Chapter 7: The Professional
Del wanted to die in a canyon. He just didn't know it yet.
"Through here." Del pointed at the gap in the ridgeline—a narrow slash between two sandstone walls, maybe eight feet wide at the opening, curving out of sight after thirty yards. "Cuts three miles off. I've used it before."
Marcus stopped. Leaned on the pipe—his knee had graduated from screaming to a persistent, grinding ache overnight, which the optimist in him called progress. He pulled up the Pip-Boy map. The topography rendered in green wireframe: the canyon cut southeast through the ridge, roughly a mile long, with walls rising forty to sixty feet on either side. Three bends. Two places where the walls narrowed to less than four feet. One section where rubble from a collapse had created a bottleneck.
"No."
Del's jaw tightened. "You don't know this area."
"I know what a killbox looks like." Marcus tapped the Pip-Boy screen. "Three blind corners. Two chokepoints where you can't turn around. Walls too high to climb if something goes wrong. Sound bounces off sandstone—you won't hear them coming until they're on top of you."
"Hear who coming?"
"Anyone. Raiders set up in canyons like this because they don't have to be good at fighting. They just have to drop rocks on your head."
Del looked at Jin. Jin was studying the Pip-Boy screen over Marcus's shoulder, her expression unreadable.
"He's right," she said.
"We don't know there's anyone—"
"We don't know there isn't." Jin straightened. Her rifle shifted on her shoulder. "We take the highway. Three extra miles won't kill us."
Del's mouth compressed into a thin line. He glanced at Marcus—a look that carried weight, the particular resentment of a man whose competence had been publicly overruled by a stranger's. Marcus held the gaze without challenge. No smugness. No I-told-you-so. Just steady.
Del turned and walked south on the highway without another word.
"That's going to cost me later."
They walked. The sun climbed to its zenith and hung there, malicious, hammering heat into the cracked asphalt until the air above it shimmered and danced. Marcus's shirt was soaked through by noon. His knee had settled into a rhythm—three steps of tolerable, one step of grinding, repeat. The pipe served as cane and metronome, its rubber-tipped end striking asphalt in steady quarter-notes.
Tomás walked beside him again. The boy's limp had improved—the wound drainage was holding, the fever down, his color better. But he was fifteen and malnourished and running on two cans of food a day, and his body was spending everything it had on fighting the infection instead of keeping him upright.
At 1:47 PM, Tomás dropped.
No warning. Mid-stride, his legs buckled and he went down like someone had cut his strings. Marcus reached for him—too slow, the pipe tangled in his legs—and Tomás hit the asphalt face-first. His body went rigid. Then it started shaking.
"Jin!"
She was already there. Both of them on their knees beside the boy. Tomás's eyes had rolled back, only whites showing. His jaw clenched so hard Marcus could hear teeth grinding. His spine arched. His limbs jerked in spasms that had nothing to do with consciousness.
"Seizure. Fever spike." Marcus pressed his hand to Tomás's forehead. Burning. The skin was dry—no sweat. Bad sign. The body had stopped trying to cool itself. "How long since he drank water?"
"An hour. Maybe less." Jin's voice was steady. Her hands weren't. She held Tomás's head off the asphalt, cradling it, keeping him from cracking his skull.
[MEDICAL CRISIS DETECTED.]
[PATIENT: TOMÁS CHEN. FEVER: ESTIMATED 104°F+. SECONDARY INFECTION LIKELY.]
[MEDICINE SKILL CHECK: DIFFICULTY — HARD. CURRENT SKILL: 19. SUCCESS PROBABILITY: 42%.]
[AVAILABLE RESOURCES: LIMITED. NO ANTIBIOTICS. IMPROVISATION REQUIRED.]
Marcus stripped off his jacket. "Del—water. All of it."
Del didn't argue. Three canteens appeared. Marcus soaked the leather jacket, folded it, pressed it against Tomás's neck and forehead. The boy's skin was so hot the water steamed on contact—or maybe that was Marcus's imagination, but the wrongness of that temperature against his palms was real.
"We need to cool him down. Core temperature. Wet cloth on the neck, wrists, groin—major arteries."
Jin was already tearing strips from her spare shirt. She knew. Twenty years since nursing, but the training was still in her hands. They worked together without speaking—a choreography of crisis management, each anticipating the other's movements.
