FALLOUT: Ain't that a Kick in the Head

[Krimp]

, brown

The sun was well into its descent, only a few hands above the mountains that lay far to the west, but the dry earth still held a lot of its heat. As Leslie and Ray crouched down behind a large rock, something once again glittered in the valley below them - were it not for the low hanging sun, perhaps they would have never noticed it at all. Signalling at Leslie to remain still, Ray slowly crept around the boulder to get a better view of what that glitter belonged to.

His eyes may have been old, but they were still sharp. Moments later he returned to Leslie, leaning close enough to her ears that his words were but a breath. "Raiders. Can't see what tribe from here. Can only see the one with the metal helmet down there, but where's there's one there'll be more 'round." The man leant against the rock that was their cover, his eyes closed in thought. A moment later they opened again, and the pale blue orbs clearly showed some sort of decision had been made.

Ray reached into the folds of his cloak, retrieving a dark, ugly piece of metal, which revealed itself to be a gun as he pressed it into Leslie's palm. "Six bullets in the chamber. Go for the body, not the head. Safer that way, less likely to miss. Wait here, I'll see if I can't take out the one with the helmet quietly."

Without another word Ray was around the boulder and making his way down the slope, something metallic glinting in his hand.

Neither of them had seen the jet-crazed man with the lead pipe who had been hiding at the top of the ridge, who was now making his way towards Leslie's position.

 

[ze_kraken]

Leslie started at the dull, dirt-covered revolver in her hands before adjusting her gaze to Ray who had made his way in the opposite direction. Taking a moment to glance around for any immediate threats; there were none. Cautiously, Leslie trudged to the ridge of the slope and peered over, cocking the hammer of the revolver. There was Ray walking down, weapon aimed about, and an empty field. It took her another moment to see the raider with the metal helmet, and that was only because he had moved enough to alter the way the sun reflected.

"Can't be that serious an issue..." She muttered, turning back around.

There he stood, cast in hideous splendor by the sun to his back and the gleaming pipe in his left hand. A metal shoulder plate was strapped to his worn and sun-bleached jacket and a few pieces of scrap metal adorned his torso in some crude form of armor. With a wide grin, the raider took off his helmet and tossed it at the stunned Leslie. Ducking instinctively, Leslie hit the dirt as the metal dome soared overhead and landed against the boulder with the rasp of metal on stone.

"You made it too easy." He commented dryly, swinging his pipe downward at the prone figure before him.

Leslie managed to roll out of the way of the pipe as it came whistling downward, the metal clanging against the ground. His arm jarred from the unexpected impact, the man turned back to Leslie and snarled. Not bothering to yank the pipe free, he drew a knife from his belt and dashed for the now-standing woman who was frantically searching for her weapon. Coming to the realization that the revolver was out of commission for the time being, Leslie turned just in time for the man's impact.

The two were launched to the ground in a frantic blur of punching and kicking. Within the span of five seconds, the raider had pinned Leslie beneath him and was reaching for his discarded knife. His hand fumbled around in the dirt for a brief span before he yanked the weapon upward and began to twirl it around his hand.

"Am I supposed to be impressed?" Leslie gasped outward, finding air difficult to come by.

"Doubt you'll be alive when 'ya truly 'ppreciate it." He chuckled, adjusting his grip on the knife with the blade facing downward. "That is, if'n you think you'll go anywhere better than 'ere..."

She spat in his face.

 

[Krimp]

, brown

The knife had seen better days. The steel did not gleam like it once did, and the leather grip was pitted and hardened by the dried sweat of many years. But its appearance was not important to Ray; the fact that it had seen him through too many skirmishes to remember was something he placed far more emphasis on. That, and the fact that it's ten-inch blade still held a keen edge.

He moved quietly down the ridge, carefully placing his feet so as not to dislodge any loose stones. His heart beat steadily in his chest - perhaps a little faster than normal, but steadily nonetheless. His breathing was steady. Ray had been in too many fights like this to let his nerves get the better of him. His grip on the knife was firm as he took shelter behind a rock at the bottom of the valley, peering out at the helmeted raider. Thankfully, the man was staring out to the west, at the sun setting behind the mountains. It truly was a breathtaking view, making the harsh Mojave a place of wild beauty, if only for a few moments.

Ray thought about this as he padded up behind the raider and slit his throat. At least the man saw something beautiful as he died, he told himself as he lowered the still twitching body to the ground. His hands deftly went through the raider's pockets, but he soon found there was nothing but smashed syringes and mould-ridden food. After a quick inspection, Ray discovered that the pistol the man had been holding would be just as likely to explode in its user's hand than shoot a bullet - this he left in the dirt next to the body.

Suddenly, a shiver passed down his neck. Ray frowned. An experienced survivor in the Mojave knew better than to ignore his intuition; something was wrong. He scanned the area, but no one seemed to have noticed his short scuffle in the fading light. No, he hadn't been caught - so what was he missing? A sudden feeling of dread in his stomach, Ray turned towards where he had left Leslie, his eyes straining in the now rapidly disappearing light.

