Atom IV: Setting Off
AN: My thanks to Aegon Blacksteel, Paladin Bailey, Disgruntledgrumkin, Alternative Nonfiction, The Desert Dancer,Paladin Delta and Guest for their reviews and critiques.
Fair warning for the rest of the story: some will have noticed with the mention of Tysons in the last chapter, but I'm not using Fallout 3's canon map. Or rather, I've tried to overlap it with the real world areas: turns out the compression and scaling in the game was more than a bit odd and imprecise.
To solve that, Alternate Nonfiction and I have been working on a large-scale Fallout map ranging the whole of the US and a bit of Canada. Regarding the Washington area in the specific, changes and implementations were in order for the game and the real map to overlap as smoothly as possible. And yet, with the scale expanded, the world of Fallout felt emptier than it already did in the game. Hence, new locations, new and different routes and so on: you'll see some in this chapter and more as the story progresses. Trying to adapt the Pitt Tunnels specifically was both a nightmare and a delicious collaborative experience that allowed us to flesh out more of the city and the areas around it.
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It was dark outside, and loud. Hard sheets of rain battered the chipped concrete, dragging dirt and gravel down the steps: pebbles and tin cans clattered against floor grating that sucked most of the water away, yet Hogarth watched fascinated the light of the only lantern reflect wanly in the puddle spreading out at the Metro Station's entrance.
The air smelled different: metallic and muggy, but cleaner, even against the stale atmosphere of the tunnel and pungent body odor. But maybe that was the abundant helping of Abraxo to clean off his sleeves and boots of blood and vacated bowels. The bleach's tang clung to his clothes.
Dead bodies were messy. Even now, Hog could sniff the heaped corpses from behind the shop they'd been stacked in until morning after Simms and the others went around cutting their ring fingers. He tried not to think too hard about it. Or about the almost casual way the Sheriff had executed the raider chemist, Ryan Briggs, after the man had spilled his guts. Now, big-ass revolvers did make a real mess of things.
He blinked away the after-image and blew out a breath, then returned to watch the rain. His feet were itching; so were his hair and skin, begging for a good scrub.
"Better if you didn't," the Sheriff argued, reading Hog's intentions. Maybe even his mind. "The night will be cold enough without you getting all soggy. Cannot light a fire for you to dry up later."
"Why not?"
The Sheriff balanced his lantern on a turnstile, then settled down on a folded sleeping bag against the wall opposite to Hog. "There's no real fuel for a good flame, only a lot of smoke. Besides, it's raining. A lot of the wildlife out here doesn't like rain and thunders. Better not give them a big source of heat to follow."
Hog nodded slowly. He saw at least some of the sense in it. Right then, a remote flash lit up the staircase. Thunder cracked a moment later. Hog flinched as the rumbling echo rolled into the tunnel: it was as if the ground itself shook for a long moment.
"That was close," the Sheriff grumbled, then threw Hog something long and sleek. The young man snatched it from the air, then turned the assault rifle in his hands, feeling its weight more awkwardly than he cared to admit. A couple of curved mags clattered to the ground beside him.
"Aren't a hand-cannon and an axe enough for one person?" He thought he'd sewn together a decent leather strap to keep the axe slung across his back. Then Mendoza had snorted, ripped the flimsy seams open and showed him how to make a more practical one for his waist and thigh. That had been a few hours before.
"There's never too much gun in the wastes, Hogarth." The Sheriff sighed and removed his cowboy hat, rubbing his bald plate. Then, to Hog's surprise, he flipped open a zippo and lit himself a cigarette.
"You smoke?"
"Usually, I don't. I don't want Harden to take up the habit." A slow intake, a pin of light and some of the tobacco crumpled to the floor, burned to ashes. "But sometimes it helps. Like when dealing with scum like them." He waved a hand in the general direction of the shop-turned-morgue-for-fingerless-corpses.
"How are Wolfgang and his crew any better?" Hog asked after a short while. The Sheriff put out the bud and gave him a critical look.
"Watch it, boy, calling people names. Wolfgang and those like him are alright. They trade fair, for once: none of the shit Mr. Grigg over there produced. And in case you haven't noticed, they took a risk telling us where the mystery rat meat came from and who produced it. If word got out, they'd be hung out to dry by month's end."
"It's not like they did it out of the goodness of their hearts," Hog replied flatly. "Tomorrow, they'll get to take anything not nailed to the fucking floor. That's not altruism."
"So what?" Hog blinked, but Simms stared at him evenly. "They help us. We help them. At the end of the day, the raiders are dead and everyone's better off from it."
Hog had no answer to that: instead, he resumed his rain-watching – and his guard duty as well, he supposed. The Sheriff enjoyed another cigarette, then checked his wrist watch.
"Well, what are you waiting for? Start disassembling that rifle."
