Chapter 171: Welcome to Hell

Chapter 171: Welcome to Hell

I woke up to the sound of helicopter blades. At least, that's what I thought it was at first; everything was so hazy and unfocused that I couldn't concentrate. I tried opening my eyes, but the light was blinding. I blinked away the haze, and eventually my eyes adjusted to the light. The world shifted into focus, and I saw a spinning fan above my head. I was laying flat on my back, on a bed in a... familiar house... somewhere...

Wait a minute. Haven't I done this before?

"You're awake," a gruff, old voice said from somewhere to my left. "How about that?" That sounded like... but no. No, it couldn't...

I rolled over, trying to get up to get a better look at who was speaking, but everything started spinning. I felt a pull deep in my gut, like my stomach was attached to a falling anvil, and I resisted the urge to vomit. I held my head and rubbed my eyes, trying to figure out what was going on.

"Whoa, easy there! Easy!" The blurry figure sitting at the edge of the bed reached out a hand to steady me. I coughed, powering through the fog clouding my head before he finally came into focus. And then I froze.

That was Doc Mitchell. I was back in Goodsprings.

"What the hell?" I asked aloud, looking around the room. My head was throbbing like a motherfucker. "What's going on?" It felt like I'd just been somewhere else. Somewhere else, doing something... really important. But... I couldn't... everything just felt... so fuzzy.

"You've been out cold a couple of days now," Mitchell replied, settling back in his chair. "Just relax a second, get your bearings."

Something was seriously wrong here. I have done this all before. I know that I have done this before. My head was still throbbing and I couldn't think straight. And then, when I looked up at the Doc again, I realized that may have been a rather unfortunate choice of words.

Mitchell was sitting in the chair next to the bed, completely oblivious to the fact that his head was upside down, resting limply against the middle of his chest. His neck had twisted around like it was made out of putty; even as I looked, I could see it continue to bend and twist out of shape, turning his head like the hands on a clock, each movement accompanied by the snapping of bone and tearing of meat.

"WHAT THE FUCK?!" I yelled, clawing and grabbing at the bed to scramble away from the nightmarish sight. Doc Mitchell's gaze followed me, and his head continued slowly spinning - each bend of the neck accompanied by a crack and a squelch - until it was completely sideways.

"Is something wrong, stranger?" Mitchell seemed completely unaware that his neck was twisted around like it had been caught in a thumbscrew.

"Fuck me!" I shouted, finally leaping off the bed and getting back on my feet. "Wait, no, FUCK YOU! Fuck this, I'm out of here!" I tried to break for the door, but I didn't even manage to get two feet before a sharp pain shot through my left shoulder. It knocked me off balance, but I didn't fall. The pain was caused by a hand with razor sharp claws digging into my shoulder, holding me up. The hand spun me around, and I saw Doc Mitchell still sitting in the chair; his arm had stretched to cover the distance.

"You really should settle down..." Mitchell growled, his voice taking on a strange echo. "After all, you've been shot in the head. You may have suffered brain damage!" His eyes started to glow, and his head began to change shape. His features boiled and churned like melting butter, spearing off in all directions and turning into malformed, fleshy spider legs. His arm pulled me in, retracting with the sounds of snapping bone that could be heard even over the scraping of my boots against the floor. He opened his mouth and unhinged his jaw, revealing row after row after row of teeth...

"Well, that's just your opinion..." I said through clenched teeth.

CRACK!

I landed one hard, solid punch against the side of his face. His grip on my shoulder loosened up, and teeth started flying everywhere. His spider-limbed face flailed madly, and he let out an inhuman screech, tumbling to the ground in a mass of melting flesh.

"... and I've learned not to trust the opinions of giant mustachioed spider people!"

I turned on my heel and bolted for the door before the Mitchell-monster got a chance to get back up. I had no idea what the fuck was going on, and I wasn't going to stay to find out. I sprinted down the hallway which was much longer than I remember trying to get to the front door. The wood on the walls peeled and flaked away ahead of me as I ran, spilling a bloody and viscous black fluid everywhere.

"Hello door!" I yelled, reaching back with my fist, lunging for the exit. The door smashed to splinters with a single punch and I kept going. "Goodbye doooOOOOH FUCK!" Before I could stop myself, I was out the door and found myself at quite the considerable height plunging headfirst toward the ground. At least, I assumed I was falling. I couldn't actually see anything below me.

For some reason, there was one thing that went through my head as I tumbled to the earth, arms and legs flailing wildly to a backdrop of screams. And that thought was: I don't remember Doc Mitchell's house sitting on the edge of a cliff.

"AUGH!" I coughed out, finally hitting the ground with a heavy thud and a wet squelch. The impact didn't hurt nearly as bad as I thought it would. Something must have broken my fall, something that was... it almost felt like mud. Was this mud? I couldn't see. Were my eyes open? I tried to get up, but every time I tried to push against what I thought hoped was the ground, my arms just kept sinking deeper.

