Author's Note: A warning that there's quite a bit of blood and gore here (it is a gory game, after all.) Miniguns are messy. So are deathclaws. There's also a lot of cussing from a certain character. I mean, how else are you going to write Cass?!
1 – Go for the Eyes
What the heck was she doing? What the ever-loving, gosh-darn HECK was she doing?
With a hand planted over her head (shrapnel! There could be falling shrapnel at any time! They had emphasized that stuff in boot!) and her chest and belly scraping against the roof, Nora Haley shimmy-crawled along, wincing at every ping, pop, and whizz that the bullets made as they pockmarked the walls of the building.
From time to time there'd be a buzzing da-da-drone-sound too: the sound of that guy in the trench-coat charging and then firing his bizarre laser-contraption. A little earlier the man had offered Nora a spare laser-musket (or whatever it was called,) but she had not had the faintest clue how to wind or whirligig the weapon, so she had stuck with good old familiar Mr. Ten Millimeter. Thank you very much!
Not that Nora was a crack shot with that weapon either, but at least a few reflexes from boot had come back to her while she had frantically hopped from cover-spot to cover-spot inside the museum, trying not to die. Suppressing fire, then run, then dive behind something, and then repeat. She'd tried, but she hadn't managed to put a single bullet in any of the wacko's (dressed in steel and bits of tire) who liked to do all of their talking with rusty pipe-pistols.
At least she had lured a few into the view of Mr. Trench-Coat up on the balcony, and his laser had turned some of them to ash.
He was the hero here. So why the heck couldn't Mr. Trench-Coat be the one pulling the heroics up here on the roof? Argh!
'None of us know how to operate power armor, miss. Sorry.' What a nice, convenient excuse. And why had she admitted that she knew how to use the armor? She was a lawyer, not a marine! Nate had always been the…
But here she was in any case, looking up at a dusty old suit of T-Whatever power armor, fusion battery-doohickey in her hand. Time to be a hero! Time to show these madhouse future-world-weirdos what a little old-world knowledge could do. She propped herself up on her knees, popping just a bit out of her hidey-spot (the suit of armor made for nice cover), and punched the fusion core into the back of the suit.
Ancient machinery jittered and whirred, and then the armor folded open like origami. A jump, and then a little careful shimmying, and then she was comfortably pressed in. She depressed a button on the inside of the right-hand gauntlet, and then the whole thing went 'whir-whir, clickity-clickity,' and she was inside a tempered titanium cocoon. Her wrist-computer-thingy shook hands with the armor's onboard electronics, the HUD lit up in a warm, comforting shade of amber, and she started ambling forward.
Okay then. Maybe this was a good idea after all! The crazy people unloading on the wall of the museum hadn't even noticed Nora yet, and she managed to trudge up to the back of the fallen vertibird before the shouts began resounding from below, and the bullets started flying and seeking her.
Ka-ping! One of those bullets ricocheted a plate of her armor, but it didn't even leave a dent. Ping! went another, right as Nora slipped her gauntleted hands under the mounted minigun and yanked it off its stand.
Servos turned, bolts popped out, and then she was effortlessly holding up the gigantic weapon, aiming from the hip. Haha! Payback time! The cannon started to rotate, pulling at the chain of bullets that hung from its side, and then it started spitting fire. The night lit up.
Ping-PONG! Something struck Nora's helmet, and the force almost turned her head. Jarred her neck. One of the psycho's had climbed up onto the opposite roof, taking careful aim with his pipe-rifle. He'd nearly hit Nora's visor! Ack!
Snarling, she turned the full fury of her spitting minigun in the man's direction. His eyes bugged out when he saw what was coming, and then an instant later his head burst like a melon, black and red and grey bits flying everywhere. Headless, his body flopped down onto the roof and flailed like a fish.
Yeah! Get some!
Nora rotated a bit, spraying bullets down at the masses of leather-and-steel-wearing weirdos, tearing up the cars they hid behind; the trashcans and bricks and mailboxes too.
And the flesh. Hard to tell what was going on, with everything so dark and distant, but at one point Nora distinctly saw a slender arm go flying. At another point she very clearly noticed a string of multi-colored, slimy, ropey guts tumble and flop out of someone and spread onto the sidewalk.
She squelched her eyes shut, though she kept squeezing the trigger. Her stomach was rolling and flipping. Don't barf in the suit! she told herself resolutely. Don't barf in the suit! At the least there was no chance of her peeing or crapping herself. That particular battle-rite-of-passage had already happened several hours earlier.
