Chapter 2: New Allies and Future Opponents
He was sobbing. He had lost his composure over the news. Even though I was generally a stone cold killer, I was raised to have a heart. I picked him up, laid him in the bed of the truck, still sobbing uncontrollably mind you, and got into the cab and started the truck up. I knew we needed to be to megaton before nightfall, because once that sun falls over the capital wasteland horizon, all hell breaks loose. The raiders come out, the vertibirds patrol the skies, and every type of beast comes out for its dinner.
These are from the journals written by Charon. Different parts of this story have been pieced back together from isolated records of individual people. This has taken 30 years to construct, finding these journals took 20 of that.
I knocked on the back window, only to find him leaned up against the cab wall. All I said was, "It's almost nightfall, reload that Tommy gun and prepare to hold them off of us until we get back to megaton."
"Who?" was the boy's only word.
"Everyone" was the response.
As the sun set over the behind Tenpenny tower, we knew we were still an hour away by truck. We saw groups of people begin to emerge from old buildings to the southeast of us. The boy took a few warning shots at them, but that only attracted their attention, and much to our dismay, one was carrying an old RPG-7. We floored it, but a rocket keeps up with a truck fairly easily. The missile hit the back of the truck and took it out; I had to pull the Jack's unconscious body from the fiery truck before it hit the gunpowder in the weaponry. I tried to wake him up, but he was going to be out for a good while. Unfortunately I had larger fish to fry at this point. The raiders that had blown up the truck weren't sure if they had finished the job and regardless wanted the ear from jack and the finger from me, knowing they could sell them off for an incredibly high amount. So, I pulled over the helm of the suit I was wearing underneath my old leather armor. I watched my hands shimmer away into the dirt beneath me. The old stealth armor worked as good as ever. I pulled out my old officer's sword, slipped around them and sliced their throats. After that, I picked up Jack, and started walking back. When we reached Megaton the kid was still out, as I passed under the thin metal walkway, Casdin gave an informal salute and went back to his post guarding the gate.
Back in the founder's early days, the Enclave took over everything. We had to come back together as Brotherhood and Outcast alike simply to defend ourselves from them. Megaton had gone from small trader town to underground city. People who are infamous now as having slaughtered thousands were close allies in those times. During these years, everyone had no choice but work together or die. The Raiders and Talon Company Mercs were the only big factions that weren't eradicated that didn't come together with us. They burned Oasis to the ground, Reilly's rangers fled to point lookout, Paradise Falls was violently overtaken, with Eulogy Jones fighting to the grave. Those who couldn't work with the rest of us were killed off, unless they were an advantage to the Enclave. But during those days, we were all stuck under one roof or under six feet of dirt.
I carried Jack into Moriarty's saloon, waved hello to Gob the ghoul bartender, a rather close friend and strolled up to Moriarty with Jack over my shoulder.
"What the hell do ya think you're doing bringing a corpse into my bar, Charon?" was his way of saying hello.
Colin Moriarty is an old man who owns a Saloon of the same name. He is a heavy drinker, rude speaker, but is a cunning and wise old man. The man has seen all 3 generations of Wanderers pass through, one with a crying baby, one looking for his father, and now one being carried in.
"Moriarty, this is Jack, Steven's son." Moriarty's expression hadn't changed in the face but you could see the happiness in his eyes, but however underneath all the liquor he was a man with a big heart. Moriarty was Jack's Godfather considering all he did for Jack's father over the years.
"Well, I'll be damned. Moira and Steven's son you say? The one that's my godchild? Is he dead?"
"Nope. Some raiders hit the truck with a rocket outside of Fairfax. He was in the back of the truck trying to hold them off. Knocked him right out of the park, I figured we might do well to wake him up with some of that British Tea that your father got before you two came to the states. I've heard from Steven that it's twice as effective as tossing him off the balcony upstairs."
"Damn right it's twice as effective and good thing you came when you did, a buyer offered me a thousand caps for the last bottle, but it isn't going to come cheap, cheaper maybe. But it definitely will not be cheap. Pony up fifteen hundred caps and the last bottle is yours. I'll allow barter only because he's my godchild."
