Work Text:
There were a number of lies that Preston Garvey at age seventeen told about himself. He told them to himself, to others. They were: that he was a good shot with a laser musket; that he knew how to properly transplant a young tato bush; that he could run a mile in under ten minutes. One of his favorite ones, one he almost believed through and through, was that there was nothing he was afraid of in the world anymore. Looking out the window of the tower of Oberland Station that summer day, though, he knew again that this was not true.
It was around noon and hotter than it had any right to be in early June when, squinting out the window of the station more out of boredom than any devotion to the sentry post he occupied – if anyone needed him, at this point, they could radio – Preston spotted a figure stumbling along the railroad tracks, making a beeline for the station itself.
Feral was the first thought that jumped into Preston’s head. The strange, stumbling walk and tattered clothes were a dead giveaway, even at this distance. Still, there was something off – there was too much purpose, something akin to a sense of direction, in the figure’s stagger. It wasn’t much, but it was enough for Preston to hold off on the safety of his laser musket instead of trying to scare the thing off or pick it off from a safe distance, as would have been most sensible. After all, if whatever it was wasn’t a feral ghoul, then it may need his help. Protecting the people at a minute’s notice. Maybe for once, he thought a little bitterly, I can actually do something useful instead of just sitting in this tower waiting for things to happen.
After an eternity, the figure seemed to be in earshot. Preston placed his musket down, took a deep breath, cupped his hands, and shouted.
That was the thing with waiting for someone to get in earshot – there wasn’t a really clear and definite way of knowing when earshot began and ended. Terrain, weather, wind, background noise, humidity, alignment of the stars – everything seemed to have some sort of say on how far and how well noise would travel. So when Preston finally called out, the figure nearly fell over in surprise, looking around almost comically for the source of the sound, pulling a small pistol out from its pants.
Definitely not a feral ghoul.
Preston sighed, an involuntary smile coming to his mouth. He already kind of liked the stranger. Granted, after being alone for a few weeks in the middle of the wasteland, he would be happy with any kind of company. “Over here, in the tower!”
The stranger turned their gaze toward the tower and Preston waved, sending up a quiet prayer to his mothers’ ghosts that the person didn’t turn out to be a raider or a murderer or something somehow worse. The figure gave a lethargic wave in return and resumed its slow, unsteady walk in what Preston chose to interpret as good humor.
The person stopped about ten feet from the station, looking in at the measly overgrown fenced-in garden. Preston now say that the person certainly wasn’t a ghoul, but that they may be soon, if they were lucky. Even without leaving the window, Preston could now see that the traveler was white as a sheet with spots of feverish, high red coloring on their cheeks. A large clump of thick dark hair was hanging loose from the right side of their head. Without stopping to consider further, Preston was down the steps and at the stranger’s side.
“Thank you,” the traveler mumbled repeatedly as Preston helped them up the stairs, into the station tower, and into a sitting position on the small cot in the corner.
“No trouble,” Preston responded as he rooted through his first aid kit for the appropriate supplies. RadAway, alcohol, tape, needle, tubing. In a minute, he had a little makeshift IV of the stuff rigged up and connected to the stranger’s arm, for whatever good it would do. Preston again sent up a silent prayer of thanks to his mother Sadie’s ghost for the years of effort she’d put in to teaching him basic medical procedures.
“Thank you,” the stranger rasped out again once Preston was finished, looking a little nauseated – a symptom of the radiation poisoning or a response to the needles sticking out of his arm, Preston wasn’t certain.
“No problem,” Preston said, suddenly uncomfortable. “My name is Preston Garvey. I’m with the Minutemen.”
The stranger nodded in a way that gave Preston the impression that he had no idea what Preston was talking about.
“What’s your name?” Preston prompted.
The man was silent for a moment, seemingly thinking. “Sturges,” he said finally.
“Nice to meet you, Sturges,” Preston said. He was no doctor, but he had been raised by one and lived his whole life in the wastes, and he knew that the man in front of him was suffering from acute radiation syndrome. He knew there was a good chance he wouldn’t live much longer, RadAway or no RadAway. “You want a blanket?”
“Yes, please.”
o
Four months prior to this meeting, Preston’s mother – his birth mother, Jayla, not his other mother, Sadie, who had passed when he was fifteen – had died. Preston had watched as she had gotten sick, then sicker, then sicker. The doctor has said cancer, that evil way the rads have of getting back at you later, even if they don’t kill you at first-meet, even if you take RadX and RadAway and chew hubflower root all day. Then she had died and Preston was all alone in the world.
Prior to her death, Preston had been so afraid. He was afraid of the dark of night and arrow that flies by day; afraid of the corruption of radiation, the monsters of the wastes; afraid of the bullet that his other mother had always sword had his name on it and was waiting in the wings for him. Most of all, he feared losing her.
It had always been the three of them on the road: Preston’s mother Jayla, her wife Sadie, and Preston. Being a caravanner wasn’t a lonely life – traveling constantly, you met a lot of people, made a lot of friends. Even the remote settlements of one or two families and the hidey-holes of scavengers in the city center were known to them, and most everyone learned to like the people who brought them medicine and news of the outside world. Acquaintances everywhere, but few friends.
Growing up, Preston had never known many other children his age – children were rare enough in the Commonwealth, and precious enough that if you had them, you hid them when strangers came in to visit. The result was that the only people young Preston ever really felt like he knew – and who knew him – were his mothers. It wasn’t a lonely life, no, but an isolated one.
When Sadie had died – taken out by an infected cut, just like that – he had felt very acutely that losing his remaining parent would mean that he was entirely, completely alone forever. How could he go on after that? How could the tree survive without the roots?
Instead, though, when Jaylah finally died, Preston had found that life went on just fine. The sun still rose; his belly still rumbled with hunger; wild mongrel dogs still broke the night with their mutant yapping. (Sometimes, sometimes, when he laid awake at night, Preston could imagine that the radiation had granted the creatures some intelligence, some capacity for language, and that the noises in the night were inscrutable alien conversations. But only sometimes.)
Faced with all this, Preston Garvey, at age seventeen, had taken a good look at life, realized that there really wasn’t anything out there that could hurt him so badly as he had thought, and decided that he may as well live the life that the part of him that was a romantic, that he had always ignored because romance just wasn’t all that useful to the traveling trader, wanted. He would be a Minuteman.
