Mutatis Mutandis 35
Dawn broke on the wasteland. The first hints of winter chill hung in the air. Light crawled through the crumbling streets of downtown D.C., revealing the hordes of green supermutants churning west towards the banks of the Potomac. Concrete blocks, each the size of cars were being carried and placed with great speed and efficiency. The streets and shores of the north and west were strung with crisscrossing fields of barbed wire. Enormous sharpened I-beams had been driven deep into the ground and pointed threateningly towards the Capital wasteland. Behind them were trenches and embankments. Concrete bunkers had been set up, with minigun turrets aimed to sweep the opposite banks. Row upon row of supermutant stood assembled in the morning light. The eastern shore of the Potomac was bristling with miniguns, missile launchers, and small arms of every sort.
Project purity had been ringed with defenses of every kind. Concrete walls, barbed wire, and plates of steel and iron surrounded it like a maze. Overlords and Masters toting pieces of Alien weaponry scavenged from the ruins of the Citadel patrolled inside and out in well-armed groups.
Faint echoes of gunfire could still be heard to the southeast as the few defenders left in Rivet City fought tooth and nail for every inch of every hallway in the bowels of the ancient wreck. Yet even their defenses were crumbling against the waves of mutants which were flooding over the gangplank and onto the flight deck. The heavy marching feet could be heard as far down as The Muddy Rudder, where the civilians were huddled in a large, frightened group.
Across the river, snipers positioned themselves. Fireteams checked their weapons in preparations for the inevitable assault. Fatman mortar teams dug in and zeroed their sights on enemy positions. Scouts darted back and forth between various listening posts on the frontlines. A vertibird soared over the river, and was promptly blown out of the sky by several missiles fired from the mutant positions.
In the forward operating base at Arlington Cemetery, a fist thumped a table.
"I told you so." Jackrum said as he watched Summers withdraw her hand.
She shot him a venomous glare. "I want more intelligence."
"Have you tried playing Scrabble? I've heard that can sharpen the mind."
"Jackrum!"
"Look, fly them higher, then. The bad guys might be dumb but they can still shoot."
Summers spun on a courier. "Send another scout at five hundred meters." She barked at her subordinate. "I want Arial photography. I want to see what we're dealing with!"
"Muties." Jackrum guessed.
"By god I swear I will shoot you where you stand, Jackrum."
"Look, we already have our plan." He said, leaning against the large wooden table. "I'm not sure it'll work anyway. This'll come down to fireteams versus muties. Street by street and door by door. Its lookin' to play out like the Liberty Prime run when the Brotherhood took the purifier from you guys. We bomb the ever-loving hell out of them. You guys take some of my crew around the bay and we'll secure Rivet City. Meanwhile we head north around the top of the river bank and roll up their line."
"We don't have the robot."
"We have the Enclave."
"We are not invincible."
Jackrum's hand swept down their map. "You'll have air support, and my mortar teams will be peppering the ground ahead of you."
She sighed and stared down at her map. "Alright. Alright. Make the final preparations. Mortar barrage starts in half an hour. Fifteen minutes after that, we attack."
Jackrum exited the tent. His various lieutenants shuffled to something approaching Attention. He said, "Get your teams ready, boys. We're on in forty-five minutes."
He knew the plan. He had gone over it with Summers again and again and again. The attack would occur in two prongs. Several Vertibirds would circle southeast around project purity to drop heavily armed troops on Rivet City's flight deck. Mortars and sniper teams would assist the task force in securing and relieving the beleaguered city. In the meantime, the bulk of the wasteland forces would cross the bridges and head south, destroying or taking control of all passages into the heart of D.C. as they went. That would contain the mutants and prevent any enemy forces from cutting them off as they drove south towards Project Purity.
Project Purity was the goal. The facility was both a literal and a symbolic fortress. As it always had, whatever faction controlled the fresh water, controlled the wasteland. Jackrum privately wondered how much the mutant army understood the statement they had made, but he also suspected that they didn't have to. It was for the Wastelanders. A campaign of demoralization. Taking it back probably wouldn't have the same effect on the mutant forces, but it would send the clear message to Brutus himself that far from demoralized, the Wasters were willing to fight to the last man for their homes and their futures.