Hog gave him a curious look. The Sheriff was unimpressed
"Remember your fucking lessons, Hogarth. Always maintain your gear the best you can. Are you sure that gun will even shoot if you squeeze the trigger?"
The former Vaultie grumbled under his breath, yet he started picking the lightweight rifle apart with steady if slow motions. Simms edged closer and offered a few pieces of advice where Hog struggled, be it unfamiliarity or the poor illumination. The rifle was different from the standard HK33 Simms had used to train him in Megaton: rather, it resembled quite a lot the Sheriff's own weapon of choice, a bastard cross between an AK-47 and an AEK-971 of Chinese production called the Type 93 Xuanlong. Or so Simms told him: Hogarth had very little idea how either gun would look like or be called.
The Sheriff took to cleaning his own guns as he watched Hogarth work. When the assault rifle was finally reassembled in his lap, the Sheriff gave him a look from under the rim of his hat.
"Good. Once more. " At Hog's incredulity, the Sheriff held up his watch. "Lucy and Mendoza's shift start at two in the morning. Still plenty of time left, and you're less likely to take a nap if you keep your hands occupied."
Hog didn't say he wasn't really tired at all, physically at least. It would have sounded like a petulant child's whine, the kind that really got on his nerves in the last few years in the Vault, even if it wasn't. He resolved to keep quiet, and for the rest of the watch the only conversation where brief pointers and reminders for the task at hand. The manual work, fine enough not to be repetitive for a greenhorn like him, kept stray, dangerous thoughts away, at least for a time.
Yet, when Hog's head touched the sleeping bag, stiff and smelly with time and old sweat, sleep claimed him immediately. And with it came the fingerless hands clawing out of the morgue-shop, reaching out and trying to drag him back, drag him in with them, in the cold, dark place underneath the mountains.
Among them was Amata. He knew it with the certainty of madness and dreams, even if he couldn't see her. He called for her, again and again, as the struggled with the hands pulling at his ankles, grasping at his jumpsuit. Eventually, she called his name back and he heard her, heard the stifled cries of babies growing distant and faint, as if a barrier thickened between them.
The last he saw of her was a tuft of hair the color of dark chocolate, then the waters engulfed her and Hog woke up screaming.
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Sarah dared to lean forward on the security railing of the gondola: the wind picked at her bun and beat harshly on her bare face, drying her lips and making keeping her eyes open difficult. Still, she looked around, then down. The Citadel's courtyard was fast shrinking, the people there losing detail and definition until they were little more than oblong dots. To the right, the Potomac flowed, peaceful and radioactive. The Jefferson Memorial was small enough she almost reached out to grasp it with her hand, before Gallows' stoic presence to her side had her rein in the childish, giddy thought.
Then she lifted her eyes and nearly gaped. The Citadel and D.C, the familiar background of her near entire life, looked diminutive compared to the vast, endless expanse spreading out before her, in every direction as far as the eye could see. To see what lay beyond the battle-torn skyline of D.C., even from a distance… for a moment, it made her head reel and Sarah felt small and insignificant. It was only a fleeting moment of weakness, though, but she didn't look down again as the Albatross ended its ascension and began to move northwards.
Not too far ahead, past the last clouds from the night's storm, the sky was an unchallenged, endless blue, and she was right in the middle of it.
"Enjoying the view, Star Paladin?"
Captain Kells leaned on the railing on her other side, a lipless, peaceful smile under his protective goggles. His rank uniform was already smudged dark with grease from the engines, but she had to admit the hat, the straps tied under his chin, did give him an air of authority. It also hid his blistered pate from sight.
"It's – " Words failed her for a moment and licked her lips, a bit embarrassed. The Captain only smiled knowingly.
"I know, right? There's nothing like it. No words would really do this justice."
She nodded. From above, even the mutant-packed ruins and the barren colors of the wastes expressed a forlorn charm and beauty she had never associated before with a land overtly out to kill any trespasser. Her gaze continued north, then to the west: beyond the edges of the devastated metropolis lay the hilly regions and the rocky ridges no Brotherhood scout had ever returned from.
The cold mentality of a soldier slotted back into place, sobering her fascination up. She tried to pinpoint the destinations she'd memorized, sites the Scribes had marked on the map to search for the Supermutants' lairs or pre-War tech stashes to recover. No matter how much she stared, willing for the landscape to unveil its secrets, she could actually make out little of specific from the succession of dead vegetation and bombed out towns.
Kells' gnarled index pointed north-north-west. Apparently, the ghouls' eyes were sharper than hers. She chided herself for the bitter thought: the Captain was likely more accustomed to the ways of the Flyboys, and rightly so.
