13 “Is this what you normally eat?” 1/2

Chapter 10 "Is this what you normally eat?"

John knocked on the door to shouts of come in, and entered the warm, cosy home. Inside the machine cut logs were lighter, lacquered to a smooth finish. The floor felt like concrete, covered with different coloured rugs and sections of clean carpet. The wood wall merged to a red brick fireplace, flames roaring. Cushioned leather furniture arranged around it.

Behind them a table with four chairs and behind that, Louisa. Half dancing, half cooking in a reclaimed open kitchen, as soft music and rich smells filled the air.

To his right by the door there were four pegs, holstered guns hung on them. The boy's small automatic. Robco's ten mil and what he assumed to be the woman's gun. A high capacity nine millimetre, next to an empty peg. The negative space of what was missing speaking louder than the things around it. John took his belt from his shoulder, laying it down beneath the pistols. Water cans and a multi tool didn't seem like fitting companions.

"Well don't you look handsome. Pull up a chair, it's almost ready." John sat at the smooth wooden table alone as the woman cooked. Wallace appeared through a door off the living room, wearing clothes that actually fit. With brightly coloured canvas shoes. John could see just how slight the boy was. He felt better about his decision to give him the spare vault-suit. Despite not being ready to give up his own.

"Hey John!" He plonked himself down next to his new friend, dropping something on the table. John first thought it a broken terminal keyboard, but turned out to be a freshly modified working one with a four pin socket. "I made this." The boy said proudly, "I should be able to control the pip…your pipboy with it. Can I try, please?" John remembered Rosie doing the same thing years ago. Wallace reminded him of her so much.

"Sure." John extended his arm and flipped the screen so a hungry mind can rifle through its code, just like the old days.

"Wallace, you let the man eat." Robco said as he entered through the back from his workshop. His coat off, pistol hung up, manner soothed by the Private Reserve on his breath.

"I will, I will." Came the boy's response over the clatter of keys. The older man sat as his daughter, by a marriage cut short, laid out plates and metal cutlery. Separate knives and forks, not the plastic sporks of the Vault.

John shifted around the unfamiliar proceedings, or fidgeted to keep an itchy collar from his neck. As he did Wallace would have to reposition the pipboy. Slightly, awkwardly, apologetically, at first. John knew the look of suppressed annoyance well from Rosie's green eyes, now he saw it here again. It made him laugh and shake so much that Wallace politely excused himself.

He returned seconds later making a loud ripping sound as he peeled back silver tape from a large roll. "Gimme that." His mother said as she took the tape away. Used to correcting the behaviour of a bright mind getting ahead of common sense. John looked around the cosy home for a solution. He and Rosie would lie next to each other in the single bed, often waking to find Rosie still working on their 'esc' code. Her 'esc' code. His 'esc' code.

"Those things on the shelf, try a few of them." John pointed to a series of vertical shapes he half remembered but couldn't find the name of.

"Books? You didn't have no books in there neither?!" Wallace's shocked tone drew saddened looks from the only two real adults in the room.

"Alright let's eat." Louisa served dinner early to avoid further talk of what was and wasn't in the Vault.

She ladled out bright shapes with crisp, blackened edges. Fragrant, tender meat dripping with juice, cut thickly from the bone with ease. "Oh, this is pork, pig meat. Those are tatos roasted in herbs, and this is corn, and carrot mash." She spoke in an unsure tone. Not used to having to identify her cooking as she piled John's plate high with wondrous food, real food.

"Is this what you normally eat?" She asked still unsure, trying to make conversation with a stranger who looked overwhelmed. Wallace snorted with derision so hard the older man laughed, remembering the protein bar.

"This looks, and smells, wonderful. Thank you." John managed to get a few words out, his voice breaking under the sensory overload.

"Don't fuss now woman, let the man eat." Robco came to his aid with a mildly strong tone, and a very strong drink. "Junior, Junior…" The boy didn't answer, already lost in green code.

"It's fine, really, Rosie would use my pipboy like this all the time." John wasn't lying but he really wanted to taste the crisp skin on the back of the thick cut meat. He only needed one arm for that.

"There had to be a girl right, nobody does anything this stupid unless they're in love." The younger woman's words and tone matched the older man's from earlier. Warm, sympathetic, but deeply amused by the predictability of fools in love.

