Today was one of the rare days that the Divide stood silent in the midst of the storms that wracked the landscape all around with radiation-laced sand, blasting exposed skin from flesh to leave nothing but raw, bloody gore behind. Comparatively mild winds whistled through the windows, once filled with glass, now gapping portals long since opened to the elements. The Tunnellers toiled beneath the earth, constantly expanding, and cultivating their many warrens, like the worlds strangest anthill. Every so often they would emerge to the surface in swarms, large or small, tearing down animals or abominations that strayed too close to the entrances to their subterranean domain.
Marked Men prowled the streets like the ghosts of a time long past, when the Bear and Bull had fought over a seldom-trodden path in the hopes that by flooding it with armoured boots now, the later would handle itself. They had no conception of the significance their failed scheme had almost attained. The evidence of the brief, shared insurrection wiped from the slate of History almost the very day pigment had been applied to its surface by men wishing to leave their mark upon it. Annihilated by a single Courier, carrying a package recovered from the ruins of Navarro. And the world keeps on spinning, a clockwork toy being wound by some invisible hand for the gratification of a race that seemed determined to destroy it along with themselves.
A singular Marked Man approached the edge of a cliff, below which his milky eyes saw dozens of his own kind among the ruins, scavenging amongst themselves, sometimes breaking out into brief fights. A Marked Man's temper was always thinly covered from the light of day. Pain had a way of eating at the mind, like a thousand insects nibbling and squirming across the surface of your brain. A centipede with sharp legs that scratched the outside of your grey matter in a million places with every inch of movement. An hour of the endless pain was torture. A year was as certain a road to madness as ever the heart of man could desire. Or to futility rebel against, in the dark hours when sleep would never come past the agony that coated the spaces where your skin used to be like liquid fire. Chained to life by the radiation, unable to die, but prevented from truly living. The only escape was to leave the Divide. Some had. Others no longer understood that there was a world outside of the artificial, radiation-soaked valleys of Hopeville and Ashton.
A noise brought the Marked Man's rifle to the ready position, its red-skinned hands flying through the motions taught to him by his NCR drill instructor so long ago, in what seemed like a half-remembered dream. The hands remembered what the brain had failed to cling to. And a spirit of rage could hold on tighter to knowledge that facilitated violence than the mind of a man driven a whole-and-a-half insane by several years of constant, ever-present, all-pervasive torment.
The rage-addled mind saw nothing he didn't expect to see, though an indefinable difference in the air of the Divide made him think that something had changed. The wind was restless, beginning to howl with a kind of latent rage that every Marked Man knew. The Spirit of the Divide was building up to one of its outburst, the likes of which this land only brought to bear when he entered its borders. He was here. The Messenger. Not the Shadow that passed silently through the Divide, the one that carried the Red, White, and Blue symbol upon his back and the Golden Eagle in his clenched fist. But the Monster. The one that burst from the darkness and dragged Marked Men down into the unseen places, like the Tunnellers sometimes did with the unwary, leaving nought behind but a carcase, splayed-apart and ripped asunder to plunder the flesh within.
The heads of Marked Men raised themselves to the heavens like dogs scenting the wind. And as if by some unspoken signal, they dispersed. Not one-by-one. No, that lesson had been taught in ways that not even the pain-addled could mistake. They congregated into thick groups, forming together in loose bands of red-skinned figures bristling with weapons, and left the wide-open expanse to fade into the rubble around them like ghosts into the concrete. Eyes gleaming from the darkness. Hidden, but still watchful.
The Marked Man upon the cliff, realising his mistake at having come up to the top of the rise to look down upon his fellows, faded into the rock through an alcove. He prowled like a large cat; radiation-infused strength prevalent in his gait. A predator going to ground to wait out the storm. And what a storm it would be. It had been some time since the Courier had come to the Divide, and the Spirit that swelt here had been saving its strength. The wind roared with fury far above, loud in the ears of those present to see it, but no-where near the high pitch of incandescent rage it usually mustered to greet its creator.
The Marked Man settled himself, rifle across his salvage-plated legs, comfortable in its hollow.
It sniffed the air, curious at an aroma that wafted in the still air within the cover it had found from the driving winds. What was that smell? An echo of something that its nose had scented long ago, when it had still been a man, and not some shambling echo of sanity long past. Consumed by rage and pain. Some sort of fragrant smoke? Tobacco?
It followed the scent, looking sideways. It saw the figure, silent and ominous in the half-darkness, looming out of the gloom. A scant second before the Monster lunged. The Marked Man died, amidst the sound of tearing flesh and gnashing teeth.
Further away, Boone and ED-E observed as the Divide inadvertently opened the way before them. He followed one or two groups of Marked Men until they faded from view, then traversed his rifle around to check on Joshua and Raul. The Burned Man and the Ghost of Mexico City were ambling along quite happily through the ruins, the two cyberdogs trailing after them. They were difficult to spot, having purposefully taken a route obscured by rubble and debris. In contrast, Boone was living true to the First Recon way and the advice the Courier had given and was sequestered high up in a crumbling building. He was covered from head to toe in fabric or armour, not an inch of exposed flesh to be sandblasted by the storm that was unexpectedly rolling in from the direction of the Big Empty. No regard to the appearance of humanity other than the eyes that peered out through his biker goggles.
Damn inconvenient timing, for a storm to start just now as if in direct answer to their presence. He supposed he shouldn't be surprised. The Divide was known for it's storms. They were the primary obstacle that kept the unwary from inadvertently immersing themselves in this little slice of hell made manifest upon the surface of the world. The only ones that come here anymore were the foolish, the brave, or the insane. Craig Boone didn't think of himself as especially brave, nor especially foolish. He just followed his friend's lead. Who just so happened to be insane.
Damn inconvenient as well, that. Of all the people to come along and do more to set his life to rights than any other before him, it just had to be the Courier. A cannibal with a heart of gold-plated hate. Or hate-plated gold. Difficult to tell from day-to-day. At least his life wasn't ever boring. ED-E warbled a warning, causing Boone to traverse his Gobi rifle to acquire a six o'clock hold on his new target. The rifle's desert camouflage was the perfect colour for these dreary surroundings. Deathclaw, three-hundred metres away. He gauged the wind, as ED-E warbled a silent summation of his own thoughts as the data rolled off his internal processors like a sniper's wet dream. It was like having your own missile guidance system for each bullet. Wind speed, elevation, bullet specs and target scans. Too bad for the little robot that Craig Boone only needed that flood of information to confirm his own gut instincts were correct. They usually were. He squeezed the trigger, and the heavy silencer on the end of the rifle turned the gunshot into a muffled pop that was snatched away on the wind like a puff of sand, lost in the developing radstorm.
