Fredrick Carr took the call standing beside a rusted drum fire, three days from anywhere. Brad Zaxxon wanted him at the base. The Rangers had cracked open Vault 141, and now they needed hands to build something out of it, a trade and medical center in the ruins. Fredrick was a tuxedo cat in worn grey and rust fatigues, a former Swedish special forces soldier who never named his unit. He carried a .45 on his hip and a pack heavier than it looked. He hung up and started walking. He had gone hungry for a cause before. This was a cause. A Ranger drove him in. It was Warrant Officer Danials, the one who had shot the feral ghoul when the inner door opened. Danials said little on the road. He gripped the wheel and watched the dust for movement out of old habit. Fredrick liked that. A quiet driver was a live driver. The operations center rose ahead, brick and metal in desert camouflage. Antennas bristled from the roof. Supply crates lined the front wall. Fredrick had seen a hundred posts like it and outlived half of them. He stepped down and adjusted his belt so the 1911 sat clear of his hip. Brad met him at the door. He wore green tactical glasses and a camouflage cap, and he carried a thick bundle of files bound with battleboard straps. Fredrick knew the cat. Brad had taught him half of what he knew about the wasteland. Eight years in the Rangers had put steel and patience into him. Seeing him now, arms full of paper, Fredrick felt the old pull of a job worth doing. "You made good time," Brad said. He held up the bundle. Camouflage tape wrapped the cover. Vault 141 Medical Research Files, the label read. "Vault's open. Med-Serve's awake. We got a hospital going up and a whole lower level to clear. Heh. We got work to do." Fredrick took the files and felt their weight. Real weight, the kind that meant lives. "I live for this," he said. He grinned. "But files don't lift crates. We need recruits." Brad's smile faded. He glanced back at the crates, then at a battered tool cart parked near the door, its drawers stuffed with wrenches. "Yeah," he said. "That's the problem." He lowered his voice. "Between you and me, I've got six bodies for a job that needs thirty. Zelda spent every favor she had on the hospital. Kira's stretched thin on supply. Everybody's tapped out." Fredrick looked at the crates, the cart, the empty yard. He had signed on to build a center, and the center had no crew. "Then that's the first mission," Fredrick said. He shifted his pack. "Point me at where people gather. I'll find us hands." Brad nodded slowly. "Trade post east of here, former military and mercenary types pass through there looking for work. Most are good people but still vet everyone twice. Take Desior with you, he most of the people there.” Fredrick and Derior take the road to the trade post.

The road ended at a stone hut with a green tile roof. A sign called it the Dancing Dead Coffee Hut. Desior had turned back at the fork, sent to run supplies. So Fredrick walked in alone. The place buzzed with the low talk of tired workers. Mugs clinked. Steam rose off a battered counter. These were the hands Brad needed. Fredrick bought a coffee and started listening for who might sign on. Before he found his angle, a sharp tuxedo cat dropped onto the stool beside him. She wore desert fatigues and a tan safari hat, a radio pack strapped to her back. Sergeant Greymire. Fredrick knew the name from Brad's roster. She was the fast hand the Rangers called when trouble moved. "Carr," she said. She did not offer her paw. "Brad said you'd be recruiting. I'm here to make sure you don't hire a knife for your own back." She sipped, watching the door. "Two hours. A team's coming to meet us. I vouch for them, or you don't take them." Fredrick liked her straight talk. He nodded and waited. The coffee cooled. Workers came and went. Greymire said little, but her eyes never rested. Two hours later the door swung open. An orange and white tabby stepped in, green beret on his head, grey pack on his shoulder. Behind him came four more, dusty and armed. The room quieted a half-beat, the way rooms do when soldiers enter. "Captain Hills," Greymire said. She pulled her radio around and keyed it. "Brad, this is Greymire. Hills is here with four. You copy?" The speaker crackled. Donovan's voice came fast and dry. "Oh man, Greymire, you found Hills? Good. Hold one." A pause, papers shuffling. "Yeah, I've got his file right here. Ranger ID, clean record, security clearance checks out. Send me the ID number and I'll confirm it." Greymire read the number off the tabby's laminated card. Donovan hummed. "Zero-four-seven-two. That's him. He's solid, Carr. Hire the whole crew if you want the bodies." Fredrick was reaching for the card when a grey and black cat pushed through the crowd. Donovan himself, headphones around his neck, grinning. He clapped Hills on the shoulder like an old friend. "Knew this cat back in the day," Donovan told Fredrick. "Ran comms for him once outside Calico. He's good. No games." He looked at the four behind Hills. "Five hands. That's not thirty, but it's a start." Hills held out his paw. "We need work. I heard you're building something worth guarding." Fredrick shook it. Five, plus Greymire's blessing. Not thirty. But real. "We're building a center," he said. "Come see it." They finished their coffee and stepped into the dust. Fredrick led them toward the base with six new bodies at his back and the same hard problem waiting there. He had hands now. He needed twenty-four more.

