#heck1

The thought alone gave her the strength to fight against her captor, although it was short-lived. Her lungs began to burn, choking away the scream she tried to make. She listened to a deep, amused laugh, as she lost consciousness once again.

-

“Well, I think you’re really neat,” Veronica said, smiling wide and giving Christine a playful punch on the arm. “You don’t give yourself enough credit, Chris.”

They sat in the kitchen, alone together, laughing and holding hands. She had never felt this kind of connection with someone before, someone who made her feel accepted and loved. It was... nice. Really, really nice.

She was just raising her hand to tuck a stray lock of hair behind her love’s ear when she heard footsteps walk by the kitchen and pause. Veronica looked over Christine’s shoulder, her beautiful smile falling into something more worrisome. She turned to look and she saw Father Elijah in the doorway, wearing that same disappointed frown he always had when they dared to exist in the same space together.

His eyes drifted between the two of them. Veronica let go of her hand and looked downwards at the table.

Christine refused to look away. He squinted at her, scoffed, and kept walking.

Veronica took hold of her hand again as soon as his footsteps faded.

-

Christine opened her eyes. She had given up using her voice for what felt like years ago. Every time she spoke, it hurt in a peculiar way. By this time, waking up and falling asleep made time feel more like a fluid she was floating around in, instead of a linear concept she had - at one point, she was sure - experienced.

The holograms and ghost people that sometimes wandered into the room never stayed. So she wasn’t sure why this one, of all of them, was peering into the Auto-doc that had become her prison.

Why did this one look horrified? What was making it use the terminal beside her? Did it even know how?

When the Auto-doc hissed out steam and the door lifted for the first time in her memory, it took all her willpower not to immediately collapse into the stranger’s arms. She was offered a steadying hand, which she took, adjusting to the feeling of putting weight on her legs as if she were a newborn calf.

She looked up to see a woman removing her rebreather and goggles, looking just as disoriented as she must.

“Are you alright?” she asked.

Where’s Elijah?

She formed the words on her lips, but no sound backed them.

Her voice was gone. She reached up and felt scars on her throat and under her chin, ones that she certainly hadn’t gotten back at the Think Tank.

The woman tried to calm her, but if she had learned one thing, it’s that the people in this world would hurt you. Take anything from you that they could.

Where’s Elijah?

-

“You can’t do this!”

It happened almost without warning. Her mother wouldn’t meet her eyes, but her father was as stern as ever.

And Father Elijah was smiling.

“We’ve discussed this, Veronica,” he said, the patient tone he reserved only for her coming through. “I’ve failed the Royce family by letting you distract their daughter with fanciful and unnecessary... affections. Such a waste of time - a valuable resource, as you know. It can no longer be tolerated.”

With the last of her meager belongings packed into a bag, Christine stood and faced her family, teeth ground together painfully. She couldn’t let them see her cry. She couldn’t let them have that.

Veronica wasn’t even supposed to know she was leaving until she was already at the Circle’s bunker, well away from here. But they had friends. Of course they wouldn’t let that happen.

She opened her mouth to protest, but Father Fucking Elijah silenced her with a look. Christine understood. He acted more like a father to Veronica than her own ever did to her.

At least, until now. Now, they looked more or less the same in her eyes.

She walked by her parents and directly to Veronica, who stood teary-eyed in the hallway outside her quarters. Drawing her in a full embrace, Christine felt her bury her face into her shoulder and release a sob.

“Shh, Ronnie,” she soothed. “It’ll be okay. Hey, it’s gonna be fine, alright?”

Veronica pulled back to look at her, reigning in the tears as best she could. “Chris, I’m so-”

“Uh-uh, none of that. Don’t you go blaming yourself.” She aimed a glare right at Elijah. “It’s not your fault.”

He knew he’d won, so of course his smug look of superiority wasn’t going anywhere.

Veronica guided her attention back to her with a gentle hand. Christine’s eyes softened instantly. She swallowed down a new wave of emotion, touched the hand on her cheek, and kissed her.

It was a moment that should have lasted nothing short of eternity.

-

The woman that left the Hidden Valley bunker was a stranger to Christine. Fitting, then, that the voice she heard when she spoke now was literally a stranger’s voice.

In a way, it was a comfort, however empty.

She looked at the code that Courier Six - were couriers always so good at saving people’s lives? - had given her.

