Chapter 3: Goodsprings
The first building Marcus reached was a lie.
From a distance, Goodsprings had looked like shelter. Rooftops and walls and the suggestion of civilization. Up close, it was a graveyard wearing architecture as a costume. The gas station on the town's edge had burned—recently enough that the char still smelled acrid. Bullet holes pockmarked every surface. The road was littered with shell casings, tarnished green.
He limped past the remains of a general store, its front wall collapsed inward. Past a house with no roof. Past a pickup truck sitting on four flat tires with a skeleton in the driver's seat, bony fingers still curled around the steering wheel.
No movement. No sound except wind pushing through broken windows.
[GOODSPRINGS — UNINCORPORATED SETTLEMENT.]
[POPULATION: 0.]
[STATUS: ABANDONED. EVIDENCE OF RECENT CONFLICT (EST. 2-6 MONTHS).]
[SCAVENGING OPPORTUNITY: MODERATE.]
"Recent conflict. So someone was alive here, not long ago."
The thought was less comforting than it should have been. Whatever drove them out—or killed them—might still be close.
Marcus checked his arm. The bandage had soaked through. Blood trailed down his wrist, dripping from his fingertips in a slow metronome. He needed to deal with that before anything else. Infection in a world without antibiotics was a death sentence, and he'd wrapped the wound with a shirt that hadn't been washed since before he'd arrived in this century.
The general store's interior was trashed but not stripped. Shelves knocked over, glass everywhere, but the back room was intact. Marcus stepped over a toppled display rack and started searching. His good hand swept through debris—packaging, broken bottles, dust.
Canned food. Two dented tins without labels, one can of Pork n' Beans with a faded Vault-Tec logo. He shoved them into the jacket pockets. A box of matches, half-full. Two bottles of water—cloudy, probably irradiated, better than nothing.
And in the corner, wedged between a shelf and the wall, a red-and-white syringe with a familiar silhouette on the label.
A Stimpak.
Marcus held it up to the light filtering through the broken ceiling. The liquid inside was amber, viscous, moving sluggishly when he tilted it. In the game, you jabbed these into your arm and watched a health bar climb. In reality—
"Only one way to find out."
He pulled off the bandage. The gashes underneath were ugly—three parallel furrows running from elbow to wrist, deep enough to see the white of fascia beneath the red. The edges were swollen and hot to the touch. Twelve hours old, maybe less. Already starting to go bad.
He uncapped the Stimpak. Lined up the needle. Jabbed it into the meat of his forearm, two inches above the worst laceration.
The pain hit first—a sharp burn that raced up his arm and into his shoulder. Then warmth. Then something else, something that crawled beneath his skin like living thread. He watched, jaw clenched, as the wound edges twitched. Pulled toward each other. Not healing instantly—that was game logic. But accelerating. The bleeding slowed. Stopped. New tissue, pink and raw, bridged the gaps.
[STIMPAK ADMINISTERED: HEALING FACTOR ENHANCED.]
[HP: 52/100. WOUND STATUS: STABILIZING. FULL CLOSURE IN 24-48 HOURS.]
[BINDING: 42%.]
[CAUTION: STIMPAK DOES NOT ADDRESS INFECTION. MONITOR FOR FEVER.]
He flexed his fingers. The arm responded—stiff, sore, functional. Good enough.
Marcus ate the Pork n' Beans cold, scooping it with two fingers because he didn't have a utensil. The taste was somewhere between cardboard and regret, two hundred years past its expiration date, but his body accepted it with a gratitude that bordered on religious. His stomach stopped trying to eat itself. The gray fog behind his eyes thinned.
He drank half a bottle of the cloudy water. Saved the rest.
---
[Goodsprings Clinic — January 16, 2290, Late Afternoon]
The clinic was at the end of what had been the main street. A squat building, cinder block, more intact than the rest. The door hung on one hinge. Marcus pushed it open with the pipe—leading with the weapon had already become instinct, which said something about how fast this world rewired your brain.
The waiting room was empty. Overturned chairs, a desk, papers scattered across the floor. Medical posters on the walls—faded images of smiling Vault-Tec families above slogans like "A HEALTHY CITIZEN IS A HAPPY CITIZEN." Propaganda from a company that had engineered the end of the world.
Behind the front desk, a hallway. Two examination rooms. A supply closet, already looted—shelves bare, cabinet doors hanging open. But in the second exam room, on a metal gurney, he found something.
