Brad Zaxxon's Arc

Chapter 6 of 9

The camp was rubble, but Brad wanted answers before the scavengers came. He walked into the ruined hideout with Donovan and Sinclair behind him. Boarded windows hung broken. Timber braces lay snapped across the floor. Brad's team had built its trading post on knowing the ground. Now he wanted to know these raiders down to the bone. "Search everything," he said. "Papers, gear, anything that tells us who they were." Donovan pried open a scorched field desk in the back room. A computer still sat on top, cracked but dark. He tapped the keyboard until the screen flickered awake. "Oh man, it's still got power in the battery," he said. His fingers moved fast. "Give me a second." Files scrolled past. His voice went flat and careful. "Brad. This isn't raider trash. This is a military evidence file. Vault 141 got hit by a nuclear blast. A hundred and fifty-four years ago." He turned the screen toward Brad. Weathered maps and stamped documents filled it. A key record card read the same thing in plain print. Brad stared at the screen. The vault his team had fought over held a scar older than any of them knew. Before he could speak, Sinclair called from the corner. He'd been quiet, the Red Hills recon man loaned to the operation, a trader who read a room the way he read a map. Now he held up a worn military folder, the paper edges soft with age. "Same file, friend. Physical copies." He set it on the desk beside the computer. "Somebody carried this here for a reason. You don't haul dead paper across the waste for nothing." Brad crouched and dug through a footlocker near the wall. Under a torn blanket he found a thick, battered book. He opened it. Dense handwriting covered every page. Sketches of camps and broken vehicles crowded the margins. Lists of names. Tribes crossed out with hard ink strokes. "It's a diary," Brad said. "A war diary. Six years of it. The raider nation broke apart. Split into tribes. These were the leftovers of a losing side." He looked up. "Keep searching. There's more here than a fight for one vault." Donovan copied the computer files to his tablet. Sinclair folded the military folder under his arm. Brad closed the diary and held it against his chest. The blast report, the folder, and the diary all pointed the same way. Someone had gathered vault history in this camp on purpose. "These raiders weren't just looting," Brad said. "They were hunting the vault's story. Same as us." He stood in the wreck, three records in hand, and understood the fight for Vault 141 had a history he'd only started to read.