"Fort Constantine is over there, ma'am. We'll be there in less than three hours at cruising speed, but I'll keep the Albatross above the kilometer line until then. This baby is a zeppelin, but I'd rather not have missiles aiming at the balloon if I can avoid it."
Sarah nodded. Falling out of the sky in a ball of fire wasn't high on her list of priorities either. And if Fort Constantine held what the Scribes had though it did for years, then a stiff resistance in place shouldn't be factored out. Not to mention every roof or tower could have a bandit or supermutant with a launcher waiting to take potshots at them and loot the carcass.
The Albatross' arrival in D.C. hadn't been exactly subtle.
"We'll recon the place from your mounted spyglasses," she decided, "then find a good location to land and scout the place from the ground." She hesitated then. On any other occasion, she'd have led from the ground herself. Leadership from the front: that's how the Pride worked.
But the Pride was a small, elite unit. Without counting the Midwesterner Flyboys, her father had placed forty-two mixed Knights, Paladins and Scribes under her command.
"Gallows? You'll disembark with Colvin and two more. I'll leave the choice to you."
The spec ops nodded once and walked away, his steps soft even with the magnetized click of his boots on the gondola's metallic floor. Sarah felt Kells' eyes boring into her skull.
"He is Circle of Steel." It wasn't a question. Nor there was any particular animosity in his tone, despite the Circle of Steel rather heinous reputation. Which, for an internal police tasked with 'correcting' doctrinal deviations from the Codex, was actually quite generous. Sarah had had to deal with no small amount of lingering suspicion from the veteran ranks when she added Gallows to the Pride's roster.
The Captain seemed curious, however. His burnt skin made it difficult to decipher his expression and the goggles hid his eyes.
"Former," Sarah corrected sternly. Her throat had dried. "He's been with our Chapter from the beginning, but he followed the Elder when he changed our directives. Came out in the open about it. The other two Circle operatives seeded in our Chapter… they didn't."
Kells nodded, looked at her and excused himself to return to the helm. Sarah remained where she was for a little longer, the pneumatic gauntlets of her power armor digging slightly in the metal of the railing.
No, those two bastards hadn't liked the shift in priorities. Not one bit. And if it hadn't been for Gallows, they would have succeeded in murdering her father too.
She took a deep breath of clean air. With that, the half-faded memories and fears of her three-years-old self receded and she was again on the Albatross, wind whipping at her face. D.C. was passing by quickly under her feet and she took one more moment to herself for sightseeing, basking in the peace of it.
Then Sarah turned smartly and marched back into the Albatross. A leader's work was never done and she would be damned if she returned empty-handed.
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The worst of the storm rolled southeast shortly before dawn, leaving behind a smattering of foreboding leaden clouds and the air heavy with moisture that soaked hair and clothes, but already promised to be suffocating as the day progressed. Unable to get a wink of sleep after the nightmare, Hogarth was on watch while Lucy fixed breakfast – an assignment that elicited good-natured grumbles of sexism from the woman – when Wolfgang's caravan walked into view, not too far behind the first, tentative lights to the east.
The exuberant merchant - who possessed no notion of personal space violation - and his brahmins carried all manners of junk in a rattling cacophony that would have woken the dead. One particularly sharp edge, belonging to something, dug into his chest when the merchant bear-hugged him.
It was a single book, however, that immediately monopolized the Regulators' attention. A moldy thing soaked in rainwater and old ink, Hog's confusion at why Simms nearly snatched it from Wolfgang lasted until the Sheriff sliced open the back cover and retrieved a small scrap of paper flattened in a plastic bag. The message was brief, only a few words in small cursive.
Point of Rocks Overlook. Three days.
S.
"This is it then. Boss's moving in, " Mendoza said. Hog barely heard him: he read the message two times, then started fiddling with his Pip Boy's map, struggling to keep his hand steady on the control knob.
'This is it.' The cursor was still stuck where Hog had left it during the previous night's scroll of the map: Paradise Falls, once upon a time the small town of Beallsville. His fingers cramped up as he typed the new location and waited for the Pip-Boy to process his request.
"Hogarth."
'This time, this is fucking it, A.' Yes, there it was. Point of Rocks, a town some forty miles to the northwest. Just on the Maryland's shore of the Potomac.
A shiver crept down his spine. There had been water in his nightmare; water and the cry of babies. Hogarth shook his head, banishing the thought: Simms had told him how Paradise Falls' slavers covered the first stretch of the way to the Pitt's 'Exchange Station' by boat. It was only suggestion. Just fucking suggestion.
He needed to focus. Point of Rocks: the Regulators would be there in forces. He could cover forty miles in two days, maybe less if he hurried. Two days. Only two days.
"Goddamnit, slow down!" the Sheriff barked, grabbing him by the shoulder and wrenching him around. Hog's teeth rattled as he was manhandled him like a doll. The man was glaring daggers and Hog blinked at seeing Lucy and Mendoza by the shuffling brahmins at the metro station's entrance, a little way off. He hadn't even realized he'd started walking.
