"First thing's first." The Wanderer turned a corner and took interest in a room that seemed to be full of money waiting to be made. "Scavenge anything that looks good."
"You and your crap. I ain't a pack rat."
"Fine, take whatever interests you. But I'm selling most of this. You know you love the sound of caps clinging together."
She did have a point. More caps meant more booze that he could piss away in the Muddy Rudder or any other dinky outpost bar. Reluctantly, he started gathering up anything that may have been of trade-in value and stuffed it into the sack on his back. Beer could almost be tasted at the back of his throat, leftover souvenirs from the previous night.
Elise's vision turned blue, then back again just as quickly. Lack of sleep will do that, she thought. Climbing up the stairs, she spied a room full of decrepit terminals. "Aha! Maybe these will tell us where the real loot is."
"Hrm. It better be good. Like guns. It better not be worthless Old World money again." Butch placed his hands in his pockets. "That can't get me a beer. Or smokes, for that matter."
"Aw, Butchie, you smoke?" She laughed, much to Butch's disdain. "Trying to become the image of Mr. American Badass, huh?"
"Shut up. It takes the edge off."
"No, you do it because it looks cool."
Well, he couldn't deny that it did sharpen the poster-child look of what a real man should look like – a sweaty, half-guzzled beer on the table, cigarette dangling from his mouth, switchblade in hand, hair perfectly gelled in place, kickass leather jacket on his back. As far as he was concerned, he was pretty much there.
"The air in here tastes weird."
Elise smacked her gums, tongue poking out of her mouth. "Unh. Yeah. Probably the stale air." She didn't recall musty air tasting this strange… like marshmallows sprinkled with Abraxo and deep-fried in solvent. "Well, let's move on, shall we?"
Butch hesitated. He knew something wasn't right here. The swirled blend of sweet and burned-down chemicals became harsher as they searched through every nook and cranny in the computer room. The stench latched onto the worn leather of his jacket, penetrating the last remains of natural and animal scents that remained. He turned up his nose as he sniffed a sleeve.
"Christ! This smells worse than that dead Brahmin beside the road!" He realized that the two scents were two completely different creatures. That reeked of sunbaked, radiated, maggot-infested rotting flesh. This smelled sickly and medicinal. But to his olfactory senses, they were both quite disgusting.
Butch's eyes froze in place as the effects of that smell began to creep into his brain via his nostrils. Suddenly, his vision became blue-tinted, like looking through a pair of jacked-up sunglasses or something that was advertised in the back of a Grognak the Barbarian comic.
"Elise? Do you see that?" A face became visible, peeking out behind one of the terminals. A mischievous grin crept up the figure's face. Recognizable features began to take shape. Wide, piercing eyes locked onto Butch's flitting, fearful ones. Light, flowing hair cascaded past the figure's shoulders, hands flipped it, sending strands into motion.
"Hello, Butch. I'm your nightmares."
Oh, shit. Elise.
The figure that he knew as Elise took deliberate, easy steps towards him, boots hitting the concrete, sounding off one, two, three, four.
"Ah, remember when you'd steal my lunch and bent my comic book all up? Now I'm gonna bend YOU all up and steal your soul."
Butch screamed, like when he'd force himself out of terrible dreams. He forced himself out of another, sending the lucid dream state into temporary hibernation.
Elise scoffed. "Oh, god, what is it now? Saw a radroach or something?"
He could do nothing but stammer. "B…b…but… you… you were… were over there, and…"
"Please. For the hardass you wanna be, you're such a sissy." She rifled through the stacks of papers beside one terminal, hoping to find something that stood out. "Now if you'll let me look through this, we can get away from the radroach." She chuckled as the papers made flip-book sounds through her fingers. "You know, you can just shoot it."
Butch frowned as his lips shook, trying to regain some style or composure. As much as his machismo wanted to take over, frightened survival instincts slammed that false bravado away into a secluded box. "It… it wasn't a radroach, I swear! It… it… Elise, that was you!"
The effects of sleep deprivation took her brain by the hand and led it astray. Or so she thought. The haze washed over her eyes as her face moved away from the moldy, musty papers and onto the broken terminal beside them. The screen was smashed in, a shattered star pattern left behind on the glass.
"Oh! Haha! I think I'm getting something!" The busted screen flickered in her vision, scrolling static and then script. "I told you I'd figure this out."