In fact Jackrum was hoping that Brutus was somewhere inside the fortress. There couldn't be many intelligent mutants in the wasteland. Killing him and his close circle would cut the head off the snake. The mutants were at their most dangerous when unified under the leadership of an intelligent commander. If he was eliminated, the mutant army would likely disintegrate into a hundred uncoordinated little camps, making its destruction far easier.
It was with this aim in mind that he visited the Brotherhood of Steel. The final thirty-four fighting men and women. They had dressed in white combat armor, with their gear insignia painted in light blue on their pauldrons, and their name and rank in black on their chest plates. They had set up several dirty canvas tents on the northern end of the Waster camp, right in the enormous ring of stone and debris which used to be the Citadel. Most of them were gathered around a giant pile of white ashes, punctuated by the occasional suspiciously shaped chunks of black charcoal. The familiar stench of burned bodies hung thick in the area.
The Brotherhood soldiers moved through their former headquarters with grim expressions, their eyes glazed as they watched ghosts move around them. Every so often they would glare across the river at the distant green shapes. Jackrum spotted Paladin Glade and Elder Rothchild, Both sitting behind a piece of rubble near the river's edge. Kodiak was there as well, firing at the distant shapes with a liberated sniper rifle.
Jackrum came to a halt in front of them, his arms crossed. Glade nodded at him.
"Kinda a strange place to set up camp." Jackrum said.
"I gave the order." Rothchild said.
"S your kids could see what the muties did?"
"So they'll get mad." Glade explained quietly. Jackrum noted the red bandana which was wrapped around the man's forearm.
"Ah." Jackrum slipped his fingers under his breastplate and pulled out a nearly empty pack of cigarettes.
"What do you want, Jackrum?"
Jackrum searched his pockets. "Damn it- where are my matches? Ah-hah." He planted a cigarette between his lips and struck a light. "Got an assignment for you. Something special."
Glade nodded slowly and leaned back against the rubble pile. "I was wondering why you'd bothered."
"Eh?" Jackrum shook out the match.
"Why you'd bothered to rescue us."
"That was the Wanderer's plan, actually. I thought you guys all died here till he told me about the vault. But I need you now. Brutus, the mutie commander is somewhere on that battlefield and if I were a betting man, I'd say he was somewhere inside Project Purity."
"You want us to eliminate him?" Rothchild asked.
"Now I know why they call you the smart one."
The elder gave him a withering look.
Jackrum said, "Four years ago your best men led the charge across that exact bridge and down the east shoreline right into Project Purity."
"We had the Wanderer with us then." Glade said.
"Not to mention Liberty Prime."
"This time you have the Enclave and my snipers and mortar teams backing you up."
"It might not be enough." Rothchild warned.
"We can't let the Enclave take out Brutus." Jackrum said, "I'm trying to keep them from stomping all over us, but I have no goddamned cards in my hand, and Summers knows it. The Wasters need a win. We need to show ourselves, and the Enclave that we own this wasteland."
"We'll get it done." Glade said, with a surprising amount of confidence. Rothchild raised his eyebrows. The Paladin shrugged. "It's always been our job to pull off this kind of stunt. That's what the Lyons' Pride was created for; the special missions. We'll get it done."
"All two of us." Said Kodiak, who had remained silent up until that point.
"We're leading the others, Greg." Glade said with a touch of reproval. "Right now the Brotherhood is to the Wasteland what the Pride was to the Brotherhood. We'll do our jobs." He turned back to Jackrum. What do you know about Brutus?"
The Waster forces were split into teams of fifteen men apiece, each division a mix between Waster, Merc, and Enclave personnel. Each team was led by a Mercenary with a Chinese assault rifle. They were usually back up by an array of wasters and mercs carrying shotguns and assault rifles. Each team had a medic, and three enclave soldiers; a Hellfire trooper with a heavy incinerator, an enclave officer used for spotting and calling in air strikes, and a regular enclave soldier to protect him. On top of that, the wasteland forces had demolition teams, armed with shotguns. It was their job to close off selected underground routes into the downtown core to prevent the mutants from easily counter-attacking.
