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October 23, 2287
Sanctuary Hills

Walking into Sanctuary Hills was like a hungover stumble home, neither of them wanted to see or look at what happened to the green trees and painted houses. They needed to pass by the gate checkpoint now covered with a litany of skeletons, one family's fingers curled tightly around the chain-link fence. A wind passed by, nudging the fence and whistling through the mesh.

Nate could hear their pounding fists and confusion, moving past it quickly as Meathead stayed close. The clanging of flesh against metal chain link fences as their voices went hoarse from screaming.

Head darting back and forth, nose to the ground, then the air, short little whines, and nervous yips, before flicking his tail and doing hot laps around Nate. Looking over the bodies, he bounced back to Nate with the holster taken from the Vault-Tec. Security guard gripping in his teeth and Nate needed to look at his dog.

"Meathead, why did you bring me this?"

The dog bobbed his head and stared up at him, breathing through his nose, and then panting out his mouth. The dog only held eye contact for a few seconds and then looked to his left and right. Sensing Nate's eyes still on him, he shook his head and looked back and the confusion was plain on Nate's face. The silence and lack of response turned their moment on the hillside next to the Vault into a despondent moot point as Meathead kept on panting and breathing.

"Just keep talking to the dog, Nate." He said while Meathead wagged his tail. Feeding the belt through the metal tang, he fastened the holster to his waist and slid the ten-millimeter pistol into place.

Meathead ruffed and then barked, turning around and bounding down the trail into Sanctuary Hills. "Meaty, stay close!"

Nate walked much more slowly, remembering how it felt like less than two hours ago, he was running up past the trees. Coming back through them was disorienting, nothing looked the same, and all the bare bones of the decaying trees clung to their few remaining leaves like they were their last hope.

Stepping around a mother and two children's bones, their suitcase laying a few feet away, open with the remains scattered and lost.

He inhaled deeply and whistled for Meathead, the dog running back to him barking the whole way, meeting him on the pavement leading down the culdesac.

"Stay close."

Inhaling, the air smelled different. It was missing the buzz of activity that always permeated a suburban neighborhood. No one was mowing their dead light brown grass. The first house they passed after exiting the trail was completely collapsed, it supports giving out after decades of nature exposure. Cars littered the street, along with litter and junk that's been beaten down and eroded and blown into the streets from houses with doors left open by their previous residents as they tried to flee.

Nate saw his house, staying on the sidewalk he rounded the path to the front door and flinched. His home was different, the panels and siding were still there, the glass was still there for the bay window overlooking the front yard and it was clean. The car in the driveway was rusted and tires flat. He noticed that someone spent the time to wipe it down so it wasn't covered with moss and pollen buildup. The hedges were red and brown and cut into ball shapes. The grass lawn showed divots and holes where weeds were dug out below the roots, making it a patchwork, but weed free lawn. While to his left, the Parker residence was completely collapsed, support beams jutting out through a fallen down roof, no structural integrity left in that building except for the concrete it was built on.

A figure passed the living room window and Nate pulled one arm back on his gun, one foot already ready to bolt. Meathead picked up on Nate instantly and growled, head level as he charged into the front door, only to bolt out a few seconds later and stop right at Nate's side. A large grey floating robot appeared in the door.

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"Master Nate! Oh how I live and breath, it's so wonderful to see you again!" Codsworth floated out into the front yard, two conical eyes tracking, and the third hung loosely, aimed at the ground. "Is it really you?" Codsworth shrugged, hoisting up the third eye for a moment before it flopped back down into place.

"Cosworth? It's you...you survived... you're still here and alive. Everything else is..." Nate reached out, wrapping one arm around Meathead's neck and head, bringing him in closer while petting his fur back.

"Where is Mistress Nora and Master Shaun? They don't appear to be with you and your voice indicates high levels of stress."

Nate's chest tightened, "Cut right through, Codsworth. While we were in the Vault, someone shot Nora. And they kidnapped Shaun." Nate's eye's watered, and he blinked through it.

"Oh dear heaven's, I'll notify the local authorities immediately! No signal detected...Retrying...retrying...No signal detected. Master Nate! I'm afraid the local authorities are indisposed with other matters or our distress signal is not being received at the local Concord station."

Nate's shoulders shuddered, "'Course not." he said to himself "I'm going to find Shaun and I'm taking Meathead."

"Ah, the trusty companion, Meathead. How are you, pooch?" The German Shepard yawned and rolled to his side, laying out in the dirt and grass. Nate smiled as the robot butler lead the way down the sidewalk. "How long has it been since I last saw you, Codsworth?"

"Oh, it's been a full minute, I'd say two hundred, nine years and nine months. Give or take a few dings to my ole chronometer. Obtrusive wasp nests in my chassis that took a year to flush out notwithstanding." Nate's legs wrapped tightly around each other to try and preserve body heat.