(That was, of course, before he had learned all there was to know from Quincy and the long road away from it, and that there are worse things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Colonel, but all that was still years down the line then. Blessed be your mothers’ ghosts.)
He kicked around for a few months before really acting on his decision, working odd jobs, gathering information. When he’d worked up the nerve, he asked around until he caught up with the nearest regiment and joined. They gave him a week’s training, a tattered hand-me-down uniform, a laser musket, and a radio and then told him to go to Oberland Station and just stay put. “Be ready on a minute’s notice,” his commander had said, and laughed, not kindly. Preston had done as asked. He wasn’t without trepidation as he set out on the road again, but he really hadn’t expected to hate the post as much as he did.
When he got to the station, he radioed in to tell his commander that he’d arrived. No one acknowledged the call, so he resolved to settle in and try again the next day.
His predecessor, thankfully, seemed to have left all his personal belongings before he went AWOL (as if that term had any meaning to an organization that couldn’t answer their own god-forsaken radio, Preston thought bitterly), so at least Preston wouldn’t have to go scavenging just to set up camp.
Cataloguing his available resources passed around an hour rather pleasantly as he got used to his new surroundings; the fact that Preston was, by his own admission, something of a snoop certainly didn’t hurt. An old mattress in a clumsily-made A-frame cot, a shockingly nice set of sheets and a ratty, seemingly pre-war blanket made a nice bed. A carton of tortoise-brand cigarettes (although Preston didn’t smoke), a few candles, an old porcelain plate and a wooden spoon. A hot plate with no power source and a lighter with no fluid. On the wall hung an old poster of a beautiful woman in a strange robe smoking a long cigarette. Under the bed was left a notebook half filled with clumsy sketches and bad poetry. There were also three books: a copy of a story called Hamlet by a man named William Shakespeare, a bomb-blasted Bible, and a New Universal Unabridged American English Dictionary and Thesaurus from 2071. The last of these found immediate use as a doorstop as Preston propped the flimsy outside door open to air the stuffy space out.
For the next few days, Preston stuck to the letter of the law and barely left the station. On day four, he decided to put his trust in the strength of the receiver of his radio and his laser musket and set out from the base to see what he could scavenge from the boxcar stopped on the tracks a little way south of his location. He had to kill a mongrel dog to do it, but inside the car he found an old squatter’s settlement and what to a solitary seventeen-year-old felt like a king’s ransom of packaged food and medical supplies. The original contents of the car, naturally, had been looted long ago.
On the tenth day, while looking for a suitable place to store the fruits of his scavenging, he encountered a human skull hidden in the space under a loose floorboard and spend the next day and a half trying to solve the mystery of just who his mysterious predecessor had been. His notebook told Preston only that he had been a poor artist and a worse poet (although Preston did think that his prose descriptions of the area around the station were nicely detailed; they also told him of a hidden patch of Queen Anne’s Lace, whose tasty roots soon became part of a vegetable-and-stingwing stew for Preston.)
The notebook read from cover to cover (or, at least, cover to where the artiste mysteriously disappeared midway through), Preston moved on to the books. The part of him that remembered comic book detectives and Mr. Connolly’s radio shows from when he was a child (and that still tuned in late at night to hear Silver Shroud reruns for the hundredth time) halfway expected to open Hamlet only for a slip of paper with a mysterious code written on it to slide out, or to finally pop open the dictionary and see that it had been hollowed out to hide a key. No such luck. Still, Preston had a leg up on a number of people in the Commonwealth in that he could read, so he figured that he may as well use the skill to some end and entertain himself with what he had on hand. (Later, he figured, he’d trade or scavenge for something actually worth his time – some new comics or a holotape and something to play it on, but for now, this would do.)
The dictionary was an immediate no-go: Preston knew from the word of a childhood acquaintance in Diamond City (where, this eminent sage complained, the mayor made everyone go to school) that a dictionary was just a very long list of words, all of which were either totally useless or you already knew. The old Bible was miraculously still legible in some places, but as Preston was no follower of the Man Jesus (although he had encountered such people) it also of little use or interest to him. Options exhausted, he started Hamlet.
The little volume, Preston soon discovered, was only in small part a story, and was in fact mostly composed of very long, extremely boring, and mostly incomprehensible essays written by other people about the tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The story itself was relatively short and written strangely, with no description or action, just the name of the person talking followed by what they were saying. A little research in the boring essay art told him that this was because it was a play, to be performed by actors, like the little troupe that had worked the Diamond City-Country Crossing-Quincy circuit for a little while when Preston had been younger.
Knowing this, Preston liked Hamlet a little better. Moreover, he soon realized that the book was laid out piecemeal: in the play part, every right page was the play itself, but every left page was notes and pictures to help the reader know what was going on. Preston understood immediately that while these guides must have been quite helpful for the book’s prewar audience, he himself was quite lost at sea.
That was where the dictionary came in.
Preston saw quickly that most of the reason that he could barely even understand the explanatory notes was that he didn’t know enough of the words. So he began doing as the sage from Diamond City had suggested and memorizing the dictionary.
He decided that if there were, as the cover boasted, 320,000 definitions in the dictionary and he could memorize about twenty definitions in a day, that was 16,000 days, which came to forty-three years, ten months, and five days to learn the whole book, by which point the Minutemen would hopefully have actually used their radio and given him a more interesting assignment. If not, then at that point he would know every word there was, could read any book in the whole world, and would be the smartest man in the Commonwealth, so it hardly mattered what the Minutemen did or didn’t do.
After the first twenty words, it occurred to Preston that the entries were not arranged in order of importance. (When would he ever need to know what an “aardwolf” was? When would anyone, even pre-war, need to know what an “aardwolf” was? If the creature had ever existed, he was certain that they were long gone now.) Rather, they were all in the same order as the letters of the alphabet, with all the As first, then the Bs, then Cs. Upon further inspection, he also saw that all the Aa- words were grouped together, then all the Ab-, followed by the Ac-. With some chagrin he came to the conclusion that the eminent sage from Diamond City may, in hindsight, been something of a fool.
Deciding to test his theory of how the dictionary was actually meant to be used, Preston began looking up a few common words. “Dog,” “cat,” and “tree” were all exactly where he expected them to be. “Mirelurk” didn’t seem to exist in the dictionary at all, but seeing as three fourths wasn’t a bad ratio, he went along with it, and started reading Hamlet again, this time looking up confusing words as he went along.
