Chapter 8) Neighbors Mean Trouble
AN: The feedback after last chapter was… better than I could ever hope for. Over 500 views and the review count almost doubled. I don't really know what to say: thank you doesn't do it justice, but are the only two words that come to mind. So, Thank You, all of you readers and reviewers: to the unwavering and loyal Aegon Blacksteel and Designation A1-13; to Mandalore of Freedom, Master of Surprise, CelfwrDderwydd and ScorpioSkies.
To Pro Assassin, whose 'Legend of the Lone Wanderer' you should go read if you want a solid Fallout 3 Fic, and to DocMarten2525, whose writing is so masterfully emotional that it's a sin not to applaud it. To docs pupil, for being my light-hearted conscience when I risked getting too serious and grimdark in my writing, and for bringing a novelization of Van Buren to this site. Huzzah.
And finally, last but never least, to the amazing WastelandScribe, who is tirelessly working to give 'Missing in Action' some beautiful, beautiful artwork. Best. Motivation. Ever.
Warning: John being a jerk ahead.
0 = MiA = 0
As the first dusting of dawn broke over the desert, the wind picked up from the north and buffeted Novac with billows of sand and dirt. Helios One's solar collection tower, alone challenging the Black Mountain's supremacy over the dry expanses of oranges and yellow and dulled browns, was concealed from even his eye at moments, when the screen of particles was thickest and the morning puffs threatened to erupt into a full-blown gale. Accustomed to the hard, ungrateful struggle of living off the barren earth rather than travel, refugees from furthest East – no further than Nipton though - would then send furrowed, empty glances and cluster together, reminiscent of the sudden storms blowing from the Divide .
Boone waded against the flow of hopefuls making for the road just north of the shantytown of tents and forlornness that had sprung up during his… absence. Behind him, the cracks of engines disturbed the morning stillness and lured the refugees forward, to the couple of deuces that rolled into town from the north not half an hour before. He could hear Lt. Monroe shout orders above the rumble and the white noise that accompanied any discontent crowd: the officer was urging people who were growing more desperate by the hour back from the first concrete hope they'd been presented in days.
An exercise in futility.
Even at a cursory scrutiny, too many milled about: Lt. Monroe had nowhere near enough places to satisfy all, nor men to handle the situation should the crowd decide to take matters in their own hands.
Boone was sure things would take an ugly turn. They always did. He expected the first shots any minute now. His own lack of concern for that was almost enough to scare him, but he didn't allow himself more than a moment before he shoved that line thought aside.
He had bought a place for Ranger Stella on one of the deuces. It was the right thing to do, he had told himself as the world laughed at his selfishness and his belated attempts at redemption.
Between that and the fee due to Dr. Gannon his reserves of favors and caps both were skirting on the nonexistent. Funny thing was, he couldn't bring himself to care: he'd spent years shoring up the funds, years of service that painted his hands with the blood of innocents and turned sleep into a haunting prospect, but he'd told himself time and again that the outcome was worth it, worth it all. That Carla and their children – 'she wanted two' he remembered – would lack for nothing.
How naïve of him. Whatever God was out there had taken his good time, but his past's sins had finally caught up and then brushed past, taking away what he held dearest before he could blink.
Boone blinked now and was removed from his dreary mindscape only a few meters away from the link gate leading deeper into the motel. The lobby door swung open with a creak that managed to overcome the whooshing of the wind: out came an unremarkable man in plain garb, his sunken posture speaking of privation and desperation all too common around Novac. A couple of steps behind him, another one such as him followed.
Between the two of them they carried a stretcher weighed down by a body wrapped into a threadbare sheet. The wind licked at the edges and one badly-affixed end loosened at the corner.
A single foot poked from underneath, bare and wrinkled and bloodless. Boone watched the two porters move past him without a second glance and he spared them not a moment longer, but that foot monopolized his attention. He could easily imagine the woman it belonged to, her smarmy smiles and her bullet-riddled chest drenched in blood, and he wished he didn't.
The image came unbidden anyway, as did her slackening face under the ghostly echoes of bullet discharges. It reminded Boone of another face moments before another bullet ended her life, and for a moment he didn't know what ate more at him: that he pulled the trigger the first time, perched atop Cottonwood Cove, or that he didn't the night before.
The leading man slowed as they carried their charge past him, casting a worried look over his shoulder that immediately found Boone and stopped at the 1st Recon beret perched on his head. A moment passed, then Boone squeezed his eyes under the shades and clamped down on the irrational thoughts singing at him so alluringly. He turned about and marched away, willing to leave behind those enticing possibilities with every step that widened the physical distance.
He knew what lay in that direction: the same madness that danced around him those months after Bitter Springs, before he met Carla and dared to hope of a future together. He couldn't allow himself to walk that path, but it took every inch of discipline imparted by his elite military training not to turn back and turn into something less that he had to be. Only when the Dino was well to his right and a few minutes had trickled by he dared to look behind him.
The stretcher was gone. Monroe had probably given orders to bury the body somewhere out of sight. It was more that Carla would ever have, face down in the Colorado, the currents carrying her further down and the mirelurks…
'Enough.'
The NCR soldier on guard duty had zeroed on him the moment he crossed the fence and tried his hardest not to fidget with his rifle now that Boone's course couldn't be mistaken any longer. Green as they got, with two brushes of hair he'd probably call mustache. Probably only a few months older than the minimum requirement for conscription.
Forlon Hope swallowed so many like him each year Military Command never released the true numbers to the general population.
"Ah, sergeant. Nobody's to see the detentee, detan… the detainee. Lt's orders. I'm sorry?"
Boone unslung his AXMC from his back and offered it to the boy, who let his own rifle almost clatter to the ground in the wide-eyed hurry to comply. Boone eyed him starkly for a moment and the boy swallowed, then he unbuckled his belt and slung it over the boy's shoulder, effectively disarming himself.
"Take good care of these."
"Yes. Yessir!"
The room was just as he remembered it: clean and carefully arranged. A worn NCR flag nailed above the headboard, two framed photos of their time in 1st Recon on the nightstand and the rack of Astounding Awesome Tales – an almost complete collection – were in their usual places, as was the metal cabinet where Manny kept his spare guns and ammo. That one, however sat unbolted at the foot of the bed, a gaping emptiness where a small arsenal used to be.
The man in question sat on the couch, elbows on knees and staring at a threadbare scarf in his hands. A sewn skull grinned up unashamedly, a large blotch of red sporting an evil-guy mustachio and a horned helmet. Some of the color had faded and something had taken a bite at it at some point, judging by the missing tissue and loose threads on one end, but Manny held it tenderly in his right hand, a thumb brushing over the skeleton face. His left arm was cradled closer to his chest: fresh gauze was wrapped tightly around his shoulder where one of the stray bullets caught him.
Boone had laid eyes on that scarf only another time before, the last day of their second rotation with 1st Recon. An hour later, Manny had spoken for the first time of leaving the military, of Novac and of the future they could have there.
Pure, unbridled hate swelled in the sniper's chest and disfigured his face for a moment before he put a lid on it with a mighty struggle of self-control.
Manny didn't turn to face him, but there was no hiding the black bruise across his cheekbones and his mended nose. Nor his sigh of relief as he took a quick look at Boone.
"You came." His voice came out quite nasal too. "Who's on duty now?"
"One of Monroe's men," Boone found himself answering. He had yet to take a step further into the apartment after the door clicked shut behind him. "Andy will take your shift."
"Poor old man," Manny muttered. "So, it means you're leaving, huh? Good for you. I still don't know where they'll ship me."
"Look at me."
Under his leather jacket, Manny tensed. The scarf, vestige of his tribal past with the Khans, disappeared behind him and when he finally met his request Boone saw the NCR soldier staring back at him, not the man who couldn't bring himself to follow orders and open fire on his erstwhile family.
