Fredrick Carr's Arc

Chapter 9 of 11

Brad wanted answers before he risked a full team. So he sent Fredrick out light to scout St Alphonse's first. Fredrick drove the tan armored patrol truck over broken ground, radar dish turning on its roof mount. Sergeant Greymire rode beside him. She kept the route map open on her knee, her green-and-brown fatigues dusty, radio pack humming behind her seat. "Stop here," Greymire said. She tapped a ridge marked on the map. "We look down, we don't go down." Fredrick eased the truck behind a low rise. They climbed the last stretch on foot and set up prone at the crest. Below sat the pancake restaurant, its faded sign still hanging. Fredrick knew Greymire from the trade post, when she'd made him wait two hours before approving his recruits. She'd been careful then too. He trusted that. She worked a long lens across the valley and took photo after photo. When she finished, she spread the developed shots on the dirt between them. The restaurant. A row of raider barracks. A church-like shrine with a cross above the door. She pointed at the figures near the buildings. "Count them," Greymire said. "Twenty, maybe twenty-five. But look close." Fredrick leaned over the photos. Some figures stood wrong. Skin peeling. Faces sunken. Half of them were turning. "Ghouls," he said. "Or on their way." "Believers who stayed too long," Greymire said. "Whatever's in that church is doing this to them." Fredrick pulled the geiger counter from his pack. He raised it toward the valley and swept it slow. The screen jumped. Numbers climbed as he aimed at the shrine, then the ground around it. "Hot," he said. "Hot near the church. Worse than the barracks." He checked the reading twice. "The whole site's leaking radiation. That's what's changing them." Greymire wrote it down in her field notes, clipping the photos to the pages. "So the supply crate came through a place that cooks people alive." She looked at him. "Brad wanted a cache for a year. This is no cache. It's a grave." They held position ten more minutes, marking gun placements and the church door. Then they slid back off the ridge before anyone below looked up. Fredrick drove them home fast, the radar dish spinning against a low sun. At base, Fredrick laid the field notes on Brad's table. The photos. The bound observations. The geiger readings. Brad pulled off his glasses and studied every page. "Radiation, ghouls, and armed believers," Brad said. "You did right not to go in." He tapped the church photo. "A full team walks into that, we lose people and gain nothing." "So we scrap it?" Fredrick asked. "No." Brad set the readings beside the map. "We know what it is now. That changes the plan. We don't raid it. We figure out how to shut off whatever's poisoning that valley." He looked up. "Get the team in here. We build a new approach tonight."