Chapter 149: Quests and Quarry

Chapter 149: Quests and Quarry

HELLOOOOOOOOOO, CHILDREN! It's me, Three Dog! BOW-WOW! Bringin' you all the music and news your little hearts can handle! Today's weather: excessively violent, with a chance of dismemberment! Tune in later for our five-day forecast! And now: some music I have lined up for you. It's Dion, singin' all about "The Wanderer." And I think we all know who this is for.

Crunch.

Dead cazadores littered the ground in almost every direction. It was impossible to walk more than two steps without stepping on one, and hearing the sickening crack of chitin snapping underfoot. Off to my left, Roxie and the other mutt Dogmeat, I think were playing tug of war with a surprisingly meaty cazador leg. And off to my right was my car. She was covered in slime and insect parts, but thankfully completely undamaged.

"Don't you worry about a thing, babe," I said, lovingly patting the hood of my car. "I wasn't going to let them hurt you. But then again, you are a tough ol' bird, aint'cha?"

"D'you two need some alone time?" Cass asked, walking up behind me. The sound of crunching insects did little to conceal the snicker in her voice.

"Hey, if you can talk to your gun, I can talk to my car," I said with a laugh. I brushed aside a decapitated cazador head, and hopped up to sit on the hood, patting the space to my right. Cass got the hint, and hopped up next to me.

"You leave Long Dick Johnson outta this, alright?" She said with a smile. I laughed, unclipped my helmet, set it aside, and reached into my duster for my smokes. That's about when Fawkes walked over to the two of us; the barrels on his massive gatling laser were still red hot.

"You fight well, Courier," the yellow super mutant nodded at me. "It's a more... unorthodox fighting style than I expected. But effective." I chuckled, grabbing a cig with my mouth and flicking open Benny's lighter.

"You're not too bad yourself," I breathed in the acrid smoke, and snapped the lighter shut. "Hell, you probably could've bagged them all with that big fuckin' gun of yours, if we weren't around." Fawkes just laughed, pulling out a cigar from where, I couldn't tell you and lit the end on one of the still red-hot barrels.

"In all things, a calm heart will prevail," he said, chomping down on the cigar and taking a long drag. "And my heart is very calm indeed."

"Think I'll take the big gun over a calm heart," Cass said. Fawkes smirked, smoke curling out the side of his mouth.

"Well, yes. It does help," Fawkes chuckled.

"You know, it's funny," A voice sounded off to my right, and everyone turned to look; Christopher was walking towards us, holding a cazador abdomen. "We've been seeing a whole lot more of these things lately. They definitely have numbers on their side now." He pulled out a fucking machete, and began slicing into the abdomen. "I mean, it doesn't help. But it's a good effort."

"I think they've traded size for numbers," Fawkes nodded at his friend. "They were much bigger in Zion, weren't they?"

"Oh God, yes!" Chris laughed as he reached into the dead bug, and pulled out something sticky was that the poison gland? Satisfied, he tossed the useless cazador carcass over his shoulder. "The ones we saw in that box canyon? They were HUGE! They must have been eating deathclaws to get that big. In fact, I bet that's why we didn't see any in Zion."

"So, where'd you guys say you were from again?" Cass asked. "Somewhere back east?" Chris nodded.

"Yeah! We're both from DC," Chris said with a nod. "They call it the Capital Wasteland, now, but..." Fawkes cut him off with a grunt, snorting out a dirty great cloud of smoke.

"I'm not sure we can really say we're from there anymore. We've hardly been back the last few years." Chris just smiled, and adjusted his mirrored shades.

"It's where we got our start!" He said, practically beaming. "And at least it's less of a radioactive piss-hole now than it was when I first crawled out of the Vault."

"Wait, back up," I said, tossing the spent cigarette aside. "DC? Like... Washington DC?" Cass looked confused; her grasp of geography was never all that good, and she was the first to admit it. But I'd seen plenty of old maps from before the war. Chris nodded. "But... that's all the way on the other side of the country! What the fuck are you doing this far west?"

"Road trip?" Chris answered with a shrug. "To be honest, I've got a lot in my quest log that's pointing me in this direction. I mean, it started off simply enough, and then it just kept building and building and building..."

"Quest log? What do you mean?" Cass asked. She leaned in close to me, and whispered in my ear: "Th' fuck's he talkin' about?" I shrugged. I honestly didn't have a clue what he meant.

"Here, I'll give you a taste..." He started fiddling with his Pip Boy. "I suppose the big quest we still have to do is heading to the Mariposa ruins. Harold wants us to get a sample of the original FEV. He's kind of tired of being a tree, and thinks that might be the key to giving him legs again."