The .308 round, specially hand-loaded by the Courier with his own proprietary blend of high-performance powder and topped by a jacketed soft point tip, entered the Deathclaw's eye socket at high-velocity, bounced off the inside of its thick skull, and rattled around inside the brain like something out of a bar-side Pinball machine. The abomination took a few more lumbering steps before what was left of its brain told the rest of it that all was not well in the State of Greymatter, and it lurched over sideways like a rotted tree-trunk to lie still as the sand gathered around it. Boone cycled targets, making a mental note to record that shot along with ED-E's warbled notes in his DOPE book. These wind currents were interesting conditions for sniping.
Raul was a ghostly figure in the now hard-driving sand, covered from head to toe in his vaquero outfit and a number of convenient wraps and rags to protect his ghoulish exterior. He had returned his polished Medicine Stick to it's leather carrying sheath in favour of Paciencia. The old ghoul wasn't stupid. He had used the lighter .44 Magnum rounds during the assault on Fort Defiance in order to deal with the increased number of targets, but for heavily armoured Marked Men that healed themselves with exposure to radiation, or Deathclaws? The heavier .308 round with its higher grain-count contained within the casing was key. He was loaded with the same custom cartridges as Boone and kept the heavy stock with its Mexican flag proudly displayed jammed into his armpit to make the business of bringing it to his shoulder and sighting down an easy task.
He and Joshua didn't speak. Not even before the wind started howling like a banshee and conversation became an impossible proposition. There was work to be done, and conversation could wait. They did share a private moment of amusement when Rex boldly sniffed Roxie's behind, and the bitch snapped at him in indignation. Dogs would be dogs.
Further ahead of them, Follows-Chalk and Lantaya T'Rali ghosted through the ruins with the same intent skill they had displayed, or rather not displayed as this was the entire point, at Fort Defiance. Chalk was up high on a half-exposed rooftop, formed by a gigantic shard of rubble that had sheared off a cross-section of this building in one of the long-ago blasts, exposing it to the outside world. Currently, he was switching out his bow for his Thompson M1A1, rightly convinced that an arrow would never travel in a straight line in such heavy wind. But that didn't matter much. The cacophony of the developing storm would mask even the report of the Courier's Anti-Material Rifle from the world. For all he knew, it already had.
Chalk motioned down through the swirling sand to Lani, and the two figures advanced through the ruins like spectral wraiths, indistinct figures that sometimes dove to the side into crags or crevasses as muzzle-flashes and bright blue biotic coronas signalled the end of hidden Marked Men or Tunnellers. They stayed close enough to support one another, Lani from below with her clever use of biotic lifts, pulls and stasis to keep their victims immobilised while Chalk attacked from above with a spray of .45 auto aimed at the crowns of exposed heads, or in one ambitious leap that sent his lithe form sailing down through the air to drive his warclub with crushing force upon a NCR helmet, bending the shaped steel inwards.
Rolling upon impact with the ground, he dodged the surprised swing of a heavy bumper sword by the singular Marked Man who remained in the hollow and ascended the concrete wall in a flapping of duster to vanish into the sand above like a distant memory. Lantaya took advantage of the Marked Man's distraction to finish him off, a biotic warp turning his head to disparate chunks of flesh and bone. She followed Chalk up the wall in a burst of biotics, coming to a rest next to his crouch form that had paused to stare fixedly down his iron-sights into the radstorm. He had found a metallic respirator in the wreckage that he had immediately recognised for what it was, tearing the rags he wore over his face off to strap that contraption around his mouth. After emptying out the worst of the sand, that is. He'd have to find the Courier and ask for one of his filters before this new acquisition could be anything more than a dustcover. He motioned for his temporary partner to follow him, while he used his skills as a tracker and explorer to decern the Courier's location amidst the Divide's furious assault upon the intruders.
He looked over his shoulder and judged the distance between them and the indistinct silhouette of the building that housed Boone's temporary Sniper Nest, and using this as a reference, drew a mental line between himself and the Courier's right-hand-man. Boone was slightly off to the side in the canyon they traversed, while he and Lantaya should be somewhere close to the Municipal Water Treatment Plant the Courier had shown them on his map. That meant that the entrance to the Temple of the illusive Ulysses was close. He couldn't make it out through the radstorm, the elemental sandblaster going at full force all around them, but he knew the bearing. The Courier would be up ahead.
He rose from his crouch and slide through the storm with Lani at his heel, providing rear security with the scanning barrel of her assault carbine.
Back in Boone's sniper nest, a Marked Man had noticed the presence of something in the decaying mass of concrete and rebar that at one point used to constitute the dwelling place of several military families and had crept into the building along with several of his fellows. The former NCR troopers and Rangers advanced in twos, bounding pairs like trained hunting hounds with automatic weapons, an equal part eclectic and deadly mix of squat shoulder-mounted machineguns, automatic shotguns and Armalite-pattern assault or marksman rifles. Among them the former Legion explorers kept close to the forefront of the advance with heavy bumper blades, super sledges, and thermic lances.
In this long-lost military base that once defended the scientists of Big Mountain and carried its own complimentary stock of earth-shaking giants primmed to unleash the final death-knell of mankind upon the enemies of the United States of America, weapon systems were like a pick-and-mix kiosk at a pre-war mall. Heavy, advanced, light, long, small, or large. You could inevitably find a flavour that suited all tastes.
Unfortunately for these Marked Folk, Craig Boone had begun his military career as a humble ground-pounder at the tender age of eighteen, worked his way up to NCR First Recon by merit alone, and had spent several years drifting at the side of the Courier. A man who casually transited through hellscapes like the Divide on his way to go Irradiated Deathclaw-hunting with his good old pal Ulysses, a man who had at one point attempted to kill him and launch nuclear weapons upon the NCR. To say that Craig was formidable in his own right was an underestimation of his abilities.