It was slow going, but Preston actually found himself enjoying it more and more as time went on; even the stilted, strange style of speech eventually started to grow on him.
(“Iambic pentameter,” the introduction told him. On a whim, he went back and reread a few of his predecessor’s poems and tried to count the syllables and realized that this was what they had been trying to achieve. When he reached the part of the play where Hamlet addresses Yorick’s skull, he practically leapt out of his chair to retrieve the mystery skull that had been hidden away under the floorboard and, with a combination of embarrassment and delight, read the speech aloud to it, positive that the station’s previous resident had done the exact same thing.)
And so he had entertained himself until the mysterious irradiated stranger showed up.
o
Sturges slept on and off for almost two days, only interrupting his slumber to mumble strange and disconcerting phrases. Laying on the thin sleeping bag that he had brought with him to the post, Preston eavesdropped on snatches of dreamed conversations about reactors and microscopes, research and development, which had him wondering just who was taking up the entirety of his cot on what was looking like a semi-permanent basis
On the third day, though, the man was up and about again, exactly as if he hadn’t wandered into the station irradiated almost to death. Preston took the opportunity to make the man switch out his old, likely irradiated duds for Preston’s extra set (which, while they didn’t properly fit the much larger man, at least didn’t look like something a feral would be wearing). Using his little pair of metal scissors (a prized possession), he trimmed off what remained of the man’s hair (also probably irradiated) and insisted that he use the camp shower to wash off whatever radioactive dust was likely clinging to him.
Meanwhile, Preston himself washed out his blankets and sheets and hung them up to dry. He wasn’t taking any more chances than he needed to. He had been taking RadX on an almost constant basis since taking Sturges in, and checking his Geiger counter like it held the answers to all life’s questions.
After the traveler got out of the shower, he and Preston spent a few minutes painstakingly applying bandages and antibacterial ointment to the places where skin had broken or sloughed away. This done, they again lapsed into uncomfortable silence.
Preston felt a sense of weird unease looking at the wounds; they were already healing. Even with the RadAway, that just wasn’t possible; really, guessing by how he’d looked when he showed up, it was impressive that Sturges had an immune system left at all. The color had returned to the man’s cheeks, and he moved without seeming to be in any pain at all. Silently, Preston suspected that this was just the most dramatic – and strangest – example of the walking ghost phase that he’d ever seen.
“Who’s your favorite character?”
Preston started. “What?”
Sturges pointed to Preston’s copy of Hamlet, sitting on the floor near the bed. “You’re reading this?”
“Yeah, I am,” Preston said, more than a little on edge.
“I’ve read it, too,” Sturges said. “‘A life without once reading Hamlet is like a life spent in a coal mine.’ Hector Berlioz.”
Preston nodded, not understanding. “I like Horatio,” he offered. “He’s… sensible. And kind. And he lives all the way to the end.”
Sturges nodded. “I like Laertes, I think. But Ophelia is interesting, too.” The man paused. “Do you read many books, out here?”
Preston shrugged. “Just this one. It’s all I’ve got.” He paused. “I’ve read others, though.”
“I never really liked reading much, but my old man made me go through some books that he thought were important.” The expression on Sturges’ face turned solemn; Preston thought to himself that maybe he, too, had lost family recently.
“Reading’s about all there is to do out here,” Preston said lightly. “That, and listening to holotapes if you can get them. Comics are good, too, and Mr. Connolly in Goodneighbor puts on old radio plays. My radio’s not good enough to pick them up all the way out here, though. Diamond City Radio isn’t half bad, either, but they just play music.”
Sturges face creased up into a genuine smile. “For a surface dweller, you sure do – .” The man shook his head. “I mean, I didn’t expect there to be much, ah, much to do in these parts. I’d heard there were only a few little settlements in the area.”
“‘Surface dweller’?” Preston cocked his head. “As opposed to what?”
A bit too loudly and a bit too quickly, Sturges replied, “Nothing!” Then he was quiet again, folding his limbs back into himself. Preston hadn’t even noticed him relaxing.
For the first time, Preston looked, really looked at Sturges. The man was big, bigger than any wastelander had the right to be, and healthy looking – shockingly so, at least, for a man who’d been suffering from radiation poisoning only a few days before. His eyebrows were dark and thick and tended to slant up in an expression of worry, and a few days growth of stubble covered his chin and neck, but he lacked the weathered, old-before-their-time look that so many people had. He couldn’t have been much older – or much younger, for that matter – than Preston himself.
Preston decided to take a chance and do some probing. “Where you from, Sturges?”
“The South,” the man replied quickly. “Just came north for a change of scenery.”
“You come up through the Glowing Sea?”
Sturges looked at him blankly. “The what?”
Preston suppressed the urge to sigh. “The big, uh… radioactive zone, south of here.”
Comprehension dawned on Sturges’ face. “Oh, certainly. I just didn’t know what folks around here called it. That’s how I got so, uh, so sick, I suppose. Not enough RadX in the world to get through a mess of rads like that – I really didn’t think it went that deep, but I sure was wrong.” He chuckled, seemingly with genuine humor. “When I came out the other side, I really didn’t think there’d be much left of me. Without you, I guess, there just wouldn’t have been. Thanks for that, by the by.”
Preston let out a little breath, amused. “No problem. It’s my job.”
Sturges raised his eyebrows. “Is this a,” he said before pausing to look for the word. “A first aid station?”
Preston shook his head. “Not quite. It’s an outpost for the Minutemen. I’m supposed to be here so that I can radio in for help if any settlements in the area need our help.” The area, Preston didn’t bother mentioning, was fairly depopulated.
“The Minutemen?”
“They’re a militia group here in the Commonwealth. ‘Protecting the people at a minute’s notice.’ If any allied settlement needs help – with raiders, or these things called supermutants that have started showing up, or feral ghouls – we can send some people to help them fight.” Preston sighed.
Sturges frowned, seeming genuinely concerned. “You’re not happy here?” Preston thought the man’s reaction was a little strange, but maybe he was just one of those people who were very open to people they’d just met. Hell, at this point, Preston wondered if he himself weren’t one of those people.
“I’m happy to help, just,” Preston said, then stopped. Just I don’t like it here. Just I didn’t want a sentry post, I wanted the chance to play hero, be the big man for once in my life. Just I’m lonely and scared and hate waking up five times every night thinking that a raider is about to slit my throat. “I just was hoping for something different.”