A Pip-Boy 3000.
Still strapped to the wrist of a skeleton slumped against the wall. Male, judging by the pelvis. Lab coat. Stethoscope around the neck bones. The town doctor, probably. Died at his post.
Marcus stood over the skeleton for a long moment.
"Sorry about this."
He worked the Pip-Boy free. The clasp mechanism was stiff with age but functional—Vault-Tec built things to last, if nothing else. The device was heavier than he expected. Solid metal casing, a screen that took up most of the forearm surface, dials and knobs along the edges. He strapped it to his left wrist. The screen stayed dark.
He turned the power dial. A click. A hum. The screen flickered to life—amber text on black, the Vault-Tec logo spinning in the center.
VAULT-TEC INDUSTRIES PIP-BOY 3000 PERSONAL INFORMATION PROCESSOR INITIALIZING...
The System reacted immediately:
[COMPATIBLE DEVICE DETECTED: PIP-BOY 3000 MARK IV.]
[SYNCHRONIZING WITH SOVEREIGN SYSTEM INTERFACE.]
[MAP FUNCTION: UNLOCKED. RADIO FUNCTION: AVAILABLE. GEIGER COUNTER: ACTIVE.]
[BINDING: 47%.]
[NOTE: PIP-BOY PROVIDES COVER IDENTITY. EXTERNAL OBSERVERS WILL ASSUME VAULT DWELLER ORIGIN.]
The Pip-Boy's map loaded. Topographical data, pre-war, mostly useless for navigating a landscape that nuclear fire had rewritten. But the compass worked. The GPS triangulation worked. And the little green arrow that said you are here was the most beautiful thing Marcus had seen since waking up in this hellscape.
A sound from deeper in the clinic. A cough—wet, rattling, human.
Marcus tightened his grip on the pipe. Moved down the hallway. Another room, this one with a closed door. He pressed his ear against it. Breathing. Labored. A muttered word he couldn't make out.
He opened the door.
The man on the floor was old. Seventies, at least. Weathered brown skin, white stubble, deep lines carved by decades of sun and wind. He wore a canvas duster over a patched shirt. His back was propped against the wall. His hands were pressed against his stomach, and between his fingers, a bandage dark with old blood.
Gunshot wound. Days old, by the smell. The skin around it was swollen, greenish at the edges. Infection, deep and spreading. His eyes were glassy with fever. A rifle lay beside him, too far away for him to have reached it in the last several hours.
The old man's eyes tracked to Marcus. To the Pip-Boy on his wrist. A sound—half-laugh, half-cough.
"Thought you were raiders."
His voice was sandpaper over gravel. Each word cost him.
Marcus lowered the pipe. Stepped closer. Knelt.
"Not a raider."
The old man studied him. Eyes sharper than they had any right to be, given the fever and the rot eating through his abdomen.
"Vault kid?"
The Pip-Boy. The cover story the System had mentioned. Marcus didn't correct him.
"Something like that."
"Hell of a time to come topside."
Another cough. Blood flecked his lips. Marcus had seen enough emergency medicine training to recognize what was happening. Peritonitis. The bullet had perforated the intestine, bacteria had spread to the abdominal cavity, and without surgery and IV antibiotics—real ones, not irradiated two-century-old leftovers—the outcome was already written.
He sat down across from the old man. Back against the opposite wall. The pipe across his knees.
"I'm Marcus."
"Hector. Hector Reyes."
"What happened here, Hector?"
The old man closed his eyes. Opened them. The effort of speaking was visible—each sentence a stone he had to lift and place.
"Raiders hit us three months back. Big group. Took everything worth taking, killed anyone who argued. Rest scattered. I stayed because—" A wet cough interrupted him. He spat blood. "Because I'm too old and too stubborn to die somewhere I don't know."
"And the gunshot?"
"Scavengers. Week ago, maybe more. Came through picking at the bones. Didn't like that I was still breathing." His hand twitched against the bandage. "Got one of them. Other two got me."
Marcus looked at the wound. Then at Hector. The old man's eyes said he already knew.
"How bad?" Hector asked. The question was a formality.
"Bad."
Hector nodded. Slowly, like his neck was made of rusted cable.
"Figured."
Silence settled between them. The kind that didn't need filling. Outside, the wind picked up—sand hissing against the clinic walls.
