Fallout 3 - Beautiful Stranger

Chapter 19 Part 1

Patience entered the building first, finding herself in the expansive entrance hall. The others filed in after her, taking up positions behind the long, curved front desk. The silence inside was even more eerie than the one outside.

The entrance hall comprised of one set of intact stairs at the far end and one set of broken, shifted stairs nearer to the doors. Two other sets of stairs, running downwards, had become the receptacles for large amounts of rubble and trash. Two bathrooms branched away behind the reception desk. On the wall, behind the reception desk and above the bathrooms, a life-size model of a vault door, the numbers '101' stencilled in the centre, hung at a slight angle.

"Looks like this place had one hell of a fight a while ago." Vincent picked up a handful of shell casings, sniffing one. "This wasn't recent."

Patience took a chance and stood up, walking behind the reception desk and finding the body of a Super Mutant, its body riddled with bullet holes. The blood on the floor dried long before. The body showed no signs of decomposition, despite the obvious amount of time since the creature had died. She poked the Super Mutant with her rifle. The skin dimpling like the creature had died only minutes, hours before.

"Jebus fucking Christ! Even fucking maggots don't want anything to do with those fuckers." Valerie, stood beside Patience, gave the Super Mutant body a sharp kick.

"There's another one down here." Gia's hand waved from one of the blocked, downward staircases, then made an exaggerated pointing movement. "This one is seriously fu ... uh ... messed up. I mean, its face is just gone. Whoever killed this? They had anger issues."

Patience stepped towards the staircase and looked down. The Super Mutant did, indeed, look like it had taken a full auto mag empty into its face. There didn't seem to be anything else of use here. The screens of the computer terminals had shattered and blackened by some mind of extreme heat. The keyboards trashed and missing keys.

The broken staircase leading upwards gave them no option but to use the staircase at the far end of the reception area. Taking up a covering position at the far end of the curving reception desk, Patience sent Vincent forward to move to the second floor.

Hugging the wall, Vincent took the stairs slow, one at a time, his rifle steady and pointing up towards the landing. Reaching eye level with the floor, he eased up a slight, swinging his rifle from one side to the other. He stopped, holding his rifle pointed at one spot for a second, before continuing up the stairs and crouching at the top.

"It's clear." He called, waving them up. "There's busted Robobrain robot and there's a radio playing, but that's it."

Patience began moving up the stairs, followed by Gia and then Valrie. At the top of the stairs, she saw the Robobrain. It looked nothing more than a trash can on tracks, extendable, rubber covered arms ending in pincers, laid beside it and the glass dome littered the floor in fragmented pieces. On the floor, in front of the broken dome, what looked like an actual brain lay in a pool of viscous, clear liquid.

"Is that a real brain?" Patience almost felt sick at the thought.

"Oh, yeah. Some people say they used the brains of condemned criminals." Valrie dived upon the Robobrain, extracting a screwdriver from a pocket and started opening up a panel on the cylindrical body. "Programmed the fuckers for security, maintenance, that sort of thing. Except most of them went fucking mad. Killed a lot of people."

Patience left Valrie to her dismantling. Nothing in her Swiss Cheese memory clicked on the Robobrain. She knew nothing about them. Whether that was due to her memory loss or because the macabre machines had appeared some time after, she couldn't tell. The idea of putting a human brain, hell, even an animal brain, into a machine sickened her. Just when she thought the Capital Wasteland couldn't get any worse.