“‘Begin again, but know when to let go,’” she recited. She cracked a smile. “Huh. Sounds like you.”

Six had left her rebreather and goggles off once the Gala had begun and they’d all woken up inside the casino, away from the mist. She laughed, despite the situation.

She’d had that knack about her the entire time they’d known each other. Bright eyes always coming up with a new solution, never losing their resolve. Finding time to find the light. Looking forward. Punching her problems if nothing else worked.

She didn’t think she’d meet someone like that again.

Christine repeated the phrase into the microphone, hearing the mechanisms for the elevator click and grind. It actually worked.

She watched as Six stepped into the elevator and hit the button, waiting for the doors to close. She gave Christine a little salute with two fingers, grinning.

“See you around!”

A moment later, Christine was alone again. She still had work to do. She was ready now.

Singing guts through the Sierra Madre.

Husky and dulcet. Gathers in satin folds. Noise clefts the fog as a beacon, sustaining a warning rhythm.

Foolishly, prospectors from the Mojave take the Sierra Madre to heart as a siren call.

No matter how the lone sentinel bares her teeth and shoulders her holorifle in a punishingly vivid burst of warning fire, every few months, a new fool clambers past the gate to try and pry apart the locked down inner chamber for gold. Without exception, not a single new body could penetrate the depths after the Courier devised the vault as an inescapable coffin to trap Elijah.

Christine didn’t bother to intervene beyond a cursory recorded warning supplied at the base of Vera Keyes’ statuesque hologram. Newcomers perished in the outermost streets.

Dumb as a pack of unrequited suitors. As all one-sided sexual attraction goes, few next to none are capable of gleaning that the ravishing myth of the Sierra Madre is based in concealing the amount of labor that it takes to make a mirage appear conquerable. The Sierra Madre is made soft and wet with gastrointestinal smaller intestine shining in the gaslight as his length stretches from northwest booth to southeast signpost. And like all else, even in deconstruction, the newcomer does not decay: All yardage of slick viscera becomes assimilated into the gut flora of the silent ville. Shanked and quartered by the distorted hazmat beasts that swept through the streets, antibodies constantly running on the lip of inflammation.

Between the last eviscerated fool and the next debt-riddled hopeful, clockwork stasis brings down an obliterating order upon the timeless inhabitants.

Perched on the ledge of a dilapidated balcony, Christine winds in another breath.

Exhales on a low note that sends a shiver down her spine.

Months have passed since the events that locked a dead woman’s vocal cords into her throat, but each time she renews her singing voice, she loses track of the weight in her soles. Everything from the shoulders down dissolves.

She stops again, which brings her back to her body.

Measures her breaths in.

Out.

Only her heartbeat remains, pounding thickly in her eardrums against the pressurized silence of the Sierra Madre Villa.

Slouching, she surveys the view below.

Dead whistles of a gambler’s tomb fills the air thicker than plaster dust from cheaply assembled structures. Each architectural limb of sprawling subsections broke apart in the same gaudy decay. A fumbling millionaire’s pastice of Latin-American opulence.

Without any requisite sunlight to drench the baked stone walkways and carefree arches, Christine wryly noted that the gated community could only slump as a post-fling catacomb, robbed of any energy to pay mind to the immeasurable undead wheezing across the distance.

She sinks to her knees. Scintillating colors are bursting across her vision, robbing her of sight briefly. Agitating, but nothing new.

This unannounced setback grew in frequency the longer she forced her lungs to adjust to the copper and sulfur-laced mist. With the migraine, she braced herself for the next wave of nerve damage.

Needle tips jab into the rope-thick scar that bisects her scalp. Pain receptors ring alive in calamity, based on old patterns of neural signalling more than any actual stimulus.

Phantom sensation made her jaw tense, grinding back teeth to ride out the wave of intensified body awareness. Stubble would never grow again. Scalpel and cauterization damage from the Auto-Doc damaged her scalp invisibly, even outside the rope-like keloids. This locked her in eternal symbolic pact with the Circle of Steel, an offshoot of home that would have long presumed her dead.

For good reason.

Her eyes began to sting and water. She exhales against the searing, throbbing migraine, letting herself ignore the biological ramifications of constant exposure to corrosive toxins.

“I’m bored with elegance,” vocalized Christine, shaky voiced draped in the lush tremble of Vera Keyes’ cords. Draped in the starlet’s voice, her whine turns into a velvet-boxed sulk.

