Chapter 2 Red Rocket

Light overwhelmed him, forcing John’s eyes shut. Leaving him stumbling blindly into the new world. For an instant he feared everything they’d told him growing up had been true. Nothing left, the surface incapable of supporting life, but it passed. Shielding his fragile eyes with his hands he began to make out just enough to see a broken down truck. Like a full size version of the ones he made as a child. He stumbled over to the shade it provided and sat on the soft ground, giving his eyes time to adjust.

Little by little, John opened his eyes, taking in the things around him. He could see a path. It might have been a road once. Now mostly smothered by the same loose rock mixed with soft earth that covered everything around. It led down, winding out of sight. Opposite the long derelict truck he saw a steep embankment. Dotted with burned white trees strewn around at odd angles. As if the ground shifted beneath them.

His confidence rising, John used the truck to steady himself and turned to face the sun. Wincing, his eyes closed to the warm light, he stood to feel the sunlight on his pallid face. It felt warm, inviting, natural, and safe. A soft breeze picked up brushing past him and flickering the tattered canvas on the back of the six wheeled truck husk. Hoping for something less desolate than burnt trees, John forced his eyes open, he wasn’t disappointed.

The exit from the Vault had been built into the side of a rock face high above a broad, deep valley. The edge wrapped in swathes of burnt dead trees that faded into patches of living ones. With blood red leaves that formed a sort of boundary to row after row of neatly laid out of houses. All damaged to varying degrees, some looking simply worn while entire blocks had been reduced to nothing but charred remains.

With his eyes improving John could make out the spaces between the houses. Roads. Like corridors, he realised, smaller feeding into ever larger, he could follow them. The rest of John’s window to the new, old world was now blocked behind the covered bed of the truck. Still not confident in his own footing, he kept his hands firmly on the rusted husk, edging cautiously round. The mixed earth changed to loose rock, then to a sheer drop, forcing him to stop and to lean out as far as he could.

Beyond the houses there were more buildings. All different shapes and sizes. Some alone in sprawling patches of grey white concrete. Others had tall, tube like vents on the roof. A few had steeply angled metal tops that glinted in the sun, connected by neat lines of missing trees in forest. A negative space marking the abandoned roads yet to consumed by red. Tracing the roads to the very limits of his vision, he could make out one clear, large road. Marked by rubble, topped with what looked like repeated blocks of metal in groups. Cars he realised, real, life size cars.

Better still, where the road met the horizon something poked up. Something obscured by the curvature of the earth, something man made, something big. That was it, it had to be. A clear sense of purpose gripped his mind, follow the roads, find the tower, that would be his plan. Still unsteady, John scanned the horizon for anything else, then looked up, regretting it instantly.

The morning sun hung at almost eye level with him, filling the world with light. He stared into the endless blue that his ancestors took for granted, unable to process what he saw. Suddenly the ladder he’d been so scared of seemed trivial.

It all became too much, the sun touching his pale skin, the oxygen rich, fresh air, the surreal endless blue. John collapsed to his hands and knees. Head spinning and stomach churning in opposite directions. He heaved, attempting to vomit with an empty belly, which only made matters worse.

Slumped against the truck John fumbled for a grip on his new reality. In the quiet his trained rock breaker hearing picked out the sound all breakers dread. The tumbling of rock into bigger rocks. Operating on instinct he bolted, hard, pushing off the loose rock surface as it shifted under foot.

Within seconds the ground fell away from beneath the truck, sending it tumbling down the steep scree face below. It looked like a toy again. John made it to the bend of the winding path just in time to see everything behind him slide away. He could still see the cave entrance, now unreachable. A problem for another day, today’s problems were enough.

The path wound ever downward. Weaving through barren rock set in soft earth, covered by the endless blue. Still adjusting, John stumbled his way along. Years of flat corridors had not prepared him for the irregular, uneven, surface. The further he descended the easier it got. The steep cliffs receded, making way for the trees with blood red leaves.

Up close John saw they were definitely alive. Twisted, gnarled branches, sprouted from misshapen, black trunks. Some of the leaves seemed to be forming in odd, doubled up ways. Leaves growing within leaves, nothing like the limited idea in his mind.

