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The lot grew quieter once they were gone, just the scrape of shovels, the clatter of crates, the soft murmur of soldiers setting into their posts. Above them, the towers of the power station loomed silent, their rusted frames catching the last glow of the dying sun.
The sun dipped further, bleeding its last light across the fractured skeleton of the station. The world seemed to hold its breath as the scavvers and their escort disappeared into the dark belly of the plant. The black doorway swallowed them whole, leaving behind only the faint clink of gear and the echo of boots on concrete before even that faded into silence.
Sico exhaled slowly, hands dropping to his belt as he turned back toward the lot. He didn't like silence. Not out here. Silence was the skin stretched too tight over a drum — you never knew when it was going to split.
He pulled his coat tighter and raised his voice just enough to carry across the yard.
"Alright," he barked, the sound snapping through the quiet like a whip crack. "We're not sittin' here twiddling our thumbs. Get this camp locked down."
Heads turned toward him, waiting. His soldiers were tired, road-weary, but they were trained — trained to listen, trained to move. Their eyes found him the way iron filings find a magnet, and in that moment the lot shifted from scattered motion to unified attention.
Sico pointed toward the sagging fence line. "First squad, peel off east. Set up watch posts along that stretch of fence. Use the rusted cars for cover if you have to. I don't want anything crawling through while we're sitting on our asses."
"Yes, sir!" came the sharp reply, and half a dozen soldiers broke from the cluster, boots crunching on gravel as they jogged toward the tree line.
He swung his hand toward the other side of the yard. "Second squad, you're west. Check the holes in the chain-link, reinforce what you can with scrap. If it can't be patched, make a choke point. We funnel anyone trying to come through where we want them."
Another chorus of acknowledgments, another ripple of movement. Soldiers began hauling sections of corrugated sheet metal from the truck beds, dragging them toward the gaps in the fencing. The scrape of metal on gravel filled the air.
Sico turned back to the center of the lot where the rest of the men stood waiting. "Third squad, you're with me. We're building barricades. Stack the crates two high around the vehicles, leave shooting gaps between. Sandbags up front, heavy as you can make them. Think of this place as a fort — I want to be able to hold this yard if hell itself comes walking out of those trees."
A few of the younger soldiers grinned at that, though their eyes betrayed the nerves beneath. They liked the sound of holding ground, of making a stand. It gave them something to focus on besides the yawning dark door of the station.
The lot came alive then. The stillness was replaced by the rhythm of men at work: the grunt of effort as crates were heaved off trucks, the dull thump as sandbags landed in neat rows, the metallic rasp of rifles slung over shoulders. Orders passed down the line in clipped voices. Someone cursed when a crate split a nail. Another laughed too loud at the joke that followed. Even in war, even in the shadow of a dead giant, men were still men.
Sico walked among them, his presence steady as stone. He checked the stacks, adjusted placements, nodded approval or pointed with sharp gestures when something wasn't right. He crouched at one half-moon barricade, pressing a palm to the line of sandbags, testing their give.
"Too loose," he told the corporal overseeing it. "You want those tight enough to eat the shock of a bullet, not spill open like a sack of flour. Fix it."
"Yes, sir," the corporal replied, already snapping at his men to redo the placement.
At the far edge of the lot, two privates were struggling to wedge a sheet of metal into a gap in the fence. The thing groaned and screeched, threatening to topple over on top of them. Sico strode over, grabbed the edge with one gloved hand, and slammed it into place with a single, controlled shove. The soldiers blinked, startled, as he drove the point of his boot into the gravel to wedge it firm.
"Next time," Sico said, voice flat, "use your legs. Not your backs." He dusted his hands and moved on without waiting for thanks.
The young driver from earlier — the nervous one — was on stacking duty now, hauling crates one at a time from the trucks. His arms strained under the weight, sweat streaking down his temple in the cool dusk air. But Sico noticed he wasn't faltering. The boy had steadied himself since that first crack of doubt. Good. He'd need to.
