Hiding In The Green: A Fallout 4 Story

Ill Met By Stormlight

Knight Rhys had a broken leg. Paladin Danse might be in power armor, but the ghouls soaked up laser bolts like sponges, and besides, even he had limits. He was tiring. Haylen could tell.

She might be a Senior Scribe, but she was still just a scribe, lightly armed and armored. Once Danse fell—and as another wave of ghouls assaulted them, mere feet away from safety, that fall might happen soon—she would be torn to shreds by the horde.

The eerie, dirty yellow-green sky flickered, showering them with rads. She had always wondered if the radstorms stimulated the ferals somehow, because there always seemed to be more of them during one. It didn't seem likely that she would ever get to compile any data on it, though, because it would take a miracle to save them now. The emergency beacon sang out their plea for help, over and over, but if anyone heard, they obviously didn't care.

Haylen's mind flashed irrelevantly back to the demonstration of that one-hit-kill poison on the Prydwen. If only, if only, if....

Groaning and flailing, another wave of feral ghouls charged. There were ones so ancient and withered you couldn't tell whether they had been men or women, though they were stark naked. There were newer ones which still wore ragged, filthy clothes. There were the ones which glowed and oozed horrible globs of greenish jelly when they were hit. Ghouls and more ghouls. 'For every sound that floats/ From the rust within their throats/ Is a groan.' There were so many of them that now they had to crawl over their own dead to get to the three members of the Brotherhood.

When she saw a feral jerk, convulse, and drop, dark froth spilling from its mouth, its eyes, everywhere, she thought it was a hallucination for a moment, a wish-fulfillment fantasy, but then another fell, and she heard gunshots as well, not from their guns, but somewhere out there in the filthy storm. And was that, could that be, the menacing growl of an attack dog?

Now the tide was turning. Between whoever was out there picking off ferals, and Danse and Haylen's own efforts, there were fewer of them. Then a male voice, rough and ragged, called out "Grenade!"

A flash of light and heat, and suddenly the area in front of the Cambridge Police station was clear. Clear of live ghouls, anyway. There were plenty of dead strewn around.

Out of the storm came three figures. A man in a hat and a pre-war trench coat, a woman in combat armor topped with a leather coat, and by her side, a dog. In the putrid-colored light from the storm, it was hard to see more than profiles.

"It's sad how many of them have something like a locket or a child's toy on them," Haylen heard the woman say. "Something of the person they used to be."

"Yeah," the man said. "Reminds you you're shooting somebody you might have liked to know, once."

"Is it possible they actually do come back to life?" the woman asked. "I don't care how overpopulated the world was before, sooner or later you'd think we'd make some kind of dent in their numbers. Instead, it seems like no matter how many we kill, the next time we swing by that location, there are just as many, if not more. Also, there are never any piles of bodies from the last time."

"That's a horrifying thought, but no," the man replied. "It may seem like we get swarmed by hundreds of ferals at a time, but usually it's less than twenty. Back when it was Massachusetts, this area was home to millions. As for why we never see any piles of old bodies—well, let's just say that like Supermutants, when ferals are hungry, they don't care what they eat as long as it's meat. I've seen them at it. Not that it's only ferals who eat ferals. Radroaches, molerats, bloatflies..."

"Nick, that is the most disgusting thing I've heard yet today."

He chuckled. "Good thing it's nearly tomorrow, then, because it'll be hard to top that."