Chapter Text

The journey to the Red Rocket station was about an hour's walk on foot from Sanctuary, complicated by the fact that a river cut off the small housing development from the rest of Concord. There had been a bridge, but two-hundred years of wood rot had reduced it to splinters that were mostly gone now, swept away by the currents decades ago. It had been nearly a five-minute endeavor to cross the river, but after that, it was a simple walk through a sparse forest of coniferous trees and deciduous skeletons that were just hanging on to the last of their leaves. The road was almost completely gone at this point, so they were depending on Max's Pip-Boy to guide them.

Hopefully the Red Rocket station was still there when they found it.

“Alright, what about Captain Cosmos?” Chloe asked as they strode along, having spent the better part of the last hour chatting about their favorite comic book characters. “Best radio show since the Silver Shroud.”

“Agreed up until the most recent season,” Rachel said. “A space monkey? Seriously?”

“Hey, don't you dare hate on Jangles the Moon Monkey,” Chloe insisted, leveling a stern finger at Rachel. “He's an American icon. Right, Max?”

Max glanced up, having been a bit lost in thought, and blinked a few times at Chloe.

“Um...I've always liked Mistress of Mystery,” she said. “She's a femme fatale, uses a .44 revolver, and she has no time for the Silver Shroud's male bravado.”

“She was totally crushing on Grognak in the first Unstoppables issue, though,” Rachel pointed out, which had Max shaking her head.

“That was because Grognak respected her strength and didn't treat her like a damsel in distress, like the Shroud and Captain Cosmos would,” she said. “She liked that Grognak treated her like an equal.”

“Wasn't there a one-off of them going on some adventure together?” Chloe asked.

“Yeah!” Max said, giggling a bit at the memory. “Grognak the Barbarian and the Mistress of Mystery versus AntAgonizer and the Mechanist. I actually once got Mom and Dad to read it, because they reminded me of...of Grognak and the Mistress....”

She trailed off, feeling her smile start to falter, but she simply shook herself. Nearby, Chloe hummed softly.

“I had to keep dad away from my comics,” she said. “He once dressed up as the Silver Shroud for Halloween, and he was in-character for like...a week.”

“I remember that,” Max said with a quiet giggle. “He started calling his car the Shroud-Mobile, and he would pull up at school and just...shout at you, 'Come along, faithful ward!'.”

“Oh my God, that sounds amazing,” Rachel laughed, and Chloe rolled her eyes.

“My dad was such a dweeb,” she said with a fond smile.

“He was great,” Max said with a nod, Chloe snickering at the statement before slowing to a stop. The other two did as well, and Max saw it, looming through the trees. A large, stylized rocket painted a bright red, standing out like a sore thumb among the foliage.

The Red Rocket truck stop. According to the map on Max's Pip-Boy, it was supposed to be right off of a fairly well-traveled highway quite close to Concord, but...it was all just trees. Max glanced between her two companions, and Chloe shrugged, drawing her pistol and moving forward toward the station. Max and Rachel had their own weapons out and flanked her, moving among the trunks. Their footsteps crunched quietly through the ancient, pulpy mulch on the forest floor but they likely only seemed loud in the otherwise utter silence of the morning.

Soon, they emerged into a clearing, and the actual Red Rocket station came into view, though it wasn't at all what Max was expecting. Where she had been picturing the dilapidated remains of an old truck stop, she saw that the place was nearly entirely refurbished and had been given a fresh coat of paint. The building itself was dominated by a large garage, which was currently thrown open to let in the morning sun. There was also a small dining area attached beyond the garage, and jutting out of one of the exterior walls was a metal overhang supported by four gray metal girders stylized to look like the smoke trail of the eponymous red rocket as it “took off”. The only feature that Max didn't remember were the twin turrets stationed around the entrance, chugging along and tracking left and right to look for intruders, she supposed.

“It looks...brand new,” Rachel observed, slowly lowering her weapon. “Someone took a lot of time to clean this place up.”

“But who?” Max asked.

“And why?” Chloe added.

“Well...we could go ask,” Rachel said. “Those turrets would have probably opened fire on us by now if their IFF chips were set to just track moving targets.”

“How can you possibly know that?” Chloe asked, sounding slightly impressed.

“Those are RobCo MK I 5.56mm automated machine gun turrets,” Rachel told her. “I did a report on AI's role in the future of warfare for Mr. Jackson's class. Aced it, by the way.”

“Oh, that,” Chloe muttered. “I just wrote 'War is hell, it killed my dad.' Got excused from the assignment.”

“Could we focus?” Max asked softly. “We need to get Lisa a new body. What's the plan here?”

“You know, standing out in the open like this is probably the worst way to discuss the plan of approach,” a voice said behind them, causing them all to jump in unison and spin on the spot. Chloe had her gun out and pointed at the newcomer, a blond man with tan skin and roguish smile, but she slowly lowered it at the sight of his bulky-looking body armor and the rifle clutched in his hands. He didn't have it pointed at them, but his finger hovered over the trigger.

“I'm Al,” he said by way of introduction. “Why don't you three come inside?”

…...

Inside the Red Rocket truck stop, Al had really tidied things up. It looked cleaner than it had even before the war. The tile floor gleamed a bright blue, and the walls shone white, almost reflective in the morning sunlight. It also smelled deliciously of food, real food. Two days of nothing but vegetables and watery broth had already begun to take a toll, and the moment she smelled cooking meat, Max's stomach growled with a ravenous need. Al noticed and nodded toward the small kitchen tucked away in the back.

“Hungry?”

“Yes,” they all three responded with various degrees of fervency.

“I got breakfast cooking,” he said. “Steak strips, eggs, home-fried tatoes, and cornbread all sound good?”

“Marry me,” Chloe said, staring at him with a wide-eyed gaze. Al only chuckled and gestured to the small bar in the dining area, which had three refurbished stools sitting in front of it.

