Hello everyone hope you are all doing well. Been feeling a little sick lately (that's not the coronavirus, at least I hope it's not), and it slowed my rate of translating/correcting chapters. I apologize in advance in case I failed at publishing at least 1 chapter a day. Anyway, hope you'll enjoy this one.
"You got it all figured out?"
Damian, Vance and Ian were walking through the Wastes towards Arefu. They'd left at dusk, Vance insisting not to come out until after sunset. In the meantime, Damian had had to face the onslaught of Brianna, who seemed to take a malicious pleasure in flirting with him.
They had surfaced from a train depot and were approaching Arefu.
"Yes, don't worry," replied Vance. "If Arefu keeps his promise, then the Family will fulfill its part of the deal."
Damian had managed to convince Vance to accompany him to Arefu. Finding Ian West was one thing, but it didn't solve the problem of the Family's attacks on the city. Damian had found a solution that, if it worked, could solve the problems of the Family AND Arefu. The Family needed blood to feed themselves and by asking Vance, Damian had discovered that he had been able to survive by drinking blood found in the supplies of an abandoned hospital. Animal blood could also do the trick, but for some reason Damian didn't know, it ended up making them sick in too large quantities.
Damian's plan was a simple one. If Arefu could provide bags of blood, then the Family would commit to stop harassing them and place the town under their protection. Damian wasn't sure how Evan King would react, so he asked Vance to stay away from the ramp and stay back, in case King thought of giving him the same explosive reception that Damian had been given.
They were only a few meters from the bridge when Damian pushed Vance and Ian behind a rock.
"What's going on?" Ian asked irritated.
Damian motioned for him to shut up and pointed to the entrance to the town of Arefu. Near the hut where the Brahmins were, a group of Enclave soldiers were inspecting the place. Damian had almost not seen them except for the armor of one of them, which had small fluorescent blue LEDs on the shoulders.
"Is this the Enclave?" Ian asked in a whisper. "On the radio they say they occupy a place right next to the ruins of D.C."
"I guess they came here looking for something. Or someone," said Vance.
He looked at Damian but said nothing else. Damian looked at the soldiers. His hand itched to take his assault rifle and kill them all, but a quick glance at the heavy armament of some of them made him give up. They didn't seem to want to move when the one with the blue diode armor waved his hand and they began to move away to the West. Damian waited a few moments before getting up again.
The path to Arefu was clear. Evan King was no longer at his guard post. He must have been locked up at home.
"Well, I'm going to go check it out, and if it's clear, I'll signal you to come in."
Vance nodded. Ian followed Damian's footsteps and they arrived at the door of King's house. Damian knocked on the door.
"Sheriff King, I've located Ian West..."
Damian heard a noise on the other side of the door. A small hatch in the door opened and Damian was hit in the face with the white beam of a flashlight. He blinked his eyes and grimaced. The light then branched off towards Ian.
"You've found him! Oh, what a relief!" King cried out. "And the Family, have you solved the problem?"
"Yes. About that," Damian said. "I was able to meet them and have a chat with them."
"And?"
"They're ready to make a deal."
"They want to negotiate?"
King seemed surprised, but Damian noticed a hint of interest in his voice.
"Yes, they're willing to protect the city if in exchange you provide them with blood."
"Blood? Why the hell would they do that?"
"Let's just say that they need it on a fairly regular basis," Damian replied. "Their leader is here, at the entrance of the city if you want to check."
The door opened and King stuck his head outside. He saw Vance waving at him.
"Ian," said the Sheriff, turning to the boy. "What about your parents?"
"It's my fault, Sheriff King," said Ian.
He explained, purposely omitting certain details. Damian had also assumed that King would not accept such a thing, but he refrained from intervening. If the old Sheriff knew where his interest in the story lay, he would take the deal.
"Well, tell this Vance guy I accept."
"I'll tell him, thank you Sheriff," Damian replied.
"Oh, while I you're here…"
Evan King had just lowered his voice.
"There's a bunch of guys in black armor who have taken up residence on the other side of the bridge. They say they're part of the Enclave."
"What?"
Damian turned his head to the end of the bridge, but the West's cabin wouldn't let him see.
"Yes, they say they're looking for a man with a Pip-Boy, like yours."
Damian remained silent as he watched Evan King who gave him a big smile.