Before long the rocks vanished from sight, leaving him in a forest of red. John felt like a character in one of the stories they’d been told as children. Brave kids trapped in a hostile world, escaping into the magical paradise of the Vault. He dismissed them as lies told to keep him in line, but couldn’t deny the world may indeed be hostile. And of course those kids were always in pairs at least, never alone like him. Now more alone than he’d ever been in his entire life. John felt strangely liberated by it, focusing on that to block out the thought of Rosie. The path he’d been following became less and less clear, continuing to slope downwards. Down he went, learning to walk all over again in the new, old world.

The pipboy pipped, earning its name, he hadn’t put it in silent mode, a careless mistake. Before he could change it he stopped, transfixed by the entirely new message flashing on the familiar screen. *New AM signal found: Listen y/n?*. He clicked the ok button and hoped, static. John moved the side wheel to increase the volume, straining to hear something, anything, finding only static.

He left the radio on full volume, hearing a sound through it seemed to be worth the risk. If anything lay in wait out here to eat him, like the wolves from those children’s stories, they would have done it by now. He hoped, again. Static ebbed and flowed through the pipboy radio, getting stronger in the clearer areas of the sloping forest. John sent out a mapping pulse to identify potential clearings, free from the ceiling of blood red leaves. The pipboy went silent, or rather it could no longer be heard by humans.

Inside the linear, cold steel trap of the Vault the mapping pulses were incredibly effective. You could map entire floor in minutes, accurately. Often with better results than the cumbersome mapping beacons they used in the caves. Out here they travelled farther and took longer to bounce back. Returning with incomplete data which translated as ill-defined blotches of light on his screen. He clicked to send two more pulses closer together. As they echoed back to him two distant features became clear. The unmistakable dead stop of the signal at the Vault door. And a long, thin, straight line towards the bottom of the hill. There are no straight lines in nature, his time in the caves taught him that. John pressed on down the slope, eager to see the new, old world up close

The line rendered on his cutting edge pipboy map screen turned out to be a chain link fence, running as far as John could see in either direction. Beyond it were buildings, houses maybe, but he couldn’t imagine even a whole family needing so much space. He could have climbed the fence, however his legs were still recovering from the descent. So he retrieved the multi-tool, using the pliers to snip through the fence and peel it back.

The house was one of many, two floors made of what John assumed to be wood. Rotten, rotting still. The roof collapsed in and the windows were either broken or so dirty it was hard to tell where they started and the flaking, painted wood ended. John approached the back of the unfamiliar structure, almost creeping. As if somehow the long dead occupants would still be there, his multi-tool gripped tight. He found a pair of large windows, floor to ceiling, too dirty to see through. On closer inspection they weren’t windows they were doors. Glass doors, thought John with a mocking grin, what a stupid idea. Raising his pipboy to shield his eyes, he struck out blindly with the multi-tool. Glass shattered, falling from the frame as John stepped in.

Inside almost everything had faded beyond recognition. Yet other things seemed unaltered by the passage of time. Brightly coloured plastic cups dotted the floor, undamaged beyond the dirt that clung to them. To his right, a kitchen, refrigerator door torn off, cupboard doors missing, shelves bare.

In front of him, a room bigger than his quarters twice over. On one side was something that looked like a heating element. The scorched black tungsten bars covered by ornately shaped metal that served no function other than to look pretty, and block heat. Another fine idea scoffed John.

There was a padded seat, big enough for three side by side to sit easily. The colour seemed to have been yellow once, judging by the scraps of cloth and foam that clung to the worn coiled metal springs. John tried to imagine how it looked before the bombs fell. Tried to imagine who'd eaten in this kitchen, sat on the padded seats. He couldn’t. A lifetime looking at the same walls left him with little concept of how these people lived, or why they needed so much space.

John walked further into the house. The morning sun shining through the dirty windows just enough to be able to see. The front door had been painted green once. Now broken and splintered near the handle. Levered open then left to rot off the hinges with everything else. John saw another larger room to the other side of the door. The collapsed roof beam brought down part of the floor above it, blocking access to everything except the wooden stairs.

