Fallout - Chapter 103: Dunwich Borers (Patreon)

Maxson could tell that Jace wanted to speak with Nate in private, so he did not linger in the command room. He left with the two Scribes accompanying him, closing the door behind them as they headed to the lecture hall outside to observe the cultural classes for the Minutemen's new recruits.

The door closed softly, and the command room immediately fell quiet.

Nate pushed it open, making the small bell mounted on the doorframe chime. Sturges had installed it specifically so that whenever someone entered or left, the sound would alert everyone inside. Otherwise, people tended to get so absorbed in their work that they never noticed someone approaching from behind.

Jace was looking through a stack of documents. At the sound of the bell, he glanced up and paused when he saw Nate.

Nate rarely came to the command room specifically to see him. If he had gone out of his way to come here, something must have happened.

And right now, Nate looked unusually grave.

"General, I need to speak with you."

Jace set his work aside and leaned back in his chair.

"What is it?"

Nate did not sit down. He remained standing in front of the desk with his hands at his sides, taking a moment to collect his thoughts before speaking.

"Do you know anything about a ritual knife?"

Jace froze.

The pen in his hand stopped in place, its tip resting against the paper until a small blot of ink slowly spread beneath it.

He did not answer immediately, but his expression changed almost at once. The focused look he'd worn while working gave way to thoughtfulness, then settled into a complicated, weary seriousness.

Nate recognized that look immediately.

It was not fear, and it was more than simple surprise. It was the exhausted look of someone who had just realized trouble had come knocking.

Nate had seen it countless times before the War. His commanding officers had worn the exact same expression whenever particularly nasty news arrived from the front.

Then Jace almost instinctively blurted out a name.

"Kremvh's Tooth."

Nate's eyes lit up.

"You really know about it?"

"That thing is nothing good." Jace put down his pen, pushed the documents aside, folded his hands on the desk, and looked directly at Nate. "Why are you looking for it?"

Nate took a deep breath and explained everything that had happened over the past few days.

He told Jace about his old neighbors from Sanctuary Hills who had become feral ghouls, how they reacted violently to him and him alone, and how they seemed almost obsessed with following him. He told him about Codsworth's memories and Mama Murphy's prophecy.

An obsession that had persisted for two hundred years. Souls trapped here, unable to find release.

Nate left nothing out.

When he finished, the command room remained silent for a long time.

Jace leaned back with his eyes closed, thinking.

He knew this random encounter from the game in his previous life very well.

Players often encountered this group of feral ghouls while exploring the wasteland. Every one of them had once been a resident of Sanctuary Hills before the War, and unlike ordinary feral ghouls, each had a unique name.

More importantly, the encounter could happen repeatedly. No matter how many times they were killed, they could appear again.

At low levels, they were little more than fragile cannon fodder that could be dropped with a single shot. But as the player's level increased, they grew stronger as well, eventually becoming tough enemies with high health and heavy damage.

Put simply, the mechanic suggested that they had somehow become bound to this wasteland.

As long as radiation remained in the land and their lingering obsession had not completely faded, they would continue to return again and again, never truly disappearing.

Mama Murphy was right.

Simply killing them would accomplish nothing.

Jace slowly opened his eyes.

Nate was still waiting quietly for an answer. His posture was straight, but his fists were clenched so tightly that his knuckles had gone white. His anxiety was obvious.

"Where's the knife?" Nate asked.

Jace was silent for a moment before answering.

"Dunwich Borers."

Just hearing the name seemed to make the room colder.

Nate frowned slightly.

He could tell from Jace's tone that this was not merely a dangerous stronghold. It was the kind of place people avoided whenever they had any choice at all.

"This is more complicated than you think," Jace said quietly.

"Before the War, there was a company called Dunwich Borers. Its owner was Richard Dunwich, and he wasn't some legitimate mining magnate. The mining licenses, exploration permits, all of it was just a cover. He founded the company for one reason from the very beginning. He wanted to dig things up."

"Dig up what?"

"Anything connected to Ug-Qualtoth. Prehistoric ruins, ancient temples, ritual artifacts. If it had anything to do with that dark god, he wanted it."

Nate's brow tightened.

"Ug-Qualtoth? The one from those files?"

"That's right." Jace nodded. "His family had been entangled with that dark god for generations."

"And they really did find something. Beneath the Commonwealth, they uncovered ruins that weren't built by humans."

Nate fell silent for a long time.

He had read the files from Appalachia before, but every time he came into contact with things like this, they felt profoundly wrong.

He had fought for eleven years. He had witnessed the cruelest and most insane forms of human warfare and seen every shade of darkness human nature had to offer.

But no matter how horrific those things were, they were still human conflicts.

Dark gods, ancient anomalies, things like that belonged to an entirely different kind of horror.