Wasteland forces had been harrying the Muties all night long, but the battle began in earnest with a mighty missile barrage. The Arlington Memorial Bridge was the chosen invasion point. Snipers kept the mutants busy on the opposite bank while the various waster teams assembled and prepared to rush across into downtown D.C.
Sixty rockets fired from ten missile launchers hit the buildings on the opposite side of the bridge, causing the collapse of one weather-beaten office tower. The other was peppered with enormous gaping holes. The smoke and dust hid the invading forces from the defending supermutants, but they responded in kind. Missiles sailed back across the river, flying high above the heads of the wastelanders to hit the buildings behind them. The Bridge itself was suddenly lit up with minigun rounds as a group of Supermutant Masters rallied mutie forces into something approaching a defensive line.
A wall of lead volleyed across the bridge like a deadly horizontal rain shower, forcing the Brotherhood soldiers leading the charge to dive for any cover they could find. Glade and Kodiak took shelter behind a concrete divider, and half the brotherhood followed them, crawling on their stomachs to stay under the enemy fire. A young nameless Enclave officer accompanying them crawled up to Glade and tapped him on the shoulder, leaning into his ear.
"I need a visual!"
"What for?" He yelled back. "We know where they are!"
To his astonishment, the young man slipped a map out of his pocket and opened it up, revealing the downtown core and the wasteland surrounding it. He leaned over to Glade, ignoring the bullets whizzing by them, and tapped the map, saying: "We're in Zone Nine! I need to call in an airstrike!"
Glade stared as the man consulted his map once again. He turned to Kodiak, who shrugged helplessly, and fired a few blind rounds over the top of the divider. A series of missiles zipped past, once of them just a foot above their barricade, close enough for Glade to feel the heat from the jet.
"We can't stay here forever, sir!"
Glade grabbed the map and rammed a finger down at the other end of the bridge. "Right there! Call it in!"
"There are safety concerns-" the officer began. The corner of their disintegrating barricade crumbled, and a few bullets pounded into an exposed Brotherhood soldier. The man dropped to the ground, and someone shouted for a medic. Glade grabbed his pistol and pressed it into the watery-eyed officer's temple.
"Call. It. In." He growled. The man thumbed his microphone and began calling coordinates. A few seconds later an Enclave vertibird buzzed by, firing six rockets into the mutie defenses. More dust rolled across the mutant position, and another office building crumbled, scattering enormous concrete slabs across the road, and into the river. The gunships circled, raking the dust cloud with indiscriminate minigun fire in order to suppress the mutants.
"Move!" Glade rolled over the barricade, followed by Kodiak and the Brotherhood division. The wasters followed, sixty in total. They pounded the gray, cracking pavement, the frontlines pausing every so often to add to the vertibirds' suppressive bursts. A few shots skipped by, but the mutant line was in shambles, and Glade crossed easily into the cloud. His vision was immediately reduced to just a few feet ahead. The crumbled building had thrown plenty of concrete barriers across the roadway, and he found himself engaged in close-quarters combat with the surviving mutants. An enormous orange shape leapt out from behind a pile of rubble and rushed at him, brandishing a sledgehammer. Three Brotherhood soldiers around him opened fire, bringing the mutant down before it could close the distance. The Brotherhood moved further, sweeping through the ruins. Glade could hear gunfire and mutant roars all around him. Muzzle flashes flickered in the dusty grey air. They could still hear the gunships buzzing around far above their heads, but at least the enclave forces had stopped firing.
The road turned south, and Glade found himself at the top of an enormous ramp. He remembered the last time he had stood there with Vertibirds in the skies above. Liberty Prime had been just a few meters to his left, and he had the entire brotherhood of steel backing him up. The Lone Wanderer, with his brown longcoat and red bandana had been walking ahead of Liberty Prime, his sniper rifle cracking shot after shot after shot, eliminating every Enclave soldier dumb enough to poke his head out of cover. Between the Wanderer and Liberty Prime, the last Project Purity run had been a cake walk. A matter of cleaning up the remains, sweeping the path behind them. This time was different. The risks were higher, and he knew that even if they won, there was no way the enclave would let the wasteland go a second time.
