"It's fine, it's fine. I can handle myself. Just try not to shoot at me, if you see me, alright?"
Maya practically ran from the NCR soldier guarding the bridge as she finished speaking. Dear god, it had been almost five minutes of back-and-forth conversation, almost entirely composed of her asking to cross the damn bridge, and the soldier mentioning that he had orders against such. What, would he get court-martialled if she ended up tripping on a rock and dying? She doubted it. Still, he looked pretty young - probably a recruit stuck in the most boring position imaginable - which meant that he might still have some of that basic human decency that seemed to be rare in most armed groups.
She avoided the rather-poorly-placed minefield on the bridge, hugging the railing closely. The mines weren't exactly hidden, but she imagined that they were more for the fear factor. The bridge would probably collapse if a single one detonated, regardless. Nonetheless, she managed to cross it, and... here she was. Primm. It wasn't quite as large as she'd expected it to be - a few average buildings, one or two that had collapsed, along with a confusing structure. It was a twisting road made out of wood, high above the buildings in some points, and rather low in others. It didn't exactly look like a walk-way, so it was probably some odd Pre-War relic. The only other building that caught her eye was a small one, albeit with a familiar sign - the red "MOJAVE" sign.
She smiled. Sure, it wasn't the same feeling as realising that she wasn't dead, or the joy of eating a quarter of a box of Fancy Lad Snack Cakes, but it was a comforting, nostalgic feeling. It was where she'd been directed by the delivery order. Apparently, a "Johnson Nash" was the regional director. Assuming that she could convince him that she hadn't run off with the package, she should be able to get at least some assistance from him. Alternatively, he wouldn't believe her, and she'd be dealing with the Mojave Express Reclamation Teams, sometimes known by their alternate name "sadistic death squads that will hunt you down across half the planet". Not the kind of people she wanted to face.
As she approached the door, she noted that the building was rather... abandoned-looking. Sure, she didn't exactly expect any massive amount of activity, but... both of the windows were shattered, and half of the door was just gone, with the rest looking charred and damaged. Someone obviously hadn't been happy with the quality of delivery. That, or this branch of the Express had to deal with considerably more robberies than the Hub. It didn't exactly look like they had security. She nudged the door with her shoulder, opening it. The inside was almost as disappointing as the outside. A few posters were spread out on the ground, shards of glass laying around them. A fan hung low to the floor, suspended by a thin wire. A few drop-off boxes were laying on their sides, near the end of the room. A radio lay, face down, on the ground in front of her.
However, the centerpiece in the room was certainly the object laying on the wooden counter-top: a large, sphere-like device. Several long antennas seemed to be attached to the rear, while a small sensor dish of some kind seemed to be attached. Maya was hardly an expert in different robot models, but... it seemed to be some sort of robotic entity. The levitating kind, probably. She turned over the spherical robot, trying to get a good look at it. It didn't seem to be turned on. As she turned it over, however, she noticed the likely cause of this: two enormous bullet holes on the robot's right side. Wow. Whoever had decided to shoot the poor thing hadn't really wanted to give it any chance of survival.
Maya looked at the sphere, curiously. Now, on one side... her engineering knowledge was very much there, but it was a goddamn robot. For all she knew, any attempt to fix it would trigger a nuclear self-destruct. On the other side... it was a goddamn robot. Judging from the large device attached to its front, it was a robot capable of shooting people. That meant twice the firepower, along with a machine that could float. She sighed, giving the room another glance. It didn't seem like anyone was using it, and... well, if they had wanted to keep it, they should've kept it behind a locked door. She pulled up a rickety wooden chair from a corner of the room, sitting down in front of the robot. She bent down, grabbing the radio from the floor and placing it one the desk, before reaching for her bag. The robot would be handy, but the repair was going to take a lot of time and mental fortitude.
. . .
"So, ED-E? Did I get that right?"