Sturges nodded sagely and was quiet for a minute, before saying in a recitational tone, “Even the smallest cog in the machine is necessary to its function, Preston. Even if you don’t feel that this is the best job for you, your superiors clearly think that it is; we must all trust that we are placed where we ought to be.”
The sudden and complete change in tone was startling. Sturges was also clearly not even slightly familiar with what a complete disaster the command structure of the Minutemen could be. “I suppose so,” he said, not really agreeing. “Thanks, Sturges.”
Sturges, not detecting Preston’s insincerity, nodded again. “You’re welcome, Preston.” He pressed his lips together and looked out the window. “If I start walking now, do you think that I’ll be able to make it to Quincy by nightfall?”
“Quincy?”
“I’m heading out to Quincy. Plan to settle there.”
Preston shook his head. Here was this outsider, knowing not a damned thing about the Commonwealth but already certain that he knew where he wanted to go. “How do you figure that?”
“I guess you could call it a gut feeling. My gut’s usually right, though, like a sixth sense.” The man gave a laugh, and it was a big, deep laugh that made some part of Preston’s insides turn warm and sweet in a way that was wholly unfamiliar.
“But why Quincy?” Preston asked again. In the purple summer twilight, the question seemed urgent, fateful, each word laden with bizarre and unknown meaning. A lot of things felt like that at seventeen.
The man was quiet again. Rather than responding, he again looked out the window. “I guess I really can’t expect to get very far before the sun sets.”
“Stay here, then,” Preston said, trying to hide the sudden urgency he felt. He couldn’t let this man leave. He’d likely die on the road, or not long after reaching Quincy. What a terrible way to go. “A few days more or less won’t make any difference.”
Sturges squinted at him. “You’re sure that’s alright?”
“Positive, Sturges. Come on, I’ve got some InstaMash I’ve been saving for a special occasion. They know how to cook in the ‘South’?”
o
“I mean, I guess that’s part of why I see the Commonwealth the way I do. I was never really in one place… just always on the move.”
Sturges nodded sagely as he pushed the InstaMash – the leftovers of their dinner from the night before – around on his plate. It was a very convincing performance, but Preston could see that his guest wasn’t that interested in eating. The disgusted faces he kept making whenever he thought Preston wasn’t looking certainly didn’t help. Preston took a sip from his jar of purified water and graciously pretended to not have noticed, quietly worried that the lack of appetite was a symptom of a worsening physical condition.
“Sounds like an exciting life,” Sturges said with what sounded like wistfulness.
“It’s what it was,” Preston said noncommittally. “There were ups and downs, just like anything else.”
“But to travel around like that, see the world.” Sturges trailed off, looking with such interest at the sunrise that he seemed to forget that he disliked the InstaMash so much and shoveled a bite of the stuff into his mouth. “Are the colors always like this?”
“Never seen a sunrise before, Sturges?” Preston asked drily.
“Course I have,” Sturges replied, suddenly defensive. “This is just a pretty one.”
Preston, an early riser by nature, could say certainly that it wasn’t an unusual sunrise by any means – the pink fingers of first light catching the early morning mist were certainly beautiful, but not special. What was, just maybe, new, was the way that the cloudy pink light brushed the short-cropped hair on Sturges’ head and the fine hard angles of his face. From here, Preston was sure that he could count his guest’s eyelashes if he felt compelled to do so. He wondered if he did. He wondered why.
Sturges, Preston had decided, was most certainly a Vault Dweller, and had most certainly gotten his ideas on what “surface dwellers” spoke like from holotapes. In addition to his truly remarkable ignorance on almost every topic not having to do with mechanics – at which he was seemingly a savant – his speech was effectively a pastiche of that of different characters from old radio dramas of the type which nice Mr. Connolly in Goodneighbor would play. Sometimes he seemed to be the hard-boiled detective; other times, the tough military man. Very often, Preston thought that Sturges sounded like the thinking feeling robots in old sci-fi dramas, or the mysterious invader from outer space; the only difference was that the stiltedness of his speech was never cold, never unfeelingly hostile, as those of the cardboard-cutout prewar villains. Sometimes, Sturges sounded like a gruff Western cowboy; this was the voice Preston liked best. Sometimes, too, Sturges sounded like Preston himself.
Sturges gestured with his spoon to Preston’s radio, which, of course, had followed them outside. “What’s the radio for?”
“It’s there in case anyone needs to contact me for help,” Preston said. Or if I need to call them, he thought. One of the great attractions of having Sturges around for the past few days – even in his irradiated delirium – was that two stood a better chance than one against any roaming raider or feral ghoul or wasteland monster that decided that Preston looked like a nice meal. “Part of my job as a Minuteman.”
“How long have you been with the Minutemen?”
Preston chewed the inside of his cheek. “A little while now.”
Sturges craned his neck to look up at the sky again, his eyes tracking the v-formation of a group of birds flying high above. “That must take a lot out of you, doing a job like that. It’s hard to be responsible for people.”
Preston looked over his shoulder. “Yeah, I guess.”
Sturges was quiet for a while. Preston took this as an opportunity to resume eating his own breakfast. Time on his own hadn’t made him unused to human company or anything of the sort, but Sturges, he was learning, sure did love to talk.
Sturges gestured to the radio again. “What’s the range on this thing like?”
Preston shrugged. “Not great. I can get in touch with the next Minuteman camp, but it won’t even receive Diamond City Radio.” Which was impressive – Preston had heard that old Mrs. Santiago, who’d been running the radio station for about as long as anyone could remember, had taken on some young techy kid from out west (Trevor? Travis? Preston hadn’t paid enough attention to the local gossip at the time to remember the details now) as an apprentice, and since then the range and transmission on the station had been a thing of beauty. The fact that Preston couldn’t pick it up here at the station when the folks from Vault 88 could apparently get it on their PipBoys as far out as the hills west of the settled area of the city was the fault of his radio and his radio alone.
Sturges hemmed and hawed for a moment, to the point that Preston was about to interrupt the chorus to ask if there was something wrong, before saying, “You know, man, I’m pretty alright with electronics and all. If you’d let me stick around for a few more days, I’d sure be grateful, and I could probably fix up your radio for you.”
