Fallout of the Heart

Chapter Three

I should have known that Cambridge was going to test my patience the second I heard the distress call come crackling over the pip boy's radio. An onslaught of ferals, hunh? Well that sucked, there were places I needed to check for information and potential caches there. Lexington showed me just how out of shape I was after being frozen for over two centuries, figuratively and combatively speaking. It was coming back to me though, and more practice couldn't hurt.

The ghouls did indeed seem endless as I made my way through the square as silently as possible. I knew the distress call was coming from the police station, but they were shambling all over the place. I knew that by blowing straight through them I'd end up leading them there anyway, and if I didn't, the noise certainly would attract them. So, I made the prudent call to clear out the nearby buildings first and not leave these shambling assholes at my back, before I went to see just what little group needed rescuing now.

As I plowed through the endless supply of the bastards, I couldn't help but wonder if this was what had happened to all the people who had no safety or shelter when the bombs hit. I mean obviously not everyone, since there were no ghouls in Sanctuary or Concord, and there were people still kicking about. Still, they had to have all come from somewhere – and they just kept coming from that somewhere to boot. Christ, there were so fucking many of them – how had people not come across them before now and cleared them out? They couldn't all be helpless.

I considered heading down and clearing out the subway while I was at it, since it was likely people had tried to shelter there and that's where most of them were coming from, but I heard the gunfire in the distance and decided to scope that out first to see how long they could hold out. I crept through a nearby building that had a massive hole in the back wall, that gave me the perfect vantage point to assess things.

Through the scope of my pipe sniper I could see who was at the station – two people hunkered by the station doors, and one towering asshole in a suit of power armor. Excuse me, he needed help? The fuck? Okay then, if you say so. I did a quick tactical assessment, then quickly laid a trail of mines from halfway outside the barricade of the police station to the doorway of the building I was scoping things out from. Then, with a deep breath, I started lobbing some of the molotovs I'd scrounged up at the barricade, hitting as many ferals as possible while avoiding the people by the door.

As I predicted, the ghouls came looking for the source of the secondary attack, allowing me to try out the new mods for my shotgun while giving the tin can man a little space to breathe. The way I'd clustered and spaced the mines very few of the ghouls made it to me, but the few that did got quickly acquainted with the business end of my boomstick. I waited until no more came after me, and I heard no more gunfire, then I made my way out of my kill box and down to the station.

To say that the 'Paladin' immediately got off the wrong foot with me was like saying it had only been a couple days since the bombs fell. I'm sorry, you send out an unencrypted distress call that could be picked by anyone who got the same frequency, then the first thing you do is hostilely interrogate the person who answered it? Granted, okay yes, I could have possibly been a raider, but they tended to run in groups as far as I could tell. Also, judging by the corpses I had found while clearing the area, one lone raider wouldn't have done well against that group of ferals.

There was also the likelihood that I could have just sniped his ass and his friends from my tactical window while they were preoccupied, but I didn't say any of that out loud. I just listened with both my eyes and my ears as he prattled on about their stupid mission, trying to get the feel of what this 'Brotherhood of Steel' was all about. First blush assessment told me they were going to be nothing but trouble, and the more they talked the worse that got. I decided to follow him to ArcJet because I wanted to do a field observation of his so-called training, and I also wanted to see if there was a cache there. It would have been a good place to hide one.