"
On one wall of the stairwell a half-buried sign remained legible. Mustering his modest command of pre-Deluge English, he whispered the words haltingly:
Maximum Occupancy: 15
Provision limitations, single occupant: 180 days; divide by actual number of occupants. Upon entering shelter, see that First Hatch is securely locked and sealed, that the intruder shields are electrified to repel contaminated persons attempting entry, that the warning lights are ON outside the enclosure…
The rest was buried, but the first word was enough for Francis. He had never seen a “Fallout,” and he hoped he’d never see one. A consistent description of the monster had not survived, but Francis had heard the legends. He crossed himself and backed away from the hole. Tradition told that the Beatus Leibowitz himself had encountered a Fallout, and had been possessed by it for many months before the exorcism which accompanied his Baptism drove the fiend away.
Brother Francis visualized a Fallout as half-salamander, because, according to tradition, the thing was born in the Flame Deluge, and as half-incubus who despoiled virgins in their sleep, for, were not the monsters of the world still called “children of the Fallout”? That the demon was capable of inflicting all the woes which descended upon Job was recorded fact, if not an article of creed.
The novice stared at the sign in dismay. its meaning was plain enough. He had unwittingly broken into the abode (deserted, he prayed) of not just one, but fifteen of hte dreadful beings! He groped for his phial of holy water."
— A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
