Rested But Cautious

Date: 8.23.2224
Location: Downtown Houston Loft 

I woke up to the smell of tar.

Not fresh tar.

Old tar.

The kind of smell that settles into wood, concrete, fabric, and whatever else has been left alone long enough to absorb the weather. 

For a few seconds, I didn't move.

I just listened.

Nothing.

No ventilation system.

No footsteps in the corridor.

No distant voices from the Chow Room.

No machines cycling somewhere beneath the floor.

No Marcus arguing with Mindy.

No Zee moving through an engineering bay.

No Lydia making some inappropriate comment before breakfast.

No Vault.

Just silence.

Then I opened my eyes and remembered where I was.

The loft looked worse in daylight.

I had slept on sheets covered in old ash.

Fallout, most likely.

Dust had settled into the fabric so deeply that the bed looked less like a place to sleep and more like something the house had been trying to bury. Cobwebs stretched between the bedframe and the wall.

Mold had taken over sections of the ceiling and crawled down the corners in thick, ugly patterns.

There were things moving in places I didn't particularly want to investigate.

Some of the insects were big enough that I wasn't entirely convinced they were insects anymore.

I sat up slowly.

Looked at the sheets.

Looked at myself.

Then laughed.

Because if I had seen this room in the dark last night, I probably wouldn't have laid down.

But apparently...

you rest where you can.

That's one lesson the Wasteland teaches quickly.

Comfort is a luxury.

Sleep isn't.

And considering the last time I slept...

I was in the Vault.

The last bed I remember had clean sheets, controlled temperature, medical monitoring, and somebody nearby who could probably tell me what was wrong before I even knew I felt it.

This bed has mold, ash. cobwebs, and whatever the hell lives underneath it.

Still...

I'm grateful.

A bed is a bed.

I stood and stretched.

My body complained.

Nothing serious.

Just reminding me that yesterday happened.

I walked toward the window.

The city was waiting below.

Downtown Houston.

Or what remained of it.

From up here, the skyline looked like someone had taken the old city and dragged it through a century of weather, war, flooding, and neglect.

Buildings still stood.

Some leaned.

Some had missing sections.

Some had been swallowed by vines and whatever other vegetation had decided concrete was acceptable soil.

The streets below were scarred.

Cracked.

Buried.

There were places where sand had accumulated against buildings as though the city had been caught in a storm that never finished.

Other areas looked like water had once flowed where cars used to travel.

Bayou overflow.

Flooding.

Broken drainage systems.

Hurricane damage.

Years of weather piling one season on top of another.

The city hadn't simply been destroyed.

It had been reclaimed in pieces.

I turned away from the window.

That's when I noticed the table.

A newspaper sat beneath a layer of dust.

I picked it up.

The paper was brittle.

The headline immediately caught my attention.

RED MENACE OR MARTIAN INVADERS?
Houston Civil Defense Monitors Unidentified Craft Drifting Toward Austin
The Houston Chronicle — October 22, 2077

I stared at the date.

I read it again.

October.

My fingers tightened around the paper.

That was after I went under.

After the world I remembered had already become something else.

I read the article.

Unidentified craft.

Civil defense monitoring.

Speculation.

Fear.

Nobody knew exactly what they were seeing.

I set it down.

Another newspaper was underneath it.

Different headline.

Different warning.

The intelligence report described preparations for an imminent Chinese nuclear attack against the United States.

I stared at the words.

Imminent.

That's a word people use when they don't know how much time they have left.

I sat down.

And suddenly I wasn't in 2224 anymore.

I was back in 2076.

I remembered the food riots.

The energy shortages.

The anger.

People standing in lines.

People fighting over supplies.

Military units deployed to control unrest.

A state of emergency.

Then martial law.

The Resource Wars had already changed the country long before anyone admitted the country was changing.

And then there were the preppers. Everybody suddenly became an expert in survival.

People bought generators.

Water.

Weapons.

Canned food.

Seeds.

Fuel.

Whatever they believed might carry them through the end of the world.

Some people built bunkers.

Some people trusted the government.

Some trusted Vault-Tec.

Some trusted God.

Some trusted nobody.

Everybody thought they were preparing for something.

Nobody knew what the something would actually look like.

Then I remembered Hurricane Kendra.

The reports.

The warnings.

The projected path.

The preparations.

