Hold for a count of four. Breathe out.

Breathe in. Hold for a count of four. Breathe out.

I connect the pip-boy's external physical port to the control console. My fist smashing the big red button causes the vault door to open. Screeching metal, a humming generator. My feet idly trace a path over a catwalk, and onto an elevator.

I blink as sunshine crosses my face, and the Geiger counter on my wrist begins slowly ticking.

A wasteland stretches before me. A place I once lived.

They killed my husband.

They took my son.

My name is Nora Rigg.

I am the Sole Survivor.