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“Why did you run ahead like that?” Cyrus side-eyed the bodies of the Freeside thugs that had dropped like flies moments before.
“Call it a hunch,” Orris smirked, gesturing with his revolver. “You do this job long enough and you learn to trust your instincts.”
That went without saying. Cyrus had fallen back on his instincts time and time again in his trek from Goodsprings to New Vegas, circuitous as it had been. They rarely failed him in combat; they never failed him with people.
“Hey,” he began, cautiously testing the waters, safe in the knowledge that ED-E – and maybe even Arcade, if he felt like it – would back him up if it went south. “You only fired three shots and there are four guys there…”
Bingo. The conman’s confident grace locked up under the scrutiny. It hadn’t even been an outright accusation, yet Cyrus could see the shift in his posture even under all that armor.
“Er, noticed that, did you? I keenly aimed one of the shots through some soft tissue of one of them to hit the man behind him.” Orris was sweating from more than the heat at this point.
Cyrus exchanged a brief look with Arcade, but neither made any comment. The researcher and self-proclaimed subject of no interest may not have been as good with people as Cyrus, but he was keener than the marks this man must have been used to, judging by his lackluster improv.
“Let’s get moving.”
As Orris resumed his path, Cyrus touched Arcade’s shoulder lightly.
‘Distract,’ he signaled. Arcade rolled his eyes, managing to convey his usual deadpan sass even through a disdainful grimace, but complied, falling into step behind the fake bodyguard. ED-E hovered over to the pair, puttering quietly, after a brief additional sign to redirect his “Follow” command.
“Impressive gunmanship. Where’d you learn a thrifty technique like that?”
Cyrus pressed the tip of his middle finger between his eyes, lamenting his companion’s inability to sound sincere for even two seconds. There wasn’t time for critique, however.
Kneeling down, he grabbed one wrist and then another as he stopped at each “corpse,” quickly confirming his suspicions: all four were fine, merely playing dead and – more likely than not – on Orris’s payroll. Cyrus let out a disgruntled huff through his nose. The half of him with medical training was relieved; the half with a sense of self-preservation was just annoyed. The King would have this dealt with swiftly, no doubt.
He went to stand, but a subtle movement caught his eye. When he had let the last man’s arm drop, he had winced, even though it had connected only with his own thigh on its descent. Checking the arm again, this time without the distraction of searching for a pulse, he noticed a patch of discoloration on the man’s dirt-coated, tanned skin, peeking out from under the hem of his glove.
Instinctively, Cyrus flipped out his switchblade and sliced the glove off in one swift drag of the blade up the seam. Peeling away a small, folded piece of cloth revealed a deep laceration between the thumb and index finger with an unsurprisingly advanced infection considering the state the man had left it in. The skin around it was red and warm to the touch. Cyrus pressed down on the nail beds of the two closest digits and timed the return of color to the flesh. It took less than three seconds. The heat and discoloration also seemed to have stayed fairly close to the wound itself. All things considered, he wasn’t too bad off.
With Arcade’s thinly-veiled and - more pertinently - swiftly fading snark setting his timer, Cyrus pulled a bottle of vodka from his pack along with an empty syringe and set to work.
“Hold still,” he whispered, sanitizing his hands with the liquor first. “Stay as quiet as you can.” The last thing either of them needed at this point was Orris circling back for them.
With a spare rag, Cyrus pressed into the wound, expressing as much of the pus as he could get. The patient flinched, his face contorting in pain, but to his credit, he kept silent. Throwing the spent rag under the car the man was slumped against, Cyrus dipped the tip of the needless syringe into the vodka and pulled back on the plunger until it was full.
“This is the part that’ll sting,” he muttered before shooting a stream of what he kept reminding himself was far less alcohol than a life was worth into the wound. The man winced and hissed as the disinfectant hit the open flesh, but still held his tongue admirably behind clenched teeth.
Tossing the empty syringe aside, Cyrus dipped a fresh square of folded linen from his pre-sanitized stash into the bottle for good measure before laying it over the wound. As he wrapped clean strips over the gauze to keep it in place and around the thumb and index finger to splint them together, he ran through what advice he could off the top of his head.
“Keep it covered, keep it clean. If it doesn’t get better, stop by the Old Mormon Fort. Tell the Followers Cyrus sent you. Hell, stop by later today if you can. They’ll take better care of you than I could here.”
Slipping the rest of the bottle and a handful of extra cloth strips into a pocket of the man’s overalls, he patted the stranger’s shoulder and pushed himself up on the car. Pulling off his hat and wiping his brow with the back of his hand, Cyrus checked the temperature on his Pip-Boy just as a little pop-up reminded him of where he was supposed to be as his mark gained more and more distance on him. With one half-glance back, he jogged to rejoin their little tour group once more.
Rounding the corner, he nearly ran smack into ED-E, floating right at head height, and smiled when he realized the little guy had waited for him instead of following Arcade like he had indicated to. Cyrus made a mental note to double-check his modifications to the “Follow” command’s code, but found the glitch sweet nonetheless.
“What did I say about sightseeing?” Orris yelled gruffly from a block away, waiting for Cyrus and the eyebot to catch up.
“Sorry.” Cyrus gave his best sheepish smile, preferring to finish this job without any further complications. “Couldn’t help myself.”