4 Chapter 3 The Grand

Chapter 3 The Grand

The next few miles flew by, invigorated from his success at the Red Rocket station and the proof of life out here. John kept a good pace as he walked through the new, old world. Narrow roads gave way to wider ones. Burnt remains changed to concrete rubble and collapsed steel. Buildings at some point, but now bore little resemblance to anything you could call structure.

Jagged half standing walls poked up from the crumbled concrete, no two areas the same. Yet he saw enough to determine patterns in the space free from rubble. Slowly being reclaimed by the sickly looking, reddish brown spiked grass.

It looked as if the former buildings were grouped in areas of three or four. With narrow off shoot roads winding through. Despite the boost he'd given the mapping pulse, it still couldn't decode the rubble into anything but hazy blobs of green light on his map screen.

The map screen showed a vast area filled with squares and rectangles. Other shapes that were unmistakably man made. As John scrolled and zoomed through the newly acquired data he began to see a broad, thick line. Heading west, connections branching off it. The main corridor, he thought, before correcting himself. The main road.

It must be the one he saw from the Vault, the one that led to the tall structure on the horizon. "The Tower." He said out loud, it had to be. Nothing else that tall had stayed standing around here.

John thought about what Rosie told him. The strength of the signal she'd plucked from the air meant it had to be coming from something tall and metal. His own antenna worked, so he made the Tower his goal, and headed west.

The fastest way to the main road looked like an almost straight line through one of the larger patches of rubble. Unmapped and unknown, it could be a risk. John stood for a moment weighing his options. Using the side wheel to scroll around his map. Trying to match up the different, yet the same, rectangles to the rubble piles. The grey debris stretched as far as his eyes could see.

It could take days to clear. He simply didn't have the water for that, so into the unknown he went. What appeared to be just rubble to the eye, and solid to the mapping pulses, turned out to be anything but. Behind the crumbled concrete were walls, floors, even smaller sections that looked untouched. Still with intact desks, chairs, and brightly coloured plastic cups.

John became transfixed with this window into the new, old world. Not with how different it seemed, but with how similar it looked. Like the offices he'd been ordered to in the Vault. He might have been the first person to set eyes on this once proud collection of buildings for a century.

John wanted to explore. To climb, to stake claim to this section of the new, old world. Yet he forced himself to stop and think. He could get trapped, he could fall. A thousand other things could go wrong leaving him alone. Even in the dark depths of the caves he was never alone. Help only ever a pipcall away, as he knew all too well. So he pressed on, content to explore from the uneven ground.

As the rubble cleared the main road came into view. Even from the side and partially obscured, it was clearly in far better condition than what remained of the other roads. Faded, cracked, dotted with metal blocks that had once drove at great speed. Unmistakable as anything but a road. There were even signs bridging over from the waist high, solid concrete barriers that enclosed it.

John cared little for the things he helped build in the depths of the Vault. Perhaps because he knew how rarely they would be used. Or that he was expected to take the requisite pride in them. John stood staring down the perfectly straight, eight lane, faded blacktop. He felt almost envious of the crew that built something functional while retaining a sort of beauty.

The same misshapen trees with the blood red leaves followed the road into the distance as it climbed and fell into the horizon. All under the endless blue. John walked for hours, taking in the sights. Occasionally stopping as he heard rustling in the leaves. Or a burrowing sound, or a muffled clapping that he couldn't place. The sounds of life he thought to himself. The conditioned fear of the outside drilled into him as a child replaced with optimism and curiosity.

Soon the gnarled branches that supported the blood red canopy began to fall from view as the road began to climb. And climb further still. Before long John could see miles to either side. More ruins, more canopy, and the radio became clearer gifting him with actual music. Fast, upbeat songs that seemed to quicken his pace, lightening his backpack and heavy boots.

The road started to level out. He saw a large section had fallen through leaving an impassable sheer drop to a quick death. It must have been thirty feet. Too wide to cross, too broad to even bother trying. Even for someone without a fear of heights. John felt a twinge of sadness for the long dead workers that built this marvel. Quickly replaced by the thought that if one section collapsed to the ground, so might another. Tentatively he moved closer to the exposed, snapped and twisted metal bars that marked the edge.

