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Breathing feels wrong.
Breathing this coarse, polluted air feels wrong. Walking this blasted, radiated world feels wrong. Every heartbeat thumping against her chest feels wrong. This all feels wrong, wrong, wrong . A wrong that Fenfang may never come to right, not in this lifetime. She would say this lifetime is her penance for her life of sins in the first place, but she knows the world does not punish wicked people. Amidst the rising grass and reeds of Sanctuary Hills, the silence of nature leaves room for reflection to fester, the space where her heart should be aching at one simple fact: all this destruction and death, this wasteland of ruins and radiation?
She did this.
Not directly. It might not have been Fenfang’s hands that directly closed the curtains on 21st century, but she spent her entire life paving a road of corpses and lies in service to China. Every battle won, every mission accomplished, every step forward was for the People’s Republic to triumph over the capitalist pigs of America by any means necessary. Annihilation through overwhelming nuclear force was not out of the question for Fenfang’s superiors, and so it was not out of the question for her. If the endgame of the Chairman was the apocalypse, a patriot must keep playing her part.
It wasn’t until the doors of the mighty Vault were sealed off that she realized that she was going to survive the apocalypse of her own making. The game is still on, Fenfang’s life goes on, and it all feels so wrong. She never should have agreed to the deep cover assignment. She never should have captured the heart of America’s war hero and built a family with him. She never should have become ‘Vicky Chao’, Mrs. Kennedy, wife of Sergeant Nate Kennedy and mother of Shaun Kennedy.
The reflection breaks.
In clarity, she shakes her head. Fenfang had her orders, and her dalliance with Nate was inevitable. Vicky Chao and the road to becoming that pathetic girl, it was a road she was powerless to avoid. The one thing she had the power over was the one decision that sealed her fate. It is the only thing she has the right to regret.
She never should have followed him into the vault.
Nate kept a pistol underneath the couch for emergencies, a pistol she now holsters at her side. The very same pistol was within her reach when the news came in that a nuclear strike on the Commonwealth was imminent. She could have ended it then and there. One bullet for Shaun. One bullet for Nate. One bullet for herself. Quick and easy. And yet she chose the hard path. She chose to live and confront a nuclear flash so bright she can still see it burned on her eyelids. Why? Why didn’t she break cover? Why did she insist on running to the Vault with Nate, with infant Shaun in tow? Was she afraid? After everything she’s done, after everyone dead at her hands, did Fenfang want to live?
Well, the Fenfang from the 23rd of October, 2077 got what she wanted. And now she has no choice but to live while the world she knew lays dying.
Lucky her.
Thorns on tall grass bite on her blue vault suit. It rips slightly and pierces her skin. It might have hurt once. Nothing hurts enough to matter anymore. And yet the snag brings her back to the 23rd century. To her penance. To the hunt. Even a sinner needs food, and she would need to be healthy to find Nate's killer, Shaun's kidnapper. She needs to live to see that bastard dead. She cannot do that with an empty stomach and a bullet in her head.
She would have preferred hunting with a more effective weapon than a bashed-together rifle of pipe and wood. She is certain the dead survivor she took it from felt the same way before a wild dog lunged at him and tore out his throat. But like the penance, the weapon is appropriate. Poetically so. Even in the depths of this damned world, humanity will find a way to inflict violence, no matter how absurd. Even scorched by nuclear fire, someone wants someone dead.
The vault dweller keeps low against the tall grass, dead beige concealing deep blue, rumbling stomach against whistling winds. Fenfang finds prey at last. Grazing in the open, twisted animals walk the irradiated earth.
It is a deer.
A horrifically warped and mutated deer. Cancerous flesh pulses where skin fails to grow. Its gaunt frame balloons with every laborious breath. Its head splits right down the middle, two pale-eyed snouts where one should be. It is hideous, yet unmistakably a deer. The silhouette remains in spite of radiation’s best efforts. In spite of the pain it no doubt feels just by existing, it continues to walk, bray, and graze as a deer. In spite of everything, it persists, and for a brief moment when one head lowers to chew on grass and the other keeps watch, it is as if it has not changed in the slightest.
In defiance of its damnable fate, it refuses to let fate change it.
Anger stings beneath her skin as Fenfang takes aim. Over two hundred years since the bombs fell, the gaze of a makeshift crosshair falls on the mutated deer’s heads.