"Wake up! Come on, wake up!"
Well, this sounds familiar.
John opened his eyes, half-expecting to see Amata's worried face hovering over him.
It wasn't. It was Sarah.
His head hurt.
"Come on, you've got to wake up!"
Why was he on the floor?
"Sarah, what..."
Then it all came rushing back. The slaughter. The shaky taunts of the Talon mercenaries, trying to convince themselves that they could take them on. The panicked cries of the raiders as they attempted, too late, to retreat. The gurgle of Commander Jabsco when Dogmeat tore his throat out. The stoic determination of the Enclave soldiers, cooking to death in their armor, giving ground an inch at a time.
The smell of burning children, when Eulogy Jones had set the slaves on fire rather than let them be freed.
Sarah had come to him after he had gotten settled into his father's old room in the Purifier's basement. She chattered for a few moments about not being able to get these thoughts out of her head, then fell silent and turned suddenly to leave.
John had simply taken her hand, and the next thing both of them knew, it was morning, and they were huddled fully clothed in each other's arms in the corner of the room.
This had become their nightly routine. When they had returned to the Citadel, Elder Lyons had taken one look at their eyes and assigned them light duty guarding the Purifier.
On their second night Dogmeat had whined at the door, and so they'd let him in and slept in a pile on the floor. They smelled distinctly doggish upon waking, but few noticed, as the Purifier offered more and better opportunities for daily bathing than anywhere in the Wasteland.
The Fountain of the Water of Life. Free. Thanks, Dad.
Cross didn't sleep. John had made a note to ask the cyborg just how she dealt with all the killing. She was on watch now, guarding against-
Against whatever is attacking us now.
He was suddenly on his feet. He strode across the room and opened the large cabinet. Inside were two suits of captured Enclave Hellfire armor, painted with the logos of the Brotherhood of Steel and the Lyons' Pride.
(*!*)
It is a good day to die, Cross thought, then put all reflection and philosophy out of her mind. She held a 5mm minigun, taken from a fallen brother. Boxes of ammunition littered the foxhole where she stood. And in front of her were hulking forms in black and red armor.
The Outcasts. Soldiers she had once fought beside.
Her foes were easy to see in the glow of the nuclear fireball to the west. Their armor, inferior to hers, hampered their agility.
She spun up the minigun and opened fire.
Laser bolts stabbed past her or bounced off her armor. Screams erupted as she walked a stream of 5mm bullets right into the helmet of the one carrying the missile launcher. The outcast screamed and his finger spasmed on the trigger, sending a missile into the dirt ten feet in front of him. Cross turned the minigun on another outcast and was rewarded by his head completely detaching from his body and flying into the chest of the man behind him, knocking him to the ground. A laser beam missed her head by inches, and she switched targets again. This time, the sheer force of the burst tore the man's arm off entirely. He spun around, and her bullets found the microfusion cell on the back of his armor.
The explosion took out three men. Desperate, one pulled out a frag grenade.
Cross' enhanced eyesight spotted this immediately, and it was child's play for her, veteran of countless battles and master of all guns big and loud, to pump half a dozen bullets into the hand holding the grenade.
Another explosion. Why did she feel so tired?
She looked down for a moment and saw the front of her armor glowing red hot.
Click.
The minigun went silent. Cross went to her knees, pulled a bottle of purified water from the pile in front of her, and emptied it over her chestplate. A cloud of steam rose, hiding her from her foes, as she jabbed a stimpak into her neck. From that point forward her actions were pure reflex. Open the loading gate. Discard the empty ammo box. Insert new ammo box, another 240 rounds. Close loading gate. Raise minigun. When her attention focused, it was on the outcast swinging a super sledge at her head.
Step back. Let him overextend himself. A burst into the armpit, between the plates. Another one down. She spun around. Another one. Long burst to the head – impossible to miss at this range. The outcast's headless body slammed into hers, and she let herself fall beneath the missile that rocketed a foot above her head and slammed into the side of the Jefferson Memorial.
Rolling effortlessly to her feet, she hefted the minigun and saw them all charging her screaming. Idiots. None of their wild fire was coming close to hitting her, because when it came down to it, the Outcasts were all about ideology and letting robots do their fighting and sneaking away in the night when innocent people needed you. Fighting for other people made you stronger. Fighting for technology? Technology wasn't loyal to anyone.
And she proved it by sending a fusillade right at the one with the Fat Man.