By the time the last edge of sunlight dipped beneath the horizon, the lot had begun to resemble something more than an open target. Crates rose in staggered lines, sandbags packed into sturdy barriers. Two machine gun nests had been improvised from the truck beds, their barrels jutting out like the horns of some great beast. Torches burned in a ring, casting jittering shadows across the blacktop, their flames reflecting in the soldiers' eyes.
Sico climbed onto the hood of one of the Humvees, arms crossed, and scanned the perimeter. His soldiers moved like ants below, tightening straps, testing firing angles, checking ammo. They weren't relaxed, not exactly, but there was a rhythm here now — the rhythm of preparation.
He let the silence stretch for a beat, the torches crackling, the night pressing in. Then he spoke, his voice carrying across the lot.
"This is where we hold," he said. Not shouted — just spoken, steady and iron. Every head turned his way. "Out there?" He nodded toward the tree line, where the mist was already creeping like fingers through the trunks. "Out there's nothing but things that want us dead. Raiders. Mutants. Brotherhood. Hell, maybe worse. But in here?" He lifted his hand, gesturing to the barricades, the trucks, the men themselves. "In here, we hold. We watch. We wait. And when something comes, we don't break. We don't run. We bleed this ground dry before we give it up."
The soldiers stood a little straighter. The young driver gripped his rifle tighter. Even the veterans, scarred and hollow-eyed, gave small nods. They'd heard words like that before, but not all words carried weight. These did.
Sico hopped down from the Humvee, landing with a thud. "Rotate patrols every hour. No man alone, ever. Pairs at minimum. If you hear something in the trees, you don't go chasing it like a dog — you report it. If you see movement near the fence, you call it out. If you have to fire, you fire to kill. Understood?"
A unified chorus: "Yes, sir!"
The camp settled deeper into its rhythm. Patrols took shape — two-man teams pacing the fence line, their torchlight bobbing in and out of the mist. Inside, fires were lit in small barrels, soldiers warming their hands, boiling water for rations. The smell of burnt beans and old coffee soon mingled with the sharper tang of oil and rust.
The camp had settled into something that resembled order, though the edges were still jagged, raw with fatigue. The night was beginning to breathe heavy around them. The torches cast their glow, but beyond the firelight lay that thick, suffocating dark—the kind that seemed alive, as if it pressed back whenever you stared too long into it.
Sico lingered near one of the barrels, letting the warmth bite at his palms. The soldiers murmured in low voices, their laughter muted, nervous in places, too sharp in others. The kind of laughter that was less about humor and more about fending off what crept in the back of the mind.
He reached down, unclipped the battered field radio from his belt, and thumbed the dial until the static smoothed. He brought it up, voice steady, clipped.
Then Sico contact Hancock through the radio and ask him how it's going inside, with his thumb stayed firm on the transmit. "You boys holding up in there?"
A hiss of static answered first, then Hancock's voice came through—raspy, laid-back, with that gravelly humor he wore even in the worst of times.
"Hancock here," the ghoul mayor drawled, though Sico could hear the strain beneath it. "We're still searching what Mel's list says we need. Also got ourselves a decent haul so far, but right now we're catchin' our breath. This place… it's crawling. Radroaches thick as weeds, ferals skitterin' in the dark corners. We're takin' it light. Can't afford to burn out early, you feel me?"
Sico's jaw tightened as he listened. He could picture it too clearly—the sprawling belly of the old plant, corridors black with mildew and rot, pipes groaning with every shift of the wind. Radroaches scuttling along ceilings, legs whispering like dry leaves. The slow, guttural moans of ferals echoing off rusted steel, carrying too far, bouncing until you couldn't tell if they were ahead or behind.
"Copy," Sico replied, his tone all business but not without a thread of concern. He moved a few steps away from the men around the fire, giving himself the space to think. "You hold your ground, Hancock. Don't get greedy. We're buttoned up out here—fence secured, barricades set. You run into heat you can't handle, you pull back. You hear me?"
