New Vegas: Sheason's Story

Chapter 22: Success and Failure

It was the middle of the night when I found myself walking along the streets of New Vegas. At least, I'm pretty sure it was New Vegas. I was walking past the Freeside sign, and off in the distance I could see the skyscrapers of all the casinos on the strip. But... something was wrong somehow. There was a subtle strangeness in the atmosphere permeating everything...

Was I asleep? Was this a dream? I mean, I couldn't quite recall how I got here. I didn't think this was a dream, though: for one thing, I never questioned a dream until after I'd already woken up. So why would I start now? Besides, this felt different than a dream. It was just incredibly hard to put my finger on just what was striking me as odd...

That was when it hit me like an alpha Deathclaw punching me in the face: there were no people. This was Las Vegas Boulevard, right in the middle of Freeside, and in the short time I'd been in Vegas, I'd never seen it empty at any time, day or night. So I kept walking, looking for any signs of life at all. What I found... didn't really qualify. It was the entrance to The Strip.

There weren't any Securitrons. There weren't any spotlights. The neon lights that previously announced "Welcome to The Strip" were missing. What I saw instead were dozens of flags and banners hanging off the wall: large, red flags, emblazoned with the image of a golden bull. The top of the wall was dotted with torches and fire pits. And right above the gate was a large bronze disk, emblazoned with the relief of Caesar in profile.

"What the hell?" I said out loud. I couldn't help myself.

"It's a damn shame, isn't it? The greatest city left in the world, and it's been reduced to scrap by an army of barbarians," The voice came out of nowhere and made me jump. I spun around, trying to find the source, and my eyes fell on the last person I ever expected to see again.

"Benny?!" I couldn't believe my eyes. But there he was, wearing his black and white checkered jacket and looking up at the city with his hands in his pockets. "How are... I mean... you're-"

"Dead?" He almost smirked as he took out a pack of cigarettes from inside his jacket, grabbing one of the smokes with his mouth. "Yeah... It's impossible, isn't it? Talking to a dead guy. Well... unless, of course, the cat doing the talking is already dead himself. Don't you think that's interesting, Courier?"

A horrible sinking feeling materialized in the pit of my stomach. Benny just lit the cigarette in his mouth and took a long draw.

"No. No way. There's just no fucking way..." I couldn't bring myself to finish that thought.

"I have to admit, I expected to see you a lot sooner," he let out a puff of smoke. "Way I understand it, you bit the big one only a few days after I did. But here you arrive now, months gone by, having missed all the action.

"But this doesn't make sense!" I shouted. "How am I dead? How are you the only one here? Why are you being so civil to me? What the fuck is going on?!" Benny just sighed.

"Yeah... that's about what I thought. This is gonna take a while. Smoke?" He offered the open box of cigarettes to me, but I waved them away. He just shrugged and continued offering them to me. "It's not like they're gonna kill you a second time, dig?"

"Maybe later," I replied. He chuckled, and moved towards the front gate.

"C'mon Courier. Let's go for a walk."

The next thing I knew, Benny and I were walking along The Strip... or what was left of it. There were Legionnaires everywhere, and slaves in rags being led away in chains. The road was lined with heads on spikes and crosses. Some of the crosses had bodies tied or nailed to them; some... only had skeletons left. From afar, the casinos had looked mostly intact, but now that I saw them up close I realized that every building on The Strip looked like they'd been dropped in a warzone. There wasn't a single structure that didn't have hundreds of bullet holes or collapsed sections... except for the Lucky 38. Amazingly, that was the only building that looked relatively untouched.

"Alright, can you start explaining to me what the fuck is going on?" I said looking around. A group of Legionnaires passed us by, not even looking up. "And why is no one paying any attention to us?"

"God, but are you thick, aren't you?" Benny just chuckled as the two of us walked down the middle of The Strip. "What part of bein' dead don't you get, Courier? They're not paying attention to us, because they can't see us. They can't see us, because we no longer belong to the world of the living. As for what's going on, I thought it was obvious. The Legion's captured Vegas, and Caesar has turned it into his own personal Rome. You diggin' the vibe I'm laying down, daddy-o?"

"I..." My mind was trying its best to come to grips with this. It was a lot to take in, in a very short amount of time. "Do you know how I died, at least?"

"Massive internal bleeding. It didn't help that you had radiation poisoning from House's vault under the Fort." Benny took another draw from his cigarette, and tossed it aside. "At least, that's what it looked like on the ride back to Vegas. I'm not a doctor, so I don't know for sure. I'm sure Usanagi's here... somewhere. Damn near everyone else I knew in Vegas died when Caesar rolled into town. I've never run into her though."