"But I told them we've never seen a guy like that here before. The Pip-Boy are only worn by people of pre-war Vaults and I don't know what one of them would do here in the Wastes."
"Thank you, Sheriff," Damian whispered, struggling to hide his relief.
He would have hated having to fight a large contingent of the Enclave in the middle of that bridge.
"It's our turn to thank you," King corrected. "Well, go tell this Vance that it's okay and if you need to rest, you're always welcome to Arefu."
Damian returned to Vance, while King locked himself in his house and Ian returned to his parents' cabin.
"It's okay, Vance. Arefu agreed."
"Then we'll honor our part of the deal," the man replied.
Damian spent the night in the hut next to the Brahmin pen. The next morning, he set off again and returned to Megaton. On the way, he passed near Big Town. The town was still standing, which reassured Damian a little. His journey to Megaton was quiet. He walked through the big gates and asked an inhabitant if he knew where Lucy was. The man told him that he had seen her heading to Moira's house.
Damian climbed up the various footbridges. He bumped into Lucy as she was about to enter and called out to her. When she saw him, a smile appeared on her face and Damian was sure she was blushing.
"Hi," said the young woman. "Have you been to Arefu? Please tell me you have news for me."
"Yes, I've been to Arefu and I brought your letter."
"You did? Oh, thank you, thank you so much. So how are my parents? And Ian? Why did they not answer my previous letters?"
Damian looked serious and invited Lucy to step aside from a small group that was coming their way. He told her the whole story in detail. The young woman listened to him, sadness in her eyes. She did not shed a single tear, but deep down she must have wanted to burst into tears.
"Well, thank you for doing this for me."
Damian gave her a comforting smile.
"I… I'm sorry for your parents… I truly am."
Lucy did not answer and nodded slowly, trying her best not to cry.
"I was going to shop a few things at Moira's. Do… Do you want to come?"
"Sure," smiled Damian.
They walked towards the entrance of Moira's store. Damian opened the door. He let Lucy through and went in. He had decided that helping Moira in her search would pass the time until the Brotherhood decided to act or repair their Vault-Tec computer.
Damian saw Lucy leaping to the side and less than a second later, he had a splash of ice-cold water on his face. Lucy put her hands over her mouth, her eyes wide open in surprise. Damian saw Moira holding a bucket from which a small trickle of water was running out. Damian could have said nothing and just laughed, but he heard his Pip-Boy's Geiger counter go wild. He looked to see that the pointer was swinging towards the dangerous zone.
"Are you fucking crazy?" Damian yelled.
In response, Moira dropped the bucket on the counter and approached him with a notepad and pencil. Damian was starting to get dizzy. His arms were trembling, and he felt nausea coming over him.
"So, if you'd describe to me how you feel," Moira said, looking at him very seriously.
"I'll tell you, I'm dizzy, nauseous, and I feel like I'm going to break everything here! Starting with you!"
"Interesting," Moira mumbled as she took notes.
Damian couldn't believe it. He glanced at Lucy, who wasn't sure whether to laugh or bring him a towel.
"Would you say you'd be able to travel a long distance, say, from here to Rivet City?"
Damian's headache was getting worse and worse, as was the nausea. The Geiger counter on his Pip-Boy was calibrated to display the level of radiation in his body and from what he could see, it was pretty high. He didn't know what Moira had put in that bucket, but he had no desire to find out.
"No! Now give me some meds or RadAway before I turn into a ghoul or I blow a hole in the floor!
Moira seemed to come back to reality. She hurriedly put down her notebook and grabbed Damian by the arm and led him to a small table. She made him sit down and remove his armor before she examined him and injected him with a dark yellow IV liquid. Damian began to feel better as soon as the product started flowing through his veins.
A few minutes later, Moira withdrew the infusion. She examined him again for a few more minutes.
"There, you see, it wasn't so hard."
Damian could have strangled her at that very moment. He heard Lucy trying to suppress her laughter. The radiation he had received was not much higher than he could ingest by eating or drinking, but he had received it so suddenly and in such rapid quantities that he could see himself turning into a ghoul or shining like a light bulb.
"I have enough notes to close this part of the book. However, there is a slight complication. While was examining you, I discovered that you've developed some kind of, uh, tiny little mutation."