"Why?" Boone wanted to know. He needed to.
"Why?" A rueful, self-deprecating smile tugged at the corners of Manny's lips. "You're really asking me why? And here I thought that you, of all people, knew me." The sniper squeezed his eyes as if to ward away some sudden pain. "Bloody, blind fool."
"She was mine," Boone hissed, his voice cracking. If with anger or something else, he couldn't tell. "Mine. It had to be me."
"And then they'd would have shot you, Craig. Bam, dead! Is that really what you wanted?"
'Yes.' "You had no right."
"I had every right! The right to stop my best friend from throwing his life away for… for some useless vengeance like Jeannie-May did! Look what happened!" Manny's eyes were wide and filled with undecipherable emotion. "It won't bring Carla… any of them, back. If they'd shot you… God, I don't know what I would do."
Boone let the confession wash away over him, and in its wake only a single emotion remained. "You hated Carla," he spat, every syllable dripping with disgust. "You are glad she's dead." 'That my child is dead.'
Manny balked. "Is that what you think of me? That I take pleasure from your misery? Goddamnit Craig! We've been best pals since we were kids. I was your best man!"
Memories flashed unbidden and fresh wounds not even scabbed over started to bleed again. Carla at the altar, smiling as the priest prattled on, a yellow dress as her bridal gown and his dog tags for a ring. That first week of leave on the Strip, she singing on the stage and the whole casino hushing down when she looked at him and smiled. That smile, he could still see it…
'No. Please, enough!'
"This is not about me. It's about you being happy the Legion took my family!" Manny made to answer, but Boone cut him short with an accusing finger, all pretenses of stoicism shimmering away. "Don't deny it."
Manny was on his feet a moment later and Boone instinctually shifted a foot back a few inches, bracing himself for a tackle that never came. Manny's expression was one of pure outrage, of pain and betrayal and hurt, and Boone hated him all the more for it.
"After what we've seen those sick bastards do, how can you say that? Yes, I think you made a mistake marrying Carla. I never denied it, and we argued enough times about it even your thick skull should have gotten the idea by now. But Craig, you loved her, and that's the only thing that mattered." He swallowed. "The Legion? Nobody deserves that. Not your kid. Not Carla. If you had told me instead on vanishing, I would have helped you. We could have saved them, together."
Would they? Would Manny's help have been enough? Regret gripped Boone's throat in an iron vise that made it hard to breath as his brain revisited those days of chase and the last few hours belly down, peering through a scope and despairing when hope withered and the only solution took form and consistence.
Self-preservation offered justifications and denial. 'There were too many. Hundreds of them.' 'We'd have been too far.' 'Not even with the entirety of 1st Recon.' Each and all rung hollow and fake, drowned in a wave of shattering regret. He tried, he struggled to put a damp on it, but his thoughts and discipline failed him, if only for a moment.
Manny covered the distance between them in that moment and a rough, familiar hand offered Boone an hook to return to reality. He took it, no matter how much he wished he could just let it go and be done with it. Manny's eyes were rheumy at the corners and shone with sincere sympathy.
"Don't throw your life away on some suicide mission or pointless vengeance. After Bitter Springs, I tried both. None of it can bring back what is lost forever."
Boone drew a complete blank at that, but the moment passed and then was gone. Manny took a couple of steps back and turned about, reaching for the 1st Recon beret folded neatly on his nightstand. Boone hadn't even noticed he wasn't wearing it until that moment, but even that thought took a back seat to surprise when Manny pressed the cap into his hand.
"I don't deserve to wear this anymore, Craig," he said slowly and a thin, sad smile danced on his face for the span of a heartbeat. "Hell, I'll probably be trialed for executing a PoW or some other bullshit. No way they'll draft me back for another rotation. You hold on to this for me, for old times' sake huh?"
A gunshot echoed. A second and a third followed in quick succession and then more, until the screams and shouts made it impossible to keep the count anymore.
"That's not a service rifle," Boone said.
Manny gave him an odd look, but Boone was out of the room in two long strides and almost collided with the recruit guard on the way out. The green boy was fidgeting in his boots: his arms still encumbered by all the guns, he was visibly torn between his standing orders and instinct, be it fight or flight. Boone simplified the decision for him by retrieving his gear and latching it onto his body as he broke into a fast jog towards the gate.
Manny watched him go for a moment and his lips curled into a wistful smile nobody noticed.
"You're a good man, Craig Boone," he said, softly and to himself. "Don't let that change." The rookie didn't even notice him until he spoke and a bitter laugh bubbled inside of him and threatened to spill. Still, no use harassing the boy. By the time the boy-soldier collected himself and started to spill whatever formal tirade Monroe had imparted him, Manny had disappeared inside again and re-emerged after a brief clack of wood hitting the floor.
In his uninjured hand, a polished Heckler & Koch SMG-2 10mm Submachine Gun caused the rookie to gape and send a bewildered look into the room, where one of the cupboard's floor planks had been removed to reveal a cavity dug directly into the floor.
Manny chambered the first bullet into the barrel with some difficulty and forced a confident grin for the boy-conscript's sake. More voices were joining the firefight, drowning the other chorus of panicking people.
"Time to put up or shut up," he announced. It wasn't the most fitting one liner, but not too terrible either by his own biased judgement. The boy probably didn't even get it, but he swallowed and managed a nod that could signify anything, really. "Let's get a move on."
0 * MiA * 0
From the hills west of Novac, they came.
Ghouls. Ferals. Dozens of rabid walking-corpses draped in ripped brown vests stampeded down the road leading to the old REPCONN site, emaciated limbs flailing in their shambling charge.
By the time Boone crouched at the corner of the concrete platform housing the gas station, the main drove was halfway to the outer tents. The bulging crowd he'd left gathered around the deuces was caught in the throes of panic, worsened by the lack of any weapon of sorts: only NCR personnel, active or former, was allowed to carry personal weapons in the camp after the night's events. Over a hundred men, women and children suddenly found themselves unarmed as the writhing mass of limbs and hunger zeroed on their position, guttural and inhuman snarls voicing their violent excitement.
Lt. Monroe's forces had been arranged around the deuces to contain the displeased crowd, and now found themselves with a moving wall of disoriented, terrified people between them and where they needed to be. The Officer barked orders left and right, hands waving and pointing above the collective heads, the exact wording lost in the multiple choruses raising all around. The civilians didn't seem to heed him and most of his soldiers hesitated, caught between their need to follow whatever their orders entailed and their instincts screaming at them to flee or at least avoid being trampled to death by the crowd.
A few bold souls took initiative in their own hands and mounted atop the deuces' roof to gain a clear line of sight. Boone caught a glimpse of Ranger Andy's brown ceramic armour and a wide-brimmed hat somehow atop one, scoped Marlin Model 336 belching .44 magnums at the approaching ghouls like in the old days. On the other roof, a soldier stood up and cocked his arm back in a passable imitation of a baseball player: something brown and oval sailed in an arc for several seconds, then bounced against a ghoul's shoulder, struck another in the hip and disappeared.
The detonation sent several ghouls sailing in all directions as shrapnel and pressure reduced those too close to shattered torsos and mauled shapes barely recognizable as humanoid.
Boone took a quick count of the dead and picked his target.
The vast majority of the clothed ferals were booking it towards the deuces, egged forward by the rumbling of the engines and the tantalizing noise denoting an abundance of prey. The grenade had ripped a gaping hole and left more broken and hissing on the ground, but no more followed and the ferals were too far gone to care about comrades or their wounded. Whatever counter fire Monroe's men setting up was whittling away their ranks, but only theirs.
Others were caracoling for the camp mostly undisturbed, their advance barely swayed by the inaccurate fire of a couple of young caravaneers who had somehow retained their guns. There were a lot of people still around the tents though, and more were trickling in from the loading area. Boone spotted a few white coats carrying and herding a group of children through the rows of dull canopy.
