Chapter 83: There Stands The Grass

Chapter 83: There Stands The Grass

"Has anyone seen Cass?" I heard Veronica ask from the hallway. I was working on a couple of weapons in my room when I heard her. "I haven't seen her since yesterday."

"Don't look at me," Arcade's said from somewhere else in the hallway.

"Cass is missing?" I asked, stepping out of my room to meet them. Veronica and Arcade were standing by the elevator and they both turned to face me when I emerged.

"Yeah, sh-" Veronica halted mid-sentence as she got a look at me. "Sheason, why are you carrying a flamethrower?" I shrugged - or, at least, I tried to. The straps keeping the fuel tank secured to my back were pretty heavy.

"Well, we're gonna go to Vault 22 later today, right? I figure this is going to be pretty useful. So long as the plants burn like they're supposed to..." Both Arcade and Veronica looked confused.

"What do you mean, burn like they're supposed to?" Arcade asked. Veronica, on the other hand, still seemed more fixated on the weapon I was carrying.

"Where did you even get that?" She asked, shaking her head.

"From the Silver Rush," I said simply. "Remember that giant pile of weapons and ammo we stole before Cass, Boone and I blew up the place? This was one of the spoils. Seems to be in pretty good condition."

"Do you even know how to use that?" Veronica asked.

"Seems simple enough. Make sure nobody's in the line of fire, point, and shoot. How hard can it be?" In response, Arcade buried his face in his hand.

"I always feel an inordinate pang of dread whenever anyone utters the phrase 'how hard can it be?' You know that right?"

"Look," I said forcefully. "I think we're getting a little off topic. You said Cass is missing?" Veronica nodded. "What do you mean missing, how could she be missing?"

"I haven't seen her since we got back from Vault 3 yesterday. She didn't come to bed last night, and it doesn't look like she's been in her room at all, either. I'm starting to get really worried..." She certainly looked it, but I couldn't understand why.

"C'mon, Cass is an adult." More or less. "I'm sure whatever she's got up to, she can take care of herself, why're you so worried about it?" Veronica's expression turned to stone, and she folded her arms across her chest.

"Shea, the last time one of us went missing for more than twelve hours, it was you, and that was because you were trapped in the Sierra Madre."

"Ah." I said, finally understanding the issue. "Yeah, that's... okay, yeah. We should probably start looking for her, just in ca-"

Ding.

As if on cue, the elevator doors opened, revealing a very drunk Cass - still clutching an empty bottle in one hand - leaning up against one of the elevator's walls. Her hat was only barely clinging to her head, her hair was disheveled, her clothes were a mess, and her face was so flush the redness almost matched her hair. And despite all that, she still managed to have the stupidest, widest grin on her face.

"Hayyy, guyysss!" She pushed off the wall and ended up stumbling out of the elevator, drunkenly twirling in place before wobbling forward. If Veronica hadn't been standing there, I'm sure Cass would've smacked straight into the ground; however, V caught the drunken caravan boss mid-fall, and for half a second it almost looked like the two of them were trying to dance the Tango. " Wh-uh-oop! Nize caaadge, gud lookin'. Haavn' funnnn?"

"Where have you been?" Veronica asked, trying to set Cass back on her feet. It wasn't really working. "I've been worried sick, I thought something really awful had happened! Seriously, what have you been doing?"

"Drinkin'!" Cass said happily. She wobbled in place for a few seconds, and then settled into leaning on the nearby wall for support. "Ah've juss b'n havin' a gud tiiime. Yeeeeah." I looked down at my Pip Boy, checking the clock. Yep, just as I suspected.

"Cass, it's 9am, and you're already completely shit faced. I think it may be time to admit you actually have a problem." She blinked a few times, and the expression on her face was one of deep, drunken contemplation. She appeared to be giving something some serious thought.

"Is th't whut time't... whut time is it?" Cass scratched her head, and then shook it, knocking her hat off. "Thing've it is... I'ven't been drinkin' jus' thiss mornin', this's been goin' on alllllll night! I'ven't stopped!"