"Radiation poisoning?" I couldn't help but sigh. "Not exactly the most dignified death I could've asked for. Did I at least get a proper burial?" When I said that, Benny laughed out loud, and took out another smoke.

"Yeah... you had a burial like mine." I thought about that for a second. And then my heart sank.

"I think I'll take one of those smokes now," I said with a grimace. He patted me on the shoulder, handing me the box of cigarettes.

"Sorry about that, kid, but your friends had bigger fish to fry, what with the Legion right on the tail of that hopped-up hot rod of yours. They couldn't worry about putting you in the ground when you finally bought it. The only one who stayed by your corpse was the robot, but the tin-can didn't exactly have any hands."

"So what happened to them?" As I asked, he offered his lighter and lit my cigarette. "My friends, I mean."

"Well..." Benny seemed to think for a minute before responding. "The robot didn't leave. He hovered around you, trying to protect your body 'til the Legion found him. It took them a while, but they eventually smashed him up. Cass... last I saw of her, she was driving that Corvega of yours West. Veronica went back to her bunker, and I haven't seen her since, but I doubt she survived. Hidden Valley was blown up a few weeks after the Legion took Vegas. And Boone, well, he staged a suicide mission against the Legion. Took out several hundred Legionaries before they finally caught him. They crucified him outside the Vegas walls. When Legate Lanius was going to compliment him for his 'reckless abandon,' Boone spat tobacco in his eye. I have to admit, though, Arcade's the one I feel the most sorry for."

"What do you mean? What happened to Arcade?" I felt like I was not going to like the answer. I was right.

"He was captured by the Legion a few weeks after you died. Apparently, Caesar made Arcade his personal physician, and spent the last few months 'speaking with him on philosophical matters.' I'm guessing that Caesar isn't as good a conversationalist as he thinks he is, because a few days ago, Arcade cut his own guts out with a scalpel and his bare hands. And wouldn't you know it, he was the only doctor in the Legion."

I felt ill. I couldn't rightly see how, given that I was already dead, so by all rights I shouldn't have been feeling anything. Then again, I've never been dead before, so I had no idea if feeling anything at all was supposed to be normal or not.

"How do you even know all this?" I asked, trying to force my brain to process everything and to force the bile back down my throat. The smoke was helping, oddly enough. I think the tobacco was calming me down. Part of me was wondering if Benny had rolled something else into those smokes.

"When you're dead, you have a lot of time to yourself. I've been wandering around the Mojave, trying to make sense of things. Watched you for a bit, till you died. Then I watched your friends. And then I watched the Legion take Vegas. Now hang on, we're almost here." I looked up at the building he'd brought us to.

"The Tops?" I was frankly amazed it was still standing. The top three floors (and many others besides) were collapsed, but most of the building was still standing. "What are we doing here?"

"I want to get a drink. And I figured you could use one too, Courier. So, we're heading up to my old office. It's high enough the Legion troops just leave it alone. Not that it really matters, since they can't see me, but hey, even though I'm dead I don't want to drink around those fucking savages, dig?"

"Can I ask something else?" Benny nodded as the two of us made our way through the lobby of the Tops. All the slot machines and blackjack tables were gone - and replaced with cages, full of slaves. "Why are you being so nice to me?"

"Say what, daddy-o?"

"Well... don't take this the wrong way," I took a draw from the smoke and let the poisons and carcinogens fill my lungs. "But I haven't exactly forgiven you for shooting me in the face that one time. And I can't imagine you're too pleased with me for beating you to death." He just shrugged.

"Hey man, that was just business, like I told you. It wasn't anything personal. I'm pretty sure that if I was in your shoes, I would've done the same thing."

"You kind of did."

"Yeah... I suppose," He shrugged as the two of us walked up the stairs towards the 13th floor. "And hell, it's not like it matters anyway. Still, it did kind of annoy me how House started grooming you to be the new number two after the big man had me dialed in.

"New number two?" I took another drag of the smoke. "The hell are you talking about?"

"You mean you didn't notice? House was pulling the same smoke and mirrors routine he pulled on me when he turned the Boot Riders into the Chairmen. When he realized I was working against him, he started looking for a new number two. And then you showed up on his doorstep."

"Really." I tried to keep my voice flat as the two of us made our way across the 13th floor to his office. But to be honest... Benny was starting to make sense. And that was scaring the piss out of me.

"I'll be honest... I see a lot of myself in you, Courier. So did House, apparently."

"Don't take this the wrong way, Benny," I said as the two of us opened the doors to his office. This wasn't room 1337, where I'd found Yes Man - this room was different, and had windows looking out over The Strip. "But I don't see any similarity between the two of us."