Finally, a small group, no more than a dozen, had split from the main horde to shamble towards the McBride's ranch and their mooing brahmins. There, a single shouting gunslinger met them head on and Boone vaguely recognized the distinctive gunfire of a N99 High Power that alerted him in the first place as the 10mm bullets wreaked havoc into the blindly charging zombies.
Boone didn't hesitate. He aligned the scope with the nearest ghoul, compensated for the morning wind, breathed and squeezed the trigger. Compensate, align, squeeze. Compensate, align, squeeze. Mechanically, he repeated the cycle, an eerie, forced calmness descending on him as he did what he did best. Every time he squeezed the trigger, a rotten, snarling head exploded or an high caliber bullet pierced the target center-mass, sending the corpses back to their natural state and sprawling like ragdolls.
By the time he went through the first magazine and recharged, the pack of ghouls threatening the camp were down ten effectives, but ghouls didn't heed to concepts like morale or unity cohesion. They weren't soldiers answering to a superior officer, of an order of battle. Hunger ruled them, and hunger spurred them forward incessantly, uncaring of losses or personal harm.
Two shots into the next magazine, the first spilled past the perimeter and fell upon the impromptu defenders, claw-like fingers grasping and jagged, broken teeth gnawing at the nearest fleshy appendage. Outside his tunnel vision he could hear the barking of M16A1s and a variety of other weapons, but the screams of fear and panic soon became intermingled with others of pain and the rattles of death.
Boone continued to shoot, but the targets were becoming harder as they jumped on the civilians or loped through the tents. He caught one in its open jaw, obliterating the lower half of its head at it reared it back to bite at a downed woman, then brought his rifle up a few degrees and nailed another in the side before it could barge into a tent. He scaled the amounts of bullets left to him with every shot, focusing on the dwindling count rather than the screams and the twitching, trashing bodies set upon by the ghouls.
Those, he moved past, whittling away at the roaming ones who had yet to sink their teeth into a prey. The practical part of his mind reasoned that the feeding ones would be too taken with their meal to threaten anyone else for a time, but the more instinctual one yelled and protested, slowly chipping away at the bars of the cage of discipline he forced it into.
Someone else in camp had other ideas. A shotgun boomed loud and clear and through the scope he saw one of the feeders' heads explode into a fine mist of bones and blood. Another found its spine shattered, then a third slumped forward dead. By then, the remainder of the pack hissed and scurried to their feet into a crouched, swaying charge, hateful eyes set upon the Cassidy woman. He dropped one as the shotgun boomed once more, taking the legs out of the foremost as he adorned the head of the second with another hole. She took it in stride and filled the next two with lead as Boone dispatched the last with his last bullet and slung his rifle across his back.
The sniper unholstered his SIG P220 and vaulted over the concrete platform, landing in a crouch and sprinting toward the line of tents as the shotgun spoke once more. He cast a quick glance towards the loading area and saw Monroe being jumped by a feral donning brown, threadbare robes as all around the soldiers on the ground unloaded their last shots from the hip into the attacking corpses and unsheathed their combat knives or reverse-gripped their rifles as makeshift clubs.
Atop the deuces, marksman fire was growing erratic. He spotted Andy kick away an audacious ghoul with his good leg, then zero his rifle somewhere behind the truck and unload shot after shot on the targets underneath. Then he passed the first tent, and they all disappeared from sight.
He shouldered his way past a fleeing woman dragging a small child along by the arm and a moment after the entrance to the nearest tent bulged and was torn from the hangers as man and ghoul collapsed into a tangle of limbs and gnashing teeth. The man rolled on top and socketed the ghoul right in the face, then screamed as the feral's teeth bit into his retreating forearm. Boone shot another approaching roamer between the eyes, but as he turned to assist the wounded man, he was treated with a wet squelch, fresh blood on his pants and the sight of the man hitting the ghoul in the face again with adrenaline-fueled rage, this time palming a large stone that came away redder and gorier each time it rose again.
Boone moved past, gravel crunching under the soles of his boots where the slicker bodily fluids didn't attempt at his balance. His nostrils filled with the smell of spilled blood, gunpowder, perspiration and rot as another ghoul tried to get the jump on him. The SIG-Sauer was steady into his hand and the crack of gunfire deafening, but the ghoul dropped with a thud and Boone didn't tarry.
A scream, louder and shriller than any adult could ever spell. Boone rounded down on the nearest tent, something akin to dread sitting snugly into his stomach: the flap was torn away, and his eyes widened a fraction in recognition. He strode in and kicked the ghoul square in the side, teeth grinding into dust: the blow resonated up his leg as the thing's ribs snapped and the ghoul rolled away onto its bloated belly with an animalistic snarl. Boone put two bullets into it, confirmed that Doctor Alvarez, clad in a no-longer white coat was dead and quickly glanced at the still form of Ranger Stella on the bed; from what he could tell, she was still comatose, but unarmed, an empty IV plunged in the crook of her elbow.
'Who then?'
A whimper reached him. Huddled in the shadow of the far corner, half hidden behind a metal cabinet holding medical miscellanea, a pale girl hugged her knees, tearful, fearful eyes locked on him from underneath a brown fringe of hair specked with dirt. The practical voice in his head told him to return outside and rejoin the firefight – 'the more I kill, the sooner it's over the safer they'd all be' - but then the girl sniffled and words emerged from the whimper.
"P-Please, it killed her. It bit her a-and ate her and it will come for me too. Don't leave me alone. Please."
The bars bent, then snapped. Before he knew it he was stepping over the dead doctor and then crouching in front of the girl. Her green eyes widened, in shock or fear he couldn't tell, but she didn't recoil from him. Without a word, he picked her up with one arm and she wrapped her skinny arms around his neck. She was light, too light as he adjusted her weight against his side, no older than ten probably, and for a moment Boone had trouble drawing breath that had nothing to do with the girl's tense grip around his neck.
"Don't look," he said to them both, and she girl buried her face into the crook of his neck as he moved around the dead doctor and the pool of blood widening around her. He looked over his shoulder at the comatose Ranger, conflicted on whether to leave her there, defenseless and prime picking for any ghoul, then steeled himself and stepped out.
'The girl first. Then I'll get help, someone to carry the bed away.'
Outside, the bark of gunfire had reduced to single shots intermingled with bursts of automatic fire that echoed through the labyrinth of canvas. Bodies, human and ghouls alike, littered the ground in twisted heaps, the blood turning the gravel and dirt into a treacherous, slick mire that licked at his boots with every step. An older man moaned feebly from underneath a ghoul not a couple of meters away, but Boone didn't attempt to reach him, mindful of the child holding on to him. Then movement caught his notice and he spun around, clutching the girl closer to his side and levelling his gun at the approaching figure.
The index moved away from the trigger when Doctor Gannon emerged from another corridor, some kind of plasma gun whirring with charged energy in a two-handed grip. The blonde doctor halted as he spotted the muzzle , then he seemed to recognize Boone behind it, sighed and waved at someone out of sight.
"It's safe, come on. The town's only a little way up!"
Fast, overlapping steps announced a small procession of refugees emerged from the same direction he came for, a few of them carrying makeshift clubs, rocks or the odd gun. They slipped past Boone, moving up towards the Motel, but nobody attempted to take away the girl. Most barely looked at him: their eyes danced wildly in their orbits at every shadow and every turn that could hide a famished attacker.
Boone didn't follow them, but grabbed at the two nearest men, one of which had been on burial duty what seemed to be hours before but his internal clock and the climbing sun said was barely half an hour, if that.
"There's a woman inside," he said, titling his head at the tent he'd just exited. The dead doctor's feet protruded outside and Gannon let out a small gasp, before muttering a name under his breath. "A NCR Ranger. Grab the bed and take her to the motel."
