The cacophony of gunfire outside the monument could be heard well and clear within the visitor's center. Nothing could be said about how terrified the soldiers were: the horror stories they'd heard about the Brotherhood of Steel and its pawn, the Lone Wanderer, far surpassed whatever they had heard growing up in the shadow of the Enclave's crushing defeat and near extinction on the West Coast.
For all their powered armor and bravado, the Enclave troops were still human. They lived, they breathed, they loved, they had hopes and dreams, they had fears and they were going to die, one way or another.
They'd set up sandbag barricades within the monument and its visitor center. It was a hasty fortification job after they'd heard of what had happened at Site R, how Colonel Autumn had barely escaped with his life after the Lone Wanderer had sabotaged the facility.
The casualty reports were heart-breaking – nearly all civilians who had been on-site at the time were either dead or unaccounted for. The military personnel barely fared any better, with roughly four out of every five on-site dead or missing.
Even the detonation of the oil rig hadn't been so bad – there were no civilians there. But here, most of the defenders had lost their entire family, and a good number of their friends.
Entire blood-lines were being wiped out wholesale, many by the same hand.
This wasn't just a war any longer. It was a fight for survival. The Brotherhood of Steel hardly had any better reputation amongst the defenders; they, too, had committed a fair number of atrocities. Those, however, came nowhere near the scale or incredulity of the Lone Wanderer's.
The doors broke open. A small group had lead the Brotherhood's assault, the so-called "Lyon's Pride."
The gunfire was no longer muffled. It was there and present, and most of the defenders felt their hearts race and their breathing intensify. Each line of defense melted away, one after the other, killed to the last man – even if they had ditched their weapon and tried to run.
Colonel Autumn, for once, seemed visibly disturbed. He had witnessed firsthand what the Wanderer could do. He had connived his way out of imprisonment – Autumn ought to have killed him outright – and proceeded to betray the President's trust by forcing a self-destruct protocol. That wasn't what was impressive – what was impressive was how, with a minimal effort, the Wanderer had managed to slaughter half the site's defense force.
The last line before the monument itself was up to bat.
Each man hugged his sandbag wall and fired relentlessly at the approaching enemy, who seemed to shrug off even plasma bolts. It was the Wanderer, Death incarnate – he was clad in a stolen suit of Hellfire armor and wielded a minigun. Flanking him were a number of unrecognizable figures – Lyon's Pride. Half of the Pride had already been eliminated, in spite of the Wanderer's steely resolve. One after the other, the defenders gave up the ghost – a few stole their way back into the monument itself, but most were killed where they stood.
Autumn maintained an air of civility in spite of the chaos around him. Many of his remaining defenders had fled out through the air-vents or the basement, some even taking their chances and jumping into the purifier itself. The steely-nerved Colonel made no attempt to stop them.
Only Autumn and a select group of his defenders remained – battle-hardened men wielding the finest weapons and armor.
There was a tense moment as the Wanderer rolled in. It was silent apart from footfalls and gunfire from outside the monument, which faded with each passing moment.
The Wanderer wasted no time. He tossed his helmet aside – revealing a mop of black hair, clashing with skin which was pale as snow – and planted his minigun on the floor. He was about a head shorter than Autumn, but his manner, his glare, seemed to have him looking down at Autumn when the two came face-to-face. Autumn's guards were being unnerved, whereas the remaining Lyon's Pride members – and their leader-in-name, Sarah, daughter of Elder Lyons.
"So it's over." The Wanderer said after staring down Autumn, who himself was unmoved by the brat's attitude.
"Give up, Autumn," Sarah threw in. "You never stood a chance, and you sure as hell don't now, seeing how we've massacred everybody on the premises." The Wanderer threw her a glare. He didn't want Autumn to surrender. His malice was evident, there could be no mistaking it. He felt absolutely no remorse.
Autumn, in turn, looked to his remaining men, who all likely bore uncertain looks behind their helmets. He couldn't condemn them to death. He didn't want to die either.
So he made his choice.
"I'd like to take the young Elder-to-be up on her offer, if you wouldn't mind," he said to the Wanderer. No, that wasn't quite true. He had said it to Sarah, but directed it towards the Wanderer. It was an off-handed spite. "Free passage for me and my remaining men out of the Wasteland. No interference."
"I don't think you're in much of a position to be making demands, Autumn," the Wanderer snarled, and was promptly ignored.
"It's done." Sarah said over the Wanderer, who looked aghast at Sarah's support for their mutual enemy. He opened his mouth to say something, but gritted his teeth and was silent on the subject.
"Get out." He said. It was the one point where Autumn had listened to the young man. The meeting had gone utterly topside from what the Wanderer had likely expected. He seemed to be fuming, like a toddler having a temper-tantrum.
Autumn had to work to keep from smiling.
He would get the last laugh, one way or another, and he heard the young Wanderer nearly explode as Autumn left his post, guards in tow.
The two quickly ditched their armor and weapons and darted out of the facility without paying a word to Autumn whatsoever, who strolled. He was looking at the ruins, so many dead over such a small thing. He saw a few engineers, wearing nothing but jumpsuits, being dragged kicking and screaming from the basement by power-armored Knights.
Outside, the Brotherhood had already begun piling up the corpses from the battle, and they were being burned. Autumn winced at the sight. There would be nobody to remember those poor souls or their sacrifices. History is written by the victor, and this chapter, at least, would be written by the Brotherhood of Steel.
He mulled over his options as he walked along the Potomac. The sun had set and it was night. Only the light of the burning piles of corpses behind him provided any sort of light, as morbid as he saw it.
He couldn't face his superiors further west. If they thought he were alive, his image would be marred by his desertion. When one causes thousands of lives to be lost, he isn't supposed to give up the ship.
That the Purifier hadn't yet detonated was proof enough that the Wanderer – or Sarah, as seemed more likely – had managed to activate it. He sighed with regret and kept walking north.
The struggles – all those bodies, all those lives lost – were for naught. Nobody would remember their names. Except for Augustus Autumn.
He would live with it for as long as he would live.