Nevada: High Roller (Fallout New Vegas)

Chapter 1: The Bitch Came Back

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Being shot in the head will teach you two very important things about life.

The first thing it teaches you is that you're tempting fate when you take a shortcut on your delivery route through a graveyard. When you're already surrounded by the dead and buried, sometimes there are people who want to help you feel at home, with a 9 millimeter hunk of lead right through your noggin.

               And the second thing that it teaches you is that, when the finky bastard in the checkered suit who pulled the nine on you is dumb enough to show you his face, you'd better remember it -- just in case you survive, harboring one killer headache and a hankering for some good, old-fashioned vigilante justice.

Being up and about one week after taking one through the head had taken as big a toll on me as you might expect. Headaches galore, as I'd mentioned, a not-so-pretty X-shaped scar across the top right section of my forehead, and an overwhelming amount of pity from all the folks in Goodsprings.

"You're a lucky lady, Nevada," Doc Mitchell had reminded me every single day for my check-up. "I ain't never treated someone for a bullet to the brain and had them walk outta here."

'Lucky,' he'd said. 

I'd been ambushed on my delivery route outside of Goodsprings on my way to the New Vegas Strip. I'd been gagged, bound and forced to kneel at gunpoint while that smug bastard in a pristine checkered suit had gloated over stealing the package I was meant to deliver. I'd been shot in the head and buried in a shallow, unmarked grave.

There wasn't a lucky bone in my body.

"Nevada?" 

Sunny's light, peppy voice rang out through the saloon as the door creaked open, a bark following as her canine companion, Cheyenne, followed her inside. 

"Nevada, you in here?"

Craning my head upwards from its resting place atop the cool wooden countertop of the bar counter, I slid my fingers deep into my wild and wavy mess of red hair and groaned tiredly in a half-assed response.

Between the hot sun beating down on the Mojave, the patched-up hole in my head and the fact I'd been sleeping on the hard floor of back room of the saloon ever since I'd been dug up out of my grave, I was beat.

I'd been alone in Prospector's Saloon for the past hour. Trudy, the owner, had stepped out for a while and let me sit at the bar by myself while she took care of some business around the little town. Between Doc Mitchell telling me that it was fine for me to drink in moderation, and Trudy letting me have two drinks per day, so long as I left the caps from the tops on the counter for her to pay her back, I had the privilege of numbing my pain with 200-and-something-year-old booze strong enough to hold its own against nuclear radiation.