The Marked Men realised this at about the same time the beep of a sensor module announced the triggering of the sniper's perimeter security. The building was rocked with a detonation of high-ex, packed within two tin cans of scrap metal and bent nails. The crude frag mine swept the attackers off their feet and down the stairs in a rolling mass of dazed ghoul. They were not dead, however. Heavy armour protected them from the worst of the blast, and natural regeneration took care of the rest. But when Craig and ED-E appeared at the top of the stairs and began pumping a brief salvo of shots into the confused heap of Divide denizens with their All-American and underslung laser weapon, the bodies started dropping with more finality.
"Time to go," Boone ordered his little metal spotter, and reaching into his chest rig to toss a parting gift down the stairs, he strode back into the snipers nest proper. The heavy clink-clink of metal on concrete echoed down the stairwell as the frag grenade rolled to a stop an inch from a recumbent Marked Man's nose. The milky white eyes barely had time to widen in shock before it was vapourised in a wash of high-velocity shrapnel intermingled with fragments of concrete and bone.
Boone kicked a waiting coil of rope off the side of the building, watching it flap wildly in the wind as he prepared to do what most climbing instructors in the Rangers, First Recon, or even the comparatively more common basic military training said never to do under any circumstances. Sighing heavily, he clipped the carabiner on the harness of his gear rig to the rope and slung the rope around the small of his back as he let it pay out behind him. Cautiously, but with his usual icy calmness, he exited stage left through window, struggling to stay adhered to the wall in the howling gale-force radstorm around him. Never attempt a wall-climb during heavy weather, the voice of his First Recon drill sergeant bellowed on repeat within his mind. He ignored it as ED-E orbited him, the duraframe Eyebot's smooth and rounded exterior cutting the wind as his hoover-generator struggled to remain on a predictable course.
Through the storm and sand, a Marked Man in the powered armour of an NCR heavy trooper primmed and aimed a Red Glare rocket launcher towards the pair. The weapon hummed as the guidance system engaged and the digital interface flickered to life. The user ignored these with an angry hiss through the Mask it wore, the one dash of Legion iconography on his person, a stylised metal mask bearing the likeness of the Legate Lanius.
ED-E however, had other plans. His scanners picked up the activation of the guidance system and with a beep his signature combat jingle issued forth through external speakers, and his comparatively dinky laser weapon was retracted into the modified Duraframe that housed his internals. To be replaced by the underslung Tesla cannon. It powered up with an ominous whine that alerted Boone to the new danger, and as the Marked Man started emptying the automatic rocket loader in a sustained burst of high-explosive death, the little robot-that-could-fry-your-ass released a streaking lance of white-hot electricity into the thick of the self-propelled projectiles. The arching electricity crackled and zapped across the metal exteriors of the rockets in-flight, turning sand particles to glass specks that reflected and refracted light like the worlds most demented disco. Life in technicolour with a dash of old-world pyrotechnics. Not designed to withstand such voltage, the rockets detonated prematurely in a wave of blossoming fireballs that rushed backwards, carrying the chain reaction towards sender like a smoking fuse on a stick of dynamite.
It only took a split second to reach him, but when it did, what was left of the rockets in the Red Glare's autoloader detonated with a heavy boom that stripped the heavy power-armoured figure apart like a peeling banana. The shockwave plucked ED-E from the air and Boone from the wall to crash down into the hollows below. Thankfully, Boone had been far enough down that the impact only cracked a rib and caused one of his auto-inject stimpacks to hiss as it discharged itself into his bloodstream. ED-E bounced off a wall with the sound of a civil-wall era cannonball, shrieking through his external speakers in a high-pitched surprised wail. Once he rolled to a stop, there was a pause, then a questioning beep that seemed to ask, "Did I really just survive that shit?" and, "Hey, Boone? You survive that shit?" in the same burst of unintelligible sound.
Not knowing which to answer, the former First Recon sniper replied with the all-purpose grunt of, "Yeah, think so!"
The two maintained the silence for a moment, sharing in their the unexpected eventually of their continued survival, before Boone got unsteadily to his feet. Time to get moving.
A sniper knew better, especially the vaunted First Recon, than to stay in the immediate vicinity of such a blinding and ostentatious display of sound and fury as they had just unleashed in the midst of their deadly surroundings. Even through the howling wind and elemental tumult of the Divide as it attempted to scour its surface clean of the uninvited intruders upon its domain, that fireball and electronic discharge had been seen by every available eye. And in the Divide, most eyes belonged to that which you would never wish to see you.
Joshua and Raul, followed by the Cyberdogs, spared the fireball a glance long enough to ascertain whether it was an explosion of some description or the prearranged signal to denote the swarming of Tunnellers. But no explosion that erupted with that much violence and fury could be attributed to a simple flare gun. The scintillating light that came from the simultaneous refraction and reflection of light through glassed sand particles being tossed around on the wind couldn't possibly be a flare. It seemed to all who watched that it was some sort of ephemeral spirit manifesting itself upon reality, partially obscured in the midst of the storm. A sandblaster that shot waves of diamonds illuminated by a boiling cascade of fire.
They both decided that regardless of its provenance, it was the signal to make swift tracks toward the Temple, stealth and subtlety be damned. Every man, monster and demon in the valley would have seen the lightshow. And there was far more in the Divide that wished them ill than wished them all the best. They increased their pace, almost at the same moment that Lani and Chalk did the same.
And the Divide, slathering at the mouth for prey to satisfy its insatiable desire for vengeance upon any and all that yet lived in defiance of its domain of all-consuming entropy, unleashed its hounds. The Marked Men streamed forth from the concrete ruins that surrounded and filled the Divide. Messenger or no Messenger, their desire for violence had been peeked by the display. And these intruders were not the Courier whose violence and cruelty, whose wrath they so feared and respected. These interlopers were of another kind entirely.
The first of the Marked Men emerged from the radstorms concealment like wraiths from a heavy fog, weapons already swinging or belching fire as Joshua's, Boone's and Lantaya's groups were all assailed from multiple angles at once. Indistinct figures looming from the sand, suddenly and without warning, charging into the crushing and confined circle the world around them had been reduced to. Joshua ducked low and drove forwards towards a charging Marked Man, meeting his charge rather than attempting to dodge. The Marked Man's arms impacted Joshua, rather than the head or haft of the wildly swinging super sledge, mitigating most of the force and driving Joshua's shoulder into his opponents gut at the same time he drove the muzzle of the .45 Storm Drum into a kneecap and pulled the trigger.
