Fallout - Chapter 116: The Pre-War Salesman (Patreon)

Moonlight lay over the eight fresh graves like a thin layer of frost.

The crowd had gradually dispersed. Some hurried away with their heads down, quietly discussing what they had witnessed. Others looked back at the clearing one last time, as though trying to convince themselves that the souls they had seen had truly been real.

Nate stood before the graves, his shadow stretching long across the raised mounds of earth.

Footsteps sounded behind him.

Every step was hesitant, as though whoever was approaching might turn and run at any moment.

But in the end, he didn’t.

Nate turned around.

A ghoul stood beneath the moonlight.

He wore a beige trench coat faded almost white from countless washings, its cuffs worn and frayed, along with a shallow-crowned felt hat pulled low over his face. He had clearly worn them for a very long time. So long that the clothes no longer seemed like clothes, but a second skin.

He was even wearing a tie.

Red, with the knot perfectly straight.

The ghoul stood frozen in place, his eyes wide beneath the brim of his hat, his withered lips trembling.

“No... No, that’s impossible...”

His voice was dry and raspy.

“Is that you? Is it really you?”

He took half a step forward, then stopped.

He was afraid that if he came any closer, the man standing beneath the moonlight would disappear just like those souls had moments before.

“You look... exactly the same. And me...”

He lowered his gaze to his hands. They were covered in radiation scars and deep wrinkles, like cracked earth at the bottom of a dried riverbed.

“...Look at me.”

Nate’s eyes settled on the trench coat.

It was the distinctive outfit worn by Vault-Tec representatives before the War.

Back then, people dressed like this had gone door to door, knocking with smiles on their faces and selling places in Vaults as though they were ordinary household appliances, no different from vacuum cleaners.

His gaze moved upward, beneath the brim of the hat.

Even though radiation had ravaged the man’s face beyond recognition, Nate still knew who he was.

“The Vault-Tec Rep?” There was a trace of uncertainty in Nate’s voice.

“It’s me! It really is!”

The ghoul jerked his head up. A sudden spark appeared in his cloudy eyes, and for an instant, his whole face seemed to come alive.

“My God, I barely recognized you. Then again, I barely recognize myself anymore.”

A dry laugh escaped him.

There was no joy in it, only bitter self-mockery.

“Do you remember? That morning when everything ended. I came to your house.”

“I told you that your family had been selected for Vault 111. Your son was still a baby then... I asked his name, and you said...”

He paused, searching his memory.

“Shaun.”

Nate was silent for a moment.

“Vault 111.” His voice was flat, almost as though he were talking about something that had happened to someone else. “Do you know what happened in there? It was a cryogenic experiment. Everyone was frozen and used as test subjects.”

The salesman froze.

“Experiment? Cryogenics?”

He repeated the words, his lips moving soundlessly afterward.

Then he slowly shook his head, as though rejecting the idea while simultaneously trying to absorb a truth that had arrived two hundred years too late.

“No... They never told me any of that.”

His hand instinctively rose to the brim of his hat, rubbing along its edge.

It was an old habit from before the War, something he did whenever he was nervous.

“I was just a salesman. I went door to door, filled out forms... and if I did well enough, I won a set of steak knives.”

He swallowed.

“The real plans... They never told me a thing.”

He opened his hands and stared at his palms.

He had no idea how many of the names he had once written down belonged to people who later died in those experiments.

“I didn’t know anything,” he repeated, quieter this time.

Nate looked at him.

He could see it clearly now.

This man had been nothing more than a cog on the outermost edge of an enormous machine, someone who didn’t even know what his own turning had helped set in motion.

That was the hardest part.

He wasn’t a bad man.

He simply hadn’t known.

“How did you end up like this?” Nate asked instead.

The salesman’s mouth twisted into that same dry, bitter smile.

“When the bombs fell... I wasn’t on the list.”

He said it calmly.

But Nate could hear what lay underneath. A shell hardened by two hundred years of being burned by that memory over and over again.

“The radiation turned me into a ghoul. I survived all the decay, the hunger, the killing... and somehow made it this far.”

Nate fell silent.

He realized he couldn’t bring himself to hate the poor bastard.

Not because there was nothing to hate.

It was because he finally understood the truth, and beside that truth, hatred suddenly seemed hollow and cheap.

After two hundred years in the post-War world, Nate could finally look at America objectively.

Pre-War America had been like an apple polished to a perfect shine on the outside while already rotten to the core. Speculators on Wall Street raised their glasses at the top while ordinary people worried about how they were going to afford food the following month.

Being a Vault-Tec representative had looked respectable.

A trench coat, a felt hat, visits to comfortable homes, a bright smile while selling spaces in shelters that cost billions to build.