" Are you...okay?" How he wished someone would ask that of him. Codsworth's metal frame groaned, unloading a backlog of built up grievances.

"Master Nate! It's been horrible! Two centuries with no one to serve! No one to talk to! For the first ten years, I tried busying myself with trying to keep the floors waxed! But it was such a fruitless effort because nothing removes nuclear fallout from the vinyl wood or upholstery, Nothing! I tried keeping the car fixed, but the wheels rotted away and the exterior rusted! You can't polish rust! Don't get me even started on the dusting! Do you know how hard it is to dust a shuddered house?"

"Codsworth, the house looks great even though we were gone for g..tch..." He exhaled. "Two hundred and ten years. Thank you. I wasn't expecting to see anyone, let alone you. I thought my house was going to look like every other one on the block." Nate said, sweeping his arm around. "What do you know?"

"Oh, sir! I...I don't know if you meant the entirety of my existence from when you and Nora purchased me at General Atomics Galleria, my entire production line material spec data, or from the moment your family left."

"What happened after the bombs fell?"

"I don't know, I was temporarily put into safety mode by a distress signal sent from General Atomics Headquarters, and then when I awoke, everyone was gone. I was alone. I thought for certain you and your family were dead. I puttered around for a few years, I found this holotape from the missus. I believe it was to be a surprise for you after your return home after being discharged. But, ah...everything happened so quickly."

"What's on it?"

"I believe it was a private message between the Missus and you, and my etiquette protocols would never allow me to play that for myself."

Codsworth extended his arm and claw with the holotape grasped lightly on the orange and white holotape.

"Thank you, Codsworth." Nate said, holding the holotape in his right hand. Curling his fingers around it, he held it at his side.

"Just about any tape player should be able to suit your needs for listening to that holotape..." Codsworth's low hanging third eye rolled upwards at an angle that strained the hydraulics for a moment. "Like that Pip-boy on your arm there! Good old Rob-Co & Affiliates!" Nate's Pip-boy buzzed, blinking green lights and checklists scrolled upwards. Taking a moment to glance down at the screen, different lines lit up and went dim. "Talk to Codsworth... Search Neighborhood with Codsworth...Does this thing do this automatically?"

"Standard Personal Information Processor model 3000 mark IV, synchs with your nervous system and cardiovascular system and monitors the tiny electric impulses a human might have to take a note, and follows the nerves to the corresponding actions a human would have to take to write the note to find out which letters the human would want to construct into a sentence, then copies that electric data and runs it through an algorithm generator to best match words and sentence structure, and finally the end product is turned into a readable format on your Pip-boy screen."

"So yes. Automatic thoughts to text." Nate said, trying to simplify things for himself.

"Well, enough feeling sorry for this bucket of useless information, shall we go explore the neighborhood? Shaun and his kidnappers may turn up?" He proposed.

"Have any people come through recently?"

"No, individual people come through here on an average of one every thirteen years, groups of two or more come through here on an average of sixty-six point seven years. No group stays longer than two days. The local mosquito and dog population has remained in small flux but is gradually increasing."

"How many?" Nate asked, casting a sidelong glance down the culdesac, he couldn't hear any dogs or see any signs of them.

"Well, the mosquito's bred like mutated rabbits before the bombs fell, now they just breed like rabbits in terms of number and physical size. The metaphor, not the actual mutated rabbit."

Nate's toes and knees clenched up, "Mosquito's the size of rabbits? Oh God Damn." His teeth chattered, "I couldn't stand them before. Is my bat still in the laundry room?"

\111/

One step inside their house and Nate stopped the moment he crossed the threshold.

He was only here less than two hours ago, and everything looked like it was sunbleached and put through the washer five thousand times.

"Oh." He said, feeling his head sway from the distortion. His Grognak the Barbarian Comic still sat on the counter, and his coffee cup where he set it, only there was a dried up brown ring coating the inside. Nora's coffee mug as well as on the coffee table next to the couch. He took one step in and felt his head swell to the size of a watermelon before he even realized he was standing in the hallway leading to bedrooms. One look into Shaun's room, and then his own and he was laying flat on the floor of the hallway.

Paralyzed. His face was locked in a scream, but no sound was coming out. Nate thought he was screaming so loud, that the walls would shake and collapse the house around him, but he was gagging and choking on the shock. His arms felt like he'd shoved them into a bucket full of sea urchins, lances of hollow point needles burrowing into his flesh. When the sound finally came, it was loud. Intensely loud. He was laying there in the hallway, screaming at his entire world that was melting away from around him.

Nothing. He thought. It was all gone.

Meathead bounded up to him and licked his face, pawing at his chest, he didn't move for ten minutes.

Then he reached out and stroked the dog's brown and black fur and Meathead curled up against him, whimpering softly for his master.

