V
Remainder — Status Affect — Caps Reward — Insecurity — Trauma Bag — At the Doc's — Lights — Med-X — At the Saloon — Loot — Combat Veteran — Long Range — Vittles — Strength — FRO
"That went well," Sunny said to Olivia, who was still looking all around scanning for targets, eager to fire her Hécate 2 some more. Sunny's ears were still ringing, though she felt the vibrations in her jaw of herself speaking.
It took Olivia a second to catch up with Sunny; Olivia was upset with herself; she'd missed at least once, though she'd made some pretty good hits, too. "Oh. Yeah," she said to Sunny.
Olivia climbed off the crates she'd been standing on. Sometimes it was awkward moving with her heavy anti-matérial rifle.
Olivia turned a full circle, checking her PIP-Boy's IFF. She had the same kind of PIP-Boy Cara did, though she hadn't tinkered with it, and didn't really want to; she wasn't as good with complicated machines and computers and science stuff as him; so hers didn't work quite as well; hers wasn't "custom," as she liked to describe his. On the IFF dial she didn't see any red marks around her, though there was a lot of yellow.
"I guess we're good," she said, then remembered and said, "Can I have my radio back, please?"
"Sure," Sunny said, pulled it out of her pocket and handed it over. "I kinda liked using that thing."
"I could tell," Olivia said.
Cara picked up his two big .338 Lapua Magnum casings for reloading, pocketed them, set the SRS down to slip back on his armored vest, then noticed he was still wearing the 5.11 tac vest and its attached web belt, as well as the damn additional backpack and radio in it, so he took both of those off, then decided hell with it and dropped everything, then put the big portable radio back on to talk with the Boomers, and went around the roof checking with everybody and looking for visible wounds. After a quick round of updates with the Boomers, he checked on Trudy first because she was closest and not doing anything. It later occurred to him that he should've gone to Olivia first.
"You hit?" he asked her.
"Oh, no. Thanks for askin', honey," Trudy said. She was holding a Winchester M1897 in both hands. Her weapon used to be what people called a "single shotgun," an ancient single-action single-shot break-open shotgun with only one chamber and barrel—one shot at a time—in 20-gauge common in the Mojave region. Cara had given her a Winchester Model 1897 12-gauge, designed by John Moses Browning, the first successful pump-action shotgun. Cara also gave her a lot of ammo for it. The M1897 had been used in World War I, where it gained nicknames like Trench Gun and Trench Sweeper, then WWII. No guns had been used in World War III, normally called the Great War; only nuclear missiles, big ones. Trudy's M1897 was a Trench model with a steel heat shield that looked like Swiss cheese, sling swivels and a bayonet lug. It looked old but vicious. Rowdy drunk traders and their guards didn't like their chances arguing with it, and people didn't try to talk their way out of paying for drinks much anymore.
"I have a sidepack of stimpacks burning a hole in my pocket," Cara told her. She smiled. She liked him. "I'm gonna go check in with everybody. If anybody's hurt send 'em to me."
"Okay," she said, and checked him out as he walked away.
Raúl was next closest. He was enjoying looking at his S&W M29. He looked good. Cara asked if he'd been hit or anything. Raúl said he was just fine.
Cara moved on.
"How are you feeling, Cheyenne?" he asked the dog as he came up to her and Sunny, and knelt to check the dog for injuries and pet her. He might've been spoiling her a little but she didn't get much affection.
She was fine. She leaned into him to get him to push his knuckles down along her back and spine. She was dirty, a lot of her fur matted. She hadn't had a bath lately.
"Hey, Cara," Sunny said. She sounded stressed. Cara looked up, concerned, but she looked completely fine, no clothing torn, no bleeding. She was a little sweaty. She was wiping off her forehead with a rag. Cara stood. "Thanks for helping us," she said. "You didn't have to do that."
"You're welcome," he said. "I know my plan was sorta crazy. I just wanted to do it in a way that wouldn't get any of you guys hurt. Now I'm gonna find out if it worked."
He looked at her. "You got a graze," he said, pointing at her face and reaching for his gear, then realizing it was at the back of the roof, not the front. On the left side of Sunny's face just above the cheekbone was a thin red line going upward. A small trickle of blood had run down less than a half inch. Sunny was a little plain but cute, with brown hair that looked red pulled back in a tight ponytail and a light dusting of freckles around her nose and strappy tight leather armor with American football shoulder pads. Oddly fashionable, leather armor.
"A graze?" Sunny said. She didn't feel it.
"Probably a bullet, though it could be a bit of wood," Cara said. "I suspect nine-millimeter. I'm gonna take care of it, okay?"
Sunny just looked at him. She seemed confused.
He went to where on the roof he'd set his SRS, armored vest, tac vest and rucksack and took from the rucksack a bandanna, a bottle of purified water and his trauma bag, from which he dug out an antiseptic.
He told her what he was going to do then did it, and took care of her minuscule wound in a few seconds, or as Sunny put it, in two shakes of a lamb's tail.
