Chapter Text
Autumn made being away in the Commonwealth more bearable. In old calendars or magazines, she had seen pictures of the way the leaves would change here and in Capital Wasteland. They took her breath away, but they were only pictures, and the leaves had lost their beauty with generations of radiation affecting the plant life. As much as she wanted to pick apples and enjoy whatever hot chocolate was, there were still some comforts of the fall around her in all seasons: campfires by which to sleep at night, her uniform’s required sweater, hiking until her feet hurt…
From the top of the police station, she watched a few ever-brown leaves float across a reservoir. She leaned on the railing and breathed deep, a small trace of petrichor still in the air from the night before. The sun was just beginning to rise, and she nursed a cup of warm coffee as the orb shone orange across the Wasteland.
Once she had finished her drink, she stepped inside the police station and descended the steps.
“Scribe Haylen,” called a fellow soldier as she reached the main floor.
“Knight Rockwell,” Haylen replied, nodding to greet him. She moved to refill her cup at a small table in the center of the station’s lobby.
“We picked up a muffled emission on the radio. The Paladin has asked if a few of us could investigate, since it’s just around Cambridge.”
“Sure,” she said, stopping the coffee’s flow before trying to quickly down what she had already poured. “Let me grab my radio.”
In the field behind the Cambridge Police Station, Haylen and two Knights walked with their radios, waving them about, trying to follow the rogue signal. All they heard was static and an occasional “help” from a man’s voice, but no matter where they moved, the signal seemed to remain poor. A slow, steady beeping played. Perhaps the recording device was the problem, Haylen pondered.
Far to her left was one recruit searching a broken-down vehicle, and a few hundred yards to her right was another searching the remains of a building. Haylen was investigating a fishing shack that was half underwater in the reservoir she often overlooked. Her team had cleared it of Mirelurks and radioactive barrels some time ago. There was no one to be found inside, and no device emitting a signal. She stepped out, avoiding getting her boots muddy, and looked towards a bridge that lead to the Poseidon Reservoir hydroelectric plant.
She approached the bridge from its side, clipping her radio to her belt as she prepared to climb the slope to its topside. There was a shuffle beneath the bridge in front of her. She froze, listening.
Haylen leaned to peer under the structure and saw a safe, as well as a tattered sleeping bag. She took up her radio, still clipped to her belt, and hit it with her palm. When the rate of the blinking light atop did not change, she clicked it off to investigate without the beeping.
The sun offered more than enough light to illuminate beneath the bridge, yet she found nothing more than the safe. She listened at the door of the metal container, but there was no radio emission from within. She tugged at its door anyway, but it would not budge, so she turned away and put her hands on her hips to think. “Maybe I could reverse-engineer a booster to pick up the signal better,” she thought aloud.
Suddenly, Haylen was grabbed from behind and pulled into a space that she had thought was the brick wall holding up the bridge. She fell backwards into darkness and the bricks closed back before her. She was released and she scrambled on her knees to try to open it, but the sun was gone entirely from the space and there was no source of light whatsoever.
There were sounds within the hidden room under the bridge- the scuff of a shoe on the slippery dirt floor, the click of a weapon being loaded, then…
“Howdy.”
Haylen opened her mouth to scream but a firm hand found its way over her cheeks while she was still gasping. A man’s grip held her mouth closed as she tried to hum out shrieks from behind it. She clawed at his arm in the darkness, but her gloves made it difficult to do any damage with her nails. “It’s okay, shh, it’s okay,” the disembodied voice reassured her. “I won’t hurt you.” Despite what he had said, the Scribe’s eyes widened greatly as she felt the end of a square-barreled laser pistol push into her gut and meet the underside of her sternum. She wanted to faint.
She asked herself how she could end up here- a stupid kid with dreams of traveling and seeing fun sights, only to be shot, or worse, in a secret room under an old bridge where no one would ever find her. She almost laughed at how silly she had been to imagine a life full of grand adventure only to die here.
“As long as you don’t make a peep, we’re golden. Okay?”
Haylen nodded with the hand over her mouth. After a few moments, it loosened its grip then released her face. The gun remained against her stomach.
She whispered out her pleas. “Please, sir, for the lo-”
“Don’t worry. I’m keeping my end of the bargain as long as you do. I just want to talk.”
“Okay,” she said nervously.
There was the rustling of cardboard, then the fizz of a match resounded in the quiet space as its flame illuminated the immediate area. She saw she was in a brick room, maybe 6 cubic feet. She watched as the match met the wick of a candle, then she followed the hand from the lightsource to its owner. A medium-build man in a jean jacket and black slacks stood before her. He waved the match out then ran his free hand through his short blond hair in the candlelight.
Haylen could say nothing, but saw her eyes reflected in a pair of black lenses on the face of the stranger.