12: Concussion

The pain in the back of Danse's skull was immense. In his armor he loomed several feet above most men, yet still, the bushwacker behind him had managed to clip the back of his exposed head with something blunt. Much to Swanson's shock and surprise, Danse's immediate reaction was to tumble forward- into and through the strange man. Swanson had screamed when Danse crushed through his desk and stomped on Swanson's leg, flattening it. It hadn't even been an intentional attack, merely the motion Danse's body had gone through as Danse himself fiercely attempted to stave off the star-stunning blow he'd taken.

Swanson's guttural cry of pain underneath the power armor's boot brought Danse back to reality. He let go of his helmet and threw his free hand to the barrel of his laser rifle, wheeling around on the foot planted on Swanson. The clipboard bearing questioner's flattened leg twisted, squished, and smeared from Danse's pivot. All that Swanson could manage was a high-pitched whine. The bushwacker- which turned out to be one man of three- looked up at Danse in object horror. He was armed only with a baseball bat. The two men behind him held crude guns made of pipes and wood.

The men didn't react when Danse swung his rifle up. It was only when he'd sent a red beam through the chest of the man with the bat that the other two panicked and began to open fire. Danse trained his rifle on the left most man, who was making a run for the lake. Danse's vision swam, the man barely in focus. Danse had lain on the trigger but failed to land a single shot before his attention was diverted.

The rumbling from the turrets on the walls became a roar as three began to pour lead down on Danse. It was by luck alone that none of them targeted his unprotected head. Rounds pinged and bounced off his pauldron and chestplate, giving Danse enough time to turn his back and protect the only part of him not covered in bulletproof steel. Swanson turned to his belly, trying to crawl into the corner of the shack for protection. Danse had half a mind- out of malice alone- to take a single step forward and crush him.

He'll know why this happened. Traumatic blow to the brain or not, Danse's military objectivity did not fail him. He ignored Swanson for the time being and went prone, crawling backwards until he felt his helmet. All the while, he felt the pitter-patter of metal rain from his feet up to the top of his back. Danse scrambled for the helmet, shoving it back into place. When it finally clicked on, his heads-up display flickering to life, Danse knew he would survive.

Danse rose, turned to face the turrets, and took his time shredding them with his rifle. He had to aim slowly, aim surely. He was starting to see double and could feel darkness creeping into the corners of his vision; he wasn't sure how much time he had left before a concussion overtook him. An internal monitor in the suit caught this drop in vitals. Danse could feel a small prick in his leg, followed by a euphoric sense of normality briefly overtaking the head wound. His vision cleared, the darkness in his eyes was banished; his stimpack had been administered.

When the three turrets had been rendered into sparking metal flowers, Danse moved his attention back to his ambushers. He hovered briefly over the one who'd hit him with a bat. His eyes were still open, though his body was lifeless. He didn't look like a raider, though; he was clean, as Swanson was. Manicured nails, even. None of this felt right.

Danse turned his eyes to the steel doors that led into Covenant just in time to see the door opening slightly, a squirrely looking man with short black hair staring back at him. His eyes went wide when he saw that those stationed outside of Covenent's walls had thoroughly failed to bring Danse down. He shut the door and was still fumbling for its lock when Danse came barreling through. A small towns worth of faces stared back at Danse, along with a small towns worth of guns.

By the time the killing was done, Danse felt more machine than man. He had held his fire for far longer than any Elder would approve when the townsfolk started assailing him. They looked too… Normal to Danse, too civilian. He would never word it this way in an official report, but they did not feel like a threat to him, even as they were putting all they had his way. When Danse did finally fire back, he'd started by killing a woman named Penny. He had only known her name because a heavy set man in a patchwork suit had screamed her name in anguish when she'd fallen from a single of Danse's shots.

The rest was a blur. Only the patchy robot that had come blasting him with a flamethrower had stuck out in Danse's mind- which was currently a soup of adrenaline, painkillers, and stimulants. Though it was technically quiet enough to hear a casing fall, the blood rushing in Danse's ears was deafening. Even Swanson had stopped screaming outside of the walls. Danse stood still for almost five minutes, simply scanning the buildings with his rifle, waiting for another body to pop up, waiting for another ambush.

As his adrenaline had begun to subside, his body now growing heavier by the second, a head popped up from behind some brick walls. "Wait-"

Danse fired a beam into the bricks, sending the man behind them back into his cover. "Surrender!" Danse ordered.