Battle! Ha! I'm a soldier, huh? Nora wondered what that maniac drill sergeant back at basic would make of her now. She opened her eyes. There was fire and carnage everywhere ahead, but now she minded it all a little less. The minigun hummed and sputtered.
And then -somewhere under her feet- there was a sharp popping sound. She lost hold of the trigger and the world went out from under her feet, the hollow fuselage of the vertibird pitching forward and then down. Nora came rolling down with it. She flew through a cloud of smoke and debris, and then she was a big rock plunging through the night. The ground rushed up to smack her, unforgiving asphalt…
…but the servos in the arms and legs of the powered armor took the impact, and it all just seemed to groan a bit. Nora stood, wobbled, and then shook herself. Everything intact. No harm, no foul!
A woman was staring at Nora from across the street. Her hair was all done up in some weird, spikey do, and her face was caked in dirt, eyes lined with black war-paint. In one hand she held a hand grenade, and the other hand was reaching over and holding the pin. But the weapon seemed to hang, limp and forgotten between her fingers.
Nora hefted her minigun, took aim, and the barrels started their whirring. The other woman's jaw dropped, she turned around. She took off down the street as fast as she could. Finally the bullets started pop-pop-popping out again, throwing up sparks around the fleeing woman. Not a single bullet struck her.
At the end of the street something suddenly seemed to erupt. An entire freaking car went flying into the air with the motion, spinning and then clattering and screeching against the wall of one of the derelict buildings. The woman fled a few more yards, then a massive shadow burst out from the ground and loomed above her. A twist, and she went flying, a ragdoll spinning head-over-heels-over-head, until she slammed into a faded Nuka-Cola advertisement painted onto the brick wall and went SPLAT. She flopped off of the wall, landing in a pile of rusty cars.
What the..? Nora flicked a fingertip against the interior of her gauntlet, turning on the armor's headlamp. It didn't illuminate much. The thing that had flung the woman still seemed like a looming shadow, over there at the end of the street. Then it took a step forward, and then another, and then it was running.
And Gosh the thing was fast!
A demon! The thing was a gosh-darn DEMON! Horns and glowy eyes and spindly claws and a flicking tail and everything! A demon right out of one of Nate's Grognak the Barbarian comics! In a panic Nora aimed her bulky gun and squeezed the trigger.
That annoying, gearing-up sound came as it whirred, and then the minigun went tink-tink-tink once again. It spat streaks of fire at the charging demon, the bolts arcing and…mostly bouncing off the creature's armored hide. It didn't even slow the thing down.
One of the demon's massive hands went slinging back, and then it streaked in and smacked Nora on the shoulder, staggering her and making her dance backwards. Servos whirred, but they couldn't counter the thing's strength.
Nora raised her gun and squeezed the trigger, and maybe three more bullets sputted out before the thing went empty.
Like a frog the giant horned devil-thing leapt and closed the distance with Nora. Its arms gripped her shoulders, its feet slammed into her belly and knocked her to the ground, and then the monster was looming and filling her field of vision, razor-teeth dripping with slather.
It gripped her shoulders. Slam-slam-slam! The powered-armor groaned and dented, and pieces of it tore. The impact punched the air from Nora's lungs. In front of her eyes the HUD fizzled. There were critical errors everywhere.
This was it! She'd been given a little moment of arrogance and actually killed some people, but now a creature straight out of Hell had risen up to punish her for her hubris. She was well and rightly FU- urm.
Well, she was truly SCE- er. Well. In any case, this was it! Even if –just a moment from impeding death– Nora couldn't quite bring herself to swear (even in her head.)
The demon was trying to pry her out of the protective tin can. Get to the meat inside. It screamed and howled right over her face. Then it reared back.
And then there sounded a distant crack, followed by a nearby whizz. And then the demon's left eye just exploded in a shower of blood and jelly. Hundreds of pounds of muscle shuddered and twitched for a moment, then all of the thing flopped down and went limp, collapsing on top of Nora.
A bullet through the eye, and then it was dead. Wow.
There was a moment of silence. Then, with a crack and a massive boom, some nearby cars went up in a mushroom-cloud. That dead lady with the crazy hair and the grenade…she must have pulled the pin out after all. Bits of twisted metal and flaming slag rained down across Nora and the dead thing on top of her. Eventually she tried to wriggle up, but found that she couldn't. The power was gone from the limbs of her armor, and now the lifeless plates were just a burden. And the dead demon must have weighed a LOT, on top of that.
There was a scuffing sound on the pavement. Ugh! Had she missed some of the psychos?
