Appalachia

Might I open the shutters for this one. On Reclamation Day — 2102, twenty-five years after the bombs and five years behind the brochure — the door of Vault 76 rolled aside, and America's best and brightest stepped out to reclaim the country. That had been the plan from the first: 76 was Vault-Tec's showpiece, a control vault with no experiment in it but the stated one. Keep them safe, then let them out.

What they stepped into was West Virginia in bloom. A quarter century had let the forests back in, gold and green over the ridgelines; the rivers ran clear; the air had forgotten the taste of ash. By every account I hold, it was the loveliest morning in this entire archive. It was also silent. No town answered. No smoke rose that meant supper rather than ruin. The land had recovered. The people had not stayed to see it.

Spring had come to Appalachia, and it found the funeral already over.

The answer was the Scorched Plague. Out of the deep ultracite seams — mined too greedily by machines that never slept — came the scorchbeasts, and with them a contagion that hollowed the living into the Scorched: still standing, still armed, no longer anyone.

The record holds the endings in order. The Responders — volunteer firefighters, police, and medics who ran toward the ruin and taught first aid to strangers until there were none left to teach. The Free States, who had built their bunkers before the bombs and came out of them anyway, because a plague cannot be waited out. The raiders of the Savage Divide, who took the high ground and starved on it. And Taggerdy's Brotherhood — Lieutenant Elizabeth Taggerdy, United States Army, sworn into a brand-new order over a satellite call from Roger Maxson at Mariposa: the first Brotherhood of Steel chapter east of California, chartered by radio, dead at Fort Defiance with the line held to the last log entry.

By 2102, every terminal in Appalachia ends mid-sentence. Everyone who might have said welcome had spent their last words saying hold.

Appalachia had kept the Old World's temper along with its beauty. Three automated nuclear silos slept beneath the mountains, armed and patient, tended by machines that never asked why; under a golf resort, what remained of the United States government waited in a bunker for a country worth continuing. The Residents of Vault 76, hunting the plague to its source, found the fissures where the scorchbeasts bred — and found that the only instrument in the region heavy enough to burn a nest shut was the same one that had made the world this way.

They used it. The record notes that it worked, and declines to celebrate.

In 2103 the roads filled again. Word had traveled that Appalachia was green, gold, and survivable, and people came back to see for themselves — Settlers, who raised a town called Foundation and meant it, and Raiders, who took the crater of a fallen space station and meant that too. They began arguing over the place almost at once, which this archive files under recovery.

The Brotherhood of Steel came back as well — a new expedition sent east over the mountains to take up the watch its first chapter had died keeping. And after that, the record refuses to close. Appalachia is the one entry in my collection that keeps adding minutes: new roads, new neighbors, new trouble, season upon season.

First the green came back, then the people, then the arguments. That is the proper order, sir, and Appalachia is the only record I hold that got it.