His suspicions were immediately confirmed: though he couldn't make out their features in the gloom, he saw a larger figure pinned atop a smaller. Leslie.

The following events unfolded quickly. With the smooth discipline of a trained soldier, Ray swung his rifle over his shoulder, looked down the sights, and fired. It was dim, and Ray had had little time to gauge the shot; while it hit the intended target, it did not kill. The bullet punched into the shoulder of the raider as a deafening crack sounded, knocking him off Leslie and into the dirt a few feet away.

Ray didn't have time to see what happened next. As soon as the rifle fired, frenzied screaming filled the air and bodies appeared on the side of the valley opposite that of Leslie. Ray ran, throwing himself onto the hard earth behind a rock as the rattle of a submachine gun bullets thudded into the earth. He crouched behind the rock, enduring the spray of weapons.

Impossibly, on the ridge above, the raider that had been shot in the shoulder was getting back onto his knees. What should have been at least an incapacitating shot was numbed by the drugs running through his system; he began to shuffle towards Leslie, his red rimmed eyes filled with rage. "I'm... gonna... fucking... KILL YOU!"

Less than a metre to Leslie's right lay the pistol that Ray had handed her.

 

[ze_kraken]

The crack had left Leslie stunned: had that been some gun of his? Was it Ray? Was it- then the blood splattered her face and torso and she came to the conclusion it must have been Ray. The man who had been pinning her relinquished his grip and sprawled in the opposite direction, clutching his shoulder tightly. He would be dead soon. Taking a brief moment to relax her tense muscles and spit out a glob of blood, partly from her bleeding nose and bitten tongue mingled with the man's, she found the man to be very alive and well, roaring some blood curdling death threat in her general direction.

Blinking back surprise, Leslie glanced left and right for the pistol, finding the dull grey object barely out of arm's reach. She lurched sideways. The man began to quicken his pace. Her fingers tightened around the handle. He was looming over her. The pistol flew up...

Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack....

By the fourth shot, Leslie's ears were ringing and her eyes were shut tight as she squeezed the trigger over and over again, followed by the twitch of her thumb that readied the next round. For a while, a good ten seconds after the weapon had been emptied, Leslie sat there, clicking the useless trigger and pulling back the hammer over and over and over again. She was only dimly aware of the shots resonating at the bottom of the ridge line, their cacophonous melody mere background noise.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck...." She muttered to herself, her senses having returned to see the limp form of the man riddled with three more holes. "You killed him... You killed him.."

She tried to reason it, telling herself it was either the doctor or the killer, but it still ached all the same. Her hands shook, sweat had begun to bead down her face, and chills ran down her spine as Leslie sat propped atop her knees, staring blankly at the weapon in her hands with indifference. A single drop of blood flew downward from her face to the surface of the barrel. Leslie let gravity tend to itself as the bead rolled down the side and to the ground. Below, either the shooting ceased or she simply couldn't bear the noise.

Your fault.

 

[Krimp]

, brown

While Leslie's struggle with the bandit continued, Ray had his own problems to deal with. An SMG was not something to be trifled with; even with its lesser range and accuracy, the continuous onslaught of bullets was enough to keep him behind the boulder. It didn't matter how shoddy the aim, when all it took was one bullet...

Ray bided his time. What must have been no more than four of five seconds stretched out into an interminable time: it could have been minutes, even hours, that he'd spent sheltering behind the rock. But sure enough, the moment Ray had been waiting for arrived.

A lull in the shooting. The gun's clip must have been emptied. It could have been a trick to lure him out of cover, but Ray doubted that these drug-fuelled raiders were that smart. He muttered a quick blessing, then stood up and whirled round simultaneously, looking down his rifle at the scene before him.

Two raiders. One seemingly unarmed, one fumbling to replace the clip of an ugly, snub-nosed gun. Ray sighted, fired. The gun and clip fell to the ground, followed by the raider. He turned to sight the other - only to see a hand slapping the barrel to one side, followed by a fist being launched into his face.

"Son. Of. A. Bitch!" The raider was on top of him, punctuating word with a punch, her hardened fists causing Ray's head to slam back against the hard earth. He brought one hand up to cover his face while the other scrabbled at his side. The raider laughed, a harsh, manic sound.

"You think you can protect your face? Ha! When I'm done with you -" She cut off mid-sentence, making a choking, gargling sound as her eyes went wide. Ray pulled his knife out of her side, letting loose a torrent of blood that darkened the both Ray and the earth beneath him. Slowly, the raider toppled off him, her blood continuing to nourish the soil of the Mojave.

