2277/08/17 - Continued

Officer Gomez showed up next. When he saw me go for the gun Amata had given me, he held up his hands. He told me that he hadn't had a hand in Jonas' death, that by the time he'd arrived, it was too late. Andy roared out of the medical bay and painted a line of flame across some radroaches that had come up the hall. Before going to help, Mr. Gomez yelled that I should find a way to get out of the vault, and that he would pretend he hadn't seen me. I always liked him.. I hope he and his family will be allright.

Downstairs, Mary and Tom Holden were in the Atrium, talking about finding a way out of the vault themselves. Before they saw me, Tom ran toward the exit.. where he was gunned down by two security guards. Mary chased after him, and they got her, too.. I swear, I heard one of them chuckle about how easy it the two of them were to kill before I started firing. Their security helmets were probably designed to stop a swung weapon instead of bullets. The joker fell after I unloaded a few shots into his face. The other one took a bullet to the throat and went down slower, clawing at his collar; it was Paul Hannon's dad, the chief of security. All these people, dying because of my father leaving the vault. It sounds so silly when you think of it that way.

I started running, then. I'd killed two people, maybe three. I wanted to get out before anybody else died because of me or my dad. I saw Mr. Lewis, the maintenance guy, with a few dead radroaches around him. At least he'd gone down fighting. When Mr. Mack saw me, I swear I heard him banging on the window and calling for the guards that I was near. I kept running; I was almost out, but between me and the Overseer's office was the vault's security room. I got as low as I could and stated to creep by when I heard Amata's voice. Slow as I could, I peeked over the edge of the window.

There she was, cowering in a chair while the Wally's older brother, Steve was standing over her. Every so often, between the feverish promises that she didn't know where I was, he would hit her with his baton. Her father was there, too.. and he wasn't doing anything to stop it. He was the one asking the questions.. he was interrogating his own daughter. The sound of my opening the door was lost in Amata's scream of pain as Steve hit her again. He wasn't wearing his helmet, so it only took a single shot to the back of his head to stop him from hurting her any more. Amata screamed and ran for the door.

The Overseer tried to play it all calm and collected, like he hadn't done anything wrong. He looked plenty nervous as I pressed the barrel of the 10mm against his throat. He even claimed that everything he'd done was for the good of the vault, and told me that if I gave him the gun, everything would be fine. I shoved him into the big single cell at the back of Security and told him that if he ever touched Amata again, that I'd be back for him. I found her in her father's office, hiding down by the arm of the couch, hugging herself. She calmed down when she saw me, but not by much. Her eyes never left the pistol at my side that I'd just shot Steve Mack with.

Getting around his computer's security system was easy enough. I can't tell if using the name "Amata" as the choice for his password was out of some long-lost feeling for his own daughter or if he did it just to keep up appearances. The whole desk lifted on these tall metal pistons, revealing an old staircase through the kind of blast doors I only saw down in the Reactor level. Amata came downstairs just as I found the controls for the vault's main door. Spinning lights and a little horn did little to warn us about just how loud of a shriek came from pulling a massive steel cog back into the track it used to roll out of the way.

Amata was very quiet, then. I asked her to come with me, but she said that her place was here in the vault, and that she wanted to stay to fix everything her father had done. We hugged tightly, and then I left.

I remember seeing the skeletons just outside the great door with their signs. Begging to be let in, pleading for mercy to the old cameras that had totally ignored them. As I made my way toward the old wooden door, the stone tunnel filled with the same scream of metal-on-metal as the door to Vault 101 pushed tightly shut behind me, probably for the last time.

I don't know what I'm going to do next, but I didn't want to step foot outside without recording what had just happened. People died, both good and bad people, and all because of my father.. and me.