Disclaimer; trigger warning, suicide
When morning arrived, they all set off.
Sandra and her friends trekked away on foot, choosing to take the long route around the hillside rather than chancing upon Nellis Airforce Base. Eventually, they arrived at another metal hatch, identical to the first—and once they climbed down inside, they found yet another wide metal hallway, surprisingly clean and leading toward a big bunker door.
"Huh. Place held up pretty well," Bradley said as they all marched forward. "Maybe Dad was looking out for me after all."
Sandra hit the button on the wall, making the door slide open. In the next room, numerous skeletons were scattered across the floor.
Bradley stopped beside her, his expression dropping. "Well fuck my life."
Sandra cracked a smirk at him before leading her friends onward.
"Thanks, Dad," Bradley griped, putting on a bad old man's voice as he began to imitate his elderly father. "'Here son, here's a key to a deathtrap called fuck all ways to die!'"
Sandra and Niner laughed, Arcade and Vulpes remaining rather serious as they scoped out the hallway ahead.
For a long while, they explored the Enclave bunker with no issue, only needing to kill off the occasional robot or radroach. Eventually, when they ended up down below on the second floor, Sandra's pip-boy began to make an irritated clicking sound.
"Rads," she announced, turning and holding up her arm to her friends. "The geiger's going off—take some rad-x. Now."
All of her companions nodded and began rifling around in their packs, and everyone took a dose of rad-x before continuing on.
"Okay," Bradley said, strolling along beside her. "We've seen about ten-hundred skeletons and pretty much nothing else. If the radroaches did all this, my entire outlook on the Enclave just went to shit."
"Nooo… not possible," Arcade mumbled as he glanced around. "Enclave bunkers are designed to be unbreachable. Radroaches wouldn't get in until after something else would've compromised their security from the inside."
Bradley turned and squinted at him. "How do you know that?"
Arcade paused, his mouth drifting agape. "Oh. From… hearing stories. About other stories… from, ah… Enclave… people."
"Stories about stories from Enclave people."
"Yeah… yep, that's right."
"You just had a stroke mid-sentence, didn't you?"
"Ahh… well…"
As Arcade and Bradley went back and forth—Sandra and Niner snickering behind them—Vulpes seemed to freeze in his stance, every muscle tensed as he glared past the rest of the group, his eyes narrowed at the end of the widened hallway.
"Hush," Vulpes uttered.
Arcade shot Bradley another snide remark—
"Hush," Vulpes repeated in a hissing whisper-yell, jutting his hand up and taking a step forward. "Be quiet. Listen."
Everyone else fell silent, glimpsing between Vulpes and the end of the hall, though no noise seemed to be astir.
Sandra turned and stared at Vulpes. "What're you hearing—?"
"Shh," Vulpes breathed, pressing a finger to his mouth and stepping past her, his eyes locked on the opposite end of the hall. "There's a scratching. Something is… scratching…"
The others watched as Vulpes slowly inched forward, eyes scoping out the area as he listened to everything intently. And, as he slowed to a stop, he heard it once more—this time loud enough for the others to hear, the faintest hint of a clawing noise somewhere beyond the wall.
Niner frowned, Arcade raising his brows and Bradley narrowing his eyes. Sandra moved forward, joining Vulpes's side and pulling out her shotgun.
"You got any idea what it is?" Sandra whispered.
Vulpes took in a breath, glaring at the metal wall. "I've heard it once before… in Searchlight. Just before I was ordered to leave the place… and just after the townspeople were… lost."
"Lost," Sandra mumbled. "Lost how…?"
Vulpes turned, giving her a serious look. "Lost in a way that's worse than death. Feral."
"Oh… ghouls," Sandra understood. "Well… we can take ghouls."
"Yes. Assuming it's a few and not a swarm," Vulpes replied, stepping forward and moving toward the next doorway. "Come on, now… weapons at the ready."
The two of them led the rest down the next narrow hall—and just as Vulpes predicted, a few feral ghouls appeared in the next clearing. Sandra and Niner opened fire, killing them with ease, and the group pressed on, following another stairway down to the final floor.
"Can't be far now," Bradley remarked. "We're coming up on the final floor…"
"Yeah, and… we're coming up on the heart of the rads, too," Sandra added, grimacing at her pip-boy. "We can't be down here for long…"
They emerged in a small room, Sandra's pip-boy clicking even louder now, this room empty save for a single doorway to the right. And to her mortification—the moment she peered inside, she came face to face with an absolute ocean of ghouls filling the large, final room.
