The Ghoul

The most feared bounty hunter in the wasteland is a ghoul in a gunslinger's duster, two hundred and nineteen years past the bombs — plus however many a leading man and a decorated veteran had already banked before them — and so established in his trade that the television record introduces him by digging him up. Men with a job opened his grave, and he came out of it working. That is the premise, and it is the safest sentence in this dossier.

I confess a certain fellow feeling, sir or madam. He and I are the same vintage — wound up before the bombs and never told to stop. He carries in his head the one collection larger than mine, and he consults nobody's. I dust his shelf anyway.

Before the duster there was a costume, and the costume was beloved. Cooper Howard was Hollywood's cowboy — star of The Man from Deadhorse — and Vault-Tec's smiling pitchman besides. As for the thumbs-up that cheerful cartoon fellow gives on every surviving wall: the record shows Cooper Howard striking it first, in a blue-and-yellow suit, at a photograph session, and I will let the photographs argue the paternity. His wife, Barb Howard, was a Vault-Tec executive; his daughter, Janey, rode horses with him. By every record I hold, he loved them entirely.

At a meeting at Hollywood Forever — an old war friend's circle, the kind the studios were calling radicals — he accepted a listening device, and he wore it into his wife's offices. What the wire caught was another meeting entirely: the largest companies in America at one table, discussing the war the way a firm discusses a difficult quarter — including whether the end of the world might be arranged privately. I record this with the care it requires. The minutes he overheard end before any vote; no record I hold establishes what that room decided, and the archive prefers a gap to a guess. He heard exactly enough to be certain of nothing — which is its own sentence, and he has been serving it since.

On October 23, 2077, he was working a child's birthday party in the hills above Los Angeles, in costume, Janey beside him. The cloud rose over the city while the party was still in progress. He put his daughter on a horse and rode. The record holds that image and declines to decorate it.

What the next two centuries made of him is chemistry and bookkeeping. What should have killed him remade him instead, and the feral turn that stalks every ghoul is held off, in his case, by a regimen — small vials, inhaled, costly, never in sufficient supply. Bounty work pays for the vials; the vials preserve the man; the man takes more bounty work. Inside that circle he keeps a code of sorts. Outside it he is as cruel as the work requires, and the work requires a great deal. The cruelty pays for the memory. He has decided the memory is worth it.

The television record's hunt is quickly told. A bounty went out on a fleeing scientist named Wilzig, whose value traveled inside his own head — the head deliverable, the cargo priceless. He rose from his grave to collect, and the pursuit put him in the path of Lucy MacLean, a vault dweller of upright habits he treated as the wasteland's newest pupil: led on a rope, traded at a Super Duper Mart for a resupply of vials, all of it — in his ledger — instruction. She escaped with her rules mostly intact.

At the season's end, at an observatory above Los Angeles, he told Lucy what two centuries had taught him about management: that the war was somebody's business decision, and that the firm — the room he once overheard, or what remains of it — may still be keeping its books. He asked a man who had been Vault-Tec's for the whereabouts of his wife and daughter, and got flight instead of an answer. The vault dweller, for her part, had proved useful enough — or impressive enough, the record permits either reading — that he took her with him. So this dossier ends where the reel does: the two of them on the trail of the man who fled, and his family's trail standing open. What follows is beyond this coverage. I have filed the gap the way I file all of them — carefully, and without a guess.