The Ghouls

Might I introduce the wasteland's living witnesses. Every other patron takes the archive's word for the Old World; a ghoul was there, and remembers, and does not need my card catalogue to prove it.

The making of a ghoul is simply told and poorly understood. A human being absorbs radiation in quantities that ought to close the account, and the account stays open. The skin necroses, the nose goes, the voice drops to gravel, and the clock stops counting in decades and begins counting in centuries. The unchanged are called smoothskins, a term of art the changed did not choose gently. As for mechanism — why the same exposure kills a thousand and unmakes the thousand-and-first, why the survivor thereafter draws nourishment from the rads that ruin everyone else — no record I hold settles it. The archive prefers a gap to a guess, sir.

The price is a line, and every ghoul walks it. At its far end waits the feral state: the mind gone, the body persisting, the appetite intact. No ghoul I have interviewed could tell me where their own line lies. All of them know it is behind them somewhere, keeping pace.

The first ghoul polity was an experiment's by-product. Vault 12, beneath Bakersfield, California, was built with a flaw no engineer commits by accident: a door designed never to seal properly. Vault-Tec wished to observe radiation's effects on a sheltered population, and so arranged for a sheltered population to receive some. The residents, and the townsfolk who crowded in on the last morning, survived the Great War in the manner this dossier describes.

They surfaced and named their city honestly: Necropolis, city of the dead. A ghoul called Set removed the vault's overseer and governed in his place — the wasteland's first ruler of the unmade, by the unmade. In 2161 the Vault Dweller passed through, hunting a water chip, and found Set holding his city in the shadow of the Master's mutants. What became of Necropolis afterward, my files hold only in fragments, and I decline to embroider them. Cities of the dead keep their own counsel.

Longevity makes careers the rest of the wasteland cannot imagine. In the Capital Wasteland of 2277, ghouls kept a settlement called Underworld inside the Museum of History, behind a doorway carved as a great stone skull — the dead of Washington filed among the exhibits, which strikes this archivist as sound cataloguing. In the Mojave of 2281, the Courier rode with Raul Tejada, mechanic and onetime gunslinger, two centuries old and more, who in all that time repaired everything he touched except his opinion of himself.

The Commonwealth holds the file's strangest entry: John Hancock, mayor of Goodneighbor, born smooth, who chose otherwise — an experimental drug, taken with eyes open, trading his face for time and his old life for a town that turns nobody away. Most ghouls were made by the worst morning in history. Hancock, alone in my records, volunteered.

The television record, filed in 2296, adds three findings. First, chemistry: a drug in small vials that holds the feral turn at bay — and therefore a market, because anything standing between a mind and its erosion will be bought, hoarded, and withheld. Second, an economy: the West Coast record shows ghouls hunted, for bounty and for parts and for the vials themselves. The record notes this plainly. It is an old arithmetic with a new ledger line.

Third, the longest career in the file: Cooper Howard, once an actor of Western pictures, who walked out of the Great War's first morning and was still walking two hundred and nineteen years later. The archive lists the ghouls EXTANT and PATIENT. No other status would survive them.