2. The Contract
MacCready POV
Satisfaction Guaranteed by The Firm
Here I am, slouched back in the red armchair as always. I've been sitting in it for the past several months. Am I ever going to leave? Duncan needs me, and all I do is sit here and drink booze. I turn the glass in my hand, looking at it from another angle. I have to do something. C'mon, MacCready! Do something! I straighten up in my chair. Go find a customer, since they're not coming to you.
I'm about to stand up when I hear boots coming down the hall from the main room. They sound determined—have that sound of someone walking with purpose. A few seconds later, I find out why.
It's the blonde chick. The vault dweller that was in here about a month ago. She looks different. What is it that's different?
She strolls right up to me and looks me in the eye expectantly. "You came back," I say, trying to keep the shock and confusion out of my voice, and failing miserably.
"Of course," she simply replies. "I'm surprised you're still here. Figured you'd be long gone." She has seemingly already said more in the last five seconds than in the five minutes when we first met.
"Told you I would be," I come back evenly. "You come back for a social call?"
"Nah," she replies. "I come for business." She pulls a string to release a smallish bag from the side of her leather armor and throws it to me. When I catch it, the sound clearly indicates caps are inside. I look up at her with a confused face.
"You said 250. Well, there's 250." She straightens her glasses a bit before continuing. "I'd like to hire you. I did last time, I just didn't have the money. So. Are you still for hire or just sitting here enjoying the view of the bar?" She's definitely different now.
"Yeah, I'm still for hire," I say, cautiously, as I open the bag to find what looks around the amount of 250 caps. She did it. Wow. "You sure about this?" I look back at her to see a smooth look in her eyes.
She doesn't answer right away, but when she does, she says, "I'm sure. Do we have a contract?"
I sigh and get to my feet, stashing the caps in the pocket on my thigh, and grab my rifle from behind the chair that's been home for far too long. "Yeah. Alright then. Lead on, boss." That felt weird to say. It had been so long since I'd had a boss for one, but also because I never would have considered her a potential for that role when I first saw her. Where is the shy young woman I met a month ago?
As I'm about to walk out the door ahead of her, she calls my attention. "Psst." I look her way to find her crouched by a curio on the same wall as the door. "Hold on," she whispers. "Anybody coming?" What a weird thing to ask. I shake my head after looking to the main room, finding everybody's attention on Magnolia as she belts out Man Enough. "Alright. Get down and keep watch." She turns back to the curio.
I don't understand what she's doing until a couple inhalers of Jet and a bottle of Gwinnett is in the bag hanging off her shoulder. "Are you stealing?" I ask, bewildered. She pauses her raid to look at me. She gives me a level glare before putting a finger to her lips and lightly shushes me. The hell?
What happened to the innocent, sweet, little vault dweller that was hiding behind the wall a month ago? The same one that cringed at just the sound of the Gunners. The same one that barely had enough caps to cover that night's food costs. This woman and the woman I met a month ago could not be the same. Yet it is.
As she finishes her looting from the VIP room of the Third Rail, she comes over and looks at me with the same expectant look as when she came in. "I have some plans. Hope you don't mind."
"Um. Plans?" She nods. "What plans? And why would I mind? You're the one paying here. I really don't have say."
"Well, it's gonna bring in some more caps, so I didn't think you would." She knows me enough, I guess. "But… still thought I'd tell you. It's how I was raised." Must've been nice to be raised. "Before I came back here, I took a job from Whitechapel Charlie. We're heading toward the Memory Den." She walks past me and leaves the room. Still confused, I follow her.
It would be dark out if it weren't for the street lights, still working miraculously. Must be around 9 o'clock by now. I look at my watch, confirming this. As we near the Memory Den, she darts to the right of it, toward a short alley. She walks up to a door and turns around, scanning the area we had just come from. Well, she's odd. She turns back to the door—crouched—and bows her head to the doorknob. I'm about two feet from her when she says, "There's a few warehouses here in Goodneighbor that need cleaning." She looks back at me with the noise of the successful click of a picked lock. "And I'm the new cleaning lady." She opens the door and motions me inside. She's still crouched, so I join her. As she closes the door behind me, we hear some voices upstairs.
