Chapter 101: Patient Log

Chapter 101: Patient Log

I'm going to be perfectly honest. The 'list of things which happened today that I wasn't expecting to have happen today' got really long that first day in the Big Empty. But heading the list, without a question or shadow of doubt, had to be... well. I'm sure you can guess.

By the time I got back up to The Sink, it was almost 4 in the morning.

"Welcome home, sir," Jeeves said as I groggily stumbled out of the elevator. I hadn't bothered to put most of my weapons back after having to discard them in all the fun, and they were slung over my shoulder. Hell, even my armor was hanging loose on me, with hardly any of the buckles... hang on, did I remember my belt? "I trust that sir had a pleasant evening, given that sir is only just returning?"

"Buh..." I coughed out. "I'm not entirely sure 'pleasant' is quite the right word, Jeeves." Yes it was. "Exhausting, maybe. Definitely. I'm absolutely spent." I let out a weak chuckle, just as Roxie bounded into the room; she barked at me, and nuzzled her face against one of my legs. I reached down and started scratching her behind the ears.

"Indeed, sir," Jeeves replied. "If sir is in the mood for some refreshment, I took the liberty of ordering a number of comestibles, which are currently waiting in the fridge for sirs consumption. Or perhaps sir is desirous for me to draw sir a hot bath, to soothe sirs weary and aching bones?"

"Uh... thanks, that's very..." I coughed, and stumbled into the next room, dropping the weapons I had slung over my shoulder. "Thanks man, but I'm... I just want to get some sleep. I am so tired..." I peeled off my duster, and tossed it on the couch. Jeeves voice continued speaking to me from a pair of speakers in the ceiling.

"You are indeed quite the picture of debility and incapacity, if sir will forgive me a momentary impertinence for saying so. Would sir care for an alarm call?" I shook my head, finally discarding the rest of my armor ... and flopped down face-first onto the bed. "Very good, sir. Good night, sir." As I slowly sank into the bed, I became vaguely aware that the lights were dimming. Roxie hopped up onto the bed, licked my face twice, and then the massive dog curled up next to me as I drifted off to sleep.

Squeaking.

Something is squeaking. Something... what is that?

I cracked my eyes open as slowly as I could; even this dim light was murder. Everything was fuzzy when I tried to look around...

Eyes. Tiny, beady eyes were staring at me, no more than a few inches away from my face. A tiny mouth opened up, and let out a dreadful, tinny squeak.

"WAUGH!" I screamed, as all my senses finally snapped into sharp focus... almost. My limbs flailed around uncontrollably, and I slid gracelessly off the bed, hitting the cold metal floor with a thud. As I lay there on the floor between the bed and the wall in a twisted, mangled heap of uncoordinated body parts, a pair of animal faces (and paws) emerged from the top edge of the bed. Roxie looked down at me, clearly happy that I was awake again, and Stripe was also looking at me... his beady eyes and squeaky mouth clearly responsible for getting me up.

"Good morning, sir," I heard Jeeves' voice from the speaker in the ceiling. "I took the liberty of setting out some food for sirs pets earlier. However, I do not believe that sirs pets are quite aware of that fact. They seem to me, sir, that they are trying to alert sir of their ravenous appetites."

"Buh..." I rubbed my face, clutching feverishly at the side of the bed, in a vain attempt to get the rest of my body to work. "What time is it?"

"The time is precisely seven minutes past ten." There was a pause. "And a bit."

"Alright..." I dragged myself up into a sitting position. "Okay... I should probably get moving..." I scratched Roxie behind the ears, and she started licking my face. "We should probably start by finding that food, what do you say?"

Roxie barked her approval.

There were several things I wanted to get done today. Get more of the technologies for the Think Tank, find some more personality constructs for The Sink, head to X-12 and see if I could find that minigun, and finally, I wanted to travel to Y-17, see if I could piece together more details about the events surrounding Christine, Elijah, and the unknown third party. Only problem was, I couldn't figure out which one to do first. So, I decided to try something scientific.

"Hey, Jeeves?" I asked, sliding Roscoe in his holster. "Pick a number between 1 and 4."