They both began eating, finally letting John feel like he could too. He stabbed at the meat with his free arm, tearing chunks away with the slightest twist. It practically melted in his mouth. Even the slightest chew released waves of contrasting rich, sharp, flavours. He couldn't remember what the rest of the piled high food on his plate was called.

Each different colour brought new textures, tastes, and satisfying crunches. He vividly recalled the taste of an apple, half an apple, from nearly a decade ago. As he thought the meal couldn't get any better, viscous, hot, dark liquid was poured over everything. Coating it all, changing, amplifying, the flavours further still. Gravy, the woman called it, he wouldn't forget that anytime soon.

Even with one hand almost literally tied behind his back, John cleared his plate twice as fast as anyone else. Wallace had barely touched his food. At his mother's frequent insistence he would blindly bring a forkful of food to his mouth, then stop. Needing his hand to type or take notes, in pencil on a big yellow pad.

Writing anything down was forbidden in the Vault, everything had to be sent digitally so it could be monitored. Aside from scratching juvenile graffiti into metal walls John never wrote anything. It never occurred to him it might be needed. The boy disproving that as he scratched and flipped pages back and forth quicker than John could switch screens.

"Your girl, Rosie, what's she like?" Louisa asked now the newcomer had stopped shovelling food into his face. John didn't feel pressured to answer the woman's soft question. She was making conversation, making him feel at ease by talking about something they could all understand. Besides he'd never had to describe her to anyone before.

"Smart. A lot like this one." He looked at the boy to his side, typing rapidly on his homemade keyboard. "Except taller and prettier." And angrier, he thought, leaving that out. They wouldn't understand. Louisa smiled.

"Don't you listen to him baby, you're plenty pretty!" She joked, Wallace peered round the stacked books to glare at her for treating like the child he was in every way apart from his intellect. "Is she…" Louisa trailed off, unsure of how to phrase her question.

"Still in the Vault." John looked down, away from the people around him, ashamed. But he gathered himself, "For now." He surprised himself with the resolute tone his words struck. Robco raised his tin cup in support, pleased to hear determination in the man's voice. Thoughts of Rosie weakened the cracked mental dam further, but in the churn of questions his perspective had begun to shift.

"Pops says you're out here looking for parts, a ventilation system right?" Louisa asked, trying to sound upbeat about his prospects.

"Yeah I've got specs here." He went to retrieve the data from his pipboy but stopped, seeing the small face further lost in green code. "I'll show you later."

"This vent system, it's not going to fail tomorrow or anything right?" John heard genuine concern in the woman's voice. Here she sat, safe, warm, belly full of real food. And still the thought of people in danger bothered her. Despite the fact most of those people wouldn't even entertain the idea of her existence.

"It will be at least a year. They made us 'build for the future'. Digging into the caves, lining them with concrete and metal walls to make more space. Even though there's empty rooms everywhere. When they bring level seven on to the main air circ it's going to put too much strain on the system and it's going to break." It felt good to say out loud, spoken freely in clear voices. Not hushed whispers hidden away from spying ears. Which would jump at the chance to report a rule violation to get an hour on the Rec deck.

"If it does I, we, are scared that they will just cut off the lower levels, and hundreds will die gasping for breath." John's words brought a hush to the table, even the radio seemed to stop. This table had heard its share of bad news over the years but nothing quite like this. "Fucking Overseer." The words slipped from his mouth, finally said for someone other than Rosie.

"Overseer?!" At first John thought Louisa had reacted with annoyance to the cursing, but that wasn't the word she repeated. "They make you work, they keep you trapped, they're no better than slavers." She pushed away the remains of her delicious food, too disgusted by the thought to eat.

"Worse." The older man said between small sips of his whiskey, "At least slaves know they should be free." He looked John in the eye, worried he may have said too much. May have pushed to John to reveal more, he had. The more John talked, hearing the words aloud, the more the waters of his mind churned. Slamming against the failing mental dam holding back question after question without answer.

"Tell her what they taught you…if you want." Robco sounded regretful, and not just for the minor verbal slip. John understood why, he'd seen the look on the older man's face at the lying billboard that told John the truth. He saw sympathy, but also pity for a man who'd been lied to all his life.

"They told us, all day every day, at every opportunity, that we were the only people left alive. That because of greed and laziness, men had burned the surface in a Great War." He could see the cartoon slideshow in his head as he spoke. "And that nothing could live outside so it was up to us. 'Our noble duty to build for the future'. So that when we had enough space the work would stop and we'd all live in a huge underground city." Shame and tears filled his eyes.