Damian became pale. He hastily lifted his shirt. He remembered his examination of the G.O.A.T. and the slide showing a Vault resident surrounded by barrels of radioactive waste with a third hand on his stomach. He let out a long sigh of relief when he saw that everything was in order.
"I... I guess now you're going to be a little more resistant to radiation than we are."
"I suppose that's a small consolation, considering you tried to burn me with a bucket of irradiated water," Damian said, getting dressed.
"Come on, don't be so negative," Moira said, slapping his arm amicably. "Here, take this instead."
She walked to the counter and rummaged for a few moments in a small wooden box before coming back. She put down five plastic bags of the yellow liquid she had injected into Damian and a box of pills.
"Here, I'll give you some Radaway and Rad-X. It'll certainly come in handy on your travels, and it's also my way of apologizing for wringing out your DNA like an old rag."
Damian mumbled a thank-you and put the medicine in one of the pouches of his belt. He sighed and got up from the table.
"Had you come to me to buy ammunition or did you want to continue to help me with my research?"
"I guess the sooner this book is finished, the sooner you'll stop trying to kill me," said Damian, who knew full well that he would regret helping the young woman.
"Still a killjoy, huh?" Moira smiles. "So, for the last section of this chapter, you'd have to go to a town northeast of here. A place called Minefield."
The name didn't bode well, and when Moira explained why, a strange feeling went through Damian's legs and lower body. For this new portion of the Guide, Moira wanted him to go to this town, defuse a landmine and bring it back to her. Damian sighed and agreed, convinced that one day his selflessness would cause his doom. The main reason he continued to work for Moira was that, besides the information he could glean, this book, if done well, would be a real source of information for the inhabitants of the Wasteland and especially for Amata, should she ever manage to leave the Vault.
Damian left Moira's store, massaging his temples, already wondering how he would disarm a mine. He heard Lucy behind him and turned around.
"You have a lot of credit for helping Moira, you know. Most of the people she asks for help just run away. Which makes me wonder, why do you care so much about helping people?"
Damian shrugged.
"When I was growing up in the Vault, my father did everything he could to teach me that there was nothing more rewarding than helping the people around you, and it's true that I have a hard time refusing to help, even if it means putting my life on the line. In fact, I don't really know if it's because of what my father tried to teach me and the fact that he and my mother tried to help people all their life, or if I have a Messiah complex and I convince myself that I'm the only one who can fix everything on Earth."
He glanced briefly at Lucy and noticed that she had not understood everything.
"Let us just say that the best way I could find to make my father proud of me was to follow in his footsteps and do good myself."
"That's very noble of you," smiled Lucy.
"Yeah, well, if I could avoid having an army of killers in power armor on my tail or being Moira's guinea pig, I wouldn't be against it either."
Lucy laughed. Damian looked at the time on his Pip-Boy and the location Moira had given him on his map. He made a quick calculation in his head. If he left right away, he would have time to explore the area and come back before early afternoon.
"I have to go," he said. "If I take too long on bringing that mine back, I'm afraid Moira will intentionally place one next time I'm in the area."
"Oh, all right," said Lucy. "Take care of yourself then, and... Come and see me sometime, Damian."
"Goodbye, Lucy."
Damian walked away. Lucy West watched him walk to his cabin. She sighed before she left.
Damian came out of his house a few minutes later. He had stopped to get some food for the road and had also asked Wadsworth to fill his canteen with water.
The road to Minefield passed through the ruins of a fairly large town. There were old offices and apartments buildings, most of which had only the steel reinforcement and a few concrete walls left. Damian was walking along a building, looking for possible ambush spots.
There was a peculiar smell in the air. The kind of smell that accompanies the use of energy weapons. As Damian walked along, the smell became stronger and he began to see empty shell casings and energy cells on the ground, and then dead bodies. Most of the bodies were charred skeletons and the few remaining identifiable corpses were an amalgam of men and women wearing leather and metal outfits. Their skin was covered with dirt and their eyes were bloodshot. Damian remembered the different groups of Raiders he had encountered in the Wastes.
Damian continued walking down the street. As far as he knew, only the soldiers of the Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave used energy weapons because of their rarity and the fact that they were very difficult to maintain. At an intersection, Damian saw a group of four people, two men and two women. They wore long brown leather coats reaching to their knees and fatigues and boots making them look like cowboys, like Lucas Simms.
