A Man Needs A Maid

II - Friends Have Gone Far Away

Centralia, Pennsylvania.

A terrible sinking feeling had begun to take over the body of Robert Joseph MacCready when he first stepped into the town, a few fellow sharpshooters alongside him. It was learning what the town had been known for before the War, however, that unsettled him most.

Despite being covered in layers upon layers of grime and overgrown foliage, a memorial sign detailing the town's abandonment remained. In May of 1962, a coal seam fire began under the town of Centralia, Pennsylvania. Now a century hence, the fire continues to burn, and the last residents of the town vacated in the mid 2030s, at which point the last of remaining residences were demolished and the town officially abandoned. At its current rate, the fire could continue beneath the town until 2274 or longer. This is the end of the road that used to lead into the town, which has been sectioned off to prevent urban exploration after several tragic accidents. Dedicated on the twenty seventh of May, 2062 by the Governor of the Commonwealth Of Pennsylvania. For a few minutes, after clearing the sign with some help, staring at it and rereading it was all he could do. Glancing at his fellow sharpshooters, MacCready let out a barely audible sigh of relief to find a few of them were themselves fixated (or, he suspected, for one of them, trying to read it) by what it told. When they slowly started to walk away to begin surveying the area or join their fellow gunners as they continued to arrive at the town, MacCready hesitated, only to suddenly draw his gun upon feeling an arm drape over his shoulders. He slowly lowered it when he saw the face of the man who had done so, but scowled at him all the same, squaring his shoulders and keeping his gun steady in his hands.

"The fuck was that for, Sinclair?"

"Had to get your attention somehow," The sharpshooter replied with a dramatic swish of his curly, dusty blonde hair. "I take my assignment as your partner seriously, and, I'm telling you, I have to catch you off guard every once in a while to make sure you're keeping your reflexes quick."

"You're lucky I don't shoot you," MacCready muttered. "And stop the 'big brother' act. You're only three years older than me, and I handle myself just fine. I watch your ass and you watch mine. That's all there is to it, stop trying to make it more significant than that."

"You've been saying that for three months now," Sinclair rolled his eyes. "Just because the top guys think you're one of their best, rising assets doesn't mean they don't also think you're a cocky kid. Which you are. But don't worry – a bunch of us are too. Difference is you and I are good enough to know we're going to grow old in this job, and a lot of them others are going to kick it within two or three years at best. Fuck, some of them are probably going to fall through the ground and into the fires here just doing the recon pansy shit."

"Might as well be at the gates of hell, then," MacCready rolled his eyes, adjusting his hat on his head. "What I want to know is why they want us here. Doesn't seem there's anything useful."

"I heard," Sinclair said as they began to walk over the end of the road. "That there are some bounties out for people from the old Massachusetts Commonwealth, bounties worth a fuck ton of caps. They aren't sure who's offering them, but they know they're paying well for it because one of the top guys found and handed one over and got a bag of caps that, when he counted it out, had well over five thousand caps in it. We might as well strike it rich and tell them we didn't receive as much as they did."

"What kind of mercs would we be if we weren't willing to keep a big cut of the caps for ourselves?" He said, swinging his sniper rifle around to his back again. "Piss poor ones, at the very least."

"Yeah, and I'd rather not get to the point where I'm so piss poor I have to drink my piss," Sinclair gagged a little. "I have eaten some pretty disgusting things to survive before, but I draw the line at drinking piss."