"Can't believe the boss is makin' us watch this crap," a voice says.
"I know," another responds. "It's not even important." These people are so from Boston, I think. Their accents are so strong.
The first voice says, "I'm gonna go grab some supper from the cooler downstairs. Want anything?"
"Yeah. Get me a Nuka."
"You think I was serious? Get it yourself." We start to hear footsteps directly above, heading toward the stairs—toward us.
My new boss grabs a combat knife out of a sheath on her hip and moves her way—still crouched—toward the stairs, hiding on the left side. Stay there and duck, she mouths. Like hell I am, I mouth back as I move to her side. She just rolls her eyes at me.
As the man I assume was the first voice comes down the stairs and turns left—away from us—she leaps up behind him, silent as a ninja, and slits the man's throat. She's brutal. I can't decide if I'm more scared, shocked, or impressed by her having done that. She turns and looks at me, raising her eyebrows at the dumbfounded look on my face. I just shake my head, so she turns and goes up the stairs. "Next," she whispers as she grips her knife in her hand more securely.
We spend the next 10 minutes "cleaning house," as she'd put it. When we finally reach the top level, we find a man sitting alone, picking at some kind of food on a stick. The boss just pulls out her 10mm and shoots a new hole in his head. "There," she says. "One warehouse down, two to go." She walks over to his body taking the .45 ammo from him before turning to the food he was working on. "Hm. Squirrel," she comments, picking it up and finishing the last three bites that were left. Normal behaviour for a regular wastelander. Her I imagine… not so much. And as if to prove me even more wrong, she notices an open bottle of Gwinnett Lager, picks it up and takes a swig from it. Seeing my surprised face, she asks, "What?"
"Didn't think you'd be one to do any of that." She looks confused, so I drop it with a shake of my head.
As we leave the warehouse, I ask her suddenly, "Hey, can I talk to you?"
"Of course." She turns to look at me with the same expectant look in her eyes that she had when she walked in, about to hire me.
"Out of the line of people's sight?" I ask, continuing my previous question.
"I don't see why you can't just talk right here," she says, looking around her to find only a few neighborhood watchers walking around.
"If you didn't trust me with your life, I don't think you would've hired me to watch your back. We're still in town. If I wanted you dead, I'd at least wait until we were far from Goodneighbor. And the fact that I'm telling you this makes it much less likely that I'm going to kill you. Wouldn't you agree?" She looks at me, exasperated.
"Fine," she says, walking into the alleyway nearby, even turning left to go further into the alley. Guess she believed me. When she gets to the end, she spins on her heel and looks at me. "Go ahead."
"Well…" I start, not really knowing how to continue. I decide to muster all I have and just spit it out already. "You're not exactly who I remember from our first meeting," I begin with. "You're different."
"How so?" She asks, crossing her arms in defense.
"I don't know. Just… you act different. You talk different. The way you carry yourself, you know?" I realize she must think I'm saying this negatively. "I'm not saying it's a bad thing!" I say almost with too much speed to seem nonchalant. Trying to recover, I continue, "Change isn't all bad. I think it's good for you. Not you particularly, but… people…" I notice I sound horrible just rattling on like this so I decide it'd be best to stop. I sigh and relax the arm I was using to emphasize my words.
She's silent for so long I think she must believe me crazy and is wondering why she hired me in the first place. Finally, she speaks with one of the most somber tones I've heard. "I had to."
She says it so quiet I have to ask, "What? I couldn't hear you."
"I had to change," she says a bit louder. She clears her throat. "I've been out here in this… wasteland… for a while now. I've seen that people like me—people who are like… how I used to be—they get killed so fast. I can't get killed yet. I can't." She looks down at her hands and tries scrapping the dirt out from under her fingernails. Under her breath: "I had to change. I can't die just yet." She realizes the dirt has moved in permanently and gives up, throwing her arms back to her sides.
"What could be so important?" I blurt out before fully thinking it through, and instantly regretting it.