About half a mile south-west from X-8 was the Y-17 medical facility. Or, at least, that's what I'd been told. When I arrived at the location indicated on my Pip Boy's map, I started to wonder if, perhaps, this was one of the labs that had gotten up and walked away, because... well... there didn't seem to be anything here.

"Hmm..." I muttered, scratching my head. "Well, what do you think, Rox? There's nothing but craters here... I suppose it could've been vaporized by one of those artillery strikes we saw earlier, right?" I looked down - past Stripe sitting on my shoulder - and realized that Roxie was no longer anywhere near my feet.

"Roxie? Where'd you-" I caught a glimpse of her tail disappearing behind some rubble, and immediately set off in pursuit. That nose of hers had led me straight to Higgs village, after all. I should probably trust the judgment of the pooch.

So I followed her tail as best I could. She scampered over and around several piles of rubble, rocks, craters, and finally jumped down out of sight behind a broken concrete wall. I dropped down after her seconds later, and quickly realized that, yes, this was definitely Y-17.

Probably.

Thing is, most of the building was gone. Reduced to rubble and broken walls. All that was left was a single elevator, with only one way to go: down. Roxie was staring at the door; Stripe jumped off my shoulder and scurried along the concrete ground, also staring at the door as he moved. Honestly? I couldn't really blame them, because what I saw on the door appeared incredibly out of place.

"What the..." Something had been drawn on the elevator door in red spray paint. It looked like it had been there a while, but the red was still a vibrant and stark contrast to the dull grays and browns surrounding it. A circle of thirteen stars - arranged in a circle - with a single large star in the center; underneath the circle of stars were five stripes going down, almost like claw marks. It reminded me a little (okay, okay, a LOT) of the American flag from before the bombs. But why had the person only used the one color? Wasn't it supposed to be red, white, and blue?

I didn't have much time to contemplate the colors of the stars and stripes, because I was interrupted at that point by a very unwelcome sound. It was the sound of something hissing and rattling, and it was coming from directly above me. I barely had time to look up before the nightstalker was leaping off the top of the elevator and going directly for my face.

"SON OF A BITCH!" I fell backwards, trying to get out of the way of the ravenous coyote-rattlesnake hybrid. I raised my Pip Boy up to protect my face just in time - its enormous fanged maw clamped down on the metal computer attached to my arm, rather than my face. Within seconds, I'd fallen flat on my ass with this thing on top of me, trying to swallow the wrist computer and my arm along with it - hell, it looked like it was trying to dislocate parts of its jaw to swallow my arm whole!

"Sorry, I'm not on the menu!" I yelled. In one swift motion, I pulled one of my combat knives out of its sheath, and plunged it into the side of the nightstalkers head. It let out a muffled yelp, and the grip on my arm loosened considerably. It was enough to let me shove it to the side and start to get up.

And then I heard another pair of rattling tails...

Six minutes later, I was standing in front of the elevator, surrounded by almost a dozen nightstalker corpses.

"Roxie?" I called out, checking how much ammo I had left. "Stripe? You guys okay?" I still had half a clip for Roscoe, one shell for the sawed-off on my hip, and three bullets for That Gun. I hadn't used the Ranger Sequoia or the MP5, and the Holorifle was back in The Sink; I only had two microfusion cells left for that one, and I hadn't found any more yet. Out of everything, the pulse gun and the sonic probably had the most ammo.

I pulled my last knife out of one of the nightstalkers just in time to see Roxie poke her head out from behind some rubble... and then Stripe poked his head out from behind Rox. It almost looked like the tiny deathclaw was riding on the cyberdog's back.

"Oh good, you two are okay," I wiped the knife on the edge of my duster's sleeve, and sheathed the knife. I walked over to the elevator, and hit the button. The doors opened almost immediately. "You guys wanna see what's inside?"

Ding.

The elevator doors ground open with a shudder; my MP5 was drawn and at the ready... but I was greeted by nothing but an empty hallway.

"Huh," I said aloud, lowering the submachine gun. "The way this day was going, I half expected something to attack me." Stripe squeaked from his perch. Of course, he wasn't on my shoulder anymore - he was still sitting on Roxie's back, holding onto one of the metal pieces bolted to the cyberdog's spine.