Suddenly missing a functioning joint and driven backwards by the Burned Man's shoulder charge, the Marked Man stumbled backwards and was savagely knocked from his feet by a snarling Roxie, who brought him down as her teeth tore at his throat. Raul worked the bolt on his rifle, expending all five rounds in the extended internal magazine of his rifle before hand loading one round after the other, calmly, and patiently with steady hands. Joshua and he manoeuvred from cover to cover, protecting each other as they advanced. They focused on the ranged targets, while the Cyberdogs handled those that got too close.
Communication was often impossible in the shrieking maelstrom, and while they managed to move in concert with one another as best they could, they were being assailed from all directions at one. Marked Men advanced through the cover of the radstorm with fearless conviction, some in neat squads or pairs that made use of proper tactics, others in wild rushes of screaming red skin whose voices were whiplashed this way and that by the wind, seemingly emerging from all directions at once. Joshua heard a wild yell from behind him, turned to receive what his ears told him to be a charging enemy, only to find nothing there to greet him. This cost him a crushing cut that almost sheared through his stab vests ballistic weave as a Marked Man with a bumper blade almost bisected him. Only his instincts born of long experience provoking a dodge at the last second that mitigated the force of the blow before a burst of .45 auto chewed through the Decanus mask.
Lantaya and Chalk advanced on the opposite side of the valley, unaware of their companion's location through the radstorm, but making use of their advantage of height and elevation. They saw Marked Men burst into their field of vision, making for the faint sounds of combat not yet overwhelmed and battered into oblivion by the Divide's cries. The Marked Men did not see them from their spot on the ruined rooftops, sequestered from a work quickly going mad around them. Lantaya motioned to Chalk that they should move to support whichever group of their companions were currently being assailed.
Follows-Chalk signed his agreement without pause, knowing that their stated purpose was to move swiftly, strike from unexpected angles and turn the flank of their enemies while the main base of fire controlled which direction the enemy struck from. They were the hammer, while Joshua and Raul were the anvil. The only way to read the movements of an enemy you could not see was to offer them obvious bait and wait for them to try and snap it up.
A larger crowd of Marked Men emerged through the radstorms cover, heavy ranged armaments of various descriptions bristling on their persons, while from their front a line of melee combatants prepared to tank incoming fire with their naturally regenerating bodies and allow their companions a chance to wield their ranged weapons with devastating effect.
They saw Joshua and Raul at the same moment the Ghost of Mexico City and the Burned Man saw them, a charging skirmish line of snarling figures that emerged into the small patch of the world still visible to them, melee fighters rushing forwards at odd angles and screaming their hate at the top of their lungs. The charging Marked Men gave their ranged companions plenty of clear field-of-fire to begin engaging, but the fire support never came.
Instead, Lantaya and Chalk opened up from the roof of a nearby building in a hail of .45 auto and green-tipped 5.56mm rounds, shredding shoulder-mounted auto-gunners, riflemen, shotgunners and otherwise in an expanding cone of fire that claimed the biggest guns first and worked downwards through the available targets. The hunters were suddenly the hunted, pincered between two fireteams with no cover that would protect them. Certainly no cover that prevented Lani from forcibly dragging those that stubbornly clung to their cursed existence from behind it to be riddled with strings of bullet-holes.
The attack was massacred in short order, and the two flankers shrank back into the cover of the storm as Joshua and Raul reoriented and reloaded in a wave of lighting quick motions as those Marked Men who attempted to engage them directly were felled by the cyberdogs. One or two bypassed the dogs in the confusion but were quickly dropped by a series of precise shots that emerged from the sandstorm, followed by an indistinct and unrecognisable warble as ED-E's scanners confirmed the unseen kills to the sniper he was spotting for.
But with bullets flying almost as thick through the air as the sand itself, you need to be lucky once every second. You only needed to be unlucky once.
Raul took a round in midsection that flattened itself against the discrete Kevlar vest he wore underneath the Vaquero coat. The impact knocked the old ghoul on his ass, gasping for a breath that never came, as the muscle in his diaphragm spasmed from the impact. The second of the rounds tore through his upper thigh, spraying blood across the sand and fracturing the bone as it passed through.
He writhed like a beached fish, unable to draw in enough air to cry out as the familiar pain of a fresh gunshot greeted him like a childhood friend. The kind of friend that always seemed to show up at inconvenient moments and seemed more preoccupied with getting you into trouble than telling you how things had been. No 'how you been', no 'how do you do', just a night out on the town that would surely end in tequila slammers and the mother of all hangovers. In other words, your "fun" friend. The one you only kept around because, god help you, you actually did enjoy it at the end of the day.
A charging Marked Man loomed out of the radstorm, thermic lance held at the ready like a lance, tip ready to turn metal to liquid, flesh to charcoal, and his pain into a tangible reality for all those that he could employ it upon. And spasming chest or no spasming chest, with or without a bum leg, the Mexican gunhand did what came naturally, and brought his gun to hand. Paciencia had fallen to the side, but any wastelander worth their salt had a backup. And a backup for their backup. Raul pulled his rightmost revolver and cocked back the hammer in one motion, blasting the charging Marked Man in the gut as quick as his beleaguered extremities would allow.
Centre mass, just as all gunhands do when the business has got to be done, and you don't have the time or the precision to be fancy about it. The Marked Man staggered as the .44 magnum hellcat ruptured his abdominals and blasted out the small of his back, taking what was left of his radiation ravaged kidney along with it. But he kept coming, as only the truly insane could when they'd just taken a .44 to the gut and were running on pure background radiation just to keep them running. The Marked Man's hand involuntarily depressed the switch on the thermic lance, and his weapon blazed into sudden iridescent light, turning sand that blew past it into instant glass that was carried away from the field of battle in a long stream of multicoloured light.
Raul put another round into the air that hit nothing but sand as it hummed through the storm and past the Marked Man's Veteran Legionary Helmet. The tip of the thermic lance, seemingly still streaming a trail of multi-coloured sparkles like something out of a child's comic, surrounded on all sides by radioactive wasteland and men fighting for their lives, closed in on the downed ghoul. Then Joshua hosed the Marked Man down with a withering stream of .45 shells spewed forth on full auto, driving it to the ground as if he were convinced he could wash away all that troubled the world, given enough bullets and a high enough rate-of-fire. Spent brass ejected out the Thompsons port and was carried away on the wind as the muzzle compensator turned the flash into a five-pronged star.
