Fallout - Chapter 151: The Holotape and the Eggshell (Patreon)

Her heart was pounding painfully behind her ribs.

Josie took a deep breath and forced herself to calm down.

There was one passage in the Chosen One’s biography that she remembered particularly well.

Back in the Den, the Chosen One had encountered a ghost named Anna who was still lingering on Earth, because the necklace she had cherished most in life had been stolen, she remained fixated on it, wandering endlessly in that old house, pacing the same spot on the floor day after day, muttering about the necklace over and over.

It wasn’t until the Chosen One helped her recover the necklace and fulfill her final wish that she was able to leave in peace and fade away completely.

Ghosts are never eerie, terrifying monsters. At their core, they are simply ordinary people who couldn’t fulfill their final wishes and are unable to move on, some simply never got to hear a “goodbye.”

Josie repeated this phrase over and over in her mind, as if pouring cold water on her frayed nerves.

She kept telling herself that fear stems entirely from the unknown, and that the unknown is something that can be illuminated.

She lowered her center of gravity and forced herself to stop backing away, like a tree bent by the wind but never snapped, her breathing light and steady.

Immediately afterward, Josie instinctively reached for the pistol at her waist, her fingertips brushing against the anti-slip grooves on the grip, but she quickly pulled her hand away, live ammunition was useless against ghosts; at a time like this, the gun was no different from a hunk of scrap metal.

So her right hand quietly slipped into the side pocket of her tactical vest, her fingertips touching a cold plasma grenade.

But she didn’t pull it out right away; instead, she brought her hand behind her back, completely shielding it with her body and backpack, hiding it so thoroughly that not even the slightest hint of it was visible from the front.

After confirming she was ready, Josie slowly looked up at the female ghost floating in front of her, her tone steady, as if she were speaking to an ordinary passerby:

“May I ask who you are?”

The green, ethereal figure floating in midair made no eerie or contorted movements. She simply tilted her head slightly, just like an ordinary person, her gaze shifting from Josie’s face to her hand.

“My name is Rachel Watkins.” Her voice was clear yet echoed, as if coming from the bottom of a well,

“Pre-War, I was an actress at the Kiddie Kingdom in Nuka-World.”

Josie silently noted this information.

She knew Kiddie Kingdom. It was Nuka-World’s family-themed area. Before the War, colorful castles and giant lollipop sculptures covered the grounds, a miniature train carried children around the park, and cheerful songs played on a loop over the PA system. It had been the brightest, happiest place in the entire amusement park.

But Kiddie Kingdom had been completely transformed. Sprayers pumped highly radioactive wastewater through the area, puddles glowed with cold fluorescent green light, and countless feral ghouls wandered the park.

Josie looked down again at the corpse on the ground.

A non-feral Ghoul. Female. A bullet hole in her temple as well. She was also wearing a Nuka-World employee uniform, the same pale purple trim, the same Nuka-World logo on the left chest pocket.

Were these two uniforms from the same batch?

No, these two uniforms were actually the same one,

one was the physical garment, weathered by wind and sun, faded and worn, with frayed cuffs and unraveling seams;

while the other was a spirit form preserved in its most beautiful state, brand-new and intact, the colors so vivid they looked as if it had just been retrieved from the uniform warehouse, even retaining the crisp, straight creases pressed by an iron.

“Is this you?” Josie pointed at the corpse on the ground and gently tapped the withered hand, which felt like a dried-out twig, with the tip of her boot.

“It’s me.”

Rachel’s voice was flat, as if recounting an old story that had nothing to do with her, no hatred, no sadness, only the weariness that comes from having seen through the world, lighter than a sigh,

“On the day the nuclear bomb fell, all the actors from the Kiddie Kingdom took refuge in the underground tunnels and survived the first few years on stored food and purified water. Later, the tunnel’s seal failed, and radiation seeped in little by little. We were all turned into Ghouls.”

Josie looked again at the bullet hole in the corpse’s head. Clean and precise, a single shot that went right through.

In the Wasteland, suicide is nothing out of the ordinary; every day, people who can’t bear to go on shove a gun barrel into their mouths.

But a Ghoul committing suicide is a rarity, the vast majority of Ghouls grit their teeth and cling to life; very few willingly give up their own lives.

Because a Ghoul’s lifespan can easily span one or two hundred years, or even longer.

Human love, hatred, and pain are gradually worn away over this time span, so long it borders on cruelty, like angular stones washed by river water into smooth pebbles, then into sand, until not even their shape remains.

