It is mid-day when Willow and MacCready finally reach MedTek, and the dark grey, decrepit building looms over the two of them forebodingly. Willow grunts as she drops a ghoul that had tried to charge her, then steps over its' body with a look of disgust before stopping and looking up at the facility.
"This place?" she asks as MacCready settles beside her – though instead of looking up at the building, he is acutely tuned in to the sound of many, many ghouls milling about behind the fence surrounding the property. He swallows and his hands tighten around his gun. Ghouls make him nervous. Though they are typically weak on their own, in large numbers they can quickly become overwhelming.
As he stares into the direction of the noise, the image of Willow's corpse from his dream flashes in his mind and his heart skips a beat. He almost jumps out of his skin when she nudges him lightly, and as he turns, Willow notes he appears to be a bit pale. It doesn't take her long to connect the dots and recall what he had told her the night before about his wife, so she offers him a sympathetic smile. Her eyes are still tired and heavy from having had cried only hours before, and her face still blotchy, but the expression brings MacCready a bit of comfort nonetheless.
"Hey," she says soothingly, "We're gonna kick this place's ass. For Duncan."
MacCready manages a smirk and a determined nod. "You're damn right we are." He turns and finally looks up at the building. He almost expects there to be dark clouds and lightning and crows circling it, but there isn't. It's drab and seemingly innocuous though MacCready knows firsthand what awaits them inside. He takes a deep breath and steps forward. "Let's just hope Sinclair's information is worth something."
Willow hangs back as she digs into her pockets and quickly retrieves a hair elastic. Ghouls are grabby – and she is not getting scalped today. She walks slowly but very easily falls behind as she pulls her hair into a bun, and then jogs to catch up to MacCready who has by then crept onto the property.
The two duck down and use an old car to their advantage as they assess their surroundings. There are at least ten ghouls milling about outside alone, and they groan and snarl as they shuffle their feet and wander aimlessly, waiting for prey to fall into their grasp.
Willow wonders how much of their minds have gone. After all, feral ghouls were humans once. Was it like an elderly person getting dementia? Are there pockets of time where they become completely sentient and aware of what they have become? She shudders at the thought – putting them down, in that case, would be an act of mercy. "We should probably get these ones now so we don't have to deal with them later." she whispers, and MacCready nods once then positions his rifle carefully across the hood of the car. Willow checks to make sure her own gun is loaded and then holds her breath as she waits for MacCready to take his shot.
As soon as he does and the first ghoul falls, the rest all turn, almost in unison, toward the source of the sound. Quickly, MacCready locates his next victim who is rapidly approaching, and Willow leaps to her feet and begins blasting at the wall of ferals heading straight for them.
Though the onslaught had seemed so vast and endless at first, their teamwork saw the ghouls barely even coming close to reaching them. With the coast clear, MacCready stands and Willow laughs softly. "Stupid things." she murmurs, then follows along after MacCready as he climbs the concrete steps to the door. "Do all ghouls become feral eventually, do you think?"
MacCready shrugs. "Beats me." he says. "I mean, I don't think so. Some of 'em have been alive for hundreds of years and they're fine. Like Daisy in Goodneighbour."
"Oh, is she pre-war?" Willow asks. "I didn't know that. Never asked her."
"You couldn't tell?" MacCready scoffs, but both quiet as he pushes the door open and steps into the lobby.
It is eerily quiet inside and misleadingly empty, though there are a few rotting fallen ghouls scattered about from when MacCready had last tried to come through here. "Alright," he says, and though he isn't speaking loudly his voice almost seems to fill the room, "According to Sinclair, we're looking for an Executive Terminal. Apparently it's the only way to override the facility's lockdown."
"And you got the codes?" Willow asks as she wanders into the room, and MacCready nods.
"I hope so."
Willow spots a terminal sitting atop the reception desk, and she hurries over to it and presses a button on the keyboard to wake it up. MacCready watches her for a moment, then moves to stand on the other side of the desk.
When Willow looks up from the black and green computer screen, MacCready has an eyebrow quirked and is fighting back a grin. "You think they'd put the important security terminal right in the front lobby?" he asks smugly. Willow frowns performatively and tosses a pen at him.
"Don't be annoying or I'm waiting outside." she warns playfully, and MacCready laughs.
"My odds would probably be better if you did." he teases her, and Willow almost lunges at him across the desk but she doesn't – she can't do that to herself. A few more hours and he would be gone. Detach. Detach.
"Or destroy the cure." Maggie sings into her ear, and Willow turns sharply and frowns at her.
MacCready's eyes flick to the spot where Willow is looking and narrows his eyes – Willow is so strange. So endearingly strange. He shrugs it off and presses onward, and Maggie manages to give Willow a sly smile before she turns away and follows after him.
"Alright, genius." she quips when she reaches his side and steps over another dead ghoul. "You happen to know where this super-duper important secret security terminal is, then?"
"No," MacCready replies with a smirk, "But I know it's not at the front desk."
He glances to her from the side of his eyes and tilts his head with an unmatched arrogance, and before it used to annoy Willow but now she can't help but to laugh at him and at herself.