Another Marked Man was ripped from his feet and flung bodily against a demolished concrete wall, cracking the crumbling architecture in a series of bricklayers patterns as the concrete blocks broke loose of the aging mortar. A brick from the very summit fell and clonked off his head like something out of a cartoon, as Chalk and Lantaya covered Joshua as he dragged Raul to a better piece of cover, the old ghoul already fumbling in his pouches for a stimpack. He was taking shuddering breaths, his solar plexus recovered enough from the sudden impact to allow the muscles to once more contract fully, compressing and expanding his lungs properly enough to suck in oxygen in great, shuddering mouthfuls.
"Are you well?" Joshua yelled over the storm, replacing the drum magazine in his Storm Drum with the next of the four drums he had brought into this fragment of Lucifer's domain on earth. "Never been better," Raul snarked back in a gravelly voice, "Being shot is a hobby of mine."
He uncapped the stimpack and slammed the needle down through his pants-leg into the flesh underneath, gritting his teeth and smiling grimly as the stimpacks brief sting of needle penetrating flesh was barely felt over the pain of the gunshot. Only time you never minded injections or gave a good god damn about injections, was when you had bigger things to worry about. As the flesh began knitting itself back together he sighted over his shoulder and thumbed the hammer on his Super Blackhawk, blowing out the lefthand hardened Plexiglas lens of the approaching Marked Man's goggles with less than a second of aiming time. The target skidded to a halt in a spray of sand as its limbs got tangled up in the ground and with each other, the interpretive dance of the recently deceased.
Joshua Graham slung his Thompson and pulled the arm of the dead, red-skinned ghoul away to extract it's Marksman Carbine. He pulled back the charging handle far enough to check the chamber after engaging the safety, then ejected the magazine to feel the weight of the rounds yet to be fired in anger. There was a good amount of anger left in this magazine to be fired, that was certain. Raul shot another charging Marked Man in the face as Joshua unbuckled the Marked Man's ammo belt and strapped it around his own torso, an entire bandolier of magazines crammed to the seams with 5.56 standard green tip. All a man really needs to make a ham-fisted attempt at setting the world to rights. As the old-world saying went, if gunfire wasn't solving all your problems you needed a larger calibre or a higher rate-of-fire. "Lacking the blood of the lamb, any blood will do," he announced grimly as he proffered Raul a hand, "Let us go and do the Lord's work, my friend. Until the streets of this ruined city reek with the stench of blood."
"I'll find us some Abraxo for after," The witty old ghoul commented dryly as he took the offered hand and was hauled to his feet, "For all your cleaning needs."
Lantaya ducked as a tri-barrelled laser rifle blasted a chunk of concrete from the wall she and Chalk hunkered behind on the second floor, sheltering from the gunfire that the Marked Men had finally directed upon their position. They had displaced twice during the course of the ongoing firefight, to take advantage of exposed flanks that the red-skinned ghouls left open in their attempts to kill Joshua and Raul. The cyberdogs were remaining illusive, slithering into cracks and crevasses to appear at inconvenient times and with savage ferocity when one of the Marked Men became isolated enough to attain the status of a target. Those unfortunate individuals were dragged down in a sudden and overwhelming rush of fur and sharp canine-teeth, the only way that lightly armoured canines could fight against heavily armoured ghoul shock troopers with automatic weapons. Thankfully, the dogs were cunning predators, and knew how to avoid direct confrontation.
She and the tribal rolled away from the holes that were being blown in a searching pattern through the concrete, tri-barrelled lasers more than enough to penetrate twice as much layered construction material. They commando-crawled away from their position, going to ground once more to vanish into the storm, only to appear again, this time on the flank of the Marked Men who currently engaged their supposed position.
This eventuality never came to pass. The firing line of Marked Man suddenly began dropping, neat entry wounds blossoming like the exact antithesis of the seed of life. Plant a seed, watch new life emerge. Plant 5.56mm Match grade rounds, watch a life flow away to nothing.
Bodies slumped, one after the other, in rapid succession as the unseen shooter worked his way down the line as quickly and efficiently as a man tapping keys on a typewriter.
Double-tap to the head, cycle targets, double-tap to the head, cycle target, double-tap to the head, cycle target….
And on and on down the line it went, even targets that should have been concealed in the depths of the storm weren't safe. The bullets found them as if guided by the hands of a ghost, or one of the Courier's spirits. A heat haze passed unseen through the battlefield, travelling like at the speed of death, a grim-reapers sprint that seemed to get faster with every single dead body dropped to the ground to never move again. Marked Men began abandoning the fight, seeing their fellows cut as if by the wind itself, utterly unable to see or combat the sudden augury of silent killing that had laid itself upon the battlefield like a malaise.
A Marked Man sprayed down a long section of wall as he caught a brief glimpse of a passing wraith, emptying his shoulder-mounted machingun in a deluge of high-cycle death that carved the wall in twain in a long string of shredded concrete. There was a brief hiss through the sand and wind, the sound of cybernetic razor-claws parting the air, and the Marked Man felt his hands go numb on the trigger. He looked down to find his insides rapidly becoming outsides through the long surgical cut that opened his chest and digestive cavities up for the outside world to judge. Then the cybernetic fist pulped his skull like a trash compactor.
And the bodies continued to drop, one by one, unexplained except by the almost unnoticeable puff of blood quickly lost in the whirling sand all around them, almost as if a ghost was wafting through the battlefield, cutting the strings that anchored the Marked Men to life with nothing more than a slice of a knife. A cold and methodical slaughter as life after life was sucked away without a moment's hesitation.
The Lone Wanderer, for the Wanderer it was who sprinted through the battlefield under the combined cover of his activated stealth field and the howling storm that he had efficiently turned to his advantage. His cybernetic eyes clicked as they cycled from left to right, seeing the world in shades of thermal orange and red, outlined against the baseline blue. The radstorm was nothing to him. Rads gifted him an extra measure of strength, bolstered his reaction time and the speed of his regeneration. The sand that made it almost impossible for a human to see was nothing to his cybernetically enhanced eyes, that moved from target to target behind the Perforator's scope.