"Go about like that and you'll be dead before midday, you bloody fool!"
A voice in his head told him he was wasting time, that he should move, that the sooner he was there, the sooner he'd rescue A and the others. Simms' glare made Hog deaf to the frantic urging: instead, he followed the Sheriff back to the other Regulators and Wolfgang's caravaneers. Much to his embarrassment, he felt all of their eyes on him. Some with pity, or even sympathy, like Lucy. Most others just regarded him with fundamental indifference, or curiosity addressed at his Pip-Boy.
Among all his paraphernalia and bric-a-brac, Wolfgang also sold some basic necessities like food, water, and ammo. Simms lent him the caps and kept talking his ear off, pointing out the safest route to Point of Rocks on the Pip-Boy's screen as Hogarth stacked up Cram, dried mystery meat and a few cartons of water in his backpack. On a whim, he squeezed in a couple of irradiated bottles too. Simms arched an eyebrow but said nothing about it. He had advice aplenty, though, the tone of which bore any argument whether Hogarth should follow it or not.
"Don't stray too far from the river, but don't cross the Potomac until you're at Point of Rocks. Eulogy and Talon control every bridge west of Arefu. Even if you managed to sneak north past them, from there on it's either slavers, or worse."
"Don't sleep in the open and don't light any fire if you can help it. There's a small settlement outside Leesburg here, Planky Town. It's a good place to crash, but don't show them your watch. Fort Bannister isn't far from there and you never know."
Only when the caps exchanged hands did Hog realize how much the Sheriff was actually spending on his behalf.
"Don't mention it," the Sheriff cut him short gruffly and handed him another satchel clinking with caps. "Something for the trip. Like it or not, you're one of us. Regulators look after each other."
Hog nodded briskly, looking at the Sheriff with newfound respect while guilt blossomed at the back of his throat. The man had saved his life, put his town and son in danger for his sake: in return, Hog had been using him and the rest of the Regulators and would do so again at Point of Rocks or wherever Sonora Cruz intended to spring her trap.
He tried to speak again, to put his thoughts into words, but a sudden nervousness stole the wind from his sails. Then Simms looked past his shoulder and his bushy eyebrow knitted.
"Lucy. No."
The blonde had emerged from around one of the brahmins, tying a weak strap of her pack in a knot and testing it. Her expression was determined as she held her superior's glare. "You said it yourself, sir. Regulators look after each other. No offense, Hog, but you don't know the first thing for surviving out there. That fancy watch can help you only so much."
Hog grunted a begrudging assent.
"I traveled the area when I was with Lucky Harith's caravan. And," she held up a hand when Simms made to rebuke her, "I'm still due my week leave from last quarter."
The Sheriff crossed his brawny arms." What about your family?"
She shrugged and smiled. "I'll stop by on the way back. Maybe Ian will jump in this time, he turned eighteen this spring."
'There will be no trip back.'
'Shut up.'
"Fine. Knock yourself out," the Sheriff grumbled, then turned to Mendoza and signaled at him to get ready for the trip back to Megaton. As they left, he looked over his shoulder at Hog and Lucy both.
"Give them hell and come back."
The two Junior Regulators, one much more than the other, nodded at their superior, then the two groups parted and went their opposite ways through the ruins of Tysons: one southeast, the other northwest along the pre-War causeway, towards the Potomac.
They had just cleared the town center and were making their way through the rows of dilapidated suburban cottages, with their shriveled garden pock-marked by molerat nests – they skirted well around any of those - and leafless, grey-brown trunks when Hog broke the awkward silence.
"Thanks. For sticking your neck out for me."
"Aw, shucks. I was going stir crazy after a year stuck in the garrison. Dunno how Stockholm does it, day in and day out on his perch." Hog chuckled dryly at her tone and exaggerated eye-roll.
"Maybe it's the name." She looked bemused at that and Hog chuckled again, more awkwardly this time. "You know, the Syndrome and all."
Lucy cracked a smile at that, but the stiffness of it was that of confusion. Then she clapped him on the shoulder as if to infuse him with some of the determination of her face.
"Don't worry, Vault-Boy. Eulogy's boys won't know what hit them."
Hog managed a nod, but that shiver returned to chill his spine. He really didn't doubt they would succeed, not with all the Regulators the Sheriff had hinted would take part in the rescue… but what if it was too late? It had been two weeks already since Talon took the Vault.
'How many will already be in the Pitt, already beyond the Regulators' reach?'
He tried not to think about it. He focused on his surroundings instead and on listening to Lucy's advice and 'pro-tips' at survival, but suddenly, the forty miles he'd thought were a short distance were forty miles too many.