“Have a seat,” he said, strolling past the bar and to the small kitchenette. He twisted a knob on the stove that he had somehow managed to shove into position before crossing to a fridge that actually worked, judging from the faint hum coming from it as he opened it.

“How did you get all of this working again?” Rachel asked. “I mean...back there, Sanctuary Hills was totaled.”

“Well, yeah, but this is out in the sticks,” Al said with an airy wave. “Frontier land. Up in Capital City, it's not bad. And there's Stadium City, southeast of here. There are places all over, you just gotta find them.”

A hot sizzling sound met their ears, and soon enough, the small kitchen area was filled with the scent of cooking meat, making Max's mouth water. Al got out a large metal spatula and poked at a few things on the stovetop before turning and making his way over to the little counter.

“So,” he said, gesturing at their jumpsuits. “Vault 111. Which one was that?”

“The one after 110?” Chloe suggested, and Al snorted, shaking his head.

“These vaults all had a thing, a shtick,” he said. “Like, one was a breeding ground for infectious diseases, one you had to vote each year to send someone off to their death in order to get your food, that sorta thing. What was yours?”

“Cryogenic freezing,” Max said. “They...stuck us all in cryo pods and froze us for two-hundred years.”

“That so?” Al said, looking thoughtful for a moment before blinking as realization struck. His eyes wend wide, and he examined them all in turn. “No shit. So you were all frozen? For two hundred years?”

“They stuck us in right as the bombs fell,” Max told him. “No warning or anything. They just...froze us.”

“Most of the pods had failed by the time we got out,” Rachel said. “It's just us three.”

“Yeah, Vault-Tec wasn't really good at thinking long-term,” Al said, leaning on the counter and reaching for a bottle of Nuka-Cola he'd apparently left there before. “Oh, uh...you guys want some? All I got left is Nuka-Cherry”

They all three nodded, and he stood, making his way back to the fridge. He paused for a moment to prod at the pan of home fries and dump some scrambled eggs into another skillet before returning with three ice cold bottles of Nuka-Cherry.

“Is Nuka-Cola a thing again?” Chloe asked, uncapping her own bottle. Max struggled for a moment with hers before Chloe simply reached over and popped the top in seconds, winking at her.

“It never stopped being a thing, actually,” Al told them. “Right before the war, the Nuka-Cola company ramped their production up to eleven, cranked out enough bottles that the company probably would've gone bankrupt if they'd kept going. People are still finding 'em everywhere. That bottle is damn near as old as you are.”

“How is it not pure syrup by now?” Rachel asked, swirling the cola in the bottle and eyeing it suspiciously.

“Some kinda additive they put in it,” Al shrugged. “Still tastes fresh, even after all this time. Even better when it's chilled.”

Max looked over to see Chloe taking a drink, smacking her lips briefly before her eyebrows raised appreciatively. “Not bad,” she said, taking another swig. Satisfied, Max took a drink of her own, finding it just as fresh as she remembered from before the war.

“You know, some of the lesser-developed areas consider those bottle caps a form of currency,” Al said, pointing to their discarded lids. “You might wanna hang onto them just in case. The Commonwealth just recently introduced an actual currency, but most places'll take that or caps.”

He excused himself again to tend to breakfast, leaving the trio with a bit to process. The more Al told them, the more questions he opened up. Was the Commonwealth just the new name for the greater Boston area? What were these cities he was alluding to? How exactly did he even know all of this?

“Alright, you three, breakfast is on.”

He set before them three plates of food, each bearing a hunk of steak, a pile of scrambled eggs, a scoop of home-fried potato/tomato hybrid, and a slice of toast that looked to have been made from cornbread.

And Max found herself musing that questions could wait until after breakfast.

…...

“I was a courier, in the Mojave area,” Al told them, passing a wet plate to Max, who toweled it dry and sat it on the kitchen counter. “Out in Nevada.”

“Jeez, that place was already a wasteland before the apocalypse,” Chloe muttered, and Al chuckled at that.

“You are not wrong,” he said. “But mankind bounced back. Built Vegas back up, called it New Vegas. Hell, you can barely tell the difference anymore.”

“I've always wanted to go to Vegas,” Chloe said.

“It's something else,” Al nodded. “They might even like a Pre-War perspective. Help them recapture some of the glitz Vegas used to have.”

“Hey, a job's a job,” Chloe told him.

“So,” Al said once the last dish was washed and dried. He toweled his hands off and tossed the cloth onto a counter at random, fixing his hands on his hips and staring at the trio. “You mentioned a friend that needed a new body? Lisa?”

“Yeah,” Max said, reaching into the bag she'd brought along and pulling out Lisa's AI core. “She was my family's Miss Nanny robot before...the war. She's pretty much...all I have left except for Chloe.”

She felt Chloe's hands on her shoulders, squeezing gently, and she relaxed a bit into the contact, leaning back and resting against her friend.

“Well, I can probably fix up an old protectron I've had sitting around in the garage,” Al said, staring down at the core. “Only problem is, the circuit board is shot to hell, and I don't have a replacement.”

“So...back to square one?” Rachel asked. Al was silent for a moment, still staring thoughtfully down at the core in Max's hand.

“Maybe not,” he said. “Some folks set up shop down the hill, started clearing out some rubble and building up a settlement. I haven't really visited, but one of the traveling merchants that comes through mentioned they have an awful lot of electronic equipment loaded in their truck. Maybe you can convince them to part with a RobCo PTN-3750 CNU circuit board.”

“...Uh...might need to write that one down,” Chloe said after a short pause. “But yeah, let's do this.”

…...

“You know, we've been doing a lot of walking in the past two days,” Chloe said, sounding a bit sullen as they picked their way down a hill that had once been a road, bound for nearby Concord and the settlement that had apparently recently sprung up there. Al hadn't known much, only that there weren't very many of them and they were apparently dismantling the decrepit buildings and salvaging construction materials, rebuilding them into functioning shelters. And there was a technology expert among them, it seemed.

“A little exercise never killed anyone,” Rachel insisted. “C'mon, we have to fix Lisa.”