"I'm not sure that that's better..." Arcade said incredulously. "In fact... that's... that's kind of worse, isn't it?"

"Righ', so, whut it'd happen'd was, was'is: after y'killed Moto'run'r, ah went to th' 'tomic wrangl'r. An' you'll nev'r guess whut happen'd! Ah ran int'a Dennis Boyd, an' ol' car'van buddy'a mine! Told 'im whut'd happen'd, he bought me'a drink, s'me oth'r car'vanner's showed up, they start'd buyin' me MORE drinks, ah bought them s'me drinks, an' th' nex' thing ah know, there's, like, fifty've us! An' then, we all start'd barhoppin'!"

"And you've been drinking continuously that entire time." I felt my eye twitch.

"Yep!" Cass practically beamed. "We must've hit ev'ry bar'n Freeside'n th' Strip! T'was mos'ly beers'n shit, buuuut... things gotta liiiiiittle fuzzy aft'r th' shots've t'quila at Th' Griff'n... Oh! An' we went t'see Joey at th' caro... th' carus... th' place in th' circus place, y'know?"

"How are you not dead?" Veronica asked. Cass, however, must have thought I was the one to ask, because when she responded, she pushed off the wall into my direction and pointed a finger roughly at me.

"Hey, ah've been pacin' m'self! B'sides... S'like ah told ye' b'fore - all six've ya! - mah liver's ind'struct'ble!" And with that, she fell forward again; this time, I caught her. She grabbed hold of my shoulder with one hand, and tried to steady herself against the flamethrower in my hands with the other. "Oh! Um... h'lo there! That a flamethrow'r in yer pocket'r y'jus' happy t'see me?"

"It's a flamethrower." I said as flat as I could. She blinked several times, and leaned in close, almost pressing her nose into the top of the barrel; it was like someone who had lost their glasses was trying to focus.

"So t'is." She looked back up at me with that goofy grin and patted the flamethrower a few times. "Ah mean... ah, ah knew that, obvi'sly. Jus' testin' ye, t'make sure ye... knew tha'. Ye pass'd, hurray!" I sighed, and tried to help her back up on her feet and off of me.

"Cass, I am, frankly, a little disappointed." Veronica nodded approvingly as I spoke. "If you were gonna go out drinking like that, you should've told the rest of us before you left - so we could've joined you!" Veronica stopped nodding immediately, and started sending me a death glare. "... more pressingly, you're in absolutely no condition to fight or even go anywhere. So. Steps will have to be taken..."

"Are you sure this is a good idea?" Boone asked. He was in the back of the car, next to Arcade; Veronica was in the passenger seat. ED-E wasn't here - he was back at the Lucky 38.

"Are you talking about going into Vault 22 at less than full strength, or leaving a stupidly drunken, practically catatonic Cass in the care of April and Emily?" Boone's face remained impassive and practically motionless for a good thirty seconds before he finally responded:

"Yes."

"Ask a stupid question..." I said under my breath with a sigh, shaking my head.

"It's like I keep trying to tell you, Boone," Arcade said to the sniper sitting next to him. "I know you don't agree with the Followers politics, but I've known both Emily and April for a very long time. They're good people. Hell, I don't think Emily has ever even held a gun in her life."

"I was actually kind of worried about asking them," I said. "Every other time I've asked them for something the last few days, I've tried to make sure there was some kind of incentive for them - make it a mutually beneficial arrangement, you know?"

"I'm with Boone, on this one," Veronica said. "Couldn't we have just told Yes Man to jump in a Securitron and look after her, instead of a pair of girls you have known for only three and a half days?"

"V, think about what you're saying for a minute," I said. "Yes Man is incapable of disobeying any orders he's given, and until Emily can fix that part of his programming, that's just the way he is. If he was watching her, the first time she asked him for more booze, he'd get it for her, no questions."

"And to be fair, I've known them for a lot longer than three days," Arcade added. "Trust me on this, Cass is in good hands with those two."

"Alright, so Cass is in the drunk tank," Boone said. "What about Raul?"