John craned his neck to see, staying back from the brink. Only to be forced ever closer. It was a long way down. Fighting the urge to vomit he saw that a concrete support pillar had given way. It had tumbled to one side, taking the road section with it.

John knew that although the support was one of many, its loss weakened the whole structure. Refusing to let that thought burrow any deeper, he forced himself to look down on the valley below for an alternative route.

Tearing his eyes away from the failed concrete pillar, as well as the thought of it happening again, he saw a small cluster of relatively intact buildings. With a road running through the centre, almost parallel to the main road. That had to be accessible through one of the offshoots he passed. So with relief John headed back down and off the main road. Once again under the blood red canopy

Looking back from under the patchwork of blood red leaves as he walked on, John saw the main road and the structure of the elevated section. His strange, vicarious pride grew as he realised just how impressive it truly was.

A row of at least eight tapered columns supported the wide, faded blacktop. Each set in tarnished steel footings rising from the uneven ground. In his mind he tried to reverse engineer the process of constructing the elevated road. John's best guess was scaffolding to support a thick steel core in place, then poured concrete to finish. At least that's what he understood from years in the Vault.

He didn't like the idea of scaffolding anywhere near that high. Or securing a mould that large while keeping the shape accurate. The most impressive aspect to him was the self evident pride in how the finished construction would look. People using it would have function, matched with pleasing form. Instead of the same panel after panel of dull steel, lit with harsh fluorescent light that never changed.

Black gnarled trunks gave way to the telltale negative space of a road. John followed it out of the red canopy, turning right, leading to the small cluster of buildings ahead. The layout looked similar to the area with the rotten wooden houses.

Neat plots of land sectioned off with individual houses in them. Steel frames partially covered with thin metal plate. Not dull like the Vault, brightly coloured blues and greens, still vibrant after all this time. These single floor structures weren't as big as the rotten wood houses. Although they seemed vast compared to his quarters on level six.

Every third or fourth one had been methodically stripped of anything even remotely useful. Leaving only outlines of steel above sun bleached floors. More signs that people survived, but no indication of how long they'd lasted out here. He still hadn't found water, or anything that seemed edible. Without water it was hard to imagine anyone lasting long, including him.

John tried the radio. It had been mostly static since descending from the main road. Nothing beyond a trace of broken words. Adequate for now he thought, realising it would have to be. Like his rations, just enough to keep going.

Steel frames were all that remained of the houses, as John walked on he started to see why. Taller, red brick buildings now surrounded him, three and four storeys high. Punctuated with grimy black squares once clear enough to let light in.

The house panels had been reshaped into coverings for high walls. Topped with sharp, torn edges. Filled with red brick rubble that bulged through in parts. John thought it almost looked like sections of the red brick buildings were deliberately demolished. Used to build the reclaimed, repurposed wall. Or they could have simply built over the rubble. Effective either way because John couldn't get past it.

John knew this must have been built after The Great War. People had survived, but his gnawing doubt saw little sign of life here now. Maybe the walls hadn't kept out whatever they were built to.

He followed the wall between the buildings looking for a way through, before long he found one. A crumbled building set in the rubble wall, collapsed and missing almost an entire side. With most of another gone too, completely negating any resistance the rebuilt barrier could have offered. John wondered again if some of the demolition was deliberate. Had they damaged the building so much to protect themselves, inadvertently weakening everything else. Was that what he'd done by leaving, would his attempt to save the Vault doom it. Had it done so already?

John pushed the thoughts from his mind to focus on his new surroundings. Wooden floorboards creaked underfoot. The remaining red brick walls seemed to have sagged. Cracked and broken from the strain of supporting the floors above. It did not feel safe.

Even so he couldn't help noticing the once satisfying patterns of brickwork. It reminded him of the much smaller polished stone blocks his father gave him as a child. Teaching him a similar pattern of alternating blocks to spread the weight. With calm, lightly placed steps he edged through the ruined brick building. Trying not to disturb anything, listening always for any sound of falling or shifting above.