The first step broke under foot, rotten. So with his back pressed to the wall John walked the edge of the rotten stairs. As he reached the top he could just make out a narrow hallway leading to an open door. It framed a chair at an angle, with something on it. He couldn’t it make out, more dirt, no, old clothes, no, a person. John froze, glued to the wall, the figure in the chair didn’t move. He took another step, then another, no movement from the room at the end of the hall.

John strained his neck to get a closer look. It wasn’t a person, not anymore, only a skeleton. And across its a lap, a long, metal pipe shaped object, a gun. John wanted it, although he couldn’t really explain why. Still creeping, for reasons that didn’t make sense in the rotting shell, he approached the skeleton. Dirt clung to it like the rest of the house making the patches of white on the bones stand out. Around the base of the chair fluids had left a large stain. Coupled with a trace of the stench he knew all too well from organic recyc.

Creeping, reaching, and trying to ignore the stain at his feet. John laid one calloused hand on the cold, double barreled, metal he wasn’t sure why he needed. Right as his foot went through the stained floor up to his knee. Sending him, the skeleton, and the object he felt compelled to pick up, crashing onto their sides.

The bones skittered and clacked along the floor. Leaving the topless, jawless, skull staring into John’s eyes accusingly. He yanked his leg free from the rot and stood, turning to see what the chair had been angled towards. This must have been the last sight before the person in it turned the gun on themselves, all those years ago.

Remorse hit him like a hammer, remorse for mocking their glass doors, remorse for invading a home that wasn’t his. Three skeletons cradling each other, each one smaller and more delicate than the last. All huddled in a bed, stained and rotten like the floor. John left, as if leaving would undo the intrusion. Forgetting the gun he felt strangely compelled to get, and was sure to need.

Walking through the carcass of the old world it became impossible to deny that it was a dead world. Yet life clung to it everywhere. Vines with similar blood red leaves wound up street lights, walls, anywhere it could latch on to and spread. The faded blacktop roads were being reclaimed by patches of earth with spiky, reddish brown grass poking through. Inert blocks of scrap, once cars, littered the road he followed. Paint stripped, tires worn to nothing, hard to believe they ever moved at all. Until one would trigger the Geiger counter on his arm.

John kept following the faded the blacktop round corners. Through more rows of houses, through entire blocks burnt to nothing. All without any sign of life beyond plants. Just static on the radio, but he pressed on telling himself if there were plants, there had to be animals. And if animals could live, so could people.

John looked at his pipboy, nearly ten, time to eat. Going into another house didn’t seem right somehow, so he walked on in search of an alternative. A few houses down he found a larger house, surrounded with vivid green, short grass. Real grass, like he imagined it should look. Excited, he ran over, knelt and ran his fingers through it. Plastic, fake, but still as close to grass as he’d ever seen so he sat, staring over the crossroads in front of him.

John retrieved a protein bar, a can of water, and his multi-tool, from his makeshift backpack. Extending the small knife blade from the handle with a well practised push, he slit the wrapper on the protein bar, making sure he could seal it back up. He slid half of the opaque, gelatinous, block of matter out and cut it, biting in half again. He pressed on the indentation on the water can, rotating it, to extend the built in straw.

Half a pint of water coupled with half a protein bar felt like a meagre breakfast for someone who’d come so far. It’d make an even poorer dinner, but enough to give him three days. Just enough to keep going, There had to be water out here, he told himself while he chewed, based on nothing. Although even irradiated water would do in a pinch. The cans had filters and they could put him on radaway for a week for all he cared when he got back, if he got back. He’d have the mapping data, he could prove the problem with the Vault. Most importantly he’d have a solution, or a path to a potential solution.

Smouldering embers of doubt caught light in his mind. Fanned by an amplified sense of isolation, and the deafening, ever present silence. Maybe he should just go back, maybe Oversight hadn’t noticed, maybe Rosie would forgive...he couldn’t even finish the thought. John had more faith in finding the source of a broadcast he heard a decade ago than finding Rosie’s forgiveness. More so if he came back empty handed on his first day.