Fredrick brought his six new hands back to the base and reported to the operations center. The desert-camouflage command post sat quiet in the heat, its map boards crowded with pins. Brad had left a folder on the table. Fredrick opened it. Base expansion reports, and two notes clipped to the top. Kira wanted three more med-techs added. Sinclair had written a single line: we need patrol vehicles. He read the reports twice. The base had walls and workers now. It had no way to move them. No trucks meant no patrols, no supply runs past the fence line. Fredrick set the folder down and keyed the radio. Donovan answered fast. "Oh man, you saw Sinclair's note. Yeah. We've got hands but nothing with wheels. Can't run a trade center you can't drive out of." "So where do we get them," Fredrick said. A new voice cut in, calm and flat. Sinclair. Fredrick had met him only in passing, the black and brown recon officer from Red Hills who had helped weaponize salvage against the raiders. Sinclair did not waste words. "I've been mapping it, friend," Sinclair said. "The scattered raiders left vehicles behind when Brad shelled their camp. Light armored patrol rigs. One's a Foxhound with a working machine gun mount. Good tan-and-rust camo. Combat-ready." "And the catch," Fredrick said. He knew there was one. "The catch is survivors," Sinclair said. "Not many. But armed. They're guarding the rigs at the old wreck site. Anyone who walks in gets shot. That's the deal." Donovan came back on. "Dangerous, but doable. I can jam their radios from the garage relay. Blind them for maybe ten minutes. After that they'll know something's wrong." Fredrick looked at the folder, then the map. Six hands. Twenty-four short. But he had Captain Hills and four soldiers, and Greymire had vouched for them. "We take the vehicles," he said. "All of us agree?" "Agreed," Sinclair said. "Foundation built on wishes won't hold trade weight. You want a center, you need wheels." "You bet," Donovan said. "I'll cut their comms on your mark." Fredrick loaded Hills and the crew before dawn. He carried his 1911, but Hills passed him something heavier from the truck bed. A compact automatic rifle, dark frame, long barrel. "For close work," Hills said. Fredrick took it. They moved on the wreck site with the light still grey. Donovan killed the raider radios on schedule. The guards never got their warning out. Two shots from Hills's crew ended it fast. No losses. Fredrick climbed into the tan Foxhound and turned the key. The engine caught. The machine gun swiveled clean on its mount. They drove three patrol rigs back through the gate. Fredrick parked the Foxhound by the operations center and cut the engine. The base had wheels now. But Fredrick noticed that the surviving raiders had started to group into small bandit gangs. They weren’t a threat to the base in any way but could be problematic for traders. Fredrick thought “War never changes.”

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.

The scouts were already below, mapping the secret stairs, when Fredrick drove up to the vault. Greymire rode beside him. The truck bed held the descent rig and the supply bundles Kira had packed for the deep levels. The old garage waited ahead, its Vault-Tec sign scarred by blast marks. Two doors hung punched full of holes. Fredrick parked and cut the engine. Zelda came out to meet them. She wore a red beret and a medic's bag on her hip. The orange striped cat ran the field hospital nearby, and Brad had told Fredrick she read supplies the way a doctor reads a wound. She did not wave. She walked straight to the truck bed and started counting. "Water. Rope. Two trauma kits." She lifted a strap and looked under it. "You brought the harness. Good. The others always forget the harness." She glanced at Fredrick. "Your mentor said you'd come light. You didn't." "Brad taught me to pack for the fight I don't want," Fredrick said. Zelda almost smiled. She zipped the bundle shut. "Then we'll get along." Logan came around the garage wall with a datapad in his good hand. The brown tabby had rebuilt the vault key and opened the inner door himself. He read machines by what was missing, and it showed in how he moved, careful of the two fingers he'd lost. He nodded at the crates. "Scouts hit the bottom of the stairs," Logan said. "Route's real. Past the collapse, clean." He tapped the pad. "But I need workers who can hold a lamp and not scream. I've got five men waiting on your say." He led them to the garage door. Five recruits stood in the shade there. Two wore old military boots. One carried a wrench like he knew its weight. They had lean, watchful faces. Fredrick had heard of them from Logan's radio calls, vetted men from the depot ruins. "Greymire cleared them this morning," Logan said. "Records, references, all of it." Greymire spoke up from behind. "I checked their old units. No red flags. They'll work." She adjusted her radio pack. "That's my read." Fredrick looked at the five men. He looked at the tools they held and the way they stood ready, not slouched. He walked the line once. One man met his eyes and did not look away. "They look good," Fredrick said. "Sign them." Logan handed over the pad. Fredrick pressed his mark. Five names locked in. Six recruits became eleven. Zelda watched him finish. "Eleven for a job that needs thirty," she said. Flat, not cruel. "And now they go underground." Fredrick pinned the last strap on the descent rig. She was right. He had the men and the gear to send a crew below. But eleven bodies split between the surface base and the deep route left both thin. The stairs were open now. The hard part was who he'd risk sending down them.

