Fredrick Carr's Arc

Chapter 4 of 11

The three patrol rigs sat cooling by the operations center when Fredrick sorted the raiders' loot on the table. Most was junk. Ammo, spare boots, a cracked scope. Then he found the letter. He smoothed it flat under the lamp. A battered page, dense with grim handwriting and a hand-drawn map. He called in Logan and Kira. Logan arrived first. Fredrick had met the brown tabby only in passing, the Atomic Cats salvager who had rebuilt the Pip-Boy and opened the vault door. Logan read machines by what they lacked. He read the letter the same way. He set two fingers on the sketched map, careful with the hand that was short two others. "Medical center," Logan said. "Level three. Look here." He tapped a small square drawn beside the labs. "Secret door. Emergency stairs going down. That's a way past the collapse." He looked up. "This is the key. We've been fighting the blocked route. This letter walks us around it." Kira came in behind him and took the letter without asking. She held it under the glasses and read fast. "Please. Slow down." Her voice was clipped. "A raider drew this. I don't trust product until it's in my hands." She turned the page over. Then she stopped. "Hah. Look at the notes. Not a route. Prayers." Fredrick leaned in. Kira ran her claw along the cramped lines around the map. Faded talk of Montana, of the dead, of a man they called leader long after he was gone. "They didn't come here to loot," she said, slower now. "They came because this place is holy to them. The vault. The center. That tells me everything about how they think." She set the letter down. "You scatter people who steal. You don't scatter people who believe." Greymire had been reading over Fredrick's shoulder. The sharp tuxedo sergeant in desert fatigues tapped the top corner. "This isn't only raider scrawl." She pointed at a printed heading pressed faint under the ink. "Old lodge book. A directory. Oddfellows. Prewar meeting club." She frowned. "They wrote their map inside a stolen record. The history here is older than the war." Fredrick weighed all three answers. Logan wanted the stairs. Kira warned about the faith. Greymire saw a buried past. All of it was true. He folded the letter along its worn crease. "Then we use the stairs," Fredrick said. "Logan takes his scouts down that route and maps it. Kira, you plan for a fight that won't quit. Scattered gangs, but ones that pray. They'll come back." Kira nodded once. "I'll stock for a siege, not a scuffle." Fredrick pinned the map to the board. The blocked route no longer stopped the center. But he had a harder truth now. The bandits forming in the hills were not chasing loot. They were chasing faith and faith makes people do stupid things. It will take a few years but they’ll be back because stupid like war never changes.