"That's a lot easier to explain," I replied, brining the car to a stop. "He had to go back to his safehouse, and take care of a few things. He told me when he left that he probably wouldn't be back until later today, or early tomorrow. Now... you guys ready?" I grabbed the G36 and stepped out of my car. "Because we're here."

My Corvega was parked at the entrance of a small, hilly canyon in the Mt. Charleston foothills. Hildern wasn't kidding when he said plants were spilling from the Vault 22 gate. I'd gotten the general idea last night, but it was much more obvious in the light of day. The ground near where I'd parked my car was covered with a thick carpet of grasses and moss - which itself was strange enough for the desert - but further into the canyon, the foliage just got thicker and thicker. Bushes, trees, vines... and that was just the greenery. There must have been a dozen species of multi-colored flowers (at least) in the area between my car and the Vault entrance alongside who knows how many mushroom colonies. All this plantlife growing freely like this was strangely surreal. When Boone and I had checked out the entrance last night, it had set off a lot of warnings in my head, and now that I was back... the bells were still going off, just as loudly as before.

That wasn't the most worrying thing, however. The most worrying thing was right near the entrance: a giant metal sign. Boone and I had seen it before last night, and it's why I was worried and insisted on brining the flamethrower. I think Arcade and Veronica were having the same reaction, because both of them were standing in front of the sign, just staring.

"Stay out!" Veronica said aloud, reading the spray painted sign. "The plants kill!"

"Itraconazole." Keely growled. "It's an antimycotic I was able to synthesize to combat the spores in the air down here. If you've seen the spectrometers I've set up, then you already know you've been breathing the spores for as long as you've been down here - however long that's been. The symptoms won't manifest for ten or twenty days at least, but I suggest you take it well before then. Otherwise you'll-"

Keely was cut off by a clunk from the ceiling above our heads. Everyone drew guns at the sound - and then it was followed by more clunks.

"Fuck!" She started backing up. "Fuck, fuck, fuck! We have to move, they're coming for us!" She rushed past us, into the next room. All of us followed, as the banging above us got even louder.

"What's coming?" I yelled over the noise. Keely vaulted over an upturned table, and took cover behind it.

"Spore carriers!" Keely yelled, bracing her laser rifle against the table. "They use the vents to move around!" The rest of us followed suit, trying to take cover behind whatever we could find in the room.

A grate in the ceiling dropped down with a clunk, and was followed by - I'm not really sure how to describe it. I mean, I could tell that it was the same kind of thing that ate the mantis earlier, but I still had no idea what it was. It was vaguely humanoid, with long talon-tipped hand and feet, and a snarling mouth filled with teeth, and it looked like it was covered from head to toe in moss. It didn't have any eyes, and I saw a cluster of spine-looking things sticking out of its back. And then it was followed by another. And then two more.

The beasts leapt into the room, and everything erupted in gunfire. I managed to hit one, but it was fast - a lot faster than I was expecting. And it didn't help that it was apparently able to cling to the ceiling. When everything slowed down enough for me to aim in VATS, I saw that my shots were actually hitting, but they were just going straight though. I started to get worried as the one I'd been shooting at was now leaping directly at my face, but it was caught mid-leap by Veronica smashing it in the chest with Oh, Baby! and sending it flying.

"Guns won't work!" Keely yelled, shooting a green laser blast at one of the leaping monsters; the beam cut straight through, and it disintegrated in a bright flash in midair. "You need to burn them!"

"Arcade!" I yelled, backing up. "Light 'em up! Torch the fuckers!"

The room lit up like the surface of the sun. A plume of liquid fire shot out, washing over everything and flooding the hallway. From the looks of things, all the monsters - Keely called them spore carries, right? - were caught in the torrential flame. By the time the fire died down, all that was left was a few charred, blackened corpses.

"What the fuck were those things?" I asked, as soon as I found my voice again. Keely checked her rifle, and reloaded the microfusion cell.