The rig hung ready on the truck bed. Fredrick had eleven names, five of them fresh. Now he needed to know what the deep route would take from those men before he sent any of them below. Greymire stood at his shoulder, radio pack humming. "You want gear checks done right," she said, "talk to the two who fixed the door and the two who read the servers." She keyed her radio. "I'll pull them in." Logan came first, walking his careful walk, the two lost fingers kept clear of anything he lifted. He carried a bright orange suit folded over his good arm. He dropped it on the tailgate. A radiation symbol stared up from the chest. "Explorer suit," Logan said. "Repaired. Seals hold." He tapped a scuff mark. "Below the collapse, the counters climb. Old reactor bleed, maybe worse. Bare fur down there and your men glow." He looked at Fredrick. "I need suits for anyone who goes past the stairs. Two, minimum. I'm one of them." Greymire nodded. "Radiation's not a maybe. Greymire says you'll want both problems solved before anyone descends. Suits and the door." "What door?" Fredrick asked. Sinclair answered as he came around the garage wall. Fredrick had heard the name on radio calls but never met the man. He was black and brown, a radio pack on his back, and he moved like someone who had already counted every card on the table. He set a battered case on the tailgate and opened it. Inside sat rows of tools, cleaned and fitted, a small screen among them. "The door past the collapse runs on a security lock," Sinclair said. "Prewar. Sealed tight. Your scouts mapped up to it and stopped, because a lamp won't open it." He touched the screen. "This will. I rebuilt the set myself. It reads the old locks and talks them open." He met Fredrick's eyes, plain and level. "But a tool's only worth the hand that holds it. You send me down, or you send no one." Fredrick weighed it. Two problems, both real. Radiation would kill slow. A locked door would stop the mission cold. He had the men. He needed the gear and the two specialists who came with it. "Then it's decided," Fredrick said. "Logan and Sinclair go with the deep crew. Suits for both, plus two spares." He looked at Greymire. "Log the hack set and the suits as mission gear." Logan zipped the suit closed. "Give me a week. I finalize the descent plan, fit the suits, test the seals." He jerked his chin at Sinclair. "He drills the lock on a spare panel first. No surprises at the bottom." "One week," Fredrick said. Sinclair closed his case. "One week, friend. Then we open the last door." Fredrick pinned the suit under a strap beside the rig. The plan had a date now. In seven days he would send Logan, Sinclair, and a handful of his thin crew below the collapse, into the reactor's bleed and whatever waited past the sealed lock.