The unknown man made to protest, but the other elbowed him in the side, his eyes briefly gazing at the gun in Boone's hand more than at the 1st Recon beret on his head. With a brisk nod, the carrier disappeared past him and into the tent; his begrudging companion followed a moment later.
He turned to look for Gannon, aware of the slightly shaking girl in his arm, and found him at work kneeling beside the same man Boone had dismissed not a minute before. Cassidy was on the other side, her shotgun on the ground as she bent over the wounded man.
"Here. Put pressure here," the doctor was saying. From one of the many pockets of his coat he fished out a small bundle of gauze and quickly unrolled it. "Hey, keep those eyes open. Right, just like that. Now speak to me. What's your name?"
Boone never heard the man's answer. Rushing feet kicking gravel and the snapping of jaws had him spin around: half a dozen ghouls were shambling forward at great speed, hands caked in red and entrails dribbling from their yellowed, rotten chins.
"Cover your ears," he said to the girl. Then he levelled the P220 at the ghouls, and opened fire.
The girl jerked and cried into his shoulder and hurried to comply after the first shot exploded. Three more, and three of the ghouls were snapping their jaws only at the cold ground, but then Boone's mental count reached zero and the gun clicked dry. The remaining ferals didn't stop, rather picked up the pace: if it was because they understood he'd run dry or sensed the two more emerging from on his left, he didn't know. He put the girl down and pushed her towards the doctor with the back of his hand as a by now familiar shotgun boomed, but if the shot hit, it wasn't one of the ghouls in front of him.
The trio of robed, charging zombies were almost on him when the fresh magazine clicked into the gun. The first ghoul jumped ahead to claw at him first and received two bullets center mass for his trouble, but momentum carried the listless body forward to crash into him before he could as much as take a step away. The breath went out of his lungs like it didn't belong there and the Sig slipped from his grip as he landed onto his back and a jutting rock struck him in the kidney. His vision went white with exploding stars, and in a moment of stark clarity, Boone realized white would be the last thing he'd see.
The tearing never came. Nor the rending, or the sinking of teeth crushing his unprotected throat. Instead, the smack of colliding bodies hitting the ground and the crunch of bones accompanied the clearing of his vision. With a grunt, Boone managed to shove away the corpse riveting him to the ground and propped himself up on an elbow just in time to see a blood-soaked blade flash down and a skull-like rotting head sail a few meters away.
John Doe breathed out, spat and then levered himself on his feet with a huff and kicked away at the beheaded body underneath him. The mercenary was covered in blood from the tip of his hair to the soles of his boots: his shirt was ripped to shreds and several thin, claw-like cuts marred his face, chest and forearms, but the man seemed in higher-spirits than when he dropped him the bomb a few hours before, despite the carnage surrounding them.
As the last of the gray swam out of his vision, Boone noticed the bloodshot pupils and the twitching of the hand clutched tightly around a Legion Gladius. Had it not been the middle of a battlefield, Boone would have frowned at that and at the choice of armament, though he knew beggars couldn't be choosers, and the N99 at his hip clearly lacked a magazine..
He accepted the hand-up instead, and picked up his gun.
"You alright?" Doe asked quickly as he looked around. It reminded Boone of a deathclaw searching for prey, or a junkie on psycho moments before the engagement. "Those mutants didn't clip you?"
Boone offered a nod, and that seemed to satisfy the man's curiosity. Doe moved past him and Boone double checked the ghouls' bodies for safety, but there was hardly a way to be deader than having one's head removed from the shoulders, or one's skull caved in.
"John!" Cassidy called. "Come here and help me pick him up."
Boone scanned their surroundings as Doe and Cassidy hoisted the wounded man up between their shoulder, but it seemed no more ghouls were nearby. The gunfire had died down to isolated shots, but so had the screams and the snarls of the ferals. Through a gap among the tents, Boone caught a glimpse of Ranger Andy waving at him from atop the deuce and pointing at Novac. Boone waved back.
A tug to his pants shifted his attention downwards and he almost froze when he saw it was the girl, her face smudged with blood. For a long, terrible moment, he drew a complete blank. Then he crouched and checked her over for wounds, turning her head this way and that as gently as he could manage, but he found none. He was about to call over the only doctor in attendance when the blonde's voice piped up on its own, carrying that particular commanding tone only doctors could successfully pull off.
"Alright, don't budge him too much. Ehi, you two, stop right there!" Boone followed Gannon's pointed finger and spotted the two men he'd charged with taking Ranger Stella away slipping out of the tent, unburdened by beds or stretchers in any form. "Where are you going? There's a woman unable to move in there and you have two sets of hands. Pick up that damn bed!"
It was a dreary procession that left behind the ravaged camp and crawled up the small rise leading to the motel's gate. The distance was brief, but the going was slow despite the fear and apprehension for lingering ghouls: more than once they had to skirt around bodies or take a moment to steady themselves unless someone slipped or tripped, coming crashing down with their charges as well.
Boone took up the rear guard while Doe lead from the front after the doctor replaced him in huffing and puffing under the weight of his patient. The girl refused to let go of him until the fence gates swung open and a bloodied and battered Lieutenant Monroe welcomed them back.
It took gentle coaxing from a blonde woman who introduced herself as sweetly as she could as Doctor Luria to finally pry the girl away from Boone's hands and for a brief, selfish moment Boone's arm lingered, before he let go. The Doctor carried her through the crowd, the moans and the moans of the motel's courtyard and up the stairs to the second floor, where they disappeared in the room beside theirs. His and Carla's.
He swallowed down the spike of anguish until it cooled to smoldering embers in his gut and took a moment to recompose himself, then nodded at Ranger Andy beckoning him over and went to see what Monroe and the Old Ranger could want from Manny, Doe, Cassidy and him with everything else going on. A minute later, his faint suspicion was proven correct.
They set out half an hour – and a shower and change of clothes for Doe - later.
0 * MiA * 0
The first leg of the 'scouting expedition', as the NCR officer fancied it, was a tedious affair of sullen, stretched silences broken only by the echo of their steps against the rocky walls. The stripped rust-eaten skeletons of pre-war vehicles were the only other presence on the road and even less talkative than his companions, giving John a lot of time to spend alone with his thoughts. His thought.
"The suit. His name is Benny. Head of the Chairmen Family in the Strip, he lives in the Tops Casino."
A whole night spent watching Dusty McBride's sleeping brahmins had somehow cooled his spirits with the cold water of rationale reasoning. He may have a name, logic insisted, but things like 'the Strip' 'the Families' and 'Vegas' everyone spoke about so familiarly were to him only distant lights at night, inkblots on an map and vague notions patched together from hearsay. He'd need more information, a plan of action and to get there in the first place…
But he finally had a name. Benny. The rest of Benny remained a big question mark above a suit, a definition that with some minor tweaking could fit himself too, but it was something. It had to be.
If he could believe Craig Boone's word to be true, that was . John stole a glance at him then and a pang of something he couldn't put his finger on made itself known. The sniper hadn't said a word after the other sniper, Manny Vargas, enacted his vengeance for him and almost got his head blown off for the trouble. He hadn't said anything as and after the Lieutenant sent them on their way the night prior. He'd just read the bill of sale for his wife and child, once, then pocketed it and John hadn't seen any more of him until the ferals attacked. And still, he kept his silence, a silence John was hesitant to break.
'What reason has he to lead me along? None.'
'None that I know of.'
John's finger twitched close to the trigger of the borrowed M16A1 and Cassidy glared at it and at him. He held it, and after a moment she rolled her eyes, turning to glower pointedly at the road ahead as if it had slighted her and she resumed poking behind every rusted heap Remington first, wary of lurking ghouls.
'Crazy woman. You and your crazy debts.'