"FIFTEEN HUNDRED CAPS! Are you out of your drunken mind! Even with barter that still means handing over enough ammo to keep the brotherhood armed for the next six months!" And then I realized why he wanted to barter; because he knew as well as I did that ammo was more limited now than in the past years and it's demand was way up. Moriarty was a shroud business man who knew how to keep the money flowing through his saloon, even if it meant selling to other merchants in town. That included Moira and the new fella that lives in the air plane jet that's above Lucas' and Harden's house. Moira sold everything, while the other guy was a weapon dealer and ammo maker. He made rarer shells in comparison to standard shells I trade off for my supply of vodka, but Moriarty knew good and well that the gentleman needed standard shells too. I smiled and said "Alright, but I'm fresh out of standard shells, sold the last of my supply over to some merchants in exchange for a few schematics and several new pieces of power armor. Can you take these drone cannons as trade?"
Moriarty looked at me angrily and said "Boy, if you weren't the man who buys my entire inventory of vodka, I'd draw a gun and have you out of my store, over the railing, and into the crater. But alas, since you do, I can't, now can I? Fine, give me what you've got and the tea is yours."
"See? Was that so hard?" I pulled opened a cellar door and pulled out a few drone cannons for the old man. I grab an old note I had written with it and glanced at it, it read
'Only sell to Moriarty if you need the last of the British Tea!'
Naturally, I laughed at the note I had left myself so many years ago, handed the cannons over to Moriarty, and grabbed the bottle. Now I knew this was a delicate thing, simply because if this stuff went down badly, he would be severely poisoned by it. So, I got Nova and Gob to give me a hand propping him up so it was a clear shot. After we got him propped up right I used a funnel to pour it down his throat.
Chapter 3: The big players on the surface
Things were blurred at first, all I saw was a metal cone, and tasted Iron. Then, a bottle popped open, and I felt it before I tasted it rolling down my throat. It was sickeningly sweet, but extremely bitter, and it felt like someone had kicked me in the head. Before I realized what I had done, I had spit out the funnel, kicked one blur in the face, and elbowed the other two blurs in their noses. It was all still a huge blur so I ran for the stairs, and when I got up them, I leapt down from above and tackled some poor gentleman. At that point it went black again, but I could still hear things.
'What the hell is going on in here? Maggie is beating down the door of my house over the racket! Someone care to explain?'
'Harden, sorry about the racket, we had a bit of an incident with Moriarty's old bottle of tea…'
'Charon, I thought you said you'd only buy that bottle in order to rise the fucking dead, you remember how bad of a number it did on Steven…'
'Well, I figured it would be better to get Jack out of his coma instead of carrying him everywhere.'
'Jack? As in this is Steven's son Jack? Well I'll be damned.'
I blinked my eyes open to see the three gentlemen standing over me. I was in too much pain to speak up though. They continued on their talking,
"Look I'm not happy about how it went down either, the kid in the blind insanity that surged through him broke my nose and gave Gob and Nova alike bloody noses. Not to mention belly flopped on Jericho. And knowing all three of them, I'm paying for Doc Church to fix them up."
"Charon, I don't care about what you're doing so long as you keep it quiet. Because if I have to come back in here, you'll have more than a broken nose and a drunk 19 year old to deal with."
The sheriff was a younger man, big beard, wore a cowboy hat and a regulator duster and had an attitude that was too big for his britches. With the age of them, I'd believe they were hand-me-downs from his father, who I assume was Lucas Simms, the first real body of government in the capital wasteland, according to dad. My eyes drifted around the room to see that everyone else had gone other than those injured, Moriarty, Charon and Harden.
"Well since you've done driven off my patrons for the evening, I ought to close up for the night, congrats you two lazy bums get the rest of the evenin' off. It won't happen again for a long time so enjoy it."
Moriarty headed for the door and prepared to put his key in it to lock it and then the door flew open and knocked him down, a woman walked in and gave Charon and Harden a yelling worth remembering.
"Are you out of your minds! It's three in the morning and this racket is keeping everyone in town up, unlike you twits, some of us have to have our stores open tomorrow morning to supply the town so it doesn't go under! So someone care to explain why the hell there is so much racket at three in the morning. It normally reaches its peak in decibels around 11!" The woman glanced around the circle of gentlemen and screamed
"WELL! WHAT THE HECK IS THIS COMMOTION ABOUT?"
I finally had the ability to speak again, "I'm terribly sorry ma'am, this ordeal would happen to be my fault."
Everyone looked down at me lying on the floor, Moriarty was laughing, picking himself up from getting knocked down, Charon was happy to see I was alive and a bit nervous for some reason, and the woman was awestruck.