An itch of rage began to snag. While Vera’s voice was an odd novelty at first, the opulence now became a cruel juxtaposition with her surroundings. Worse, it was a reminder of one more intrusion planted into her body.

Drive it deeper. Make it contort until it feels like home again.

Until her vision returns, she might as well continue to push the limits of her voice.

Start.

A mellifluous, low hum rumbles towards a howl.

Ramping up against the grain of a silky voice, Christine plucks at the edges and splits hairs over the notes, once-elegant tune blaring as ferociously as hooked fingernails sinking into a surface of soft skin.

Words fail to capture lost time.

Her borrowed voice pummels the dead air, emptying lungfuls of indignant rage.

No response follows.

Christine skirts her tongue against the back of her teeth; acrid stained rings of canned coffee. Her mouth is dry. She forces the cramped muscles in her hips to relax.

And though all her companions through this Hell have long since deserted their shackles, a slow clap begins to fill the space behind her.

Immediately, she pulls her holorifle and locks onto the target.

Two fists, one encased in a loaded pressurized mechanism, raise towards the air.

“Hold--” sputters Christine, splintering throat snagging against the smooth vocal grain, “I’ll shoot.”

A silhouette from the past held still.

Unearthed ghost, chewing nervously on a lower lip.

A pretty familiar lip.  

.

“I’ll catch,” Veronica offers, helpfully.

Christine’s eyes widened. A peppery flare in the middle of her chest burns out.

“I’ve been listening to you for the past couple. Five hours or so,” says Veronica. “Takes forever to get around without stirring up a horde. Plus, I’ve been cloaking my trail this whole time. Didn’t know if you were the only person I’d run into. Thanks for making yourself easy to find.”

There’s a  halo of exhaustion on Veronica, running deep purples in the sleepless pocks beneath her eyes, to the way that her arms won’t reach up without a noticeably elbow bent. Muscle exhaustion, complicated by the added weight of the forearm-secured mechanism that kept her life well within reach. Knees are held unnaturally stiff. Made sense. To bypass the shambling hazmats, any person would have to crouch and tread silently for well past any healthy amount of time.

Veronica continues, “I really like what you did with the vents. Great home renovation. Really keeps me from seeing this place with rose-tinted glasses.”

Christine takes note of the wispy quality to the intruder’s words. The rolling masses of red fog takes the harshest toll in the beginning. On top of lung damage, there was the added complication of the neurotoxins cooked into the Big MT emissions. Part of brain function was tempted to shut down automatic breathing altogether; surviving took very conscious efforts to force the body to intake and exhale. Without a respirator, Veronica was clearly struggling to get full oxygen capacity.

Lowering her rifle, Christine tries not to betray any emotion.

Hard luck. There was always a twist to the right of her mouth, a sour grimace.

“Why the fuck,” she says softly; hoarse enough that it almost passed for her own, prior to the transplant, “Why would you slip in here? Did you come here to find Elijah?”

“And do what?” Freed of the obligation to raise her hands like a dolt, Veronica rubs at her red-rimmed eyes. “I only got his last recorded message from the Courier months after she’d left this place. And even then, I had to play bodyguard to a manchild ghoul for a couple of weeks before I could get the rest of the coordinates for the bunker. Courier didn’t want to tell me. Father Elijah, he--”

Grief steals over, and Veronica begins to cough in quick succession. Wheezing, she shudders, a thin line of spittle running from the edge of her mouth to the dip in her cowl.

“--Unless he eats gold, you know, he died of starvation,” she finishes, absentmindedly brushing away the line trailing across her lip. A rueful look crops up, pleading for the topic to move on.

“Then you’re here because. Let me guess. You are. A born-again masochist,” says Christine, drier than a bone.

“Thought I wasn’t, ‘til I saw you again. Dunno, maybe it has something going for it. Listen to you. Like some old-world starlet,” says Veronica. “I’d try to wink, but I think I’d just end up closing both eyes. I’m in a lot of pain.” She’s grinning. She looks beat up to shit.

Shouldering up her weapon, Christine beckons.

“Over this way. I have a stash of stimpacks and rations. Let’s catch up somewhere safer.”

---

Marching through the dilapidated hotel, Veronica drinks in the sight of ruined splendor. During the entire trek over, she avidly drank the babbling water of Christine’s new voice as she recounted all of the calamitous events, from their separation to the present. Each pain filled stretch of time was recounted with chilling detachment. Time had supplied Christine with more than enough self-reflection and bitter closure to know better than to attach fixation on top of the burden that PTSD already shouldered onto her daily routine.

