New Vegas: Sheason's Story - 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.

“Well now… that looks promising,” I said aloud. Over on the right side of the room was a door, that led off to another part of this facility… and it was clearly blocked by a shimmering blue force field. I hooked the MP5 back into the sling under my arm and reached into my duster for the sonic projecto gun. “Time to see if that upgrade is worth the price I paid.”

I pressed my hand against the force field, and it shimmered slightly beneath my palm. This felt much more like a pane of glass – solid and unyielding. Not at all like… well… Yeah. The force field got me thinking about last nights shenanigans, and that was all it took to distract me just long enough to get into trouble.

“Oh, now what’s this then?” I heard a robotic voice sound off directly behind me. “A new patient? Excellent! I haven’t had the chance to operate in ages!” Before I knew what was happening, a metal claw like a vice clamped itself down hard around my neck and pulled – lifting me off my feet and dragging me off to fuck all knows where.

“Wh- HEY! Put me down!” I yelled, dropping the sonic by accident and reaching up to try and clutch at the metal claw. I strained to keep the muscles in my neck tight so I wouldn’t choke to death; I was, after all, several feet off the ground and held aloft only by my neck. I eventually managed to twist around so I could get a look at what was holding me.

It was a Mr. Handy, but not like any I’d ever seen before. It had a white painted chassis, red eyes on the end of its three eye-stalks, and a lot more than just three arms. Most of the arms ended in a dizzying array of medical tools – or was I dizzy from the lack of circulation to my head?

“Now, now, don’t struggle!” The robot said, extending one of it’s eye stalks down to my face. “I am a trained professional, and there’s no need for you to worry. Once we get you on the operating table, we can remove that ugly, misshapen tumor on the end of your neck in a jiffy!” As it spoke, one of the arms came at me – and the buzz saw on the end started to wind up. Instinctively, I took one of my hands away from the claw around my neck and grabbed the arm with the buzz saw, pushing against it with all my strength to keep it as far away from my head as I could.

This was all happening so fast, and I was getting so dizzy, that I hadn’t had a chance to grab any of my guns before the buzz saw came at my face – and now, both my hands were occupied. It didn’t look good, honestly. But luckily I had an ace up my sleeve that even I didn’t realize I had.

Clunk!

“Oh my word!” The robot exclaimed. “Who are you?” The three eye stalks looked away form me, and pointed inward – looking squarely at the tiny deathclaw that had landed on top of the robot. Stripe let out a single squeak… and then proceeded to rip the closest eye stalk to shreds.

The robot screamed. The buzz saw stopped spinning. And best of all? The claw opened up, letting me go. There was just one problem. I wasn’t expecting the drop, and I was several feet in the air when it let me go, so I ended up looking rather silly and fell flat on my ass.

“Ow! Stop it! OW! Mother of – That’s hardly Marquess of Queensbury rules, now is it?! OW!” I heard the robot yell from above me. I shook my head to try and get the blood flowing again, and looked up. The white Mr. Handy was flailing around in the air, spinning around and shaking madly; the anti-grav jets in the bottom were spluttering, every once in a while belching out a burst of blue flame that sent it in a random direction. Stripe, on the other hand, was merrily latched to the top of the robot, ripping into the chassis, tearing it to pieces. Wires and scrap metal rained down until finally the robot gave one last shudder, and the whole thing came crashing to the ground.

I eventually got up, still rubbing my throat and coughing. I started walking to the twisted hunk of metal that used to be a Mr. Handy… and was amazed when parts of the metal shifted, and out popped Stripe, completely unfazed. He was still chewing on a few wires as he trotted along the ground to me.

“Man,” I coughed, kneeling down to the tiny deathclaw. “You are quite the little gremlin, aren’t you?” I began to pet his mohawk and he squeaked happily before scuttling up my arm to sit on my shoulder. I shook my head and laughed. “Alright, where the hell is that damn dog? She’s been disappearing a lot…”

“Bark!”

I looked up to one of the catwalks; Roxie was looking down at me through the metal bars. She barked twice, and turned away, wagging her tail. I rushed up the stairs to find out what she’d found.

“Alright, alright, what’s so important?” I asked, walking up to the cyberdog. She was sitting next to a desk, that was strewn with trash and discarded pencils next to a broken terminal. At first I didn’t know what was so important… and then she put both paws on the desk, pointing with her nose at a box. A very familiar looking box, with a white hexagon on the top.

“Huh…” I picked up the box, and sure enough – another personality chip was nestled safely inside it. I smirked, snapping the box shut. “Good dog.”

“Alright,” I picked the discarded sonic pistol up off the ground. “Let’s try this again…” I cast one final glance around, just in case there were any more insane robots around, and leveled the pistol at the force field.

BARK!