A figure sashayed into Nora's field of vision and loomed above her. She held a gun, but thankfully she did not shove it against Nora's forehead. The woman was also not dressed in steel, long johns, or bits of tire. Instead she wore a long, sleeveless jacket, some symbol sewn just above the breast (a spade?) The woman's skin was cocoa-dark, she wore a black, wide brimmed cowboy hat on her head. Over her shoulder she carried some sort of rifle, with a wooden stock and a long, bolt-action barrel.
"Need some help?" the black cowgirl asked. Her voice was deep and there were some leathery lines on her face, but she looked sturdy and fit. There were some freckles there too.
From somewhere out of Nora's field of vision another voice sounded. "Who says she's not a raider?" This other woman sounded sharp and bitter.
"Looked like she was fighting raiders."
"How the fuck do you know?" the other voice protested. "Bunch'a folks with some gel in their hair and some welded-on clothes, and you just fucking assume that they're raiders? They could have been honest folk, you know. Just trying to get by, and then turned to gibs by miss psychopath here with the minigun and the powered armor."
Sheesh! This other woman sure sounded rude, but the cowgirl with the rifle was smiling a good-natured smile and paying no mind. "They were raiders," she simply stated, and then she smiled down at Nora. "And this one's not."
"But how do you fucking know?"
The woman turned toward Nora and loomed overhead. "Hey miss?" she asked. "Are you a raider?"
"I'm a lawyer," Nora protested, her voice a sounding a bit strange through the facemask.
The unseen voice sputtered, and then laughed. "A what?!"
"A lawyer." Nora thought a moment, and then made an effort to explain. "A student of abstract legal theory, working as either an advocate or an adversary, in criminal or civil-"
"Speak American, fuckhead."
"I am! And could you please not use such…such language…"
Now a full-throated belly-laugh came out from the out-of-sight woman, and a moment later she stepped into Nora's view. She was smaller than one might have expected, based on the voice: short and slight of build, dressed in torn blue jeans and a leather jacket. Her complexion was pale and a bit ruddy, and her eyes were faintly blue; close to the color of ice. There was a ratty straw hat on her head and a shotgun rested against her shoulder, her hand cupping its stock. "Ha!" the woman barked, and now Nora noticed that one of her front teeth seemed to be missing. "You're a strange one, huh?"
The other woman just bent down and wedged the butt of her rifle under the dead demon. "A little help?" she asked as she started to shake the creature off of Nora.
"And get my fingers shot off?"
"The safety's on. And since when are you cautious about anything, Cass?"
"Ha! Am I really supposed to trust you to leave the safety on?" Teasing, but the white, ruddy woman was helping now.
"I'm not a drunk."
"Seen you throw back enough vodka and beer to kill a brahmin."
"Only on special occasions."
"Ha! Yep. Like every time the sun goes down. 'Only through massive sacrifices of vodka may we please Re, the Sun god, and insure that another day comes to pass. Amen.'"
With a mutual grunt they both managed to prop the dead demon-thing up and shove it off. Grateful, Nora rolled onto her belly and then warbled unsteadily to her feet. A few buttons pressed and she began to shed bits of powered armor, revealing the Vault Tec jumpsuit beneath. "Thank you for rescuing me…" she muttered. "From that…that…demon!"
"Deathclaw' the cowgirl with the rifle corrected her. "Tough hide, but they die quick enough if you shoot 'em in the eye."
"Death…what?" Nora asked. Sure had looked like a demon to her.
"They're just hyper-evolved lizards, really."
"Hyper…what?"
The white cowgirl guffawed again. "Oh! I get it! You're one of those weird-ass vault dwellers, right? Sheltered for generations, ever since the bombs fell?" Another chuckle. "Shit. I can't even imagine."
Nora looked at her feet. "You could say that. It's a…long story." (Or maybe a very short one. 'Hi! I'm Nora Haley. I got cryogenically frozen right after the bombs fell, then my husband was murdered in front of my eyes and my baby was snatched right out of his arms. I got frozen again, and now I've just woken up. And I have no idea what the TOOT is going on out here!')
She straightened and offered a hand. "I'm Nora Haley, by the way."
Instead of shaking, the shotgun-wielder tapped her chest. "I'm Rose of Sharon Cassidy." She hooked a thumb and pointed towards her companion. "And this –and I'd suggest bowing when you address her highness–"
"Cass…" the other woman groaned and protested. "Don't…"
"This is the esteemed, one and only…"
"Really, you said that you'd stop…"
"Queeeeen…" Cass drew out the word with this odd, Tennessean twang. It almost sounded like she was doing an Elvis impersonation. "…of New Vegas, Her August Majesty Petra VanBuren!"
