The clock in her Pip-Boy says it’s been sixty-four hours since Ellen last slept. (Really slept. Chemically knocked out doesn't count.) She should know; she’s checked it five times in the last twenty minutes. After a certain point, she loses all sense of time herself, but the Pip-Boy just keeps rolling along.

She kind of envies its ability to keep on going so smoothly.

She’s been awake sixty-four hours and she’s not happy about it. Nobody would be. But when you’ve had a head injury and you’re out of stimpaks you don’t dare lie down and sleep. That goes double when you’re in a strange land and separated from home by more miles and more water than you would like to think about. Triple, when the others you were sent with are dead or-

The point is that she’s been awake a long time now, and she’s far from home and things are really, really bad. Until she can find her way out of the damned Maryland swamps and onto dry land they’re not going to get much better. But at least she has a chance of letting the Citadel know what’s happened, just as long as she stays on reasonably high ground. The radio will work, once the ionosphere cooperates. Once the D-layer fades into insignificance. Once it gets dark.

She’ll be all right a little while more. The night just has to come, that’s all.