章 140: Rust and Rats

The cave was dark, the only light available was the beams streaming in from the shoddy door to the outside. Afton activated his Pipboy light so they could at least see where they were going.

The cave itself was more like an airlock for the vault, the large vault door sitting at the end of it already opened for some reason. Afton was expecting to have to hack a console to get in or something.

Though, he wondered why the door was open. There were only a few reasons why this would be this case. The residents could've been feeling from something inside, or the door controls may be broken... Perhaps they simply just forgot to seal it again when they finally left the vault?

"I'm not liking the look of this already." Karl says, wiping some dust off of the entrance with a finger to check how long it'd been open for.

Afton gives a light punch to his shoulder, "If we're scared of an open door then we might'as well just kill ourselves now."

Inside the vault entrance was the control panel for the door aswell as a lot of trash... Paper, metal scrap, as well as food and drink packages littered the dust-covered floor. Even the machinery responsible for resealing the vault didn't look operable due to the rust that'd gathered.

"Place looks abandoned... For a while too." Karl mutters as he tosses some spent ammunition casing away. "Looks like they were tryin' to fight somethin' as well... Or maybe some scavengers found trouble?"

Heading further inside Afton could vaguely hear the sound of something squeaking? As well as the pattering of many small feet. His signals the other's who ready their weapons as whatever it is approaches their position.

...

After thirty seconds they spot something coming around the corner... Well, more than just "something", as eight huge rat-like creatures spot them and start dashing towards them.

Afton scowls at the rats, if they were regular ones they wouldn't be much of a problem, but these one's had mangy-looking fur, bright turquoise eyes, and brutally sharp-looking teeth. Without a moment of hesitation, he draws Lucky and That Gun before opening fire on them.

Boone and Karl fire with their respective weapons as well, the hallway making it like shooting fish in a barrel. In a couple seconds the vault went silent, the sound of the rats ceasing just as the bullets stop flying.

"See? Not so bad, just a couple rats." Afton says as he holsters his weapons after reloading them.

Karl just shakes his head, "I still think this is a bad idea..."

Afton ignores Karl's apprehensions and continues onwards, going through the various rooms of the vault. There's a canteen, medbay, reactor room... As much as he'd like to dismantle the whole place for parts to experiment with, he knew it'd take a huge amount of time and effort to do it. The place was designed to survive a nuclear holocaust, so he'd need specialised tools to gain access to the more valuable components held within.

Not to mention he'd need a couple military-grade trucks to actually transport everything out... He'd probably need to blow the cave entrance open to allow him to pull the larger parts out. Shaking his head, he decides to just grab the ventilation component and any other interesting loot they might find.

As to what this specific vault was designed to do? Afton had no idea. Usually it'd be fairly obvious, but this place was fairly innocuous. Though, there was one thing that griped him... That was the ungodly amount of booby traps some bastard had hidden in this place.

If Karl wasn't travelling with him there'd probably be bits and pieces of him covering the staircase. Some chucklefuck thought it was a good idea to connect a tripwire with some grenades hung from the top of it.

Fortunately, Karl had been leading and managed to spot it before anyone tripped it. Allowing the group to gain a couple grenades to use or sell in future.

The place as entirely infested with giant rats, they'd somehow managed to get into the food stores and turned the place into a nest. Their teeth didn't seem strong enough to chew through the vaults reinforced walls though, preventing them from creating a complex tunnelling system... It'd be one hundred times harder to deal with them if they were able to just pop out of the ground or behind them at will.

The further they progressed into the vault the more rats they disturbed. Afton had lent Boone his sawed-off shotgun as his hunting rifle really wasn't suited for the kind of combat they were engaging in.

It wasn't all bad though, in most of the trapped rooms there were many boxing of ammo just layng around, allowing the group to scavenge quite a good haul. The ammunition they'd already found would be worth the trouble of travelling through this place alone, but Afton had also found a Pugilism Illustrated, a skillbook to be put simply.

[+3 Unarmed]

There were a few still active terminals placed around the vault that Afton had managed to hack into, his curiosity had gotten the better of him and he couldn't restrain himself from finding out what'd happened here...

Vault 11 was, a shit shot to put it bluntly. Apparently there was some sort of annual sacrifice that the residents were forced to do. They'd vote for the Overseer of the vault and that person would enter a sacrificial chamber after their term was done. Afton wasn't sure why they thought putting the person that'd eventually be killed in power was a good idea, but Vault dwellers tended to be somewhat stupid.

Obviously, this eventually devolved into some sort of political warfare where factions would slander the other's to make sure their preferred candidate was chosen. Judging by how many corpses were lying around the place, he guessed that violence had been the only answer in the end.

This would also explain the many booby traps, if the vault dwellers had been fighting with each other then booby-trapping places to prevent other factions from gaining access would be a relatively smart thing to do.

Shaking his head, Afton scours the terminals for some information on the location of the ventilation component before moving on, the other's had gotten bored enough just waiting around while he played with the terminal.