"What." Cass deadpanned. I was too busy trying to make sense of his earlier statement to say anything.

"There are also those transmissions we've been getting about Jacobstown. Fawkes wants to go up there, see what a community of friendly metahumans is like. But personally, I want to go up there to see if the rumors about Marcus are true. I've always wanted to meet one of the guys my dad travelled with, back in the day..."

While Chris continued rambling on, I hopped off the hood and started making my way over to his hovercraft. I had a feeling he was going to take a while, and I wanted to see what this thing he was driving actually was.

Crunch. Crack. Crunch. Snap. Yeah, that wasn't going to get old.

For as streamlined as this floating triangle appeared from a distance, the clapped-out, cobbled together nature of the vehicle really started to shine through up close. The strangest thing was the varying levels of quality. Most of the exterior looked rusted and salvaged and crusty classic scavenger junk, basically. But then I'd see a part that looked brand new. Shiny brand new. Like Jeeves had just built it, or something. And it was really jarring to see such pristine, shiny components attached to utter garbage.

And then, I got a decent look at the nose art. I saw it before, but hadn't been close enough to work out any details. And now that I could see what it was, it stopped me dead in my tracks. The paint was cracked and faded, but unmistakable: a yellow Vault Door cog-wheel, with a "101" printed on the inside.

An image in my head flashed of those five eyebots in the divide, prophesying at me on the collapsed building-bridge:

"fInd thE hUndrEd And fIrst sOn, And fOllOw hIm. hE wIll brIng yOU tO thE mOthEr, And AwAkEn thE slEEpIng gIAnt!"

"Hundred and first son..." I muttered to myself, staring at the symbol. I had no reason to believe them. Hell, half of what those crazy, half-broken eyebots had said sounded like utter nonsense...

And yet...

"Hello?" Christopher snapped his fingers in front of my face, and broke me out of my stupor. "Earth to The Courier?"

"Uh... yeah. Yeah, sorry. I guess I was spacing out, trying to make some sense out of this..." I gestured at the hovercraft. "What the fuck is this thing, anyway?"

"Ah, you like? I built this hunk of junk myself out of parts I salvaged! I call it The Roadkill!" Chris smiled, patting the side of the hovercraft. "And trust me, it really is all roadkill'd up in there. Lots of zip-ties and duct tape. Freiburger and Finnegan would be proud."

"I'm calling bullshit," I said, folding my arms across my chest. "How do you make a hovercraft out of salvage? What, did you use the anti-grav thruster from, like, a dozen Mr. Handy robots or something?"

"About 20 Mr. Handy's, actually. Give or take." Chris grinned wide, and waggled his eyebrows behind his sunglasses. I just started rubbing my temple.

"Ask a stupid question..." I muttered.

"Believe it or not, it wasn't always a hover ship like this," he said. "It started off as a sort of dune-buggy, go-kart kinda thing. Back then, it was pretty much just some wheels, a chassis, an engine, a roll cage... It didn't even have a seat at first. Just some cushions I found and bolted to the frame. And over time, I just kept building on it, and tinkering, and adding on more and more stuff until... voil."

"Seriously?" I asked, staring at the thing. I honestly couldn't reconcile the idea of a go-kart turning into the hovercraft in front of me.

"Seriously! My only regret in turning this into a skimmer is that it can't do burnouts anymore." Chris lifted his metal-clad arm, and patted the side of the craft. "But who knows? Maybe I'll give it wheels again one day." And it was at that particular moment that I realized why the arm looked so strange: I heard the whirring of servos and hydraulics as it moved.

"Hang on a sec. Is that a cybernetic arm?" I asked, pointing at it a bit needlessly. Really, it was another stupid question now that I was looking at it, of course it was cybernetic! The hand, especially, looked like it came straight from a robot.

"You like?" he asked, holding up his arm to show it off. "I needed a new arm after Old Olney, so I built this from a spare set of T-51b I had lying around, and just hard-wired the Pip Boy into it." He chuckled to himself. "Yeah, that was a fun day. I had to walk all the way back to The Citadel with a bleeding stump, carrying my own severed limb under my other arm, and I even had a Tesla coil strapped to my back. All while a pack of deathclaws were chasing me. Good times!"

"Sounds like it," I said, holding up my own cybernetic for him to see. "I got mine after fighting about a million techno-zombies."

"Oh, WOW!" Chris leaned in close, grabbing hold of my arm to inspect it and practically drooling. "I almost didn't realize this was metal! Christ, Rothchild would cream his pants from gusset to knee if he saw this level of craftsmanship, this is gorgeous!"