Before putting his stuff back in his bag he said to Sunny, "I have a mirror in my armor. Do you wanna see your battle wound?" He was clearly kidding but said it as if he were serious. Sometimes his sense of humor was dry like that.
Sunny giggled and said sure. She had a dry sense of humor.
Cara put his things away quickly and came back with a mirror that fit in his hand. He usually forgot he had it. He held it up for Sunny to take. She took it.
"Have you been in a fight like that before?" Cara asked her.
Looking at herself in the mirror and turning her head, then looking to Cara, then back to the mirror, she said, "Not really. I got scared."
"I saw you. You did fine," Cara said. "It can be kinda scary. It's good that you were up here; you had cover. I guess this roof can take a bullet."
"Yeah," Sunny said. "Without your idea we would've all just been out on the street." She handed the mirror back to Cara and gestured at her bullet graze: "This doesn't look like much. You took a lot of risk with those radscorpions." She spoke without a tone, but her choice of words seemed like both rebuke and thanks.
"I'm a lot faster than them," Cara said. "It sounds risky but it wasn't really. I'm sorry, it prob'ly seemed like I was trying to be cool or something. I wasn't. I said this to Trudy: I only did it cuz this didn't put you guys at as much risk. And I wanted to try it. I was afraid some of you would get killed. You still got shot at."
"Not very much," Sunny said. "You got here right after Cobb and them started shooting."
"That's good," Cara said.
"Cara," Sunny said, with this look.
"Yeah," he said, making sure he was actually listening and hearing her.
"That was . . . " Sunny began. "Olivia really likes you. The thing with the radscorpions made her really nervous."
Cara's expression softened. He felt overwhelmed with emotion, and confirmation of something he'd been denying himself, and conflicting feelings and fear and pulled in different directions and unsure. He looked away from Sunny for a second, then back to her warm but unwavering gaze. "Thanks," he said. "I probably seem indecisive. I just . . . want to do it the right way, if that makes sense. For the right reasons. I'm worried I'll say the wrong thing. Or that . . . we won't be in the same place, or something."
"I understand," Sunny said. "Just don't hurt her."
"I won't," Cara said. He looked directly at Sunny so she would know.
She looked into his eyes examining him.
Two or maybe five seconds later—it felt like an awfully long time—she smiled and hugged him, hard, breaking eye contact. He hugged back but was thinking too much about Olivia to feel it. "You guys are so good together," Sunny said. "Even if you're a little too into guns." They were both smiling.
"That's more her than me," he said.
"She told me the legend of your SRS," Sunny said, smiling, "enough times I remember it's called an 'SRS.' Does that stand for something?"
"I just did my research," Cara said, flattered and smiling, the sight of which melted both Sunny's heart and something else in her, kind of between the legs. Her eyes dilated. "It means Stealth Recon Scout. It's a really good long-range weapon," Cara said, almost not noticing autonomic Sunny's physical reaction. "And not big or heavy or whatever. I used to use a Hécate 2 like she does, and some other light fifties. I might want to go with something lighter like .300 Win Mag."
"Is that what her rifle's called? That big damn thing?" Sunny said, just a little breathy. "Hécate." She tasted the word.
"Yeah," Cara said. "It was made by this French company; it's a French gun; but the Gun Runners make them now. I dunno how they got the schematics, or why they'd choose that. Because it looks sorta rustic, I guess. It weighs 34.8 pounds."
"Jesus Christo," Sunny said, "Christ-O." It's "Kreestoh;" it sounded odd in her hard flat American English accent, though she pronounced J like H correctly in "Jesus." Cara wondered if Sunny was Hispanic, in part or otherwise. She was light-skinned. Maybe mestizo? Sunny said, "She must be stronger than she looks."
"She is," Cara said, proud that Olivia was strong now. She could bench almost 150 pounds. "We work out together, and do some weight training almost every day."
"Wow," Sunny said, mostly lost in thought about Cara couldn't tell what. Then she smiled, shaking her head. He smiled too. She hugged him again. "You make her happy," Sunny said quietly. It wasn't an imperative; she was telling him the effect he had.
"I just . . . hope I can keep her interested. Like, never forget why we got together. Do you know what I mean?" Cara said.
"I kind of do," Sunny said.
"I better go check with her," Cara said. "If you hug me again she's gonna think I have designs on you."
"Sorry," Sunny said.
"It's fine," Cara said, touching her arm as he stepped away.
"Cara!" Sunny called. He looked back. She pointed at her cheek and said, "Thanks for taking care of me," possibly blushing just a little, with a big smile on her face.
"You're welcome," he said.
As Cara made his way to Olivia, a flying ED-E ran into his head. He didn't have his helmet on; it hurt a little. Nobody seemed to see it happen, though.
"Did you do that on purpose, Eddie?" Cara asked it.
ED-E trilled.
"If you say so," Cara said. "Did you get shot at all?"
ED-E said "a little," but not in English. It was wobbling a little, hovering unevenly. Cara heard something loose inside of it.