One of the women, wearing a large gray leather hat, noticed Damian and waved to her companions. Damian was standing on the corner of a building. The mysterious group watched him, their weapons lowered. Damian put his hand away from his assault rifle. He was close enough to the wall to take cover, but he wasn't going to provoke those people unnecessarily as they showed no sign of aggression.
The four strangers looked at each other and the woman with the hat raised her hand to Damian as a greeting. Damian returned the gesture. The four strangers tipped their weapons on their shoulders and approached. Damian did the same and walked towards them, keeping an eye around him.
The four people were of different ages. The two women must have been between 30 and 35 years of age, while one of the two men was a little older than Damian and the second, with a large moustache, was in his late fifties. They were all equipped with laser rifles, except for the woman with the hat, who wore a 12-gauge shotgun with a circular magazine.
"Hello stranger," said the woman, tilting her hat. "My name is Sonora Cruz, leader of the Capital's Wasteland Regulators."
"Hello, my name is Damian Franklin."
The young man glanced at the dead bodies lying in the street.
"Don't be afraid," Sonora said with a smirk on her face. "If you're not on our list, then you don't have to be afraid of us."
"Your list?"
"We Regulators, we spread Justice through the Wastelands," explained the woman. "Gang leaders, murderers, those who profit and abuse others, all must be brought to Justice."
"So, the four of you are walking the Wastelands and killing Raiders and criminals? Good luck," said Damian with a touch of sarcasm.
"We are not alone in this," Sonora replied. "All over the Capital Wasteland, other Regulators are working to make these lands safer."
"And how do I know I'm not on your list?"
"The fact that you're still alive," Sonora answered in a sly smile. "So just stay out of trouble and you'll be fine."
Sonora waved to her men and they walked away, greeting Damian. Before leaving, the Regulator with the moustache pulled a knife with a serrated blade from his belt and cut the index finger of one of the corpses with a sharp blow. He then put it away in a small box which he placed inside his coat.
Playing vigilante was a noble enough cause, but with the ever-increasing number of Raiders in the Wasteland, the place would not be pacified before years. Moreover, the Regulators' vision was very limited. If the Regulators were concerned with eliminating the Raiders gangs and slavers, then yes, the Capital Wasteland would one day be a slightly safer place. On the other hand, if the Regulators considered that all those who committed criminal acts, such as theft, deserved to end up like those Raiders, then they were no better than them.
"'...And Justice for all'," said Damian, recalling the lyrics of a song.
Damian didn't have time to continue philosophizing about it. Maybe one day he would find out about these Regulators and if their targets were only Raiders, slavers, assassins and maybe the Enclave then he would probably give them a hand.
Damian was about to leave when he heard footsteps behind him. He turned around and saw a man in green combat armor with a matching helmet waving at him.
"Donovan?" Damian said, recognizing the mercenary. "But... what are you doing here?"
"I am on a mission, on behalf of Reilly," replied the mercenary after catching his breath.
"How did you find me?" Damian asked.
"It's simple, the map module Reilly gave you emits a signal, and I just had to follow it, but I'm glad I didn't have to go through this whole damn desert to find you. Reilly likes to keep an eye on the newbies and make sure they're okay."
He rummaged through a small pouch and pulled out a black steel tube.
"What's that?" Damian asked, taking the items and inspecting them.
"It's a silencer for your 10mm pistol. Sometimes a little discretion can't hurt."
"Thanks Donovan."
Damian drew his gun and fixed the silencer on. He weighed his gun and felt it a little heavier, like in the Anchorage simulation. Donovan looked around while Damian removed the silencer and put it in a pouch on his belt.
"What are you doing in the middle of Bethesda ruins?" asked the mercenary. "You're improving your karma by taking out those Raiders?"
"That's the Regulators' job, I ran into them on my way here."
"Ah, the vigilantes? Good guys," said Donovan. "Didn't really understand the appeal of the Western style, though. And you? You're maintaining your image?"
"What do you mean?"
Donovan frowned, obviously surprised Damian didn't know what he was talking about.
"You don't know? The radio's been going on and on about you. Three Dog even gave you a nickname, 'The Lone Wanderer'. You're a real hero now."
Damian knew that Three Dog had already talked about him when he disarmed Megaton's bomb and saved the Rangers, but not that he had made him into some kind of heroic figure.
"Fame isn't really my thing," Damian said with a sigh.