“Yeah, that's true,” Chloe said with a smile over at Max, ambling her way to wrap an arm around her shoulders. “How you feeling, Max? You've been quiet.”

“I'm just...taking this all in,” Max sighed. She was quiet for a moment, neither Rachel nor Chloe prodding her. A few silent moments later, she spoke. “Mom and I would sometimes go shopping in Concord. We'd park the car and just go walking through the downtown area. There was this one little coffee shop that had these amazing turnovers. And then we would go to this little photography boutique that had all of this amazing equipment that I could never dream of buying, but the owner knew I loved taking pictures, so he'd let me at least try the stuff out.”

“Sounds like a cool guy,” Rachel said. “You and your mom must have had a lot of fun.”

“Yeah,” Max nodded as they reached the edge of Concord, taking in the sight of the crumbled remains that were all that was left of most of the buildings. “Yeah, we did.”

The sprawling city of Concord had definitely seen better days. Anything that had been constructed out of brick or wood was simply a heap of crumbling mortar, splinters, and concrete, several piles even covering the remains of entire roads. There were a few metal buildings left that were apparently from before the Great War, though those were little more than sheds and shacks. Max could see where the new settlers had been salvaging bricks and rebuilding them into proper buildings, or at least one building that looked new among the remains.

There was also gunfire.

“Hear that?” Chloe asked, and the other two nodded. “Over there.”

She pointed toward the twisted remains of a metal shed on the outskirts, and they hurried over to crouch near the wreckage. Max reached for the gun at her waist, twitching the safety off and taking a deep breath as she peered around the shed. A long side road stretched out in front of her and led toward the building she had seen earlier. Something very heavy had packed down the rubble and stone into a semi-solid path. Along the road, a few bodies littered the ground, pools of blood beginning to form beneath them. Max's hand shook for a moment, but she took a deep breath and forced herself to steady it. It was the apocalypse; people were probably going to die. She just had to make sure she wasn't one of them, along with Chloe and Rachel.

“This way, the road is clear,” she said, leading the other two out from behind the shack and down the road. Further along, they came upon the reconstructed building, a three-story number made of refurbished brick and wood. A massive clearing had been flattened out in front of it, a whole block of buildings cleaned out completely in what was probably the beginnings of a Main Street. As Max drew closer, she saw that it was swarming with men in what looked like a modern take on medieval armor, complete with small horns on their helmets that made them look like post-apocalyptic Vikings. All of them were carrying various firearms that they were firing at the building. Max saw a lone figure on the third floor, crouching on a small balcony and firing back. The loud buzzing sound of a capacitor discharging a microfusion cell told Max that whoever it was was armed with a laser rifle.

“What do you see?” Chloe asked from right behind her, causing Max to jolt briefly. She was like a ninja.

“Four or five guys,” she said. “They look...like zombies.”

“What, really?” Chloe scooted closer and peered right over Max's shoulder. “Wow, that's...messed up.”

The five men in the road looked like burn victims that had escaped from intensive care a bit too soon. Their skin was heavily scarred and covered in sores, and their eyes looked hollow and black. What hair they had was thin and patchy, and though Max couldn't make out words, they shouted to each other in raspy, growling voices, like even their vocal cords hadn't escaped the damage. One drew close enough that Max could hear him as he fired a series of shots from his pistol.

“This is our land, smoothskin!” he shouted at the man on the balcony. “Your kind aren't welcome here!”

He ran his clip dry and cursed, turning to look for cover as he popped the empty clip out of his pistol and reached for a new one. He was in the middle of reloading when his eyes landed on the trio of girls.

“Whatta we got here?”he smirked, raising the pistol, and Max froze, fear gripping her as she stared directly down the barrel of the gun. There was no fight or flight instinct, as she had always imagined there might be if she were ever in this situation. Most action stars managed to smack the gun away or dive aside in time for the shot. But when confronted with the real thing, Max could only stare dumbly as the ghoulish man's finger squeezed the trigger.

“Max!” Chloe's voice echoed from a great distance as Max felt herself yanked back. As she fell, Chloe leapt at the man, and a gunshot sounded. Max saw a hole appear in the back of Chloe's jumpsuit, a spray of red following behind it, and Chloe pressed her gun against the man's neck as she fell against him.

Koom!

“Chloe!”

Another gunshot sounded, the gunman falling as Chloe crumpled. Max sobbed out Chloe's name once more, holding her hand out toward her friend, the last remnant of her old life, the only semblance of normalcy in this world. She couldn't lose her, not Chloe. Not her, too.

As Chloe fell, time slowed, but Max wasn't imagining it. She watched as Chloe froze mid-fall, her face frozen in shock and terror, before Max felt her outstretched hand grip onto something, something that wasn't there but was still very much present. Somehow, she knew she was able to pull this thing, whatever it was, and she did so, watching as time seemed to spin back around her, rewinding before her very eyes. A rushing sound filled her ears as the bullet sped back on its path, through Chloe and back to the man's gun, the hole closing up behind it. Chloe and the gunman separated, Chloe backing away and resuming her position behind Max while the shooter's hand reached up and pulled the full clip from the gun, tucking it back in his belt. Just as the empty clip was flying back toward his gun, Max released her grip with a gasp, drawing the gunman's attention.

“Whatta we got - ?”

Koom!

Max stared down her arm at the gun's sights, the other supporting the weapon from underneath as she watched a hole bloom in the man's skull, his gun falling to the ground shortly before he did as well.

“Not. Chloe.”

“Whoa, Max, that was ice cold,” Chloe said, and Max breathed a sigh of relief at the sound of her voice. She took a deep breath, peering around the battlefield, and saw that the other shooters had heard her gunshot.

“C'mon, we have company,” she said. Across the street, there was a military cargo truck parked near the door of the building, the rear door thrown open to reveal crates of what appeared to be salvage. Whoever lived here had probably just gotten back from a scavenging trip, only to be attacked by these...zombies. These people that would simply kill Max, kill Chloe, kill anyone just because they wanted to.