But in reality, this man had been just another ordinary person living one step away from disaster.

His paycheck probably barely covered the rent.

And his reward for outstanding performance was a set of steak knives.

That trench coat had been nothing more than another work uniform.

And Nate still remembered that day.

October 23, 2077.

Before the air raid sirens began.

The man had been working.

He had come to Sanctuary Hills, visited Nate’s family, and told them they had been selected for Vault 111.

When the sirens finally sounded, he ran toward the Vault entrance along with everyone else.

Only to be turned away.

A cold gun barrel.

A spinning minigun.

And a soldier’s equally cold words.

“You’re not on the list.”

He had fled in panic, shouting that he was going to file a complaint.

A salesman denied entry to the very product he had spent his days selling.

Nate looked at the wear on the man’s trench coat, then at the red tie that was still tied perfectly straight.

Finally, he asked,

“How did you spend the last two hundred years?”

The salesman didn’t answer immediately.

He rubbed the brim of his hat, as though brushing dust from the memory.

“I stayed in Sanctuary Hills for a year. Codsworth was the only one there with me. Every day, he’d say, ‘Welcome, guest.’ Every day, he’d ask whether I wanted a cup of tea.”

His voice softened to little more than a sigh.

“Then I left. I went to Diamond City. Quincy... Eventually I settled in Goodneighbor.”

He raised his head, his gaze hollow beneath the brim of his hat.

“But I don’t have a single friend.”

Nate looked at him, then nodded.

“Let’s go get a drink.”

The salesman froze.

It was as though he no longer understood such an ordinary phrase from two hundred years ago.

“...Really?”

“Of course.”

Nate turned.

“My treat.”

The salesman opened his mouth.

In the end, he merely lowered his head and pulled the brim of his hat down farther, whether to hide his expression or simply because he was accustomed to retreating into its shadow.

...

Concord.

The small town had gradually come back to life under Minutemen control.

Jace had laid down one absolute rule.

“No matter who they are, human or otherwise, don’t treat them like an outsider until they deliberately make an issue of whatever makes them different. And if they’re only doing it to act superior, take it somewhere private before you start swinging.”

The rule was enforced thoroughly.

Jace didn’t like wasting words, and he didn’t like listening to people waste them either.

He had posted the rule on Concord’s bulletin board, written it into the Minutemen training manual, and repeated it during every pre-patrol briefing.

Then he made sure everyone understood that it carried weight.

There was another reason the people of Concord had grown accustomed to ghouls.

The town’s sugar and alcohol had always been shipped in from Goodneighbor, which was ghoul territory. Caravans constantly traveled back and forth between the two settlements, and over time, people simply got used to seeing them.

So when Nate entered town with a ghoul in a trench coat, passersby merely looked up once before returning to whatever they were doing.

No pointing.

No whispering.

No hostile stares boring into his back like nails.

The salesman actually stopped for a moment.

He hadn’t expected there to be anywhere outside Goodneighbor where people would treat him this way.

Concord was being rebuilt.

Sand, gravel, and lumber were piled along both sides of the streets. Several groups of workers were repairing a half-collapsed house. Some laid bricks, others replaced roof timbers, while still others cleared away rubble and debris that had accumulated over two centuries.

Old material went out.

New material came in.

The rumble of machinery, the pounding of hammers, and the shouts of workers blended into a noisy din.

But it was the sound of people living.

Jace had introduced a work-for-relief program.

The Minutemen paid the townspeople in caps to repair houses and roads.

That way, until they could begin working the land next year, the people here could support themselves instead of surviving indefinitely on Minutemen aid.

The program solved two problems at once.

It provided relief while also improving public order.

People were too busy earning money to cause trouble.

Nate led the salesman into an underground bar.

Under the dim yellow lights, the counter had been pieced together from mismatched reclaimed boards. The grain ran in every direction, but the surface had been polished until it gleamed.

Several yellowed pre-War posters hung from the walls.

A few workers fresh off their shifts sat at the counter, watching an old television in the corner.

A pre-War Western was playing.

The bartender was a middle-aged woman with a tattoo sleeve.

She glanced at the salesman, asked no questions, and simply set out another glass.

The salesman stared at the bubbling beer, brought it close to his nose, and inhaled deeply.

At last, his tense shoulders relaxed.

“You asked me how I spent those two hundred years?”

Nate nodded.

The salesman lifted his glass and took a sip.

“I spent the first year in Sanctuary Hills with Codsworth. It was quiet. Too quiet. The whole world was dead, and there was nobody left except me and a robot.”