Glade glanced down at the bandana around his arm, and wondered where the Wanderer was. He wished the young man was with them now; it would have added so much to the charge. More than that, he wished Sarah was there leading them.
Snipers lined up all around him, firing at the dozens of mutants who had set up barricades along the road.
"Up high!" someone shouted, and then a rocket exploded just a few meters behind Glade, killing several Brotherhood soldiers, and a few wastelanders. The blast knocked him onto the pavement, and he looked up to see several mutant masters with rocket launchers on a catwalk far above their heads.
"Take cover!" he ordered, watching the mutants reload. Moments later a vertibird flew by, firing several missiles into the structure, which collapsed onto the roadway below.
"Keep moving!" Kodiak called out. Wasters and mercs filed past, flooding down the shallow ramp, and onto the street below. Among them were the bulky, Black jangling shapes of Enclave Hellfire mercenaries. Snipers at the railing exchanged shots with mutants hidden in the surrounding office buildings. Wasteland forces snaked out, fireteams covering one another as they entered the offices through windows and doorways, clearing each building floor by floor. Muzzle flashes lit up darkened windows, and gunfire echoed through the street.
"Sir, we got trouble!" A hand pulled at Glade's shoulder, and he followed a young mercenary back out towards the bridge. Wasters were still moving across, a few fireteams at a time. Their progress was slowed by minigun fire from the opposite bank. Supermutants had collected in the blindspots, places where the Wasteland snipers across the bank couldn't pick them off. The bridge was too exposed for any team to bunker down and offer consistent resistance.
Glade pulled the mercenary close. "Get me one of those Enclave Officers. We need another airstrike!"
Then they heard it, the furious roar of a Behemoth. Silence fell as everyone paused, looking for the creature. Glade's heart dropped. He had thought the Wanderer had gotten them all. How many could be left? If there were anywhere near the number which had attacked the Citadel, they were screwed.
The monstrosity burst through the wall of a nearby office building. The giant's skin was red and burned, horribly disfigured. It wore a vest, and with a cold shock, Glade realized that it was wired with explosives. Two missiles, taken from one of the fighter jets atop Rivet City, were strappd to its back.
The moment the behemoth appeared, the entire east bank lit up. Thousands of Minigun rounds peppered the Waster-held shoreline. Among the Supermutant barrage, Glade could see the strange energy projectiles of the alien weaponry the Wanderer had given the Brotherhood of Steel. Those dangerous green balls of energy bounced across the water. One of them slammed into a Talon Company tent and detonated, leaving a red-hot crater, and killing close to a dozen men. The Wastelander army scattered and dove for cover to avoid the led wall which zipped and zinged above their heads.
The Behemoth charged down the center of the river itself, bulling its way through what was, to it, a waist-deep current, and Glade realized what its purpose was. He began to push his way through the crowd of wasteland soldiers.
"Get the men off the bridge!" he shouted, waving to the incoming Waster forces as the behemoth disappeared under their feet. "Get off the bridge! Get off the-"
The monster disappeared under the bridge. There was an almighty explosion as the missiles detonated. The ground shook, and the air around him seemed to squeeze, and press in on him. In the confined space between the bridge's arching supports, the Supermutant Behemoth was turned to paste. The pressure pushed upwards, and threw the central span of the bridge high into the air, along with all the men and supplies crossing it. Pellets of stone the size of a man's head flew outwards, splashing down into the Potomac and peppering Jackrum's army, killing and wounding several wastelanders. Weapons and bodies splattered into the brown, churning river, and Glade was left standing at the edge of the ruined bridge, cut off from the bulk of the Wasteland forces.
From their camp across the Potomac, Jackrum and Summers stared in shock at the devastation. The barrage of suppressing minigun fire had ceased as most of the mutants turned their attention inwards, towards the two-hundred or so Wasteland fighters trapped on the east side of the Potomac. Wasteland snipers were still exchanging fire with a few mutant riflemen, but the river had for the most part gone quiet. Everyone in the camp could hear the staccato of assault rifle rounds, and the panicked shouting of the trapped wasteland forces.