The ghouls let out hissing yells before scrambling and sprinting toward her—Sandra unleashing numerous shots as Niner and Bradley did the same. Arcade stepped to the side, firing plasma into the mod of insanity—Vulpes veering a hard left and avoiding everyone else's gunfire before throwing one hard displacer punch after another.
The fight suddenly grew hazardously close, Sandra spotting a final door at the end of the room between shooting one ghoul and side-stepping another. Bradley's armor got chipped, Vulpes getting slashed once on the arm—Niner pausing to reload as Sandra was forced to do the same thing—
"Everyone—DUCK AND LOOK OUT!" Arcade bellowed from the back corner, pitching a plasma grenade over everyone's heads.
The others staggered back—the grenade landing in the heart of the ghoul hoard and—
BAAAAAANG.
A fantastic green eruption shook the very atmosphere, rattling the bunker's interior and ripping the remaining ghouls to shreds.
Bradley stumbled back and leaned against the wall, Niner hitting the floor while Vulpes remained standing, having fallen back a fair distance. Sandra barely made it away in time—jumping back and hitting the floor, sitting upright and shielding her head with her arm, looking up just in time to watch the marvelous emerald and bloody explosion.
Sandra grinned with wonder, turning to Arcade. "What the hell was that thing?!"
Arcade inhaled several rushed breaths, somewhat shaken and regaining some composure. He swallowed and faced her, shrugging with a sideways nod.
"I, ah… I make plasma grenades once in a blue moon," he told her. "Don't use them unless I really have to. They're powerful, but… you've gotta be careful not to kill everyone in the room when you use one…"
"Maaan, I forgot plasma grenades were even a thing!" Sandra beamed, leaping to her feet and rounding on him. "Can you make me some?!"
"Ah… sure…?"
"Oh, I love you! You're a closet badass!"
"Aha… well, Sandra, I've never disagreed with you more…"
While the two of them bantered, Bradley kicked aside many of the ghoul corpses, examining each one until he found something of intrigue. One of the ghouls—an orangeish glowing one—was wearing the tattered remains of a high-ranking uniform of some kind, presumably belonging to the Enclave.
Bradley bent down, reaching into the pockets of the ruined uniform until his fingers coiled around something tiny and metal. He pulled out a key, then stood and faced the final door, eyeing the keyhole and smirking before marching toward it.
Sandra and the others gathered themselves before following after him. Bradley unlocked the door and pushed it open, and they all stepped into the last room, a small, isolated office with a single desk to the left—and once more, a flat red keycard was sitting on the desk's surface.
Sandra and Bradley traded smirks, inserting the card into the pip-boy and waiting for the map to pop up. When it did, the rectangular signature appeared above a building bordering fiend territory, just beyond New Vegas.
"Okay. That's… weird," Bradley muttered. "Last one's in fiend territory. But, hey… after fighting through Fort Zombie, the fiends will be nothing. Ready for the final go-round?"
"Hell yeah," Sandra affirmed.
"Good. Let's go—I can feel the rad-x wearing off," Bradley concluded, waving toward the exit. "Let's get outta here before I start shitting plutonium."
All of them were happy to depart the bunker, escaping from the rads as fast as possible.
During the drive toward Vegas—Sandra, Niner, and Bradley felt to be entirely high of life, blasting the radio and yammering stupidly along with the music while the courier drove them toward their final destination. All was going well; they hadn't seen hide nor hair of any more syndicate goons, they'd secured all the keys necessary, and now, they were headed off to the vault that contained Bradley's prolific inheritance. Everything in the world was finally looking up now.
Sandra parked the bus beside the outer wall of the Crimson Caravan, she and her friends continuing the rest of the trip on foot. They crossed the bridge, approaching the broken buildings where the fiends resided—and their destination was the small intact building just across the street.
Gunshots broke the air from a distance—and as usual, Sandra and her friends made short work of the straggling fiends, popping off a few shots until their opposing fire ceased. They hurried into the small building with haste, closing and locking the door behind them.
They all found themselves in a messy rectangular room, and Sandra wheeled around, spotting an elongated metal opening in the floor just beside a large console. It was similar to the entryway she'd seen in the fort's bunker many months ago, an entryway leading underground.
"This is it," she said excitedly, hurrying to the consol and inserting the final key into it.
The metal hatch opened up from either side, revealing the staircase leading down below.
Sandra and her companions swapped glimpses, then began heading down into the bunker, opening another door and marching through it. They appeared in yet another hall, rounding the corner and approaching a long, empty room—and at the end of this room was the very last door of their journey, a gigantic thick metal door that would lead them to the riches they sought.