Ten minutes later they stumbled upon the first signs of trouble: a duo of ferals whose un-life Boone rectified in less than ten seconds and a couple of hisses from his silenced rifle. A massive overpass of chipped concrete spanned over the roadway at a straight cut angle, complete with fortified tool booth on one side and still surmounted by some lengths of chain fence along the top walkway, the sections too damaged and crumpling to attract the attention of even Novac's scavengers.
It reminded John of some medieval castle illustration he must have laid eye upon before Benny, Top Cat of the Chairmen Family shot him in the head. And missed. Too bad for him.
John reached the first leaking sack of irradiated meat and kicked it on its back, pursing his lips as disgust welled and coiled in his belly like an angry beast. More dotted the asphalt here and there, their bodies smashed by some strong impact that crushed their bones into paste and gifted a lot of color to the dull monochrome of the asphalt. More than a few looked like their rotten meat had seen more than a few set of teeth.
"Monsters cannibalizing monsters," John scoffed and stepped over the corpse. "How appropriate. Who could have dressed them like some kind of old monk sect? Because these clearly couldn't themselves."
Boone's voice echoed slightly as he disappeared inside what must have been an employee parking area slotted in a hollow underneath one of the ramps. A number of dead ghouls were congregated there.
"The last scavenging spotted a few by the tool both and a camp just further ahead. Armed ghouls, same robes. Definitely not ferals." A pause. "Damn."
"What's up?" Cassidy said, shotgun rising.
"Supermutant. Dead."
The light was lacking and the stench was awful, but neither stayed John from his first meeting with a 'Supermutant', albeit a dead and chewed upon one. The tall lump of violet meat was sprawled in a corner, its trunk like limbs dislocate and almost torn from their sockets by opposing pulling forces. Torn rags did little to cover a body muscled up to deformity, but what stopped John was the face, if it could be called so by any stretch of the imagination: a protruding, heavy set cranium, not unlike an ape's, that only possessed two small eyes, one of which missing, and a full-gum grin kept fixed in death by some form of harness wrapped around the back of its head and pulling its upper and lower lips away.
"This day is turning into a freak show." 'And you are the main attraction', Legion Dog-Head's voice supplied without missing a beat.
"The ghouls tore him to pieces," Cassidy pointed out, her voice muffled behind her hand in a vain attempt to quell the stench. "What the hell is a nightkin doing here?"
Boone looked around. "Could be a straggler, but I see no stealth boy. There might be more around. Watch out for ripples in the air and the stench: you won't hear them walk until they charge you."
Cassidy let out an heavy breath and clutched her Remington tighter, but nobody had anything to say to that, and John was glad to turn back to their task rather than contemplate another misshapen horror of the wasteland.
They stumbled upon the camp the sniper mentioned just past the overpass: a semi-circle of sandbags arranged at a bend of the road and two shacks of tin foil and salvage, though the former had been scattered in places and more leaked where the cloth was torn or simply burnt away. John's nose wrinkled at the bodies of ghouls sprawled around: the stench of decay was stronger, as were the signs of feasting on the corpses still lying on patched mattresses or tossed around like ragdolls.
Cassidy cast a long, wary glance around, then picked up a duffel, dropped the contents on the pavement without much grace and started pacing around, stopping every few steps to pat a corpse or stuff a particular object in her newly-acquired bag. John took notice and reached for what looked like an ammunition box.
"Nightkins took these by surprise," Boone said, crouched and unbothered. "No casings, but plenty of empty e-cells. Supermutants don't usually use those: too fragile, too many little pieces. And the bodies look bashed in."
"There ain't any of those around here though," Cassidy huffed as she gathered up a decent pile of caps scattered around an upturned table and a broken chessboard, shifting the nearest dead ghoul aside to reveal a few more under the body. "Shame, things are worth a pretty penny."
"We aren't here to scavenge," Boone said, voice flat and mouth pressing into an impassible line.
"You aren't, soldier boy. Good for you, you're better than me." she shot back. "Me and suicide cowboy here are quite broke however, and I know Cliff Briscoe wouldn't mind parting with a few caps for some of this stuff."
John glared at the ammunition box rather than give the irritant woman satisfaction and pondered whether or not it was worth just punching the lock open. 'Cassidy wouldn't mind, and it might get her to stop holding last night over my head.' The sniper, however, was still an unknown variable.
The man in question stood up and walked to the edge of the camp rather than continue the spat, then stepped over the sandbags and continued down the road.
"Great. Another jerk to add into the mix. Just lovely."
"Nobody asked you to come. You can go north anytime you want," John pointed out.
"Yeah, sure. Five minutes alone and you're bound to get shot to pieces. Take last night." The redhead looked over her shoulder. Not at him, rather at the NCR sniper's retreating back. "And this time they won't just let it slide with a warning and a chat over some drinks."
Ice shot down John's spine. "What did you tell them?"
"I didn't tell them about your arm," Cassidy snapped. He still had his back turned to her, but he could hear her rising to her feet. Was she aiming the shotgun at him? "The rest? Pretty hard stuff to cover up with half a dozen Followers in town and you surviving wounds no average Joe has any right brushing off."
"Who? Who did you speak to? Who asked the questions?" 'The caps? Too few, unless she's keeping the rest stashed away. But then why come here? Why not be on her way? Why did she throw me down last night when they could have shot her as well?'
'Goddamnit.'
"The leader of the Ranger party. Better him than those nutjobs of the OSI: right up the crazy alley, all of them. You'd get along like an house on fire. I guess his second knows too, and of course Doctor Alvarez – the one you scared to death - suspects." She paused, and her voice lowered a notch. "But she's dead. Out of the picture. Must be nice for you, hmm?"
"You think I have any idea why I'm a freak? You think I want this?" he growled back, and punched the ammo box. The lock flattened and the whole top deformed around an indentation the size of his fist "Benny took everything I was and left me with this body, a ton of questions and no fucking answers. Best part? No matter how much I try to delude myself, I'll probably will never get any of those answers. Not from him."
The sniper waited beyond the next bend in the road and John's concern whether he had eavesdropped took a temporary second place to the sight he was treated to. From the vantage point up on the road the REPCONN test site widened in all its tumbledown glory: a huge, double-winged complex dominated one end of what he had been informed was once, centuries and centuries past, a lake bed, now dry. The main building remained surprisingly well preserved, with radio antennas and globe-like decorative implements still standing proud against the wear and tear of time.
Several stories tall and enjoying a natural elevated position reinforced with several concrete emplacements all around its perimeter, it still failed to match in height the rocket-shaped monument that commandeered both the center of the valley and John's undivided attention for several seconds. Narrowing his eyes and with the sun behind him, he realized his assumption was dead wrong: the rocket wasn't a monument.
A moment later, it came to him that it must be a 1 on 1 reproduction of the real thing, one of the crafts meant to be launched from Bloomfield Space Center before the Old World soiled itself in nuclear shit. Or even one of the real things, repurposed to retirement ahead of its time.
"Whoever held the reins here must have housed some serious delusions of grandeur. That, or over-compensation issues."
Boone was crouching behind the skeleton of a Humvee pushed to the side of the road, rifle in hand and small lines creasing his forehead. "We are being watched."
Just then, John realized what a perfect target he was, square in the middle of the road. "Where?"
"Second to top floor. Can't say if human or ghoul, definitely not a supermutant." He turned to look into his scope for a few more seconds, then spoke again without taking his eye away from the lens. "Where's your friend?"
"She's coming," Cass bit back. The duffel strapped across her back jingled tantalizingly as she adjusted the strap around her shoulder and John couldn't help but appreciate in passing how the contents bulged and strained against the tissue.
"Eyes up here, cowboy."
Their descent was a cautious one, and done mostly in silence. Several smaller buildings, stripped of use and recognition by time and erosion, were arranged around the colossal rocket. Each corner and shadow, each pile of rubble could house a lurking zombie or hide the telltale shimmer of a stealth-boy. John kept a single eye always locked on the windows of the HQ's top floors, though with the naked eye the most he glimpsed, or thought he did, were flittering shadows and shapes.