"I thought you said the Wanderer had gotten all the Behemoths!" Summers snapped furiously.
"I thought he had too!" Jackrum shot back. "Look, don't panic. For all we know, that was the last."
"For all you know? What the hell do you know, Jackrum?"
"I don't have time to argue about this! A quarter of our army is trapped over there!" He turned away. "I need a runner!"
A courier materialized, and Jackrum grabbed the man's Brahmin skin shirt and leaned in close. "Tell the sniper teams and mortarmen to keep up the pressure, and get me my division commanders. I want my forces packed and ready to move in two minutes!"
"Where are you going?" Summers asked as the courier ran off to relay the messages.
Jackrum pulled out his Chinese assault rifle and checked it. He said, "Brutus wants to divide and conquer. I'm going to put my army back together."
The wastelanders were panicking. The blown bridge had cut them off from reinforcements and supplies. They were two hundred men strong; a quarter of all the Wasteland forces. Yet most of them were just Wastelanders: untrained and undisciplined. While they believed in fighting for their homes as much as any Brotherhood warrior, most of them lacked the iron nerves which had been drilled into Elder Lyons' soldiers.
Glade knew that if he didn't act quickly, their defenses would disintegrate, and they would be overrun by the mutant hordes pushing towards them from Rivet City. He held up a hand. "Brotherhood, rally to me!"
The division obeyed. Brotherhood warriors, in their white and blue combat armour gathered quickly. Glade's heart wrenched as he realized they were down three men already. Kodiak was still alive, blood seeping from a scrape on his scalp. Glade ordered six of them north, under the direction of a more experienced knight. He wanted to keep a decent rearguard in case the mutants decided to circle down the eastern bank and come at them from behind. To his mild shock, several Enclave soldiers joined them, marching side by side with the Brotherhood warriors as they took up position on the broken bridge.
Seeing the Brotherhood rally, unshaken by the loss of their only route home, many of the wastelanders stopped panicking. Though their army was fractured, they rallied to their own leaders and set about assembling a defense. The Brotherhood, accompanied by the enclave soldiers, slowly made their way to the
Glade found Sergeant Manny 'The Masher' McClane curled up behind a rusted car. The Star-Paladin turned back and ordered his own division onwards, then when no eyes were upon him, he confronted McClane. The man's helmet was missing, and he was screaming into his microphone. "I want a pickup! Do you hear me? I want out! We have muties coming in from all sides, and the wasters are dropping like flies! I don't care how hot it is, just get a Vertibird in here and pick me up!"
Glade hefted his rifle and smashed the butt end into the back of the man's head, feeling a great deal of catharsis. He pulled off the man's communicator and spoke into it. "Hello?"
A stern, female voice greeted him on the other end. "Hello? Who is this?"
"Sergeant McClane has been relieved of command. You're speaking to Star Paladin Glade of the Brotherhood of Steel, Ma'am. We need air support, and could you tell the mortarmen to back off a little? They're dropping mininukes way too close to our lines. I'm going to try to rally things here, but I need your help."
There was nothing but silence on the other end of the radio. At the southern end of the road, the mutants were beginning to make a push. Glade ran forward, sliding into cover beside Kodiak. Several dozen Talon Mercenaries were there, alongside a few rougher-looking Wasters and two Enclave Hellfire troopers. Together, they had slowed the mutant advance to a virtual deadlock.
"Hold this line!" Glade ordered as a few dozen bullets whizzed above his head and thunked into the concrete slabs all around them.
"We're doing our best, sir!" a young mercenary replied smartly. Glade recognized him from Jackrum's inner circle. Turner was his name. Instead of his usual clipboard, the young warrior was carrying an assault rifle. Judging by the multitude of dead mutants, he was putting it to excellent use. The young man said, "We can hold them, but if we're going to make a push, we need more firepower!"