"Want a stimpack?" Cara asked it.
"What would I do with a stimpack?" ED-E said.
Cara shrugged.
Cara sat on the roof, cradled ED-E, shut down most of its routines and processes and hardware, including the flying suite, took a hex key from a vest pocket and opened one of the eyebot's rear panels. A deformed, probably FMJ 9x19mm round rolled out when Cara started rotating ED-E's chassis. It was too wide and too short to be 5.56x45mm. "Ah," Cara vocalized, picking it up. The bullet had cooled down. ED-E tweeted. "Nine millimeter," Cara said, and showed ED-E. ED-E blooped. They both laughed.
When he reached Olivia, who was talking to Cass, who was drinking something hard, he checked Olivia out, and also looked for visible wounds. He saw none. She was sweating but looked fine. She was wearing her armor, though she'd taken off the helmet, as far as he knew after the radscorpions were all dead. He wasn't too worried about her, but there was always a chance of something going tits up.
"Either of you get hit?" Cara asked them.
"Not a once," Olivia said. "Thanks for asking."
"I'm good too, thanks," Cass said. She was smiling. "Did you get hit, you crazy bastard? I saw when you ran through them Powder Gangers. I thought any of 'em was about to drop you."
Cara said, "I seemed to catch them rather by surprise." He hadn't meant to be funny but Olivia laughed, then Cass did too, looking at Olivia. "I don't think they even shot at me. So neither of you got hit? I have a shitload of stimpacks on me."
Cass smiled drunkenly. Olivia grinned and gazed at him with this look in her eye.
"They hardly got any shots off," Olivia said, but it wasn't what she was thinking about. She looked down at the floor of the roof. "Could you help me gather my shells please Cara?"
He considered it, then said "Sure" and did. She'd emptied her magazine plus one. The two of them found all eight of her empties easily. She mostly watched him doing it. Three shells Cara retrieved were hot, but the others had cooled off. She put the salt shaker-size .50 cal casings in her ACU pants' cargo pocket, the one without a holster strapped down over it, put her empty magazine in a vest pouch and swapped it out for a new one, but for safety's sake didn't automatically chamber a round this time.
Cara put on his armored vest and radio, clipped the tac vest on his back via one of the MMAC's shoulders with one of many rock climbing carabiners he'd brought. He kept climbing kits in the helicopter incase of fun or emergency. He also put on the MOLLE II rucksack, then strapped the SRS to his back to go down the ladder to the ground. "We ready?" he asked Olivia. He probably looked kind of stupid with so much stuff on him. At least Viana still had his HK417. That would've been nine more pounds of bulk and awkward, and he didn't trust either ladder.
"Yep," Olivia said.
"Okay; everybody," Cara said to their followers, "let's head back down. You too, Rex!"
Rex barked and got in line.
Cara went down after everyone else. While he waited, he radioed the Boomer UCAV teams and checked in with them; they hadn't located any more radscorpions or other critters menacing the town, and they didn't see any other Powder Gangers heading toward Goodsprings. He asked them if they would stay on station for about 5 more minutes, incase anything came up, to which they said they loved the practice and would've been happy to stay in the area for another hour or two, easy.
The trip down the ladder was uncomfortable for him but went fine.
Sunny, Trudy and another Goodspringer started moving back down the crates and barrels they'd moved up to the roof to stand on. Once they noticed, Olivia and Cara helped take down the rest of them.
Cara decided to check in with everybody else in town to make sure they were okay. He hoped they'd stayed behind cover, but at least a few of them had tried fighting radscorpions. Olivia wanted to just leave, but went along with it.
Before they could leave the saloon's area Ringo walked up to Cara and Olivia, with a small burlap sack in his hand. They didn't know where he'd got it from. His timing was inconvenient.
Looking between the two of them Ringo said, "Thanks. I owe you a huge favor for this. Here—" he said handing the bag to Cara, "these are technically Crimson Caravan funds, but . . . I know they'll understand once I explain things." The bag jingled of caps when Ringo handed it over.
Feeling a little more famous, Olivia said, "Okay." Cara handed her the bag. He didn't seem to care about money. He didn't say they'd split it 50/50. She pulled its drawstrings open: There were a lot of bottlecaps in the bag; it looked like more than 50, maybe 80 or a hundred. Not 200; it didn't weigh that much. Once again Olivia felt stupid for condoning that the currency for most people in the wasteland was not direct barter but rather soda pop bottle caps. Cara felt similarly without being bothered by it. The NCR and the Legion also used their own currencies, paper money in the NCR and coins in Legion territory. And each of the working casinos on the Strip had their own chips. Before the war they apparently all had.
"You're welcome," Cara said.
Unasked, Ringo offered further, "Yeah, I'll stick around here for a bit longer, but I'll be gone in a few days." Cara and Olivia independently suspected he wouldn't be. Ringo went on, "If you ever visit New Vegas, look me up at the Crimson Caravan camp."
"Whatever, man," Olivia said.