Marcus elevated Tomás's injured leg. Unwrapped the bandage. The wound looked—not good, but not catastrophic. Pink at the edges, some discharge, the red streaks retreated from where they'd been two days ago. The primary infection was losing ground. But secondary infections could bloom anywhere when a body was this compromised—lungs, kidneys, bloodstream.
"The seizure's from the fever, not the wound," Marcus said. Talking through it. Forcing his brain to stay clinical while his hands pressed cold cloth against a fifteen-year-old's burning skin. "If we break the fever, the seizure stops. If we can't break the fever—"
"We break the fever." Jin's voice left no room for alternatives.
Marcus poured water directly onto Tomás's chest. The boy gasped—a reflexive, unconscious reaction. His back arched harder. Then, by degrees, the rigidity began to ease. The shaking continued but softened. His jaw unclenched. A moan escaped—human, pained, aware.
"More water. On the cloth. Keep it cold."
Del knelt beside them. His face had gone gray under the tan—the expression of a man watching a child die and knowing he couldn't stop it. He held the canteen with both hands to keep it from shaking.
Twenty minutes. Thirty. Marcus counted Tomás's pulse—fast, thready, but present. The boy's temperature came down in fractions of a degree, each one a small victory against a body trying to cook itself from the inside.
At the forty-minute mark, Tomás opened his eyes.
"...Mom?"
Jin made a sound. Not a word. Something that came from deeper than language. She pulled her son's head into her lap and bent over him, forehead to forehead, and breathed.
Marcus sat back on his heels. His arms trembled. The FEMA training—the real-world version, not the game stats on a green screen—had been designed for stabilizing patients until the ambulance arrived. There was no ambulance here. There was no hospital. There was a highway, a dwindling water supply, and eight miles of desert between this boy and anything resembling proper medicine.
[MEDICAL CRISIS: RESOLVED (TEMPORARY).]
[EXPERIENCE GAINED: +30 XP. XP: 75/100.]
[NOTE: PATIENT REQUIRES ANTIBIOTICS WITHIN 24-48 HOURS. CURRENT TREATMENT IS PALLIATIVE ONLY.]
"Forty-eight hours. That's what I bought him."
---
They rested for an hour. Couldn't afford more. The water they'd used for cooling was gone—two canteens worth, evaporated off a teenager's skin. Their remaining supply wouldn't last the day.
Marcus sat against a car hulk, legs stretched, pipe across his lap. His knee had stiffened during the crisis—kneeling on asphalt for forty minutes hadn't done it any favors. The joint felt like it was packed with broken glass.
Del walked over. Stood there for a moment, not speaking. Then he held out a water bottle.
Marcus looked up. Del's face was doing something complicated—pride fighting gratitude, losing.
"Thanks," Marcus said. Took the bottle. Drank. The water was warm and flat and tasted like the inside of a canteen, and it was perfect.
Del sat down next to him. Not close. But not far.
"The canyon," Del said. "You were right."
"Maybe. Maybe it was empty."
"But maybe it wasn't. And if we'd been in there when the kid went down—" Del didn't finish. He didn't need to. Narrow canyon, unconscious boy, no room to work. The math was ugly.
"He needs real medicine," Marcus said. "Not field treatment. Actual antibiotics."
"Outpost might have some. Old NCR medical supplies. They left in a hurry—might not have cleaned out the cabinets."
"How do you know?"
Del picked at a callus on his thumb. "I've been to the Outpost before. Two years ago. Passed through with a caravan. It was already half-empty then. Most of the NCR had pulled out."
New information. Marcus filed it, the way he filed everything—date, source, confidence level. Del had been to Mojave Outpost. Del knew the layout. Del was more useful than he'd been letting on.
"What was still there?"
"Barracks. Mess hall. Command post. The statues." A pause. "Medical wing on the east side. Locked when I saw it. Might still be."
Jin appeared. She'd been checking Tomás—sitting up now, drinking carefully, pale but present.
"Eight miles," she said. She looked at Marcus. Then at Del. Something had shifted in the way they were sitting, and she read it the way she read everything—quickly, completely, without comment.
"We'll make it by nightfall," Marcus said. He stood. The knee buckled; he caught himself on the car hulk, straightened, locked the joint. "He needs to."
Jin helped him balance. Her hand on his arm, firm and brief.
"Then we move."
They moved. Four people on a dead highway, one on a makeshift stretcher cobbled from Del's jacket and two lengths of rebar, heading south at the pace of the slowest and the most broken. Marcus limped at the front now—Jin had put him there, the place where the navigator walked, the one who picked the path.
He didn't miss the significance. Neither did Del.
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