"Wait- God damn it, I said wait! I ain't with them!"

"Who the hell even was 'them'!? Who are you? Explain yourself!"

"Alright!" The man said. "I will, I just- Shit, are you a raider or somethin'!? What the hell happened!?"
"I think you're forgetting that I'm the one with the gun here; I'm asking the questions. Talk."

"Shit- Fair enough! My name's Honest Dan! What's yours?"

Honest Dan. If Danse wasn't experiencing the mother of all headaches, he might laugh at the irony of such a name in such a place. "The one with the gun asks the questions, Dan. Forget already?"

"No! No, I ain't forget, heads just a bit damn buzzin' after all this killin'. Shit- Alright, let me just… Catch my breath. Just- You ain't a raider?"

"Dan-"

"I know, I know, no questions, but for shit sake at least answer me that. Did you come here plannin' on killin' all these fuckin' kidnappers?"

"Kidnappers?" Perhaps it was the concussion, but it took Danse a moment to realize that the blow to the head was likely an attempt at taking him alive. "No. I'd come for-" He doesn't need to know. You have the gun, Danse. "Other reasons. Are you with them, with Covenant?"

"No- Fuck no, if I may be so bold. May I stand? Will you shoot me if I stand?"

"Do you have a gun?"
"Of course I have a gun!"

"You can stand."

Honest Dan did as he was told, slowly rising from behind the rock wall he'd been taking cover behind. He was a greasy man; that was Danse's first impression. Bounty hunter was the title that came to mind. Dan would quickly confirm that Danse's instincts served him well, even after a traumatic brain injury. Dan held a laser pistol in his free hand, though he made absolutely no move to even point it vaguely in Danse's directions. "They got your armor pretty good."

"Nothing some polish won't fix." Danse affirmed, moving the barrel of the rifle to train on Dan's chest.

Dan threw a hand up. "Whoah- Hang on, I thought we were past that, we're being cordial now aren't we?"

"As far as I'm concerned, this is me at my most respectful for folk who've taken shots at me."

"I didn't shoot at you, hoss." Dan kept his free hand up- another gesture that he's wasn't a threat. "I half debated shooting some of these folk in the back, actually, when I started to realize they weren't gonna win this fight. Figured I might earn some good favor with you."

"So you're a coward?"

Dan, to his credit, rose a stiff upper lip. "I'd threaten you for words like that, if you weren't hidin' behind a foot of steel. No, jackass, I ain't no coward. But I ain't with them, neither. I was lookin' for a missin' girl, pokin' my nose where it didn't belong. Had half a mind they were gonna whack me like they were gonna whack you, in fact. Bit fuckin' shocked they tried to do it to you so fast… Especially seeing as how you're built like a tank." Honest Dan shook his head. "I… Didn't take these folk for idiots. I must be losing my insightful touch- or perhaps I have taken the word 'common' in 'common sense' for granted."

"You'll understand, 'Honest' Dan, that I don't particularly care why you were here. If you didn't shoot at me, then fine; leave." Danse debated lowering the rifle, but a faint, resurging pain from where he'd been struck in the back of his head reminded him that caution might be better. He adjusted his grip on the rifle instead.

Honest Dan inhaled slowly, nodding even slower. "Probably would be wise of me, but I still need to find that girl. Just got a gut feeling that if they're kidnapping folk, then all of a sudden some mean bastard in power armor comes in and kills 'em all, that there might just be some kinda connection there."

Danse sighed. "I don't see your point."

"My point is…" Honest Dan went to holster his pistol, though a shift in Danse's body language encouraged him to keep his shooting arm rigid instead. "... My point is, I think we can help one another. I think maybe we're here for the same reason. I'm here to rescue Amelia Stockton from Bunker Hill. And you, you're here because…?"

"That's classified."

"Classified?" Honest Dan seemed almost amused at the word. "... You a military man? You with the Gunner's or something? No- Y'know what? I don't care. Look, just- We can't exactly ask anyone any questions now, but there's terminals, journals, and safe's left unguarded. I say we poke around a bit. We ain't enemies I don't think, so why don't we at least avoid gettin' in each other's ways if you're so adverse to us bein' friends?"

