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“I treated a man…a…I don’t even know if we could call him a man, the amount of drugs we put into him”
The fire crackled and popped in the centre of the group; a rag-tag selection of travellers, misfits and vagabonds. Some were seated around, alone or in small cloisters - others milling in the background. It had been days on the road, moving across the harsh wastes of the desert landscape, and slowly, night after night this had become the norm. It was a long way to New Vegas, after all, even if they were only travelling part of the way with the Caravan.
Stories around a campfire - the oldest form of entertainment around. It was inevitable that someone would start, and that others would join, night after night, sharing their tales under the radiation tinted stars, above.
It was the doctor's turn tonight, a weathered old woman with crows feet deep as the cracks in the dry earth beneath them, eyes starting to turn milky with age.
“A ghoul, or a man?” one of the audience asked, a young woman - red hair half plaited, the rest fanning around her like fringe on an old jacket. She laughed like she already knew, and Lucy had been surprised to see a pip-boy peeking from beneath her old coat.
“Ghoul” the doctor confirmed with a swallow, hacking out a dry cough before continuing. “Didn’t see his face, all covered up with a bandana but his eyes, I’ll never forget those eyes. It was out Boston way, years back - before I decided to move out west, like my ancestors did. I was travellin’ town to town and city to city, deliverin’ babies and fixin’ up gunshots - you all know how it is, out there.
“Commonwealth’s…nasty, I hear?”
The priest, a quiet one in the group so far but very upright, very proper. The kind of man who set Cooper’s teeth on edge.
“I’ve always wanted to go out there, to preach to those who suffer so greatly…”
The old woman blinked at him, thin lips pulled back in thinly veiled disgust. “Right,”
Silence prevailed for a few moments before she carried on, shooting the man of the cloth a withering look. “Anyway, my son and I, he was only young at the time, we ended up travelling through the ruins of Boston, looking for a place to sleep. Happened upon an absolute shithole called Goodneighbour, biggest selection of wastrels and addicts you’ve ever seen. And the moment I say I’m a doctor I’m dragged into this room where a man's been strapped to a table and a ghoul in a fucking tricorn hat’s tryin’ to remove a bullet with his bare hands!”
Gasps echoed from around the fire and she leaned in, knowing she had a captive audience.
“What happened?”
“So, the man in the getup looks to me, pupils the size of dinner plates, and my boy just pushed him out of the way like he was a leaf in the morning breeze. Didn’t fight it or nothing, just stepped to the side and sagged against the pock-marked wall. Muttered about timing and me being heaven-sent, usual crap”
“No,” the redhead laughed, shaking her head. “With the man on the table!”
The old woman snorted, shaking her head slowly - wild hair almost floating above her head with the motion.
“Well,” she laughed, “it turned out the gunshot wound was a gunshot wound; a lacerated abdomen, and a knife so close to his groin it’d nearly taken off a part he likely held quite dear”
Lucy cackled to herself beside him, blowing cool air over the hot broth in her cup.
“So I ask if they have any sedatives. I’d seen the eyes of the ghoul in the frock coat and hat, and knew they had stuff lying around. No use wasting my precious reserves, you understand, if this place has more drugs than a pre-war Mardi Gras party. And they tell me they’ve already given him 3 inhalers of Jet!”
On the outside of the group, close enough to hear but far enough to offer privacy, Cooper leaned in close, lips tickling the shell of Lucy’s ear. She, of course, was transfixed - as she was every time a story was told, though Cooper had to admit the old bag knew how to tell a tale.
“It was four, actually. We counted em’ after she left”
Lucy waved him away, then turned faster than a rattlesnake, eyes wide, voice low. “She’s talking about you?”
He nodded, savouring the taste of the whiskey he’d found a few nights back.
“Well…don’t spoil the end. Shut up”
He huffed, chuckling. “Alright, ma’am, consider me quietened”
“So I’m worryin’, right,” the old woman continued, “because if we give him more he could overdose, but if we don’t sedate him, well…if the shock didn’t kill him my son would, as I knew he’d come up swingin’ the moment I started trying to fix him up.”