It took less time than it seemed, but he made it through. Exiting into the soft, warm afternoon light from the sun, still making its way across the endless blue. John accessed the map on his jet black pipboy. The mapping data wasn't great so he sent another pulse. It returned quickly filling in some of the bright, blank spots. Revealing the rows of tall brick buildings he could see. With an open area ahead, and the road he needed to find just beyond that.

John wound between buildings. Under the metal staircases mounted to the sides and scrambled over piles of rubble. It brought him to the open area. Dominated on one side by a broad building full of blackened or broken windows. Letters once copper now thick green, spelt out 'The Grand'. Or did until some fell off, leaving slightly clearer patches of once white stone.

The square area in front was paved. Dotted with metal benches and blown out street lights. Dead tree trunks fenced into neat sections. All edged with a narrow road. John stayed opposite The Grand, making his way along a line of smaller glass fronted buildings. Each one smashed and picked clean to the bone of anything and everything.

He couldn't look away from The Grand, imagining how it once looked. With its copper lettering mounted to a clean white stone façade. Each window embellished with carved adornments. It must have been quite a sight, he thought. Now it looked grimy, dirty, and broken, like everywhere else.

As he came to the end of the row, something across the road caught his attention. A shape he'd never seen before, yet looked familiar. At the entrance to another narrow alley. Under more exterior metal stairs, lying on ground. Metal set in wood, a rifle. Feeling the same compulsion as when he tried to retrieve the skeleton's long held shotgun, John walked over and picked it up. Only to instantly realise what a stupid mistake he'd made.

The heavy weight of the rifle held a near invisible, single strand of wire. Tied to a rusty bucket suspended over the railing of the metal stairs above. Taking the obvious bait sent the cacophonous contents of broken brick and scrap cascading down. Pinging, clanging, echoing louder and louder with every hit.

Something small, and too fast to see, zipped through the air in front of him. Embedding itself in the red brick with a puff of dust, followed by a sharp crack through the air, a bullet. Someone was alive and they were trying to kill him.

Adrenaline coursed through his entire body. The gel cushioned sleeve of the jet black pipboy contracted sharply with an emergency notification, reflexively making John look at it.

*INCOMING FIRE DETECTED EMERGENCY COMBAT PROTOCOLS ENGAGED*

Electricity swelled up through his spine, overtaking every nerve in his body. Supercharging them, priming them for action. As he looked at the world it became brighter, sharper. Light amplified, details magnified, and something else. Something not possible, yet happening before his eyes.

The junk spilled from the bucket was still falling, but impossibly slowly. As if it weighed less somehow. John turned his gaze from the freshly made, fist sized hole in solid brick that could have easily been his chest, automatically looking back at The Grand. It became highlighted in a green outline. Seemingly overlaid onto the world. It scanned and eliminated windows. Before highlighting one singular square of the twenty or so he could see. A faint green line projected through the air to the ground around him. Highlighting it with overlapping circles of red light.

More data appeared in his field of view. Pipboy screen green code streaming down his peripheral vision. Like reading too long in the dark, but instead of an after image, this was new data. All being calculated with code he couldn't read mixed with equations he didn't understand. He didn't understand anything.

John turned back to the cascading bits of brick still falling at an impossibly slow rate. A large red warning indicator bloomed into view on, or rather in, his eyes, demanding he turn back.

He looked to the road leading towards The Grand. The top right corner of his vision somehow zoomed in, creating a separate image within his view. It showed people, live people, armed people, running towards him. Both marked with the same green outline. The data showed them at forty nine meters, moving impossibly slow, like the still falling bricks.

The zoomed image vanished leaving red indicators showing forty eight meters. A timer appeared in the centre, counting down. Six point eight seconds, six point seven, six point six. Each fraction of a second lasting far longer than it should.

Operating on automatic John looked down at the rifle gripped tightly in his hands. It pulsed with a green outline and diagrams of it scrolled into the left side of his view. It prompted him to pull back the bolt showing an empty chamber.