Danse wanted to believe he was sure he didn't need help from some bounty chasing wastelander but, frankly, he wasn't really sure why he was here. A name mentioned in Haylens' notes with only vague rumors that it might have a lead regarding synthetic beings in the Commonwealth wasn't much to go on. Maybe this "Honest" Dan might be of some help… At least point me in the right direction, Danse considered. Not getting brained again though, that's for sure.

"... Ok."

Honest Dan smiled. "Alright?"

"But toss me your gun."

Honest Dan frowned. "What!? Why!? What if-"

Danse took one hand off his rifle to give an open-palmed gesture. Honest Dan stopped talking. "My head's still ringing from the last time I tried to give polite trust, so, we're going to do this my way. I'm the one in eight feet of armor with a gun on your chest; that's not a threat, civilian, that's just an object fact."

"Civilian…?"

"If anything comes through the front gate, it'll have to go through me to get to you. If it gets through me, you didn't stand a chance anyway. You want a little bit of trust? You wanna put 'Honest' before your name? Fine. Earn it."

Honest Dan chewed that over for a moment before giving a quiet, beaten whisper of a laugh. "Shit… Alright, I guess that's fair. I'm gonna toss the gun over now, ok?"

"Go ahead. And if you have any hold outs-"

"I gotta knife, but I'm pretty sure it ain't gonna do shit against what you're packin'."

"A correct assumption. The gun, please."

Honest Dan nodded and swung his arm forward, tossing the laser pistol to Danse's feet. Danse knelt, his armor giving a deep steel moan as he did so. One hand kept his laser rifle propped, the barrel barely wavering, while his free hand took Honest Dan's pistol. Danse glanced down at it, the disgust at its poor condition hidden by Danse's helmet. "Good. Now, you mentioned something about terminals?"

To his credit, Honest Dan had worked fast. Danse had agreed to simply patrol the exterior of the compound, keeping an eye out to see if the one man that had escaped him at the front gate might be coming back with company; he didn't. No one did. It would be fair to assume that he had simply ran off into the wastes, a chapter of his miserable life having come to a close with that ever common violent signature this world was so fond of. For some reason, Danse felt this wasn't the case. Danse's stomach felt uneasy, and he didn't think it was the concussion's doing.

As he was passing back inside, having to duck his head to enter through the metal front doors, Danse saw a rather pleased looking Honest Dan exiting from the house farthest from the front gate. Honest Dan smiled. "Think I've got it!" He called out.

The two met in the center of the battlefield that had once been the small town of Covenant. Neither one had bothered to move any of the bodies from where they'd fallen. Danse imagined neither one would before they left. The mutants have to eat, I suppose, Danse mused. "What did you find?"

"Something about 'the Compound'. Some kind of external facility not far from here- not far at all, in fact. Just across that lake."

Danse gave a glance back the way he'd come, staring through the gate at the lake in front of Covenant. The man that had gotten away had run toward it, Danse having lost him somewhere in the brush. Danse's stomach knotted tighter. "A Compound? What's its purpose? Did they say how many might be stationed there?"

Honest Dan gave an honest shrug. "Not entirely sure. Something about synths, I've gathered that much at least. Something about refining this SAFE test of theirs. Don't know anything about that- don't really give a shit either, if I may be frank."

"The Stockton girl?"

"In said 'Compound' I'd imagine."

Danse figured as much. He turned to his left, preparing to give an order to Haylen to go and poke through the terminal to see what she could find. There was nothing- no one- to speak order died in his throat. He tried his best to ignore the sickening pang in his chest. Danse drew Honest Dan's pistol and offered it back to him. "One of the men who attacked me at the gate got away. I presume he probably fled to said Compound. No doubt they'll be waiting for us. You don't have to come with me."

Honest Dan looked around to the carnage strewn about Covenant. He took a step away from the bloodied remains of a woman in a green dress. "If it's all the same to you, I'd like to see this through. But… Might let you take point, if you're not opposed to that."

Danse nodded; he had no interest in watching this unarmed bounty hunter die in whatever ambush was surely awaiting them inside this so-called 'compound'. "You can watch my back, then. How's your munitions?"

"My what?"

Danse sighed. "How much ammo do you have?"

"Oh-" Honest Dan curled his nose, feeling a little foolish and scorned. "Plenty; enough for a hundred shots or so. Worst case, I'm sure there'll be some folk no longer in need of their bullets by the time I run out of mine."

Danse nodded, satisfied, then gestured to the gate. "Lead the way."