Even though his eyes were swelling at a rate comparable to his nose, Ray saw the empty look on Leslie's face and knew what it meant. He'd seen it often enough, when the NCR rookies returned from their first skirmishes, a vacant look on their eyes. He'd seen it, and he'd dealt with it before; now he'd have to do the same for Leslie.

"Ye don't happen to know of a doctor 'round these parts, do ye?" Ray's voice was made nasal by the blood clogging his nose. "Only, I know someone who'd love the help o' one right now." He sat down stiffly, looking at Leslie through swollen eyelids.

 

[ze_kraken]

The sudden sound of Ray's voice jolted Leslie out of her trance. She examined his swelling face for a moment before sliding her pack off her shoulders. With a thud, it hit the ground and Leslie began to search through the contents, tossing what she didn't need out into the sand. Bags of dried jerky. A metal canteen. A spare set of clothes. By the time she was finished, there were more items sprawled around her than in her hands.

Leslie held in her hands a roll of thick and crudely woven cloth to serve as bandages, a bottle of water, and a small box whose frame was too battered to clearly read. For the moment, her face had a sense of determination and purpose etched upon it. Already drying blood was crusting across her face and along her clothes, as for whose blood it was she didn't know. Her hand, nicked bloody and beginning to bruise, reached for the knife the raider had dropped when Ray had shot him. While she began sawing through the bandage roll with the blade, she turned finally to look at Ray.

"Seen better days." She commented after a whistle.

Taking a moment to analyze her patient, Leslie gingerly prodded around Ray's torso to affirm that the blood that had splattered there was not his. Satisfied that he wouldn't bleed out, she cut a portion of her sleeve and poured water across it before putting the damp cloth in his hand, ordering him to keep it pressed to his eyes. While he did so, she took the portions of cut bandage and further divided them before rolling them into tubes.

"Might be best not to flinch here..." Leslie muttered, taking the pieces of cloth and lightly pushing them into Ray's bleeding nose. "That should stop the bleeding, but either way, we can't do much about the swelling 'cept taking it easy and keeping some water to it. Don't have the way to make it any colder than that, but I don't think they hurt you too bad 'less you're hidin' some gun wound from me in some notion of bravado. I imagine you gave 'em a better fight than me, yeah?"

As Leslie spoke, she began tending to her own hurts, wrapping the remaining bandages around her knuckles and opening the faded box. Inside rested a pack of pills colored a rustic brown. She promptly cracked one of the seals open and downed the pill with a swig of water, spluttering as it stuck to her tongue.

"Also, got painkillers if you need them. At least, I hope they are, Anne never told me exactly which one was which..."

Leslie allowed herself a strained chuckle and rested herself against her pack, forcing herself to relax. For now, the dead raider was at the back of her mind, but she doubted it would be for long. Eventually she'd need to turn around...

 

[Krimp]

, brown

Ray's jaw clenched as Leslie treated his battered nose, but beyond that he remained unfazed. He sat in silence as she continued to talk, his hand pressed firmly against the damp material that he held to his eyes. It was only when she laughed that he disobeyed her directions, lowering the cloth to look at her. There was a faint trace of worry in his eyes as he looked the girl over.

"You gave 'em all the fight you needed to give," he said softly.

A moment's silence passed between the two as Ray looked at Leslie with knowing eyes. It was him who broke the stillness, getting slowly to his feet before brushing dirt off his trousers - a fairly pointless gesture, considering that most of his garb was already drying a dark crimson. "Much as I'd like to stay here an' keep this cloth over my eyes, that lil' gunfight we just had wasn't exactly quiet." The bandages stuffed up his nose gave his voice an oddly muted quality, dampening his customary drawl. "All sorts of no-goods will be flockin' here like flies to a carcass, an' we don't wanna be here when they arrive."

His words masked his thoughts: better to get the girl away from the scene before what she had done had time to sink in.

Stooping down, he began to help Leslie repack the bag. Before long, the two were on their feet, walking away into the darkness of what had fast become night.

Neither of them noticed the dark figure detach itself from a rocky outcrop a hundred metres further up the rise. An eerie green glow emanated from beneath the figure's hood as moved in the same direction the pair had just gone.

[---]​

Ray's frown deepened as he caught Leslie once again staring mutely into the flames, a blank look on her face. Not that his frown was very intimidating when he had two wads of bandage stuffed up his nostrils.

The pair hadn't needed to walk long before Ray had found a location he deemed suitable for camp. A derelict building, with three of its walls still fully intact and the last a crumbling ruin, it provided both cover and multiple exit points. The lone, undersized molerat that they had encountered outside had been a contributing factor too - it now lay roasting over the fire.

"Leslie." Ray's throat had grown more swollen over the walk, and his voice scarcely carried over the flames at this point. "I can see summat's on yer mind. I'm not much fer talking right now," he gestured wryly towards his battered face, "but that jus' makes me a better listener."

He waited patiently. When she was ready to talk, she would - no point trying to force things.