Fallout's Darkest Skeleton Stories Hidden in the Wasteland | Fallout Lore

Fallout's Darkest Skeleton Stories Hidden in the Wasteland | Fallout Lore A skeleton is still gripping the wheel of a car that never turned over again. In the Capital Wasteland one is coiled in a bathtub, one has slid half under a bed frame, one sits in a vault corridor with a pistol two inches from an open hand. Nobody ended up in those positions by chance. Somebody placed every one of them, arms at a chosen angle, head tipped a chosen way, with a single object left within reach to finish the sentence: a bottle, a letter, a child's toy. On October 23, 2077 the bombs arrived around 9:47 in the morning and the war was over in roughly two hours, which left nobody above ground to dig a grave. The soil is largely dead, the air is dry, and the radiation that killed these people also stalled the bacteria that would have taken them apart, so dry bone stayed exactly where it stopped. Fallout 3 opens in 2277, Fallout 4 in 2287, and the skeletons are still posed like display pieces. The ordinary is where it gets unbearable. A meal stopped mid-bite, plates still set, a coffee cup tipped where a hand let go of it. Fusion cars still bumper to bumper on the roads out of every city, lunch pails on the passenger seat, a few of them with keys in the ignition and doors hanging open. Offices full of people hunched over desks built for eight hour days, a stapler nudged askew, one hand outstretched toward a desk phone that was only ever going to give a busy signal. Bank lobbies and clinics hold queues that have not moved in two centuries, shoulder to shoulder and patient, and the bathrooms went somewhere stranger entirely. Then come the fridges whose latches only worked from the outside, the bars like Moriarty's Saloon and the Third Rail, the shelved cellars nobody came to loot, and the rooms locked from the inside where fingernail scratches cluster at chest height on one side of the door and never the other. Two sets of bones holding on to each other turn up in every one of these games, and the most famous pair chose a bathtub. In the nurseries, a crib, a mobile still on its hook and a stuffed rabbit slumped against the bars do the rest. Outside the vault gates the ground is not dirt or gravel but overlapping rows of bones, skulls all pointed at a slab of steel that never moved. Inside the vaults the bombs never touched anyone, and that is the colder story. Vault-Tec built 122 of them with an experiment behind most doors. Vault 106 pushed a psychoactive compound through the vents until residents could not tell the living from the dead. Vault 92 buried messages below the level of hearing in its musicians' sleep. Vault 108 printed the same man over and over and called him Gary. Vault 11 made its residents elect one of themselves to die every year, and they did it for decades. Vault 75 sorted children by test scores in a school built under a Boston middle school and culled the ones who did not measure up. Vault 112 still sits worst of all: a spotless pre-war street called Tranquility Lane where a small girl named Betty asks you to play games that hurt her neighbors, and where Stanislaus Braun, the man whose name is on the G.E.C.K., has been running that town as a toy set for over 200 years. Out on the surface, dogs died at their posts beside the door, soldiers stayed on the sandbag line long after the war ended above them, Pickman lifted bodies into scenes and signed the work, and a deathclaw den keeps skulls in a neat row along the back wall. The oldest version of all of this is not in a game. In 79 AD Vesuvius buried Pompeii in a single day, and in 1863 Giuseppe Fiorelli poured plaster into the hollows the bodies left behind, which is how a man with his arm thrown across his face and a dog still on its chain are readable as posture. Around 300 skeletons were found packed into Herculaneum's boat sheds in 1982, waiting on a rescue that never came. It ends at a steel door, two people divided by three feet of reinforced metal, one arm pushed under the bottom edge on each side, fingertips that stop short of touching.