The King of Boston

Chapter 19: Welcome to the Jungle

December 10, 2287

It is strange how much a man can miss something as stupid and ridiculous as the vain display of christmas lights that used to adorn these streets of mine back in the day. However, as I stared out of my office through the sadly missing wall, their absence hit me as yet another relic of the past I would never see again. Even as a kid I never believed in the old well doer that functioned as the poster boy for this corrupted feast. You can't trust people who give without receiving anything in return. Not to mention that my name never had too much of a lifespan on the "nice" list.

Christmas... One big ad for the Nuka cola company, and a set of rules that brainwashed children into happy little, and most importantly of all: submissive, consumers. I may have never believed in christmas magic, but I will applaud the bastards who came up with it for their ingenuity. I could count myself lucky if I ever came up with such a scheme. What was it the romans said again?

Bread and games.

More than two thousand years ago, those motherfuckers had already figured the whole thing out. Of course, then they had to mock it up by involving religion and things like heaven and hell. People don't care for the afterlife, they only care for bread and games. Our standards on what bread we will eat and what games we will play or watch makes us who we are. It probably won't come as a surprise if I tell you my standards are phenomenally high. At least as far as this sorry excuse for a world is concerned.

I looked down the street from my perch, silently observing my small army of artificially selected raiders. Only the smartest and more careful raiders had passed the test. Among those, only the ones that had sworn loyalty to me had survived my return. My new pets will remember that day for a while. I smiled.

Down in the streets my crew was working on dismantling or retrieving anything of use. My offices needed renovating; and now that we didn't have to keep up the old front; that leaves a fantastic amount of extra space for more interesting things. I have Rook setting up a trade post on the first floor. The rest of the raiders don't really understand why, but from what I gather Rook has learned how important a good flow of goods can be for moral during his time in the brewery north-west of town. He will ensure no one gets out of line as long as I promise him he'll be getting a cut from the trade. As soon as that shop gets set up I'll make sure to send my people to secure and lock down most major routes into diamond city. If they want to trade with the green jewel they'll have to trade with us, or pay the exorbitant toll fees. Empires usually start small, I think I'll skip a few steps.

Once we've drained Diamond city trade down to a trickle I'll start to clear out the rest of town. From the reports I gathered there are quite a lot of those green giants I met outside Diamond city last month. Strangely enough, if my men are to be believed there's less and less of them as time goes on. Apparently there's a group of heavily armed soldiers rounding them up, shoving them onto boats and transporting them north. I don't know why they do it or where they take them, but I don't really need to know that now do I? All I need to know is that here's a demand for living mutants, and I just need to take hold of the supply.

Before I'll know it, I'll be in charge of a very wealthy little trade empire, I can't wait.

I stood up and walked across the room to my beautiful new prize: a working holoplayer. It's a bit beaten up and doesn't sound as good as the player in my pip boy, but seeing it means I won't have to carry that cumbersome thing around all the time, it's most certainly worth it. As my finger slid across the backs of the holotapes that had been carefully stored on a shelf above the holoplayer, my thoughts wandered back to the previous week. More importantly, to her.

Even before the war I don't think I ever came across a woman like that. Late Mrs. Lafoy, was a sweet woman, a beautiful woman at that, but she wasn't... like her. To be entirely honest, apart from Good old Eddy, I never met someone who wasn't afraid of what I was, what I represented. It's strangely refreshing.