Behind the encroaching mutant forces, and across the Potomac, were the remnants of the Citadel. And around the corner to his left, around half a kilometer away, lay his objective: Project Purity.
The radio crackled to life again. "Star-Paladin Glade, this is Lieutenant Samantha Summers. We're awaiting bombing coordinates."
"I appreciate that, ma'am."
Glade heard several shouts behind him, and he turned. A division of Wastelanders was marching up the road, all of them Megaton citizens. They were led by their sheriff, Lucas Simms. With his cowboy hat, and grim jaw, he towered over the cowering wastelanders. His division, thirty or so sturdy Megaton fighters, stood firm, taking strength from their leader. He declared, "We're going to hold the line like Stonewall Jackson at Bull Run!"
The Megaton Fighters lined up behind the Talon company mercenaries, firing wave upon wave of lead into the mutant lines. The green hordes broke and fell back, buying them all a moment's respite. The victory did more, however. The other Wastelanders rallied, reforming their divisions. On the opposite side of the river, Glade could see the rest of Jackrum's army. It was moving north in a steady line. They were circling to reconnect, he realized.
They could still survive this.
Glade grabbed the Enclave officer who had called in the airstrike earlier, and dropped him in front of Turner and Simms. "This guy can call in airstrikes. Use him. Jackrum's coming, but I really need you guys to lock this down and keep our army intact until he gets here."
They all paused to add fire as the muties pushed again. Bullets swarmed back and forth, and the ground ahead of them was filled with mutant bodies.
"Where are you going?"
Glade glanced down at the bandana again. He said, "Project Purity. We're going to find their leaders and end this."
"That'll still leave hundreds of muties around." Simms said doubtfully.
"An unorganized mob." Turner replied. "It'll be the end of their army."
"That's a suicide run, though." The Sheriff told them. "Project Purity is a mutie fortress."
"We succeed, we win this war." Glade replied. "I know it's a long shot."
"How are you going to get in?" Turner asked.
"The outflow pipes that pump excess chemicals into the river." Glade said, "They lead into the heart of the project. I'll take a small team in there. We'll find the mutant leader, and kill him."
Simms nodded slowly, then turned back to his division and pulled out two Megaton fighters. "Billy, Lucy, find these men some ammunition!"
The two young wasters saluted and vanished into the crowds of Wasteland fighters. Simms turned back to Glade and shrugged off his sheriff's duster. "Take this. You aren't going to get far unless you cover up all that white armor."
Glade gave the worn leather a somber look before he slipped it over his shoulders. "Thanks."
"We'll hold down the fort." Turner promised. "Just try and stay alive."
Glade pulled Kodiak and two other Brotherhood Knights from the remnant. He placed the rest under Turner's command, and the four of them, wearing threadbare scavenged Brahmin-skin clothes to hide the armor, slipped into the Potomac.
The resistance was working in shifts, each taking their time at the barricades. They had managed to gain some ground. The bridge to Project Purity was in sight, but there were too many mutants gathered at the far end, flowing in from Anacostia crossing. The bridge itself was impossible to cross. Overlords and mutant masters were dug in at the far end. Mutant riflemen stood at the shoreline to their left, ready to fire at any silhouettes attempting to cross the bridge. Vertibirds couldn't get close to the fortress; the first two that tried were taken down by rocket launchers. The battle was rapidly becoming a stalemate. Except it wouldn't last. Another army of mutants had circled north through D.C. to reemerge out of the Tepid Sewers near Dukov's place and hit Turner's beleaguered forced from behind.
They held, with the help of the Enclave's heavy hitters. Geography assisted as well. The broken section of Arlington Bridge gave wasteland snipers an excellent vantage point for hitting the mutant forces who were approaching through the completely open northern passage, but they soon found themselves under fire from miniguns and tri-beam laser rifles.