The feeling that something enormous was approaching and that everyone was trying to determine whether it would actually hit them.

I remembered watching people prepare for a storm while the country was already falling apart around them.

Back then, I thought we were preparing for a hurricane.

Now I understand.

We were preparing for the end of an era.

Maybe nobody knew it.

Maybe some people did.

I looked back down at the newspaper. It reported the future as though the future still belonged to somebody. That stayed with me. People were still writing headlines. Still printing photographs. Still making plans. Still arguing over tomorrow.

Then tomorrow arrived...

...and it belonged to no one.

I looked around the loft again.

The newspaper had survived.

The people hadn't.

Or at least...

there was no sign of them.

That bothered me.

There were photographs on the same table.

A family.

A mother.

A father.

Two children.

Smiling.

One picture showed them standing outside somewhere in Houston.

Another showed a birthday cake.

Another showed somebody holding a football.

Ordinary things.

The kind of things nobody thinks are important until they become the only evidence that somebody existed.

I picked one up.

There were no bodies.

No blood.

No obvious signs of violence.

No final note.

Nothing explaining where they went.

Just absence.

Abandonment.

And somehow that was worse.

Because death gives you an answer.

Abandonment leaves the question open.

Maybe they made it to a shelter.

Maybe they reached a Vault.

Maybe they joined a caravan.

Maybe they went somewhere north.

Maybe Northt.

Maybe they survived for years.

Maybe they didn't.

I don't know.

And I won't pretend that I do.

That's something the Wasteland is already teaching me.

Not every empty room contains a corpse.

Sometimes it contains an unfinished sentence.

A story that simply kept walking.

I put the photograph back down.

Then I noticed the smell again.

Tar.

Mold.

Old wood.

Dust.

Something sour beneath the floorboards.

Something damp behind the walls.

The smell of things I couldn't see.

That may be one of the strangest parts of this world.

You smell something before you understand it.

Radiation doesn't have a smell, but the places it has touched seem to develop their own language.

The air tells you things.

You just have to learn how to listen.

Outside, Houston had become something I barely recognized.

Sand from storms had accumulated in places where sidewalks once ran.

Floodwater had carried pieces of the bayous into streets that were never designed to hold them.

Highways were cracked and partially buried.

Vehicles sat where people had abandoned them.

Buildings remained because nobody had bothered to tear them down.

Downtown still had the shape of Houston.

But the city itself had become something else.

A corroded version of what I remembered.

I thought about the Houston I knew.

Busy streets.

Office buildings.

Traffic.

People everywhere.

Cities don't die all at once.

They become quieter versions of themselves...

until someone decides to listen again.

A city that felt like it was always moving toward something.

Now it stood almost still.

Almost.

Because there was movement.

A figure crossing the street.

Smoke rising somewhere beyond the buildings.

A caravan moving in the distance.

A bird landing on a broken sign.

Life.

Small.

Persistent.

Unconcerned with what Houston used to be.

I found myself wondering something.

If Vault 288 was beneath the Astrodome...what else is beneath Houston?

The George R. Brown Convention Center came to mind. 

Could there be a Vault underneath it?

Maybe.

The old Red Rockets Arena?

Where the basketball Team Played...

Could Vault-Tec have hidden another facility beneath the city?

Possibly.

Houston was never short on places to hide something underground.

But I'm not going looking.

Not today.

I have enough questions.

I don't need to manufacture more.

Besides...

I have somewhere to be.

East.

I folded the newspaper and left it on the table. I took one last look at the photographs. Then I shouldered my pack.The room was still disgusting.

The mold was still spreading.

The bugs were still entirely too large.

But for one night...

it did what I needed it to do.

It gave me somewhere to stop.

That's enough.

I stepped outside.

The air was heavy.

The city was quiet.

The road east waited.

I checked the Pip-Boy.

Then I looked toward the horizon.

Harrisburg Blvd.

That's where I'll start.

Not because I know exactly what I'm going to find.

Because I don't.

But I've learned enough to understand that I don't need certainty before I move.

I don't need certainty.

Certainty makes people stand still.

Direction makes them walk.

East.

That's enough.

Toward Pasadena.

Toward whatever remains.

Toward whatever comes next.

I gotta Leave this place.

But I won't pretend it means nothing.

I remember what it was.

I see what it became.

And now...

I'll find out what it can still become.

That's enough for today.

— Big Chief Mike Marcel