Not today.

There were four of them outside the building, two carrying pistols, one with a shotgun, and one with a hunting rifle. Max saw Chloe raise her gun and fire on the guy with the hunting rifle, leaving her to dash for cover behind a crate sitting on the ground near the back of the truck. A trail of bullets followed in her wake, pinging against the brick wall behind her and shattering a window. She dropped to the ground behind the crate, taking a deep breath and waiting. She heard a last few shots before a clicking sound came, followed by a swear as the guy dashed for cover. Out of ammo. Max took another breath and stood, raising the gun and watching him run away.

Let's see if it happens again, she mused, flexing her fingers and grabbing onto...the timestream? Reality itself? Now that she had done it once, it seemed like it was always there, just within reach. The familiar rushing sound returned, and she watched her foe retrace his steps in reverse. With a flex of her fingers, he began to zoom along his path, raising the gun again. Just as a curl of smoke wafted back toward the barrel, Max released her hold on time, hearing him try in vain to fire a last couple bullets, but Max was already there, aiming at him.

Click-click-

Koom!

“Dad always said, don't forget to count your shots,” she told him as he fell to the ground. There was a muted click, the sound of a revolver chambering a round, and Max froze as she felt something press against her head.

“He probably should've told you to be more aware of your surroundings,” a growling voice said. “Don't move. Any of you. We could use a few more comfort girls back at our barracks. I'm gonna walk you to the truck, you're gonna get in, and - “

Taking hold of the timestream was a lot easier this time, but the pressure on her head seemed a little more intense as she rewound time for the third time in a short period. Was this even a short period to use this strange new power? She didn't know whatever rules came with it. Where had it even come from?

No, Max could ponder questions later. She had to save all three of them from becoming zombie rape-bait, something she had never thought she would have found herself needing to do.

The pressure left her head as she released her hold, raising her gun and firing in the direction the man had come from. She was rewarded with a grunt and turned to see the last of the zombie men falling to the ground with a bullet in his neck. Shaking herself a bit, she had to take a moment to reorient herself. Doing this too many times in quick succession had left her head feeling a bit wobbly.

“Max, that was so cool!” Chloe said, running over and hugging Max tightly. Max shut her eyes and let herself sink into her friend's embrace, resting a moment. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I just...need a moment,” Max said. She took a deep breath and stood, peering up at Chloe. “Are you okay?”

“I just watched my best friend totally badass her way through a gunfight,” Chloe said. “You were like...shoom, shoom, 'I'm here, I'm there, bitch I don't even gotta look at you,' bam! How did you do all that?”

“I...something happened when that first guy found us - “

She was cut off by a voice from above them, and they all looked up to see the man from the balcony, now directly above them. Unlike the others, this guy's chocolate-colored skin was in perfect shape, his eyes wide and contrasting starkly. He wore a duster and clutched what looked like a tricorn hat right out of the American revolution to his head. Max serious doubted such a thing had lasted several hundred years; maybe he had had it made himself?

“Hey, you three!” he shouted. “Up here! There are more of the bastards in the building! I have a group of settlers holed up in here. We've barricaded the door, but they're almost through! Grab what you want from the salvage truck and help! Please!”

“Shit, c'mon,” Chloe said, immediately hurrying to climb into the truck. Max clambered to follow, standing stooped a bit in the truck's cramped interior. Inside, she saw the crates she had spotted earlier were branded with the iron star of a military supply crate. They were also filled with guns, ammo, tactical body armor, all in near perfect condition. “Jeez, were they going to war?”

Max couldn't make heads or tails of much of this stuff, but she needn't have bothered; Chloe dropped a cloth harness of sorts lined with ballistic plating over her, strapping it in place over her vault suit. She then tossed Max what looked like riot gear kneepads next, and Max yanked them on, managing to strap on a pocketed belt that Chloe also lobbed at her as she herself donned a set of what looked like military-issue battle armor. Nearby, Rachel had found a makeshift metal breastplate not unlike the ones the zombie guys had been wearing, coupling that with leather pads on her elbows and knees and leather guards on her shins and wrists. She raided an ammo chest, snagging up a few 10mm clips and tossing them to Max, who caught them and stuffed them into a pocket of her belt.

“Ohohoho, yeah,” Max heard Chloe croon, and she turned to see her best friend drawing out a double-barrel shotgun, flipping open the break action and finding it already loaded. She whipped it back shut and slung the gun over her shoulder, snagging some ammo and tucking it into her belt. “Momma's gonna put some bastards down with this.”

“Just watch the kickback on that thing,” Rachel said, drawing out an aluminum baseball bat. “You'll dislocate your shoulder if you're not careful.”

“A baseball bat?” Chloe asked with a nod at the item in question.

“And a revolver,” Rachel replied, withdrawing the gun in question as she spoke. “Snagged it off of one of those corpse guys. He had a whole bunch of ammo for it, too. I figure I'll bash their heads if they get too close, right?”

“I like it,” Chloe said as they hurried back out of the truck, hopping to the ground and heading for the door to the building. “Max'll pick 'em off from far off, I'll blast 'em if they get close, and Rachel can smack 'em if they reach us.”

“Count bad guys, memorize defining features, don't forget them, don't stop until you get to zero,” Max breathed out, and Chloe and Rachel fixed her with twin curious looks. “Dad...used to talk in his sleep.”

They said nothing, Chloe placing a hand on the door handle and yanking it outward. Max peeked in first, hearing distant gunfire from upstairs. The ground floor was large and open, sunlight streaming in through the open windows to light a large staircase that led up to the higher levels. There were a few doors off of the ground floor, leading to who-knew-where. More concerning, there were two zombie men flanking the stairs, wearing the same metal armor and horned helmets as the guys from outside. They jumped at the sudden intrusion, but Max had her gun up and trained on the one on the left before they could even take a step.

Koom!