That didn’t come from Roxie – it came from the sonic. A wave of blue energy burst from the emitter, and the barking sound travelled with it, creating a strange sort of Doppler effect. The energy struck the field, and it rippled in exactly the same way the surface of a lake would if you threw a stone into it. It crackled with a wave of electricity, and began to rapidly de-materialize, starting at the point of impact and only ending once it was all gone.

“Not bad,” I said, walking through the now open door, and putting the energy pistol back in the holster. “Guess that upgrade really… did…” I trailed off, finally looking around this new room.

I was in a prison. The walls were lined with computers and terminals, sure, but the middle of the room was nothing but cages. Metal bars that ran from the floor to the ceiling, barely wide enough to even stick your hand through. They were all empty, but it was still… slightly disturbing. Wasn’t this supposed to be a medical facility? Why would it need a prison? Unless…

I shook it off and moved on. If my hunch was right, then there was something here that might help me follow in Christine’s footsteps. This building was almost certainly where she’d been operated on. I’d be willing to bet that she’d spent some time in these cells either before or after the robots cut her head open.

I walked around the room, past the different cells, and my foot brushed against something metallic; I looked down, and saw several spent rifle casings littering the floor. Yep. This definitely seemed like the right place.

I came to one of the cells in the middle of the row. Unlike most of the others, the door had been forced open… and there was something else. A chalk drawing on one of the concrete pillars. It was small, but I was able to recognize it once I got close enough: a Brotherhood of Steel symbol. It wasn’t quite like the others I’d seen. There was the sword and the wings, yes, but instead of a set of three cogs behind the sword’s blade inside a circle, there was just one cogwheel, and it was the circle.

My foot disturbed the filthy mattress on the floor when I knelt down to get a look at the chalk drawing, and something metallic began to poke out. Roxie leaned in around me, sniffing the air as I picked it up.

“A holotape?” I asked aloud, turning it over in my hands. There was a small label on the top – it wasn’t handwritten like most holotape labels, but obviously printed by a machine: Patient Log: Y-17.0. Without hesitation, I plugged it into my Pip Boy, and started to play the recording.

“This is Christine Royce,” an unfamiliar female voice began. “Knight of the Brotherhood of Steel… the Circle.”

My first thought was That doesn’t sound like Christine. But then, I remembered: Oh, wait. Dean cut out her original voice box and gave her the voice of Vera Keyes, didn’t he? Of course she doesn’t… this must be what she used to sound like. The recording continued, with her sighing heavily.

“Not going to make it through this. I hope someone finds this message… gets it to the Brotherhood in the West,” Christine cleared her throat. “I tracked a rogue Brotherhood Elder – Elijah – here, to the Big Empty.” She sighed again. “This place is more than it seems. There’s a crater hidden deep inside… a junkyard of Pre-War labs scattered across the crater’s surface, all still running… like… like this one. Elijah has been dissecting these centers, one by one… I managed to track him down to one in particular. An old Chinese-American internment camp. Little Yangtze, I think…”

An internment camp. I guess that’s what Zero meant when he’d called it a “human farm.”

“There were survivors. Ghouls. All of them were fitted with bomb collars. The robots moved in when I tried to intercept him… and Elijah sent the camp ghouls against us both. Like… like walking bombs. I lost him. Got him by an explosion. Woke up here.” Christine paused. “Guess the medical robots were programmed to bring wounded victims form the camp to this center. Y-17. Some kind of Auto-Doc prototype lab… manned by corpses trapped inside suits that keep them moving. No idea why.”

I immediately looked over my shoulder. Knowing my luck, that would be the precise moment that one of those Trauma Harnesses that I’d heard about (but hadn’t yet seen) would show up. Thankfully, I was just being paranoid. They must have all wandered away… which meant I wouldn’t be able to predict just how or where I’d run into them…

Joy.

“Not sure how long I’m going to last… they…” she grunted, and I heard some indistinct shuffling on the recording. “…cut open my head like a lot of the humans I’ve seen here. Feel… strange. I can talk, but I… I can’t hack the term-” The recording suddenly was interrupted by a burst of static, and some other sound I couldn’t quite place. “… wait. An explosion? That was an explosion. Outside. Someone’s here… someo-”

The recording ended abruptly.

Ding.

“Well, I suppose that’s why the top levels of this place aren’t here anymore,” I said aloud as I stepped out of the elevator, looking around. Roxie barked in reply. Stripe squeaked from his perch on Roxie’s back; he’d hopped off my shoulder during the elevator ride.

“Yep. Blown to smithereens.” I laughed to myself. I always liked that word – smithereens. It was one of those inherently funny words (like bamboozle or kumquat), but I hardly ever got the chance to use it. “Kinda makes me wonder just who this… other guy… is…” I trailed off. Despite my amusement at being able to use the word smithereens, the pit of my stomach dropped out. And that was never good news.

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.”