In the Wasteland
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CHAPTER ONE: THE WANDERER
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Around the lip of the giant crater was an impenetrable scrap-metal wall. Inside, a sprawling settlement of corrugated iron surrounded the half-buried, un-detonated fission bomb. The town was named Megaton after the bomb: the long-sleeping danger.
Edna’s Edibles: Your Radiation-Free Dining! was near the bottom of Megaton’s steep gradation of metal-patchwork buildings. It was a slow night. Natalie, Tootie, and Mrs. Garrett seemed content to sit around the cabinet radio, glued to GNR as the Daring Dashwood program wound down.
But Blair, toweling off a few glasses at the empty bar, had had about enough of that show. Did every single female lead have to be played by a breathy falsetto? It was funny at first… but weren’t there any actual women in the whole studio?
As soon as Dashwood was over, the regular DJ picked up. “This is Three-Dog, ow-oww! And you’re listening to Galaxy News Radio: bringing you the truth… no matter how bad it hurts. Now the Lone Wanderer - A.K.A. that kid from Vault 101 - has done some pretty interesting things, but this one takes the cake…”
Edna flipped the dial. Even after tuning out that awful radio drama, Blair’s ears had perked at the mention of ‘that kid from Vault 101.’ She looked up when the radio cut out.
“Mrs. Garrett!” shouted Natalie.
“Yeah!” said Tootie. “What’s the big deal? I think he’s talking about Jo!”
“Well I don’t want you to get scared again - that’s the big deal! You two have scared yourselves after listening to Three-Dog’s news reports almost every night since the station’s signal has been strong enough to pick up.”
“What? Come on,” said Natalie.
“She’s right,” Blair added. “And I don’t want to be woken up again.” In the middle of the night, they’d hear the house creak and be convinced they were about to be overrun by super mutants. Blair doubted that Natalie and Tootie had ever even heard of super mutants before Three-Dog and GNR first graced their radio a couple of weeks ago.
“We won’t bother you again, we promise,” Tootie said. But Blair doubted that. “It was only scary at first - we’re getting over it.”
“So over it,” Natalie said. Blair wiped down the counter, though it was already clean.
“I hope so.” Mrs. Garrett walked around the bar toward Blair. “You girls are capable of making your own decisions, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. We’re safe here. Being able to listen to gruesome news from the capitol doesn’t change that.”
“She’s right,” Blair said. “Do you really think a Warner would live somewhere that wasn’t safe?”
Tootie practically pounced for the dial. Edna rolled her eyes at Blair.
“It’s time once again for an important GNR public service announcement. For all you guys and gals tempted by the thought of scavenging in the downtown DC ruins, here’s a tip: You see, Children, the super mutants might violently and horrifically rip you to shreds… but only if you’re lucky. According to most of our sources, they usually prefer capturing their victims and hauling them off to god-knows-where. Consider yourself officially warned. Now for some music.”
“Aw!” Tootie said. “We missed what he said about the Lone Wanderer!”
Once they closed up and headed for bed, Blair snuck out the back door and looked up the other side of the crater. Strings of lights criss-crossed above the thoroughfare. Blair could see where Jo’s house was, and the light was on.
It was hard to believe that less than a year ago Jo had wandered into town sunburned, bruised, and half in shock. And harder still that she had once occupied the extra bed.
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The sniper in the roost above the gates of Megaton realized the wanderer was a girl once she came within close range. He had first seen the black riot helmet with the plexi-glass visor, the Kevlar vest over her uniform-blue jumpsuit. Looking freshly scuffed up by the wasteland desert-dust.
That uniform-blue was from a Vault. The wanderer gripped a pistol with both hands and pointed it at the ground. There was a messenger bag strapped tightly against her back, a baseball bat tucked through it.
When she reached the gates, Deputy Weld the Protectron twitched and whirred to life. He raised his robot arms.
“Halt, wastelander. Holster-your-weapon.”
“I’m not a wastelander,” the wanderer said back. The sniper didn’t think she could have been older than nineteen or twenty. Through the scope of his rifle, he saw her shaking.
“Holster-your-weapon. This-is-your-final-warning.” The whirring sped up to a loud hum.
“Kid!” The sniper yelled down. “Drop the gun!” The Protectron was about to toast her - the sniper had seen it happen a handful of times before. Gruesome. Back through the lens of the scope, he watched her switch the safety and holster the gun. The Protectron hum died down.
“Thank-you.” Deputy Weld lowered his arms and the sniper set his rifle aside.
“Where did you come from?” he shouted.
“Vault 101.” She didn’t look up at him. If she was Vault security, what was she doing on the surface?
“Something happen down there?”
She didn’t answer.