Just when Sandra moved to approach it, she caught sight of Vulpes through the corner of her eye, turning to face him. Vulpes had stopped following the rest, lingering by the opposite doorway and frowning at the hallway behind them.
"Foxxy," Sandra said. "What's wrong?"
Vulpes let out a heavy sigh. "We haven't cleared the way."
"What? Yeah we did."
"No—not the whole way. We only fended off the reprobates on the fringes of their little campsite out there. We didn't exterminate the rest inside."
"What… why does that matter?"
"Because. If the rest of them decide to come after us, then they'll break down that door upstairs and flood down here in a heartbeat."
"Oh. Well, then… you guys could stay here," Sandra suggested, she and Bradley hovering close to the metal door. "Me and Bradley can go find the loot. You guys stand here and keep watch. Keep your guns out and watch the back hall, just in case."
"Okay, just… don't be in there forever," Niner told her. "We better get the good shit and get gone fast as we can."
"I plan on it," Sandra promised, pulling the latch and opening the door. "We'll be right back."
At that, she and Bradley stepped into the last room of their journey—a massive, expansive room with a high ceiling and a football field's worth of empty space, shelves along all the walls and munitions contained on some of them. The shelves in the center contained Enclave footlockers, and Sandra spotted them at once, smirking before quickening her pace toward them.
She didn't hear the mechanisms of the door shifting as the door shut behind her.
Sandra stopped at the nearest Enclave box, excited to pry it open—but then, she spotted Bradley approaching her from the side, meeting her eyes and wearing a grave visage.
"Somebody just sealed that door up," Bradley reported. "We're trapped in this motherfucker."
"What?" Sandra barked, her heart dropping.
At once, she rushed back to the giant metal door, bashing her fist to it and calling out to her companions—but she heard no response from the other side.
"They're not gonna hear you," Bradley sighed. "Not through that solid metal barrier."
"Fuck. Fuck," Sandra hissed, grinding her teeth and glaring at the door. "Who the fuck—?"
Zzzxxt.
Sandra and Bradley stopped, both of them glancing to the side and spotting a small white intercom on the wall, positioned just beside the door and cackling with the faint sound of static.
The two of them traded serious looks with one another. Then, Sandra moved forward, hitting the button on the intercom and making the static disappear.
"Arcade?" she said.
"Arcade?" an unfamiliar voice spoke from the intercom's speaker, a smooth, charismatic sort of voice, followed by a mild little chuckle. "No… no, it's more of a condemned shack rather than an arcade up here. I do like the sound of that, though. There's enough money down there to build a whole new arcade, right on the outside of Vegas. They're all blowing their money on gambles when they could be blowing money on games. Quite a nice business idea. Thank you."
"Who the fuck are you?" Sandra snapped. "What is this?!"
"My name… is Zimmer," the smooth voice of the syndicate leader replied. "I represent a… certain organization… which holds a very hefty stake in that vault. Contractually, it belongs to us. I suppose the late Mr. Sellers neglected to mention that little caveat."
Sandra hesitated, feeling a terrible sense of anxiety sinking down her very being. Then, she made a face, thinking of her companions on the other side of the wall and wondering where this intercom was speaking from, if not from there.
"Where the fuck are you?!" Sandra asked.
"Upstairs… out of your current reach… working with a nice new friend I just made outside," Zimmer replied. "Who would've thought a random drug-addled fiend would be capable of hacking a security terminal? I swear, they come from all walks of life. It never ceases to amaze me…"
"Yeah, okay… what the fuck now?" Sandra snapped impatiently. "What, you're gonna lock us in here? Leave us to die? You're not gonna get all your precious gold if you do that, dipshit."
"Ohoh… no, Courier, there's no need for that," Zimmer replied eerily. "See, my new friend only just found a failsafe protocol on this extremely old computer up here… and it seems that we can fill that entire room up with nerve gas in a matter of seconds. I do love convenience on the rare occasions it arises. Gas you, take the loot, and be on my merry way. That does sound nice, doesn't it?"
"Christ—do you ever shut up?" Sandra barked angrily. "You really think you're gonna scare me with that BS? I've been shot, burned, and buried a-fucking-live—and I'm a goddamn bounty hunter, too. Try again."
Zimmer fell momentarily silent, seeming to pause in thought.
"Oooh… Arcade," he mumbled from the intercom seconds later. "Arcade… the person. You were referring to the person, not a game room. Oh, now I know where I've heard this before. You're the new up-and-coming protégé for Randall & Associates, aren't you? It was my understanding that Arcade Gannon was wanted by the NCR. Forgive me for prying, but… how is it that your little friend is still free and clear? I assumed the ever-persistent NCR would've had him in captivity by now."