"I hate you a lot." she jokes. "I'm going to feed you to—"
A ghoul screeches and slams into Willow then, and the irony is not lost on her at all though she hasn't any time to lament. She is caught by surprise and as a result, she falls to the ground with a short scream. "I've got you!" MacCready says as he steps back and then promptly shoots the ghoul once, twice, three times before it falls sideways off of the woman.
The noise has alerted a horde of other ferals, and Willow scampers to her feet, breathing heavily as her eyes dart around wildly. They are surrounded by doors and hallways, and she cannot pinpoint exactly where the sounds are coming from. All she knows is that they are rapidly growing louder, and so she lifts her gun and plants her feet firmly on the ground.
She spots one: a ghoul, flailing its' limbs about as it barrels through a doorway and sprints towards her. It makes it two steps into the room, and then it falls with a wet thud as Willow fills it full of steaming holes. Another one runs out after it and trips over its' fallen comrade, and Willow uses the opportunity to kill it easily, too.
Behind her, MacCready is picking ghouls off as they charge in from a hallway. Bullet casings hit the ground by his feet but none are wasted as he hits every mark. Unfortunately, though, for every ghoul they kill, it feels like two more crop up, and Willow can see now why MacCready struggled in here alone. She steps back to put distance between herself and the ghouls which seem to be closing in on them, and MacCready does the same until eventually they are back to back and the ghouls are falling mere meters before them.
"Holy shit!" Willow says through gritted teeth and picks off a few ghouls descending the collapsed floor which leads upstairs, "There's a lot of these stupid things!"
"I told you!" MacCready takes out a ghoul which attempts to climb over the balcony and drop down to the floor below, "This place is crawling with 'em."
Willow frowns as she feels her hand start to burn where she holds the barrel of her rifle. "Guns getting hot, Mac." she alerts him. She doesn't want it to overheat and explode in her hand. Not again. Thankfully for her, the coast seems clear on MacCready's side so he swiftly spins and guns down the last few ghouls that stagger in through the door.
Though it is now quiet once more, neither lower their guns for a long moment: just in case. But eventually they do, Willow first, and she cracks her neck and grins triumphantly as she silently counts the dead ghouls on her side of the room.
"Sixteen." she says finally, and MacCready's face scrunches in confusion.
"Sixteen what?"
"I killed sixteen ghouls. How many did you kill?" she boasts and puts a hand on her hip.
MacCready chuckles and shakes his head, but turns back to his side of the room and takes a moment to count. His smile fades, though, as he finishes counting. Willow watches his expression change, and her winsome smile broadens. It grows especially wide when MacCready shakes his head and whips back around, then points to her corpse pile.
"Three of those are mine." he states, and Willow blows a raspberry and waves her hand.
"Like hell!" she exclaims. MacCready points to the two ghouls which he'd shot from the balcony, too, and then holds up his index and middle finger to count two more whilst making hard eye-contact with Willow to make sure she has seen him.
"So, really, you're at thirteen and I'm at seventeen." he claims.
"You're full of it!" she cackles.
"I'm not!" MacCready laughs, "You were whining about your gun being hot. So I handled the situation."
Willow knows he is right, and she has lost, so she responds by shoving him back childishly. But the simple feeling of her hand on his chest is so intoxicatingly electrifying that she regrets it instantly. Detach.
"You don't have to." Maggie whispers but this time, Willow ignores her and tries to keep her smug smile rooted on her face. Thankfully, MacCready doesn't seem to notice when her expression slips from genuine mischief to forced amusement, and he laughs, then bumps her shoulder as he walks by her to keep exploring the hospital.
"Sixteen." he mutters to himself and shakes his head. "Nice try!"
Willow swallows thickly, then forces a laugh and strolls casually behind him. "Whatever." she scoffs, her tone lighthearted.
They make their way upstairs, where they pick off a few more ghouls then finally find another terminal. Willow leans down in front of it and notices immediately that it is unhackable and password protected, so she stands and taps her fingernail on the rounded glass screen excitedly. "Mac, it's gotta be this one." she says, and MacCready rushes to her side and digs into his pocket for the password from Sinclair.
He hands it to her. "Sinclair's password better work." he says and leans into his hand which he's rested on the desk, "Or we're screwed."
"It's gonna work." Willow whispers as if willing it into being. Maggie appears beside her then, sitting on the desk and kicking her feet as she watches her hunch over the terminal and clumsily punch the code in. She isn't used to the layout of a keyboard – and why, god damn it, are the letters not in alphabetical order?!
Maggie glances to MacCready and purses her lips as she then regards Willow. "If you type it in wrong enough times, you could lock the terminal." she suggests. Willow's brow furrows and she tries to focus on the task at hand and not let Maggie's words get to her. Because honestly, keeping MacCready here with her in the Commonwealth is too tempting an idea. And the closer they come to their goal here, the more she can feel him slipping through her fingers; and the more she wants to hold tightly and never let him go.
But she doesn't listen to Maggie. She punches the code in correctly and the terminal unlocks, and MacCready releases the breath he'd been holding. Willow makes eye contact with him and they share a unifying grin, before Willow turns back to the computer screen and overrides the containment lockdown. She clicks around a bit more but finds nothing else of use to either of them so she straightens once more.
"Well?" MacCready asks in anticipation, and Willow winks at him.
"Let's get that cure." she says, and the relieved smile she receives in response is far preferable to the look of reproach she can feel Maggie drilling into the back of her head.