Cara, insecure, had worried upon meeting Ringo that Olivia might go for the handsome guy instead of himself, or just fuck Ringo or something, which Cara wouldn't have liked either, but since Ringo had introduced himself by pointing a gun at Olivia, she hadn't so much as looked in Ringo's direction kindly. She looked like she wanted to kill him, whatever his relationship with Sunny might've been. Cara had seen Olivia look at quite a few other people the same way before killing them. Ringo had also totally creeped her out just before Cara left to round up radscorpions. Olivia especially hated threats, people pointing guns at her, and rudeness. Cara mostly only hated bad logic, formal or informal, animal cruelty and sexual abuse. And sometimes gender and sexuality politics. Cara still felt threatened by Ringo, like he'd lose Olivia's friendship, and that tore him up inside badly, but he tried not to let it bother him. He tried to think about anything else. He thought about running, playing with dogs and crying alone. Whoops! Dogs! he thought. Just let go, he told himself. Let it go. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
Cara was about to say something nice to Ringo, but then Ringo abruptly wandered off toward the saloon. He walked with a limp.
The other five Goodspringers there—less Doc Mitchell and Chet—were armed poorly for fighting gigantic scorpions, but fairly well for Powder Gangers.
Cara'd had Chet dole out leather armor to all of them, he thought, but one was still wearing this rustic but nice field hand outfit, a long striped red dress with short sleeves and an apron over it. She was a pretty blonde with a short pixie haircut armed only with a steel cooking knife, which embarrassed Cara, who would've given her something better, even one of the weapons in his helicopter or his backup sidearm, a .40 S&W HK P30S, if he'd known all she had was a cheap mass-produced dull knife.
Two of the other four Goodspringers had ancient firearms: an anonymous unmarked long double-barreled 10-gauge shotgun, and a rusty Colt Single Action Army in .45 Colt, also called .45 Long Colt. Another had a varmint rifle in .22 Long Rifle that looked like it was from about 1952. The last one had a dull blackish grey modern carbon steel single-and-double-action revolver, and Cara asked them what it was. He could tell it was Smith & Wesson, but not what model; they didn't know. They weren't entirely sure how to work it and had maybe never cleaned it. He examined it. On the side of the barrel it read "S&W .357 MAGNUM." On the frame with the cylinder open it read "MOD 586." It had five rounds in its six-shooter cylinder, all of them fired. It had a 4" barrel. Some of the metal was rusty, like Sunny's varmint rifle, and the wood grip was damaged, missing pieces, and had old sticky duct tape wound around it.
Two of the Goodspringers were wounded, the one with the shotgun and the one with the varmint rifle, one worse than the other. They were both right-handed, like most people; everyone, really. One had taken a through-and-through of a small caliber in the left arm; knowing the Powder Gangers' and NCR's arsenal probably 9x19mm or .223/5.56x45mm, which had fortunately not hit bone to go on and deflect and bounce around inside, tearing up who knows what, like bullets were wont to do, called "terminal effects;" nor had it hit any arteries. Cara's pinky finger didn't quite fit in the hole. It was bleeding but not badly. The bullet was probably FMJ, to go straight through, which would make sense as that was the NCR's standard 5.56mm round. You rarely saw anything else, especially on Powder Gangers. Cara would deal with her second, but he couldn't do nothing now, so he quickly cleaned the wound, disinfected it and taped gauze down on both ends to stop the bleeding and keep out dust and other contaminants. The other Goodspringer was bleeding more heavily from a more solid hit to the left thigh, which was bad and could've been horrible, though the bullet hadn't hit anything important but muscle, apparently. Which was still bad.
"We don't need to take the bullet out, but I need to clean it and treat it," Cara told him. "Then I can give you a stimpack or two. We can't let it get infected, that's the main thing."
"You don't need to stitch it up or nothin'?" the Goodsprings settler asked, wincing from pain as he spoke. He'd been holding a filthy red rag over the entrance wound; there was no exit wound.
"No, the stimpack does that," Cara said, gesturing by making an open hand into a fist. "Closes it up. I can put this sealant thing down on the surface if you want me to."
"Is that stimpack one of them fancy future deals?" the man said.
"Yes it is," Cara said. "The word's a generic contraction of 'stimulant package.' I've also seen it written 'stimulant delivery package.' No, 'stimulation.' It's a pretty solid cocktail of a couple things, most importantly synthetic stem cells which accelerate natural regeneration by quite a lot. Steroids too. I don't know why I'm going on about this, sorry."
"That's okay," the man said.
"All right, thanks. This might be embarrassing, but I need to move you to a clean environment without aggravating your injury. So we're gonna go to Doc Mitchell's house," Cara said.
Not understanding what Cara meant, the man just started walking that way.
Cara stopped him. "Don't move. I need to move you to Mitchell's house, okay?"
The man looked him over, panicking about something but only for a half-second. Cara was a big guy. To the man, Cara looked like he could carry him without dropping him.
