They took her in her sleep, in the dead of night.
Maria Sanchez had lain out beneath a stinking, peeling billboard south of Goodsprings, and blown the smoke of the day's last cigarette up at the stars she could just see past the brim of her hat until she'd blown away all but the filter. A flick of her fingers toward the fire and that was gone too. With the small package she was carrying stowed safely in her jacket, she fell asleep with the campfire's flickering heat on her and woke screaming to cold, rough hands twisting her arms behind her back.
In the few jarring moments her eyes were open, she saw a group of men surrounding her, all silhouettes except one in white who stood back apace from the rest.
"Hands off!" Maria hollered and thrashed against them. Her fingers barely brushed the cool metal of her sidearm when she reached for it and she shrieked in frustration and terror as her face was ground into the dirt. She struggled frantically and kicked one of them in the jaw with a hard-booted heel before they smashed her head against the ground hard enough to plunge her back into unconsciousness.
A lantern was burning when she came to and the smell of fresh dug dirt filled the air. Low voices murmured indistinctly nearby. Rough fabric filled Maria's mouth with the sour taste of dirt and sweat and her cheeks were wet with her own drool. Pain beat a throbbing rhythm in her head. Maria groaned.
When she forced her eyes open she saw there were five of them standing around, waiting and arguing. Four wore armor that she recognized, if only just, as Great Khan armor. The fifth was the man in white and she saw now that his suit was checkered and well-made.
Maria lolled her head to look at herself and her hat rolled off her head and flopped over quietly in the dirt. Strange that they would put it back on her. Her jacket was ripped open so her misshapen chest was apparent. Her hands and feet were tied. Fear cold enough to burn spread through her.
There was a sudden soft commotion of voices when they realized she was awake and Maria tried to focus on what they were saying through her foggy head, though she could guess. It was still dark, she couldn't have been out long. The only reason to wait for her to wake up, she knew, was so they could watch her scream when they hurt her. She tried to brace herself for what was coming.
But they weren't taunting her. The man in the suit shushed the others, saying he always looked a person in the face before killing them, and met her defiant glare with a cool, apologetic smile. She watched him pull a polished poker chip from the inner pocket of his jacket and hold it up for her to see. It might have been the same chip she was supposed to be delivering, but she had only seen a description of it before this. Understanding broke over her and it did nothing helpful.
"It's nothing personal, kid," the suited man assured her. "From where you are this all must seem like an 18-karat run of bad luck," he went on, as if he'd practiced these words a thousand times before saying them here. He returned the chip to his coat pocket and in its place pulled out a shining pistol. Maria's gaze followed the gun and her heat returned when she noted the Holy Virgin engraved on the handle. Outrage and despair filled her. She hadn't left Arizona to be put down like an animal, and she hadn't crossed the river to be killed by an image of her namesake and Our Goddamn Blessed Lady.
She seethed so hotly she didn't hear him finish his speech, only saw him raise the gun. She shook her head and shouted, tried to say something that would change his mind, but her protest was stopped by the gag. The sound that erupted from the gun when he squeezed the trigger rang against her ears. She never heard it fade out.
Darkness followed, heavy and thick like sludge. Slowly, slowly it dissipated into the wisp of air and an elusive, beating whir. Alive, then. Or…not? She felt no body attached to her, only weight.
She tried to shift it. It dragged her down. Like drowning.
Gasping at the air, her mouth wouldn't open and her chest felt like lead. Tightness grew in her throat, resisting her efforts to shake it off.
"Easy," a voice said from very far away, "Easy there." She tried to look, to see. "You're alright, gonna be just fine." It drawled, unfamiliar and indistinct. Steady hands fell on her, through her it seemed. It frightened her for a moment, then reassured her when they pulled her out of the dark and let her slip back into her body.
Now she was sitting up and in her peripheral she saw the old man back away carefully. The room spun around her and she thought she would pitch forward and fall on the floor, almost did before she steadied herself with a few deep breaths. Everything throbbed thick with pain. Her head, mostly, but the rest of her too.
The man was talking to her in a gentle voice and she understood him, but didn't. It was a moment before she realized he was speaking English. She knew English but couldn't call it up at that moment. She nodded absently and looked at the room, clean and bright and reeking of antiseptic. It was a nicer, more permanent version of the Followers' tents she'd been in and out of from time to time.
Usually she knew why she was in places like this but now all she could grasp was a hole. A hole in her memory, a hole… she couldn't follow the thought, it was lost to her, unraveling even as she tried to stitch it together.
The man, she realized when she looked at him again, was not dressed like a follower. He was just a man, clean and bald. He looked concerned and when he saw he had her attention he repeated himself slowly.
Her name, she realized, he wanted to know her name.
"Maria!" she croaked out quickly, stumbling over her clumsy tongue.
It was hard to tell if his pause was deliberate or imagined, especially with her head throbbing the way it was and her skin pulling tight over her bones. She watched his eyes that wanted to move but didn't. And when they did, instead of scanning her body his gaze flickered to her name inked into her arm in a flowery script.
"Maria Sanchez?" he clarified.
Yes, she nodded. Yes. Please. Mentally, she was no longer in the clinic, she was thinking about what would happen when she went outside again. She didn't know where she was, after all, but through the window to her left she could see a settlement nestled at the foot of the hill beneath the clinic. If she could get the doctor on her side, get him to call her Maria, others were less likely to confront her.
"Well, alright," he said, "Not what I would've picked for you but if that's your name…"
"It is," she insisted, shifting uncomfortably, finding her words again. He didn't press it, only nodded slow and thoughtful, and she breathed relief.