The real disaster struck when the mutants came up through the metro system. The battle had been going for almost an hour. The fighting was fierce and heavy, with mutants approaching from both the north and the south. The supermutants were fierce, stupid, bulky creatures and their tactics reflected their direct, brute force tendencies. The metro system running underneath the D.C. ruins consisted mainly of train tunnels and cramped maintenance passages. They would be extremely difficult for a large force of mutants to navigate. In order to flank the stranded wasters, the long column of muties would have to travel underground in single file, searching their way through the maze, just hoping they chose the right passage to bring them back up to ground level. The mutant army had never been that subtle, and the way they had thrown wave after wave after wave at the barricades indicated to Turner that they had no intention of playing it smart.
As it happened entrance to the Irradiated Metro system sat on a plateau right in the middle of the beleaguered wasteland resistance. It had been designated as a rest area, where the wounded and tired could find a moment's respite from the fighting.
It shocked everyone when six overlords with super sledge hammers charged up the slim staircase and laid waste to the wounded wastelanders. Within thirty seconds they had killed twenty-five men, and thrown the entire stranded resistance into chaos. Many humans were hit by friendly fire as the terrified wastelanders fired indiscriminately into the chaos, hoping to drive the mutants back. Supermutant Masters were pouring out onto the plateau behind the berserker overlords, preparing to rake the barricades with minigun fire.
The Enclave saved the day. Under orders from their sergeants, every Hellfire trooper the stranded wasters had, twenty-seven in total, left their posts at the barricades to drive the mutants back. The front rows bravely engaged in vicious hand-to-hand combat with the raging berserker overlords, keeping the disaster contained. Behind them, a steel wall of Hellfire troopers opened up with their heavy incinerators, arcing shots of flaming napalm high up into the sky, to rain fire down upon the plateau, where they scorched and burned everything to ashes, including the wounded wastelanders. The black smoke rose high into the sky, and putrid fumes of napalm and burned flesh scorched everyone's nostrils.
Yet nothing could survive it. Not even the mutants. One by one, the overlords fell, though the Hellfire troopers suffered heavy losses taking them down. The line moved forward, up the stairs and onto the plateau, driving back the cunning mutant offensive, and pushing the green wave back into the Irradiated Metro system.
The departure of the Hellfire troopers meant that the barricades, already strained, had lost a key pillar of their defensive strategy. North and south, they both faltered. The northern barricade crumbled completely, and the wastelanders found themselves being pushed back until the mutant line was halted in the bottleneck right under the broken bridge. A second weaker barricade was formed there, from the bodies of fallen combatants, mutants and human alike.
The southern barricade, which face the brunt of the mutant attack strained and nearly broke. Indeed it would have, were it not for Sheriff Lucas Simms and his fearless Megaton column. With what remained of the Brotherhood, they held the line. Even as a detachment of Talon Company mercenaries left the barricade and headed north to assist the faltering defenses up there.
Turner was with the Hellfire Mercenaries. Six Talon mercenaries were following in his wake, and together with the enclave they drove into the metro system, chasing the mutants back. The fighting through the turnstiles was savage and crowded. The mercenary combat shotguns proved more effective than the incinerators, and soon it was the Talon Company fighting through the hallways, inch by inch, door by door, grate by grate. Sometimes the combatants were less than a meter apart when they met. Mutant bodies stack up to the point where the mercenaries were forced to wade and crawl through them, ducking as they did so to avoid banging their heads on the ceiling. Feral ghouls came pouring out of the woodwork, ambushing both sides and turning the affair into a chaotic three-way brawl.
Using what ordinance they had left, Turner directed the Mercenaries to find the weak points in the metro system, and together they collapsed several tunnels, blocking off the mutant access. After that they had to fight their way back out through dozens of feral ghouls.
Turner was never so happy to see daylight in his life. Soaked in blood and stinking of gunpowder, He collapsed beside the metro entrance, taking a moment's desperate respite. He glanced across the river at the Wasteland Resistance Camp. It was empty, save for a few Enclave officers.
"C'mon, Jackrum." He murmured, eyeing the burnt mutant corpses lying all around him on the blackened pavement, "We can't keep this up forever."
I kept promising this was coming, and here it is. I want to assure you that if this series dies prematurely, I will post a notice to let all of you know. Until then, expect new chapters. Thank you very much for your patience. I'm aware this is far beyond late in coming.