"AHEM." Fawkes gravelly baritone echoed. "Chris, didn't you want to ask him something?" Cass was making her way over to us, trying to catch up to Fawkes' massive strides, and both dogs were also trotting underfoot.

"Hm? OH! Right, yes! Thank you!" Chris clapped Fawkes on the arm, and turned back to me. "Sorry, I can I'm easily distracted. Sometimes. Shiny object, you know..." He then turned back to Fawkes with a smile. "Like that time we got lost in Alton, remember?"

"How can I forget?" Fawkes rolled his eyes. "You only delayed us leaving Illinois for about a month."

"What can I say?" Chris shrugged. "I'm obsessive about finding secrets and finishing sidequests!"

"Obsessive compulsive, maybe..." Fawkes let out a throaty chuckle. While the two giants joked, I edged my way over to Cass.

"Is this what it looks like from the outside?" I whispered. She tapped her chin, thinking for a second... and then nodded.

"Kinda," she said. I couldn't help but shake my head and laugh.

"How do you put up with me?" I asked.

"SCANNING!" I suddenly heard Christopher shout, causing both Cass and I to look up in confusion. "You said earlier that you were scanning for an energy signature, right? But I wasn't the one you were trying to find? Who were you trying to find?"

I hesitated for what felt like years before giving him an answer.

"That... could take a while to explain," I scratched at the back of my head. Chris just laughed, and hopped into his hovercraft, gesturing for us to come over to join him. The windshield pulled back further, and several more panels seemed to retract out of the roof, giving us a much clearer view of the inside.

"Oh my god I love you," she said, and I honestly didn't know if she was talking to me or her shotgun. Probably Long Dick Johnson.

"Oh, HANG ON!" Chris leaned over my shoulder, looking down into the trunk of my car. "You didn't say you had an alien blaster!" That threw me for a loop. Sure, I was keeping that alien weapon in an easily accessible, decently visible holster attached to the trunk lid, but I didn't think anyone would recognize what it was.

"Wait, how do you know abo " I turned on my heel, and came to a stop when I saw Chris pulling a pistol out of his thigh-holster. It was another alien pistol, identical to mine. "Oh, you are fuckin' with me."

"Let me guess, you found it in a crashed flying saucer?" Chris asked. All I could do was weakly nod. "Yeah, that's how I found Firelance, here. Little did I know what was waiting for me..." He spun the pistol around several times before holstering it. "It's kinda funny; Fawkes and I had a bet on about where it crashed. Looks like I lost!" He started laughing, and turned on his heel to the quarry. "You'll have to point out where it landed later. Now c'mon! Let's go catch this Enclave sneak!"

He walked on ahead, becoming more and more obscured by the swirling white limestone dust around us with every step. Dogmeat bounded on after him, so Fawkes, Cass, Roxie and I followed suit, trying to catch up. Part of me wanted to ask Fawkes if Chris was always like this... but I decided to keep my mouth shut. The less noise we made in deathclaw territory the better as far as I was concerned.

For a few minutes, nothing happened. The six of us made our way into the quarry, and the only noise we heard was the sound of our own footsteps. The limestone dust storm started to settle, and I could finally see the actual quarry for the first time: apparently, we were skirting around the top-most edges. The pit in the center was massive and deep, ringed on all sides by the sheer cliff faces carved out of the rock, and even from this high up I could see several pools of stagnant, scummy green slime pretending it was water. All the abandoned mining equipment was still here, and the rusty metal buildings the NCR workers had used were all still intact... but I couldn't see any deathclaws. The silence was deafening, and it was putting me on edge.

"Alright, I'm bored," Chris said suddenly. He rolled back his shoulders, inhaled deeply, and then: "HEY DOUCHE-CLAWS! COME ON OUT, DINNER IS SERVED! ONE ORDER OF CRISPY VAULT DWELLER DOUSED IN SRIRACHA!"

"What th' fuck?!" Cass hissed, grabbing at him before I could. "Are you nuts?!" He didn't get a chance to answer. I'm not sure he would've wanted to, anyway.

"RRAAAAAGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!"

The loud, guttural roar that shook the rocks beneath our feet came from behind one of the nearby tin shacks. A massive black claw emerged, followed swiftly by the rest of the equally-massive jet-black deathclaw. I couldn't help but do a double take. The last time I saw a deathclaw that big was in The Divide; I was silently glad that this one wasn't glowing and radioactive.

Everyone even Fawkes started backing up at the sight... except Christopher. He just started laughing, cracked his knuckles, and ran headfirst into the jaws of death.