He killed with the efficiency of a mechanised assembly line, his processors calculating variables down to the second to ensure perfect kill-shots, each double-tap and the accompanying pieces of spinning, expended brass signalling the death of another victim. He was averaging a kill every second, something he couldn't do outside of just such a target-rich environment as this. Each time a new target entered his sightlines, they were added to the end of the queue. Just an automated process ticking off lives like checkboxes on a clipboard, the only variation occurring when a target was deemed to be more of a present danger to mission success than the others, jumping the queue by just enough to keep the cavalcade of death going.
The last bullet left the Perforator's expended magazine, just as his headlong rush got him within eyesight of a Marked Man holding a Plasma Caster at the ready. The Wanderer dropped the R91 Infiltrator variant, letting it hang from the sling as he pulled his ace-in-the-hole from his hip holster. The MPLX Prototype Novasurge glowed green as it emptied half a standard issue energy cell in one single, massive power draw. It was terribly optimised for sustained fighting, only supplying a meagre two shots before reloading was required. He fired. The Marked Man didn't even have time to traverse the heavy plasma weapon around as he realised far too late what the faint heat-haze he had been peering at through a mix of the radstorm and his own confusion, was. The green blast from the small prototype Plasma blaster entered the Caster at the nose, burned its way through the length of the weapon, and detonated it in a blinding flash of verdant light as the initial blast continued on its path through the torso.
The smoking stumps of the Marked Man's legs were all that remained once the sand rushed in once more to engulf the area that had been cleared by the explosive overpressure.
Omega returned the Novasurge to its holster, content to save its second shot for something that warranted the plasma handcannon's particular touch.
Joshua, Chalk, Raul and Lantaya advanced, snagging any weapons that happened to peak their fancy as they passed by. Joshua had his new Marksman Carbine, the .45 pistol rounds not having nearly enough penetration to deal with superabundance of armoured targets. Raul had abstained from obtaining a new weapon but nevertheless had rifled the ammo-pouches of some Marked Men for their trail carbine's spare .44 Magnum rounds. Not the .44 hellcats he preferred, but serviceable.
Lantaya had retrieved an entire belt of spare 5mm rifle rounds from a minigunner and had wrapped them around her torso like a gunslinger from an old-western, awaiting the moment when she would remove them from the belt and slot them into expended magazines. Follows-Chalk, comfortable with low-tech and practical designs, had obtained a Remington 870 pump-action, colloquially referred to as the Hunting Shotgun. With a 12-guage slug you could hunt some mighty ferocious wildlife, and the two Marked Men he'd looted seemed to agree. They'd possessed pouches of spare shells, a veritable smorgasbord of options. Buckshot, Dragon's Breath, 12-guage Shell, and even a handful of Legion Denarius Shells that he could tell apart from the others by the unique shape and weight of the gold projectiles contained within. Roxie and Rex on the other hand, had managed to obtained a severed arm from somewhere, and were playing an impromptu tug-of-war game as they bounded after the advancing humans.
The gunfire pursued them as they instigated the breakout, punching through the Marked Men that engaged them from all sides and up the slope towards the Temple entrance, bullets travelling through the air as if they were trying to blend in against the sand. Match each individual grain, shot for shot. Lantaya gasped as her mass effect barriers that she hastily erected to block the worst of the pursuing fire also had to deal with the overwhelming force of the storm in addition to the staccato impacts of high-velocity hate.
Follows-Chalk assisted her with a guiding arm, showing her the way as all good pathfinders do for those they mark the way for, pumping his 870 industriously to provide covering fire.
As they climbed higher, the cover became sparser. Rock outcroppings and junk submerged within the rivers of earth that had shifted like water on that day, many years ago, when the giants of the Divide had awoken from their slumber to briefly remind humanity of the fear they once provoked in the hearts of mere mortal men. Distance from cover to cover became longer, with predictable results.
Follows-Chalk took a shot to the shoulder that popped the bone from the joint and shattered the outside end of his clavicle, sending him to the ground as fragments of the 10mm Automatic round that the SMMG had spewed forth on full-automatic caused shocking devastation to his arm. He went down with a cry that was plucked away in the wind, the only indication of his absence from their scattered and advancing battleline being Lantaya's sudden realisation that his hand had not touched her back in almost twenty seconds. A far cry from the almost constant nudges he had been giving her during the ordered assault in order to guide her as she advanced backwards, providing cover fire.
She cast around for him, calling out for the others to halt their advance. They could not hear her through the radstorm's all-encompassing and long-drawn-out scream. Their figures were already becoming difficult to make out through the sand, as they inched away from the Marked Men who pursued them. Lantaya stared desperately back down their path, and finally made out a form struggling up the slope trailing a limp arm after him as the plucky tribal did his best to keep ahead of their pursuers. He paused every so often, firing his .45 auto pistol at the indistinct figures that slide through the sand towards him, the only weapon he had that he could effectively fire with only one hand.
Lantaya reached out with her powers, purple corona seeping into reality around Chalk in a sudden ground-rush of biotic power. Follows-Chalk's cry of pain as he was biotically pulled from his arduous crawl and up the slope with his injured arm flapping behind him like a side of brahmin on a meat-hook was inaudible to anyone save himself. Even then, the wind and the stabbing pain made it difficult for him to tell his own scream apart from the sounds of battle, or the Divide's cries. As Lantaya pulled him away by the collar of his duster, the tribal holstered his pistol and extracted a strange bottle from the depths of his duster, yelling past the sound of the chaos that surrounded them for Lantaya to stop moving and find a spot for them to hunker down for a moment or two. She couldn't hear his cries, and so continued on dragging him by the collar, digging her feet into the sandy ground as she emptied bursts of 5mm rifle rounds down the slope one-handed. A visible biotic glow surrounded her, making it clear that she was supplementing her natural physical abilities with her biotics to maintain the absurd level of activity she subjected her small frame to.
He slammed his arm into her leg to gain her attention, motioning that they should go to ground. She obeyed his direction, changing direction to get behind a jagged outcropping of rock as he uncorked the bottle. He lifted up his respirator mask to exposed his mouth, the skin stinging cruelly as sand carried at wholly unnatural speeds by the Divide winds, began stripping the skin from his smooth face like he was being hit by a sandblaster. He jammed the bottle into his mouth, chugging it as quickly as he could, not just because of the sand that tore at his skin, but also because of the truly foul taste and smell of the contents.