Vault 101 was pretty close, at least if you followed what was left of the old highway. As far as the sniper knew, that Vault had always been sealed. Though sometimes things went bad, with all those people cooped up for so long. Every once in a while you’d hear about a group of Vault-dwellers spilling onto the wasteland for the first time. Fresh meat for raiders and super mutants.
When Sheriff Simms showed up, they let the wandering girl in with a great clank of the opening gate. She was badly sunburned - lips chapped, eyes distant and jumpy.
“So, some shit go on down there?” Sheriff Simms recognized her uneasy silence as the edges of shock. “If it did,” he said, “don’t worry about it. You don’t cause trouble here and there won’t be trouble for you.”
At the clinic, the doctor didn’t make the girl take off the helmet, but Sheriff Simms asked for the baseball bat and the guns. He didn’t want a slaughter on his hands on account of underestimating the girl’s reactionary trauma.
She was so quiet. Simms was going to wait a few days and see what happened.
He brought the lone girl to Edna Garrett’s place because Edna already boarded some girls who were about the same age. Those three had families well enough off that they sent their daughters to Megaton. The relative safety and quality of life in the settlement was unmatched anywhere in the wasteland. Especially if you could consider the bomb dead rather than waiting.
As soon as the sheriff and Mrs. Garrett brought the helmeted wanderer through the restaurant, Natalie turned to Tootie with a grin.
“Who was he?”
Blair stopped in the middle of busing a table. “I don’t know why they’re taking a boy up there.” She was ready to follow them. “There isn’t anything but our rooms.”
“What was he wearing?” Tootie asked. The helmet, bullet-proof vest, filthy jumpsuit. Combat boots.
“You don’t think…” Natalie began with a trouble-making grin. Tootie’s eyes went wide.
“Mrs. Garrett’s taking in a boy?!” said Tootie.
Blair threw the towel down on the table.
“She can’t! Where would he stay? In the hall?”
“Blair,” said Mrs. Garrett from the doorway. “She’s not a boy.”
Blair and Natalie exchanged glances and Blair stood there dumbfounded.
“Oh.”
“Maybe you couldn’t tell because she was wearing that helmet and security armor. She came from the wasteland earlier today, dehydrated and in shock. They got some fluids in her at the clinic. She’s from a Vault. Her name is Jo.”
“A boy’s name?” Tootie asked.
“From a Vault?” said Natalie.
“What happened?” Blair asked. Her parents, who still lived fifty miles south in Tenpenny Tower in separate suites on separate floors, said the Warner family had survived the war in one of the best Vaults ever built - and lived alongside other old money and the remnants of the U.S. government. Of course, that had been a long time ago - at least a hundred years as Blair understood it.
“We don’t know,” Edna said. “But it wasn’t good. The sheriff took her weapons into safekeeping. I imagine we can learn more about her soon. She’s asleep on the spare bed in Blair’s room for now.”
Up until then, the spare bed had been leaning up against the wall. They must have at least moved Blair’s desk. She bit her lip to keep from talking back. How did Mrs. Garrett expect her to share her room with someone they knew nothing about? Someone who had just wandered in from some kind of Vault meltdown?
Blair opened her mouth to argue, but stopped. In the three years she had lived at Mrs. Garrett’s, she had never had to share that room.
Natalie and Tootie speculated about the new girl for the rest of the evening, and Mrs. Garrett brought Blair into the hall for more privacy.
“I didn’t tell the sheriff that Jo could stay because I had to, and I didn’t put her in your room just because the extra bed happens to be there. I saw the frightened look in that girl’s eyes - she didn’t start whatever drove her out here.”
“Okay,” Blair said quietly. She had a sinking feeling, maybe guilt.
“I put her in your room because I know you’re mature and kind enough to make her feel welcome her here, however long she stays.” However long?
Blair took her time brushing her teeth and washing her face in the bathroom down the hall. Nat and Tootie were lurking in the doorway to her room when she was done. A dim lamp was still on in there and they stared at the sleeping girl.
“Would you two go to bed already?”
“But Blair-”
Blair cut Tootie off in a harsh whisper. “Stop making such a spectacle of it.”
Nat and Tootie left with exaggerated sighs.
Blair normally shut her door at night, but she wondered now whether she should keep it open. The new girl was hardly more than a lump there. Just like the Megaton bomb, Jo slept so deeply she seemed unlikely to wake.
Blair turned off the light, but kept the door open. Jo was so quiet and still, it didn’t take long for Blair’s tension to ease.
In the morning, the spare bed was empty.
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It wasn’t until after everything happened that Jo realized her parents must have known that one day she would leave the Vault. That it would be best for her, and not just because she had kissed the Overseer’s daughter or got into fights all the time. However often she had landed herself and a handful of boys in the infirmary, the problem wasn’t just that she didn’t fit in.
Jo questioned the Overseer, the relevance of her schooling in the Vault. She questioned the history of the war.
The Vault was too small for her wandering mind.