The only response the woman got for her troubles was a garbled noise. Well, not "noise", perhaps. The robot was communicating, speaking, she just... didn't fully understand it, quite yet. Even as she carried the "Operator's Guide To Eyebot-Class Robotic Communication" that she'd found in a drawer, she had trouble deciphering messages without having the robot repeat them at least ten times. Maybe it came with practice. It likely didn't help that her repair job had been... less than perfect. Two sensor modules were haphazardly attached to either side of the robot, and it had an entire new layer of metal in a few areas. Not that she could really dedicate time to that right now: she had alternative priorities. From her initial observation, there was nobody in the town. Which, obviously, didn't make sense. The NCR had told her that the reason they hadn't just mowed down the town was because there were civilians. Her current theory was... well, evacuation. The bandits in the streets - even though she didn't see them - had forced everyone to evacuate into a safe area, and... well, only one place seemed large enough to support such a group.
The building was rather massive, stretching the length of Primm. The sign above it identified it as, in rather large letters, the "Bison Steve Hotel". It made sense, certainly. It was big enough for a population, and it was a hotel. They were made to keep a bunch of people in one place, comfortably. Hopefully, she could get some answers. Maybe even find the "Nash" that her order mentioned. She'd likely have to apologise about the robot, though. She glanced back at ED-E, as he floated in place, gently moving up and down, before turning back around. Truthfully, she was a tad nervous. There was no way that the town was just dead, of course. They couldn't have all been rounded up and shot before the NCR got word of it, and there were no corpses anywhere. Still... she couldn't shake a feeling of unease as she took one last step towards the building.
As she pushed the double-doors of the hotel open, the first thing she noticed was the utter state of disrepair of the lobby. The ceiling looked like it was about one gentle push away from collapsing. The walls were cracked, with paint peeling off of them. All the lights were smashed, save for a single one, hanging by a few wires. The place was an utter mess. The next thing she noticed was the man sitting behind the main desk. He was tall, with messy jet-black hair. He was nursing a bottle of... something, and had a weapon propped up against his seat: it was impossible to identify it further with the poor lighting. She considered asking about her delivery order specifically, or where she could find... well, anyone. She never got the chance: the man practically jumped up from his seat, swinging the weapon - now visible as a shotgun - around, pointing it directly at her. His finger remained near the trigger, shaking slightly. Now that she noticed it, the man was shaking everywhere. His arms, his legs. It wasn't the nervous wobble of a man who didn't want to point a gun at someone, however, or a man afraid to pull the trigger. No, it was the artificial wobble, the kind created by only one drug. Psycho.
"Hey, who the fuck are you? Fuckin' talk! I'll... I'll blow out your fuckin' brains if yo-"
The man froze, the expression of surprise on his face mirroring the woman's. He collapsed, crumpling backwards. The woman simply stood there, dazed. She'd felt herself do it. She'd felt herself pull the ten-millimeter N99 from the holster, quickly raise it, squeeze the trigger thrice. She saw the smoke coming from the barrel, the blood starting to flow from the man. But... she hadn't done it. She hadn't been in control. She'd been panicking, confused, on the verge of tears. It was the other part of her: the small, animalistic part of her brain, the one that acted. The one that didn't care about the fact that a tiny slip of his finger would have killed her. The one that didn't try to negotiate. The one that wasn't concerned with the fact that she had just killed someone. She knew that it had been self-defence, but... that didn't make it different. She walked, now in control, trembling, over to the man. She saw the three bullet holes in his chest, the shotgun at his side. The empty injections of Psycho on the ground.
She heard something, too. Footsteps. She couldn't make out an exact number with her ears ringing, but it was more than one set. She had to move, she had to run. They were going to come in, see her kneeling over their friend's body, and shoot her. She couldn't. Her legs were lead. Her brain was on fire, unable to process what was happening. Her arms didn't reach for the pistol, paralysed at her side. The footsteps got louder. She refused to die here. The last time, she'd been on her knees, but still fighting, never content. She wasn't going to die here, kneeling on the ground, crying at some murderer's corpse. She let the animal instinct take over.
The footsteps grew louder. Two, three people? She grabbed the shotgun from the man's body, turning around to face the doorway that led farther into the hotel. A young red-haired man rounded the corner, a pistol in his hand. She pulled the trigger once, turning the man's torso into a mess of blood and gore. He barely had time to register what had happened before the next one became visible. The man's armour was covered in metallic scrap, and he waved a submachine gun around the room, looking for her. She raised the shotgun a few inches, pulling the trigger. His sunglasses were little protection as the round simply... erased his head, leaving a bloody mess on the back wall. Tossing the shotgun to the ground, she pulled out her pistol once more, pressing forwards. There would be time for looting later. She almost collided with the third man, as he swung a cleaver down at her. There was no time to move: it sunk into her shoulder. She moved almost as fast: the first pistol round went into his right leg. As he began to collapse, the next two went into his chest.