"Now that is more like it!" His laughter was disturbingly upbeat. The massive beast reared back, towering over all of us, and roared again. For half a second, it almost looked like Chris was going to get swallowed whole the deathclaw's mouth was certainly bigenough for that to be a realistic possibility but instead, we were treated to the unmistakable crack of metal against bone. Somehow, he'd managed to leap up, and punch the deathclaw in the face! so hard that the two of them toppled backward.

Straight off the edge of the cliff.

"EXCELSIIIIIOOOOOOOOOOOOORRRRR!" Chris' laughing, shouting voice trailed off as both he and the deathclaw tumbled down into the pit below and out of sight. Cass and I stood there in stunned, slack-jawed silence for a few seconds.

"What... the... fuck..." Cass muttered.

"Don't worry about him," Fawkes grunted in response, hefting up his massive gatling laser. "He does this kind of thing all the time. He'll be back."

And just like that, the sounds changed. The wind had stopped howling, and was replaced by the echoing of growls and snarls and roars from every corner. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement off in the distance... dozens of scaly monsters crawling out of every nook and cranny, all coming straight for us.

"Break's over, ladies!" Fawkes bellowed, swinging the gatling laser around. "Time to go to work!" I slammed the bolt forward on the anti-materiel rifle. Cass seated the ammo drum and pulled back the AA-12's charging handle. Even the two dogs were crouched back on their haunches, growling and snarling at the swiftly approaching deathclaws.

The first of them scrambled up over the top. Followed by a second. And then a third...

"OPEN UP!" I yelled a bit pointlessly, as it turned out. Between the snarling of the dogs, the superheated fired of the gatling laser, the deafening roar of the AA-12, the monstrous boom of the anti-materiel rifle AND the battle cries and inarticulate death wails of the giant mutant lizards as they were ripped into red sausage, there was absolutely no way my voice was heard by anyone.

There weren't that many of them. It wasn't like the swarm of cazadores that descended on us earlier. But to be honest, they were deathclaws. They didn't need numbers. Even with all the fire we were laying down, we only managed to drop two of them before the third in the back closed the distance.

And one was all they needed.

"SCATTER!" I yelled out, chambering another round. I'd already fired six shots with this thing, and was going to need to reload soon. I started backing up, but the deathclaw was already lunging straight at me with its mouth wide open. VATS kicked in unexpectedly, and the monster didn't even seem to slow down.

"Fuck you!" I jammed the end of the barrel straight down its open maw and pulled the trigger. The inside of its mouth lit up briefly before the back of its head exploded in a shower of brains and scales. Sparks and smoke and fire spilled out between its teeth, and the limp sack of meat crashed into the ground at my feet.

"You're luggage..." I growled, pulling the barrel out of its mouth and taking a few teeth with it. I didn't have time to celebrate, because by the time I chambered the last round, another deathclaw was leaping over the dead one, aiming to make a meal out of my face.

"SHIT!" The jets in my rocket boots kicked in, boosting me up a few feet and not a second too soon. A massive claw swiped through the air, tearing through the top of the deathclaw corpse like a hot knife through butter. It just kept speeding past me, carried by its own inertia, and I started falling. I twisted myself around as fast as I could, and reached out to grab hold of one of the horns and then I was off! Carried away on the back of a bucking, writhing mutant lizard.

"Why do I always do this?!" I yelled to myself, holding on to the horn as tightly as I could, doing everything in my power to keep getting thrown off. Not easy, when it feels like your cybernetic limb is going to get ripped free of its housing.

I slipped into VATS to try and give myself some breathing room. Time slowed down a little... and that's when I noticed something strange. There was some...thing attached to the back of the deathclaw's head. Something foreign.

Something metal.

"Fuck it." I jammed the barrel against the foreign object and fired. There was a shower of sparks, and a blinding flash; I was almost knocked off the back of the deathclaw by a blast of heat battering me in the chest and peppering my armored form with fire and shrapnel. The deathclaw screeched and shuddered, and the horn I was holding on to was ripped free. I leapt off the back, and the jets kicked in; the monster kept going, and smashed head-first into a cliff wall.

I landed on my feet a good 20 feet from the carcass, and kept sliding backward. I released the empty magazine, grabbed a fresh one, and wheeled around to try and find more targets.

"Sheason!" I heard Cass yell. "This way!"

The quarry had turned into a slaughterhouse. There was meat and blood and torn up body parts everywhere. But, for the moment, it seemed like the deathclaws had stopped. I followed the voice, and found Cass standing on top of a bloody pile of meat that used to be the top half of a deathclaw.

"Where's Fawkes?" I asked, looking around. "Hell, where'd Rox and Dogmeat go?"