Static buzzed for a moment, then Hancock's chuckle came through the speaker. "Relax, boss. We ain't green. Mel's got his eyes on the prize, and the boys know how to pace themselves. Besides, I ain't about to let a bunch of overgrown bugs or shambling corpses write my obituary. You'll hear from me if things turn sour."
There was a pause, then Hancock's voice dipped lower, more serious. "Place feels wrong, though. Not just the usual rot. It's like… like the walls remember somethin'. Like you can hear the echoes if you listen hard enough. Don't know if it's just me bein' twitchy, but—hell, I've walked plenty of bad ground, and this one? This one don't sit right."
Sico glanced toward the looming silhouette of the plant. Even from out here, where the night swallowed most of its form, it was an ugly shape. Too many jagged edges jutting against the horizon, broken smokestacks like snapped bones stabbing at the sky. A place that had died but refused to lie still.
His grip on the radio tightened. "Not just you," he said at last. "We'll keep the fires burning out here. You make sure nothing eats you alive in there."
"Roger that," Hancock answered, the faint scrape of boots and distant voices bleeding into the transmission. Then, softer, "Keep your men sharp, Sico. If this place draws things—and I'm thinkin' it will—they'll come at you before us. You're the light in the dark, brother. And the dark? It don't like competition."
The line crackled, then cut to static.
Sico clipped the radio back to his belt and stood still for a long moment. His eyes swept the yard. The men hadn't heard the whole of Hancock's words, but they didn't need to. Soldiers always read more from a commander's face than from his orders.
One of the veterans, a broad-shouldered sergeant with a scar running from temple to jaw, approached with a questioning look. "How's it inside?"
Sico rubbed a hand over his mouth before answering. "Mess of roaches and ferals. They're moving careful. Resting for now."
The sergeant grunted, shifting his rifle strap higher. "Figures. Every goddamn ruin's a nest for something."
"Yeah," Sico muttered, eyes lingering on the mist creeping thicker along the treeline. "And sometimes the things inside aren't the worst part."
The night deepened. Patrols rotated, pairs walking the fence line with rifles at the ready. The forest beyond whispered with unseen movement—the groan of branches, the flap of wings, the occasional crunch of something larger shifting just beyond sight. Each sound tugged at the men's nerves, made fingers flex along triggers.
Sico walked the perimeter twice himself. He believed in command by presence, not just words. A commander who only barked from the center of camp lost his men faster than bullets could. When they saw him walking the same paths they did, standing in the same cold, staring into the same dark—it stitched them tighter together.
By the time he circled back, the younger soldiers were clustered around the barrel fires, eating what passed for stew out of dented tins. The food was bland, but it was hot, and in the wasteland that counted for more than taste.
Sico took a seat on a crate near the nearest fire, unshouldered his rifle, and began the slow, methodical process of cleaning it. Every pass of the cloth, every click of a chamber check, was a ritual as much as a necessity. A way of focusing the mind, pushing back the quiet with rhythm.
The nervous driver sat nearby, hands wrapped around a tin cup of coffee that was more mud than water. His eyes kept drifting toward the plant's hulking silhouette. Finally, he spoke, his voice low.
"Sir… you think they'll be okay in there?"
Sico didn't look up from the rifle. "Hancock knows how to keep men alive. Mel's sharp. They'll manage."
The boy nodded, but his fingers tapped against the tin, restless. "Just… feels like that place is watchin' us. Like it don't want us here."
Sico set the rifle aside and finally met his gaze. "Everything out here doesn't want us here. The land, the air, the things that crawl in the dark. You don't measure survival by whether the world wants you—you measure it by whether you can make it stay your hand for another day."
The boy swallowed hard, then nodded again, this time with more steel in his spine.
The dawn came gray and reluctant, as if the sun itself wasn't sure it wanted to climb over this stretch of land. The air had the damp bite of mist still clinging low, curling like pale smoke between the twisted branches and the rusted ruins that loomed around the camp. The fires had burned down to little more than ember-glow, and the soldiers who'd stayed up through the night were huddled in their coats, eyes red-rimmed, faces drawn tight by fatigue.