The premier suite was the safest place of rest and operations. In a strange fit of pragmatic sentiment, on her way to the final confrontation with Elijah, the Courier had taken Vera’s bones to the square’s fountain and arranged them in a final nod to the woman whose legacy laid the groundwork for the Sierra Madre. As close of a burial as there could be in a sealed world, remnants placed below a flickering hologram that would forever loop her angled chin; the come-hither sharpness of a quizzically plucked brow.

Immediately, Veronica spotted the scarlet taffeta dress folded over the chair. Even in her sickly state, her eyes narrow in a lock-down.

“I’m wearing that,” she says, seemingly revived by a burst of manic energy.

Food and meds out of mind, Veronica peels off her hooded garment. All earth toned and layered, made for camouflage and inconspicuity; shapeless, in other words.

Hands traveling to the hem of the dress, Veronica pulls it over her head without ceremony, wriggling it as much as she can.

Without meaning to, Christine audibly smirks. Watching the dishevelled uncombed bob of brunette hair submerge into rich scarlett satin, then re-emerge like bobbing for air, was a hell of a sight. A lot of twisting ensued. Whoever Vera Keyes was, she must have been built like an amazon. The posters were no exaggeration; judging from the dress alone, and the amount that puddled around Veronica’s shins like a poorly conceived trail of fabric, the starlet could have inhabited a good six feet or more in luxuriant height and stature, posing atop glossy high heels.  

“Hey,” Veronica calls out, “Get this zipper in the back.” “Mm. No,” came the reply, as Christine fusses open a stimpack and two curling packets of RadAway. “Arm out first.”

Obliging with a whine, Veronica complies with the order to allow Christine to administer the kit and remove irradiation. Then, Christine reaches over places her fingertips on the sides of the open zipper maw.

Veronica’s back muscles tense up, anticipatory. Christine steadily draws up the zipper over Veronica’s tawny shoulder blades, fingertips brushing carefully to stay on the fabric. She knew Veronica hated cold hands. The corsetry hung off her ribs like a loose cage.

“This is a bust,” murmurs Christine,

“No, it’s not. I’d need two extra busts just to reach halfway.” Veronica pulls both her arms into the top of the garment, folding them across her chest to exaggerate the cavernous space. Even with her scrawny elbows sticking out to each end, the corset barely held tension into some odd facsimile of the intended structure.

Against her trauma-hardened stoicism, Christine burst out laughing. Already, this felt like the warmth of their old give and take, a natural beat that grew pride between the both of them. In better times. But even now, after eons.

“That’s-- Don’t move, you’ll trip.” she pleads.

“Now you can give me some food,” says Veronica, primly, before letting the gown fall to the floor in a noisy mass of ruffles, and stepping neatly out of it.

After redressing in her regular clothes, she went with her guide to the extensive food locker outfitted in Vera’s personal room. Between the two of them, they split a pack of artisanal salami and wax-sealed cheese. Other odd luxuries included freeze dried fruits, dessicated pistachios, and electrolyte infused mineral water.

Stifling a belch, Veronica ventures a new topic.

“Alright. So one percent of the time, this place isn’t hell on earth. But the other ninety-nine percent of the time, you’re singing to ghosts?”

Crumpling a piece of wax paper between forefinger and thumb, Christine replies, “Don’t judge. I only do that on occasion. Kills the time after the latest prospector refuses to take a warning, runs into the fog, and bites the dust.”

This was an opening made for Veronica to climb in with another one-liner.

Not to sit there and look genuinely anxious.

“This is bad.”

Christine was about to speak, but was cut off.

“--I get it, I can’t begin to imagine what you’ve been through.” The plain sincerity in Veronica’s voice could push stress forward like nothing else. “And I know your job is done, and it would be Armageddon 2.0 if anyone could really split open this place and engineer the fog for mass death across the Mojave and, odds aside, the rest of civilization.”

Armageddon. Now they were getting well and truly old world.

“Everyone who comes in is too dumb to know how to release the fog without dying. Father Elijah was the only one who came close, and he’s gone. This sounds awful, maybe, probably, but I think there’s no point in playing sentinel for rich ghosts if you’d just going to die in a few years of neurotoxin exposure regardless.”