The doubt reached a full blaze. Unsure whether he wanted to hear something or not he clicked on the radio, setting the volume as high as it would go…static. But something behind it, a rhythm. Spurred on even by the faintest trace of his goal, he hoisted up his pack and began pressing further into the unknown.

Everywhere became the remnants of houses. Burned to the foundations long ago, or the endless blue that still made John queasy. The broken, worn away blacktop led John’s eyes to the horizon. Focusing on this new sight seemed to calm his dizzying sickness. He pressed ever forward, sending out mapping pulses and stopping to look at the ground so he didn’t vomit what little sustenance half a protein bar would provide.

As he walked something began to appear on the horizon, inching up from the black ground with every step. What began as a tiny red triangle grew into the endless blue until it became the only visible structure. The shape seemed familiar, he’d known the name once, but it’d been buried by years of safety protocols and dull manuals.

Tall, cylindrical, pointed at one end. What was it, he asked himself with each step towards it, and why did it seem familiar to him. New features became apparent. The structure appeared unmistakably red, easy to spot against the blue and black. With sharply angled plates attached to the bottom. No, not plates thought John, fins. He knew where he’d seen the structure before and with that memory came an idea of how it could help him now.

The shape unapologetically protruding into the endless blue was a rocket. John knew it from the children’s stories. One in particular, about people who built one of these rockets to escape The Great War. A story of how cooperation, determination, and sacrifice had saved humanity from extinction. Like they were doing. Probably all lies he told himself, but he couldn’t help smiling when he remembered the last slide. And the way he used to pull it to make the rocket fly.

When he arrived at just about only structure for miles around he saw it wasn’t a real rocket. Of course it wasn’t, he told himself, disappointed for allowing such immature thoughts. The steel depiction of the rocket had been used to draw the eye to the building below. A simple structure under a roof far larger than it needed, surrounded by the inert blocks that once moved.

John kicked loose a chunk of blacktop, took it in his hand and threw it, striking the rocket with a satisfying, echoing, metallic ding. John smiled, it might not have been a real rocket, still it was more than enough for what he had in mind

The sign above the door said Red Rocket in dynamic, bold, letters, three of which had fallen to the ground. John collected them, stacking them neatly by the door. As if he were about to submit a repair request for the long broken sign. He tried the narrow, red striped door, locked. John thought about breaking the broad glass windows that made up most of the adjoining wall. That didn’t feel right to him, not after the last house.

John looked again at the door handle. It barely cleared the recessed section so he knew it had to be part of the locking mechanism. Ask him to take a test, or carry on a conversation, or tell a joke, and John would fail, quickly. Give him a puzzle to solve, a broken tool, a leaking pipe, a door that hasn’t opened in a hundred years, and he could find solution before most people found the problem.

John took his multi-tool, attached the wrench to recessed handle and started to lever it back on itself. Metal inside snapped, allowing the door to open. Inside the flat, cracked tile floor put him immediately at ease. Empty shelves lined the walls, leading to a counter with a worn floor behind it. Knowing there had to be more he moved behind the counter to try another door. Locked again. Another grip and twist with the multi-tool broke the handle clean off, to reveal an empty vehicle repair bay.

Anything that wasn’t bolted to the wall had been taken. Stenciled lines on an empty tool board. Half missing vices attached to work benches too heavy to move. The changes in the colour of the floor where cabinets had stood for years, now gone. All of it gave him hope, someone had to come in here and take these tools he told himself. You’d need tools to fix things, and there was clearly lots to fix.

Thinking positively to keep the flames of doubt well smothered, John looked around the empty repair bay. Trying to imagine cars coming in, problems being found, fixed, then sending them back on their way. Would he have been happy doing that in the old world, would he even know how happy felt anymore. John couldn’t even remember a time he felt content, let alone happy. Before the fire in his mind could catch again he saw something he knew, something familiar, and exactly what he needed.

Running along the edge of the near empty room, the same quarter inch conduit pipe that wove through the entire Vault. Even in the same yard lengths. Joined by the same hexagonal connectors and junction boxes he’d worked with for years. John found the first connector he could access. A threaded straight section for joining one length to another. He scrambled over to it and started using the multi-tool to undo it. At first it wouldn’t budge, it really is the same thought John, reminded of his Mr Fix It training.