"Okay," the man said, compliant. His face was a little pale. His pants were shiny with blood down the front of the left leg. Cara suspected there was a large blood splatter or maybe a pool of it somewhere, wherever he'd been shot.
"We don't have a stretcher—" Cara was saying.
"It's right there," the man interrupted, pointing at Mitchell's house maybe 40 yards away.
"I can't let you walk or you're gonna make the wound worse. You might rupture an artery," Cara said. The man didn't know what that was but it sounded bad. "So I'm just gonna carry you. Understand?"
He understood but still looked confused.
Cara picked him up in a fireman carry, careful but assertive. Cara was made a little awkward by all the things hanging off him, but the gear and the fully grown man didn't slow him down. Nobody offered to carry anything for Cara, but he hadn't expected them to. Sometimes he missed the South.
For a smooth ride Cara walked rather than jogged.
"Olivia, could you get the door for me please?" Cara asked her in front of Doc Mitchell's house as he went through the open gate of the picket fence around it.
"Sure," she said and went up first and knocked on the door, but no one answered it after a few restless seconds, so she opened it.
As Cara stepped into the house, still carrying an adult male in addition to a lot of gear, he called out to Doc Mitchell, who didn't answer; he continued not to answer until Cara went right up to him in his kitchen.
"Hi, Cara," Mitchell said. "Is that a person you're carrying?"
"One of your townsfolk," Cara said, "Yeah. Do you remember that thing with the Powder Gangers I asked you about earlier?"
"Yes," Mitchell said.
"Did you hear the gunfire a minute ago?"
" . . . Yes."
"He got hit," Cara said, gesturing.
"I see," Mitchell said, looking at the streak of dark wet on the leather pants of the inverted man Cara was carrying.
"May I use your operating table?" Cara said, feeling a mite impatient.
"Yeah, sure," Mitchell said and took a slow bite of bran cereal.
"Thank you," Cara said.
He went back to the clinic area of the house, set the man on the main operating table by the left wall and the man groaned, then Cara set down his long gun and tac vest and manpack radio and armored vest and rucksack against the back wall in one of many open spaces, which took him a few seconds, then he looked around and noticed a lot of people in the room watching him—a Goodsprings settler he didn't know, Olivia, Cass, Raul, Rex, ED-E, Sunny Smiles, Cheyenne and even Ringo. The dogs were sniffing each other. Viana was probably at the saloon playing cards. The room was crowded. Cara felt self-conscious but tried to ignore it. "Hey, Ringo," he said.
"Hey Cara," Ringo said, smiling.
Cara flipped the main operating light on. It worked and came on brightly after two seconds. In Mitchell's rather dark dusty house the contrast between lit and unlit was striking. Cara had to squint and let himself get used to it. He briefly wondered where the machine's power came from, and where the Vigor-Tester's power came from. There were also several wall lights, all on, in the house.
"I needed to get you to a clean environment," Cara said to the man lying on the table, pulling his trauma bag out from his rucksack and taking out blue sterile nitrile rubber gloves for each hand. "I'm sorry it took a minute," Cara went on. "But if I just did it outside it might've been bad. Irradiated dust could blow into the wound and kill you. Or anything could happen. I'm sorry, I'm talking too much." The man didn't seem to mind it.
Cara went to his trauma bag, gathered things and came back with a syringe; a small-gauge hypodermic needle; a small round bottle, clear with a printed label and a rubber top on the cap; then after thinking for a second also a handful of tourniquets, a big maroon bottle of rubbing alcohol and some cotton balls. He screwed the needle into the syringe. Then he said, "This is morphine," of the small round bottle. "It's an opioid and analgesic. Painkiller. It's gonna make you feel good. You'll probably feel me poking around but it won't hurt. I'll give you 10 milligrams. It'll last four hours. I'll need about two minutes. I just need you to stay still, okay?"
"Okay," the man said. He was eerily subdued and clearly in pain but submitting.
Cara applied a tourniquet, a stretchy rubber tube, tying it to the man's upper arm, then got rubbing alcohol on one cotton ball and rubbed it over a big spot on the inside of the man's elbow, making the skin seem greenish yellow. "Make a fist," Cara said to the man, who did it right on the first try with an expression like "Is this right?" Cara tapped on the man's elbow with two fingers together a couple times; he had good veins; and slipped the needle through skin into a vein and injected him, then took the tourniquet off. Damn, I need to get a Band-Aid, he thought. Cara set the needle and syringe and tourniquet aside on a tray on the top of a wheeled metal cart Doc Mitchell kept within convenient arm's reach of the operating table.
"A lot of people call it Med-X, which I think is stupid, but what're ya gonna do," Cara said to the man. "I'm gonna set up to clean your wound." He looked at his PIP-Boy and pressed a button then flipped and cycled to its atomic clock, in the Data section, and waited five more seconds. "You should already be feeling that," he said. "Do you feel different at all?"
" . . . I don't feel anything," the man said.
"Good! It's working," Cara said. "Am I gonna need to tie you down to keep you still?"
"I don't think so," the man said.
"Alrighty then," Cara said. "Just stay right there, okay?"