A few days had passed with her unconscious, a fact she might have guessed by the three-day beard she'd grown and the hollow gnawing at her stomach even if Doc Mitchell hadn't told her. What she would not have guessed were the circumstances of her arrival at the clinic: Buried alive with a bullet in her head and rescued by an old world securitron and now somehow awake with enough of a brain left to understand what was going on – it sounded like some tall campfire story. But Maria believed him. As he spoke she remembered… something. Not why she'd been shot, but the Virgin Mother looking down on her and her final supplications. She remembered her righteous anger and with it came everything else. The breath left her like she'd been slugged in the gut and she crossed herself quickly, saying a brief prayer under her breath instead of swearing. She knew how she had survived.
The memory was hazy but she remembered enough: the man's too-clean suit and the gun he didn't deserve to have. She rubbed her jaw only to cringe at the prickling stubble she found there. She lowered her hand and wiped it on the bed in disgust. The longer she was awake the more of her she realized was hanging out.
Before he'd let her do anything else, even before he'd let her go hunt down a smoke, Doc Mitchell insisted on testing her reflexes and recall to make sure everything was in order. A few dexterity exercises and a spin through a Vit-o-matic Vigor Tester and series of ink blots later, he decided she would probably be fit to walk around on her own and granted her the privacy to pull herself together. In the bathroom she shook out her dirt covered clothes and wrestled her thick hair back into braids as well as she could without a proper brush. She shaved her face with a straight razor she had to borrow from the good doctor. Few of her belongings had made it to the clinic.
She lingered in front of his mirror for some time, relearning her face as she had so often done before, but now because of the broken and sewn up flesh more than anything.
Doc Mitchell let her leave shortly after feeding her. Before then he surprised her with the gift of a pistol so she would not have to go around unarmed and, even more surprising, he presented her with a piece of the old world to wear on her arm, a computer he called a Pip-Boy. Maria refused at first but by the time she was out the door the machine was weighing down one of her arms.
Everything dragged on her so heavily that it was a wonder she made it back up to the graveyard at all. It was the highest point in Goodsprings and the wind whipped at her hair and stirred the dirt that filled her grave. The moment she stepped into it to dig for more of her belongings she quit breathing. Not because she held her breath; it was dragged from her as if the grave recognized her and intended to exert its claim on her life.
Maria scrambled out when she could stand it no more and gasped for breath. It seemed like a long while before she managed to paw through all the loose dirt. Her hat was gratefully recovered and Maria held it up to the sky with a thankful prayer before pulling it back on but there was little else. A few bottle caps and a half empty pack of cigarettes that had fallen out of her jacket, for which she was also grateful, and only dirt besides.
She sat down in the dirt and lit one of the cigarettes for lack of a better solution to her predicament. It was her second since waking up, the first she had talked out of a gruff man at the saloon. It hadn't done her much good and neither had the time she spent shooting cans behind the saloon to get her arm back. Her reflexes were shot. She missed over and over again, even when she took extra time to line up each shot but what frustrated her more than her scattered aim was how long it took her to fumble the firearm out of her holster. Maria prided herself on how often she had her gun drawn before some asshole could finish reaching for his piece. Beyond pride, she found her security in it. There had been a time when she had the fastest hand down where the saguaro grew; it almost hurt too much to think about spending the rest of her life fumbling for her weapon like she didn't know her own hands.
It would take time to regain her faculties, she knew that, but sitting beside her grave with all her limbs flopping like a marionette's, Maria felt like she had lost everything. Still walking perhaps, but little more than a dead woman. At the same time, her Holy Mother had seen to her preservation and as far as Maria could tell that meant she was charged with righting this wrong. The package she'd carried was clearly far more important than she realized, judging by the to-do her killer made of it, but whatever his purposes for taking it were she could tell he was scum.
She knew which way he was headed thanks to word around town and she intended to find him whether her limbs cooperated or not. If she was never as fast as she had been then there would be some other way to get by, but she would count it a grave loss.
The wind blew away her cloud of smoke and brought her the scent of broc flowers. She would have to leave the hilltop soon if she wanted to keep looking for her belongings before night fell. With three days gone by it was unlikely that anything was left of her campsite, if the Khans hadn't taken everything for themselves in the first place, but it would put her mind at rest to look.
Walking the road out of Goodsprings was as strange as it was nerve-wracking. Maria rested her hand on her gun, nervous as a girl leaving home for the first time. The skittering of reptiles among the outcroppings of rock on either side of her followed her all the way down the path and kept her on edge.
Her campsite was barren. Even the ashes from her fire had long since been blown away or buried under a thin layer of dirt. Maria kicked through the dirt under the billboard for any small thing that might have been left behind.
Something caught her eye near the stones of her fire pit, a small black pencil. Maria laughed bitterly when she picked it up and examined it. A worn down stick of eyeliner was all that was left of her things. She lifted her hat and ran her fingers through her hair as she thought.
One of her emergency stashes was hidden about a day's walk from Goodsprings. Going after it would put her even further behind her killers and if it was gone it would be nearly two days out of her way with nothing to show for it. But it would be so nice to have a change of clothes that weren't filled with grit and the extra caps would help her get her footing back.
She'd need enough water to get her there, of course. And ammunition. She slipped the eyeliner into the inside pocket of her jacket and started back toward Goodsprings, stopping along the way to seek out the fruit and herbs growing off the beaten path and hoping the good people in town were generous enough to trade her what she needed.
Author Note: I'm really excited about this fic but to be honest it probably won't update much faster than Shrapnel Hearts. Enjoy!