Preston raised his eyebrows, pretending to consider. His answer, of course, was yes.
o
Preston sometimes wondered what had happened to the last person to have his uniform.
He resisted the urge to yawn as he pumped his arms up and down, agitating the soapy water in the bucket using the plunger. The “washing machine” had been another gift from his predecessor in his post. It consisted of a five-gallon bucket with a small hole cut in the lid and a clean (Preston hoped) toilet plunger with five rough circles cut into the rubber part. Stashed near it was a small scrub brush and a decent stockpile of Abraxo cleaner. Preston had sighed when he’d seen the thing; he personally would have preferred a washboard and a tub, but it was sure as hell better than nothing. He’d have to thank the station’s last resident if he ever met them. You couldn’t really do all that many clothes at once using the “washing machine,” but considering that the only clothes to was were Preston’s uniform, his extra set of common clothes, and the rags that Sturges had shown up in, it wasn’t really anything worth complaining about.
With that thought, Preston glanced over his shoulder to make sure that Sturges was doing alright. The man was weeding the small unkempt garden; he had wanted to start digging a real latrine, but Preston had calmly but firmly refused. The fact that the traveler was on his feet at all, even after a week, having been that sick was a miracle in and of itself. Preston didn’t want to test his luck.
Sturges had, indeed, put off leaving for long enough to repair the radio. It had only taken him part of the day, but Preston had asked again that he stay on the pretense that he could also look at his laser musket while he was around. (The musket was in no way broken; Preston had taken most of his admittedly short Minuteman training to heart and put special faith in the maxim that if you cared for your weapon, it would care for you in turn.)
Sturges, for his part, didn’t seem particularly eager to leave himself. Preston wasn’t sure if it was that his miraculously quick recovery was surface-level only, and that the stranger just wasn’t feeling up to traveling again yet, or if it was something else. He was new to the area; maybe he just wanted more time to absorb local customs from Preston before going out to face the wider world.
Deciding that the clothes were clean enough, Preston popped the lid on the bucked open and began fishing them out. He took a moment to use the scrub brush on a stubborn bit of mud on the cuff of his uniform but gave up after a moment and began slinging the articles of clothing over the top of the ancient chain link fence to dry. There was no clothesline; if he was to spend a significant amount of time here, he would probably want to set that up, but for now, this would do.
Preston dragged the bucket a good distance away from the garden and dumped it out. He wasn’t exactly an expert on farming – growing up, they’d always eaten what they could scavenge or purchase, never really staying in one place long enough to set up a good garden – but he knew that Abraxo cleaner was hardly salutary to a tato plant.
Preston glanced over at Sturges again. In complete fairness, he wasn’t really sure that Sturges really knew what he was doing, either. If he really were from a Vault, how would he even know how to garden?
Preston recalled being ten or eleven, visiting Vault 81 and standing by window of the hydroponics bay, looking in with fascination at the bays of healthy, beautiful plants, so much different from the stunted growth on the surface. Preston wasn’t allowed to go into the bay; really, he was hardly allowed into the Vault at all, but the Overseer had just opened it for the first time in order to take in resources from the outside, and Preston’s mothers were both trustworthy and well-supplied as traders went, so they’d become quick favorites.
Between then and the time that Preston had set out on his own, they’d visited the Vault maybe a dozen times, and each time it produced a strange twinge deep within Preston’s heart. Not so much a longing as a sixth sense that the place was wrong – that people, maybe, weren’t meant to live like that. He’d always come back to the surface with a sense of deep relief, like returning to life after a year in the land of the dead, like Persephone in the book of Greek myths that he’d had as a child. He’d traded that book for a pair of new shoes before he set out to join the Minutemen; they sat upstairs next to his cot.
Preston slowly lowered himself into a sitting position on the bottom step of the stairs that led up to the tower and wondered what it would have been like to be raised in a Vault. The sun was pleasantly warm on his skin; wearing only his undergarments as the clothes dried, he had every excuse to simply laze and enjoy himself. He wondered what it could be like to be born and raised never seeing the sun. He wondered what it could be like, knowing only the same set of maybe one hundred fifty souls, developing without the deep and loving sense of place that the Commonwealth provided, and for a moment, he was sad for Sturges, for anyone who led that kind of life.
Vault dwellers were uncommon, but they were more a curiosity than anything else; Sturges, however, had been going to lengths to avoid discussing his past in any great detail. Preston wondered why. The few answers he’d been able to glean had been given too quickly and were short and finite, like they were memorized from a book and not the genuine story of a young man’s life. Sturges was eighteen. He’d worked as a handyman. He was from somewhere in the South. Beyond that, everything was evasion and silence.
Preston stood up and walked up the stairs, stepping gingerly so as to avoid getting any two-hundred-year-old splinters in his feet. He grabbed the little notebook and the pencil he now kept with it (found under the floorboard with the skull) and walked back down the stairs and resumed his position on the step, watching as Sturges continued to work.
He’d scribbled out a page to mark the end of his predecessor’s work and the beginning of his the day before, and started to try and keep notes. For yesterday: June 10, 2283. Sturges (strange man from the other day) came and souped up my radio for me. Sure hope he’ll stay awhile; beats the hell heck out of being alone. Today’s new word: languid.
Carefully, he drew a dark line under that entry and wrote in neat, slanted print “SCAVENGING LIST” below it, and below that, “MEDICINE FOR STURGES.” Under that, he jotted “CLOTHES FOR STURGES.” The man’s clothes were a disgrace by any standards; Preston strongly suspected that he’d looted them from a corpse or a skeleton.
Thinking, Preston tapped the pencil’s rubber eraser, made totally useless by age, against his lower lip. On the next line, he wrote “ROPE OR TWINE (FOR CLOTHESLINE)” and then “DISINFECTANT (FOR LATRINE)”. He wasn’t really sure what else he’d need for long-term habitation in this place. After a moment, he added “FOOD” and “BLANKETS.” On another line, “COT FOR STURGES”.
Preston remembered that there was a flooded but mostly intact neighborhood, Forest Grove Marsh, a little to the southwest of the station, past the old relay tower, that seemed like a likely spot for a little scavenging. In places like that, even if they’d already been heavily picked over since the war (which they usually were), intact structures meant that others would have been through in the last two centuries, using the buildings as shelters and sometimes leaving behind useful salvage.
Of course, the same quality that meant that there may be something of value in the marsh also meant that there could be current, unfriendly inhabitants. When Preston went, he’d need to be on his guard.