The week was up. Fredrick stood at the level three door, deep in Vault 141. Logan crouched beside the lock, his two lost fingers curled away from the panel. The rest of the crew waited behind, weapons up. Past this door sat a Sentry Bot with a minigun and six rockets. It had guarded the level under lockdown for centuries. Fredrick carried what Brad had promised him for the job: a launcher on his shoulder and a heavy grenade at his belt. "Once I open it, the clock starts," Logan said. He tapped the lock. "The bot needs fourteen seconds to lock on. Toss the grenade first. Fry its brain. Then hit it with the tube while it's blind." He glanced up. "Miss the order and it eats us." Desior moved to Fredrick's right, grenade in hand. The grey tabby had run supplies and raids with Fredrick for weeks now. He no longer waited for orders. "I throw, you shoot," Desior said. "Same as the wreck site. Don't flinch." "I don't flinch," Fredrick said. He set the launcher against his shoulder and put his eye to the sight. "Open it." Logan worked the tool. The screen flashed. The lock clunked. The heavy door slid back, and cold air rolled out. The Sentry Bot stood in the dark beyond, plating scarred, camouflage faded to brown. Its orange eyes flared to life. A servo whined as the minigun barrel began to spin up. "Fourteen," Logan said, backing away. "Go." Desior pulled the pin and threw. The grenade struck the bot's chest and stuck. Blue light pulsed once, then burst. The pulse washed over the machine. Its eyes died. The spinning barrel slowed and stopped. The whole frame went still, arms locked mid-rise. "Now," Logan said. Fredrick squeezed the trigger. The launcher kicked hard against his shoulder. The rocket crossed the gap in a breath and hit the bot dead center. Fire filled the doorway. The blast threw metal against the walls. When the smoke cleared, the Sentry Bot lay in pieces on the floor, one leg still twitching. The crew moved forward through the smoke. Level three was open at last. This was the way to the medical labs, the heart of Brad's whole plan. But Fredrick's boots crunched on something soft. He looked down. Bones. Old bones, in torn Vault-Tec coveralls, scattered across the floor past the door. Not one body. A dozen. They had died on this side of the lock, trapped, clawing at a door that would not open. Desior lowered his rifle. "The bot didn't kill these." Logan crouched by the nearest skull. He studied a long gouge across the bone. "Teeth," he said. He looked up at Fredrick, dead level. "Something in here ate them. And the bot never let it out." Fredrick keyed his radio. "Brad. Bot's down. We're through." He looked into the dark hall ahead. "But we're not alone down here." Brad’s reply came back steady. “Sending backup now, 3 guards and medic Mary Long arriving in five minutes. Stay in place until they arrive.” Fredrick liked working with Brad because he plans ahead.

The medical labs were secure. With level three cleared, Fredrick took a break from the vault and joined a patrol topside. He rode with Warrant Officer Danials, a black and tan tabby who had fought beside the team on level two and taken ghoul claws for it. She wore Swedish fatigues like his own, a black beret, and a map case on her belt. She drove hard over broken ground. "There," Danials said. She stopped the truck near a wrecked transport. The Iveco sat on flat tires, its shell torn by an old rocket strike. A machine gun still hung from the roof mount. Bullet holes stitched the doors. They searched it together. Fredrick found a sealed crate wedged behind the seats. The label read rare medical supplies. Danials found a map folded in the glovebox. She spread it across the hood. Red lines wound through the hills to a spot marked St Alphonse's Pancake Restaurant. Faded notes ringed the site. Church. Raider base. Military camp. "Every guess but the truth," Danials said. She tapped the crate. "And this was headed there. Same name on the label." Fredrick keyed his radio. "Kira. We pulled a medical crate off a wreck. Sealed, marked urgent. Where do you want it?" Kira's voice came back fast. "Field hospital. Zelda's short on everything. Bring it straight in." They drove the crate to Zelda at the field hospital. The orange tabby medic pried the lid and looked inside. She did not smile. She just counted. "Stimpaks. Antirad. Surgical kits," Zelda said. "Enough to keep the ward running a month." She looked up. "Funny what survives when no one knows what they're looking at." "There's more," Fredrick said. He set the map on the table. "The crate came from here. So did others, maybe." Zelda studied the red lines. "Mary and Kira will want this. But I don't send people into a place with three names and no answers." She pushed the map toward him. "Take it to Brad." Fredrick found Brad in the command office. Brad pulled off his glasses and leaned over the map. "Heh. St Alphonse's," Brad said. "I've heard traders name that place. Never with a straight story." He traced the route with one claw. "Medical stock moving through there means somebody had a supply line running. Prewar, maybe still stocked." His voice quickened. "A cache like that would set the hospital up for a year, no more begging favors." "Or it's a raider church full of believers," Fredrick said. "Yeah. Could be both." Brad set his glasses back on. "Information's currency out here, and right now we've got just enough to get people killed." He folded the map and handed it back. "We prep an expedition. Vehicles, gear, a full team. We go find out what's really there." Fredrick took the map. The hospital had its supplies. But the crate had come from somewhere, and now the whole team would follow the line back to its source.

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."