"I understand you but with everything that's going on, having a guy like you gives, well, it gives people hope. I mean, not many people would go into downtown D.C. and rescue a bunch of beleaguered mercenaries or try to disarm a nuclear bomb."
"Speaking of disarming things," said Damian, who wanted to change the subject. Any idea how to disarm a landmine?"
"Why, you're planning a trip to Minefield?
"Well, yes."
"I knew you were crazy, but that… That beats everything," said Donovan.
"To put it simply," explained Damian. "Megaton's main shopkeeper decided to write a book called 'The Wasteland survival Guide', and she asked me to help her with the research."
Damian briefly explained Moira's request to Donovan. The mercenary thought the idea of the book was crazier than anything else.
"Well, there hasn't been any new best seller sold for two centuries, so… But who the hell has time to write a book these days?"
Damian shrugged. Donovan looked at him for a few seconds before he started walking North.
"What are you doing? Damian asked.
"No offense, but if Reilly ever found out I let you go up there alone to rig explosives for a crazy woman to write a book, she'd kick my ass."
Minefield was built on the side of a hill on which stood the rusty remains of a water tower. Only a few houses were still intact, the rest of the town being just another pile of concrete or wood ruins, as the Capital Wasteland counted hundreds.
Crouching on a small rocky mound giving them a bird's eye view of the area, Damian and Donovan watched the town from a distance. On the way, the mercenary had told them what he knew about the city, like basically any person of the Wastes. Once a small town called Ridgefield, the town had been completely devastated by a group of slavers and had gained a reputation as a haunted town. Damian almost laughed when he heard this, but he could sense that Donovan believed the story to be true. The mercenary seemed a little nervous and had been staring at the town with binoculars stuck in front of his eyes for five minutes.
"What makes people say this town is haunted?" Damian asked.
"The people who tried to scavenge the place and didn't end up like a jigsaw by stepping on a mine, all said they heard voices asking them to leave. A deep voice from beyond the grave that came from everywhere at once. No one ever saw who was talking, so I tell you, this town is haunted."
"And yet you're here with me," Damian said, looking at the mercenary with a smirk on his face.
"Fuck you man, I just don't want you to end up in multiple pieces and quite honestly, I'm more afraid of Reilly than of the ghosts living in those ruins."
Damian smiled while Donovan turned his attention to the ruined houses.
"If this place is called Minefield, it's because it must be a minefield, right?" Damian said.
"You figured it out alone?" said Donovan with a smile.
"What I mean, is that someone must have placed these mines in town, and I doubt it was a ghost who did it."
Donovan snapped his tongue in his mouth, thinking about what Damian had just said.
"Yeah," he said, putting away his binoculars. "Your theory makes sense, but I still say this town is haunted."
"No offense, Donovan, but I find it really hard to believe you're afraid of that, when I've seen you fight the Super Mutants and they really scare the shit out of you," Damian said.
"Yeah, but a Super Mutant, I can see it and it's bleeding, so I can kill it. A ghost, no."
Damian shrugged. He had never believed in ghosts, but this devastated world had already brought him many surprises, and part of his brain was beginning to imagine that it was possible that all around him, the ghosts of the millions of dead from the Great War were wandering around this desert without anyone noticing.
They approached the city from the main road. At the far end of the city, Damian could see the ruins of a large concrete building and on the other side of the city on a hill, the chimneys of a factory.
A heavy silence reigned around them and Damian had an unpleasant impression. He was beginning to understand what was making Donovan uncomfortable. The center of the town was occupied by a playground. Damian was constantly looking at his feet. Donovan stopped and crouched. Damian approached him cautiously. The mercenary was standing in front of a small set of dry brush next to a small house and the wreckage of a car. He grabbed a combat knife from a holster on his leg and slowly spread the branches with the blade. Looking over his shoulder, Damian could see a metallic object, beige in color and circular in shape, blending perfectly into the soil and vegetation. Donovan slowly approached the blade of his knife when a voice echoed around them.
"Go away!"
Damian and Donovan jumped up and pointed their rifles as they looked around them.
"Oh shit!" said the mercenary. "I told you, this place is haunted!"
Damian looked around looking for someone. He saw nothing and the voice had already vanished into the wind. The voice began to speak again, and Damian tapped the mercenary's shoulder and pointed to something in the window of one of the houses. Donovan raised an eyebrow and looked at Damian and the object he had just seen.