The social ostracism and school suspensions resulted in more time at the gym, in the engineering lab with Doctor Palmer, and at the makeshift shooting range her father had built on the lowest basement level. Her parents hadn’t disciplined her more for the trouble she caused, she realized, because they hadn’t wanted to dull her fierce will. She would need that to survive.
When the fateful morning came and her mother woke her up, handing her the gun, Jo took it. While Jo slept, Vault security had imprisoned her father for disloyalty and killed Doctor Palmer - beaten him to death. Jo had to leave before they found her next.
“But Ma…”
“Please,” her mother had said. “Get out of here. I’m used to this place and I’ll be fine. You were meant for better things. Outside.”
Jo snuck around corners and fought her way out, activating the enormous, sealed Vault door from the Overseer’s office. Doctor Palmer had told her that there was still life on the surface, unlike what she had been told in the classroom.
So many times she had wondered what it would be like.
Jo staggered out of the Vault entrance tunnel, into the heat and the blinding light, having killed at least one security guard. Exposed to the blue, open sky for the first time, she started to cry. And she kept crying for everything.
Doctor Palmer had taught her about fission bombs, and Jo realized why now that she was in Megaton with the bomb in the center.
Sometimes, when Jo woke up in the shared room - afraid without knowing why - she put on her jacket and went out the back door. Through the electric lights and scattering of neon, she watched the silent hundred-year-old missile from the steps outside of Edna’s Edibles.
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The refrigerator behind the bar had been on the fritz for weeks before Jo showed up. And as soon as she noticed something was wrong, she asked if she could take a look.
Blair was trying to catch an early lunch between the breakfast and noon rushes, when the next thing she knew Jo and Mrs. Garrett had unplugged the fridge and were angling it away from the wall. She watched as Jo went behind it and start tampering. The old tool box from the back office combined with that blue Vault jumpsuit made Jo look even more like a mechanic.
“That should do it,” Jo said finally.
“Let’s see...” Mrs. Garrett plugged it back in and it came on with a much steadier hum. “Oh, Jo! I could kiss you!”
“That’s all right, Mrs. G.” Jo wiped her hands on a towel. “It was no big thing.”
Mrs. Garrett seemed positively ecstatic. “I’m going to ask Natalie and Tootie to help me bring drinks from the back!” As soon as she was out the door, Blair sniped.
“So modest.”
Jo looked back at her disbelievingly.
“Look. All I had to do was figure out how to reconnect the coil. It wasn’t rocket science, Blondie. Though it may seem like it to someone like you.”
“Someone like me? Oh, you must mean someone actually civilized.”
“I mean a spoiled brat who thinks she’s some kind of princess in the wasteland.”
“Well,” Blair said. “At least I’m not Vault-trash.”
The bell on the door chimed. The first costumer of the lunch rush was a tall man in a suit.
“Oh, Mr. Burke!” Blair smiled. “Good afternoon.” Burke was probably one of the best-dressed people in Megaton. And the wealthiest, if pre-war fashion was any indicator. Blair, with her seemingly endless wardrobe of pre-war style, liked to think it was. Burke had a clean pinstriped suit with a matching vest. A fedora. He also wore sunglasses, the true rarity.
After seating him at his usual table, Blair hurried back to get Mrs. Garrett. Jo shoved the refrigerator back flush against the wall.
“Did you fix that?” Burke asked. Jo turned to look at him.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t believe we’ve met,” he said. “I’m Alistair Burke.”
“Jo.”
“Perhaps this is forward of me, Jo. But you haven’t been in town long, have you? I’m only here on some business myself.”
“Oh yeah?” Was she supposed to care what he was doing there?
“I may have a mechanical job for someone like you. If you’re interested, I’d make it worth your while.”
Burke wasn’t someone Jo particularly wanted to hang around, but it was the first opportunity to earn some money. Mrs. Garrett gave her room and board in exchange for help around the restaurant, but couldn’t afford to pay her. Without another job, she would be stuck sharing Blair’s room indefinitely.
“Yeah,” Jo said. “I might be interested.” Wouldn’t hurt to check it out. What kind of mechanical job could some guy in a fancy suit have?
“I’m at Moriarty’s every night,” Burke said. “If you want the job, pay a visit sometime. Tell them you want to meet with me in the side room.”
Moriarty’s: the saloon with the neon sign. It was high on the bowl of the crater, and Jo had never been there.
Mrs. Garrett entered from the kitchen in a flurry, carrying a full plate.
“Mr. Burke! Corned beef and potato hash, just the way you like it!”
Jo left to put the toolbox away.
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Blair pretended not to notice Jo’s night terrors. After that first night of dead-exhausted sleep, Blair had woken up to Jo crying out and running into the corner. Breathing hard, she shielded her head with her arms.