The sniper led them around the main square, keeping close to the constructions on the right but not close enough for anything to jump at them without warning. Cars crowded another parking lot, some crashed into others, their seat and carcasses littered with chipped, white bones and grinning skulls. Those they skirted, wary of clawing hands reaching up from underneath.
Where the refugee camp had been a spiraling, chaotic stampede and the canyon amplified their very steps, any living or undead presence bar theirs had seemingly deserted the valley and a cloak of silence hung over the three like a shroud, cracked only briefly by their breathing and the soft padding of boots on the ground. No corpses rotted in the climbing sun, no feral shambled out to sate its hunger or follow whatever its rad-rotten brain commanded. The sniper shot John awaited from whomever populated the top floors never came either, and a few minutes of shuffling forward later, they reached the base of the steep staircase leading up to the front door.
The inner courtyard atop the steps offered a markedly different spectacle, one John welcome with more relief that the still emptiness below. If the checkpoint at the overpass had been the site of one-sided slaughter, here the robed ghouls had put up a far nastier defense.
John poked one of the hulks – 'Nightkins. Supermutants,' he reminded himself – with the muzzle of his rifle, then kicked it in the head for good measure to confirm it wasn't pretending. Four more, flesh cooked and limbs missing from concentrated energy fire, lay between the steps and the entrance, the doors bent and bashed in by superhuman strength and dangling from their hinges. More than fifteen ghouls however littered the floor in a carpet of torn brown robes and crushed bodies, huge concrete hammer-heads and rebar spikes still decorating some of them. A Supermutant and two ghouls were lying down in what might have been a lovers' embrace, if one of the ghouls wasn't bent backwards on its snapped spine and the other wasn't still holding onto the knife jabbed in the Supermutant's eye.
"These haven't been here long," Boone said, staring into the gaping, broken jaws of the entrance. "No longer than a day. Maybe less: corpses are still fresh."
John snorted, then scooped up a laser pistol and frowned at it and it's crushed casing, only to drop it. "How come nobody in Novac did notice either of them approach? I can understand these uglies and their stealth fetish, but the ghouls? You have quite the sight from that T-Rex's mouth."
"They came from elsewhere. Many paths cross the Black Mountains, some giving into the middle of the desert."
"You could have manned this place if it's so crucial to your survival," John retorted.
"It wasn't my decision to make."
"Is it me," Cassidy piped up, turning towards the front door with a frown. "or is there someone talking in there?"
Three muzzles were levelled at the entrance and after a moment, John crawled forward. The thick blanket of darkness ahead faded with every step, revealing the outline of a round reception desk, strewn rubble and more bodies caught in the throes of death. Overhead lamps swayed precariously from the ceiling, husks of shattered glass and odd sparks. He could hear the other two shadowing him and his own squishing steps echoed as he crossed the threshold only to dart to the left this time, knowing he offered a prime target to even the worst sharpshooter by standing in the door's light.
The crack of static and the croaking voice that accompanied it almost made John jump out of his bones and punch the grimy interphone there and then.
"Hey, smoothskins. Are you listening? The Prophet said you would come. Go to the loading area in the east wing, the one with the metal staircase. The Demons are waiting there, and then we'll talk."
"Prophet? What are you – "
"Stop wasting time and get over here."
0 * MiA * 0
There weren't many options but doing their best not to walk blindly into a situation that stank of trap even when surrounded by the decomposing corpses of mutants. Cassidy suggested one of them should hike back to Novac, but their very presence ankle deep in what looked like some sort of ghoul-Supermutant feud bespoke of what kind of support they could receive from the thin and harried town garrison, and there was no telling how the situation, murky as it was, could escalate if they tarried overlong.
In the end, Cassidy canned that line of action herself and the sniper guided them through a covered, porticoed walkway that run outside around the base of the complex all the way to the east wing rather than brave the maze of close-quartered ambush sites that would make everyone ripe pickings for cloaked Supermutants.
John didn't particularly despise that idea: the revelation of Benny's identity had stirred something primal in his gut, something the night on watch cooled but the ghouls' stampede reawakened with a vengeance. Part of him, including his wounded pride, couldn't help but wonder how he'd fare against one of the blue, lumbering beasts if push came to shove, and more than once, when he thought he spotted a shimmering in the air, it was eagerness that came to the front rather than worry, or fear.
Eventually, however, they had to abandon daylight and plunge into the belly of the REPCONN building through a service entrance. Inside, the air hung still and thick with dust and moisture, but overhead neon lights shone and even the broken ones flickered with current from exposed cables. A layer of sediment grime coated the naked walls and the floor, putrescent papers mixing with sand and dirt blown into the cracks of the walls and ceiling.
Water pipes remained exposed underneath and condensation coated the rusted metal in beads that gave up to gravity at times, plinking and pinging like arrhythmic heartbeats . The air was so damp the dust clung to their exposed skin and clothes and snaked into their eyes and nostrils. John quickly came to envy Boone's glasses in that department
"This place has a power plant of its own or what?" asked Cassidy, then flinched as her voice bounced off the walls and dispersed into an all-encompassing echo.
Boone, in the lead, settled for an inscrutable glare from behind his shadowed lenses. "Reactor," he whispered. "Ghouls must have switched it up. Now, be silent."
They crept forward, past empty rooms stripped to nakedness, offices where only the imprints of furniture remained and empty boots cluttered with broken, burnt terminals and other worthless junk nobody bothered to pick up. John brought up the rear and slung the M16A1 across his back, opting for the more familiar Sunny and the gladius for the small confines of the veritable labyrinth. The sniper seemed to know his surroundings though, because never once he paused at the crossroads of sorts.
Ten minutes passed by just so, then Boone rose a clenched fist. Cassidy, looking elsewhere, would have stumbled into him if John hadn't caught her at the last moment.
"Two." The sniper gestured. "Around the corner. Supermutants."
John made to answer, but a creak cut him short. He spun around, catching a glimpse of Cassidy's eyes going wide as saucers and a acrid waft of ozone combined with pungent body odor, then Sunny was pointed at the forehead of a Supermutant clad only in a loincloth and a cowl, its face pulled back in a feral grin by a leather harness.
It was also pointing a flamethrower right at them.
"How did it get behind me?"
A stealth boy was latched to the mutant's wrist, the grey device comically small around the meaty limb. John's index hoovered over the trigger and a disembodied, stern voice in his head commanded him to shoot and kill the mutant, that he would survive, he already had, and he was in the right. Then he heard more steps thundering closer from behind him and he didn't dare to turn, but Cassidy's voice and Boone's curse were enough to clean the haze and remember he wasn't alone.
"John…"
"Human put weapon down and human don't look." the Supermutant growled, words crude and grating to listen to. John almost shot him there and then as the thing talked. He didn't, but he didn't lower Sunny either, nor he removed his finger from the trigger. The Supermutant's face hardened and turned uglier. "Captain says humans work for ghouls, so kin humans don't kill for now. Kin takes humans to Captain and you talk, but only if human put weapons down and stop looking at kin!"
John seethed, gritting his teeth and felt the retort form word for word at the tip of his tongue. Only the insinuation that he had anything to share with the zombies made his vision pulse red, and he almost followed along with what that suggested. Then Cassidy's hand was on his shoulder, her grip tight to the point it hurt, and he remembered other times, seemingly so removed and yet so close.
The desert, the Legion charging. Fight rather than flee. Smoke and crosses and the bruises of a collar around her throat.
A storm. Churning insides warm around his hand and a body cold at the touch. Blank eyes, broken spirit and the anguish of an old man.
The Supermutat hefted its weapon higher. John closed his eyes, exhaled as if he could bowl the mutant over by breath alone like a titan of old and lowered Sunny. If the Supermutant was pleased, its expression didn't show it.