He’d already decided that he wasn’t going to drag Sturges along with him; he really didn’t need the help, and didn’t want to have to worry that the man, in his weakened state, would end up in some sort of trouble that Preston would have to rescue him from. More importantly, if he did get hurt, Preston wasn’t sure he could handle being the one responsible.
Sturges was standing up over the garden, brushing his hands together to knock the dirt off in a way that suggested to Preston that he wasn’t used to getting his hands dirty. Again with the same strange, unconscious good health the man seemed to enjoy more as a gift from heaven than anything else, he yawned and ambled his way over to Preston.
“What’cha writing there?”
Preston flicked the notebook shut, feeling a little guilty. “Shopping list,” he said, hoping he sounded facetious.
Sturges laughed, the same deep, whole-body sound as before. “Well, if you want, we can take a spin over to the Super-Duper Mart in my new Corvega later.”
Preston cracked a smile. “You a Vault dweller or a time traveler now?”
Sturges’ face froze for a moment, before relaxing through what seemed more a force of will than any real change in mood. “Neither, man. Just a guy trying to make his way in the world.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” Preston said, feeling anxiety swell in his chest. “Your past is your business.”
Sturges nodded and smiled, clearly uncomfortable. “Thanks.”
Preston stood up, looking for a pretense to go somewhere, anywhere else. “I’m going to go and see if I can radio in with the Minutemen. It’s been a while and I’m probably overdue.”
Sturges knit his brow and nodded. “Alright.”
Preston nodded, internally cursing himself. He could vividly remember Sadie telling him, You need to learn how to keep that mouth of yours shut. You need to learn that what you say has consequences.
“Tell me how the radio’s working when you’re done,” Sturges offered, voice concerned and a touch confued.
“It’s all good,” Preston said, forcing a smile, trying to relax his posture. No need to blow this out of proportion just because you’re a caravan kid, Preston. No need to ruin what may be the first friend you’ve had the chance to make just because you don’t have any social skills. “I’m gonna grab the radio now, though. No offense to you, but you’ve been here less than a week and I’ve already run through every dumb joke and interesting fact I know.”
Sturges chuckled. “Fair enough. I’m about at the end of my conversational rope, too.”
Preston went upstairs and sat on the cot, looking absently at his sleeping bag and wondering how long he could stay inside without it being suspicious. Rationally, he knew that Sturges wasn’t angry at him; he knew that he hadn’t even screwed up that badly, and that all was already probably forgotten and forgiven, if Sturges had even noticed the slight at all, but he knew that the feeling of being bad, of having failed to be good and kind and considerate, was going to eat at him for the rest of the night. Knowing that it was unreasonable didn’t help in the slightest.
Preston stood up, grabbed the little handheld radio, and took the steps back down two at a time. He mumbled some excuse about having stashed the radio under the floorboard and forgotten about it, and tuned into Diamond City Radio.
Sturges commented happily on the solar-powered battery of the little radio, noting how impressive it was that its battery was still up and running after all these years… Preston nodded along, happy to listen to the man’s voice, happy to have confirmation that he wasn’t angry.
“What I’d really like is a pack of playing cards, or some checkers,” Sturges continued. “Now that’d be a real way to kill the time.”
Preston nodded. “Maybe next time a trader comes through, we can see if they have anything like that.”
o
Preston woke up before Sturges the next day. This wasn’t exactly unusual, and Sturges slept like a burnt-out fusion core, so the precautions Preston took were perhaps unnecessary, but he still spent his first quarter hour of consciousness sneaking around and making his preparations. He wrapped a couple of the InstaMash cakes from the night before in a piece of cloth and stashed them with a little water in the bottom of his pack, which he’d emptied out, got dressed. He slung his musket over his shoulder, carefully secured his radio to the side of his pack, and crept down the stair, one foot after the other down the side of each step where he knew it would creak less.
It took him hardly any time to get over to the radio tower, and from there to the neighborhood. He took a brief detour at the tower to listen for any unusual signals: there was the old distress signal (“If anyone can hear this, my son and I are trapped…” Two centuries and still no one had even bothered to go and turn off the transmission. Perhaps, Preston thought, it was a respect thing – if he ever did find the source of the message, he wasn’t sure that he’d have the heart to turn off the last connection those ghosts had to the flesh and bone world, either), but nothing of any particular interest.
He entered the unflooded part of the neighborhood, figuring that most of the buildings in the flooded portion would be inaccessible. This early in the morning, the only sound he could make out was that of his own footsteps, light enough themselves. Looking around, he saw a few likely locations: some boarded up houses, an old pub, an abandoned truck.
The pub yielded a couple rusted and bulging cans of Cram – more likely to make them sick than anything else. An old mop closet contained a bottle of some orange-pink liquid with a label that he couldn’t make out and some surprisingly intact garbage bags; the thin plastic would surely be useful for something.
Glancing into the truck as he passed by revealed a couple ancient skeletons, one in the driver’s seat and one in the passenger seat. Pushing aside his revulsion, Preston reached over the lap of the passenger and with some difficulty popped open the glove compartment. A few moths fluttered out, disturbed by the action. Rooting through the dusty scraps of what must have at some point been clothes – a hat? Gloves? A handkerchief? – Preston touched on a small metal box. Carefully drawing it out, he found that it was a breath mint tin – not immediately useful, but maybe tradeable. Giving it a small shake, he found that it didn’t rattle at all, but it nevertheless felt heavy. Something else must have been stuffed into it in place of the original mints – promising. He pocketed it.
The first of the boarded-up houses had been picked clean, to the point that even the furniture was gone – probably taken as firewood (a rookie mistake – the wood in most prewar furniture was heavily treated and burning it was both difficult and hazardous to one’s health).
The next was more promising, not because it was intact but because it had clearly been someone’s shelter in recent memory. An outhouse had been clumsily constructed in the front yard of the place, and the scraps of someone’s laundry still hung from a line strung between the columns of the sagging, peeling porch. Preston would guess that someone had been here in the past month.