"Sounds good," the man said lightly.
There were generic medical bandages with gauze in the middle and sticky ends on Mitchell's wheeled convenience cart. Cara took one stuck it over the injection site.
Cara got ready the next things he'd need.
With an obsidian scalpel Cara always kept about his person he easily cut the man's leather pants off of the wounded leg, which was a little pale and bloody and sweaty. The filthy grey boxer shorts the man had on under the pants were short enough that all Cara needed to do to get them out of the way was push them up the leg a little. Cara applied a tourniquet above the wound and elevated the leg.
"I don't think the bullet hit anything important. That's lucky," Cara said. "I guess. Just so you know, I don't have the tools on me to take it out. The bullet. We'd need to go to the New Vegas Medical Clinic or maybe the Followers' headquarters, that old Mormon fort, or this lab place I kinda live at. If you want to do that in the future just let me know. I should buy you some pants too. You need X-ray to do it right. Controlled X-ray machines, I mean, not just setting off a nuclear device next to you." The man smiled at that with a look like he would've laughed if he weren't high. Cara went on, "It's also a difficult operation. We can't know how much exactly you've been moving around since you got shot, thus the location of the bullet's probably changed too. It might've gone up or down by inches. We'd have to find it. And anyway the tissue naturally clenches and heals up around the bullet even though it's a foreign object, so by rooting around in there lookin' for it we might make the wound worse, or make some whole new wounds. Any of which could result in heavy bleeding. It's sensitive, y'see. We don't really need to take the bullet out, though. Fortunately. The stimpack will take care of it. That and your body's natural healing. If you lost a lot of blood you might want to transfuse some more in with Doc Mitchell, but I think you're okay. Try not to run or do much heavy lifting in the next few days, okay?"
"Okay," the man said.
"Did you bleed an awful lot?" Cara asked.
"I don't know," the man said.
"What's your name?" Cara said.
"Arturo," the man said.
Cara administered a stimpack, injecting it by the entrance wound, put its empty syringe on the tray, and dressed and bandaged the wound while it got to work.
Cara cleaned his hands and bagged up his used equipment and put his trauma bag away in his rucksack, and went to Doc Mitchell to say thanks.
"Good job, Cara," Mitchell said.
"Were you watching too?" Cara asked.
"No," Mitchell said. "I just know you would've done a good job. It's mighty white of you to patch up a common citizen."
"You might need to give him some blood," Cara said. "I didn't think to blood-type him. Anyway, thank you for the compliment," he said, smiling. Mitchell patted him on the arm. "Oh," he said, "I was gonna go put him in the saloon and buy him a drink. Is that okay, for treatment? I'm not sure about drug interaction—"
Mitchell said, "Should be fine."
Cara said, "Okay then."
Cara told the injured Goodspringer, Arturo, the plan, picked him up again gently, left his own gear in Mitchell's house and carried Arturo to the Prospector Saloon, which Olivia among others noticed seemed to be about as taxing a physical activity for Cara as carrying a rag doll.
She also noticed that a few Goodspringers were working to clean the mess of gore south of the saloon where radscorpion had hit Powder Ganger, as well as another person or two dragging smaller radscorpion bodies out of other places in the town. She mentally noted to help them clean up after this bit was done.
Before reaching the saloon Cara noticed the same thing and paused and turned around to address the crowd behind him—Olivia, Cass, Raúl, Rex, ED-E, Sunny and Cheyenne. He let them know what he was doing incase they hadn't heard before then said, "I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were following me. I was focused. You guys just do whatever you like, okay? Including help clean up the town. I'm gonna set this fella down, get him a drink and then go pick up my stuff from Doc Mitchell's. Then I'll help clean out the bodies too."
Cara found the other injured Goodspringer, whom he'd slightly forgotten about, in the saloon. She seemed to have forgotten she'd been injured. The bleeding had stopped. She was fine, except she had a hole in her left arm, and some blood on her clothes and one sleeve was gone, which looked trashy. He'd done a good job on her before. He'd need to buy her new clothes. He should take her to the Strip and get her something that would last, something good, from one of the clothing shops or tailors he knew, but not so good as to be ostentatious or impractical for country desert living; he offered to do that as he worked on her. She called herself a country girl, and didn't believe him. He told her to tell him when she wanted to go. She could call him over the long-range radio he'd put in Trudy's saloon; there was a list of a few frequencies, including his sort of home one at the Lucky 38.
Cara changed the bandage and injected a stimpack to heal the wound. She thanked him. He bought her a drink. She hugged him with one arm and thanked him for helping them all. He said she was welcome and he was really sorry she got shot. She said she'd never been shot before but hadn't even noticed it happening. He said he didn't believe her. She laughed and said it was true. He still didn't believe her.
Viana had been in the saloon, playing caravan for low stakes with Trudy. Both were good caravan players. Viana had a better deck from her time in the service, but Trudy won more games than her.