"The fuck are you talking about? Ain't shit there." Folding his arms, he checked over his shoulder and back again to make sure Nightmare Elise wasn't about to sneak up behind him and sever his head off. He only saw real, overly confident Elise having a one-way conversation with a broken piece of pre-war shit.
Her fingers nimbly tapped the keys, making loud clacking sounds as she spoke to the computer like a sleepy-voiced hypnotist. Finally, she managed to read the only legible lines it displayed.
"What the hell?"
Note To Self: Sit back and enjoy the ride. Why worry? This place seems great. It's about time we kick back, relax and forget about the desolate, hopeless, bleak and blasted wasteland outside. Have we enjoyed a frosty Nuka-Cola yet today? Well, we ought to fix that.
"Hey, Butch, take a look at this. Some weirdo wrote this. Maybe it's a code."
"The only weirdo in here is you, Elise. You're the one talking to a blank monitor." One side of his mouth turned up, an eyebrow was raised, an eye was squinted. "I always knew you were fucking crazy, but this proves it. You know, I thought being the doctor's kid he would have treated that crazy in your head."
Butch felt the air going into his lungs and the taste of cough syrup and burning in the back of his throat. That Vault-issued tussin was so terrible, he refused to drink the stuff when he caught ill. It didn't have the cool effects wasteland cough syrup had, like feeling giddy when you took too much. Half of the time, that was intentional. Now why they would pump the smell through the ventilation here was an oddity. The stench of it as it filled the plastic cup was enough to knock a championship wrestler off his feet.
The Wanderer's hazy doppelganger made a return, squatting beneath one of the tables. That smile, curled ear to ear, wide, wild eyes going in for the kill. Butch stepped backwards, hitting a table as he took his fourth step. It tripped him up, sending him crumpling on the floor and holding his bruised rear end. His movement did not stop as he crawled back under the thing that trapped him.
"I'm baaaaaaaaack. And this time, I'm gonna succeed."
"F… fu… fuck!" He clutched one table leg with both of his arms, knees to his chest.
The illusion inched closer, brandishing a serrated combat knife. "Baby, you can dish it but you can't take it, can you?"
He hugged the leg like it was going to save him, like a mother chasing away bullies such as himself from their dear child. The girl, the one smiling with teeth as she took steps in slow-motion, she was that kid. Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, reaffirmations that came from the mouths of the adults in the Vault. But whatever doesn't kill you makes you kill? Does that make you stronger? He had it coming back to him in spades. Something about karma. But this way was too much. He imagined it'd be a swift kick to the nuts or something, not bleeding out in a forgotten Vault and laid to waste by the hunted who had become the hunter.
"N… no, stop!" He let go of the table leg and rose to his feet, adrenal glands pumping chemical fear in his bloodstream.
Elise tried the second terminal, hoping to decipher the riddle she thought the chamber set up for her. She didn't have to go far to receive a second message: A Note To Me: This place is great, I think it's time to accept the new and embrace this change. Relax.
She had grown agitated within her confused, hallucinogenic state and smashed her fists on the half-intact keyboard. "What? Fuck you! I didn't write this!"
Hurriedly she tried others, hoping that this was all a joke, a big stupid practical joke on wasters that wandered in. Maybe when she discovered everything these computers had to say, a loud "Surprise!" would be yelled from the other room, balloons would float in through the broken door and a conga line of Vaulties would dance in, hands on each other's hips, connected and slithering like a snake.
She turned away when the last one blew her off. Her eyes focused on her panicking companion. Opening her mouth to say something, possibly another patronizing insult aimed at him, she was cut off when her vision and her mental state double-crossed her. Butch split like an amoeba, with a second head emerging from the first. The rest of his reproducing body split to the left, creating two of the same kind.
The two backed away from each other as their imaginary twins stepped closer with threatening gestures. Both wielded knives, both sought one thing and one thing only: their flesh-and-blood adversaries' blood. They desired to have their host yell and freak out as they slowly slipped away into the never. In a way, it was death within death, a death sandwich. Two pieces of thickly-sliced death that contained fillings of ham, cheese, and doom.
"Uh, Butch? What… just what are you doing with that? Put that away."
Fake Butch evilly grinned, waving his beloved switchblade back and forth. "Tell you what, you sad wreck. How 'bout I end it all for you right here and now."