"Humans walk. If human shoot, kin will burn humans, then give you to centaurs. Raw human sinewy and tasteless. Cooked human better."
It took all of John's self-control to holster Sunny and not discharge the entire magazine into the mutant's face. Two more, whom the thundering steps belonged to, had come up on Boone's side, makeshift clubs of rebar and concrete clutched in their paws. John felt those bestial grins mock him and taunt him, but the flamethrower-toting creature kept behind the trio and egged them forward, well out of reach and still close enough for the threat to be effective.
John looked at Boone, but the sniper shook his head. The man remained calm and in control: his eyes never rested too long on their blue captors and his gait was poised, like a panther's biding its time and ready to strike. If he intended to do so, however, John couldn't tell.
Cassidy had paled considerably at the mention of 'centaurs' instead, and whatever the things were, the fondness with which the nightkin spoke of it didn't sound encouraging to John either. In an effort to distract himself, he mirrored her gesture but avoided the excessive squeezing and to use his left. She glanced at him, took a long, steadying breath that had her eyes turn rheumy at the stench around them but nodded, and John let go.
They were led past the office areas and through a couple of larger corridors that gave into spacious storage rooms decorated with empty shelves caked in dust. Here and there, charging pods for robot units stood like silent sentinels, their charges long destroyed or relocated by the enterprising population of Novac.
Then the storage rooms were behind them and John spotted lances of sunlight spearing through the cracks on a distant wall on the second floor, a large swathe of which was visible above them where the ceiling had collapsed. The Supermutants veered to the left, away from the light, and proceeded down a short ramp and through thick, rotten wooden doors already swung open, humans in tow.
A single Supermutant awaited inside behind a large desk littered with stacked clipboards and human bones. It was holding up a human skull in its large hand, beady eyes boring deeply into the shadowed sockets, leathery brow furrowed into thick creases. It turned the skull around slowly, then pulled it closer to its face and whispered with the same subtleness of mortar fire.
"Antler, is it you?"
The skull forsook to answer, and the blue giant snarled in sudden, unbridled rage. Its hand came down on the desk and the skull exploded into a shower of splinters and white dust. The Supermutant howled, a piercing sound that had everyone recoil, and John was inches away from drawing his gun when the sound was reduced to bouncing echoes and the creature's eyes fixed on him with an almost palpable weight.
"Humans. I can smell you. Draw your weapons and you feel Antler's horns. Be good human, and kin gives you freedom."
'Free to leave, die, or to turn into something like you?'
It was Boone who stepped forward, however, his voice slow but firm, devoid of emotion. "We don't have any quarrel with you, kin. Neither does Novac. Why are your people here?"
John stared and stepped between the flamethrower and Cassidy, but the jet of liquid fire never erupted. The Supermutant leader took its small head between its paws and made as if to squeeze its own brains out, then shook it and stomped on the floor, eliciting a sharp crack of shattering tiles.
"Men of steel and men of flesh search and probe. Tabitha says kill them all." Its eyes shot open, and John could see the madness in them. He tapped Cassidy's shoulder, and she stiffened under his touch, but the muzzle of her shotgun steadied. The other mutants didn't seem to notice. "Then different man takes the climb, challenges for entrance and kills Green child. Tabitha wants to kill him, but Good Man brings gifts, Stealth Boys, and says kin are strong, stronger than him human, stronger than any human. Good man respects strength and tells Tabitha more gifts here. Gives invoice. More Stealth Boys at REPCONN, it says."
The Supermutant howled again and the desk's surface caved under its weight as he struck it with both elbows, still clutching its head. John took a step back. "Antler says no, trap in Good Man's red smile, Good Man is cunning and sly and fake. So Tabitha crushes Antler instead! She says I am with Marcus, but I still remember Master! I remember Unity. Master was best thing that ever happened to kin. Master God! Nightkin strongest with Master, until Master goes boom!"
Cassidy let out an horrified chortle, but the other Supermutants were cheering, their hollers shaking the moldy plaster off the walls, and only John noticed. He took another step back and Boone's head tilted his way, a nod he might have missed had he blinked.
"Lies!" the Supermutat exploded, and pointed a meaty finger at John. "Humans lie! Good Man lies! All lies! Antler was right, but Antler gone! Ghouls already here, with their Prophet and their energy weapons and many kin die trying to take stairs and room with Crack Shot. Good Man says kin are stronger than with Master if kin fight other humans now, but kin cannot fight without Stealth Boys, or kin end up like Marcus and Keene!"
Another step, and the muzzle of the flamethrower pressed between his shoulder blades. John stiffened, then willed his muscles to loosen and glanced up at the ugly visage of one of the mutants.
"Human listen to Captain Davison, or human flambé."
Boone tugged at the strap of his rifle and fell on one knee in one fluid motion: the loud hiss of the silenced rifle was amplified in the close confines of the office, then drowned as the Supermutants bellowed. John was already mid-motion: he spun and bashed the flamethrower's muzzle with his left away from his companions as he unsheathed the gladium with his right and sliced at the wrists holding the cumbersome weapon up. Momentum drove the blade deep, even into the Supermutant's thick skin, then Cassidy's shotgun barked.
One of the rebar-toting uglies was cured of the affliction of life as the 12-gauge turned its face, throat and right shoulder into so much mush, but the beast still lumbered forward. Boone let his rifle hang from his shoulder after expelling the spent casing and withdrew the P220. The other mutant with a passion for melee staggered forward, green blood falling in thick globs from its mouth and flooding from the hole in its chest.
Davison roared and John felt excruciating heat wash over his left arm, but the jet of ignited gas went wide. It sprayed at the wall before spreading to the ceiling. John wrenched the gladium away, danced around a boulder-sized fist and hacked at the injured hand again, wincing as the Legion steel ground against impossibly thick bones.
The Remington Wingmaster boomed again and a heavy thud stressed its efficiency, then the desk exploded in a shower of splinters as Davison charged right through it. Boone dropped his target with three more shots between the eyes, then threw himself to the side and rolled hugging his rifle as a super-sledge sailed where his head had been only moments before.
A kick connected squarely with John's chest and he was sailing one way as his breath went the other, but muscle memory was more resilient than brain memories and he caught himself with a half roll, drawing as he landed. Sunny's shots were whispers to the shotgun's, but the green tears that blossomed on the Supermutant's face were just as deathly. The flamethrower-wielder let go of its weapon, which cluttered to the floor as paw-like hands clawed at its own face in blind pain, its hulking body jerking and spasming.
Cassidy's shotgun barked again, but Davison was too quick, too maddened and the shot barely clipped him as the rest decorated the wall with yet another hole. Cassidy worked the pump frenetically and Boone placed half a dozen .45 bullets in the Supermutant's back, but the creature shrugged them off and surged forward, waving a warhammer the size of a child like it was a rack of paper. The wall exploded with a deafening bang above her and Cassidy cried hoarsely as debris showered her and dust clogged at her eyes and throat; she staggered and coughed as Davison swung his hammer again and Boone dropped the empty handgun, AXMC already rising.
John threw his whole weight at the sledge as his right drove the gladius into the Supermutant's throat, but Davison bent to the side and the blade only trailed a thin, green line on the thick skin. The human barreling like a cannonball into his swing spoiled its aim however and he staggered, the weapon almost wrenched from its hands. John bit down on the pain flaring across his ribs and grabbed the hammer's shaft with his left as the blade flashed in an arc across the mutant's eyes.
Then he was flying through the room, and Boone's rifle hissed like the crack of thunder.
He connected with the far wall moments later and the small of his back wailed as it found the super-sledge's head and not putrescent plaster to soften the impact. John crumpled to the floor as Davison fell on one knee, the other mush courtesy of Boone, but its moment of weakness passed and it staggered on both feet, grabbing at one of his dead kin's rebar clubs.
