Journals From The Outpost:

Angry Red & The Dead Boy

~ 2 ~

EVERYONE HAD HEARD IT BUT THE BOY. He was still clonking and clunking down to the culvert moaning to himself about the lack of brotherliness amongst Minutemen and how he wished he'd taken up that caravan guard job he'd been offered in Diamond City.

'What'd you see LT?' Benny Trejo whispered, trying to ascertain wether to draw out his hefty sidearm or a forearm sized warhead.

Trejo was the squad's missile man. On his back was the monstrous pipe-launcher that would fire one of six missiles tucked into the bandolier across his chest. It was said he had made short work of super-mutants with that launcher on more than one occasion. His bull-barrelled .44, however, won the competition. He looked at LT Mac expectantly, his thick, walrus moustache twitching beneath his dark eyes.

The rest of us hunkered low on our bellies, weapons in hand. Only LT knew where the bad guys were, so we just did what he did. And as he was hunkered down as low as he could go, so were we.

The late Corporal Voss's old .45 combat rifle was up and ready in my hands. The hefty weapon made me feel a lot more confident than the ancient double-barrelled shotgun assigned to me before he was KIA. The shotgun everyone in the squad nicknamed 'Old Timer' was now assigned to Granville. I glanced back down the hillside and could still hear The Boy clonking and clunking and muttering obscenities about his lot in life and how cruel the world was.

'Granville!' Red hissed after him. LT raised his hand to silence her, but she ignored him.

'Boy!' she hissed again. But The Boy did not hear her. 'Goddamit! If he doesn't get killed by those damned mole rats down there someone's gonna start using him for target practice. Where are they LT?'

LT Mac just glared at her.

Then we heard them.

Laughter. Cruel and low. Followed quickly by the dry rattle of voices long used to sleeping and marching in the dust of the wasteland. The laughter stopped almost as soon as it started, and then the voices dropped to excited whispers.

'Shit,' LT muttered under his breath.

We all flinched as the first shot rang out.

The report was like a crack of thunder. It bellowed, barely twenty yards away, and rolled in lazy echoes across the hills.

The Boy let out a yelp. We could hear the canteens clonk-clunking in a mad drumline as he tumbled bodily down the hill.

'Bingo!' a man shouted. His friends laughed with him.

LT motioned with his hand. Four fingers up followed by a sharp point to our 8 o'clock. It was the opposite direction from where Granville had gone and a little further up the hill.

Red was the first up. Then Sergeant Rawler. I came up with LT and the rest of the squad.

Red's silenced hunting rifle sneezed. The .308 round went through the neck of one gunner, as clean a shot as she had taken out on the mole rat down in the culvert. A pink mist flowered into the air. The gunner collapsed dead in the dust.

Rawler hit the second guy with a three round burst from his combat rifle. The .45 rounds stitched the guy's belly below his chest plate and sent him tumbling down the hillside.

The last two gunners were standing in confounding close proximity. How they had not heard us or we had not heard them was a mystery. The pair lifted their assault rifles to their shoulders and returned fire.

A hail of 5.56mm raked the bramble-willow patch above us. The bullets buzzed over my head like angry bloatflies. The reports rattled the sky and resounded off the hillsides. But for some reason they missed us entirely.

We all opened up then. It was a miniature hellstorm and the last two gunners jiggled the leadbelly dance of death before dropping atop the bodies of their comrades. Then we heard the shouts of more gunners nearby. They were urging one another into position. Damned if we hadn't just stirred them all up like a nest of angry ants.

Red was up and running before LT could stop her.

'Watch her back, Munday!' he screeched at me. 'Get her back up here!'

I nodded and took off into the burning sunlight.