[u][b]Cincinnati - The Breaking of The Dam[/b][/u]

	Knight-Commander Braxton looked up and over the barricade, scanning the fog-choked no-man’s land that lay beyond its protective shielding. Corpses of ghouls, mutants, and all manner of abominable FEV-spawned creatures were scattered about in heaps, piled nearly as high as the barricade itself. The last wave attack had been brutal, and they’d expended all but the last reserves of their fusion cells in repelling it, yet he knew this was only a taste of the slaughter to come. 

	Braxton turned to look at the weary eyes of the men and women around him. Brotherhood soldiers and civilian combatants in broken armor and tattered blood-stained clothing: exhaustion, fear, and desperation evident in their blood-shot eyes. They’d gone without sleep nor food for many hours now, and most were running on sheer adrenaline alone.  The few Calculator robots among them were just as battered and beaten, missing limbs and dangerously low on power reserves. They had no more cards to pull, no more gambits to run, this was it. If the mutants broke through with their next wave, and they almost certainly would, there would be nothing stopping them from taking the city. 

	Braxton steeled himself and gripped his laser rifle tighter, saying a silent prayer to whatever god would listen - so long as it wasn’t that unholy monstrosity the mutants worshiped as their deity. A god whose voice, if the abominations were to be believed, wormed its way into their thoughts and compelled them into action. UNITY, they said, fight for UNITY, die for UNITY, kill for UNITY. 

	A siren sounded, and Braxton’s heart sank. They were coming again, he could already hear the inane gibbering and half-crazed shrieks of the ferals. They always used them as cannon-fodder, sending them in uncounted droves to soften up a position before the mutants attacked. The soldiers around him nervously took up their positions, steading their weapons upon the top parapet of the barricade. Some prayed for a reprieve, others begged for a mercifully quick death - but none truly believed in victory. 

	The pounding of Brotherhood artillery came next, followed by distant explosions and inhuman shrieks of pain as the rounds found their mark. It would slow them, thin them out maybe, but it would never stop them. Nothing ever did. Braxton had been there at the fall of St. Louis - watched his home overcome by the cavalcade of monstrosities as he and the remaining Brotherhood forces fled across the river. Once he’d seen The Brotherhood lines break back then, he knew there was no real hope left. The wall had been breached, the dam had broken - and now the enemy would pour in. 

	“Here they come!” someone shouted, voice tinged with fear. 

	The thundering horde of screeching ferals began to break out of the fog-line. Braxton saw a glimpse of life in their still human eyes - the tattered remains of Midwestern civilian clothes clinging to emaciated bodies. These poor souls were the result when the Mutants deemed someone unworthy of being turned into one of their brute soldiers - they instead forced them into chambers where they were slowly, and painfully, flooded with radiation and turned to ferals: then hurled at their former comrades. Killing them was a mercy, but no less horrific for that. 

	Braxton closed his eyes and thought of home for a brief moment, picturing his once peaceful homestead on the banks of the Mississippi. 

	Then he opened them again, fierce determination filling him once more. He and his soldiers would die, no doubt, but not without a fight. He refused to be captured alive and hauled off screaming to the vats to be dipped. He would die standing his ground. 

	“For Barnaky!” He shouted, “For The Brotherhood! And for humanity! OPEN FIRE!”