Logan Harrison's Arc

Chapter 9 of 9

The Sentry Bot was dead. Its hull lay split in the doorway, smoke curling from the wound Fredrick's launcher had torn. Logan stepped past it into level three. Fredrick and Desior followed, boots crunching on scorched tile. Beyond the door lay bones. A dozen skeletons in Vault-Tec coats, jaws and ribs cracked by teeth, not bullets. The Sentry Bot had not killed these people. Something else had. Logan crouched over the nearest ruined machine, a shattered security frame. He read it the way he read all machines, by what was missing. Its casing was peeled outward. Bitten, not blasted. He caught a smell then, sour and wet, like meat left in the sun. Somewhere close, something gurgled. "Contact," Desior said, low. He raised his rifle at a side room. The thing burst out before anyone fired. It was no ghoul. Six limbs, tangled human and animal parts fused wrong, tusks jutting from a caved face. It reared and spat. Acid struck the tile where Logan had knelt a breath before. The floor hissed and bubbled. A drop caught his shoulder. He rolled sideways, hat gone, arm burning through his jacket. "Down!" Fredrick shouted. He was already up, launcher braced. Desior did not wait for the tube. He fired three shots into the creature's head, then dove clear as it lunged. Fredrick stepped past him, calm, and put a round from his Colt through its eye. The thing dropped, tentacles curling in on themselves. "Hold," Fredrick said. He walked the room's edge, Colt ready, checking the side chamber. Empty. He holstered the pistol. "Clear." Logan sat against the wall, gripping his shoulder. The acid had eaten through cloth into skin. It stung deep, worse each second. "I'm hit," he said. His voice came thinner than he wanted. Footsteps came fast down the stairwell behind them. Mary Long, the field hospital's tech, pushed into the room. She wore her blue scrubs and carried a blue and yellow medical bag against her chest. Logan had watched Zelda's team stock that bag with Radaway. He had not expected Mary this deep. "You shouldn't be down here," he said. "Zelda sent me the second the launcher fired." She knelt, already opening the bag. She flushed his shoulder with clean water, then pressed a stimpak to the burn. The sting dulled. "Acid. Any spray in your eyes?" "No." "Good." She glanced at the dead creature and went pale. "That's not a ghoul." Fredrick studied the fused corpse. "No," he said. "It made these bones." He nudged a skull with his boot. "It won't be the only one." Logan looked at the bones, then the side room, then the dark hall past it. Level three was open. The Sentry Bot was gone. But the thing that killed the scientists still crawled somewhere below. The server cores were closer now than ever. So was whatever made this thing. He stood, arm bandaged. "Then we seal this room and find where it came from."