Hydra, one of the only remarkable innovations to come from Legion cooking pots, the "drug" was a mix of herbal ingredients that grew in heavy irradiated areas underground and tribal knowhow. He felt the drug working immediately, like the marching of a thousand ants underneath his skin as tendons, bone and muscle tissue slowly began knitting itself back together. He grunted, forcing his white-knuckled fist to relax its grip on the now emptied container so it would slide out of his grasp to be whisked away into the wind on a journey to god-only-knew where. A brief shower of hot brass tumbled past his duster sleeve as Lani burst-fired the carbine down the slope, the needle-like 5mm rifle rounds, though being small in calibre, had such blistering muzzle velocities that they penetrated through the heaviest armour with ease. But the Marked Men ignored these rounds, hunkering down to let the spiking radiation of the storm heal them by degrees, just as Chalk was now being healed by the Hydra that circulated through his system.
Her last burst, fired at centre-mass on the body of a Marked Man holding a Riot Shotgun, clicked to an abrupt halt. She pulled the trigger a few more times, not noticing at first that it no longer fired past the howling wind. The lack of muzzle flash or recoil made her realise, as the Marked Man rose up menacingly from the knee it had dropped to as the rounds carried through-and-through its torso, that she was out. That had been her last pre-loaded magazine. Clenching her fist in response to the Marked Man's lifting of his shotgun muzzle to give her a good look down its blackened barrel, she prepared to block the shot with her biotics and blow him ass-over-end back down the slope. Then her opponent seemed to see something over her shoulder that gave him pause, body language shifting to adject panic. A strange emotion to read in the body of such a creature, whose very existence seemed to scream evil intent.
It took a single step backwards. That was all it had time for, before the whirlwind of violence passed her by, a flash of movement in her peripherals that barrelled down the slope with reckless abandon. It moved so quickly she almost didn't catch what it was, but the maniacal chackling and the Marked Man's sudden lack of a head gracing its shoulders gave her a good indication of who had just finished clearing the upper slope of any blocking forces. The Riot Gun dropped blackened muzzle first into the sand as the Courier charged down the slope at the advancing denizens of the Divide like a berserker, his rifles slung on his back and his machete gladius and tribal warclub held in each clenched fist. His blood sang with the flesh he had consumed, bullets bounced from his unnaturally thick skin or ricocheted from his armour, wounds knitting together as his implants, mutations, and the spirits of those he had spent the last hour consuming one after another in the ruins, lent him strength.
He cackled and howled at odd intervals, turning the Marked Men's own trick against them as the wind carried the manic hoots of delight at the sheer joy of the slaughter and Old Gaelic war cries in from odd angles, making Marked Men cast wildly around them for enemies that were not there, as his monstrous form emerged at full sprint from the opposite direction, removing limbs and crushing skulls with massive blows. He faded in and out of the sand, a wild animal striking with predatory swiftness. A well-aimed .50 calibre bullet penetrated his helmet and clanged off his skull and glanced off in a spray of blood and lacerated scalp, deflected by the cybernetics left behind from his escapades in the Big Empty. His entire skull was lined with titanium plating from where it had been obliged to be reinforced to regain structural integrity after the removal of his brain. Brand new, it had even fixed the weak spot in his skull from when Benny had forced him to take a dirt-nap in Goodsprings. Better than new in fact, for if Benny had attempted to blow his skull away today, the 9x19mm bullets would only have succeeded in annoying him.
Lantaya stared at the display, the flashes of gunfire downslope as the Courier delivered his message of hate and ill-will to all those that challenged him, before shaking herself from her violence-induced stupor and offering Chalk a well-needed shoulder to lean upon as he dragged himself up. He was flexing his fingers now, a very promising sign for that arms continued use. Then, abruptly, Craig Boone emerged from the radstorms embrace like a phantom, a bobbing red beret his first visible sign. He and ED-E had clearly charged directly through the Marked Men's lines at top speed, headless of the targets they passed, relying on the Courier's distraction and the cover of the storm to allow them passage.
The gambit, as evidence by their sudden presence, had clearly worked as intended. Boone took charge of the situation without a word, his consummate professionalism requiring no words spoken to take command in a crisis. Which was very well for those present, as the storm was now so loud that no voice except the Courier's could be heard over the sound of the Divide. The former-NCR sniper knife-handed his intentions towards Lani, as straightforward and as deliberate as a heart-attack. It said, "Upslope, on the double!"
Gathering up Follows-Chalk, who was no light burden, like he was nothing more than a child, Boone slung him over his shoulders in a fireman's carry, hooking Chalk's leg and arm with one massive arm to leave his gunhand free. Boone pulled his sidearm and carried on up the slope like an unstoppable force driven by some internal fire that blazed like a steam engine. Lantaya and ED-E followed on behind him, laying down a storm of covering fire downslope.
The Courier, meanwhile, remained at the bottom of the slope, within the midst of his enemies. Dancing upon the razors edge of danger as he used the storm and the lack of visibility to ambush the Marked Men who know full-well that he was among them with flashing blade and blood and sand encrusted warclub but couldn't pick him out amidst the boundless anarchy that surrounded them. Bodies dropped like cut ears of wheat, heads rolled the short distance to the base of the slope like discarded soccer balls to tangle the feet of the occasional Marked Man as he backed away from cackled warcries that emerged from the radstorm like the calls of ghosts.
Bullets flew in all directions, hitting everything in their path as trigger discipline and target identification, concepts already tenuously clung to by these pain-maddened minds, shook their heads sadly and left the situation to sort itself out. The dropping bodies, unseen within the sand, now did so as a consequence of friendly fire more often than the Courier's direct action. He slammed the warclubs head into a red-skinned victim's side, tenderising the liver like a butcher tenderising a cut of meat, then severed the leg just below the knee to add a few more screams to the sounds that echoed on the winds. A 5.56mm round penetrated his chestplate and Kevlar underlayer, burying itself half-an-inch deep into his thick skin and muscle. True armour piercing, he concluded. Black-tip AP ammunition from the military facilities that dotted the Divide. He shrugged the impact off as his skin and muscle started knitting itself together, forcing the invasive round out from his flesh like an irritating splinter.
