1: Can't Breathe
She can't breathe.
"Has your life taken a turn? Do troubles beset you? Has fortune left you behind? If so, the Sierra Madre Casino, in all its glory, is inviting you to begin again…"
God help her, she can't breathe.
"…Stroll along the winding streets of our beautiful resort, make new friends, or rekindle old flames…"
Someone help her because God doesn't seem to want to, she can't breathe.
"…So if life's worries have weighed you down, if you need an escape from your troubles, or if you just need an opportunity to begin again, join us, let go, and leave the world behind at the Sierra Madre grand opening this October... We'll be waiting."
He calls her Cat-Eyes sometimes when the memory of a dead wife wasn't too over-bearing. It makes her wonder sometimes just how many lives she has left as she imagines the green light in her eyes flicker to black like a burnt out bulb.
He spots her through his sniper scope. It isn't the first time.
Her sun-bleached hair hangs in curtains as callused fingers fiddle with the hatch. He doesn't know if she stumbled upon it, or had looked for it all along. He tracked her all of the way from the damned dinosaur and he couldn't tell if she was running away from something or running to it. He still can't tell, especially when the hatch pops and she slips inside, familiar and fearless.
He surveys the cards he has to play with. Nelson gives way to the Colorado in lesser crags and greater cliffs and he doesn't know the shape of it. Getting down there should take a day's scrambling descent, but that's being optimistic. It's an uncomfortably learned behavior.
The first time had been twilight and he had spotted her through shredded teeth and faded crosshairs. She hadn't looked like trouble, a soft-looking thing with fuzz for a hairline. Weren't any pretty young things left in Novac to make a comparison, so resemblance to a ghost meant nothing.
The second time was daylight and he could read her belt buckle with uncomfortable accuracy. "I don't care what color his armor is. He's a kid. You're not shooting him." He decided she was trouble after all but likely more trouble without him.
It takes him two days to make the descent without skirting too close to Cottonwood. He wouldn't mind shooting the place up, but there's other trouble to find. He keeps the hatch in sight and doesn't see her leave.
The lock is disengaged when he reaches it, and it makes him both grateful and worried. It isn't like her.
A seductive voice rolls out a familiar pitch as his boots echo against the bunker floor. He remembers that she's not from the Mojave. He's heard rumors, whispers on the wind, but never thought anyone would be stupid enough—
Makes him doubly stupid, he thinks, looking at an empty room. The radio winks at him as the gas swirls in.
Five days. It seems the hound has finally turned up something useful. Good dog.
The greatest of Caesar's frumentarii lowers his binoculars and sets up camp. He waits through the night for the woman extraordinary enough to earn Caesar's attention and her degenerate soldier to emerge from their den. They do not. Possibly having a sweaty little futūtum. He chuckles and leans back against the cliff.
Caesar was not pleased when he heard she ignored his mandate to go to the Lucky 38 and end House. He dispatched the one man he trusted to find her. To bribe her. To entreat her. To seduce her.
To take apart her beloved NCR dog piece by piece until she bent her will to theirs.
They are certainly taking their time with it. He does not entirely blame the degenerate. She is a beautiful woman. Even smudged with soot, blood, and sin in the ashes of that abysmal town.
One does not become the mastermind of bloody intrigue after bloody intrigue without the gift of patience. But the memory of her sneering down her nose at him, flanked by fires and crosses, sends him climbing down through the hatch and into the earth beneath.
A woman's voice cajoles him to a licentious gambling den just as he is mandated to cajole her to align her interests with those of the Legion. He does not understand these profligates and their vices; there were some houses in Arizona but he will of Caesar decimated them all. He moves slowly through the bunker, listening for a man's murmur, a woman's sigh, beneath the chatter.
He finds the radio perched upon a table, but not her.
He looks down and sees her degenerate sniper's body on the floor, but not hers.
When the toxic gas rolls over him, sends him gasping onto his knees, it is a wonder he does not fall upon his own blade in failure.