Not to mention Ghouls like Rachel, who had survived since before the War. Most had been raised in the Christian faith. Under Christian doctrine, aside from martyrdom, suicide was considered a grave sin that led to hell. They would not choose that path lightly.

Josie furrowed her brow and pressed further, her tone betraying an unmistakable curiosity:

“Since you survived the nuclear blast and endured the Ghoul transformation, why did you ultimately choose to take your own life?”

Rachel’s green spirit form flickered slightly, and her previously steady voice took on a barely perceptible tremor. The green radiance around her flickered on and off like a candle in the wind.

“I left Kiddie Kingdom and traveled across the entire Wasteland, hoping to find a cure for the Ghoul mutation and save the other companions in the park who still retained their sanity.” Her voice dropped, each word seeming to squeeze out between her teeth.

“But I traveled the entire Wasteland, from the East Coast to the West Coast, across dried-up riverbeds and forests warped by radiation, over collapsed ridges and abandoned highways. There is simply no cure that can stop the Ghoul mutation.”

“I sought out Parthenia Blankenship in Appalachia. I also asked Set in Necropolis on the West Coast. They both shook their heads after hearing my question.”

“Everyone gave me the same answer. There is no cure. There never has been, and there never will be.”

“My consciousness was being worn away day by day, my memories and sanity constantly devoured by the mutation. I could see what I was becoming: a feral ghoul.”

“I had set out from Bradberton, so I came back here to end everything where it had begun.”

After hearing Rachel’s story, Josie quietly clenched the plasma grenade in her fist,

Although Rachel’s story sounded sincere and selfless, and her motivation to save her companions was noble,

But someone capable of crossing the entire Wasteland alone, from the East Coast to the West Coast, evading countless Raiders, Gunners, and mutants, not to mention traversing radiation exclusion zones not even marked on maps, could never be simply a good person.

This is the Wasteland, not a pre-War highway; there are no gas stations or motels along the way, the number of lives she’s taken would be enough to stretch from here to Diamond City and back.

Even now that she was dead and a ghost, she was probably still no pushover.

“Since you’ve already killed yourself, why are you still lingering here?” Josie pressed on, her gaze fixed on the flickering green light.

“Do you still have unfinished business?”

She was genuinely puzzled. Logically, it didn’t make sense.

As a Ghoul, if she truly had such a strong obsession that she couldn’t let go even in death, she wouldn’t have gone feral in the first place, so how could she have been driven to suicide by that very process of going feral?

Yet Rachel chose suicide, which meant she had given up all hope and left everything behind.

Yet her ghost was still here, which meant she was clinging to something she couldn’t let go of.

Rachel’s spirit flickered between light and shadow, the green glow expanding and contracting in a rhythm as steady as breathing, yet as real as a heartbeat.

After two or three seconds of silence, she spoke, her voice so soft it was almost drowned out by the wind outside:

“My love, Oswald. He’s still waiting for me at Kiddie Kingdom.”

Oswald.

Josie etched that name into the deepest recesses of her memory, placing it in the same mental compartment as the marked danger zones on a map.

“I’d like to ask you for a favor,”

Rachel’s spirit drifted half an inch forward,

“Please take something to him for me. A holotape.”

Josie was silent for two seconds. Her throat bobbed once as she asked the cruelest and most important question:

“Tell me, how long have you been gone?”

“About a hundred years.”

Josie’s breath caught in her throat, and she raised her voice without realizing it:

“A hundred years? Your lover might already be.”

She didn’t finish her sentence, but the implication was crystal clear.

In two hundred years, towns would be razed by radiation storms; rivers would change course, their dried-up beds filled with wind-blown sand;

not to mention a non-feral Ghoul trapped in a theme park filled with highly radioactive sewage, Oswald had most likely gone feral long ago.

“He’ll be fine.”

Rachel cut her off immediately, her voice carrying an unquestionable resolve. The green glow of her spirit form suddenly intensified, becoming so bright it pierced every corner of the room, making even the dust on the floor clearly visible,

“Radiation affects Oswald completely differently than it does me. He must still be alive. I can feel it. I can feel him waiting for me.”

Josie suppressed her surprise, swallowed the string of questions welling up in her throat, and nodded:

“All right, I’ll help you. Where’s the holotape?”

But in her mind, she’d already begun to weigh her options.

Kiddie Kingdom was littered with sprayers pumping out highly radioactive wastewater; the radiation levels in the air were enough to send a Geiger counter off the scale.

