It had not been an easy day, not by a long shot. Annelise didn’t know how long she had lain beside the car, but she knew it had been for too long. Eventually she had stopped crying and shaking, had forced herself to realise that if she didn’t get up and move then she’d soon be as dead as the others. It had been difficult picking through her friends remains, each time she was forced to look at one of them again she felt like she’d break down again, but she just kept reminding herself that she had to survive, had to live, that if she died too then not only would they be dead but it would put the lives of everyone back in vault 96 at risk too. She wasn’t just surviving for herself anymore.

After again what felt like hours she had not only gathered together all of the vault dweller’s possessions but she had picked through the Raider’s things too. Altogether it was too much for her to carry, but right now she just wanted to get out of the open, out from under this endless sky that seemed to only bring misery and death. Annelise soon found herself with one pack slung over her shoulder and another she dragged behind her as she made her way into the abandoned factory that was a few minutes back down the road – making her way through the building slowly until she came to the office on the top floor. The trip was a miserable one, practically every part of her aching and throbbing, her hand especially. She wasted very little time in pushing a huge desk to block the door, still terrified that more Raiders might find her – but she needed to rest, needed to recuperate.  

She pulled Antony’s medical kit from one of the bags and made her way into the restroom that was just off from the office. She had to again fight back tears as she began to pull the crystalline shards from her hand, her hands shaking and generous quantities of her blood flowing into the sink – she couldn’t ever recall feeling such agony. As she did she stopped to examine herself in the mirror, hardly recognising the face that stared back at her. There was blood smeared over her eyes, which were red and puffy – the right eye swollen and bruised as a black eye was rapidly beginning to form. A dark bruise ringed her neck from where she had been strangled and she was sure that her back and ribs too would be developing dark bruises. She finished pulling the last of the shards from her hand before she dropped the tweezers on the sink and pulled out a bottle of purified water before she cleaned the wound. Finally she pulled out one of the few stimpacks she had and injected it into her palm before she wrapped thin bandages around it. Already the stimpack was working its magic, the painful throbbing slowly subsiding. Next she turned to scrubbing the dried blood from her face before she wished that she was back in the vault once more, that she could shower with warm water, use a soft fluffy towel and then curl up in her cosy bed… preferably with Antony. Her vault suit was covered in deep patches of blood, some from Selby, some from the raiders and some  of her own too. She wished she had a change of clothes, but instead had to ignore the clammy dried blood for the meantime.

She again had to fight away a wave of sadness as she made her way back into the office and tipped the contents of both backpacks onto the floor kneeling next to the piles. She would need to travel much lighter and so would need to decide what she would take and what she would leave behind. She flicked her Pip-Boy on and started to sort through the list of items as she stared dully at the bright screen, moving the items into two separate piles. As she came to the crippled remains of her AER9 rifle she frowned, it was clear that it was beyond salvageable in any sense of the word. It felt odd to still be upset by a broken rifle when already she was mourning some of her closest friends, but still she’d probably spent more time with the gun than she had with any of them and now it was gone too. The sense of loss was so overpowering she felt practically numb, she felt like just laying down and giving up. She finally turned her attention to the last small pile of items, the things that had belonged to the others that she hadn’t been able to leave behind. She wished that she had been able to burn their bodies or at the very least bury them, the thought of them simply laying and rotting out in the irradiated wastes made her feel sick again but she hadn’t dared spend any more time at the site of their confrontation in case the sounds drew in any other Raiders… or anything worse. 

She picked up the necklace that had belong to Carrie, a gift from her husband before he’d died – she remembered her telling her. A little silver pendant in the shape of a bird, what kind of bird she had no idea since she’d never actually seen one in the flesh. She opened the clasp and slipped on Selby’s wedding ring and Dalton’s great great grandfather’s dog tags before she fastened it around her neck. She slipped a picture that technician Stevens had in his pocket of who she assumed was his daughter (her mother had once told her that she’d died of an illness before Annelise was born). Finally she had found a heart locket in Doctor Hadley’s breast pocket, upon opening it she was somewhat shocked to find that one side of it had a picture of her in, on the other side though was a picture of a younger Antony with a beautiful raven haired woman. She didn’t know who she was but the pair of them seemed happy and young, and judging by their embrace and where she had found the picture she guessed that she had meant a lot to him. She felt uncertain how appropriate it was for him to have kept it next to a picture of her, but since it was the only picture she had of him she slipped the locket into her own pocket. 

Once she was finally done she moved over to the corner of the office furthest from the door before sitting down and laying the laser pistol comfortably within her reach. She had a bottle of water and the last of the food that they’d brought from the vault. She’d looked over the food the group had bought from the traders, but the Geiger counter on her Pip-Boy had shown her that it was all irradiated with low levels of radiation. Nothing deadly in the short term, but she wanted to avoid such food as long as she could. She sat in silence as she ate, thinking about her situation again and again, obsessing over what had happened and how it had happened. Suddenly it dawned on her that she had now killed at least six men. She wondered how many more she might have to kill before she managed to get home, if she ever did get home that was.