"Haha, Butch. Good one. You couldn't even kill that radroach over there without whimpering like a lost puppy." It was all jokes and fucking around in here, right? She was his life-blood out here, and without her guidance, he'd still be moping over alcohol in that piss-and-chlorine smelling bar. If she even knew how he got from 101 to Rivet City without being impaled on a stake by a raider flying high on Jet or his bones and marrow becoming munchies for Yao Guai, she'd probably just laugh and call it luck.
"I didn't come alone." He faced backwards and motioned with two fingers. Three other figures formed behind the so-called Serpent King, his minions one and all. Familiar faces took shape in the form of his toadies as they morphed from thin air.
"Wai… wait just a minute!" Her index finger reached out to a figure she knew as Wally Mack. "You're dead." With her arm starting to involuntarily shake and her mouth agape in disbelief, she reflected as much as she could with emotions heightened by the vapor swirling around in her head. "You're dead. You… you were my very first kill. I shot you down."
"Well then, let's just say I came back to haunt your ass."
"Haha. Please. Someone tell me this is just all a ruse." Cupping her hands over her mouth, she yelled out into the hallway, "Okay guys, show's over. Come on out, you got me."
The snake pit swarmed around her, hissing collective insults through teeth and tongues. Closer and closer they approached Elise, space narrowing, fear arising. For the first time since she was reborn into the wasteland, she felt once-distant pangs of dread, ones she had tucked away using the power of swagger and self-confidence. They popped out of their locked crate and slithered into her reason.
Four figures swallowed her whole, dragging her into the murky depths of her withheld fears kicking and screaming. These were the ghosts of her upbringing, daily tormentors who plucked her nerves, tried her patience, and cut deep into her resolution. The chair of them all pointed the tip of his blade at her forehead. She felt a gust of air come down over her face as he made a slicing motion down.
Two of them. Two faces, identical in nearly every way. One poised to destroy, one grappling with his own demon. Both flailed with their pocket knives, but which one was which? Two. This had to be a nightmare.
She motioned towards the real Butch, long fingers inches from his windpipe. Tighter and tighter they became as Butch backed away step by step.
"The fuck are you doing?" Butch exclaimed, with surprise and terror in his voice. He saw two casts of his own merging into one as Elise was a breath away from his throat.
"You."
"Me what?"
No answers, only that three-letter word. No I'm gonna fucking kill you now, no time to die, not even a jab at his intelligence or his overt, braggart sense of self. She was a mighty rival when it came to one-upping his own haughty persona, self-confident as nothing else. Quite a departure from her pre-Wasteland self, no doubt.
Oh, so the vocabulary smacks him in the face now after y-o-u repeated like a broken record, in various tonalities ranging from a whisper to a cracking yell.
"You. I let you get away with all of that. I let you get away!"
"Wha… what in the fuck are you yapping on about?" Backwards, towards the hallway, mentally counting out how many times his feet hit the floor, glossy eyes scanning the frenzied girl in front of him. Maybe she was a secret psycho all along, and that… thing he saw in front of him was prophetic. She wanted to get him alone all along, blow him away in a museum of failure and leave him to rot in a place where few dared to tread. He could see it in her eyes, flames of enmity in her pupils. That fire turned into an inferno when she whipped the laser rifle off her back.
"What? What the fuck, Elise?
Reality set in. Either he could make happy trails, or he would succumb to lasers fired between his eyes. Hues switched back and forth, but the image stayed the same – little Elise with a weapon about half her size a foot away from the angle of his jaw. If he was going to die, he would go out a-blazing against a bunch of mutants and chem-addicted raiders claiming to be King of the Wasteland, not against a puny girl who he could lift with one arm. The epitaph would be depressing: Here lies Butch Deloria, brought down by a girl. He never scored and the Tunnel Snakes are a lie.
Itchy finger on the trigger, wide eyes centered onto Butch's growing disbelief, dread, and into the universe of nothing. "If I'm going down, you're coming with me!"
Now. Now's the time to scoot. She isn't playing.
"Think you're just a bit too fucked-up for me. Think I'm a bit fucked-up for me, too." Butch shook as he turned tail towards the exit, towards the outside where the sky was grey, the air wasn't as poisoned, and girls in armor weren't pointing energy weapons at his face.