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Chapter Text

The crowd milled and surged through Vault 27's atrium, easily an entire third of its population packed together and murmuring apprehensively amongst themselves.

"Thank you all for coming," Overseer Kanade addressed the crowd as the chorus of confused voices below her began to subside. "I realize this is difficult for all of us, but we need to face this crisis head-on. We're not just out one fusion core now, but we're also missing a friend. A brother. A son." She paused for a moment, quivering slightly as she tried to compose herself before delivering a statement she knew wouldn't go over well with the crowd below. "We're looking for volunteers to join an expedition to the surface, to rescue John and to recover a replacement fusion core."

The crowd of blue-suited vault dwellers erupted once again, the overseer giving them several minutes to process before a hand flew upwards and a voice split through the commotion. "I volunteer." The crowd around the girl parted, Overseer Kanade gazing down at her from the catwalk.

"I admire your bravery, Lilly," she responded, "and while assigning someone so close to our missing resident to this task carries certain risks..." the overseer stared down, pleading gray eyes locked with her own, "your brother is no doubt in a frightful state right now, and you may be the only person he'll listen to." She watched as Lilly's grim face began to brighten. "Very well. Report to the armory, Matt and the rest of the team will meet you there."

The expedition team met Lilly with open arms. Her cousin Royce simply wished her good luck, barely noticing as she retrieved a suppressed pistol and far more 10mm ammunition than necessary for what was supposed to be a short expedition. Her aunt Cheryl hugged her tightly as the team passed by her room on the way to the elevator, unaware of the meat cleaver missing from her kitchen cabinet.

The guards positioned around Vault 27's gargantuan door stood in silence, ushering the expedition team through and into the clearing that surrounded the other side, strewn with the skeletal remains of those who'd tried to seek shelter two centuries ago only to be turned away.

Alicia and Cole stepped forward onto the decayed concrete with rifles and Geiger counters in hand as the door sealed shut behind them, never expecting the screaming metal hollowpoint rounds that slammed into their skulls with unnatural precision. And by the time Matt had processed where the shots had come from, an impossibly sharp bone needle was already buried in his throat.

Chapter Text

"There it is again!" The Brotherhood soldier's gaze flitted up to his power armor-clad superior before snapping back towards the treeline and frantically peering into the darkness. "There's something moving, sir, did you see it?"

The knight engaged the thermal imaging device affixed to their helmet, following their subordinate's gestures as they strained to see through the optic's gray electronic haze. The spot he was pointing towards was just as dark and cold as the inky black forest that surrounded it.

"Thermals are clear, I'm not seeing anything over there. There's one heat signature up on the ridge, but it's probably just an animal." They turned to look at the soldier beside them. "Is this your first patrol out here?"

"Yes, sir," the soldier replied. "I'm not exactly, uhh... acclimated yet. Only just got transferred in, and I grew up in the marshes near Harvest, which is, like, as different from up here as it gets."

"You'll get used to it," the knight reassured warmly. "Just stay close, and stay vigilant. Once you're used to what's normal here, you'll have an easy time spotting stuff that's..." their electronically distorted voice trailed off as something rustled behind them in a cluster of redwood trees. The soldier beside them immediately turned on his heel, raising his rifle and fumbling for his flashlight. They once again engaged the old salvaged thermal optic, still met with no nearby heat signatures in its grainy view, nor was there a single creature revealed by the soldier's light. The redwood forest that stretched for untold miles around them seemed entirely lifeless.

The walking corpses lurking in the darkness, drawn towards the outpost as if carried by invisible marionette strings, had already come and gone.