Date: 10.8.2224
Location: Coulee Mine, Lafayette Outskirts
Red Rocket Truck Stop Territory
The night was quiet.
Too quiet.
Inside the Red Rocket, Pinball’s voice echoed through the old walls as he played Atomic Garden with the Dean children. His excitement filled the room, broken circuits and all.
Larry had finally gone to sleep.
Clancy too.
For once, the wasteland allowed a moment of peace.
Jean Dean and I walked away from the lights of the truck stop, following the edge of the Coulee Mine. The toxic waters reflected the moon above, a reminder that this place was both refuge and reminder.
I had fought feral ghouls.
I had watched them attack.
I knew what they could become.
But I still did not understand what happened to people like Jean, Mabel, and their children.
So I asked him.
“Jean… how did this happen?”
He was quiet for a moment.
Not because he didn’t know the answer.
Because he had lived it.
“It wasn’t the bombs that changed us. It was everything that came after.”
“Before the war, I worked my grocery store in Freetown. Everybody knew something was coming. It was on television. It was on the radio. Every day, more stories about shortages, conflict, panic.”
“At first, business was booming. People were scared. They stocked food. They bought supplies. Everyone thought they were preparing for a disaster.”
He paused.
“But nobody understood what kind of disaster was coming.”
“We thought we had time. We didn’t.”
Jean explained that when the sirens sounded, people believed they would have warning.
They believed they could escape.
They believed the world still followed rules.
It didn’t.
“When the bombs fell in other places, we thought Louisiana would survive. We thought we were far enough away.”
“But the Fallout came.”
“Radiation doesn’t always kill you. Sometimes it leaves you waiting.”
Jean described watching the world change slowly.
Not in one moment.
Not in one explosion.
Over years.
The Fallout settled into the land.
Into the water.
Into the air.
Into people.
“The first thing I noticed wasn’t my skin.”
Jean looked back toward the ruins beyond Lafayette.
“It was the silence.”
“Freetown used to be loud.”
“Cars. Music. People talking across porches. Children running through the streets. Folks arguing about football. Boudin, Zydeco in the neighborhood.”
“That was Freetown.”
“After the bombs, the silence was the first thing that told us the world had died.”
Jean explained that Freetown wasn’t destroyed by one single event.
It was worn away.
Floods came.
Storms came.
The land itself became another enemy.
“I watched people survive the bombs, only to be taken by everything afterward.”
“Floods. Sickness. The ash in the air. The smog. The years.”
“People think the bombs ended the world.”
Jean shook his head.
“They started it.”
“We don’t know why we lived. We just did.”
Jean told me about his family.
Mabel.
The children.
The people who never made it.
Some died quickly.
Others changed.
Some became feral.
Some simply lost themselves.
“I watched people turn into something else. Some glowed. Some stopped being who they were.”
“But me? Mabel? The kids?”
“We kept eating. We kept drinking clean water. We took whatever vitamins we could find.”
“Maybe it helped. Maybe it didn’t.”
“I honestly don’t know.”
Jean looked at his hands.
“I just know we’re still here.”
I asked him the question that had been sitting in my mind.
“Do you think there’s a way to reverse it?”
Jean looked back at the Red Rocket.
At his family.
At the home they built.
“Maybe.”
“But I don’t know if we should.”
He took a breath.
“Sometimes I wonder if becoming human again would even save us.”
“We survived as we are.”
“Maybe the world changed us because this was the only way we could endure it.”
“People hear the word ghoul and think monster. They forget we were people first.”
Jean’s voice hardened.
“Freetown had families. Workers. Businesses. Churches. Schools.”
“It wasn’t a wasteland.”
“It was home.”
He looked toward the southeast.
“My store is gone. My friends are gone. Most of what I knew is gone.”
“But the University still stands.”
Jean pointed across the dark horizon.
“We’re on the west side of Lafayette.”
“Freetown is southeast of here.”
“When you see the University, you’re seeing Freetown.”
I stopped.
The words landed.
Because I knew that place.
Before the war.
Before the Fallout.
Before all of this.
“I was a student there,” I said.
“I studied engineering there.”
Jean looked at me.
“Then maybe you need to see it.”
I nodded.
“Maybe I do.”
“But first, I need to know what the Brotherhood is doing.”
Jean understood.
The Vertibirds had been circling for days.
The Brotherhood was searching.
For technology.
For resources.
For something.
“Maybe they’re not here for us.”
Jean looked back toward the sky.
“But when people with that much power come looking, you pay attention.”
Before we returned, Jean looked over the Coulee Mine.
“Before the war, this was a shallow mining area. Gravel. Shale.”
“After everything happened, the rain changed it.”
“The water changed.”
“The land changed.”
“But there are still living fish down there.”
He smiled slightly.
“That’s where I found this place.”
“The Red Rocket was abandoned.”
“We made it a home.”
“The world took everything from us. So we built something anyway.”
Jean looked toward the truck stop lights.
“This area isn’t much. Warehouses. Old roads. Empty buildings.”
“But nobody comes here.”
“That’s why it works.”
“Quiet places are valuable now.”
I thought about the map Clancy gave him.
The old Freetown map.
A piece of a world that existed before.
“Thank you for the map,” Jean said.
“For the first time in years, I can see where home was.”
When we returned, Pinball was still playing with the children.
The sound of laughter filled the Red Rocket.
Outside, the Brotherhood searched the skies.
The wasteland waited.
But tonight I understood something.
A ghoul is not a monster created by radiation.
A ghoul is a person carrying a history most people forgot.
Freetown was not a ruin.
Not completely.
Because Jean Dean was still there.
And as long as someone remembers what a place was...
A place is never truly gone.
— Big Chief Mike Marcel
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