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The first person to escape the local vault and wander into Megaton was an easygoing guy with an sharp edge and an itch for freedom. He sat at Moriarty's bar and drank his fears quiet and his dreams loud, until one day he wandered off into the Wastes, never to be heard from again. While he's cleaning glasses during slower moments, the eponymous Moriarty sometimes surprises himself in wishing well on the man.
The second person to escape the local vault and wander into Megaton is an entirely different entity. Technically he's the third person, but no one counts James.
“If you don't give me that information, Moriarty, I'm going to freaking kill you, you lying sack of shit.” the man, a very young man, barely a man at all, hisses, the muzzle of a crappy BB gun pointed at the Irishman’s gut. He looks mad and murderous, his eyes pointing in two different directions, his head shaved, his vault suit absurdly baggy. He's nineteen going on forty-five.
But Moriarty takes no heed of these warnings, and laughs, his derision carrying the strength of a plasma cannon. “Hahahahaha!! Ah, kid, I'll give you that one for free, since you're new to this game. But you should know that I've been shooting raiders since Simms was knee high to his da, and if you lay a finger on me, the whole of Megaton will rise up and tear you apart…so go ahead, try it." He takes hold of the nose of the gun, and points it at the bottom of his jaw, his smile wide and full of nothing but pride and malice. When the Lone Wanderer, that unworthy son of James, does nothing except grimace, Moriarty laughs again, smile cracking open into a grin that reveals unusually sharp teeth.
He's won, made his point, is what he thinks when the bastard leaves his saloon, stomping off into the wasteland. Never gonna see that asshole again.
Almost a year later a beast in black Enclave power armour storms into the saloon, stomps into the storeroom where Colin is carefully adding up his possessions, and shoots him in the belly with a shotgun, before hacking him up with a machete like he's so much meat. The entire town does rise up, but the entire town versus a maniac in power armour is the equivalent of one mole rat versus fifteen deathclaws.