"It was all a lie, and I believed it. We all believed it, for years. We worked twelve hour shifts breaking rocks every day, gladly, proudly. All to build space we didn't need for a future we wouldn't see." John wanted to stop. He wanted to hold back things that were clearly upsetting the good people that took him in, he couldn't.

"A few years after we got pipboys, Rosie figured out they didn't just look different. They could do things the standard model couldn't, things they shouldn't have been able to do. She hacked the loudspeaker network, level by level, using mapping pulses to scan the whole Vault." For a moment John was fifteen again, staring at Rosie sitting at her stolen terminal, her face bathed in green light.

"Like I said, she's smart. When we compared them to the map we had installed, there were new sections on our map that they tried to hide behind false walls. One led to the door. We weren't supposed to be anywhere near it, not even on that level. But one day we snuck up there. Rosie being Rosie she started hacking away and found a radio signal playing music. It sounded beautiful." John could hear it now, even over the music playing in the warm home. "We knew, right there and then, it meant people were alive. That there had to be someone out there." Fearing he may soon have to leave the warm glow of the fire and the even warmer glow of company, he pressed on, unable to keep from talking.

"We, I, decided we should leave…whatever was out there had to be better, even if it wasn't, we'd be together. It took a long time, years, but Rosie didn't give up. She wrote a hack to open the giant door. Once that was finished we started planning, like really planning. Begging, borrowing, stealing anything we could to help, which wasn't easy. We used to sneak through the air vents. The more we did, the more we saw how bad it looked."

"Worn fans, blades missing. The main unit was even worse, spluttering, leaking coolant. And even in a stockroom so big you could barely see one end from the other, there were no spares. We tried everything to get them to listen. Rosie even generated fake work orders, but all they did was punish us….and Rosie, it…it made her angry. The plan was she would go. Sneak out, while I spoofed signals and faked logins, covering her tracks for as long as I could. We figured we could do it for three days, then I'd get caught and sent to organic recyc for three months."

"She worked out that the radio signal had to be coming from something tall enough to see. With the mapping tech wired into a big enough radio tower we could send a pulse for miles. That was Rosie's theory anyway and that was good enough for me. Even if she didn't find the parts we'd have the mapping data to show people. Prove that they were being lied to, change things for the better."

"So we got our hands on three days of rations. Just enough to keep going for a day west, a day back, and a day just in case. If there was nothing out there, like they told us, she would come back no one would know. And we would have to take more direct action. If she wasn't back in three days I would do what I could to slow things down. Break stuff, lose things, trigger false rad spikes. Whatever I could to give her more time, and she would be back in three months regardless."

"About a month ago Rosie changed the plan. She wanted to tell everyone about the broken systems to stir things up. When security came down they'd start cracking skulls and taking people away, like always. It would turn into a riot and in the chaos she'd slip away. We didn't have to do that. If we had proof we could at least get some people onside. Maybe nobody had to get hurt, but she couldn't see it, so we got in a big fight." John worried he'd painted Rosie in a bad light, he couldn't read the expressions. Louisa had turned away to hide her tears, Robco's expression hadn't changed at all.

"She's a good person, she got lost somehow down there, too focused on getting out at any cost." John took a deep breath of warm air, another few bites of real food and finished his sweet intoxicating drink. His good hosts, who took such pride in the things they built, would not like the next part of his sad tale.

"To get the hack to work Rosie built a virtual door on one of our pipboys and hacked it with the other. Over and over again, for years, so I had the code…her code…and I used it to leave instead of her." No one spoke. John wiped the tears from his face with his free arm, shifted his weight, ready to leave. Return to solitude of the fallen night he felt he deserved. Without turning her head Louisa took his hand and squeezed it tightly to let him know that he wasn't alone.

Pressure eased in John's mind, the spilling of secrets over the dinner table allowed him clarity. "All that matters now is her. I'm going to find those parts, I'll fit them myself if I have to, then she will be free. She'll hate me, but she'll be free, and neither of us will have to think about that fucking place ever again."

"We're gonna help right Momma? We're going to help John on his quest aren't we?" The boy had been listening for a while, John started to apologise for burdening them with his life story.

"I didn't mean t—"

"You're damn right we are baby." Louisa let go of John's hand and took her son's. "You're damn right we are."