For a minute or two Olivia stood outside the front of the Prospector Saloon, partially enjoying the sight of it—she'd always loved its façade—and partially inspecting the damage to it. The Powder Gangers hadn't got very many shots in before Cara reached them with the radscorpions, but at the time it'd felt like they got hundreds of shots off. Olivia could only count nine or maybe 11 new holes and nicks on the saloon's front side, most of them on the tall façade where the normal lettering of "Prospector" and the janky mixed media neon of "Saloon" of its name were. A few holes and nicks were deep, and some were shallow. The lower, smaller neon "OPEN 24 HOURS" sign at eye level was untouched. A few of the saloon's lovely, sparkly multi-colored Christmas lights had been shot out. That bothered Olivia. Both strings of lights were still lit, though. She loved the look of the lights. She wanted to put some Christmas lights up in her home with Cara, maybe in the main entrance of the casino and then in their 22nd floor presidential suite. Whatever Christmas was, she liked it.
Olivia had their followers start helping clean up the town, except Rex and ED-E who couldn't carry bodies. The other Goodspringer followed Cara with Arturo into the saloon. Sunny decided to get a drink of water with them.
After selling Cara a bottle of Wild Turkey Kentucky Spirit bourbon whiskey and a Nuka-Cola for Arturo, which Cara did a serviceable job of mixing by himself, Trudy asked Cara, "What should we do with the Powder Gangers' bodies?"
As it happened Cara had been thinking about that. He said, "I'll take care of them. If you want to do anything with them just put 'em in like a centralized body pile."
Cara gave Arturo the bourbon and cola, said, "Don't get drunk, okay? This'll be your only drink for about six hours," to which Arturo said "Okay," then Cara went to Mitchell's and came back out with all his gear.
He set most of his stuff down in one of two very rusty dumpsters by Chet's general store, for the moment. He meant to get his HK417A2 back from Viana, too—he was still wearing its empty sling and felt half a fool for it.
He looked around for Olivia, first finding ED-E, whom she had told to stay with him. He patted ED-E on the side and looked for his various party members.
Olivia was in the Powder Ganger massacre area—a huge smear of spilled blood, bodies and dismembered parts of bodies and bits of brain and tissue—dragging one of the Powder Gangers.
"I got them to agree that I get first dibs on their gear and stuff," Olivia immediately began saying, as Cara came up to her, about loot, "but the other people from Goodsprings—actually just this one named Toni—have already looked them over for valuables."
"Okay," he said. "Did they have any valuables?"
"Couple'a rings, some jewelry," Olivia said.
"Did she check 'em for money?" Cara said.
"No," Olivia said. "Well, for bottlecaps yes. She said some of 'em had NCR money, but she didn't want it."
"Do you mind if I take it? I do some business in the NCR," Cara said.
Appearing out of nowhere behind Cara, Cass gave his ass a quick possessive tight spank as she said, "Think you're hot shit, Cara?" joking—and making him flinch, and reflexively start to draw his sidearm to shoot her, and reaching his other arm out to grab her and control her body; he didn't mind her touching him but it was dangerous to surprise someone who'd been in combat like that, worse to do it to someone who'd been in a lot of combat, even if they were unarmed, and especially if they'd been trained exhaustively for years and years in different forms of hand-to-hand combat and martial arts, like Cara had, or happened to have various guns and mêlée weapons within arm's reach, like he also did. Luckily, those instincts didn't take hold of him. He never grabbed her, and his fingers only briefly grazed his Glock 22C's handle. He must've given Cass some kind of look, though, because a second later she gave him a look back, as if what she'd done were his fault, and trying to make him feel bad. Cass was manipulative like that sometimes. It didn't entirely work.
"Be careful about sneaking up on me, okay?" he said to her. He should've heard her coming.
Cass looked to Olivia for support and got none. Olivia spoke. Cara looked to Olivia to listen; she had this "You done fucked up now, Cass" look on her face. Olivia had snuck up on Cara a couple of times successfully and his reactions hadn't all been cutesy. Sometimes Olivia forgot about all the combat and horrible violence he'd experienced—it was easy to forget—not really knowing anything about it herself, despite a few years' NCR military service of her own. She'd never seen any action. She'd been a quartermaster, and not in the Mojave region. Not what she wanted, but she got to play with guns all day. She said what Cara had been thinking: "Bad idea, Cass. I'm not saying I'm not a little excited to see him get spanked, though."