Sico rose before most, his body trained by years of soldiering to need less sleep than sense. He moved with quiet steps, boots crunching faintly against gravel as he made for the small mess table someone had cobbled together from planks and a pair of rusted barrels. A battered percolator hissed softly, sending up a weak but steady line of steam that smelled—mercifully—of coffee.
He poured himself a tin cup, the liquid black and sharp enough to scrape at his throat on the first sip. He let the warmth sit in his palms, staring out toward the mist that still veiled the tree line. The plant in the distance loomed like a corpse hunched against the horizon, its jagged silhouette unchanged, but the night had left its residue on him. He could still hear Hancock's words from the radio, about walls that seemed to remember. He could still feel the uneasy tension that lingered even when the men laughed.
He was lifting the cup for another sip when movement caught his eye.
Shapes. Dark against the mist, but moving with purpose. Not stumbling like ferals, not slinking like animals. Walking. A group of them, eight or nine at least, spreading out as they approached the fence line.
Sico set the cup down on the table without a sound and straightened. His hand rested near the rifle slung at his shoulder, but he didn't raise it. Not yet. His eyes narrowed as the figures drew nearer, breaking from the haze into the half-light of morning.
They weren't soldiers. He knew that in an instant. Their gear was a mismatch—leather, chains, pieces of metal hammered crudely into armor. Faces painted with streaks of black and red, some masked with rusted hockey masks or strips of cloth. Guns slung carelessly across shoulders, blades hanging loose from belts. Raiders.
The lead man stepped forward, grinning wide, teeth yellow and broken. He carried a long pipe rifle over one shoulder, the barrel wrapped in strips of cloth, as if to hide the rust eating it alive. His coat was patched with scavenged bits of armor, and his left eye was covered by a crude piece of metal hammered into a makeshift plate.
"Mornin', boys," the raider called, voice raspy but mocking. He spread his arms as if he were walking into a tavern instead of a fortified camp. "Hell of a sunrise, ain't it? Shame it's wasted on you lot squattin' where you don't belong."
Sico didn't move from where he stood. The men on patrol had already clocked the newcomers, rifles lifted but not fired. Tension was a wire stretched thin through the air, humming with the risk of snapping.
The raider leader's grin widened as he came closer, stopping just short of the barricade. "See, this here? This is our turf. Always has been. You wanna squat near our ruins, drink our water, scavenge our metal—you pay the toll. Caps. That's how it works. You pay, you stay. You don't… well." He gave a slow shrug, letting the implication hang in the mist.
The men behind him chuckled, the sound ugly and jagged, like knives scraping against each other. One of them spat on the ground. Another tapped the blade of a machete against his thigh, a slow rhythm meant to carry threat.
Sico let the silence stretch for a long moment, studying them. His expression didn't shift—flat, unreadable, the way it always was when he faced down someone trying to flex power. He wanted to see how far they'd lean into their performance.
Finally, he stepped forward, slow and deliberate, until he stood just behind the barricade. His voice, when it came, was calm. Level. The kind of calm that didn't need to shout to make itself heard.
"You're raiders."
The leader tilted his head, mock-offended. "Raiders? Naw, brother. Entrepreneurs. We provide a service. You pay, we protect." His grin widened again, teeth catching what little light the dawn offered. "Ain't that right, boys?"
The group behind him barked laughter, one of them pounding his chest, another letting out a shrill whistle.
Sico didn't flinch. His eyes stayed locked on the leader. "You've got two choices. You turn around and keep walking, or you stay here and find out how many bullets you can catch before your boots hit the dirt."
The laughter cut off quick, like a rope pulled tight. The lead raider's grin faltered for just a second before it twisted into something sharper, uglier. His good eye narrowed, the plate over the other catching a flicker of dawnlight.
"You got stones, I'll give you that," he said, his tone harder now. He stepped closer, his boots crunching against the dirt just beyond the barricade. "But you think your little camp can stand against us? You think you'll last out here without makin' friends?"