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They moved as a trio into the neighbor's faded greenhouse and Nate's heart pounded, he didn't even look in his own and his neighbor's house was missing most of the glass windows, dozens of boards fallen and rotten off the house making it easy to look through.

Meathead growled and Nate flicked out his pistol as crunching noises filled the hallway. Two large lumps bore upwards through the carpeting. Two football sized irradiated cockroaches tunneled out of the floor and jumped at the group.

Nate's head pounded, feeling his hand move slower than his eyes, weighing out the statistical probabilities to hitting each body part on the cockroach and mentally counting off the number of rounds he would fire. Meathead jumped on the first one, jaws bared and head snapping back and forth, Meathead bit into the shell. Green inky ichor spilled from the dog's jaws spilling to the ground as three bullets rang out, hitting the roach one in the head, and twice in the shell. The second one twitched and chittered and jumped up onto the ceiling and landed on the ground with a thump. Nate kicked it into the wall with a smack as Codsworth descended down onto the bug with a buzzing rotor saw. The lens were blasted with a coating of sticky green radroach meat, he shook the eye cones and flung away the bits.

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In the driveway of Nate's house, he stood on a small stepladder, Codsworth resting on his metallic arms below him on the ground. Meathead was resting on his haunches, head out and aimed towards the street. A panel was popped open, and a few screwdrivers and wrenches were laid out beside them.

On a blanket was everything Nate picked up along the way, from Henderson’s yellow house next door, he picked the lock to their gun safe and found three handmade pipe pistols, a welded strip of metal curled in a loop for the grip, a .38 revolver cylinder chamber, and around steel pipe bored and screwed into place. It was a garage gun, technically legal, but darn it if it didn’t look like it was about to blow up in someone’s face. He unscrewed and jammed a steel wool q-tip down each barrel and chamber, cleaning out any rust or gunpowder residue. This little neighborhood was packing plenty of ammo and drugs. Two little eightballs of a greyed-power didn’t know the neighbors were keyed so high, with Jet written on it. A needle filled with steroids, marked by the label and remaining letters from Hallicingen Corp., in black sharpie the word ‘Psgcho’.

Refilling his pantry shelves with cans of Cram, Sugar Bombs, Powdered Milk, and cans of purified water, he wasn’t hungry.

"Once I get your eyes back into place, I'll take Meathead and check out the town of Concord. If there's more people or someone who can fill us in on what's happened, then we'll see about 'Ping'..."

Nate jerked his arm out of Codsworth's metal dome and looked at the Pip-Boy on his arm.

"'Check out township of Concord' it wrote down the...the task I thought of. Any way Concord, people, food, water, bed. It's a long day and I feel like it's only going to get longer. Right, Meathead?" The dog thumped his tail against the ground, acknowledging the call out while panting lightly in the morning sun.

"If I may suggest sir, to continue my necessary maintenance, that Master takes a short trip to General Atomics Galleria? There should be the required parts and materials to fix all of me entirely." Codsworth working lens rolled up to Nate.

"Yeah, I'll ah...I'll run out there when I get the chance. Codsworth set wander limit to the entire neighborhood of Sanctuary Hills."

"Acknowledged. Thank you, sir."

Nate fit a wrench around a bolt inside, and heaved backward "Come on 'ou son of a bitch!" The bolt gave away and Nate fell backward off the stepstool and onto the lawn. Codsworth rightmost eye clunked to the ground with three long wires connecting the visual and electronics.

"All right." He said, picking up the eyepiece, still tracking him with small clicks. "Two pieces and you'll be good as new."

Nate picked up a small metal rod attached with a hook and fitted it inside, threading it out to connect with the metal plates keeping the eye cone in place and screwed it onto the bars. Tightening the rod, Codsworth eye returned to its original place, a few degrees lower than his others but it was a fitting replacement that could hardly be noticed with the robot constantly hovering up and down while in action.

"All right Codsworth, that's it. I want you to go through the neighborhood. As of now, everyone in Sanctuary Hills relinquished their property two hundred nine years ago. Anything still salvageable, useful, or that can be considered of value to be scavenged and brought back to the house across the street and separated into different piles. Food, clothing, medical supplies, tools and hardware, books, miscellaneous junk that can be broken down for scrap, weapons, ammo, and lastly trash. Can you do that for me?" Placing two loaded pipe pistols in his back belt waistband, he took thirty rounds and half a box of six shotgun shells.

"Yes, sir."

"Good, If you can, find a broom. Sweep out the leaves and get rid of any ceiling tiles that have fallen down. I expect to come back to a clean house, Codsworth. Can you do that for me?"

"It will be done, sir."

"All right then, we’ll be back soon. Meathead. We're moving out."

Everyone always has Diamond City Radio going on in the background to detract from the abstract horrors of the Commonwealth, right?