The Road Through Lafayette

Date: 10/30/2224
En Route to Freetown — Immediate Surroundings: Lafayette

The road drags. The Pip-Boy tells me I’m three miles from the hospital, but in this terrain three miles feels like thirty. The city is corrosion and collapse stitched together with madness. Streets buckle where the swamp eats through asphalt. Skeletons of old cars block the way like gravestones, their rusted frames rattling when the night wind pushes. Every step forward costs twice the energy it should.

The desolation here is alive gunshots tearing in bursts, scavengers whispering behind crumbled walls, and Vertibirds sweeping low like vultures with spotlights. Each pass rumbles the ground and sets Larry twitching. Clancy keeps his hand on his weapon, jaw tight, as though every shadow hides a memory.

Larry’s fear is constant. I gave him my meat hook—extended it on a pole to give him reach. He looks ridiculous, but fear with a tool is better than fear with empty hands. If a radroach or bloodworm jumps him, maybe he’ll stand a chance.

Pinball has been running quiet. Not broken—focused. His tone is sharper, clipped. “Big Chief, perception levels are at peak efficiency. Scanning patterns are green.” He misses the Deans, though I can tell. He buzzes softer at night, like a song cut short.

Clancy Asks of the Old World as we walk. His voice pulls me back—makes me miss it more than I admit. The University skyline rises crooked in the distance, and I feel that old ache. I spent hours in those halls once—the Engineering Department, the library. Places of memory, of learning. If the library still stands, it may hold maps, blueprints, truths worth carrying forward.

But distance is slow. Three miles marked, three miles not yet taken. The terrain consumes time, and the city is in no hurry to give it back.

During one sweep, I stayed awake while Larry and Clancy rested. A Brotherhood patrol passed close. One of them—armor polished, movements precise—caught sight of my frame. He nodded once, acknowledgment without hostility. He told me straight: “Get that suit repaired. If you’re running hot, you’re wasting it.” Then he said they had a post at the hospital and moved on, his shadow swallowed by the fog.

I didn’t answer him. But the words stuck. The hospital isn’t just my next waypoint—it’s theirs too.

Every step forward is slower than it should be. But I will get there. The station awaits.

—The Big Chief