Sico's gaze didn't waver. He didn't move his rifle, didn't raise his voice. He simply stood there, a wall of stillness against the raider's swagger. And when he spoke again, it was quiet. Dangerous.
"You're not my kind of friends."
The standoff held, breath thick in the morning air, rifles tight in the hands of the soldiers behind Sico. The raiders shifted, restless now, their laughter gone.
The leader studied Sico for a long moment, then spat onto the ground between them. "Fine," he muttered, his grin gone flat. "We'll see how long you last without payin' your dues."
He jerked his head, and the raiders began to back away, slow steps at first, then turning with casual swagger that didn't quite mask the tension in their shoulders. Their laughter returned, hollow now, echoing back as they melted into the mist and trees beyond.
The silence that followed was heavy.
Sico let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding and turned back toward the camp. The soldiers were watching him, waiting for orders. He met their eyes one by one, steady and deliberate.
"They'll be back," he said simply. "Double the patrols. Nobody walks alone. And make sure your rifles are clean and loaded. Raiders don't take 'no' easy."
The men nodded, grim-faced, their weariness swallowed by the steel of purpose.
Sico stood for a moment longer after the raiders melted back into the mist, the echo of their laughter lingering like a foul taste in the air. His men had already begun to move—checking rifles, tightening straps, scanning the tree line with sharper eyes than before—but Sico stayed still, staring out where the shadows had swallowed those painted faces. He knew men like that. He'd fought them, killed them, seen the way they slithered back when outmatched only to return with twice the numbers and three times the cruelty.
He rubbed a hand over his jaw, the stubble rasping against his palm. He hated that sound in the morning—the lazy confidence of raiders who thought they could bleed order out of chaos just by showing up with painted faces and rusted steel. He hated more that they weren't entirely wrong; too many places had fallen to men like them because people chose to bend rather than break.
Not here. Not today.
He turned, heading back toward the table where his tin cup of coffee sat cooling in the gray light. He didn't touch it again. Instead, he reached down and unhooked the battered field radio from its place on the table, the aerial bent at an angle, the casing dented, but the damn thing still worked. He twisted the dial with practiced fingers, the faint crackle of static cutting through the dawn silence until he found the frequency.
"Hancock," Sico said, his voice low but clipped, the way it always was when he didn't want to waste a second. "Come in."
The static held for a moment, a long breath of silence, then a burst of coughing and a voice that carried both smoke and humor.
"Goddamn, Sico, you know what time it is? Some of us actually enjoy beauty sleep."
Sico let out the faintest snort, though the humor didn't reach his eyes. "You don't sleep, Hancock. You pass out and wake up still talkin'. Big difference."
A raspy laugh rolled through the speaker. "Fair. Fair. Alright, what's the fire, soldier boy? You don't buzz me this early unless you're about to make my day worse."
Sico leaned against the edge of the table, his gaze still locked on the mist curling at the treeline. His men moved like shadows in his periphery, shifting into tighter patrol routes. The camp had woken to the threat in the air.
"Need you to move faster in there," he said. "Mel's list—we don't got time to drag feet. Reinforced alloys, capacitor banks, pre-war coolant systems. That's priority. Find 'em, get 'em, and haul your ass back out here."
The line crackled again, the sound of Hancock shifting the receiver, maybe lighting up a jet stick, maybe just grinning his crooked grin.
"Aw, hell. You sound like you're sittin' on a minefield."
"Not yet," Sico muttered. "But we got company sniffin' around outside. Raiders. Nine of 'em this morning, struttin' like they owned the dirt under their boots. They'll be back, and next time they won't be smiling."
Hancock's voice lost its playful edge, settling into something more grounded. "Shit. Raiders, huh? Figures. West Roxbury's been a nest for scum since before the bombs. You want me to drop the scav and head back?"