"The former inhabitants of this Vault," Keely growled, checking each of the corpses carefully; she didn't even wait for bodies to stop smoldering. "The corpses have been eaten from the inside out and taken over by colonies of entomopathogenic fungi, called Beauveria Mordicana." She turned to Arcade and Veronica. "If you don't want to turn into those, I suggest you two take those injections."

Keely was leading the way, deeper into the Vault, with Arcade right behind. It seemed like every corner we got to, she had him flush it out with a burst from the flamethrower. We'd seen a few more spore carriers, but Arcade's flamethrower seemed to do the trick. Eventually, she led us into a large atrium, dominated by three large vines as thick as tree trunks in the center.

"Where are we going?" Veronica asked after a while.

"The lowest level of the Vault. If the data I've collected is correct, the concentration of spores is highest there. If we can find the source, then we can detonate this:" Keely reached into her satchel, and pulled out what was obviously a bomb, but it was surrounded by several vials of glowing blue liquid wired into it. "When this goes boom, it'll spread an airborne version of that antimycotic compound into the air, and trigger a chain reaction that... should clear out all the spores. Trouble is, I've never been able to get down deep enough for it to be effective."

"So, what the fuck happened down here?" I asked, trying to keep pace. Keely growled out a laugh.

"What do you think?" The ghoul growled. "It's just the side effects of this Vault's... experiment." She spat out the word with visible disgust. I was just confused.

"Experiment? What are you talking about?" Keely stopped in her tracks mid-stride, and walked past Arcade to stare at me with narrowed eyes. She looked me up and down, scrutinizing me, with an expression on her skinless face like she couldn't believe I'd just said that.

"You really don't know, do you?" Keely asked. When I didn't answer after a few seconds, she sighed heavily and shook her head. "The Vaults were never meant to save anyone..."

"They weren't?" Boone asked.

"I thought the Vaults were supposed to be fallout shelters?" I asked. Keely turned and walked away, shaking her head and continuing to talk as we moved; obviously, she didn't want to stay in one place too long. That was just asking to get ambushed by more spore carriers.

"Do you know how many people were living in the United States in 2077?" she asked.

"Just under 400 million," Arcade rattled off. That was surprising - he'd been pretty quiet for a while. Keely nodded.

"Exactly. At most, a Vault can hold up to a thousand people. Do you know how many Vaults were constructed for the public use? 122. Do the math." Keely snorted - quite a feat without a nose. "The Vault program was a scam from the start, and if that was where it ended, that would be bad enough. But..." Keely sighed heavily. "There's more to the Vaults than most people know..."

"So... what were the Vaults for then?" I asked. That sinking feeling was crawling in my stomach again. Everyone was paying attention, now - even Boone.

"The Vault program was a massive social experiment, engineered by Vault-Tec and bankrolled by the Enclave. They wanted to see how humans would react to various different environments, and the stresses of isolation for extended periods. Technically, they wanted to test the feasibility of travelling to another world and colonizing it after this one had been blown to shit, but when you've explored as many Vaults as I have, you can just tell that the Vault-Tec engineers were just taking the piss at the end. Almost every Vault I've been to had a different 'experiment' and they've all been nuts. Some of them were innocent enough, but most of them ended up like this place: everyone dead, and filled with dangerous monsters and hazards to rival the most hellish parts of the wastes.."

"Hang on," Veronica chimed in. "You said all of this was a side effect of this Vault's experiment. What was the experiment?"

"This Vault didn't have any food extruders, like a lot of the others," Keely punched a door control that led into another hallway. "In order to feed the population, the scientists living here had to develop plants that could grow in incredibly hostile conditions - low or artificial light, no water, cold temperatures, highly compacted soil - but could still produce enough food to feed the Vault's population."

"Didn't really go their way, did it?" Boone asked. Keely shook her head.

"It worked too well, is what happened. They just didn't account for any of the side effects. Now shut up and check your corners." Keely held up a fist as she checked around a nearby corner; after a few seconds, she motioned with her hand for us to keep following. "We're bound to run into some Man-eaters soon."

