Liberty and Jack

I stood by the fire and listened to the constant gunshots coming from New Gad, just to the south. “They’re rowdy tonight,” I said to Liberty. I put my gun away and lit a stale cigarette, Liberty sat on the ground crisscross, back to the fire, scanning for super mutants. If an attack did come, we knew we could handle it.

“Jack?” She asked.

“Yeah kiddo?”

She looked at me disapprovingly. She hated when I called her that or anything referring to her age. In all fairness, she was a grown woman, but she was a toddler when I first met her. She knew exactly two years of pre-war life, and she didn’t remember any of it.

“Are we really rebuilding America?” Liberty asked, “Sometimes it seems like we just kill freaks and blow stuff up.”

I sat down next to her.

“Don’t smoke,” she ordered. Begrudgingly, I complied and flicked my cigarette in the air. I thought about drawing my .44 and trying to shoot it before it hit the ground, but that would have just wasted a bullet and drawn unwanted attention.

“You know,” I responded, “I really thought we were when we were all together.” Ever since leaving the vault, our group stayed close. We lived together, fought together, and survived together, and as a team, we were unstoppable. It didn’t matter what we faced: ghouls, killer robots, super mutants, whatever stood between us and our goal went down and went down hard. We took down a scorchbeast with a combat knife, a pair of brass knuckles, a power fist, and a few guns. “I felt like we had momentum on our side. These last few months it feels like we’ve been treading water.”

When Kol disappeared, we all sort of splintered. V was the first to go. She left to find him and didn’t want any of us to slow her down. That was months ago. We haven’t heard from her since. Tyler headed out not long after V to establish an outpost in the Savage Divide. Suzi worried about Tyler being by himself. She went to check up on him a few weeks back and decided it would be best to set up camp near him. She wasn’t worried about anything hurting him; Tyler is a tough kid. She was mostly concerned with his chem use, but I also think she didn’t want him to get too lonely. When she told me her plan, I understood, but I didn’t like it. We couldn’t give up my camp. I had water and an iron ore extractor working 24-7. And what’s a gunslinger without iron? I had to stay.

Liberty stayed with me. We pulled our resources and set up a decent ammo manufacturing operation. What we couldn’t make, we obtained in our frequent raids of New Gad. She’s a good little fighter: smart, tactical, deadly. She’s changed a lot since the vault. We all had I guess.

“Here they come,” she said softly. Five super mutants approached—three from the southeast, and two from the southwest. I targeted the first one with my .44. He exploded into meat chucks. Without hesitation or effort, the second target went down, then the third and the forth. The fifth target was taken out by a man in a trench coat and fedora just before he vanished.

“I seriously love that gun-fu thing you do,” Liberty said sweetly.

“Thanks, doll.”

“I like doll,” she said. “Much better than kiddo.”

The man in the trench coat and fedora had been showing up from time to time lately. He’d help in a fight, but he didn’t say much. From what I could tell, he wasn’t that great of a fighter, but sometimes he would draw the enemy’s attention away from me. Liberty called him the mysterious stranger. I just called him Bob. He looked like a Bob. If Bob was a friend, he would have stuck around. He was watching us, watching out for us, but he was no guardian angel. Of that I was sure.

The gun fire to the south had stopped. Liberty stretched out on the sleeping bag near the fire. She could have gone inside the shack we constructed and slept on the bed, but when I was on watch, she preferred to sleep near me. “Would you lay here with me until I fall asleep?” she asked.

Yeah, kid. I can do that.”

I laid down on the ground next her, propping my head up on my hand.

“I’m worried about Kol,” she said, turning to face me.

“V will find him,” I reassured her.

“Nobody finds Maddox Kol. He’s the freaking Shadow of Death. One time I saw him go into a whole room of freaks and kill them all before they even knew he was there. It wasn’t a dark room, Jack. How do you find a guy like that? You don’t. She’s searching the whole wasteland for someone you can’t find when he’s in the same room. He’s the hide and seek champion of Appalachia, and the only one looking for him is Freaky V, and who knows what even happened to her.”

She rolled back over facing away from me. She wasn’t wrong. The best we could have hoped for, at that moment, was for him to find us.

“Next time use your .308 bolt action. We’re drowning in .308’s. .44’s not so much,” she said just before nodding off.

The mysterious stranger stood off in the distance under the starry sky of the Appalachian wasteland. He crouched in the shadows of a destroyed shack and vigilantly watched Liberty and Jack. He had silenced New Gad for the night, his trench coat splattered with the blood of mutants. Liberty would have a peaceful sleep, and Jack a silent watch. He decided it was safe to return to the Whitespring Bunker to give MODUS a status update.