Code scrolled faster and faster. Calculating, interpreting the world to find a solution, when suddenly it stopped. Going completely blank for a moment. Then a surreal image, even in the midst of everything else, appeared in the centre of his view. The system's cartoon mascot, Vault Boy, used to train him how to use his pipboy as a child. It appeared, winked, waved his arms and vanished into a cartoon puff of pixelated smoke.

*EMERGENCY STEALTH RESERVE ACTIVATED*

The air fizzed around him. Charging with unknown energy that enveloped him. Vanishing his entire body from view. As the training cartoon had done fractions of a second earlier.

He looked at his hands, his chest, his legs still rooted to the spot in panic. He could see through them to the ground below. He couldn't even see the pipboy. Only the green code, somehow displayed inside his eyes. John touched his hands to his chest, almost to check they were still there. Forgetting he still held the rifle that started to drop at the same distorted rate.

Another indicator bloomed onto his screen, his eyes, green and pointing towards a person shaped outline against the wall. Positioned directly underneath the somehow still falling broken bricks and scrap. In an almost nightmare, dreamlike state he staggered over to the outline. Commanded by the only thing that made anything close to sense.

As John moved his body shimmered, distorting the field enveloping him. Momentarily causing the images of the ground beneath him to shift in a deeply unsettling, stomach churning manner. It put John off balance. Through a force of will not entirely his own, he made it to the projected person outline, pressing his back against the red brick wall. The nauseating field cloaked him into repetitive patterns. As if a switch had been flipped, the bricks, scrap, and rifle all hit the ground in the same instant.

John forced himself to take shallow, quiet breaths as footsteps approached. Panting, they rounded the corner with their backs to the invisible man stood scared rigid. They were so close he could smell them, they stank. Skinny, twitching, two men, carrying rifles like the one he'd been so foolish to grab mere seconds earlier.

"I heard the trap man, I heard it, it, it was a guy. A guy in a blue suit that vanished, he vanished man!" The shorter of the two men spat the words out far too fast. It looked like they'd fashioned crude armour from the housing plates. Bits of cut car wheels strung together to cover their shoulders.

"Yeah, he vanished? How much Psycho did you hit?" Asked the taller man. John could see the bruising up his arms as he turned. His skin scarred and dirty, open sores across his neck.

"I hit it all man, gotta fight, gotta fight the vanished man, gotta be sharp." He barely made sense, which was lucky because he'd definitely seen John. "The trap, look at the trap! Someone upstairs took that shot too, they don't waste ammo, where's your rifle man it ain't here, it vanished man!" The shorter man started getting more animated, twitching, breathing heavily. Snarling through stinking, rotten teeth. The countdown on the inside of his eyes reset to twenty seconds, dropping fast. No, normally he realised. The word held little meaning in that moment.

"Maybe there was someone here." Said the taller man, and off the pair went. The shorter man running ahead, glad to not be standing still. Off they went searching for a man that vanished, on the instructions of someone wired within an inch of his life. They cleared John's view, turning a corner.

Fifteen seconds on the countdown. He forced himself to move, trying to focus on the alley ahead and not the nauseating effect cloaking his body from view.

Weaving through alleys and round buildings, John soon lost all sense of direction. He had to stop. He slid against a wall sinking all the way to the ground. Shutting his eyes tight to wait out the countdown. He could still see numbers ticking down inside his closed eyes.

The countdown hit zero, he opened his eyes, relieved to see his body again. A difficult sensation to process. A panel he didn't know opened retracted on the back of the pipboy. It spat out a glass cylinder that cracked as soon as it hit the ground. Spilling a hot metallic liquid and triggering a minor rad spike.

The last minute felt like an hour. To get his bearings John checked his map screen, thankfully now confined to the pipboy. The road looked close. As he cleared the alley he saw the elevated road in the distance.

