I was in a caravan. Part of a load of others that were coming up through Washington from Utah. The caravan workers were New Caananites, so naturally, I didn’t trust them. They had trained these docile, deathclaw-like beasts to carry their loads and pull their carts. They were herbivorous and sturdy, unlike their large feral cousins. They kept to themselves and took their caps as they brought us into the immense vastness. I’d never seen that many trees in my life. Or trees, period, for that matter.
I was dressed in a sleeveless shirt with a white eyelet lace. My only carry-on item besides the supplies in my bag was a Brahmin skin coat.
In the Olimpic Peninsula of the land formerly known as northwest Washington, there exists a small settlement that still uses the name Forks. It exists under a near-constant state of cloud coverage. The rain is nearly constant. I had been to this town once before as a baby, but the memory hardly sticks in my mind. I’m only happy that my dad, Sheriff Charlie, is still around. He’s the closest thing the town has to a mayor or government. He and a handful of deputized citizens.
It was here that we were both exiles. Exiles from the vault, exiles from Utah. But I was self-exiled, and I took that with great horror. I detested Forks.
I loved Vault-97, I loved the gleam of the artificial sun lamps.
“Bella,” my mother had said to me a thousand times before I left. “You don’t have to do this.”
My mother looks like me, except with short hair and laugh lines. I didn’t want to stay because, since dad had fucked off to Washington, she’d started hooking up with the overseer of the vault, and I felt like that was too uncomfortable a situation for me to be in. So, I left. I took a gun and a bag with me and radioed Dad my location on the road between us. He always told me there was a place for me in Forks. Mom and Phil could have their fun, but I didn’t want to be anywhere near them and their vaguely cringe-inducing relationship.
Months passed on the road. I found myself embroiled in gunfights with raiders, various tribes that had sprouted up, and I even executed a feral ghoul that made its way into camp while we were grilling up sausages. The New Caananites were kind of shocked by how quick and callous about it I was. I guess they expected me to be a soft vault-bred pup.
Charlie was fairly pleased when I arrived outside the walls of Forks. He embraced me with a hug and walked me through the town. Unlike most settlements in the wastes, Forks is relatively well preserved. I guess, bombing the area around Forks wasn’t the first thought on anyone’s mind when things went to hell in October a few centuries ago. Charlie even enrolled me in the local Followers camp that sprouted up in the years that followed. He said that I could get some learning done and act as their guard in case anything went askew.
“I’m not going to be one of your deputies,” I told him.
He waved me off. “Nobody’s expecting you to, Bells. I’m just saying, they need someone with experience, and things are stretched a might thin up here. But hey, check this out.”
He walked me outside of the house he lived in and to the stables. There I saw yet another one of these odd domesticated deathclaws. A flat-footed thing with a beaky snout. It looked lazily at me like a brahmin looks at an oncoming train.
“I was doing some trading with Billy Black,” explained Charlie. “He’s a guy down at the La Push settlement. I got a good deal for this beaut. They started breeding them a couple of years ago, and now there’s a bunch of these fellas.”
“Does it got a name?” I asked.
“I was thinking you could handle that,” said Charlie.
“I think…Prospero,” I said. “He looks vaguely noble.”
“Good name,” said Charlie. “Think of old Prospero here as a homecoming gift. He’s sturdy, so he’ll keep better than a Slepnir or a hayburner.”
The radiation storm in the distance hissed, and energy crackled in the air. We went inside. It was a small, two-bedroom house that apparently belonged to the previous sheriff. I wanted something with more metal on the walls and a vast sea of tubes and pipes, but instead, I was treated to a pre-war house with faded red paint. My Pip-Boy’s geiger counter clicked and hissed, but we weren’t at dangerous radiation levels just yet.
There was only one small bathroom at the top of the stairs, which I would have to share with Charlie. Not a big deal, because I shared a bathroom with Mom and Overseer Phil for a time.
The Followers Camp had a few students. About fifty-eight students and a handful of armed guards are around the place. All the students were locals of Forks who came out of the woodwork to study with the followers for their reasons. I know for a fact that a few of them just want to manufacture chems and become kingpins of the wastes, but that’s their business and not mine.
They expected me to look a certain way, but I defied the expectation of being tanned from a life in the wastelands. I was ivory-skinned and slender, despite vigorous exercise. I wish that I were kind of jacked. Y’know? Not like a buffout addicted freak, I just want to be toned like actors in movies and dense like a piece of rebar.