"Down in th' crater, lookin' fer th' Wanderer, I think," Cass motioned with her head to her left. The next thing I knew, one of the buildings at the far side of the crater exploded; a ball of fire consumed it from the bottom up, and the tin shack on stilts collapsed into nothing. Cass started laughing. "Ah, guess they found 'im."

I wasn't laughing. I wasn't looking at the exploding building anymore, either. I was looking at one of the conveyor-belt crushing machines sticking up above everything else. I still had VATS on, and it practically lit up the black-clad figure standing on the roof like she was a neon sign.

"DOWN!" I yelled, tossing the rifle aside and tackling Cass. The two of us went down like a sack of potatoes, taking cover behind the huge deathclaw carcass. A huge sonic boom buffeted the air above us, and everything was bathed in the bright blue light of an energy weapon discharge.

"Mother fuck!" Cass blurted out. I rolled off her, pulling the Jury Rigger off my back and pulling out the grapnel gun. She grabbed her AA-12, pushed off the ground and steadied her aim with the deathclaw carcass we were using as cover. The shotgun fired round after round at the crushing machine, laying down decent cover fire. The building was slammed again and again by the explosive slugs.

PKCHOONT!

I sailed through the air, searching below me, trying to find her again. The crushing machine was starting to collapse in on itself from all the explosives hitting it, but... THERE! She was sliding down one of the conveyor belts, trying to get away from the twisting metal and shrapnel. The jet boots kicked in, and it gave me the push I needed but it flipped me upside down as well. I was right above her...

CLUNK.

A mass of blue holorifle cubes hit the conveyor belt right in front of her, and smashed straight through it like it had been hit with a super sledge. I hoped it might slow her down some, but she just vaulted over it and kept going. By now, I'd twisted myself upright and landed on the conveyor belt myself, too far away to grab hold of her... just as the whole structure buckled in on itself.

PKCHOONT!

I'd aimed the grapnel at a spot on the ground ahead of her, and the next thing I knew I was crashing into the back of her. I grabbed hold of her, and everything went upside down as the two of us crashed in a mass of limbs into the hard stone floor of the quarry pit.

"Gotcha!"

In hindsight, that was a bit premature. I may have been doing my best to try and grapple her and pin her down, but it was no good. A grip like a vice grabbed hold of my cybernetic hand, followed by a pair of legs wrapping around my arm... and a boot kicking me in the face.

"I'm not! Letting! Go!" I shouted between blows to the head. Eventually, I grabbed her by the foot and tried to push up off the ground. But she just turned the motion around on me, and she threw me off her. I rolled, twisted around, and finally my feet found purchase. I kicked up off the ground, and saw a roundhouse kick coming for my face.

"Damnit, girl!" I reached out and grabbed the kick with my cybernetic arm; her foot came to a dead stop. "C'mon, Tuera! It's me! It's Sheason!" She kicked off the ground and twisted out of my grip, back flipping through the air away from me. She landed on her feet, and I did my best to prepare myself for her next attack. She leapt off the ground, reached back for a punch...

ZZZAAAAAP!

"GYAAANNGH!" She screamed, convulsing in midair as dark blue lightning rippled over her. The electricity arced and popped and sparked, and vanished just as quickly as it appeared. She was still being carried by her momentum, even if she no longer seemed to have any control over where she was going. She tumbled like a ragdoll in a useless mass of limbs, and I rushed forward to catch her without even thinking.

"What the " I breathed out, dropping to my knees. I held her in my arms, but she had gone completely limp. The suit was warm to the touch, but not hot certainly not hot enough to explain the wisps of steam and smoke curling away from the suit.

I was in a daze, and could barely think. What the fuck just happened?

"There, that should about do it," I heard a voice from above me. I looked up to see the Lone Wanderer still smiling, but covered in a considerable amount of deathclaw blood standing over us. In his hand was a pistol; it wasn't the alien blaster, because it was too angular and box like. It almost looked like a laser pistol... but it wasn't quite the right shape for that.

"Wh What did Is she " I stammered out, unable to think properly.

"Don't worry," Chris said. "She's not dead. Just tazed. She should be out cold for the next few hours or so." I looked up at him, then back down to the girl in my arms, and back up at him again.

"What is that?" I asked, gesturing to the pistol in his hand. It wasn't much, but I had to focus on something to try and pull myself out of this stupor.

"Compliance regulator," he said, turning it around in his hands. "It's a neat little toy a picked up in Zion canyon. It's basically a stun gun on steroids." He paused, apparently confused by my expression. "What? Did you think I was going to kill her or something?"