The team gathered in Brad's command office the night after the ridge scout. Fredrick pinned his field notes beside a new board that had grown all week. Carr and Ann marks covered it now. Surveillance photos of the shrine. Arrows drawn across the perimeter. Someone had circled the church door twice in red. Lieutenant Ann Parks stood at the board, not Brad. Fredrick had recruited her six-person team for this exact job, because Rangers couldn't survive the radiation and ghouls at St Alphonse's. She wore grey-green camouflage and a faded beret. She traced the ridge line with one claw, calm as a surgeon. "My team watched the camp two days," Parks said. "The ghouls move at dawn. The raiders sleep late and sloppy." She tapped a photo of figures near the barracks. "We hit before either wakes." A repaired eyebot hovered by the door, its dented camouflage shell turning slow. It had carried her team's footage back from the valley. Parks played the clip on a cracked screen. Fredrick saw the shrine glow on the counter overlay. He saw the chained thing the ghouls fed. "When?" Brad asked. He leaned over the table, glasses pushed up. "Tuesday," Parks said. "Three in the morning. Two teams. Barracks and shrine at once." She looked at Brad. "We need your artillery on the ridge. Same strike window. Three a.m." Fredrick studied the board. "Why three days out? Why not tomorrow?" "Because the ghouls are moving in four days," Parks said. "They leave the shrine and march for the vault road. We hit while they're still home. One day's margin. No more." She wrote it on the board. Tuesday. Three a.m. The red marker squeaked. Brad was quiet a moment. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Heh. So we don't get to think long." "No," Parks said. "We don't." Fredrick already knew his piece. Amy Gill of the Atomic Cats held the relay network that tied the vault, HQ, and the feed tower together. Her lines would carry the strike timing to the ridge gun crew. Donovan had the channel open. Fredrick would run the coordination between Parks's team and Brad's artillery. "The guns can be laid by Monday night," Fredrick said. "Shells are counted. I'll ride the ridge myself and spot for them." Brad set both hands flat on the map. He looked at Parks, then at Fredrick. "Alright. We do it." His voice dropped low. "Between you and me, I don't like sending anyone into that heat. But if those ghouls reach the vault road, we lose the hospital, the trade, all of it." "Then it's Tuesday," Parks said. Brad nodded once. "Three a.m. Tuesday. Destroy the camp. Ready your teams." Fredrick pulled the marker from the board and drew the final arrow. Barracks. Shrine. Ridge. Three lines meeting at one hour. The plan was set. In three days the valley would burn, or they would.

Tuesday came. Fredrick lay on the ridge at 2:50 a.m., radio pressed to his ear. Below, the shrine glowed on his counter overlay. Parks's two teams crept toward the barracks and the church. The desert gun truck sat behind him, its 155mm howitzer laid and waiting. Donovan's relay line carried every voice. Fredrick's job was simple and impossible. Keep the artillery and the ground team from killing each other. "Teams in position," Parks said over the channel. Her voice was flat and calm, the same voice she used in Brad's office. Fredrick had hired her for exactly this. Rangers couldn't breathe near that radiation. Her six could. Then the shrine stirred. Fredrick saw ghouls rise from the dirt around the chained thing. They moved as one, not like wild ferals. The big one at the center pulled against its chains and stumbled. Its back legs would not hold. Something in it was breaking. "Carr, they're waking," Parks said. "Call it." Fredrick keyed the radio. "Parks, hit the barracks now. Ghouls are up but the big one's crippled." He heard gunfire start below, sharp and close. Her shrine team opened on the moving ghouls. Muzzle flash lit the church wall. "Gun crew," Fredrick said. "Shrine, my mark." He read the coordinates off his notes. The howitzer boomed behind him. The first shell landed short of the church. Fredrick corrected. "Add fifty. Fire." The second shell struck the shrine dead center. The glow on his counter spiked, then dropped. Dust rolled up the ridge. The chained thing screamed and tore free. It charged the shrine team. "It's loose," Parks said. Her team scattered back. "One more," Fredrick said. "Gun crew, drop ten. Fire for the big one." The howitzer answered. The shell caught the creature mid-stride. When the smoke thinned, it lay still in the crater. The counter reading fell to near nothing. Parks's voice came through, steady. "Shrine's down. Big one's down. We're cleaning the rest." Her teams pushed through the camp tent by tent. Scattered gunfire, then quiet. One ghoul at a time, they cleared it. By dawn the valley was silent. Fredrick walked down with a med-tech who carried a blue and yellow Radaway bag. Tammy Lammens, the field hospital's head nurse, checked each of Parks's team for radiation. She dosed two of them from the vials. "You're clean enough," she told the last one. "Go home." Fredrick found Parks by the ruined shrine. She looked at the dead creature, then at him. "No one on my side fell," she said. "Good shooting." Brad's voice crackled on the relay. "Fredrick. Talk to me." "Camp's destroyed," Fredrick said. "Shrine neutralized. Big one's dead. The ghouls aren't marching for the vault road." "Heh." Brad let out a breath. "Good. Mary will file the report. Get your people home." The road to the vault was safe now. The hospital would stand. Fredrick holstered his radio and started up the ridge.