"What year is it?" Marcus asked.
Hector's eyebrows climbed.
"You really are from a vault."
"Humor me."
"2290. January, if the calendar in my head hasn't slipped." A ghost of a smile. "You missed a lot, kid. None of it good."
"The NCR?"
The smile died.
"Gone. Capital got erased. One bad day and two hundred years of rebuilding turned to glass."
His hand found the rifle stock beside him, gripped it like a tether.
"I was NCR. Thirty years in the Rangers. Retired to Goodsprings because it was quiet. Because nothing ever happened here." His laugh turned into a cough that lasted too long. "Funny how that works."
"Shady Sands. He's talking about Shady Sands."
Marcus kept his face neutral. In the game—in the show, if he was remembering the timeline right—Shady Sands had been destroyed. Nuked. By a Vault-Tec executive named Hank MacLean, sometime around 2281 or 2282. Nine years ago, give or take.
He couldn't say any of that. Couldn't explain how he knew. So he sat with a dying man and asked questions he already had answers to, because that was all he could offer—company and the fiction that someone cared enough to listen.
"The Legion?"
"Fell apart after Caesar died. Splinter groups. Warlords. Same as always—men with swords and bad ideas." Hector's breathing had changed. Shallower. Faster. "Brotherhood's still out there. They've got their own problems. Busy shooting each other over doctrine."
"What about settlements? Anything organized?"
"Mojave Outpost. South of here. Might still be standing—was last I heard. Few trading posts scattered around. Nothing like what the NCR built. Nothing that lasts."
He wrote Mojave Outpost on his palm with a fingertip, pressing hard enough to leave a white line in the skin.
Hector watched him do it.
"You're making plans." Another cough. Weaker this time. "Good. Only kind worth making." His eyes drifted. Refocused. "There's a footlocker under the desk in the front room. My supplies. Take whatever you need. I'm not going to need any of it."
"Hector—"
"Don't." The old man's voice went firm. Steel beneath the rust. "I've made my peace. Made it three days ago when the fever started. Just—" He swallowed. Winced. "Just don't leave me for the coyotes. That's all I ask."
Marcus looked at the man who'd served thirty years protecting people in a world that had already ended, who'd retired to a quiet town that got eaten alive, who'd been shot by scavengers and left to die in the same clinic where he'd probably gotten his annual checkups.
"I won't."
---
Night fell. Marcus found blankets in the footlocker, along with a box of .308 rounds with no matching rifle, a knife with a leather handle, and a hand-drawn map of the surrounding area marked with Xs and circles. He brought a blanket to Hector.
The old man's breathing had gone ragged. Irregular. Long pauses between breaths that stretched like held notes.
Marcus sat with him. Didn't talk. Didn't need to. The Pip-Boy's screen cast faint amber light across the room—enough to see Hector's face, the lines softening as consciousness receded.
Around midnight, the breathing stopped.
Marcus waited. Counted to sixty. To one-twenty. Pressed two fingers against the old man's throat—warm skin, no pulse.
He pulled the blanket up over Hector's face.
[NON-COMBAT INTERACTION LOGGED.]
[SOCIAL EXPERIENCE: +10 XP.]
[BINDING: 51%.]
Marcus stared at the notification until the green text blurred.
"He was worth more than ten experience points."
He stood. His legs ached. His arm throbbed where the Stimpak was still knitting tissue. His eyes were dry and hot and he refused to acknowledge why.
The Pip-Boy map glowed on his wrist. Mojave Outpost—thirty miles south. A dot on a dead man's hand-drawn map. Maybe people. Maybe hope. Maybe another ruin full of ghosts and shell casings.
He picked up Hector's knife. Tested the edge against his thumb. Sharp.
Outside, the desert waited. Somewhere in the dark, things moved—things that hunted, things that shuffled, things that had forgotten what it meant to be human. And somewhere beyond all of it, events were ticking toward a future Marcus had watched play out on a television screen in a world that no longer existed.
Six years. He had six years before the show's timeline kicked in. Before Lucy MacLean climbed out of Vault 33. Before the Ghoul dug himself out of the ground. Before everything went sideways.
Six years to build something. Or six years to die trying.
Marcus picked up the pipe in one hand and the knife in the other. He looked back at the room where Hector Reyes lay under a borrowed blanket, then turned toward the clinic's front door.
Dawn was four hours away. He'd dig the grave first.
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