The front door was locked, but the wood around it was so rotted that one good solid kick was enough to break it enough for Preston to jostle it open. The living showed some signs of use: furniture had been stacked to block off the stairs, with a plastic tarp and a truly impressive amount of duct tape being used to insulate the two downstairs rooms from the presumably more deteriorated upstairs. A mattress lay directly on the floor, with an abandoned pack next to it. Preston fiddled with the rusty zipper and after a moment gave up, took out his utility knife, and sliced the thing open. The inside was a goldmine. A roll of what initially seemed to be just cloth was revealed to be a grey cloth shirt, some heavy canvas pants, a thick pair of workman’s goggles, and a knit cap. One pocket contained a handful of 9mm bullets; another, an old watch, nonfunctional but likely good for some salvage. At the bottom of the pack, there was a book (The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the cover said, superimposed over the faded image of what Preston assumed was the woman herself, dressed in a flowing, red garment and looking mournfully off into the distance with eyes wild with exaggerated, but somehow seemly, sorrow). Underneath the book – a pack of playing cards.
Sorry to have sliced the bag open, Preston carefully loaded the bounty into his own bag, making sure that the more vulnerable items (the watch, the book, the cards) were wrapped in the clothes to give them some sort of protection from whatever rain or radiation may come. He then turned his attention to what he assumed was the kitchen.
The door was shut, but when Preston turned the knob, it turned in a way that was profoundly satisfying. Sometimes, he thought to himself as he gave the old door a good pull, things just work out.
That was the last thing he had time to think before he was laid out on his back, ears ringing, blood running into his eyes, something on top of him battering his face with clawed and withered hands.
Later on, Preston wouldn’t quite be sure what strength allowed him to shove the ghoul off him, and stumble out the door. He careened off the porch, falling onto his elbows and feeling something twist out of place in his shoulder, and then the weight of the body of the irradiated monster was back on him, tearing at his clothes, his pack, his exposed arms.
Preston heard a shot and a sickening crunch and then heard nothing at all.
o
“…now that was ‘Crazy He Calls Me,’ performed by Billy Holiday. A timeless classic from a timeless voice. Folks, not much survived the bombs, but we sure are blessed to have some beautiful music. Finishing out our show for the night we have some more easy listening evening music: ‘It’s Easy to Remember’ by Hazel Scott – now that’s a personal favorite of mine – and ‘Lucky to Be Me’ by the same.” The sound of a woman clearing her throat, shuffling papers. “This broadcast has brought to you in part by someone that hardly needs advertising – Diamond City’s own private eye, Nick Valentine, over at the Valentine Detective Agency. Got a stubborn problem? Nick’s there to fix it. We are also sponsored today by Trashcan Carla’s Caravan, bringing the finest goods to all corners of the Commonwealth. Want quality? Look for Carla.” The clunking sound of someone covering the microphone with their hand, some whispering. “Thank you all for tuning in for another night of classics old and new, and I hope you’re all enjoying this lovely June evening. This is Lupe ‘Saintly’ Santiago with Travis ‘Lonely’ Miles – say hello, Travis!”
“Hi.”
“We’ve been coming to you live from Diamond City. Now, sit back, enjoy the music, and have a wonderful night, all.”
The first few notes of a sweet piano tune. It was something new – Mrs. Santiago must have picked up a new tape from a trader sometime recently. It was the most beautiful music Preston had ever heard, full bodied and tuneful and perfect, each chord like the smooth round stones at the bottom of a clean-flowing stream. Sweetwater.
Preston gazed vacantly at the poster on the wall of the woman in the robe. She seemed lower her cigarette for just a moment to look at him and smile before returning to her usual habit of staring listlessly at the red background of her world. The French lieutenant’s woman. Preston wondered what sort of a place France was, what the rest of the world was like, outside the Commonwealth. A pang of love for this place, his home, hit him – for the remote settlements of one or two families and the hidey-holes of scavengers in the city, for the people, who somehow got up every day when they knew any moment could be the one where that first cell divides, and the radiation begins eating you from the inside. Love also for the abandoned places, for the places that still belonged to the dead, the places that, though they were in the flesh and bone world, really were the domain of ghosts.
o
Preston hadn’t been there when his mother had died. He’d been sitting around by the Diamond City greenhouse with a couple of acquaintances – the sage who thought you needed to memorize the entire dictionary and his girlfriend – listening to them bicker over the best way to butcher a bloatfly. The doctor had said that she would likely hold on for a few more weeks of pointless suffering, so Preston had left her with the friend they were staying with in that damp apartment and gone out.
His mother’s friend had come up to them, walking with no particular direction or sense of urgency. Preston had looked up without any particular dread in his heart.
He clearly remembered asking, “What’s up, Ms. May?” Her response had been something like, just wanted you to know that your mother passed away about a half hour ago. Preston had been very quiet and very still, and his heart beat very hard for a moment, but he didn’t quite cry then. His friends put their hands on his shoulders and asked him if he was alright, and he’d said yes, yes, it’s really for the best that she didn’t hang around any longer.
Preston saw her body only once, just before they burned it outside the gates with the bodies of everyone else who’d died over the past few days in Diamond City. He was glad, later, to not have seen it. As she’d gotten sicker, her face had lost the roundness it had always had, and Preston had learned that under her flesh, her bones were just like his; she looked just like him.
o
There were a number of lies that Preston Garvey at age seventeen told about himself. To himself, to others. In the end, though, they didn’t much matter; sometimes, you could mold yourself into the form of a good lie, to the point that in the end, they were all just truths before their time.
“You’re awake. Oh, thank Jesus.”
Preston blinked again, and there was bright light coming in through the window, and the radio was playing ‘Uranium Rock.’ He winced at the noise, turning his head into the pillow. There was a click and it turned off.
“Do you think you can drink some water?”
Preston nodded halfheartedly. His mouth was dry and tasted bad, but he felt nauseous and unwell. He’d drink, but he’d make no promises about keeping it down.
A jar of water was brought up to his mouth; he sipped at it listlessly, drawing back his head every so often as the hand, shaking, clumsily brought the thing against his teeth time and time again. Finally, he turned his head away and shook it. No more.
“Do you want to eat?”
Preston shook his head. Too nauseous. Did he have a fever? He felt as if he had a fever. A cool rag came up and dabbed at his face, but the motion was too rough, unpleasant.
He worked his jaw, struggling to speak. Finally, he choked out, “What day?”
“June 13,” Sturges answered, a look of concern on his face. “You’ve been pretty out of it for a couple days now. You hit your head pretty good.”
Preston groaned and looked up at the ceiling. “I’m eighteen.”