Blair was about to sit up when Jo turned and started pacing the room. In the tight t-shirt and boxer briefs, Jo cut a defined silhouette in the dark. Blair caught herself staring.
Jo took her leather jacket from the chair and left.
The nights after that were almost like clockwork, though Jo cried out less and less with time. But whenever Jo jolted awake, even silently, it woke Blair as well.
What had happened in Vault 101? Where did Jo go when she left after the nightmares?
The Jo Blair saw at night was different, like a secret. During the day and wearing that formless blue jumpsuit, Jo seemed invulnerable. She was ready to jump into the verbal fray as soon as Mrs. Garrett was out of earshot. Blair couldn’t believe that Vault-punk’s audacity.
But every night, there was another Jo: afraid. And Blair pretended to stay asleep as her eyes lingered on that Jo’s body.
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Blair could have lived out her entire life in the confined luxury of Tenpenny Tower. The high-rise stood alone in the wasteland like a fortress, untainted by radiation.
Everyone who was anyone lived there, or so Blair had been brought up to believe. Always the belle of the ball, Blair could have easily married. There were more than a few handsome, eligible young men - if she had wanted them. Older men even. And affairs seemed more the rule than the exception.
Though married, Blair’s parents had always lived in separate suites on separate floors. Blair had known about their numerous affairs for as long as she could remember. She noticed the way their eyes followed other people, and the dirty looks from lovers’ spouses scorned.
It was a stagnant pool of lies and veneers. Life as one big play for social power.
Did her parents want that same kind of misery for her? Blair didn’t think they knew what they wanted. They just stayed there because it was all they had ever known.
Blair didn’t know what she wanted either. But whatever she did want, it wasn’t in the Tower.
When she turned sixteen, she asked for her inheritance. Or at least enough money to move to Megaton. The fact that her mother had outright refused had only cemented the deal, since her father so loved to contradict her.
Blair’s father was an expert at spoiling his daughter and throwing money at problems. He paid trusted mercenaries to accompany her on the trade caravan. The trip took three days.
Megaton was drab, largely poor, and classless. It was certainly dirty, and the first time Blair had ever worked. But she took to it quickly. Unlike most people Blair had spent her life around, Natalie, Tootie, and Mrs. Garrett were sincere.
The first time Blair’s eyes had truly followed someone was when a group of freelance soldiers passed through town and ate at the diner. They were led by a woman, and Blair’s eyes had been locked on her.
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Blair walked into the kitchen and stopped in her tracks when she saw Jo - sitting in a chair and slumped over the counter top, asleep. Her arm for a pillow.
The Jo during the day and the Jo at night were not different people after all.
“Hey…” Blair touched the sleeve of Jo’s jumpsuit. She had no idea whether Jo remembered her dreams or not, or what horrible thing it was she dreamed about.
Jo started.
“I was just taking a break.”
“It would probably be okay if you wanted to cut out early.”
Jo leaned on her elbows and looked at Blair with keen-eyed suspicion.
“I’m fine,” Jo said. But she stood up wearily. How many nights had it been? When was the last time Jo slept like a normal person? Blair tensed with everything she wanted to ask.
“Why do you have to act so tough?”
“Think it’s just an act, huh?” Jo stood up straight, inviting a fight. “Wanna try me?”
“Do you ‘wanna’ stop acting like such a Neanderthal?”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“I know you get up from nightmares every night.”
“Why don’t you just… mind your own goddamn business!” Jo’s voice cracked. She threw the kitchen door open hard and it hit the wall with violence as she left through the restaurant. Had she been about to cry?
Hardly a few seconds later, Mrs. Garrett ran back into the kitchen.
“Blair! Is everything all right? What happened?”
“I… we had an argument.” As Edna watched her, Blair felt more and more scrutinized. “Well it’s not my fault she can’t control her temper, is it?”
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It was a while before Jo could stop shaking. She took the steep path beside the diner up to the lip of the crater and followed the scrap-metal wall.
She wasn’t able to save Doctor Palmer or make life better for her parents. She wasn’t even able to stay awake during her shifts in the restaurant anymore or stop Blair from knowing her secrets.
What kind of weakling couldn’t even sleep at night? And if Blair noticed, couldn’t everyone?
Jo walked the crater until nightfall, when the bulbs along the slack power lines came on and illuminated the paths and metal catwalks. The iron-sided houses and shacks below reflected the light back dully. At the bottom of it all was the bomb.
Still twisted by anger, Jo went to Moriarty’s instead of home. She pushed open the saloon doors too hard and a few people turned to look at her, including a bartender who had some kind of skin deformity so badly he was like a half-burned zombie.
“You got a problem?” he rasped from behind the grungy counter.
“I need to talk to Burke. It’s business.”
After two hours of drinks and circumlocution in the side room, Jo realized Burke wanted her to help him rig the bomb.
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(CHAPTER TWO: THE ATOM BOMB )