"Yeah, they did. Until I got there," Sandra glowered. "And take a wild guess what happened. I did to them what I'm gonna do to you."
Zimmer went quiet again.
"Truly," he eventually said, his tone sounding more serious than before. "Truly… I do applaud your resolve. That resolve is exceptionally hard to come by in any sort of person… especially for a woman. No offense intended—I'm not a misogynist by any means—I'm just speaking on the statistics. Women never seek confrontation as much as men do… but you have really broken the mold, here. You're a woman who carries more resolve than most men, and that is truly commendable. Truly, truly remarkable."
"Oh, hoo-fucking-ray," Sandra snarked. "Thanks so much. Let me die now. Save me from more of your fucking talking."
"Oh… come now, Courier," Zimmer sighed. "It's only business. Surely, you can understand that. Look… I commend your resolve, so I'll offer you this. I will let one of you leave… right now. Whichever one leaves alive… that is entirely up to you and Bradley."
Sandra fell still, hand curling into a fist as it leaned propped against the wall, her heart beginning to pound with a fervent growing anger.
"You want us to fight," she growled through clenched teeth. "You want us to fight…?!"
"Kill or be killed," Zimmer replied conclusively. "Just as it should be."
"You're gonna pay for this," Sandra promised, tone dripping with toxicity. "You understand me? You are gonna pay for this. Ego te manducare cor tuum!"
"What, are you casting a spell on me?" Zimmer quipped in response. "Save that aggression for Bradley. I suspect you'll be needing it soon."
At that, the intercom switched off, a low static replacing the voice of the syndicate leader.
And to Sandra's great dismay—she heard the faint click of a gun just behind her, a shudder slithering down her spine as she slowly began to turn, releasing a long, stressed cloud of breath.
She turned to face Bradley—who had pulled out his rifle, gripping it tight, staring into her with an expression painted with nothing but conflict.
"Fuck… I don't… wanna do this," Bradley muttered, gently shaking his head. "I don't want do this… but… fuck. Fuck me… I'm… sorry."
Sandra stared at him—suddenly entirely gone, absent of feeling, thoroughly devoid of any sense of hope or joy like she'd felt earlier in the day.
The cold, unfeeling stare she wore now rivaled the one she'd given to Vulpes the night they met, the vacant glare of the lone-wandering courier during her most severe and honest of moments, void of happiness, sadness, hope, insanity, or promise. In fact, it was a look Bradley knew and recognized, the glazed, primal stare carried only by the eyes of a soldier.
Because, once more in her life—as it always seemed to be—she had to face the loss of a friend, as she was seemingly always destined to. She should've known better, smiling all day long and celebrating her victories alongside him. She should've known it would come to this, just as it always had. But she would not break and shatter from it this time. It was the way of all war, from warring countries to squabbling individuals—and just as she'd resolved five years ago, war truly never, ever changes.
So she would have to change instead.
No happiness would hinder her, no hope to blind her. No despair would weigh her down, and no innocence would plague her. Not during a time such as this—when what had to be done had to be, and there was simply no room for feeling more.
"You better kill me," Sandra told him in a cold, unfeeling hiss. "Because I don't wanna have to kill you."
Bradley's face grew even more torn.
"I don't wanna die," Sandra stated. "I really… really don't wanna die. I would snap your neck and plant your gun in your own throat before I pull the fucking trigger. But… I don't think I can just attack you for no reason. I've killed so many… and I've done this dance so many times… I'm just gonna let this one ride. So… you better kill me, Bradley… and you better not miss. Because if you miss the first shot you take… you're not gonna have time for round two."
Bradley gazed into her with the most conflicted look she'd ever seen on a human being, the two sharing a long, terrible silence as they stared into one another without a word.
And, after what felt like an eternity came and went, Bradley barely lowered his rifle, his expression hardening, teeth grinding, looking as if he'd come to come sort of conclusion, a deep and difficult one to endure. He glared downward for several seconds, incredibly stony and grave—and when he finally raised his head again, he gave her a look of resolution, making a final, disclosing nod.
"You better reckon with these fucks," Bradley stated with resolve.
Sandra stared at him, narrowing her eyes, looking put off. "What…"
Bradley turned his rifle around…
And he inserted the barrel of the gun into his mouth.
Sandra's eyes widened and she inhaled a sharp gasp.
"NO—!"
BANG.