Fighting her way through hordes of feral ghouls in an environment like that? No way.

She knew her own limits. When the time came, she would shout a couple of times from the edge of the park, leave the holotape on the ground, and retreat to a safe distance.

Whether Oswald got it or not was none of her business. No one had said she needed to hand-deliver it to him.

“It’s right in your hand.”

Rachel flipped her palm open with a light, eerie motion, her fingers unfurling like a flower blooming silently.

Josie suddenly realized that the plasma grenade she’d been hiding behind her back had vanished into thin air, replaced in her palm by a cold holotape. The chill seeped into her skin along the lines of her palm.

The label on the holotape bore a handwritten date and a few symbols: Recorded in 2286. For O. T.

She flipped the holotape over. On the other side of the label was a tiny smiley face, drawn with painstaking care. The curve of the mouth had been traced over several times, as though the artist’s hand had trembled and she had gone back to correct it again and again.

“When did you swap it out?”

Josie looked up in astonishment. She hadn’t seen Rachel move at all. The plasma grenade had clearly been clenched in her palm the entire time. She hadn’t felt it leave her hand or noticed the holotape replacing it.

Rachel gave the plasma grenade in her hand a light toss. The green-glowing grenade bounced half a foot high in her equally green-glowing palm before falling back down, where she caught it steadily.

“Two hundred years is enough time for me to learn a lot of things.”

She tossed the plasma grenade back to Josie, who caught it in a fluster, her fingers closing around it in a panic.

Josie clutched the plasma grenade she’d lost and regained, her heart still pounding in her throat.

“I know what you’re up to.”

Rachel’s voice remained gentle, yet it held a faint, almost imperceptible chill. There was no breeze in the sealed room, yet the flame of the oil lamp on the table flickered violently, the wick stretched into a thin, elongated line of fire before snapping back into place.

“If you break your promise… I happen to know there’s more than one way to stay alive in the Wasteland.”

She tilted her head slightly to look at her.

“You don’t want to know what that feels like, do you?”

The moment her words fell, Rachel’s spirit suddenly burst into a blinding emerald green light, completely overshadowing the oil lamp in the corner of the table. The green light filled every crevice in the room, the cracks in the doorframe, the fissures in the window sills, and the gaps between the wall panels.

Cold sweat trickled from Josie’s temples, and beads of sweat on the back of her neck slid down her spine.

“I promise, as long as I’m alive, that holotape will be delivered.” Her throat felt packed with sand; every word came out rough and strained.

Josie didn’t dare linger. She turned and strode quickly out of the cabin, her boots crunching over gravel and broken glass in a frantic rhythm, like a rabbit being chased by a dog.

Once outside, the radiation storm had already subsided considerably.

The sky gradually shifted from an oppressive yellow-green to a grayish-yellow, and visibility improved dramatically; the outlines of distant ruins emerged from the murky haze. The acrid, metallic smell in the air had also faded somewhat.

At the Red Rocket Gas Station, Arsie stood motionless. The faint glow of the dashboard shone silently behind the windshield.

Josie was just about to walk over to Arsie when she suddenly remembered the main task at hand, Gray Claw’s belongings hadn’t been destroyed yet.

She turned and hurried back to the half-collapsed brick building where Gray Claw had been hiding. As she pushed open the wooden door, a stench of blood and decay hit her in the face. The three Gatorclaw eggs were still sitting on the table.

Time was running out; there was no time for a thorough search. Josie simply gathered the three eggs and Gray Claw’s backpack into a single bundle, the fabric and eggshells clattering together with a dull “thud, thud.”

She pulled out the plasma grenade Rachel had tossed back to her, pulled the pin, pressed the trigger ring, flipped her wrist to shove it into the center of the pile, then turned and ran.

Three seconds later, a blinding green ionic blast erupted through the window.

The shockwave shattered the remaining window glass; shards mixed with radioactive dust flew everywhere, clattering against Josie’s helmet and armor. Cracks appeared in the brick walls, half the roof collapsed, and the blast-scarred walls glowed with a luminous green afterglow.

It was completely destroyed. There was no way anything could have survived.

Josie stood where she was for a moment, catching her breath, then turned and walked through the rubble and radioactive dust toward Arsie.

But she never noticed that deep within the blasted debris, one of the eggshell fragments had a tiny hole chiseled from the inside out.

The edges of the crack were jagged, marks left by some tiny claws or teeth.