Cistern

Chapter 3 - Made To Suffer

It is all crashing down. Everything is falling apart. Booker thought he'd have a little more time to prepare, more time with Jenny. More time to live.

The radiation leaks have increased, now spreading to the greenhouse areas. All of our fruits and vegetables have died in the area, and wheat will no longer grow, forcing Jenny to close her bakery.

The water is also more unsanitary in the stream, for a child has died to poisoning, others have infections in wounds due to the water.

This wouldn't be much of a problem, if the purifier hadn't burnt itself out. The multiple years of rust and the few instances of maintenance, have deteriorated the purifier's parts. Just weeks after the first murder, clean water no longer trickles from the pipes.

This loss of essential resources was already a death sentence to the population, but a third murder tied it all together.

The third victim was an elder man, left in the center of town, throat slit. With Jeremiah Brown no where to be found, mass panic began to set out amongst the remaining dwellers. What they have yet to know was with news of the major radiation leak into the cavern, Brown secured his belongings and fled to his secret stow-away deep in a hidden vein.

With the population in a panic, radiation leaking in, destroying any valuable resource it touches. Amid the hysteria, several families commit suicide, others raid the stores and armories and risk their lives in the tunnels, sure to be walking to their deaths.

As powerful and lethal amounts of radiation continue to pour into the Vault, and many of Booker's friends begin to flee, he has accepted his impending doom. Jenny, on the other hand, entirely fears the possibility of death. She wants to do anything she can to survive and stay with her friends.

Two days after a majority of the city dispersed, Jenny, after leaving a note, disappeared with some others, leaving Booker alone in the second story of the last home he'll ever know, but the only home he refuses to love.

The town grew quiet through-out these next several days. Booker would occasionally see a light here or there go out on the ceiling up above, a person in a window, the fear in their eyes. Everyone grows more hopeless as the days drag on. Some who still live near a radiation leak, grow increasingly sick, becoming more weak and fatigued.

Booker sits in his home, watching his second life fall apart in front of him, and wonders what he could have done to change things. Had he done something sooner that would have saved him, saved his wife, saved his colony, now lost beneath the crust of the Earth.

Lights slowly shut down one by one, the Vault, consumed by a cloud of radiation. Slowly, what was left of Booker's world dies in its own tomb, buried for ever beneath a toxic world. The Flash has finally claimed its last known victim, and like those lights above, hope, for everyone, dies.