"Man-eaters?" I asked, soft as I could.

"Don't know if you've noticed," Keely growled. "But all the plant life here is mutated, and a lot of it is sapient. The worst ones are what the scientists called 'Species BE908'. I call them Man-eaters becau-" She cut herself off, stopping just shy of the door at the end of the hall. "Shh! Hear that?" There was a strange sort of burbling growl coming from the next room. She pressed herself up against the nearby wall, her laser rifle at the ready. I edged past her to try and get a better look at what she was talking about.

There were two large patches of foliage overflowing out of the center of the room, and in the middle of each was... well, I could only assume these things were what Keely was talking about. They looked like a pair of giant Venus Fly Traps, each of them as tall and wide as I was, but they were moving... and growling. Their giant mouths were swinging around on thick stalks, like they were almost sniffing around for prey; at the base of each stalk was a twisting mass of vines, moving and slithering along the floor like tentacles. The two plants turned to... er... face me as I looked inside, and hissed, opening their spiny-toothed maws as wide as they could.

"Whoa!" I ducked back behind the wall just as a pair of thick heavy spines flew through the air and embedded themselves in the opposite wall. The next thing I knew, the tentacle-vines were trying to follow, wildly flailing in the direction of the door, but were too short to reach.

"Man-eaters prefer tight spots," Keely growled, letting out a grim chuckle.

"I'm... not even gonna touch that one," I shook my head. "Let me guess, guns don't work on these either, right?" Keely shrugged.

"Dunno. I know lasers work."

"Right, fuck it. We don't have time to deal with this." I pulled a plasma grenade off my belt, and tossed it in the room. "Fire in the hole!"

Eventually, after fighting through a few more spore carriers (and torching every man-eater we came across) the five of us found ourselves on the lowest level of the Vault. Keely led us to a large steel door with a hatch-wheel in the center, then shoved a metal keycard into a panel next to the door. The wheel started to spin around, the door opened up with a hiss. Beyond the door was a jagged mass of rocks with a steadily growing mesh of plants, moss, and grasses growing out of the cracks. The tunnel was dimly lit by rather regular patches of bio-luminescent mushrooms.

"This is it," Keely said, peering around carefully. "All the data I've collected on the spores suggests their origin is somewhere inside here."

"What the fuck are we walking into down here?" I asked, crossing the threshold into the cave. It felt even hotter down here than the rest of the Vault, amazingly enough. We barely got twenty feet into the cave before all the various plants and mosses covering the cave floor, walls, and ceiling got even thicker. Thankfully, we didn't see any more of those man-eaters.

"No idea." Keely growled, her laser rifle at the ready. "Don't trust anything - any plant could be connected." Suddenly, the cave seemed to widen. The mushrooms had been enough to illuminate the tunnel, but the cavern had now become so huge, that the ceiling was completely obscured by darkness... almost. Ahead of us, however, was a small light source: a patch of plants that was illuminated by some glowing orange orbs. It almost looked like fruit.

"Connected?" Veronica asked. "Connected to what?"

A rumble echoed through the cavern from the darkness. It was impossibly loud and low, and the whole cavern shook from the massive noise.

"What was that?" I tried to yell over the noise, looking around. "Is it an earthquake?"

The cavern shook violently again, and the patch of vegetation illuminated by the fruit exploded from the inside out. Huge tentacles as thick as tree trunks shot up, wrapping themselves around the stalactites in the ceiling. A cloud of dark-green gas burst up and out, flowing out like a stupidly thick cloud of fog. A mouth - similar to the man-eaters, but ten times bigger - rose up on a thick neck-stalk, growling and snarling and thrashing. It opened up its massive maw, filled with row after row of thick dark-brown spines like teeth and strange orange and green fluids dripping out and onto the ground in huge buckets - to say nothing of the dozens of tentacle-vines sticking out of the center of its mouth flailing and writhing and thrashing around. It pointed the open mouth down, almost like it was looking at us... and roared.

"No!" Keely yelled, backing up with a look of horror on her face. "Worse!"