The bullets impacted the warhead just as it was being launched. Its impact fuse interpreted this as contact with a legitimate target, and a second atomic fireball lit up the night. Soldiers and pieces of soldiers flew burning in all directions. The Geiger counter in Cross' Hellfire armor started ticking, and she used the momentary light to check on the other Brotherhood soldiers guarding the Purifier.
All dead of course. That simplified matters considerably.
Reload. Fire. Reload.
Her chest was burning again. Another bottle of Aqua Pura. Another stimpak. Technology wasn't all bad. A brother well-equipped and all that. Take this armor. Advanced poly-laminate ceramic composite. Non heat-conductive. Great against lasers. Something flew past her to her left. It was brown and had a red trail as it flew away. She looked down at her chestplate. Ah. Her left breast. She could see clearly through the melted hole in her armor where it had been torn from her body. Beneath was one of the armor plates that had been installed when the doctors had turned her into a cyborg to save her life.
No time for Aqua Pura now, she decided. Her hands felt hot. She looked down and saw that her minigun was on fire. The servos in her armor's arms were working just fine, so she flung the burning weapon into the charging horde, where its nearly full magazine detonated in a spectacular expanding cloud of deadly sparks and rogue bullets.
How many were there, she wondered absently as she picked up her discarded laser rifle. Half charge. Good enough for a last stand. Yes. Rest soon. Screams echoed all around her as burning outcasts staggered toward her, frantically triggering weapons that just as often exploded in their hands because there were bullets lodged in them. At this range, she could easily aim at their eyepieces, and she did. The lenses were bulletproof and tinted against nuclear blasts, but not even they could protect from a direct laser hit. Those who didn't die reeled back blinded. One had the entire front of his metal helmet melt into his face. She fired at three more outcasts, watched them burn to ash. Her head rang as an armored fist slammed into it from behind, and then she was on the ground, her rifle broken in two in her hands as half a dozen of her sworn brothers emptied their microfusion cells into her body.
One of them was wearing a T-51B. Nice.
Back in Evergreen Mills, John had improvised a weapon for them, made from scrap, a sensor module, and a spare mini nuke from his Fat Man. Funny boy. Called it a Fat Mine. She held it now, as the entire surviving Outcast army crowded about and cheered over her broken body. A good death indeed.
Click.
(*!*)
Sarah threw herself to the ground as another nuclear explosion threatened to blind her. John helped her to her feet and charged roaring into the staggering, irradiated outcast soldiers. He spun up the spinning blade on his weapon – he'd called it a Man Opener, got it from the Pitt – and plunged it into outcast after outcast as if their armor was nothing. Heads and limbs flew everywhere. The enemy soldiers couldn't even react. She saw it all in slow motion as he decapitated one effortlessly and moved on to the next, a grim reaper sprinting through the battle.
She turned.
To the west, a mushroom cloud towered kilometers into the sky over where the Citadel used to be.
The Brotherhood. Her Pride. Father.
An outcast power helmet bounced off the ground in front of her. The head inside popped out and hit her in the chest, leaving a red stain on her armor, right over the Lyons' Pride logo.
A laser bolt bounced off John's armor.
She reached into her webbing and pulled out a syringe of morphine. Med-X, they called it. Numbs pain. She'd been using it a lot, here in the Purifier. It helped with the long hours standing guard, alone with your thoughts.
Her father would have been horrified.
She injected herself, and hefted her laser rifle.
(*!*)
The trick to this, John thought, was to go for the weakest ones first. The rush of killing them somehow made you ready to do the same to the next one, and the next, and the next. The Man Opener was particularly good at cutting through armor, and the Hellfire armor compensated for its great weight. Swing here, and another outcast lost his head. Shove here, and another one bids farewell to his arms. Slice, carefully, at a man's laser rifle, and duck back as it blows up in his face. This one tries to step back and trips over a dead comrade. Slice to the femoral artery, sweeping through the genital area for good measure. This one panics and throws a punch. Block with the spinning blade. This one, desperate, tries to fire his missile launcher at point blank range, but he can't do it if his arm's off, can he?
The spinning blade chatters and bounces off the armor of the next one, and it takes two blows to kill him. The blade is getting blunt. The next five are worrying, but Sarah tags them all, and it's easy to aim for the glowing spots where her laser fire has softened the armor.
After a timeless interval, John took a swing like any other and found it blocked. He staggered, and the feeling of sprinting came to an end. He felt drained, somehow, unable to take action, and could only watch as the miniature chainsaw that had blocked his blow swung at his head.
His own block was automatic, but the two roaring weapons bounced off each other and just like that, his weapon was spinning away.