“How much did it take?”
The question came from the priest, this time, talking over the redhead. Cooper hated the radiation worshipping freaks, and so far, this one was no exception.
“Ooh…” the doctor whistled, “in the end, it took at least five extra hits of jet, and I used half my supply of anaesthetic just tryin’ to numb the area. Because I was right - that fella came up swingin’ the moment I pulled out the knife lodged next to his pecker like he thought I was gonna finish off the job. Guts half out, skin already startin’ to heal, and he’s worried over his old boy, not his digestive tract…” she turned to the young woman, winking. “Men, am I right?”
“I wouldn’t…”
“So we hit him round the head with a pan, instead!”
Silence cast across the group for a second, and Lucy turned towards Cooper, eyebrows raised in question.
“Thought you were payin’ attention.”
“And I thought you were more sensible than…that!”
“I’ve cut down a fair bit since then, don’t you worry.”
He had. He’d gone on a small bender after those idiots had pulled him from the grave, but Lucy’s disapproving looks proved too hard to ignore, after a while. Goodneighbour had been a riot though, all the chems he could consume and folk’s who didn’t look at him like he was mad. And that mayor…
Would it be wrong to take a new flame to visit your old one, as the nostalgia of the story had him missing that little town like an old friend? Though he supposed even callin’ Hancock a flame was a bit generous.
The group laughed as the woman mimed it, then swooned, pretending to be her own patient. “So we strapped him down for good measure-”
“Nono” one of the other interrupted. Some kinda lawman, Cooper guessed, given the self-righteous way he lorded it over the others, stickin’ real cosy with the priest. Too cosy, he reckoned - like they were plannin’ something against the others. There was nothing more suspicious than shouted morality, out here.
“You got a problem with my story?”
“That’s enough to knock out a Brahmin, you’re lying!”
She shook her head, smirking. “I assure you I am not. I found out after that the poncy fella in the getup was the Mayor, so you can hightail it back to Boston to check, if you fancy.”
“Oh, who cares if it’s not true!” a young man to the side snapped, so covered in guns and ammo it was cute, really. He kept to himself but watched Cooper like a hawk, especially whilst he and his Vaultie had been workin’ on her target practice with some of the less…traditional weapons than they’d had in her little underground enclosure.
“So anyway, once we’d knocked him out I stuffed his guts back in him, found a load of shrapnel he’d been walking around with for god knows how long, stitched up his groin-” she paused, cackling in that way only old women did, mischief pouring from every pore. “And wasn’t that just a treat, lovely specimen-”
He elbowed Lucy, who just snorted into her tin cup of Moonshine.
“Hear that, you should consider yoursel’ lucky,”
“Shut up.”
Her laugh was quiet but musical, and it burned low in his belly - the same belly that still held the scars from the old womans ministrations, somewhere under all of the others. He’d gone years, decades without makin’ people laugh in the right way, the best way, but the lil’ lady beside him was effortlessly easy to please.
“Got the bullet out too, had to knock him back out halfway through that one which popped a load of the new stitches in his torso, and I felt like I’d wrestled a brahmin, by the end of it.”
“Did he survive?”
For the briefest moment, an impulsive part of Cooper's brain considered standing up and answering for the woman, but he refused. That was the part of him, the extroverted, cocky, impossible part of him that charmed its way through Hollywood. The part of him he desperately wanted to forget.
“I believe so, though never got his name. Went back through Goodneighbour a few years later and the same wastral of a mayor told me he’d lived, that he’d moved down California way. Didn’t see his face though, just those eyes…like fire, behind ‘em. No doubt raiders’ll have got him by now, those were the eyes of someone who doesn’t know when to stop, when to settle down…I like to think of him as a ghost though, still wandering the plains in that cowboy getup, spurs janglin’…”