Christine scowled, retorting, “Sure, and there’s no point in promoting anti-murder laws if people are just going to murder anyway, right?”

“I don’t-- That--” A frustrated high huff. “I’m not here to play government philosophy with you. I can’t tell you what to do with your hard fought freedom. I don’t even know if I’m making any sense.”

“Why did you risk your life to come here?”

“We used to be something.”

Christine’s expression was unreadable.

Veronica kept going. “I know time and calamity changes that. We aren’t going to be the same people after what we’ve been through. But if I’ve gotten anything from splitting from the Brotherhood to see more of the world, it’s that no one has time to be a machinery cog for a dying cause. This isn’t what we’re made for.”

She balled up a wrapper and opened her palm, where it slowly flattens back into the original shape. “This doctor I travel with. He said something that keeps me up, in a bad way. He was telling me. There wouldn’t be a point, evolutionarily, in having a consciousness if you couldn’t pursue higher ends than the circumstances you were forced into.”

Christine shifted uncomfortably. “Hypocrite. Thought you said that we weren’t going to play government philosophy.”

“I mean, I’m allowed to do that because I have a life. That’s all you’ve done for the last year by monitoring this hell cave.” Veronica closes her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose. “Hey. Christine. If nothing feels good to you anymore, then I won’t bother you. If you want to pummel your voice, your liver, your lungs for a bunch of dim prospectors who’ll never crack up the safe that killed off Father Elijah, of all people, maybe it does something for you I’ll never understand.”

She scoots forward, closing the distance between them.

“But I’m here. I came here to see you again. I don’t know that love can happen the way we are now, but you’re the only person I know who could help me guard so much more of the world out there. That’s your mission, right? Keeping the world safe?”

Just the rise and fall of their breaths together. Filling the small room, where Vera’s dying message still shrouded the wall facing across from them.

Veronica continues, “Between the two of us, we can push west and try to reach the other Brotherhood of Steel members. It isn’t too late to push the case for opening up knowledge. And look, if they’re already sharing out their technology, great. Mission accomplished. But if they’re as stingy and bullheaded as our bunker, then they must be thinning out in their ranks, too. They could use our skills. We could influence them to keep this stupid, beautiful world pumping along for a few more decades.”

She looks ready to keep that tirade launching, but Christine cut her off shortly.

“Nothing here changes,” she says, in her borrowed voice. “A perfect stasis since the Courier left. I’m so tired of upheavals. Going from place to place to extinguish genocidal maniacs. Getting more of me ripped up along the way whenever my body is convenient, or forgotten. Since my lobotomy, I can’t even read or write. I used to be a scribe, Vee. I used to know what I sounded like.”

Veronica seemed to wilt. Spontaneously, without smiling, Christine brushed aside a few locks of Veronica’s bangs out of her eyes.

“You really need a haircut.”

“You’re not coming back with me,” Veronica says, sounding like tinfoil crumpling.

“As long as I sleep in this ventilated space, there’s barely progression on the neurotoxin’s effects. RadAway helps. I’ll live longer than you think. The supplies in this place were meant to last for a lifetime. Several of them.”

“I wouldn’t let anyone hurt you that bad again,” says Veronica.

“Me neither.” Christine stood up, picking up discarded packaging to toss out. A bizarre gesture to think about, now that there was another flesh-and-blood human being to reference for some standard of normalcy. Putting objects in wastebaskets seemed a little nonsensical without a furnace disposal system. The least it could do for now was to occupy her hands and glances, away from Veronica’s expression.

“What does your good life look like?” asks Christine, distantly, as Veronica bites back a sob.

“It hasn’t changed since the last time we spoke.” Years ago. “I can’t stand by and watch inefficiency. It’s actually physically intolerable. That’s probably why I was such a good apprentice for Father Elijah. We could-- I could, engineer so many better possibilities for the world to use.”

“Vee, come here.”

When they kissed, Christine’s cheeks took an imprint of the tears running down Veronica’s face.

“You will move on,” Christine says, simply. “You always do. I liked that about you the most. I was really crappy at that. Still am.”

Veronica swallowed painfully, as though the pain rose like fumes and crackled her words from transmitting clearly. “You’re one of the best things about my life.”

“Stay the night,” says Christine.

“There is no night!” sob-laughs Veronica.

Christine studies Veronica’s face intently, brushing a knuckle down the side of her face slowly.