"No?" Benny walked over to the bar near the window, and started pulling out glasses and bottles of alcohol. "You don't see any similarities, or do you just not want to? Because I'll tell you what I see when I look at the two of us: I see a pair of failures."

"What, because we're both dead?" I sat down at the bar, and he handed me a glass of Old Royale Whiskey on the rocks. Benny just smirked, and started pouring himself a glass of scotch.

"You could say that. I mean, I failed in my attempt to free Vegas from House."

"Wait, what?" Benny downed his glass of scotch in one go and poured himself another. I just sort of stared at him dumbfounded for a minute. "What are you talking about, free Vegas?"

"What did you think I was doing when I stole the Platinum Chip? It certainly wasn't because I wanted to rule Vegas like House. You never got a chance to know the Overboss like I did, Courier, but he's the one with the hard-on for power and control. Everything was about the bottom line with him. Personally, I liked life when the Chairmen were still called the Boot Riders. Things were... simpler. I didn't have to put on an act and I didn't have to run things." Benny shrugged, and drank more of his scotch.

"Really?"

"Oh sure! I hated running things. It was all... money and business and... rules. I mean, yeah, there were perks, but..." he stared at his glass of scotch for a second, and then set it down and looked right at me. "Do you know the city I wanted to see when I stole the Platinum Chip?" I shook my head, and he continued. "I wanted to see a Vegas that was free. Free from the tyranny of House's Old World rule. Free from the bullshit and fake democracy of the NCR. Free from the slave chains of the Legion. I wanted to make a Vegas that was independent. No gods. No masters. Free."

I was dumbfounded. Was this the same man who shot me in the face? Surely not. There was just so much to take in all at once. The room was silent for a moment. He'd made his point, and I couldn't think of anything else to say. So I grabbed my glass of whiskey, and was about to take another drink... when I started to hear a strange beeping sound.

"The hell is that noise?" I looked around, trying to find the source of the beeping. Benny looked at his left wrist, and I could see that the watch he was wearing was, apparently, the source of the noise.

"Damn," he said aloud, sighing. "I was hoping we'd have a bit more time. Ah well." He downed a third glass of scotch. I was getting really confused now.

"More time? More time for what?"

"More time to talk," He put his hands in his pockets and shrugged. "Let me level with you for a second - I haven't been entirely honest with you about something." This was sounding more like the Benny who'd shot me in the face. Either way, the beeping just got louder. "But it seems... we're out of time. And now, I think, you need to wake up, Courier..."

My eyes snapped open.

I wasn't in Benny's office in The Tops. Benny wasn't around. I was lying on my back, staring at a ceiling somewhere. The beeping was still going on. I looked to my right, and my eyes fell on a woman in a white lab coat.

"You woke up."

Perhaps a bad choice of inflection. Is she implying I could've just as easily not?

I rolled my head around, trying to take stock of my surroundings, and was immediately greeted by ED-E's speaker grille hovering right in front of me.

"Bout time yer crippled ass woke up," I heard Cass' voice from next to me. ED-E hovered backwards out of the way, and I could see everyone standing around me: Cass was sitting to the left of me, looking at me with a satisfied smirk. Veronica was behind her, Arcade was standing next to the woman with the white lab coat, and Boone was leaning up against the back wall with his arms folded across his chest. He wasn't wearing the armor and trenchcoat anymore, but I did see that same desert-camo sniper rifle slung across his back.

It took a few seconds, but I eventually figured out where I was. I was lying on one of the recovery beds in Dr. Usanagi's medical clinic, just east of Vegas (it was the same place I'd gotten the bullet taken out of my knee). I also figured out what that damn beeping noise was - there were several sensors stuck to my skin, hooked up to an EKG that was monitoring my heart rate. And, surprisingly enough, on my left wrist was my Pip-Boy.

"So..." I shifted in the bed, trying my damnedest to sit up. "What the hell happened?"

"You very nearly died, is what happened Mr. Fisher," Dr. Usanagi walked past Boone and into the room, clutching a clipboard.

"Oh," I suppose I must've sounded like a real dope, but now that I was getting my faculties back, I was starting to remember that yes, after all I'd been through, it made a certain amount of sense.

"I must say, I hadn't expected to see you back in my care so soon." I shifted uncomfortably in the bed and scratched the back of my head sheepishly.

"Yeah, I've been gettin' that a lot," For some reason I thought of Vulpes. I'm not entirely certain why. "So what all was wrong with me?"

"What wasn't wrong with you would be a more pertinent question." The tiny Asian woman somehow was able to look both relieved and annoyed at the same time.