He jolted backward as the bullet hit the small bit of exposed flesh above his breastplate, landing and not getting up. His partner paused to chance a look at him, long enough for Chloe to hurry up and crack his face with the butt of her rifle. For good measure, Max hurried forward and shot him square in the forehead. Wordlessly, they moved up the stairs, pausing when a crack of gunfire sounded behind them.

Krack!

Max looked back and saw Rachel lowering her revolver, a third zombie guy that had been lurking out of sight in one of the rooms crumpling to the ground. She smiled at Max, who smirked back and continued their progress up the stairs. They arrived on a wooden landing that stretched back into a hallway wide enough for the three of them to walk elbow-to-elbow. At the far end of the hallway, past more doors, another staircase led up and out of sight. Max gestured at the other two to hug the walls as she saw two pairs of feet come into view, hurriedly making their way down the stairs. She slunk back next to Chloe and waited.

“I thought we got all of 'em,” one of the new arrivals said, his growl of a voice indicating him as another zombie guy, as was his partner, presumably.

“Could be they had backup,” the other said. “Or just bleeding hearts passing through, trying to - “

Koom! Krack!

Max got the left one in the neck, watching him scrabble at the bullet wound before collapsing in a heap. Rachel's shot landed right in the middle of the other one's forehead, which Rachel seemed pleasantly surprised at.

“Damn, I'm getting good at this,” she said, and Max snorted softly.

“You guys need to stop kicking so much ass, I wanna use my shotgun,” Chloe huffed petulantly.

“You are ridiculous,” Max said with a rueful smile, leading the way down the hallway. “C'mon, I think this is the room they're holed up in.”

“Lead the way, Captain Max,” Chloe said with a smile.

Max crept up the stairs, which ended on another landing, this one much smaller, only just big enough for the three of them to fit. There was an ornate door, which bore a number of scuff marks and bullet holes, evidence of several attempts at forced entry. Someone had probably barricaded it from the other side. Max raised a fist and knocked on it a few times.

“Hey, it's us,” she said. “The girls from out front.”

After a moment, they heard the shuffling of something heavy being moved across the floor, then the metallic scraping of several locks being undone before the door finally opened, revealing the dark-skinned man from earlier and a room full of people huddling in chairs or in corners away from the windows. The room itself appeared to be a simple office comprised of a desk, a basic office chair, and a few couches along the walls. Max counted about five people total, including the man at the door.

“Wow, you work fast,” he said in a smooth voice, stepping back to let them inside. “You got all of them?”

“Unless any of 'em chickened out and ran,” Chloe said.

“That'd be about the first good luck we've had,” the guy said, moving over to the desk to set down his weapon, which Max observed was some sort of crank-action laser rifle. The way he had used it before suggested he was very familiar with the weapon, despite how impractical it looked. “I'm Preston Garvey, with the Minutemen.”

“I'm Max,” Max introduced herself. “That's Chloe and Rachel.”

“'Sup?” Chloe greeted him.

“Nice to meet you all,” Preston said. “Really, it is. We were in a tight spot there.”

“You couldn't have used your neat laser gun?” Chloe asked, nodding at the crank-laser in his hands. “Thing looks like it could pack a wallop.”

“I had to make sure the others were safe,” Preston said, gesturing at the people in the room. “These people aren't combat trained, and they've already been through hell anyway.”

“What happened?” Rachel asked with a look around at everyone.

“About a month ago, our settlement in Jamaica Plains was overrun,” Preston said. “Ghouls. We settled in Lexington, but then these crazies found us.”

“Who even are they?” Chloe questioned him with a gesture at the stairwell, in the general direction of the .

“They call themselves the Gauls,” Preston said. “I guess they're named after some ancient Iron Age Celtic civilization. Rumor is they just took the name of the old Boston basketball team and ran with it.”

“And why do they look like that?” Chloe asked. “All...corpsey.”

“You've never seen a ghoul before?” Preston asked, looking perplexed. “What rock have you been living under?”

“A vault door,” Chloe said flatly. “We just got out.”

“That would explain the suits,” Preston said with a wide-eyed look at them all in turn. “Wow, this must be a bit of a shock.”

“Only slightly,” Rachel said. Max, meanwhile, drifted away from the conversation, toward the other occupants of the room. Besides a brunet boy at the desk tapping away at a computer terminal, there was a couple of Asiatic descent, though Max was horrible at discerning anything more specific than that, and there was an old woman in a loud pantsuit and...a turban –

“Wait!”Max gasped softly. “You!”

“Well, nice to finally see you on the physical plane, kid,” Mama Murphy said, looking just as she had in Max's dream the night before. “I was starting to think you were just a figment of my imagination. Thought I'd have to see a therapist.”

“You're...Mama Murphy,” Max said, and the old woman rolled her eyes.

“Catch on quick, huh?” she asked, staring at Max for a long moment. “Hm, you got...something about you. Something powerful latched onto you since last time, something that's gonna change the fate of the Commonwealth. Maybe the whole world.”

“You...how do you know about...?”

“I got the Sight, kid,” she said. “It's hard to describe, really. I just see stuff, stuff that's not there but will be or...stuff that's there but can't be seen. Like on you. You got something big on you. A storm. The tides of time are...swirling around you, like a vortex.”

“But what does it mean?” Max asked, unable to keep a hint of desperation out of her voice. “I-I saved Chloe, and...what else? What am I supposed to – “

“Preston!”

Max turned to see that the boy at the desk, who looked to be even a bit younger than Max now that she got a good look at him, was gesturing at a small bank of video consoles against the wall, between two windows. On the screen, security footage showed more of the Gauls, unmistakable in their armor, making their way up the main street. In the lead, one of them had armor with numerous decorations and ribbons, likely some sort of commander.

“Damn it,” Preston said. “It's Brennus. I didn't think he'd make an appearance after last time.”

“You know that guy?” Chloe asked as Max made her way over.

“That's Brennus, the leader of the Gauls in this area,” Preston said. “He's been after us since Lexington. We think he's looking for someone.”

“He's probably after me, Preston,” Mama Murphy said from her place on the couch. “After my Sight.”