"No." Sico's answer came quick, sharp. "You finish the job. We need those supplies more than we need another gun at the barricade. But you don't get sloppy in there. Move quiet, move fast, and for God's sake keep your head down. If the raiders catch wind we're pullin' gear out of this plant, they'll come hard and heavy."
Silence on the line for a beat. Then, softer: "You don't like this one bit, do you?"
Sico's eyes narrowed on the mist where the raiders had vanished. "No," he said. "I don't."
The Power Station was a carcass of concrete and rust, its skeletal towers stabbing at the sky, its guts choked with cables and corroded pipes. Inside, Hancock crouched beneath a mess of collapsed ductwork, the radio receiver pressed to his ear, a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth even as his eyes scanned the shadows.
"Well," he muttered, more to himself than to Sico, "ain't this just the kind of party I live for."
He tucked the receiver back into the crook of his jacket, adjusted the battered tricorn hat perched on his head, and stood. Around him, the plant groaned with the echoes of its dead machinery, the air thick with the stink of rust, mold, and the faint ozone tang of something electrical still alive in the bones of the place.
Hancock spat into the dirt and started forward, boots crunching against grit. Reinforced alloys. Capacitor banks. Pre-war coolant. He rolled the list around in his head like a gambler memorizing cards.
He knew Mel—knew the man's brain ticked faster than a hot-wired circuit board. If Mel said he needed those things, then every nut and bolt was important. And if Sico said "faster," well, that meant Hancock's usual lazy stroll through hell had to kick up a notch.
He ducked into a hallway where the ceiling hung low, vines curling through broken vents, and began his hunt.
Back at the camp, Sico set the receiver down but didn't turn it off. The static was company, a lifeline stretched thin between him and Hancock's reckless swagger inside the plant.
He turned toward his men. "Alright," he called, his voice carrying in that clipped, even way that made every head snap his way. "You heard me—double patrols. No one wanders. I want sentries on the towers with eyes on the treeline at all times. Raiders think they can lean on us, let's show 'em the ground they're standing on ain't theirs."
The men moved with renewed purpose, their weariness buried under the instinct to act when given a plan.
One of the younger soldiers—a kid with freckles still scattered across his cheeks, barely old enough to shave—swallowed hard and asked, "You think they'll bring more, sir?"
Sico looked at him for a moment, then nodded once. "Yeah. They'll bring more. Raiders don't like being told 'no.' Makes 'em feel small. So they'll come back, bigger, louder, meaner. That's what bullies do." He let that sink in, then added, "But they bleed like anybody else. And they'll learn quick we don't scare easy."
The boy straightened, squaring his shoulders as if the words themselves had added weight to his spine.
Sico gave a small nod, then turned back toward the radio. Static hummed, steady and patient. Somewhere out there, Hancock was threading his way through the bones of the old world, chasing the pieces Mel swore they needed.
________________________________________________
• Name: Sico
• Stats :
S: 8,44
P: 7,44
E: 8,44
C: 8,44
I: 9,44
A: 7,45
L: 7
• Skills: advance Mechanic, Science, and Shooting skills, intermediate Medical, Hand to Hand Combat, Lockpicking, Hacking, Persuasion, and Drawing Skills
• Inventory: 53.280 caps, 10mm Pistol, 1500 10mm rounds, 22 mole rats meat, 17 mole rats teeth, 1 fragmentation grenade, 6 stimpak, 1 rad x, 6 fusion core, computer blueprint, modern TV blueprint, camera recorder blueprint, 1 set of combat armor, Automatic Assault Rifle, 1.500 5.56mm rounds, power armor T51 blueprint, Electric Motorcycle blueprint, T-45 power armor, Minigun, 1.000 5mm rounds, Cryolator, 200 cryo cell, Machine Gun Turret Mk1 blueprint, electric car blueprint, Kellogg gun, Righteous Authority, Ashmaker, Furious Power Fist, Full set combat armor blueprint, M240 7.62mm machine guns blueprint, Automatic Assault Rifle blueprint, and Humvee blueprint.
• Active Quest:-