This Place Is Not A Place Of Honor

The Vault-Tec map they'd loaded onto Ellen's Pip-Boy said Vault 87 was somewhere under the rock formation up ahead.
( This place is a message, and part of a system of messages. Pay attention to it! )
There was a sign rammed into the ground at an odd angle, warning the unwary to approach no further without hazmat clearance and a personal dosimeter. Where it had come from Ellen didn’t know, but it set the hairs on the back of her neck to prickling.
( Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. )
Ahead there were spikes rising out of the ground. Chunks of girders torn from buildings. Pieces of ancient highway guard-rail. Twisted steel rail wrenched out of the ground in one place and thrust back into it somewhere else. The jagged remains of half a dozen cars.
( This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here. )
And there were mutants.
( What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. )
Ellen counted six of them, easily, but there might have been more. She didn’t know, couldn’t say. There were no doors to flee through here. She dove for cover and came up with her plasma rifle in her hands. At the very edge of her vision, red flashed- Cross’s Gatling laser. She saw no more than that before the mutants returned fire.
( The danger is in a particular location. It increases toward a center. The center of danger is here, of a particular size and shape, and below us. )
They kept coming. They just kept coming. And they were worse, now, bigger and tougher and less human than any greenskin she’d seen yet short of the Behemoths. They roared to each other in voices loud enough to be heard over the gunfire. One charged Ellen’s position, the vast green scourge of an angered God, and not even enough plasma to fell any three of the others slowed it down. It swung its sledge, a flashing metal war hammer longer than Ellen was tall-
( The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. )
There was no laser fire. Cross’s own sledge smashed its right knee to gory pulp, and it staggered. Even through the black armor at least two of Ellen’s ribs had shattered under the mutant’s strike, but it was a nice gesture all the same.
( The danger is to the body, and it can kill. )
After that there was no time left to think, or even to form real memories. There was fumbling with syringes of Med-X and grabbing for stimpaks and loading and firing and loading and firing and oh, God, where were they coming from, where and why and how many and why weren’t they stopping-
( The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. )
Then it was quiet, quiet enough that all she could hear was her own breathing, rasping raggedly through the power helmet’s filters. It went on like that for a long time before she realized there was another sound, equally ragged, a long, stuttering stream of ticking like the... like... She’d heard it before.

Her eyes fell on her left forearm. She’d never seen her Geiger counter’s needle pegged like that.

( This place is best shunned and left uninhabited. )





[Whitetext courtesy of United States Department of Energy, Nuclear Futures Panel]