“Well, if he is, we can't let him have it,” Preston said, turning to the trio. “I know you've already helped us out once, but we need you again. Please, if we can clear these guys out and take out Brennus, we might stand a chance at being able to settle in this area.”

“I dunno, that guy's got a lot of guns,” Chloe said, peering closely at the screen. “There are like a dozen guys with him, too. We're pretty good at this, but we're not quite that good.”

“Preston, what about the suit?” the boy at the computer asked, peering up from his computer console for the first time since they had entered the room. His eyes—round and brown like a puppy's—shot wide when they landed on Max, his mouth falling open slightly. “Um...there's suit...um, a suit of power armor on the roof of the building.”

“Nice,” Chloe said. “What kind?”

“Mostly series T-45,” the boy said, his gaze lingering on Max for a moment before he glanced back at Chloe. “I did just fix up the right arm and leg with T-51 plating, and the chest has been upgraded to B-grade. There's also a minigun.”

“I'm in,” Chloe said immediately. “Minigun. Let's go, I'm ready.”

“Is the fusion core still in the armor, Warren?” Preston asked, and the boy named Warren nodded.

“I was doing some diagnostics on it earlier,” he said. “I...even got the radio working, so you can communicate with it using the transceiver. It's raring to go.”

“Here,” Preston said, holding his rifle out to Max, who took it. “No need to reload. Just crank the capacitor and fire.”

“Oh,” Max said as the rifle was pressed into her hands. “Um...thank you.”

“Don't thank me until you've saved us,” Preston said, though he wore a small smile as he spoke. “Roof access is through the other door over there.”

He pointed to a door past Mama Murphy, along the same wall as the one they entered, and Max led the way, passing by the couch where the gypsy lady sat.

“Good luck, kid,” she said as they made their way through the door. A narrow, claustrophobic staircase greeted them, leading the cramped way up to the roof. Max pushed open the roof access door with a groaning creek, and they stepped out onto the metal plating of the rooftop, their footsteps clunking softly.

“Whoa,” Chloe sighed out appreciatively, doing a slow spin on the spot to take in the sight of Massachusetts sprawling around them. “Nice view.”

Up here, Max could see far and wide, all across Concord and beyond. The sun was high in the sky, the Boston Commonwealth gleaming a gray-green through the distant fog. It was beautiful, in a way, and up here, the crumbling buildings and wreckage of civilization disappeared amidst trees, grass, rolling hills. The world hadn't been destroyed, at least not completely. Sooner or later, Max figured, something would always grow back.

“Oh, there it is, there's my new best friend,” Max heard Chloe say, turning her attention away from her ponderings and back to the situation at hand. Chloe was crossing the rooftop, bound for a towering set of power armor that looked not unlike the ones Max had seen guarding the vault so long ago. Next to it sat a large metal crate with the aforementioned minigun and transceiver perched on top of it. Chloe uttered a noise of relish as she hurried toward the suit, all but running across the rooftop.

Years before the Great War, the military had been unsatisfied with the lack of mobility infantry tanks had had. Sure, they had been fast and capable of dishing out damage, but they had been matched too evenly with what the Chinese forces had had to offer. America had needed an edge. And that edge had come in the form of the West Tek Research Facility's T-45 power armor. Capable of withstanding everything short of a full-scale ballistic bombardment (and later models had boasted resistance even to such damage), the armor was nothing less than a tank shaped like a person. Dad had been the leader of a power-armored fireteam, unofficially dubbed the Four Horsemen. He had even once earned a commendation for his skill as a power armor pilot.

“Chloe, do you have any idea what you're doing in that thing?” Rachel asked as Chloe circled the armor.

“Kinda,” Chloe replied with a shrug, reaching up to twist the release valve on the back of the suit. With a soft, popping hiss, the armor's plating released and folded away to reveal the padded interior where the pilot was meant to go. “Dad piloted one of these babies in the war. Grenadier Rifleman. He made the big explosions.”

“Okay, but did he ever tell you much about how to actually pilot one of them?” Rachel asked, only becoming more visibly nervous as the armor closed up. When Chloe spoke next, her voice was now distorted by the suit's helmet.

“Rach, it'll be fine,” she said, flexing her arms and taking a few steps that caused the roof to vibrate a bit under Max's feet. “Hah, this feels fucking amazing! Max, do I look awesome!?”

“So awesome,” Max said with a smile, picking up the transceiver and holding it aloft so Chloe could see it. “Don't whip your arms or legs around too fast. Let the armor move for you and not just with you. I'm gonna give this to Rachel so she can be your spotter, and I'll give you covering fire.”

“Wow, Major Max with the strategy,” Chloe said, and Max could just imagine her smile behind the helmet as she sprang a clumsy salute, her hand pinging against her helmet. “Yes, Ma'am.”

She turned and gripped the minigun, hefting it easily and making her way to the edge of the building with a series of muted mechanical whirs as her armor flexed and moved. Max and Rachel tailed her to the edge, watching as she leapt off. There was a moment of utter silence as she fell like a rock, then an earth-shaking impact when she landed.

“I am the instrument of your doom!” Chloe shouted, and Max heard the quiet mechanical hum of her minigun winding up before unleashing a barrage of bullets that sprayed the oncoming line of Gauls. “Look upon me and despair!”

“Definitely been reading too much Silver Shroud,” Rachel muttered with a shake of her head, speaking into the transceiver. “Chloe, guy with a shotgun on your six. Max, how do you know so much about power armor?”

“My dad was tapped to give a presentation about it,” Max told her, cranking the laser musket and taking aim. She lined up the iron sights and fired, watching a distant Gaul warrior fall to the ground. Below, Chloe spun and backhanded the attacker with the shotgun, sending him flying a good five feet into the side of a nearby building. Already, half of the Gaul forces were down or injured, the minigun a destructive sight to behold.

“Maybe you should be down there in the armor,” Rachel said with a grin, turning back to the transceiver. “Chloe, the leader guy is trying to flank you. Watch your back. West street.”