On the windows of the house next to them were loudspeakers, connected to electrical wires, going from house to house.
"Go away!" repeated the mysterious voice through the speakers.
Damian turned his head towards Donovan and smiled at him.
"I think I've found your voice from beyond the grave."
"Yeah, what I'd like to know is to who that voice belongs to," the mercenary said, scanning the area.
Damian heard a whistle and then a click. Shards of asphalt gushed out of the ground. A shot rang out. Damian and Donovan dove behind a car wreck while a second shot rang out.
"Damn it! Did you see where it came from?" Donovan cried out.
Damian was about to respond when a bullet slammed into the body of the car. Damian turned his head towards the hill where the water tower was, but saw nothing at all. A fourth shot was heard, which was immediately masked by an explosion. Dirt fell on Damian and Donovan.
"Damn sniper," Donovan said. "He detonated the mines when he fired on them."
"Any idea where he is?" Damian asked looking around.
"I think he's in that big building at the end of the road."
A voice echoed through the speakers again, but Damian didn't pay attention.
"The road to the building has to be clear, we can go to his position and kill the bastard," said Donovan, crouching even more behind his cover. "The problem is we're going to be right in his line of fire. The other thing is that even though there are no mines on the road, there may be mines on the edges like the one we found."
"So what's the plan?"
Donovan looked around before he turned to Damian.
"We're gonna climb that barricade and we're gonna go around the side of the house. We should come up on his flanks and then we'll light him up."
"All right, we'll do that."
The mercenary crawled up to a barricade of wood and metal, which was set up between two houses. After checking, he climbed over the obstacle and jumped to the other side. Damian imitated him. They walked along the wall of the house as far as the corner. Other handmade barricades had been set up, forming a barrier around the town. They walked along the barricades when another shot was fired. Damian heard a curse and saw Donovan stumble and a sheaf of sparks flying from his hands.
They ran and threw themselves to the ground behind the wall of another house.
"Son of a bitch," Donovan spat between his teeth.
The sniper had anticipated their movements and had hit Donovan through the barricade, probably after seeing him through one of the holes in the fence. The bullet had severed the pinky finger of the mercenary's left hand and his gun flew through the air as it was hit by the bullet. Damian rummaged through his saddlebags for bandages.
"Give me your gun," said the mercenary after bandaging his hand.
"Are you alright?" asked Damian, worried.
"Yeah... I think I know where he is. I'll shoot him from here. That should make him duck his head. In the meantime, you keep walking around and get inside the building. All right, one more thing, watch out for holes in the walls. Once you're in the building, move slowly and avoid anything that looks weird, suspicious, anything that doesn't seem to fit, there will be a trap."
Damian nodded. He drew his pistol and gave it to the mercenary with several magazines.
"Okay, good luck," Donovan said.
He got into position, counted to three and started firing. Damian walked along the wall and fences. He climbed two car wrecks on top of each other. He was facing the sniper's building. He had to walk about ten meters before he reached the building. Damian could see bullet impacts where Donovan was shooting. He ran up and entered the building from the corner that had collapsed.
There was nothing left of the ground floor of the building. Damian noticed a stairwell. He also noticed small piles of debris and pieces of cloth on the steps, as if to hide something. Damian walked slowly, his rifle raised towards the floors, his gaze going from the tip of the barrel of his gun to his feet.
Damian slowly climbed up the first floor. In the corner right in front of the stairs, a mattress was lying on the floor with a small blanket with a hole in it. Boxes of food and .308 caliber ammunition were scattered around the mattress. Damian also noticed a pair of crutches beside it. He turned his head and saw a man crouching behind a window. He was wearing beige cloth clothes. The man was old and had no hair on the top of his head. Damian approached. The shooting stopped. Damian heard a small object rolling at his feet. He had just bumped into an aluminum can. The man turned around with surprising speed and pointed his sniper rifle at Damian. The young man fired a burst. He hit his target on the arm. The sniper staggered and fired his rifle. The bullet missed Damian who took cover behind a concrete pillar. The man cursed and fired again several successive shots. A last shot rang out and Damian heard something fall to the ground. He ventured to look and bent his head out of his hiding place.
