» Thu Apr 07, 2011 10:20 pm I wish, deeply, that I may have died in an atomic blast. For man’s trials and errors can prevail through the harshest of days, and seeing the world fade into nothing would present a favorable alternative to that hell in the incandescent light of the Vault. When I first encountered our Vault-Tec representative, I was ten years old, accompying my brother with an accustomed air of maturity I had taken to while being alongside him. My brother got out of his trench on the Alaskan front and sprinted toward the enemy line. He fought down to his bare hands against the Chinese before killing a Red officer who was directing mortar fire back to American lines. He came home with a fistful of medals, a Chinese pistol, and a cynical attitude toward any civilian in a position of power. The only reason he was here was that he knew what the Reds were capable of. He stared across the desk at the blond fellow in the suit.
“...and I am priviliged enough to inform you of your acceptance into one of Vault-Tec’s most expansive and privilged Vaults, Vault 101! Richie, I am pleased to make accomodation for a war veteran such as yourself.”
“What of my parents? How can I be in a Vault with simply myself and my brother? Only an animal would separate a cub from it’s parents. Perhaps you’re already animals...”
The man was all smiles.
“Mr. Adams, may I call you that? Your parent’s entrance into the Vault is simply not feasible at this time. Please, focus more intently upon yourself! You bring several...needed qualities to the Vault. Focus on your survival, kid, Vault-Tec needs you and not the other way around.”
My brother rose and ripped apart the acceptance list, slammed it upon the desk and left. I followed my brother out of the building, gently closing each door my brother slammed open. I had never seen him this bad before. We walked through the summer breeze, I sitting on a Chryslus’s fender while he dialed a pay phone. He soon joined me on the hot metal of the old car. For a long time we sat there, watching the clouds drift across the sky.
“Hey, Robert?”
He turned and for the first time I saw worry in his normally distant face.
“Yeah?”
“What’re we gonna do about moms and pops?”
He looked back at the clouds.
“I have no idea, bro. But if we go, we go as a family and not in some over-hyped tin shield. We have lived together, and we will die together, understand?”
He glanced at me with the seriousness only a survivor can appreciate.
I felt the cold rising in my chest.
"I understand."
In 2077, the world collapsed.
Like a circus with each pole being knocked over, each and every form of diplomacy or civility we knew in politics degenerated into an ethical soup of a screaming match. With each passing day, the chances of war loomed over our heads like the angry musings of a tormented god.
We felt the blows of defeat edging in circles upon on our bright continent. Time was shorter in the day and the newspaper made each minute feel more and more accelerated. We brother and I would sneak into the shed of a foreclosed house where a fallout shelter was, to our amazement, fully stocked by its prior owners.
You saw less cars on the road because of the spike in oil prices, so we played in the street and sometimes slept there. Our parents were unnerved of what my brother had seen and done to attempt to stop him. Like a hijacked train, we moved onward.
Preparing for a nuclear apocalypse without the backing of a country-wide government agency was hard enough as is, but the materials certainly were at our disposal. This Mr. Gomez guy was a sap, we figured. Who was so bent on living through a bomb explosion but not keen enough to take his materials with him was a fool. Another reason to pin the blame on Vault-dwellers. We took up carving furniture for our home away from home illegally from wood taken courtesy of Springvale's assortment of forests. We shoplifted varnish, teak-oil, electric sands, hammers, anything!
Girl scouts didn't show up at houses anymore. Fallout drills became a daily factor instead of weekly at the full-tilt pace of the race toward destruction. We lived day-to-day, breathing easy when we acquired an extra tin of Snack Cakes. We made extra beds for our parents, but they never seemed interested. They were too busy trying to bribe themselves into a Vault to pay much attention to our juvenile pursuits.
On October 23rd, we huddled in our shelter, not from cold or from the police, but from the air-raid shelter. Mom and dad went to the local Civil-Defense agency near the Naval Base. We closed down the shelter when the Geiger counter blipped. After four hours, Galaxy News Radio went off of the air. On the Citizen's Band frequency we caught the news and the lockdown of Vault-101 of its PA system. We were only 200 feet away from the Vault. We heard people rushing outside the shelter to try to get into the Vault. The radiation-doused people wouldn't last a day. My brother went into one of his moods, alternating between staring and talking about a "Sgt. Montgomery" Or how he himself was featured in General Chase's training simulation. After a while, sleep dragged us into the only simulation we could appreciate at the time, the fiction of an intact world, where bombs were a memory and the Chinese never attacked us.
