Jacob Burns and the Order of the Algorithm #Wattys2017

Chapter 2: Dead Man Walking

The next morning I woke up feeling like the ass end of a mutant mole rat, but I doubted a splitting headache and a growing sense of regret was going to get me out of this. It had been a long night, longer still with Hancock's "friendly" neighborhood watch patrolling by my door every ten minutes. I had hoped to be long gone by now, maybe somewhere to the southwest where the Brotherhood didn't yet have a hold. I had always thought Shady Sands had a nice ring to it, or maybe down to New Vegas, or Reno, or even Mexico for that matter. Hell, I've heard the miasma in the dead city of Los was just beautiful this time of year.

A knock pounded on the door and a graveled voice called out a five minute warning. After that, they'd be kicking down the door to "spray the place for vermin", and somehow, I didn't think he was talking about the radroaches.

I grabbed my things and slipped on my old bomber jacket, the one I got as a recruit when I first enrolled in the Lancer program. As I loaded up for the journey, I couldn't help but catch a glimpse of myself in the cracked mirror. My hair had grown long and unruly since my military days, and my brown eyes stared back at me bloodshot and broken. To top it all off, I was covered in a layer of filth that was all the rage with the raiders these days. Basically, I looked like shit.

That's what three months of hell looks like, alright. After The Prydwen fell, I was wounded and in need of shelter from my former Brothers, and fast. I had asked Diamond City of course, but as soon as they had learned who were after me, they kicked me to the curb faster than a bloatfly can spit. Vault 81 actually laughed in my face when I had asked them, and there wasn't much for settlements around these parts ever since the Minutemen fell at Quincy. So that left only one place to go. Problem was, Goodneighbor was what Hancock called a "free market" society, by which he meant the market was free to price gouge me into oblivion. Then again, I guess all those late nights at the Third Rail probably hadn't helped much either.

I quickly tucked my holotags under my shirt before heading out the door and down to the hotel lobby where Fahrenheit and her Watchmen were waiting for me. When I asked where Hancock was, all I got was a typically snarky response followed by the excuse that Hancock was far too busy with his mayoral duties to the townspeople to do anything today, which was code for "he was sleeping off a hangover". It was just like Hancock, let me do all the work so he can swoop in last minute to steal all the gold and glory.

There wasn't much point in arguing it now, so I left it at that and we walked out of the gates in silence.

*************

It wasn't a long journey to the vault, but it was a deadly one if you didn't know the way. The city was a labyrinth of back alleys and collapsed ruins, crawling with raider gangs, wild dogs, and damn near every other abomination the Wasteland had to offer. One wrong turn in downtown Boston and you just might end up on the menu at the local Joe Spuckies, now catering exclusively to Super Mutants. More than once, we were forced to the rooftops to avoid being seen, but once we crossed over the bridge and into the Cambridge area, the roads opened up and we could finally move freely again.

The sun was high in the sky by the time we reached the mine. An open pit spread wide before us, the bottom littered with rusted excavation equipment and barrels of nuclear waste. I led the party around the edge and towards a dense patch of brambles underneath a circle of dead trees. I cut away a swath with my machete to reveal a large shaft reaching deep into the earth and a couple of Watchmen hooked up the harnesses to the sturdiest looking tree, while the rest of us cleared away the brush. Looking down, the shaft stretched on forever. It was impossible to tell how far down it really went.