The door at the end of the hall slid open when we all got close, and it led into a two-story room, ringed with catwalks along the upper edges of the room, and a metal staircase that led up to the catwalks in the middle of the room. Lining the walls were row after row of machines - servers, terminals, and large boxes with faded medical symbols printed on the front. In the center of the room, under the stairs and buried beneath a massive pile of rubble was a cylindrical auto-doc, identical to the ones I'd seen in the Sierra Madre.

Something was buzzing. A shrill buzz that was loud... A very familiar, and very unwelcome sound, just like the rattling I'd heard coming from the nightstalker earlier. I turned to face the sound... and there, perched on top of the elevator, in almost the same place as the first nightstalker, was a cazador.

"FUCK!" I yelled, pulling the sawed off out of my hip holster and breaking into a sprint away from the giant insect. "Rox! RUN!" I fired off my last shotgun shell, but it barely seemed to even stagger the giant bug. The buzzing got louder and it lifted off the elevator. The chase was on.

I started running. Thankfully, Roxie had taken my advice and was loping along ahead of me; she was going so fast, that I felt I could barely keep pace... but somehow, I managed to pour on enough speed to do just that. Behind me I could hear the cazador buzzing as it flitted through the air in pursuit.

Something interesting to note: I didn't appreciate it at the time, but when I replayed the scene in my head later... I realized that I wasn't actually scared 'in the moment' as it happened. I recognized that the cazador was a dangerous, imminent threat, but... I didn't have that surge of adrenaline, and my mind wasn't screaming at me like I would be if I was truly afraid. My mind was clear, and I was able to think, free of fear, and I suppose that's what helped me think clearly enough to navigate.

"Rox!" I called out as I ran over pipes and darted around rocky outcrops and rubble. "I hope you have an idea, because I got nothing!" I pulled Roscoe out of his holster and let off a few badly aimed shots to try and buy me some time as I kept running. The cazador just seemed to dart through the air, as if dodging the shots.

I let out a string of expletives that would've made Cass blush, and holstered Roscoe - only to realize that I'd lost Roxie. It didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was that I had to keep running. I'd find Roxie la-

"WHOA!" The ground dropped out from under me, and I suddenly found myself falling. I crashed against a hard stone wall, and hit my head before finally coming to rest - once again - on my ass. "Augh! Fucking - gah! Son of a..." I clutched my head, and tried to look around through one open eye. "Where the fu-" The buzzing was directly overhead. I shut up, still clutching my head. And then, the buzzing passed. Everything was quiet. I sighed, and looked around in earnest.

I was in a cave. Or... something. There was a ladder, and directly above me was a hatch made out of metal, but this was definitely... I couldn't tell if this cave was natural, or... Whatever it was, I was thankful for the unexpected save. And even more thankful when Roxie appeared next to me from nowhere and started licking my face.

"Ugh..." I grunted out with a smile, scratching the dog below Stripe's foot; the tiny deathclaw was still clinging Roxie's neck, riding on her back. "Warn me next time you're gonna do that, that fucking hurt..." I laughed, and Roxie whined, nuzzling her face against me. "Alright, alright, thanks for the save, girl. So, what is this place?"

I clutched at the rock wall, trying to pick myself up. There was a tunnel opposite the ladder that led deeper into the cave... and now that my eyes had adjusted, I could see that there was a faint light coming from within.

"Huh..." I said, letting go of my head and giving it a decent shake. "Wonder what's behind door number one..."

It was a hideout. If the wall of sandbags at the entrance was anything to go by, it was a very well fortified hideout, made by someone either unnecessarily paranoid, or properly paranoid. The light was coming from the planters all around the cave, filled with bioluminescent mushrooms that lit up the place in a dull green glow. There were several shelves filled with tools, ammo cans, and various other bits of detritus. Two old US Army bedrolls were on the ground, on either end of the cave, with the remains of a long extinguished campfire between them. And I only knew they were US Army bedrolls because they were dark green, and had a white Army star with "PROPERTY OF THE US ARMY" written in stenciled paint in the corner.