His inbuilt stealth suit OS moaned in his ear, sensual-like, erotic. "Mmmm, that one hurt so good. Vitals still stable. Go get them, killer. I love to watch you work."
The Courier obliged. After all, the spirits pleasure at watching him work was nothing compared to his own deeply-ingrained hunger for war and death. His veins thrummed with drugs, with power, with the blood of others that he had made his own by force. The hate flowed through him, his limbs controlled at least in part by the spirit of rage that he'd allowed entry to his mind in a haze of adrenaline and the sacred datura. His heart was pulsating with manic energy, sweat dribbling down his face within the confines of his helmet to mix with the spittle that forced its way from the corners of his mouth, uncontrollably salivating in a Pavlovian response to the recent gluttony he'd indulged in. The aftertaste of the Marked Men thick in the back of his throat as he hacked another ghoul apart in a spray of arterial blood that splattered his duster like a poor attempt at interpretive art.
Privately, he wished that the entire world could be like this, this one moment as blood flowed within and without, the wind howled with the cataclysmic fury of spirits that sought nothing but destruction, and he at the centre of it all. Picked out. Singular in his might. The Warrior among Warriors, proving for all the Spirits that dwelt in this cursed place that he was subject to nothing, to no-one. No Gods, No Masters!
But as his latest victim slid off his blade, propelled by the warclubs head, letting the blood mix freely with the sand, with the air, with the dust of a dead world, he extracted the lower half of his mind from the Nightmare. The part of the Dream where the darkest spirits made their home and wrestled back control of his emotions. The Spirits allowed the reclamation, confident that his Road would supply many more opportunities to slake their thirsts and appetites. They remained near the bubbling surface of his psyche, ready and willing to emerge once more. More than willing. Champing at the bit to wreak havoc on anything that might provoke them. Provoke him.
"You're not stopping already, are you?" The mechanical voice whispered in his ear.
He dropped to his haunches and slipping into the radstorm as the Marked Men continued firing at phantoms of their own imaginings, their cries of pain and alarm now indistinguishable in their maddened brains from his own cackles and war-chants. Self-sustaining carnage.
Rushing up the slope, he extracted a detonator from his pocket and flipped the safety cover off. No battle was complete, as far as his refined and matured tastes were concerned, without a dash of fire. "Ohh, are we going to see fireworks?" The Mark 2 OS giggled delightedly, "Turn around. Let me see!"
The Courier did so, holding the detonator at hip height as his duster flapped wildly around his long legs. Then he depressed the detonator.
Within the frantic gunfight downslope, a gut shot Marked Man crawled unsteadily away from the gunfire in an attempt to gain enough space to regenerate, survival instincts honed from years in the harsh environment of the Divide giving his actions a simple cunning that his mind could no longer support by itself. His hand met the surface of a large, paving slab shaped object buried in the ever-shifting sand. He had the briefest impression of wires, electronics, and duct tape, before the receiver for the detonator signal beeped happily in the screaming wind. And suddenly, the Divide's voice was silent in the presence of an even greater fury.
The slab of high-ex and duct-taped frag filling detonated in a sudden rush of overpressure and expanding shockwave, shunting aside the sand and wind, and kicking up a miniaturised storm within a storm, a circle of dust and fragmented rock, concrete and Marked Men shredded far past the point where even the radiation could heal them. Courier Six's gaze lovingly caressed the devastation as the dust cloud settled or was carried away by the storm, doing him the kindness of dispensing with suspense. Among the mutilated bodies that now lay scattered throughout the battlefield, he made out only one that still moved. A former Legionary if the makeup of his gear was an indication, missing a foot and a sizable chunk of flesh from its right side. It's hand grasped the splintered remains of a Brush Gun, the barrel bent and deformed by the blast, the stock cracked and missing large sections of wood.
The last remaining Marked Man from the attacking force saw the figure further up the slope and regarded the Courier with what seemed a surprising calmness, considering the state of it. Perhaps the pain of its injuries had eclipsed the madness within, given it a fleeting moment of lucidity on the very cusp of death. It nodded to the Courier, it's expression inscrutable behind the mangled football mask. The nod was returned. No hard feelings. This was just what men like them did, after all. An echoing and ominous crack found its way to the Courier's ears, and he swung around and ducked just at the right moment to avoid a long length of metal that had separated from the summit of the slope far above. A metal flagstaff that had stood for centuries since the great war, finally ripped from its stand, either by shrapnel, the strength of the storm, or the shockwave of the explosion. Or perhaps a mixture of all three, providing the perfect circumstances to dislodge what had remained proud and upright for almost two-hundred years. It passed his ducking head like a javelin, impaling the Marked Man he had shared a silent moment with through the torso, nailing his form to the ground. What was left of his extremities twitched at the sudden, fatal blow, and lay still. A faded symbol of the Legion Bull on his chest-rig rapidly covered by sand as the wind whistled around the flagpole.
His eyes were draw to it, almost against their own will, to the flagpole that bore its fabric at its bottom rather than at its summit. Standing proudly in the midst of the bloodshed he had wrought. Then he was knocked flat once more as one of the many spare miniaturised warheads that dotted the Divide, buried under the dirt long ago by the detonation of its larger brethren, blew up in a wave of gleaming flame. His eyes never shirked their observances however, and he watched as if in slow motion, as the earth cracked and moved, spewing a nuclear inferno like lava from the depths of a volcano. It consumed the proud flagstaff, and the body within which it was anchored. Shards of rock and clods of dirt rained all around him, one massive thump not a metre away from his head signalling the return to earth of one particularly large chunk that might have crushed his torso if it had landed upon him.
The Courier pulled himself to his feet, staring at the new fissure in the Divide's landscape. The storm closed in around him. Below, from deep within the chasm, the Tunnellers shrank away from the sudden surface light, hissing at the intrusion. The Courier heard the hiss. Even against the howling of the wind that overpowered anything save the devastating blast of high ex. Thousands of Tunnellers, all hissing at once, echoed and amplified by the cavern walls like a voice issuing from a megaphone. Their hiss of mild irritation, the footfalls of an army that had yet to march upon the outside world. But they would. Ohh, they would.
He grinned beneath his bullet-pocked Riot Helmet and turned away from the spectacle.
A true shaman he might not be. But even he could read an Omen as ostentatious as that had been. He vanished into the sand, to re-join his fellows.