"So the ritual knife is inside that mine?" Nate asked at last.

"Yes. At the deepest point, on the altar in the underground temple."

Nate nodded and immediately turned to leave.

"Understood. I'll head there now."

"Wait."

Jace stopped him at once.

"If you leave now, you'll reach the place just as night falls."

Nate looked back.

"What's wrong with nighttime?"

Jace stared at him with a hint of exasperation.

"You're planning to crawl into a haunted mine in the middle of the night?"

Nate froze.

One foot was already half a step forward, but he stopped as though he'd been nailed to the floor.

He had been so focused on solving the problem that the thought had never even occurred to him.

As a veteran of Anchorage, Nate was accustomed to fighting in darkness.

Throughout the entire campaign, the U.S. military had never managed to secure air superiority. Chinese bombers filled the skies, flying hundreds of sorties overhead every day, with massive bombers appearing in seemingly endless numbers.

Going outside during daylight was practically suicide. The enemy could call in air support faster than a soldier could throw down his weapon and run. Once a position was exposed, bombs could start falling within five minutes.

As a result, experienced U.S. soldiers learned to operate almost exclusively at night.

Nate had enlisted after the war began in 2066.

In early 2077, the war ended. Or at least, everyone thought it had.

Then he retired.

Of his eleven years in the military, six had been spent on the front lines.

He had stopped being afraid of darkness a long time ago. On the battlefield, darkness had protected him. In the wasteland, it gave him cover while he hunted.

He was used to moving, fighting, and surviving in the shadows.

But not being afraid of the dark was one thing.

Deliberately entering a haunted mine filled with malevolent forces in the middle of the night was something else entirely.

"Get some rest tonight. We'll go together first thing tomorrow morning."

Nate was silent for two seconds.

Then he calmed down and nodded.

...

Early the next morning, a faint chill lingered in the air.

The rising sun climbed over the eastern hills, stretching long bands of light and shadow across the ground.

The team had already assembled.

On the right stood Danse and several Brotherhood knights. Three suits of T-60 power armor gleamed a cold gray beneath the morning sun, with the white gear and sword insignia standing out clearly across their chest plates.

Danse stood at the front, holding a modified laser rifle.

On the left were Nate, Preston, and several Minutemen veterans. Four suits of T-51 power armor bore the Minutemen's distinctive gray and blue paint scheme.

Jace was not wearing the Type 92 this time. Instead, he had returned to his old T-45, which he had specifically asked Zeke from the Atom Cats to upgrade.

At his waist hung a shotgun with a short barrel and a short sword. He also carried a long object wrapped in canvas, its shape impossible to make out from the outside.

Jace had also asked Maxson whether he wanted to come along and see Dunwich Borers for himself.

Maxson's expression had changed on the spot.

Back in the Capital Wasteland, he had heard plenty of ghost stories about the Dunwich Building from the Lone Wanderer. The strange details in those calm, matter of fact accounts had left him deeply unsettled.

After several seconds of silence, Maxson finally asked in a nervous whisper,

"Is that place... really haunted?"

"Don't worry."

Maxson had just started to relax when Jace added,

"It definitely is."

Maxson froze.

The corner of his mouth twitched twice, and he forcibly swallowed whatever he had been about to say.

In the end, he decisively refused, claiming that he needed to remain at camp and finalize the details of the education reforms. Instead, he sent Danse and a group of knights with strong nerves to support the operation.

Dunwich Borers lay in the northeastern Commonwealth, about two hours from Sanctuary Hills by vehicle.

When the enormous quarry came into view, even these veterans, men accustomed to the wasteland's most dangerous terrain, instinctively slowed down.

The quarry formed a massive sunken basin, with a vertical drop of forty to fifty meters from the cliff edge to the floor below. The bottom was nothing but grayish white rock.

Anyone standing at the top could see practically everything happening below.

There was no cover at the bottom and nowhere to retreat. Anyone caught down there would be a sitting duck, while an enemy above could fire down with ease.

It was a death trap in every sense of the word.

"These raiders must have some skill if they've managed to hold a place like this for so long," Preston murmured from the cliff edge as he looked down.

The mine entrance lay at the very bottom of the basin.

The remains of a campfire still smoldered in the clearing outside. An iron cage hung from a chain over the fire, while bones littered both the cage and the surrounding ground.

Old remains and new were mixed together in such numbers that the sight made their skin crawl.

The fighting outside did not last long.

Danse led the Brotherhood knights straight through the front. The heavy footsteps of their T-60 power armor echoed across the open quarry as laser beams cut bright lines through the air.

The Minutemen veterans swept around from both sides, sealing every escape route.

Preston took the high ground and opened fire, dropping one raider with every shot.

Within twenty minutes, every raider on the outer perimeter had been dealt with.

