Of Mice and Men
A year after the war with the Brotherhood had begun, it was over.
Adam's Air Force Base was utterly destroyed. A young lieutenant, Lukas Sigurdsson, and more than fifty others were working through the ruins, still smoldering from the battle that had torn through the base. Bodies were piling up on the runway, with the soldiers of the remnant Enclave spared from their collective, rotting stench only by the air filtration system on their power armor. It didn't make the task of recovering bodies any less grisly.
A great deal of soldiers and civilians had been practically turned into mincemeat.
"It's just like Site R!" one of the other soldiers screamed. He dropped to his knees and started audibly moaning. Lukas knew he was right. The tragedy at Site R – Raven Rock – had come without any warning, where many hundreds of soldiers and innocent civilians were massacred by that monstrosity the Brotherhood had set on them at the Jefferson Memorial. The whole facility had collapsed in on itself, which made the recovery of those bodies just that much harder. At least at Adam's, the whole affair had happened above ground.
"Lukas, do you know what the tally is?" Another survivor, Preston O'Reilly, asked. He was a Captain, and the highest-ranking officer of the survivors.
Lukas looked over at the runway, where the bodies had been piled up. They were grouped into fives, with numerous piles of viscera being separated from the rest in what they assumed represented the remains of a human.
"One-hundred fifty? Two hundred? I've lost count, sir." At least three-fifths of those who had died were the civilian survivors of Site R. And they had only accounted for a tenth of the total area of the base. The bodycount was just rising as the enclave remnants worked. Occasionally they found the bodies of Brotherhood knights and paladins, but none of the Enclave survivors were willing to give their dead enemies any respite. They were the ones the Brotherhood didn't recover, anyway, buried deep in rubble or in a sufficiently dark corner.
"What's the point?" one of the other soldiers asked over the comms. "We know what happened. All of them were killed. Every last fucking one of them was rounded up and shot."
There had been no diplomacy. The whole war that had destroyed the Enclave was started and ended by brutes – first Autumn, who in his rashness decided the best opening move for the operation to retake the wasteland was to murder a bunch of scientists, and then the Brotherhood, uneducated lugheads who had no concept of diplomacy to begin with, who murdered anybody who bore a different banner than they.
Riley McAllister collapsed. He was a good soldier, a hard worker, but Lukas saw him collapse seemingly at random. He was shuddering.
"McAllister, you okay?" Lukas asked over the comms. He gave up on his pile of rubble and approached his collapsed comrade. "Hey?"
"Those bastards," Riley said, quietly, his voice wavering. He was cradling something. Something round.
A head.
His daughter's head.
Lukas suppressed the urge to vomit into his own helmet. The girl was scarcely four years old. Riley slammed his fist against the asphalt. His crying could be heard over the comms; it was quiet, but present nonetheless. Everybody else went silent.
"We should've been here." Preston said, after several minutes.
"So that we could die with everybody else?" Lukas spat.
"And what did our civil war do, Sigurdsson?" Preston asked, a rhetorical question in his mind. "We spread ourselves thin. Nothing was accomplished. If we had been here to defend – "
"We would be dead."
"Not necessarily."
"I was there at Project Purity, captain. I saw how the Brotherhood works, first hand. They're ruthless. They'd kill us as easily as the rest. The only thing that set us apart from the rest of the Enclave is the fact that we disagreed with what the majority wanted us to do."
"What are you saying?" Preston said. "What difference does our faction make at this point? Ours is the only one left."
"Take it as a blessing that the rest of the Enclave wanted us dead. We left the base, we got spared. We can continue the fight."
"The fight, Lukas? What fight? The one we've already lost?"
"We can do something. Oppose them at every turn."
"We don't have an army," Preston reminded everybody.
"We're standing here, aren't we?"
"A hundred against a thousand. Those are pretty long odds, don't you think?"
"If the colonials could beat the British, why couldn't we beat the Brotherhood?"
"Because they have two significant advantages – the Lone Wanderer and that robot."
"The robot was destroyed," Lukas said.
"What are you planning?" Riley asked. He stood up, still cradling his child's head.
"We strike from the shadows. Hide among the population and take up arms at every opportune moment," Lukas proposed.
"You want to become terrorists," Preston interjected. He was shaking his head.
"Like the minutemen," Lukas said.
"This is insane, Lieutenant."
"I'll join you, Lukas," Riley said. "Anything as long as I get to take another shot at those bastards."
The other Enclave survivors started gathering with Lukas. There was a general agreement that they shouldn't give up the ghost quite yet. Only Preston and a few others were refusing to follow along.
"Sir, please," Lukas said. "We need as many hands as we can get."
Preston huffed and shook his head again. He looked down, staring at his uniform, that standard khaki officer's uniform.
"Fine," he said after several minutes. "I'll join with you. But this isn't the Enclave anymore, you know that, right? We're an army without a government."
"The United States is a government of the People, Preston. And we are the People."
So this is a rewrite of a rewrite, in light of the Fallout 4 and some personal revising I've been doing.