“Codsworth kept doing housework every day. Cleaning the living room, tidying the kitchen, asking me what I wanted for dinner. Like nothing had happened.”

“Sometimes I’d sit on the steps outside your house and stay there all day.”

“Eventually, I left. I went everywhere. I saw everything, and somehow ended up with nothing.”

He put down his glass and looked at Nate.

“Now I’m just a traveling merchant. I go from one settlement to another. I never stay anywhere too long... Stay long enough, and the way people look at you starts to change.”

Nate held his drink without responding.

Something had occurred to him.

The Minutemen had established a food processing plant at Park Street Station.

Most of its products sold extremely well.

Jam, desserts, dry rations. They could barely keep up with demand.

But canned meat was another story.

It simply wouldn’t sell.

The problem wasn’t quality.

The Minutemen used real meat in their canned goods and put real effort into the seasoning. It tasted better than the pre-War canned food still scattered around the Commonwealth.

The problem was price.

Theodore Collins operated a cannery almost entirely by himself, keeping the whole production line running with a handful of Mr. Handy robots.

His canned meat wasn’t particularly good.

But it was so cheap that the price barely seemed reasonable.

What the Minutemen needed now was someone who actually understood business.

Nate set his glass down and looked at the salesman.

“Think you could work as a business consultant?”

The salesman froze with his glass halfway to his mouth.

“...What?”

“A business consultant,” Nate repeated. “Our canned meat isn’t selling. Longneck Lukowski’s Cannery is crushing us on price, and we need someone who knows the trade to help us figure out what to do.”

Something lit up in the salesman’s eyes.

Not excitement exactly.

It was the look of someone experiencing, for the first time in far too long, the feeling of being needed.

“You mean... you want me to help sell your canned meat?”

“Yes,” Nate said. “You’ve got top-tier pre-War sales skills, two hundred years of post-War survival experience, and a network of trade routes across the Commonwealth. You’re a perfect fit.”

“If you’re interested, I’ll recommend you to the General.”

The salesman lowered his head and watched condensation trickle down the side of his glass.

His voice was slightly hoarse.

“...Two hundred years. This is the first time anyone’s thought I could still be useful.”

He said nothing more.

He tilted back his head and emptied the glass.

As he enjoyed the moment, something on the television caught his attention.

On the screen, a cowboy in a trench coat pulled back on the reins of his horse. His sharply defined profile stood against the desert wind as he raised one thumb.

“Look. That’s Cooper Howard,” the salesman murmured.

Nate turned and looked at the face on the television.

“The inspiration for Vault Boy,” the salesman said, rubbing his chin as though remembering some long-buried dream. “He was a huge Hollywood star before the War and Vault-Tec’s original spokesman. That thumbs-up pose was his.”

He took another drink, his tone becoming more complicated.

“He was a veteran of the Battle of Anchorage, just like you. Except he was a Marine.”

Nate raised an eyebrow and looked back at the television.

A Marine.

Nate had been Army.

In the U.S. military pecking order, the Air Force were the pampered first-class boys, the Navy were the second-class technical types, and the Army were third-class grunts.

The Marines?

They were genuine fourth-class cannon fodder.

“I don’t know why,” the salesman continued, shaking his head, his expression becoming more complicated, “but before the War, Vault-Tec worked with the House Un-American Activities Committee and suddenly slapped him with every label they could think of. Enemy collaborator, subversive, anti-American radical. You know what that meant back then.”

“No movie studio dared hire him after that. I heard his wife divorced him, and he was left raising his daughter while paying a fortune in alimony.”

He sighed.

“A soldier who went to war for his country, and in the end they threw him away like garbage.”

On the television, Cooper Howard rode his horse toward the sunset, his silhouette lonely and defiant.

Nate watched him, and a thought crossed his mind.

A Marine who had fought in the Battle of Anchorage.

Judging by his age, he must have been sent into battle wearing T-45 power armor. That thing had an unstable reactor and terrible heat dissipation. Wear it long enough and the fusion core could cook you alive before the enemy ever got the chance.

And he still managed to leave the service in one piece?

He was probably about as capable as Nate himself.

Nate raised his glass toward the blurry figure on the screen.

A toast to another veteran who had been discarded.

“To veterans.”

He lightly tapped the rim of his glass.

“If I ever meet him after I’m dead, I’m buying him a drink.”

He paused.

“No. A whole bottle.”

The salesman looked at Nate and suddenly laughed.

“You know, you two are pretty similar. Both of you got kicked straight out of a good life and into hell.”

He raised his glass.

“And both of you are too damn stubborn to stay down.”

Nate smiled as well.

He glanced once more at the figure riding into the distance on the television, then tipped back his glass and drained it.