Several bodies lay on the ground. The remaining five survivors had been disarmed, bound, and forced down.

A few Brotherhood knights immediately began questioning them, but the interrogation went nowhere.

When Jace walked over, he found the knights at a loss.

The biggest of the prisoners, a bald, heavily built raider, lay sprawled on the ground with his head tilted to one side. Drool hung from the corner of his mouth, while a wild, defiant grin stretched across his face.

"Won't talk?" Jace asked.

"General, they just took chems. Their sense of pain is almost completely numb. Standard interrogation methods aren't working," one of the knights reported helplessly.

Jace crouched in front of the bald man.

The raider looked up, his unfocused eyes briefly passing over Jace before he burst into wild laughter.

Several of his teeth were missing. The ones that remained were yellow and black, making his grin look both deranged and vicious.

"I'll give you a chance," Jace said calmly. "Tell me everything, and I'll give you a quick death."

The bald raider laughed even harder.

"If you've got the guts, just kill me!"

Jace showed no anger at all. He remained crouched there and spoke as casually as if they were having an ordinary conversation.

"If you don't talk, I'll throw every one of you into that mine."

The laughter stopped instantly.

"You've been here long enough to know what's down there," Jace continued, staring directly at him.

"If you die out here, at least you'll get some peace. If you die in there, you'll never know peace again."

The arrogance vanished from the bald man's face.

He was not afraid of dying. He could kill, risk his life, take chems, and lose himself in madness without hesitation.

But he was afraid of whatever lived inside that mine.

These raiders had occupied the area for years. No one knew the strange things beneath the ground better than they did.

The mine tunnels were frequently haunted, and tremors sometimes came from the deeper sections. The farther down they went, the more frequent and violent the shaking became, as though something enormous lay sleeping far beneath the earth.

The thought of actually dying down there shattered the bald man's resolve.

He immediately told them everything.

"The tunnels follow the terrain downward. There are four stations altogether, and every level gets worse the deeper you go."

"Not long ago, our boss Bedlam took a group down to the Station 4 at the bottom. Only two of them came back. Bedlam and one of her men named Hugo."

"Hugo completely lost his mind after he came back. He ran off that same night and disappeared. The first thing Bedlam did after returning was lock the iron gate leading to the Station 4."

The bald raider swallowed and added,

"Oh, and she turned off the lights."

Jace's eyes sharpened.

"All of them?"

"At first, she only shut off the lights at the Station 4," the bald man said, his voice trembling as he lowered it.

"But a couple of days ago, she suddenly ordered us to shut off every light in the upper stations too. Now the whole mine is pitch black. Nobody dares go down there anymore."

His fear grew as he spoke, and the words started pouring out faster.

"And Bedlam changed completely! She breathes fast and hard, her pupils are tiny, like pinpoints, and she's constantly muttering things none of us understand."

"It doesn't even sound like her voice anymore. It's like something else is using her mouth to speak."

Another raider suddenly cut in.

"And her shadow! When she walks, the shadow on the mine wall is several times bigger than she is. It's terrifying."

Jace's pupils contracted.

He immediately remembered a detail from the game.

The final entry on Bedlam's terminal contained a sentence that had been copied and pasted over and over again, repeated countless times.

"I'm safe in the light."

In the game, if the circuit breaker was left off and there was no light source, paranormal phenomena inside the mine occurred frequently.

Turning the lights on would wake the feral ghouls, but the strange supernatural phenomena would disappear instead.

Yet now Bedlam had deliberately turned off every light.

That meant she no longer needed the light to protect her.

"Shit."

Jace swore under his breath and immediately stood.

He turned toward everyone behind him, his expression grave.

"Something's happened inside the mine."

Sunlight spread across the rocks outside the quarry, drawing a clear boundary between light and shadow.

Ahead of them, the mine entrance looked like an enormous black mouth swallowing its way deep underground, with no end in sight.

This was not ordinary darkness.

It was thick and oppressive, almost as if it had weight of its own. It slowly churned and spilled outward from the entrance, only to shrink back slightly the moment it touched the sunlight, like a living thing afraid of the light.

A faint sound drifted from somewhere deep inside the tunnels.

It sounded almost like wind moaning through hollow rock, but there was something else mixed into it as well. Something indistinct that made the listener's chest tighten.

Danse stood at the edge of the entrance, unconsciously rubbing a finger along the trigger guard of his laser rifle.

It was a small habit he had whenever he was nervous.

He stared into the pitch black depths of the mine, silently drew a deep breath, and grew even more serious.

Preston looked into the endless darkness.

After hesitating for several seconds, he finally lowered his voice and asked,

"General, what exactly is hiding in there?"

Jace stood at the boundary between light and darkness, staring into the bottomless mine tunnels.

He remained silent for a long time.

"I'd like to know that myself."