The strangest thing were the flags. The most obvious was an actual American flag, and it was hanging on the cave wall above one of the bedrolls. It was tattered and faded, but completely unmistakable. What were less obvious were the flag symbols. They were roughly the same kind of flag symbol I'd seen on the elevator door, and they were drawn all over the inside of the cave... it was almost like whoever had drawn them was practicing them over and over again until they got it right. Red symbols... blue symbols... white symbols...

"You find something?" I asked, realizing that Roxie was sniffing the ground, near a pair of open (and sadly, empty) ammo boxes. I knelt down to look at what she was interested in... and found another pair of holotapes. They had identical labels as the one I'd seen before: Patient Log: Y-17.5 and Patient Log: Y-17.9.

I decided to play number 5 first.

"... don't want to argue philosophy with you," I heard Christine say. The holotape must have been corrupted or something - it sounded like it started in the middle of another recording. "The Brotherhood are preservationists. Tech in the wrong hands... it's, it's dangerous. I mean, look at the Mojave! That's proof right there!"

The voice that spoke next was... different. To say the least. It was strong. Deep. Impossibly masculine. And almost completely monotone. I could tell... somehow... that the owner of this gravelly, deep voice was a man who had seen much, and lost even more. I don't know how I knew that, but... there was just no emotion in his words - except maybe exhaustion. Like everything had just been wrung out of him.

It frightened me more than the cazador.

"No denying that. Proof's here in this crater, all around us. Your tribe, the Brotherhood - haven't met many of you. Wanted to. Thought you might be the last chance for the Mojave... the West. The East. But you're all the same mind. Obsessed."

"Elijah is obsessed!" Christine spat back. "He's mad! It's why the other Elders ordered his execution." The other unnamed voice grunted.

"Two are more alike than you know. Too wrapped up in the wrong bits of history to see ahead." He paused for a long time. "Not judging. I know how it is. People are like couriers, you and him. Sometimes don't even know the message they bring. You all had a new flag. Thought maybe new ideas along with it. What you believe isn't any better than the Bear or Bull. No future in either."

"So says the man with the Old World flag on his back," Christine snorted. "America... the Commonwealth. Burned away."

"America sleeps," the other voice growled. "And until it's dead, I carry it. Just like I carried you. More than hope. Belief. There's voices here in the Big Empty. I want to talk to them. Not like your Elijah did. Got questions. Want to hear history give its answer."

The recording clicked off. I was rooted in place. Even Roxie and Stripe seemed to have been transfixed by it.

"Who is this guy?" I whispered aloud. Roxie lied down, setting her head on her paws. I grabbed the other holotape, and started the playback.

"Huh..." Christine sighed, almost like she was relieved. "Didn't think you'd make it back."

"Almost didn't," the other voice grunted out. "Got my answers. Your Elijah, he met the Gods in this place. Did a good job of making them question the way of things."

"Do you know where he went?" Christine asked urgently, and I realized - she wasn't relieved that this guy who saved her, whoever he was, was safe, but that her lead was still intact.

"He's gone to the Sierra Madre," the other voice said simply. "That's a special kind of hell. He won't come back. Someone smarter, tougher's going to kill him. If the Madre doesn't."

I laughed softly to myself; well, I suppose that would mean I qualified, since I killed the son of a bitch, in the end...

"I have to go after him." Christine's voice was forceful, resolute. There was a very long pause before the other voice spoke again.

"Not going to talk you out of it. Know what it means to track someone you share history with. Got a meeting of my own."

"That courier?" Christine asked. The other voice grunted out a "hmm," before speaking again properly.

"Get him to come to me. Got a message for him, like the message he had for me. Make him walk the road West, straight and true. Sink his feet in Old World ash. Let storms tear at him. See the Divide. See what happened."

My blood ran cold. Another courier... was he talking about... No... no, he couldn't be talking about... that's just not possible...

"The Divide?" Christine asked, confusion evident in her voice. "But... there's nothing there..."

"Nothing there?" The other voice asked. "Like the Big Empty? The Sierra Madre?" He grunted again. "No... no, the Old World sleeps there. Sure as the flag I carry. Courier Six knows the way."

WHAT.

"And at the Divide, he and I - there, we'll have an ending to things."