Chapter Text
“Tell me again, momma.”
The woman chuckled, a raspy sound through her irradiated throat. “How many times am I going to spin this yarn, child?”
This was their little ritual, the ghoul and the girl she’d claimed as her daughter. The child smiled a huge toothless grin and answered as she always did.
“Just once more.”
The lights in the house sputtered once before going out. The ghoul sighed, reaching for the gas lantern and it flared to life. Ranger Station Alpha held a strict schedule with their generators and tended to changed the shut off schedule with little or no notice. It made sense, given all the disputes over power allocation. And since they’d illegally run some powerlines to their little shack, she wasn’t in a place to complain.
“All right then, darlin’.” She pushed the girl down onto the cot and pulled a tattered blanket up to the girl’s chin. Gently, she brushed her fingers through the her hair, some of the strands catching on her blistered flesh. “Just once more. Then it’s off with Mr. Sandman for you.”
She giggled in delight and pulled the blankets up to her chin to show that she would do as her mother asked.
“Once upon a time, oh, I’d say six or seven years ago—“
“Six years three months and nineteen days!”
“Yes, thank you, child. But remember, it’s rude to interrupt.”
The girl bit down on her finger to keep herself from talking again. The ghoul smiled and patted her on the head.
“There now, where was I? Oh, yes, just over six years ago, I was scavenging through what I thought should be an old warehouse. Just looking for, oh, I don’t know. Food, vacuum cleaners, whatever I could sell for parts. And wouldn’t you know it, the danged place turned out to be a secret bunker! Now who would’ve thought that?”
“You did, momma!”
“Well, not at first, child. ‘Cause I’d been to that old warehouse more times than I could recollect. But we’d had a run of earthquakes lately—little ones—and something must have shook loose.”
“That’s when you found the secret door.”
“I sure did. Whole section of the of the brick torn clear away. And there it stood, that massive round gear of a door and the Vault-Tec logo shining bold as brass.”
“How’d ya get the door open, momma?”
“You know as well as I do, dear heart. Computers is just like people, only they speak their own language. You just got to know how to talk to ‘em.”
“And boy howdy can you talk to ‘em.”
“Your old lady knows a thing or two about the contraptions.” The ghoul smiled, relaxing into the familiar story. They’d been through the tale so often, they both had it memorized, but she didn’t mind. But if you had to relive one day, that was a good one—the day she finally found some meaning for this afterlife.
“A secret Vault-Tec storage facility.” The ghoul went on. “Not a proper Vault, mind you, but something untouched for over 200 years. And here was me, the first to find it. Boy, how my luck had changed.”
The girl giggled, burying her face in the dirty pillow. “There was something special inside, huh, momma?”
“Sure was. Most special thing to come into my life. Not what I woulda thought, neither.”
“You thought it was going to be fancy new tech, huh?”
“Something like that was what I’d hoped. Though, I’d guess it would be fancy old tech, huh? Never would have imagined what I did find. A slew of pods all set up before the Great War. Don’t know for sure what they hoped to accomplish—all the data files being burnt out they way they was—but if I had to hazard a guess, well, I’d say they planned to put everyone to sleep for a long time. Powerful long. And when all the dust and fallout had settled, they’d wake y’all up.”
“But something went wrong.”
“Sure did, sugar pie. ‘Bout as wrong as it could go. A malfunction somewhere along the way. All the pods had gone dark and the people in them asleep for good.”
“All except one.”
“That’s right. The best one of them all. You was still in there, all snug and tight and just waiting for me to come along and rescue you. Out of all the things that could have gone wrong…well, someone upstairs was looking out for you, child. I was supposed to find you in that pod. It was meant to be.”
“And that’s why you named me what you did, huh, momma?” She wriggled under the covers, too excited to have reached her favorite part of the story. “’Cause of the pod.”
“You betcha, hun. All of ‘em gone dark, ‘cept the most special number….my lucky Six.”