As the man collapsed, dead, she stumbled against a wall, glancing at the wound. It was surface-level, but... the moment the adrenaline wore off, it was going to hurt. She pulled a stimpak out of a jacket pocket, moving it to her leg. It was only then that she noticed how much her own hands were shaking. Not now, Maya. More were going to come up. They wouldn't wait for her to recover. She pressed forward... and barely avoided a hail of bullets as she rounded a corner. Jumping behind a small chunk of the wall, she tried to make herself as small as possible as someone fired round after round. As she turned around, back against the table, she saw ED-E. She almost broke down laughing at the ridiculousness of it. Here she was, fighting for her life... and the fucking robot was just hovering there. A few stray bullets pinged off the robot, leaving only small dents and ricocheting. She looked up at it, and the voice that came out was full of rage and confusion.
"DO SOMETHING! Please, you goddamn metal ball, shoot them! Do anything!"
The robot simply hovered there. Letting out something that was a cross between a cry of desperation and exasperation, she gently raised one hand just barely above the wall, firing blindly. The shots didn't seem to hit anything, but... the man wasn't shooting back. It'd had the intended effect of getting him into cover. She stood up, quickly moving, trying to advance. She saw the man's shadow behind a small overturned table, and... simply fired. The wood did little against the six bullets that she pumped into the man. Even then, she approached cautiously. Hugging the wall, she came up next to the man's corpse. She nudged it, roughly, being ultimately content that it was dead. Content?
She entered another room, one labelled "RESTAURANT". She took a deep breath, pushing open the doors... and immediately had that air thrown out of her lungs as something collided very rapidly with her shoulder. The woman fell, pushed to the ground, dazed, pointing the gun at whoever. The man's identity didn't remain a secret for much longer. He was relatively tall, with dark brown hair. He wore a suit of metallic armour, made of scrap plates of steel. His most noticeable feature, however, was the enormous flamethrower that he carried. The barrel of which was stained with a splash of blood from her wound. The man was approaching, and the woman was already feeling the heat from the small blue flames at the tip of the weapon.
"Don't you fucken move, bitch! You kill my boys? You fucken shoot 'em to get to me? You fucken do that?"
The man swung the flamethrower around rather easily for something that looked quite so large. He pointed it at her, and the pistol that she pointed at him felt meaningless in comparison. Even if she could shoot past the armour... she couldn't do it before he unleashed a torrent of flame on her. She wouldn't survive that - two bullets to the skull were different from that. She moved to answer, to try to negotiate - even though she knew that there was nothing she could say - but the man cut her off.
"I'm gonna cook you alive! You kill my men, I'ma make you wish they killed you! Gonna make you... the fuck?"
Even as the man flicked a switch on the flamethrower, causing the blue fire to surge another few inches in front of the weapon, he turned his head to the doorway again. She followed, hearing much the same thing: a strange, catchy western tune. It was just a few seconds long, but... the more surprising thing was the source of it: ED-E, floating in the doorway, one of the metal plates that she'd welded onto him swinging loosely, and a small series of red lights turning on... along the side of the weapon attachment he had. His weaponry wasn't broken at all: she'd obscured some system with her repairs. The flamethrower-wielding man understood a second too late, turning too slowly with the bulky weapon as a flash of red light flew out of the weapon, colliding with the tank of the large and very-volatile flamethrower.
The woman practically flew backwards, colliding against the nearby wall as shards of metal embedded themselves into the ground and walls around her. The robot hovered exactly where it had been, looking as normal as ever. The man... well, the man didn't exactly exist anymore. Maya managed to stagger up from her seated position, looking around the room. Nobody else. The room was massive, filled with mattresses, but... nobody was in here at the moment. Out, presumably, or all dead. She stumbled over to a smaller set of metallic doors, hoping to find some sort of medical supplies, and hoping that ED-E's generally amazing gun of death didn't need to recharge for long.