She walked up to me, knelt down, and touched my face lightly mumbling
"Is that you, Jack…?" She started crying.
I was perplexed. Charon walked over comforting her saying "It's alright Moira, he hasn't seen you in a very long time. He's been with Steven for the last 13 years…" At that point I realized who she was, it was my mom. I picked myself up and stumbled over to her and hugged her.
"It's nice to see you mom." She kissed me on the cheek and just was so overwhelmed with happiness. Unfortunately, our reunion was short lived… Sirens were blaring outside.
Chapter 4: The Siege of the Eagle.
The Enclave was conducting a search of the city. Vertibirds swooped down from the skies and soldiers stormed the gates. They were looking for Jack, and we both knew it. It appeared there were twenty soldiers, with 3 officers and one man in a overcoat, probably Colonel Autumn.
With the Brotherhood's help, Steven, Lucas, Moriarty, and I designed a perfect false cover, an abandoned town. Steven and I staged a false massacre by faking Moira's death, and in the grieving he slaughtered the entire town supposedly and then went cannibalistic and devoured the corpses of the citizens. When the Enclave came for him, Jack and I were sitting downstairs playing chess and I pointed a route up the stairs and said 'follow the bones', of course, I wasn't expecting little Jack to go running after his father when the enclave took him away in chains. There was one moment that I proceeded to laugh at for years to come, Colonel Autumn pushed the young child down when he was trying to follow them and little six year old Jack pulled a little .32 pistol out and was using all his strength simply to keep it up, and he fired the pistol's clip into Autumn's right leg. And as Autumn went to shoot the child, Steven whispered something in Autumn's ear that made him stop dead in his tracks and sent shivers down my spine.
"If you put your finger on that trigger, I swear I'll be out in a day, and I assure you won't live to see the end of the week."
To this day Jack still carries that pistol in his boot, and Colonel Autumn walks with a cane.
As far as the Enclave knew, the only ones still alive were Casdin, Moriarty, and I. Also as far as they knew, Moriarty and I were captives of Casdin's. To them, Casdin went nuts when the raiders took over Fort Independence and slaughtered his group of men and arrived here as a new haven from the wasteland with nothing but a rusty Dragunov, a fusion pulse charge, and enough landmines to assure if he died, anything within the city, or outside for 20 miles died with him. While in truth, the entire city was underground. The brotherhood of steel broke into the abandoned vault 101 and used that as the foundation to build our new citadel, one that spanned underground from the cog door to the abandoned vault 106, and all the way to the Potomac.
We used modified technology traded in from the Pitt through old man Ashur to carve our new underground city, and it turned out pretty damn good. The entire area looked like a air hangar area after we got some custom forged steel imported, once again, courtesy of Ashur. The ordinance we used to hollow out the caverns was imported from all over, we eventually had to contact NCR in New Vegas and the Brotherhood out west to send us enough ordinance to finish construction. They sent us 20 RPGs with a thousand rockets and 500 pounds of C-4. How they negotiated only 2 armored helicopter with a firing squad on board of each and all that 2000 miles to here is a mystery to me.
Thing was that the place felt so impersonal to the people of the wasteland once we got it up that we eventually started carving out tunnels from certain places with blast doors equipped so that those who wanted to sleep in their actual houses on the surface could, and still return back down here to do trade and hide from the Enclave. We developed a air raid siren to use when the Enclave were about to conduct their search. This kept the city safe and our cover solid.
I glanced out the window, terrified, and saw the enclave apply breach charges to every building in the city and from the looks of it, it was all Hellfire and Tesla troops, heavily armed and ready to bring back Jack and Steven back to the base even if it meant in a pair of pine boxes. But now, the Enclave knew Jack was here, and if we hid him, things would get bad. Colin and I had a choice to make, sell Jack down the river and keep the fortress his father made to keep him safe secure, or hide him and risk compromising the last safe haven in the Capital Wasteland. I saw the troopers breach Billy Creel's old house. And I knew if we didn't do something quickly, we were all dead, those above and below.
Colin walked behind the counter of the bar, poured himself the last bit of his tea, and downed it in one gulp.
"Charon, take care of yourself my good friend. And keep my godson out of trouble." Was all he said as he reached for a shiny lever on the old rusty cash register. I jumped for him but I was too late. He had opened the trap door to the city and we were all fell downward into a small tunnel not far below. He waved goodbye as the doors sealed shut.