“I thought you were seventeen.”
“I was.” Preston paused, struggling to string the words together. “Yesterday… the twelfth. My birthday.”
“Happy birthday.”
“Thanks.”
o
The next time Preston woke up, it was night again. Sturges was sitting with a small flashlight – where had that come from? – and thumbing through the Bible. He levered himself into a sitting position, feeling a rush of dizziness as he did so.
“You into the Man Jesus, Sturges?”
Sturges looked up and shrugged noncommittally before closing the book and putting it down next to his chair. “How are you feeling?”
Preston licked his lips. “A little better. Got any water?”
Sturges picked up a jar from the stack in the corner and brought it over, unscrewing the lid. He offered it to Preston. “You got it?”
Preston remembered how, before his mother had died, she’d been insistent on holding her own cup. Her hands had shaken so badly that she couldn’t bring it to her lips. His heart squirmed at the recollection. He accepted the jar gratefully and lifted it to his lips, wincing as he knocked the glass rim against his own teeth.
“It’s still the thirteenth,” Sturges said.
“What happened?”
“You were gone when I woke up,” Sturges said. “I had a… a hunch, and I looked in your notebook and saw that you were going to go scavenging.”
“A sixth sense.”
“The marsh was the closest place I could think of, so I went there. Got there just in time to see you getting batted around by that… thing wearing your uniform. At first I thought it was some sort of disagreement but -.”
“What do you mean, wearing my uniform?”
“It had on the same uniform as you.” Sturges pointed to Preston’s Minuteman outfit, hung up on the window sill.
Preston felt his heart sink, suddenly sure that he knew what had really become of his predecessor in this post. Haltingly, he told Sturges about his experience – the trapped door, the ghoul jumping out at him.
“Are you saying you think that it may not have been feral?”
Preston bit his lip. “I think that it may not have been… I think it may not have been feral for long. I think that there was still some sort of intelligence in there. Otherwise, why would he have thought to trap the door of the room he left himself in? Why would have he just stayed there?”
Sturges shrugged. “I haven’t been around long, but I saw enough ferals in the, uh, Glowing Sea, to say that they do all kinds of strange things.”
Preston shook his head.
“Preston.” Sturges was looking at him with a strange intensity. “Even if there was – some something left – some intelligence, or whatever you want to say – aw, hell, man, that’s not your fault. It’s not even like you killed it, I did. Don’t beat yourself up.”
Preston looked to the side. The robed woman on the poster didn’t smile at him this time, just gazed off at some point he couldn’t see.
“Preston.” Sturges put a hand on his shoulder. “Please. Listen, I haven’t known you that long, but.” He stopped short and let out a frustrated huff. “You’re a good guy, but the world’s not your responsibility. You deserve to be happy. You deserve to give yourself a break.”
That was just the problem, though – who could take a break, who could ever rest, in a world like this? What was the point in going on when you could live your whole life just scraping by, only to die alone, wasting away on a bed that wasn’t yours while your only son sat a few blocks over, doing nothing? How could anyone go on knowing that it ended like that?
Suddenly, without really trying to, he was talking, talking about everything, the words flowing like clear water or the tune of an old melody. He told Sturges about his mother, told him about how confused she was by her own death, how he could only glance at her body out of the corner of his eyes, how looking directly at it would have destroyed him. It was like the end of the walking ghost phase, when the body finally showed the damage it had been dealt, when everything was out in the open.
Preston felt his face contort and felt tears on his cheeks. Less out of shame than out of some poorly understood primal emotion, he turned his head away, pressing his mouth and nose up against the hand on his shoulder. Sturges turned his palm upwards, and Preston kissed it quietly. He felt Sturges’ other arm wrap around him, and suddenly he had his head buried in the other man’s chest, and he wept like a child of ten years, letting himself be held and comforted.
o
It would later occur to Preston that nostalgia wasn’t necessarily for simpler times, but for certain times – the places where, in hindsight, you knew that the story ended well. The places where the lesson was already learned, where the wounds were already healed.
Sturges stuck around through the end of August, helping Preston recover from his injuries and the far more dangerous infection that came with them. Preston, in turn, taught him how to shoot a laser musket, how to forage, how to preserve food, how to purify water. They played cards. They read the same books again and again and then talked about them. They acted out scenes from Hamlet with gusto and melodrama.
Preston didn’t actually get word of the Minutemen effort against the raiders in Cambridge via the radio; a trader passing by mentioned it, and he himself had to radio the Minutemen to figure out what was going on. When all was said and done, it turned out that they wanted him to go join the group gathering by the old trailer park by Graygarden; fair enough.
“Take care, now,” Preston said with a smile. “Remember what I said about water.”
“If it’s too radioactive for bugs and algae, it’s too radioactive for me. Got it.” Sturges grinned. “I’m not as dumb as I look, you know.”
Preston snorted, then looked over his shoulder at the station tower. He and Sturges had taken what they would need for their respective journeys and tried to put the rest of the place back in as much order as they could. It was with some remorse that Preston determined that he couldn’t really afford to lug the dictionary around with him, so he left it there under the floorboard with Hamlet, the Bible, the skull, and the old notebook. They also left behind a good supply of clean water and food for whoever next happened to live in the building; it would hopefully be another Minuteman, but Preston had his doubts. In either case, they couldn’t really take any of it with them.
“We’ll be back,” Sturges said. “Someday.”
Preston nodded, feeling a little choked up. Some part of him, though, was certain that Sturges was right. He’d see his friend again.
Preston took a step closer to Sturges and without preamble threw an arm around his shoulders, bringing him in for a tight hug. “Stay safe out there.”
“I will,” Sturges said, the sound of his voice muffled by Preston’s shoulder. “You too, Preston. World can’t afford to lose one like you.”
Preston disengaged and gave a rueful half-smile. “Thanks, Sturges.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
Sturges sighed. “Alright, we can’t stay here saying goodbye forever. I’ll see you soon, partner.”
“See you soon, Sturges.”
And with that, the two of them parted ways. After a bit, Preston looked over his shoulder to watch Sturges’ figure retreating into the distance, the August heat warping the air around him. He took a deep breath and set off again with a renewed energy.
Quincy and the road away from it, Sanctuary and the Institute, the Brotherhood and the Railroad – all these things were still far in the unknown future, but at eighteen, perhaps for the first time, Preston felt that truly, he had nothing to fear.