But sinking into what?

My vision returned without warning, and I almost wish it hadn't. For a second I thought I was face to face with one of the Marked Men... but I quickly figured out that I was elbow deep in corpses. The smell of human sewage flooded my nostrils, and I damn nearly vomited right there. Body parts in various states of decay and dismemberment were floating all around me in a pool of blood and excrement. Helmets, weapons, and pieces of torn military uniforms were scattered among the meat and feces. Flies and maggots were crawling along anything above the semi-liquid muck; they were digging their way through every orifice they could find, like survivors of a flash flood trying to stay afloat.

"What the fuck!?" I shouted, finally pulling my arms free of the cloying muck and bringing up a rotten, decaying hand with it, clutching tightly around my wrist. The skinless, bloody face in front of me turned to stare with a pair of unblinking, milky white eyes; its mouth opened wide in a blood-curdling screech, and out poured a swarm of flies headed straight for my face.

I didn't hesitate. I just grabbed the rotten arm clinging to mine, ripped it off, and used it to smash the meaty skull screaming at me. I pounded it again and again and again, sending bone and blood flying everywhere, until the arm I was using as a club disintegrated into nothing. I finally managed to get back up on my feet, still covered in... fluids... and I tried to back away from the nauseating sight.

"What the FUCK is going on?!" I coughed out, trying to wipe the muck off my face. The sea of corpses stretched as far as I could see which wasn't far, thanks to a thick, blood red fog. Crosses stuck out of the bloody swamp like trees. Fires were burning in the distance, threatening to be choked by the fog. It almost looked like the sky itself had been set on fire, smothered with ash, smoke, and embers... but that didn't seem to bother the hundreds of crows circling right above my head.

"Can't you tell, pardner?" A voice with a distinctive cowboy drawl said from somewhere behind me; a mechanical voice. I wheeled around, and sure enough, Victor was looming over me. The cartoon cowboy face was twisted in a vicious sneer, staring at me through the cracked glass of his broken screen. A huge chunk of his chassis above the screen was missing, and his right claw arm was mangled and broken, leaking oil into the lake of carrion flesh.

"We've come..." another voice rasped out. "... to collect... what we're owed..." I kept trying to back up, and was met with another unwelcome sight. It wasn't quite a skeleton, but there wasn't enough flesh to be called a body either. I instantly recognized Elijah by the tattered blue Brotherhood robe with the square hole in the chest, the scraggly white beard, and the Pip Boy hanging loosely from thin strands of bone and sinew he was trying to pass off as his arm. His eyes were missing entirely: hollow, empty sockets, filled with nesting maggots.

"After all," another voice rasped out. "You did say you'd meet me here. Did you not?" I turned and was face to face with another man who... wasn't quite a corpse. He was certainly better put together than Elijah, but he was still gaunt beyond belief, with waxy yellowish-green skin stretched far too thin. He was wearing the tattered remains of a brown suit... with a single hole burned into the center of his chest. He tightened his necktie, and it was like he was securing a noose around his own neck. "I hate to disappoint... but I am not resting in pieces."

"... House?" I asked in horrified disbelief. The three of them started to gang up on me, and I tried in vain to back away; the knee-deep muck was threatening to pull me back down again. Or was that the not-quite-dead bodies in the soup reaching up to claw at me? "What the fuck is..."

"Yer standin' square in the middle of yer legacy." Victor cut me off, rolling through the sludge to advance on me. "All the death an' destruction you've wrought over the years... it's been right here, just waitin' for ya."

"How many people... have you killed... over the years?" Elijah wheezed, his speech broken by gulping, raspy breaths. Flakes of Red Cloud started pouring out of him in huge chunks as he moved. "Can you... count... them all? They... remember..."

All around me, more bodies started pulling themselves up out of the bloody, filthy swamp. Most of them were too decayed to even be recognizable as human, but every once in a while... I saw a face I knew. Not just the people I'd killed personally: but the people who were dead because of me. Including...

No. No, it can't be! It just...

Cass...

"Tell me, mailman, if you can..." House snarled at me, showing a mouth full of yellow teeth. "You have destroyed so much. What is it exactly that you have created? Can you name even one thing?" I was so paralyzed by the horrors unfolding all around me that I couldn't speak. House just started laughing again. "I thought not."

"I... I..." I began to stammer out. "WAUGH!" I tripped over something unexpectedly, and fell backward. I didn't hit sludge or bloody body parts like I was expecting; I fell into a shallow, dirty ditch that felt like it was made out of concrete. The three of them crowded around the edges of the ditch, and my joints locked up. It wasn't until I saw the water tower on the edge of my vision that I realized: this was my grave in Goodsprings. Because of course it fucking was.