One sixth of a turn at a time he eased the first connector off, exposing what he knew would be underneath. Single strand copper cable. The comfort John found in preforming a repetitive task with a clear goal felt short lived. He pulled four conduit lengths and about double that in cable from the walls. These plus the T box from behind the counter and a couple of straight connectors would be more than enough.

John took his scavenged materials outside, dumping them at the back of the building. The sun caught him off guard. Right above him in the endless blue, beating down on his scalp through his brittle, close cropped hair. John could have checked the temperature, he didn’t, fearing the actual number would only make it hotter. Instead he set to work. First throwing the T box, connecters and pipe lengths on the metal roof. Each landing with a pinging, clanging sounds that travelled across the burnt, open ground, once filled with wooden houses.

Next he tied a solid knot in one end of the rubber coated cable, leaving a small hoop. He fed the other end through to create a tightening loop. Throwing the loop up and over the red rocket letters turned out to be more difficult than expected. Until the fourth attempt, when the wide loop caught the K and pulled tight enough to take John’s weight. He yanked on the cable, then swung from it for a moment to be sure. The roof wasn’t that high, plus he climbed before in the caves and through the failing air recirc vents. But a broken ankle could be a death sentence out here. Cautiously, he pulled himself up, scuffing his boots on the red brick. Then rolling onto the metal roof with an audible sigh of relief.

John sat cross legged. Methodically feeding the cable past the freshly sharpened multi-tool knife. Keeping it held at the right angle to strip the rubber coating without completely destroying it. Next he exposed three or so inches of copper from the plastic sheathing. He wrapped it around a poorly fitted bolt in the mountings of the rocket to anchor the precious copper wire while he stripped the sheathing away with a series of sharp tugs.

That done, John gathered the pipe sections, connecting them to form a T shape. He wrapped in the precious copper round. With just enough left over to coil tightly around the extra connecter. The sun beating down, combined with the light and heat reflecting back up from the metal roof made the rocket hot to the touch. He held the tip of the rubber coating to it and counted to ten, it didn’t melt, a good sign. With a deep breath of rich, warm air, he climbed the rocket as high as he could which turned out to be not very high at all.

Standing precariously on the fin, John managed to reach the bottom of the curved nose cone. Where the pilots would sit he remembered. He threw the rubber strip around, tightened it and repeated the process to form a secure mounting. He jumped down, denting the metal, getting back up with the giant metal T in hand. John pried the rubber back just enough to slide the unwieldy metal tube through, it held. Fearing it wouldn’t hold for long, he quickly tied down the coiled connector. Making sure to get plenty of contact between the copper and the rocket.

His crude construction finished, John ejected his wireless four pin connector from its slot in the pipboy. He pressed in two of the pins, and touched it to the copper coil. This had to work, he thought to himself. “This will work.” He said aloud to the new, old world, and with that he sent a mapping pulse.

A faint charge coursed from the wireless adapter. Through the coiled copper. Through the red rocket. Up the scavenged pipe and out into the world. Travelling further and faster than the secret, cutting edge tech could muster alone.

The map screen filled with data, zooming out more than he’d ever seen before. John mapped more terrain in the last few seconds than the ten or so pulses he’d sent since leaving the Vault. He calmed his excitement, flipped the four pin over, and turned the AM scan mode on.

Static, louder static, but static all the same. Achingly slowly John moved the four pin down the coiled copper when out of the static came a voice. “From The Tower with power every hour, Lady Luck is with you. Stay safe out there.” Not daring to move any quicker than he’d been doing he looked at his screen, he found the frequency, ninety seven point seven. With a deep breath to summon his nerve, he took the four pin off the copper coil. The warm, sultry voice remained. Quieter, slightly distorted, but very much there. Life in the new, old world at last.

John jumped and hollered with a mixture of relief and vindication. Until he realised what a bad idea jumping on the roof of a century old building was. Instead he sat on the edge, his legs dangling over, staring out at the horizon. Enjoying the view for the first time in his life.