"Well, don't keep me in suspense, doc. C'mon, spill."

"Where to begin? For one thing, you were suffering from acute radiation poisoning when your friends brought you to me. Your body had to be flushed of the 257 rads you had absorbed before I could even attempt to diagnose any of your other ailments," I felt a twitch in the back of my mind. Hadn't Benny said something... She continued before I could think about it any more. "Eight of your ribs were cracked, there were shards of a broken 9mm round in your right collarbone, your right arm was broken in two places, all of the metacarpals and proximal phalanges in your right hand had been shattered, several of your organs including your stomach and your liver were badly hemorrhaging, your left lung was completely collapsed, and both the cornea and lens in your right eye had been damaged wholly beyond repair. Not to mention the dozens of cuts, lacerations, and bruises all over your body..." She removed her glasses and shook her head when she looked at me. "Speaking frankly, I've never seen anyone in such shit shape cling to life so stubbornly."

"I might have had a little something to do with that, I think..." I heard Arcade mutter just loud enough for us to hear him. Veronica nudged him in the ribs.

"Yeah, you helped stabilize him on the trip here. But putting the Pip-Boy back on his arm, that probably helped. Just a bit." I wasn't really paying attention to the two of them going back and forth. I was just going over everything Usanagi said was wrong with me - how the fuck was I still alive?

"So... how long was I out?" I said when I finally was able to find the words.

"Only two days. I expected you to be under for a week and a half - at minimum - after the surgery. Usually it takes patients at least that long for their bodies to fully accept any bionics implanted into their system. The fact that you're even conscious so fast is absolutely stunning. You should be in a medical journal."

"Wait, hang on - implants?" My mind had latched onto that word and wouldn't let go. She merely nodded.

"Well yes, your body had sustained so much trauma that cybernetics were needed simply to fix you. I had to replace your collapsed lung with a synthetic one, your right eye had to be replaced with a bionic lens, I reinforced your ribcage with a NEMEAN sub-dermal armor weave, a PHOENIX Monocyte breeder..." She kept speaking, but her words started to mesh together. I tried to listen, but it was all a bit much to take in.

So. I was a cyborg now.

When the fuck did my life become so weird?

"...and finally, two nano-bionic weave implants to repair the structural damage your arms sustained. Your body should work better now than it ever has. Some of my best work, I must admit." There was something niggling me, however. And then the bottlecap dropped.

"Doc... how much is all this gonna cost?"

"All told? 64,430 caps." Every single person in the room - even ED-E - seemed to be staggered by that seemingly absurd number. Even I blanched a bit.

"Wh- y'never told us it'd be that much, doc!" Cass looked the most worried of all. She was probably worried that they'd all have to chip in to pay for my medical bills. I just composed myself, and shrugged.

"The amount of cybernetics you put in me, I thought it'd be more than that, honestly," I said. Dr. Usanagi just chuckled a bit.

"Well, to be honest, I did give you a bit of a discount - I haven't gotten the chance to perform surgery like that since my days in medical school, back at the Angel's Boneyard." When she said 'surgery' her eyes lit up with a strange sort of mania, that made me feel rather uncomfortable. I began to wonder what she looked like when I was under the knife... and promptly decided I was better off not knowing.

"So, here's a question - can I take this off and get my clothes back?" I sat up, and tapped at one of the sensors still stuck to my chest. "Waking up in a doctors office wearing nothing but my boxers has been a disturbingly regular occurrence lately."

"That all depends - do you have the caps to pay for your surgery, or are you going to have to owe me? Because those cybernetics keeping you alive are quite expensive."

"Yeah, I have the money in my car," and with that, I ripped the sensors off my chest. "You'll be able to accept NCR dollars, right? Caps take up more space than bills, and I'm pretty sure I have at least..." I thought about the conversion rate for a minute. "... $161,075 in NCR currency." Usanagi nodded, showing me where my shirt, my pants, my boots, and my leather jacket were being held.

As I was putting my pants on, I realized every one of my companions (except for ED-E) were just sort of staring at me.

"What?" I asked.

"Did..." Cass was looking at me like I had a tree growing out of my head. "Did y'jus' figure that math out in yer head jus' now? Th' fuck did y'do that?"

The group of us started walking out of Usanagi's clinic, towards where Cass had told me she'd parked my car. Since, apparently, she had been the one to drive us away from Cottonwood Cove.

"Alright," I said, fishing out my keys. "I think it's about time you guys tell me what the hell happened. Last thing I remember was Veronica liquidizing that gladiator's face."

"Yeah, it's not like we haven't heard about that for every hour since we escaped," Arcade said, sarcasm dripping off of every word.