Cassidy was coughing and crawling to her shotgun at the same time and Boone barely dodged a wild swing that would have turned his insides into goop. John got on all fours and dry heaved, then grasped at the super-sledge's handle and propped himself up. The rebar club connected with the floor in a shower of detritus that hid Boone from view for a moment, then the shotgun boomed and Davison snarled, one arm dropping limp along a mangled side.
"HUMANS FEEL ANTLER'S HORNS!"
Davison kicked Boone away and the sniper went sailing above and behind the desk, then turned around with a speed that nothing with that much lead in its body had any right to pull off and charged at Cassidy, whose hands shook as she fished out fresh shells to feed her empty gun.
John's left closed around the super-sledge and his legs carried him forward. Then he was spinning, momentum struggling to tear the super-heavy weapon from his grip, and when the hammerhead connected the backslash threated to snap his spine.
Davison's ribcage did snap as one of the super-sledge's heads disappeared into its chest. The Supermutant shuddered to a stop, then stumbled back and its bad legs gave way under it, leaving it growling out blood and propping itself up by clutching at the rebar club. John kicked it in the face and wrenched at the super-sledge with a snarl: it came away with a wet squelch, dripping green ichor, but Davison didn't go down. It glared at John, panting and gurgling as it tried to speak, its eyes burning with hatred.
John swung the sledge down on its head with a wordless cry and green blood splashed all over his face.
He let go of the hammer and doubled over, panting and trying to spit out the blood in his mouth as the corpse collapsed with a thud and a clang and the floor shook. Then it kept shaking and shaking as heavy feet thundered closer and closer, guttural voices hollering in rage of betrayal.
"Throw the bag!"
Boone was on his feet, sniper rifle propped on an intact segment of the desk and aimed at the door. The gun belched and Cassidy was working the strap around her shoulders after a moment's hesitation, the duffel jingling jollily with caps. John grabbed it from her, body working on auto-pilot as his mind struggled to keep up, and pushed her towards the desk as Boone's rifle spoke again.
The bag struck the foremost nightkin straight in the face and John's throat dried at just how many clogged the entrance, each pushing and shoving against the others and two of Boone's victims to get their paws on the humans first. The bag bounced back and plopped on one of the corpses, beady eyes following it in surprise and annoyance, and John saw Boone expel a spent casing and adjust his aim.
A lightbulb switched on and John hightailed towards the desk, adrenaline pumping through his veins and sending every cell of his body into overdrive. He picked Cassidy up bodily, wrapped his hands around her taking advantage of her confusion and jumped over the edge as the rifle kicked back and the sniper threw himself onto the ground.
The bag detonated in a ball of blinding, white-hot plasma that evaporated everything in a two-meters radius. Walls, ceiling and pavement disappeared and the closest Supermutants didn't scream because they had no time to before they were reduced into smears of bondless goop. The shockwave came next, rolling out like an invisible cloud of doom and heat that invested the desk and flowed through the gap the late Davison created.
Boone had tucked himself away deep under the desk, but John, shielding Cassidy with his body, took the brunt of it. Heat washed all over his skin, sizzling his hair and lapping at his bare skin. He squeezed his eyes shut, held his breath and placed an hand on Cassidy's face to do the same to her, speaking not being an option: she groaned, but she didn't bite, and then it was over.
The Supermutants were still screaming, loudly and excruciatingly, but rage had melted away with most of their flesh to be replaced by pain: the sheer heat and the plasma burned through them and set their tumbling bodies on fire, turning them in stumbling, writhing mutant torches.
John peeked over the scorched surface of the desk and couldn't help but look away: he had thought his nose and stomach had both been desensitized by Primm and later Nipton, but he found himself pushing down on the bile while Cassidy wiggled away from his grasp and emptied her stomach's contents on the ground, coughing and spitting. The sniper's face had assumed a slight shade of green, but it was without complain that he picked up John's M16A1, braced against his shoulder and started silencing those blood-curling manifestations of agony.
"What… what the fuck did you stash in that bag?" John gasped, licking his cracked, dry lips. He felt an answer forming up even as he asked her the question, but the whole act of speaking was really more of an effort to distract himself and get his bearings. "Those were no simple energy cells."
Cassidy gagged, puke and saliva dribbling down her chin. She spat with a shiver, took a small breath, then retched again.
"Plasma grenades," Boone offered. A three-rounds discharge and the flailing of heavy limbs on the floor quieted with the last of the shrieks. The fire continued to burn merrily, however, fueling on grime and bodies, its tendrils licking at the walls and ceilings, trying to expand on the damp surfaces. "We better get out of here."
John offered Cassidy an hand up and she accepted it: he winced as she pulled hard on him to get on her feet, his left side and back a single, throbbing flare of pain. He pressed his right against his tender ribs as Cassidy wobbled up and he had to bite down on the insides of his cheeks to suppress a groan. His thoughts turned to the couple of stimpaks the Followers had parted with for their expedition, but he pushed it aside a heartbeat later.
'I'll heal. The others wouldn't.'
Boone was already starting towards one of the holes in the walls as the main door, enveloped with flames, wasn't a doable option. A slight limp spoiled his gait, but if it bothered him he didn't let it show: the M16A1 he held up butt-first to act like a club or a pickaxe, but when John made to join him, Cassidy tugged at his left.
"John," she whispered urgently. "Your arm."
The explosion had knocked off some of the lights, and John was immediately thankful it was Cassidy who noticed it and not the NCR sniper. The skin on his artificial forearm had been burned to a crisp where his side had only suffered some minor burns, but unlike the latter the blackened, cracked tissue was rejuvenating under his very eyes. There was no pull or stretching like in Primm or the morning before, barely any discomfort, just a minor sense of fatigue that crept up on him and settled over his shoulders.
Strips of crispy flesh fell off and turned to ash as they touched the ground, but by that time a new film of skin had already spread over to replace it. John caught a glimpse of something translucent and flowing underneath, then only pink, raw flesh remained. The whole process couldn't have taken more than a handful of seconds, and John had a feeling in a couple of minutes the whole arm would be undistinguishable from before he parried a flamethrower.
Cassidy swallowed visibly, exhaled and nodded jerkily at him before walking off. 'She has seen it too,' he realized. Something coiled and settled in the pits of John's stomach and he made to grab at her, not unkindly, but she jerked her arm away at his touch. A few meters away, Boone was hammering and kicking at a partition, widening the hole already present. John tried to tell himself the expression on her face was due to the awful stench polluting the air and the close call with enraged, huge mutants and the fire spreading and a lot of other things that weren't fear of him, but it rang hollow.
"Cass-"
"It's… it's alright," she said quickly. Too quickly. "Let's just get the hell out of here before we end up like gecko steaks, ok?"
John watched her retrieve her shotgun, dust it off and hug it close to her chest. He found he didn't have it in him to curse, so he just picked up the super-sledge from Davison's corpse and focused on the searing pain from his hands, dead tight around the scorching metal as he started hammering away at the wall.
0 = MiA = 0
AN: Novac will be done by next chapter, which is already half-written. This chapter just kept growing and growing until I had to split it in two or it alone would be the size of a novelette. So, I'm afraid next chapter will wrap up Come Fly with Me and Novac, and Veronica will be the next. Apologies.
After next chapter, which should be out in a week or so accounting for a through proofread, I'll probably stick to a 10k+ chapter-a-month, as my time for writing has considerably reduced. Which only means I'll just waste less time lollygagging and more getting actual writing done. To those interested in the Wasteland Legends Universe (pretentious, I know) the 'prequel-I-can't-write-before-the-sequel-or-I'll-spoil-most-of-the-storyline', WL: The Thin Line, has updated twice since the last chapter of MiA, another reason why this chapter is slightly late.
Again, my deepest appreciation to all the people reading and supporting this story.
Sincerely,
Alexeij