The sniper was dead. Lying face down on the ground, a small hole in the back of his skull and his face destroyed. A puddle of blood surrounded his head and Damian could see small pieces of bone and bits of brain on the ground. He heard footsteps on the floor below, then Donovan's voice.
"Damian? Everything okay up there?"
"Yeah, I'm still in one piece. You come up. It's clear."
Donovan climbed the stairs and joined him. He glanced upstairs and approached the sniper's body.
"So this is the ghost of Minefield? An old man with a sniper rifle?"
"Looks like it," said Damian. "If you ask me, he's the one behind all the rumors around here."
Donovan shrugged.
"I don't know and I don't care. This guy tried to blow our brains out and almost succeeded."
He bent over and ripped the sniper rifle out of the corpse's hands. The mercenary went back to Damian and gave him back his pistol and the magazines he hadn't used.
"Well, we came here to find a mine and defuse one, right?" the mercenary asked rhetorically. "Come over here."
He came down from the building. Damian took one last look at the man's corpse, wondering what could have caused an old man to turn this town into a death trap and joined the mercenary downstairs.
Donovan spent about twenty minutes explaining and showing Damian how to disarm a landmine. Damian listened carefully, observing how the mercenary was able to render the explosive inert. The easiest way was to insert a small needle into the pin mechanism, thus blocking the trigger. Donovan advised Damian, however, that the easiest way to disarm a mine was to shoot it from a distance. He also explained to him that some people had modified these mines and had installed proximity sensors. The mine would beep and explode when someone was too close to it.
"One more thing. Never lift or turn the mine over. There's often an internal mechanism so that if you move the device while it's active... Boom."
Damian never imagined that these small objects could pose such a danger in the Wastes and were so complex to disarm, compared to the Megaton nuke which, in comparison, had been a piece of cake. Donovan explained to him that most of the mines that could be found in the desert had been placed just after the Great War by groups of survivors of the US Army, who were convinced that the Chinese would try to invade them. The invasion did not come, and as the years passed, the mines remained in the ground waiting for a poor traveler to step on them and have his leg ripped off. Today these mines were mostly recovered by groups of Raiders or slavers to protect their camps or to ambush caravans, the others were still buried in the ground, mainly near roads or in fields, but Donovan reassured Damian a little by telling him that they should be harmless after two centuries without maintenance.
"Don't go jump on them with your feet, either," said the mercenary. "I've already seen a Raider stoned to death on Jet trying to do that and, well, you get the idea."
Damian easily imagined the body being pulverized by the explosion. Knowing that he was unlikely to inadvertently step on a mine laid in the middle of nowhere by a soldier who had been dead for 200 years reassured him.
"Thank you so much for your help Donovan."
"Rangers take care of each other," said the mercenary with a smile. "And in the future, tell your friend who wants to write her book to come and get her mines herself."
Damian smiled. They headed South again when Damian heard his Pip-Boy beep. He raised his little computer and looked at the screen.
"What's going on?" Donovan asked.
"Looks like I just picked up a radio signal," Damian said as he scrolled down the list of frequencies his Pip-Boy could display.
He activated the new frequency and a very strange sound came out of his Pip-Boy's speakers. Intermittently, small noises were coming out of the interference. The sounds sounded like someone talking but neither Damian nor Donovan understood what the message was saying.
"Must be a scavenger who activated one of those old antennas in the Desolate Lands and started broadcasting a pre-war signal," the mercenary said.
Damian stuck his ear to his computer and tried to distinguish a word or a sentence, but he couldn't make out a word or a sentence at all.
"Are you coming?" Donovan asked, tilting the sniper rifle over his shoulder.
"No," Damian answered. "I'm going to check that signal, you should go home and get your hand fixed."
"I think it's a waste of time, but okay. I'll tell Reilly that you're fine. Take care of yourself out there."
The two men shook hands. Donovan walked away towards the ruins of D.C.
Damian took a few steps in each direction, holding his Pip-Boy by his ear. The signal didn't seem to weaken in either direction, but he noticed that the parasites disappeared slightly as he walked North.
"Well, let's go and see what's so mysterious about this radio broadcast," he said as he began to walk.
Hope you all enjoyed. I know the "And Justice for All" is in the Pledge of Allegiance to the United States, but I took the literral meaning of Justice (and the one in the Metallica song) for this chapter. Hope I'm not butchering or disrespecting anything related to the US by writing that, and if so, my sincere apology. Until next time.