"Hey, I had fun," Veronica shrugged. "Anywho, if you're looking for someone to thank for that in-the-nick-of-time rescue, look no further than the eyebot here." She patted ED-E's chassis, and the robot chirped happily. "If it wasn't for him, I don't think we would've gotten there in time."

"Speak fer yerself," Cass chimed in. "I was jus' 'bout t'grab a boat when ED-E showed up."

"I just wish that... thing... hadn't fired a laser at my feet. I was just about ready to shoot it! I thought it had finally blown a vacuum tube and was going berserk!" Arcade eyed ED-E warily, and I realized he was walking opposite the floating robot. Cass just slapped him on the back.

"Well, if you'd gotten on th' boat like th' rest of us..."

"Call me old fashioned," Arcade brushed Cass' hand off his shoulder. "But I'm not exactly a big fan of robots herding me towards anything."

"I think we're getting a bit off topic," Veronica said. "Basically, here's what happened - ED-E got us all on a raft, we hooked a chain to his underside, and he pulled us all the way upriver. That's about when Boone started shooting anything red."

"Not everything," he growled, just as we all got to my car.

"What's wrong with you?" I asked, unlocking the trunk and shoving most of the junk out of the way. I had to get to that secret compartment.

"Aw, he's just mad 'cause he missed," Cass said, trying hard to hold back a laugh. I just sort of stopped and stared at the stone-faced soldier with the sunglasses and red beret.

"Boone? Miss? Impossible." I shook it off, and finally cleared enough junk away to reach the secret compartment under the fake spare tire, unlocking it with both keys.

"He was right there!" He said through gritted teeth. "That bald, big-nosed bastard was right in my crosshairs, and I shot wide! I could've ended the whole damn war right then and there, but I missed, and that bastard is still alive!"

"Don't worry, Boone, I'm sure you'll get another chance." I opened up the cash box and started counting out the bills I'd need. If only the exchange rate wasn't so ridiculous...

"The fuck?!" Cass just sort of stared in disbelief as I started counting out hundreds. "I thought you said y'were a courier, man! Th' hell did y'get that sorta cash?" I just sort of shrugged.

"What can I say, business was good before I came to the Mojave. I never had to deal with casino bosses shooting me in the face, or shipments getting stolen by khans, or cowboy robots working for 200 year old megalomaniacs, and I most certainly never had to deal with massive slaver armies. Hell, the car cost at least four times these damn cybernetics." I pulled out the last bill, and shut the cash box, locking it again. "There, that should be enough."

"Wait a minute," Arcade leaned in while I put everything back in place. "I'm less interested in the cash and more interested in what you said earlier - about Boone getting another chance?" I nodded, shutting the trunk.

"Of course he'll get another chance. I left something at the Fort, and we have to go back," I said. Cass and Veronica both just chuckled.

"No you didn't," Veronica said with a smile, turning to Cass. "Do you want to tell him, or should I?"

"Tell me what?" I asked.

"Ya didn't really think we'd leave yer guns in that slave camp, didja?" Cass reached behind her, and pulled out both Roscoe and That gun, handing them to me grip first. "Between th' two of us, snatchin' those was easy. Caesar's lucky he still has a throne left. If we hadn't been in such a hurry t'leave, we'd 'ave snatched that too."

As grateful as I was to have my favorite pistols back, they weren't what I was concerned about. Now that I was up, and had finally regained my senses, all I could think about was the little girl... the scared little girl I'd promised and failed to save. I don't like breaking my promises.

"Thanks for the guns, but..." I hesitated, holstering both pistols and wondering how to proceed. I don't think they'd understand if I told them why I wanted to go back. "We still have to go back." Boone was the first to speak up.

"We can't."

"Why not?" I shot back at him. He merely shrugged.

"You remember that semi truck hanging off the edge of the Cottonwood Overlook?" Veronica interjected. I nodded, and she continued. "While you were heading upriver, Cass and I used your Pip Boy's Geiger counter to find out what it held: little over a hundred barrels of toxic, radioactive waste. Boone and I rigged the door with some explosives, and when we were making our escape, Boone shot it. By now, that whole area should be flooded with deadly radiation."

I just stared at her, realizing the implications. On the one hand, Caesar's Legion would need to find another way across the river... which was good. But... there was no way I would be able to get back to the Fort now. And no way I'd be able to make good on my promise to Melody. No way I could save her.

Benny's words from earlier rang in my ears, and I couldn't shake them out of my mind.

"You don't see any similarities, or do you just not want to? Because I'll tell you what I see when I look at the two of us: I see a pair of failures."