(*!*)
Sarah watched death plunge through the air at John's head and something broke through the fog of morphine. Screaming, she opened fire on the hulking figure, blasting the ripper out of his hands and tearing into his helmet with beams of crimson light. John threw a punch and there was a crunch and a shout as their attacker's helmet flew away in pieces.
And Sarah looked into the surprised face of the man who had once been her father's best friend.
CASDIN!
He whipped out his laser rifle and shot her in the chest as she charged him, firing. She didn't hit him, but she hadn't planned to. The distraction gave John enough time to get to his feet and activate his power fist. Casdin perceived the threat just in time for the metal plate to piston into his face, breaking his nose.
To her amazement, Casdin didn't miss a beat, spinning around and braining John with the barrel of his laser rifle. He clawed his armored fist around her stunned friend's head and shoved the rifle in his face.
"Give me the G.E.C.K.," he said through broken teeth, "and he lives."
She shot him. The bolt hit right between his eyes and she watched his hair burn off. John tore free of his grip and raised his power fist, but by then, Casdin was charging for the entrance to the Purifier, hand over his eyes, her lasers bouncing off his rear armor plates. With his other hand, he jabbed himself with a stimpak.
He didn't even bother to raise his head as he plowed through the door, ramming it off its hinges.
He staggered into the hallway, dazed for a moment, and that was when John hit him with the Fat Man.
John and Sarah flew through the air as the nuclear blast vaporized a good portion of the entrance hall. They rolled as they landed, their training kicking in, and were actually on their feet before reality set in and they both sank to the ground. Her melted rifle fell from her shaking fingers. John injected himself with a stimpak, then her, and she found herself so tired, so crushingly disappointed, that it was a stimpak and not morphine. Why go on?
Her thoughts continued in this vein as John administered anti-radiation drugs. Her father dead. The Pride, picked soldiers, trained by her personally, gone and with no chance to go down in honorable battle. Who would protect the Wasteland now? How could anyone protect them, if decades of work and sacrifice could be undone so completely in minutes?
It was with some effort that John pulled her to her feet. Then all fatigue left her when she heard gunfire inside the Purifier.
Instantly the two of them were running. They arrived in the rotunda just as Bigsley – overworked, cynical, trapped-at-his-desk Bigsley – emptied a full clip of 10mm ammo into Casdin. The rounds punched through the crushed and melted armor. Jets of blood spouted into the air.
It didn't help Bigsley, who died instantly when Casdin threw a power-armored punch at his throat. Casdin jabbed himself with a stimpak, then another one, and then two more. As John's power fist hurtled toward his head, he spun and punched him in the exact same spot where he had hit him earlier. John went down with a clatter of power armor, and then it was just Sarah and Casdin, barehanded.
She jabbed at him with her left, and the next she knew she was on the ground with a hole punched through her chestplate. Casdin injected himself with another stimpak, and Sarah kicked out. Casdin simply stepped aside and injected himself again. Sarah rolled to her feet – slow, too slow – and got kicked two meters across the room for her effort. Repurposing the momentum, she rolled to her feet, blocked a punch, and fired an uppercut right into his jaw.
Casdin roared and smashed his fist into her face so hard she felt his finger bones crack against her cheekbone. She ducked, got hit anyway, threw a punch, missed, and got hit by three consecutive punches. Casdin grabbed at her hair and threw his whole weight into her so that she crashed face first into the stone floor of the Jefferson Memorial. She felt his hands around her head, twisting, and rolled so she was face up, landing a hit on his broken ribs even as he straddled her. He spat blood onto her face, and she gagged at the bitter taste of it entering her mouth. She threw a roundhouse punch, which he blocked with a jab to her nose, and used her other hand to claw at his eyes.
She missed, of course. Her head was ringing from a concussion, her movements sluggish and telegraphed. But the roaring in her head wasn't the pain, it was Casdin, howling as he pistoned his broken fingers into her face again and again and again.
How silly he was, she though, damaging himself like that. As for her, she didn't feel anything at all...
A dark gray blur cannoned into Casdin with a growl. Dogmeat latched onto his hand and clamped down on the broken fingers until Casdin stopped punching her with the other one and flailed it at Dogmeat's head. In the chaos and the howling, none of them noticed as John walked up and calmly stuffed an armed plasma grenade in one of the holes in his armor.
The explosion shattered the glass walls of the Purifier rotunda, propelled Dogmeat into a stone wall, flung John across the room, and sent Casdin flying into the water beneath the Purifier, where the weight of his technologically advanced armor dragged him straight to the bottom.