I rode Prospero to the camp, and I noticed I wasn’t alone when it came to the beasts. I left my mark on its eye. A red handprint of paint so I could identify it later. They had based their setup out of the old Forks High School. Repurposed the whole thing for their operations. Upstairs held chemical labs, sleeping quarters for homeless or sick people, and things of that nature.
I approached the head honcho of the place, who was nestled into a tiny office on the first floor and wore a red mohawk that I envied.
“I’m Isabella Swan,” I informed her.
There was a sudden awareness in her eyes, and a smile crept across her face, “Of course, the sheriff’s daughter. Nice. Well, things are kind of covered here. You’ve got your gun, we just need you to do a few rounds around the building, looking out for animals or looters. Then, after that, you have some classes. Nothing flashy, just a few rudimentary first aid courses and chemistry. Unless that isn’t your fancy, we also have a few history scholars with us from The Boneyard.”
I did as was asked. I walked around the building with my hand on my hip, ready to draw my pistol if anything went wrong. I was approached by another Follower named Mister Mason. He told me that he grew up in a vault in California and was a literature teacher before joining the followers. We shot the shit about the usual set of authors: Poe, Bronte, Chaucer, Faulkner, Shakespeare, etc. I sat in on one of his adult literacy courses where he taught some of the disenfranchised folks of Forks how to read.
I find wastelanders so unbelievably nauseating in their ignorance. A gangly boy with skin problems that might almost count as a mutation and hair that was slick and oily leaned over to talk to me.
“You’re the sheriff’s daughter, right?” he asked.
“Nice, when’s your next class?” he asked.
“At twelve, chemistry,” I said, skeptically.
“Nice, nice, I’m Eric,” he said, “That’s in Building four, I can show you the way if you like.”
“You’re barking up the wrong tree, fella,” I said, taking a step back and unholstering my pistol so he could see it.
I’m not a bad person; I didn’t shoot him. I just want him to think I would.
Everyone ate lunch in the communal cafeteria, which was the former high school’s cafeteria. There was a collection of people that arrested my attention at a round table near the back of the room. They didn’t look anything alike. They didn’t look like typical wastelanders, either. They were oddly perfect, almost like statues. The kind of people you’d see in pre-war magazines. But there was something vaguely wrong about them. They were flushed and colorless. My eyes were drawn to one of them in particular. A girl with chesnut colored hair and eyes that seemed ringed with red.
I remember focusing on her and having my tongue run across my teeth as I sized her up from across the room. She wasn’t a typical example of a wastelander. She was devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful. I wondered what was up with her eyes, but those thoughts were far away as my own moved along her toned frame as it was sewn into a follower’s labcoat and slacks.
“Who are they?” I asked Eric.
Eric, whom I previously scared, spotted them from across the room.
“That’s Edythe Cullen,” he said. “Doctor Cullens’ daughter.”
“Doctor Cullens plural?” I asked.
“Then that’s her sister, Alice, Jasper, Rosalie, and Emmett,” said Eric. “They’re from California, like the Followers, but only joined recently.”
They didn’t look anything alike, these Cullens. Other than being hauntingly beautiful, they didn’t look anything like one another. But, I figure that’s because of wasteland orphan reasons. I encountered a lot of orphans displaced by war, famine, and radiation, and I did nothing to help them. However, these Cullens, maybe I could find kinship with them. Maybe that Edythe girl, especially. She looked up as my gaze lingered and shot me some sort of look, and I immediately tore my eyes away. I bit my lip and giggled a bit. I felt so unreasonably giddy about having gotten her to look my way.
I didn’t realize that I would be seated next to her in the chemistry labs.
We were in the midst of some lecture when Edythe Cullen sat next to me, and I got a more proper look at her. She had a bit of a slight overbite, and her red-ringed eyes lacked proper irises. They were entirely black like pools of obsidian. She smelled clean, like strawberry-scented soap.
The rest of the lecture was kind of a blur as I found myself being lost entirely in the beauty that was Edythe Cullen. That was until she looked towards me at the tail end of the lecture with furrowed brows and eyes full of hate.
What the fuck had I done to arouse such a reaction? This piercing, hateful expression made me feel like a great weight had suddenly been thrown over my shoulders, and I had been cast into a black pit.
After the day was over, I fled on Prospero to the house and hid myself away in my bedroom.