Olivia wondered about Cara. He'd told her he hadn't been in the NCR military, but he'd clearly had military training, and much more of it than her. Martial arts, too, not just guns and a little physical training and drills like she got. He was some kind of qualified sniper or something, and assaulter—it was pretty amazing to see him storm a room, or a building—special operations. Most impressively to her he could make shots, even on moving targets, from a much longer range than even Craig Boone, formerly of the NCR's elite First Recon scout/sniper battalion—really only a squad—could, hundreds and hundreds of yards away; she'd actually seen him do it loads of times; a few times at even more than a mile, according to their rangefinder lasers, which was hard to believe. But he'd done it. Slack-jawed, she'd watched it happen. With wind and without; up or down elevation, and at even levels. At ranges of more than a few hundred yards, the bullet took quite a while to reach the target, which itself had a lot of time to move after Cara fired, though she wasn't sure if he ever missed. She figured the targets got hit before they heard the shot because the bullets Cara used for such ranges were supersonic. She couldn't imagine how he possibly calculated leading targets, and windage and trajectory and parallax and stuff like that. She'd never seen him make a range card, or whatever they were called, which she'd heard you were supposed to do, but then again they weren't military, and never stayed in the same position for long; hadn't been ordered to. Most of the time he just estimated distance by eye, and windage didn't make much difference to powerful, heavy long-range rounds with pretty straight trajectories like .338 Lapua Magnum or .50 BMG, the two she'd seen him use; sometimes he used another rifle in .50 called a Hard Target Interdiction (HTI).
"What're you talking about?" Cass said indignantly, bringing Olivia back to the present. Cass had been drinking. "I've snuck up on him before."
Olivia said, "And he didn't karate-chop you in the neck or something?"
"Well . . . " Cass said.
"It's just a reflex!" Cara said. "I'm sorry!"
Olivia looked scandalized as she began to say, "No, I'm just—" but then interrupted herself to say, "Oh, you were kidding, weren't you?"
He nodded and shrugged. "Kinda," he said. "I'm still sorry."
"It's still fine," Olivia said warmly. She smiled. Cara smiled back.
Cara looked to Cass and said, "I'm not saying don't touch my ass. I'm just saying, be careful."
"Okay," Cass said, but it sounded like "whatever."
"Oh, shit, I forgot why I came up to you," Cara said. "Olivia, may I buy you a drink?"
She looked touched. She unceremoniously dropped the Powder Ganger corpse she'd been dragging with a heavy dull thump and stood up straight, pushing her chest out—though as she was still wearing her IOTV it didn't have the intended effect—then cocked her hips a little to the side and put a hand on her hip, and said with her head inclined forward, "Yes you may, Cara sir." She looked alluring but absurd. He wasn't sure what she meant by the pose. They were both grinning.
Cara treated her and Cass to drinks and a snack and suggested they all help clean up the town afterward. They agreed. Cara told Arturo he couldn't help because of his injury. Arturo agreed. Arturo bought Cara a beer, a dark left-hand milk stout that was good and a little bitter, and Arturo's friend bought Cara crispy cooked squirrel bits on a stick which he didn't particularly want to eat and ate out of politeness.
Cara couldn't stop himself checking Olivia out even when she was sitting. She sat with her legs crossed at the knees, not the ankles.
ED-E, who was still following Cara but had been silent, agreed to help clean up too.
"What did he just say?" Olivia asked Cara of ED-E. Cara noticed the "he."
"It'll help too," Cara said.
ED-E bleeped, about Olivia.
"That's not nice, Eddie," Cara said, between swallowing and biting off cooked bits of squirrel. He wondered where Trudy's provider had found the squirrel. Cara had seen Mohave ground squirrels, but he didn't know anyone who hunted them, paid for their meat or otherwise acquired them. He'd only ever seen squirrels that he could remember in the states of Michigan, Ohio and Texas, and the country Japan, and when he'd been very young. He just hoped Trudy didn't get them through some form of factory farming.
"Was he talking about me?" Olivia said.
"No," Cara said and took another bite and a drink.
ED-E beeped. Cara looked at it, listening.
"What'd he say that time?" Olivia asked.
"That . . . That was nothing," Cara said.
"Was it calling me a drunk?" Cass said.
"No," Cara said, "but you might want to slow down a little."
"How much weight can he carry?" Olivia asked Cara of ED-E. She had an idea but not a number.
"I'm not sure," Cara said.
ED-E beeped and fizzled for a few seconds.
Cara translated: "It can lug around about 200 pounds—it can lift 260 pounds. It can push or drag 650 pounds."
"Wow," Olivia said.
"Pssht," Cara said.
"What? How much can you push or drag?" Olivia asked, already kind of knowing.
"A lot more than that," Cara said. Olivia knew it was true.
"Bragger," Cass said. She smiled at Cara. He smiled too.
"I'm not bragging," Cara said. "I just don't want you two ladies to be more impressed by ED-E's carrying capacity or strength than mine."
"Doc Mitchell has that vigor tester machine thing," Olivia said. "Do you wanna go check it out?" she dared.
"To put all of you in your place, yes I do," Cara said to general laughter. They understood he was kidding. Probably. "But if we FRO'd to do that we'd be letting Goodsprings settlers clean up all the bodies for us. So, I propose we do the dick-measuring contest after we clean up out there."
"What's 'F-R-O' mean?" Olivia asked.
"Fucked right off," Cara said. Olivia and some of their followers laughed. Cass didn't; she viscerally enjoyed hearing him say "fuck" then "off" in that voice too much to laugh.
After the laughing calmed down Cass said, "I don't have a dick."
"That you know of," Cara said to more laughter.