Brad Zaxxon's Arc

Chapter 8 of 9

With Parks's team settling in for their three-week rehearsal, Brad turned to the part of the war he could still touch from a desk. He climbed to the garage rooftop where the radio base station sat. Donovan had wired it into the new network himself. Two nodes were live now, the vault and headquarters, linked across the Wasteland. Brad keyed the mic and read his update off the communications board. Node assignments. The Western station next. The Atomic Cats' New Reno tower holding as its own hub. He signed off and pinned the sheet back among the field maps. When he came down, Zelda was at the mission board, marking a row with a green check. She had bled every favor she owned to stock the field hospital, and she tracked her vault the way she tracked a supply count. "Level three's done," she told Brad, flat. "Research labs, offices, the staging room. Level four's still staging. We wait on the suits and a way through." She capped her pen. "Four's as deep as we go. Five and six stay sealed. The fungus down there wakes on air." She said it like a weather report. "Funny what kills you once someone opens the right door." "Good enough for a hospital and a trade station," Brad said. That had become the plan. He had let go of the deepest levels, and the trade post he wanted was closer for it. Fredrick Carr waited by the table with a woman Brad had met only by radio. Amy Gill. Light orange fur, tactical camouflage, no rust on any of it. She ran the Atomic Cats' tower access from Broken Hill, and her signature was the reason two Ranger nodes talked at all. She studied the pancake house photos without being asked. "Carr says you want to hit St Alphonse's," she said. Not a question. "Parks takes the barracks and shrine. We give artillery from the ridge," Brad said. "Three weeks out." Amy tapped the map. "The ghouls at that shrine feed something chained. Same mutation we've tracked on your road and in your vault. One source." She looked at him. "Burn it right, or it spreads to my routes. I'll loan you a relay node for the assault. Live coordination between your ridge and Parks's teams." Fredrick spoke once. "Cheaper than a dropped shell on your own people." Brad shook her hand on it. Then Amy slid a worn book across the table. The Atomic Cats' history, their rise from raiders to merchants with an army. "Read it," she said. "You're building what we built. Learn where we got it wrong." Brad read it that night by lamp. Her people had started exactly like the raiders at St Alphonse's. Trade had changed them, not guns. He closed the book. The assault had a tower node now, and his network had a third partner. But the book named a cost he hadn't planned for. The deals the Atomic Cats tend to be permanent. They survived for near 200 years not by killing but by absorbing or fusing with smaller groups. One other thing Brad noticed is that the Atomic Cats have been around so long that they know things about the old prewar world others can’t guess about like the persistent rumor that the war didn’t happen 250 or so years but over 500 years ago.