He knew keeping that on his right meant heading west so he ran through the last remaining red brick buildings. Running from what might have been the state of everyone in this new, old world. He ran to drive the thoughts from his head. Getting faster until all he could concentrate on was running. His focus on moving straight under the now familiar canopy of blood red leaves.

John fell to his knees in a small clearing. He couldn't take another step. Instead rolling onto his back, staring into the endless blue. Now being overtaken with unfamiliar white and grey shapes high above. It was all too much, his mind raced.

People, live people, but sickly and very hostile. Were they all that remained, preying on other people? What was combat protocol? How did the data appear in his eyes? How did he get out of there? Did it save him or itself?

A wave of unexpected, unwelcome and unnecessary tiredness came over John forcing him to sleep. His closed eyes fluttering as if dreaming. After a few blank seconds his eyes opened, staring up at the white shapes invading the endless blue.

John felt calm. His heart rate steady, breathing deep, rhythmic breaths. John raised his left arm to activate the once trusted, familiar device he'd worn for a decade and a half. Revealed now as something far beyond his understanding. The screen showed the cartoon mascot above a rapidly filling progress bar. It was rebooting. They were rebooting.

The bar filled and the screen went blank. Then it showed the cartoon training program's familiar mascot, Vault Boy. Wearing a helmet of some kind and carrying a gun. The banner scrolling down the screen read *Congratulations Soldier*

Soldier. He didn't know what the word meant. John hadn't seen one of the reward messages in years, not since he left the family deck. They were used as part of the system designed to teach him to use his pipboy as a child. It would set maths tests, or little games that required the wearer to find different points on the map screen and get to them for the next clue. Simple things but fun, especially in a place with little else in the way of entertainment.

The reward message cleared, starting the boot up sequence. New systems, new pages, cycling up. Medical, heart rate, dehydration, blood oxygen, radiation all displayed. On and on it went. Frequency scan, mapping pulses that fired in threes instead of one, returning with more accurate data. It all became too much. He looked away, thankful to not see the data in his eyes too.

John sat up and retrieved a water can. Forcing himself to get the already opened one. He pressed the lid and drew on the straw, draining the half empty vessel all too quickly. John looked at the fill gauge on the side, tapping the little red ball bearing. As if it would magically fill and float up.

John inspected the makeshift backpack. It'd nearly fallen off one too many times. He knew how to improve it and welcomed the distraction. First he emptied it, worked the knots loose till it resembled a vault-suit again. Then he retied the knots at the shoulders and hips. He used the crook of a misshapen branch to pull the knots tighter. Twisting the empty arms, tying them together to form a v, instead of a strap.

He slipped the v strap over his head then joined the tightly twisted legs around his waist. Leaving a small loop to hold the multi-tool close at hand. He filled the tighter fitting, smaller backpack with his meagre rations and slid the multi-tool into place across his chest. Delaying looking at the once understood device as long as he could. Finally looking down at the jet black sheen. Almost catching a reflection of himself before the screen automatically activated.

Everything looked normal at first. Same layout, same menu options on the right. But with exclamation points indicating new information under training. Being pointed at by the cartoon Vault Boy.

John ignored it, clicking on the familiar radio option to hear the static, then to the map screen. It seemed sharper, more detailed. Like his vision after he grabbed that rifle and everything changed. Almost as if the pipboy had more power. It could interpret more, understand more. The measurements were all changed over from yards to meters. The time displayed as 16:38, not 4:38pm. He thought about finding the settings to see if he could change it back but he didn't want to look at it any more.

The secrets revealed to him were something far beyond anything he and Rosie ever thought. She'd always told him there were big chunks of data she couldn't access. Even with her gift for understanding the thing they'd both worn for so long. She'd always blamed Oversight. Useless morons she called them. They'd tried to wipe the data, but just corrupted the headers making the data irretrievable.

John knew she'd still be on shift and wouldn't have listened to the holotape he'd recorded for her yet. Not that she needed it to tell her he'd left. She saw that on his face in the last, brief moment they'd shared passing in the corridor. Although it would tell her why he'd gone alone. Something he now regretted more, and he didn't think that was possible ten minutes ago.