"Don't get too comfortable down there, pardner..." Victor growled, as sparks flew out of the top of his chassis. "This is only just beginning..." He reached down with his good claw, picking up a huge pile of dirt and prepared to toss it on my face.

"You're right about that much," a fourth voice sounded off, and all three of them looked up. I couldn't do anything, as my arms and legs still felt pinned to the dirt, but I didn't say anything either. A trio of gunshots rang out over my head, and one by one House, Elijah, and Victor fell back out of my view.

"You low down, rotten cheat!" Victor snarled, amid a shower of sparks and a hail of grinding gears. "Why, I aughtta GAH!" A final gunshot rang out, and Victor went silent. For a few seconds, the silence was deafening.

The silence was broken with a tinny "Fshnk!" noise: the unmistakable sound of a lighter being flicked open.

"Well, well, well..." the familiar fourth voice said from just outside my view. "You sure do have a knack for getting into trouble, don't you, daddy-o?" Benny appeared just above me, with a lit cigarette hanging limply out of his mouth, Maria in one hand, and his still lit Zippo in the other. He snapped the lighter shut with a metal clink, and he shoved his nickel-plated pistol into his checkered jacket.

"Benny?" I muttered, still a bit in a haze. "Holy shit, man... thank you for introducing me to a genuinely new experience." Benny looked at me with a raised eyebrow.

He kept staring at the mushroom cloud on the horizon for several minutes. Finally he reached up, pulled his helmet off, and tossed it aside. Without a single word, he turned and walked away from the cliffs edge.

The world around me dissolved again. I had no idea where Benny had gone. All these shifts in perspective were starting to make me feel sick. Not quite as sick as earlier, when I'd been surrounded by corpses, blood, and shit, but... it wasn't pleasant. I dropped to my knees, desperately trying to get the world to stop spinning.

"Where th' fuck am I now..." I muttered, trying to get my bearings. I was in a rocky canyon, in the middle of the desert somewhere. There were tents all around. I could see tribals in war paint, carrying spears and hatchets milling around a campfire in the center. Packs of dogs roamed around the camp; there were just as many hounds as people.

When I looked up, I could see crows circling in the skies above. A man was approaching from the outer edges of the camp. He was a huge, heavily muscled man with scraggly dark hair, wearing animal skins and carrying all manner of weapons. At first, I thought he was covered in war paint... but the markings were shifting and changing all over his skin including a large patch over his entire face and they had the texture of burnt and cracked charcoal rather than painted skin. In his hands, he was carrying something: the severed head of a Legionnaire.

"Good hunting?" a heavyset tribal who was actually covered in war paint approached the man, who just stared through his mask of cracked, blackened skin.

"Always," he growled. The warrior tossed the head aside with a wet thud, and it rolled to a stop in front of me.

"The Legion march on us," the other tribal said, with blatant worry in his voice. "The chieftain says they will be here in days." The warrior snorted, walking past the tribal; every step hit the ground with a heavy thud.

"Good. Let them come."

The scene shifted again, and the whole world dissolved into something new. I was in one of the tents, and everything was covered in blood. The floor of the huge tent was littered with bodies and body parts. Easily a dozen men covered in the warpaint of this tribe were standing over a dark-haired figure kneeling on the ground. Except... he wasn't exactly kneeling. The men were holding him down by the dozen spears impaling him from nearly every angle. He was covered in open wounds, spilling blood everywhere, but he was still struggling against the men holding the spears. For a second, it almost looked like he was going to get up...

But then a Legionnaire walked past me. He was holding an anti-materiel rifle in his hands, and he pressed the end of the barrel against the struggling warrior's skull.

There was a deafening blast as he pulled the trigger, and I was blinded by the bright muzzle flash. I blinked my eyes against the light, and when I opened them again, I was somewhere else yet again.

"Fuck sake!" I shouted, clutching my head, trying to get the spinning to stop. "Enough already!" I rubbed my eyes, trying to focus.

A man wrapped in bloody bandages was lying in a filthy bed; the bandages covered him so thoroughly, he almost looked like a mummy. He was staring at the figure sitting next to him: a bald man wearing furs and a fancy red outfit, with a circular medallion acting as a clasp for his cape. His hands were laced together in front of his smirking face, and he pointed at the man in the bed.

"You... are a very hard man to kill," Caesar said in a smug voice that dripped with menace. "But it seems that even you have your limits. So I have an offer for you, killer." Caesar leaned forward, but the man wrapped in bandages didn't move. It suddenly occurred to me that maybe he couldn't move. "Kill for me, in my name."

"For the Legion?" he growled, practically spitting out the last word. Caesar nodded.

"Exactly. Or we do it the other way: chop you up and feed you to your own fuckingdogs."