She looks at me with a thin line of a mouth and a fire in her eyes. I'm not sure if I should be scared of said fire or not. "That's none of your concern currently," she replies with a steely voice.
"Wouldn't it help if I knew?" I ask.
"No! Just… no." She turns to head out of the alley. "You don't need to know to do your job. You just need to worry about watching my back. …We're done talking." She sighs. "To the next warehouse." She walks out of the alley, leaving me staring after her until I realize I should probably be following her.
We finish cleaning the next two warehouses with ease. Somewhere in the second one, I asked her what I should call her. Just call me Boss, I guess, she said. That's what you've been calling me. That's fine. When I told her my name, she just said Hmm, and reminisced how she went to school with a MacCready. Wonder if I knew your great-great-grandad or something, she continued then laughed. How old does she think she is, I wondered at that comment, but decided to just leave it.
As we are walking down the stairs of the cleared third and final warehouse, she stops on the landing to continue our small squabble. "I do not have weird habits!"
"You do, too. Who else picks up everything that isn't nailed down, anyway, huh?
"These things can be repurposed. I guess you've never heard of recycling?" She crosses her arms as if to prove a point.
"Whatever, Boss. It's still weird." By this point, I really couldn't care less about it, but it's funny to see her worked up, so continue on I shall.
Suddenly, I hear a noise behind me, on the stairs we just came from. As I turn around, reloading my rifle, a gunshot fires. Loud and deep. From the sound of it, it must've been a .44 caliber. "That's for killing all of my frien—" I have my rifle ready and finally shoot the last remaining Triggerman between the eyes, cutting his words off.
I turn around to see my boss lying on the ground, blood seeping out of a bullet hole on her right shoulder, just below the collarbone. She looks as if she hasn't been shot before. Probably hasn't been. My auto-medic kicks in before I realize I need to.
I pull a Stimpak from my pouch, along with a leather strip I keep for purposes like these. "Bite on it," I say as I shove it in her mouth. She doesn't even have time to be confused by my order as I reach into her shoulder with my fingers and pull the whole—luckily intact—bullet out. She screams into the leather strip, from the pain as much as the swiftness of which it all happened. I reach for the Stimpak and inject it directly next to the bullet hole itself.
"Sorry I don't have any Med-X. It'd help if I had some," I say. I watch the hole slowly heal up before my eyes, something I'd gotten used to after being in the wasteland my whole life.
After a handful of seconds go by, she reaches to pull the strip from her mouth. I feel her eyes on me. I look at her face, complete bafflement is clear. No longer pain at least.
"How did you do that?" she asks.
"Do what?" I ask back at her.
"All of that," she says. "You shot him between the eyes at a moment's notice. Plus, you helped me so quickly and calmly… with such ease… I'd think you were a doctor, not a mercenary."
"When you're a merc," I reply, "it comes with the territory. I had to learn to do that to stay alive. Also," I continue as I look at the bullet in my hand that pierced my boss, "what good are my caps if you're dead?"
As I'm putting my leather strip back, along with the souvenir bullet, I hear her say, "Beth."
"'Scuse me?" I feel my brows knit together in confusion.
"You asked earlier what you can call me. My name's Beth. Or Elizabeth for long," she chuckles. "But… don't call me that. Just Beth, okay?"
"Why not Elizabeth? That's a nice name," I say.
"Because I hate it. It never fit me. Ever. So call me that, and I'll frickin' kill you myself. That's if we don't find a yao guai or deathclaw first." She grins devilishly.
"Okay. Whatever you say, Beth." I smile back at her.
Leaving the spent Stimpak, some of Beth's blood, and the last Triggerman behind, we quit the premises and head back out into Goodneighbor.
I swear I hear Magnolia singing an encore from earlier as we pass by the Third Rail. Must be drifting out from a subway grate or something, I think.
If you got style and you know how to please, and a smile that makes me weak in the knees. If you're a guy who is gentle and tough, you might be the man who's man enough.
A/N: And the new Beth is revealed. Maybe she'll have a voice soon, eh?
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