“I don't think I could really utilize power armor as well as Chloe,” Max said, cranking the capacitor on the gun and taking aim on another Gaul, this one camped on a rooftop and taking aim at Chloe in turn. She fired.

K-chnk!

The Gaul crumpled and fell right off the rooftop and into the street, landing near Chloe, who had spun and simply smacked Brennus with the barrel of the gun elbowing him to the ground and taking up a dropped shotgun with one hand.

“Fuck you, zombie,” she said, her voice coming out of the transceiver. She fired the shotgun, and Max was glad she was so far away, but even then, the large red smear that appeared on the street was...unpleasant to think about.

“Fuck yeah!” Chloe said over the transceiver, turning toward Max and Rachel and raising the minigun triumphantly over her head. Max began to feel a bit nervous as she lowered it, reaching for her helmet and tugging it from her head. Without the transceiver, her voice was now much more distant as she spoke. “Did you guys see that shit!?”

“Oh, no,” Max said, realizing what she was seeing. “No, Chloe!”

“What's the matter?” Rachel asked, peering around the street. “Max, they're all taken care of.”

Max turned to answer, but they both jumped as a massive crashing sound came from the other end of the street, a sound of ripping and tearing metal that groaned before the street split apart, bursting from the ground. It looked like a sewer pipe had burst open, but not of its own accord. The massive reptilian beast from Max's dreams was now very much real, crawling from the hole and bearing down on Chloe, who raised her gun. She was too late, though, as the creature snagged her entire upper body in its claws, which sank right through the exposed flesh of her head.

“Oh, God, Chloe!” Rachel shrieked, and Max quickly shot both hands out, grabbing a hold of the time stream.

The familiar rushing filled her ears, everything shimmering around her as she pulled. The squeeze on her brain was familiar and a bit more intense but bearable now that she was focused on a goal. The lizard thing's clawed hand pulled away, and it began to stalk backward toward its den, climbing back in and seeming to reach up and pull the metal of the sewer pipe back down, the pavement closing neatly over the hole. Max gave herself a little extra time, watching Chloe put her helmet back on and raise the minigun above her head before she let go, setting things back in motion. She had scarcely done so before grabbing the transceiver from Rachel's hands.

“Chloe, move it, back to the building!” she shouted, and Chloe paused in her celebration, looking up toward Max.

“Max, wha – “

“Move it!” Max screamed as the familiar rumbling crash came. “Go, get back here!”

Chloe was headstrong, but she wasn't stupid, and thankfully, she understood the urgency in Max's voice. This time, as the horned beast emerged, Chloe was well out of its reach, though she got too close to the building soon enough, out of Max's line of sight.

She hated not being able to see Chloe.

“Chloe, where are you?” Max asked into the transceiver, watching the creature take off after her. Despite its size, it was quick, dodging a stream of minigun fire that came from the bottom floor of the building by zipping left and right with alarming speed, forcing Chloe to attempt to track its movements.

“I'm inside,” Chloe said as the creature prowled down a side alley down the street, hiding out of reach of Chloe's gun. “Holy shit, Max, what is that thing!?”

“I don't know, but we should take it out,” Max said, cranking her rifle and taking aim. She lined up a shot and fired at the thing's head, but it didn't really do much more than make it aware of her presence. It fixed beady eyes on her and loosed a roar that made Max's stomach drop. Darting from cover, it tore toward the building, and Max hurriedly cranked another shot.

“Chloe, it's coming at us!” Rachel shouted into the radio. “I bet it can climb, too!”

“On it!” Chloe said, and Max saw her dash back into the street, lobbing something at the beast. She heard a concussive blast and realized Chloe had to have gotten a grenade or two from the truck. “Hey, ugly! You're not done with me yet!”

She leveled the minigun at it, unloading a stream of bullets, and the creature snarled as it rounded on her, strafing right and circling her in a flash. It raised a claw, but Max was ready, raising her own hand and pulling him back along the timestream.

“Chloe, on your left!” she said into the radio, cranking her rifle and holding it up as Chloe spun to intercept the creature, smacking it across the face with her gun. Max fired on its belly, which was pale and lacked a covering of thick hide, and she was rewarded with a massive red welt and an angry snarl from the beast. It once again took off for the building, bounding along the street, but Chloe rushed to keep up, elbow-checking it and sending it off-course enough to give it pause. Max cranked another shot and took aim, carefully lining up a shot at its leg. She fired, missed, and quickly rewound to line up the same shot. The second time, it struck true, and the beast stumbled roaring in earnest as it hobbled on one good leg.

“Yeah, you fucked with the wrong bad bitches!” Chloe said, dropping another grenade and hurrying away. It detonated, tearing apart the beast's legs and ripping its belly to shreds. If anything, it just seemed to get angrier, loosing a shrieking roar and making one last bound for Chloe on its hobbled legs. Still screaming at her, the beast was dumbfounded when Chloe rammed the barrel of her gun into its mouth, the hum of the minigun powering up a background to her next words.

“Eat shit, salsa-for-brains.”

The minigun fired, and the beast crumpled to the ground as a spray of bullets ripped a hole directly through the back of its skull, Chloe unloading the remainder of the clip before she would stop. Finally, she simply let the minigun drop to the ground, the sound of her heavy breathing carrying through the radio. A short moment later, she pumped her fists triumphantly in the air, doing a little circle around the creature as she continued to punch the sky.

“USA! USA! USA!”

“We're never gonna hear the end of this,” Rachel said with a shake of her head.

“No, she'll be bragging about this until the day she dies,” Max agreed, smiling fondly at her friend.

…...

Preston and the others were already out front when Max and Rachel made it to the bottom, Chloe having exited the power armor. Other than a small scrape on her cheek and a bruise forming over her left eye, she looked none the worse for wear, so Max didn't feel out of line tackling her in a hug, squeezing her and holding on tightly.

“Chloe....”