The two Legionnaires at the foot of the bed raised their rifles with a clatter of metal. Caesar leaned back in his chair, apparently content to watch everything unfold, no matter which choice he made. For a few seconds, nothing happened, and nobody said anything.

"I have one condition..." the man on the bed snarled. Caesar nodded.

"Name it."

"Give me the men of my tribe..." he said; the bandages around his hands started to smolder and burn from within, sending ribbons of smoke into the air. The two Legionnaires looked to each other nervously. "I would teach them the price of betrayal... and the true nature of fear."

The smoke filled my vision, and everything around me melted away until I was standing alone in darkness. This was getting out of hand. I couldn't take much more of this insanity...

Fshnk!

"Charles... Lanius... Corax..." Benny muttered behind me, his face glowing from the light of his cigarette. He snapped his lighter shut. "Doesn't matter what you call him. He's a tough son of a bitch just like you."

"But he's not invincible," I said. Benny nodded, and ash fell off the end of his smoke, floating away.

"He'll try and trick you with those psychic powers of his... overwhelm you with visions of madness and fear, like before I pulled you out. But you just gotta remember that it ain't real, Fish. And if it's not real, then it can't hurt you. You can fight through, and you can kick his ass. Dig?"

"I still don't get why you're helping me like this," I said. Benny chuckled. "I mean... I did kinda kill you, after all."

"Yeah, but I tried killin' you first..." he shrugged. He pulled out the cigarette and blew a smoke ring just as a tiny dribble of blood leaked out of his mouth. "I probably wouldn't be this helpful if I was still flesh and blood. But there's something I've got now that I didn't have before."

"And what's that?" I asked, rooted in place.

"Perspective," he said. As he spoke, his face started becoming battered, and more blood began leaking out of every orifice. "It was never personal. It was just business." His face was now almost entirely concave. His head was a bloody mass of meat and shattered bone.

"Still..." I shrugged. "I'm... I'm sorry." Benny started laughing, spraying blood from his ruined, busted trachea. "I'll see you around."

"No," he replied. "You won't." His voiced echoed in the darkness, and his body dissolved into sand. Within seconds, the pile of sand was picked up by a gust of wind I couldn't feel, and what was left of Benny had blown away.

I was falling again.

I don't know how I got here, but I was falling feet-first to Earth from what must have been orbit. For a brief second, I was high enough to see the entire California coastline, and before I knew what was happening, the ground was rushing up to meet me. I could see the sprawling concrete of Vegas, Lake Mead, Hoover Dam... the closer I got, the more details I could see, but they were going way too fast.

And then, when I got close enough to see people below me, I realized what I was aiming for: myself.

THUD!

I collapsed on the ground like a marionette that suddenly had its wires cut. It wasn't nearly as bad an impact as I was expecting from the buildup. I desperately pushed off against the rocky terrain below me, and unsteadily got back up on my feet.

I was back in the Legate's camp. The fires were still burning, the crows were still circling overhead, and everyone around me was still frozen. Off in the distance, I saw the Remnants just as frozen as everyone else. Lanius was standing in front of one of them, with his armored hand outstretched just above the power armor helmet.

"Kreger," Lanius' deep voice boomed. "You should not have come back. But the last of the gaps have now been filled." Based on where he was, and what was still going on, I tried to do the math. That whole nightmare couldn't have taken more than a few seconds. Maybe a minute, if I was feeling generous.

I reached for the closest, most easily accessible of any of my guns, and pulled out Roscoe. If he was turning around as fast as I thought he was, then I didn't have time to find any heavier artillery. I slipped into VATS, and aimed for his head.

The bullets hit the side of his helmet with a loud metal ring, and ricocheted off. But what happened next, I didn't quite anticipate. The fires all around seemed to die down slightly, the sky shuddered, and colors changed from a deep blood red to a more realistic smoky brown... and the crows disappeared entirely. Everyone around me who had been frozen in place suddenly collapsed at once even the Remnants in their power armor, who crashed loudly.

"WHAT?!" Lanius shouted, turning to me; now that his concentration had broken and the illusions were evaporating, even his armor had been altered slightly. It didn't seem quite as demonic as before. "But... how? You were trapped in a psychic labyrinth! No one can escape from their own mind!"

"Good thing no one told me that!" I said, still breathing heavily and trying to catch my breath. I reached down and picked up my discarded Jury-Rigger, my eyes never leaving Lanius. "So, you gonna stay in reality for round two, or are you just gonna pussy out like before... Corax?"

Even surrounded by all that armor, I could see just how much he visibly stiffened when I called him out by his Enclave code name.

"Fine then," he reached down and pulled his massive sword out of the ground. "Your death will not be quick, or painless." He kicked off the ground and lunged at me sword first... but I just laughed, firing the LAER.

"What, are you gonna bore me to death?"