“I'm fine, Max,” Chloe said, quickly returning the embrace and nuzzling into Max's hair. “I'm alright. That was sick, though, right? Am I a badass now?”

“You were already a badass,” Max told her. “Now you're a total badass.”

“Oh, I like it,” Chloe said, slowly releasing Max enough that she could at least peer over her head and speak to the others. “So, the circuit board?”

“Here we go,” the boy named Warren said, emerging from the back of the truck. He spotted Max in Chloe's arms and froze for half a second before letting a sigh and shaking his head. “Yeah, uh...RobCo PTN-3750 CNU circuit board. Works with any third-generation Protectron. You know, if you wanted, I could cobble some spare parts together, get a Mr. Handy frame working. You know...if the Protectron thing doesn't work out.”

“You'd do that?” Max asked, turning in Chloe's embrace to face Warren. “That would be really cool. Thank you.”

“Yeah, I mean, no problem,” Warren said, fidgeting a bit as he handed a large green computer chip of some kind to Max. “Check back in in about...two weeks? If you're gonna be in the area for a while.”

“Is there anything else we could help you with?” Preston asked. “After everything you've done for us, we can't thank you enough.”

“I mean...” Rachel trailed off for a moment. “We could use ammo. And supplies. And maybe we could keep the body armor and weapons?”

“Absolutely,” Preston nodded, turning to Warren. “Warren, put together an ammo bag for them. They've earned it.”

“Thank you,” Max said with a look at Warren, who climbed back into the truck. Max heard him shuffling around in the bed, grumbling quietly to himself.

“Don't mention it,” Preston said. “If you three ever need anything, Concord will do what we can to help. With Brennus gone, the Gauls in the area will probably scatter, and we can finally make a go of an actual home, a community. Somewhere safe. All thanks to you three.”

“We really should get going, though,” Max said as Warren emerged from the truck once more, passing the ammo bag to Chloe. “This chip is the last piece we need to rebuild a...friend of mine.”

“Then we won't keep you,” Preston said. “We'll see you, hopefully.”

They said their final farewells and left, Max feeling a strange...lightness. She felt good, better than she had since this whole mess had begun. They had helped someone, saved lives and stopped some bad people from kidnapping poor Mama Murphy. The glow of actually doing some good did a lot toward dispelling the gloom she had been feeling. More than anything, all she could think of was that Mom and Dad would have been proud of her in that moment.

That felt good.

…...

The arrived back at the Red Rocket truck stop just past noon, and Al had stew bubbling on the stove for lunch. He called it mirelurk stew, and when Max took a bite, it tasted not unlike the clam chowders Boston had been famous for before the war. It was delicious, of course; Max hadn't known Al long, but the way he handled a kitchen spoke volumes about his cooking skill.

“So, sounded like quite the ruckus went on down there,” Al said, wiping down the bar counter as they ate. He had already installed the chip in what was to be Lisa's new body, along with her AI core, and now they were simply waiting on her to boot up, a process that could take upwards of an hour, he had said.

“Yeah, there were a bunch of these jokers attacking the town,” Chloe said through a mouthful of stew. “Called themselves...Gauls?”

“Gauls,” Rachel confirmed.

“Yeah, I've heard of them,” Al said. “Supposedly, they've been around this place for a hundred or more years, back when the Glowing Sea stretched across the whole Commonwealth.”

“The what?” Rachel asked, scooping out another bite of stew. “There's a sea around here?”

“It's not actually a sea of water or anything,” Al explained, sipping at another Nuka-Cherry. “Down south of here a ways, there was a huge nuclear dump site, lead-lined, totally safe, right below the ground. Well, wouldn't you know it, the only nuke that hit in the area landed right on top of it.”

“Oh, shit,” Chloe muttered, and Al chuckled.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Well, you know, nuclear waste doesn't exactly like being nuked, so there was a chain reaction that sent a whole mess of rads out, irradiated the whole area for about fifty or sixty years. So for a few decades, this place was only livable by ghouls.”

“And what are ghouls?” Max asked. Al gave her a funny look before seeming to remember their peculiar circumstances.

“Right, right, you have no idea,” he said. “Ghouls are humans, or they were. Lots of them don't consider themselves human anymore. They get so irradiated that there bodies don't just break down, they mutate into something new. It happens at random, and no one's really sure how. Their skin peels and flakes like a radiation victim, and their voices usually end up fried, hair falls out, all that. But something changes in their DNA. After a certain point, it stops breaking down, and what's left...repairs itself. Way faster than any human's. At least I think so, I don't really know much about the science behind it.”

“Weird,” Chloe said with a shake of her head. “Gotta be fucked up, being basically immortal but you gotta walk around looking like a corpse.”

“And then there's the fact that any ghoul has a chance of going feral and just becoming a mindless zombie thing,” Al told them. “It's definitely a complicated thing to go through.”

Max fell silent, taking a bite of her stew. She was part of a very different world now, one where the stakes were much higher than they had been. Today, she had had to fight for her life and the lives of her friends. And if she wasn't careful for even a moment, there were dire consequences. As she thoughtfully chewed, she heard a clanking metal noise, followed by a robot voice.

“P-p-powering up,” it spoke. “Core detected. Loading...AI module.”

“Lisa,” Max breathed, climbing to her feet and hurrying down the small hallway that led to the garage. Inside, numerous toolboxes and workstations had been set up, crates and crates of spare electronic gear stacked along wall opposite the large garage door. In the center of the room, there currently stood a roughly human-sized bipedal robot. Its top-heavy body bore two small arms with claws fixed on the end, and its head was a large, oblong dome through which the flashing lights of its visual processing unit could be seen. The whole thing had been painted a pale off-white, and Max recalled Al mentioning that he had picked it up at a hospital during one of his scavenging jaunts.

“Did it work?” Chloe asked, coming up behind Max. The protectron took a few tentative steps forward, turning to face Max.

“Max?” Lisa's unmistakable voice spoke. “It really is you....”

“Lisa...” Max said with a choked smile.