The battered bar still clinging to life in the skeletal heart of what used to be New Vegas carried the faint, stubborn perfume of pre-war normalcy—like a photograph left too long in the sun, colors bleeding but the outlines stubbornly refusing to vanish. For Cooper Howard—for The Ghoul—it was the closest thing to a time machine the wasteland had left to offer. Step through the creaking doorframe and, for a few suspended heartbeats, the bombs might never have fallen. Two hundred and twenty-some-odd years of hunting, killing, being hunted, and slowly rotting from the inside out could almost pass for someone else’s nightmare.

Almost.

Reality had a way of clawing back in: the radiation-scarred rasp in his throat, the perpetual low burn behind his eyes, the ledger of atrocities he’d both committed and endured. Those were the only things that felt solid anymore. Everything else was dust and wishful thinking.

Whiskey, though—whiskey still worked.

It didn’t erase the memories. It just sanded the edges until they stopped cutting quite so deep. Ten glasses, fifteen, twenty—numbers stopped mattering somewhere around the time the room started leaning comfortably to one side. The mind quieted. The mouth, regrettably, did not.

The Ghoul stared into the seventeenth glass of the night—or maybe the eighteenth; he’d quit keeping score after the second pour blurred into the third. He tipped it back in a single, practiced motion, the burn sliding down like an old, familiar friend. The empty tumbler clinked against the spiderwebbed bar top with deliberate care. His gaze drifted upward, lazy and half-lidded, tracing the dusty shelves lined with whatever bottles had survived the centuries: ancient bourbons with labels peeling like old skin, clear moonshine in cloudy glass, a few stubbornly intact pre-war imports glowing amber in the low light. His cracked lips parted on a slow exhale.

Then his eyes snagged.

In the far corner behind the bar, perched on a tall stool like a bird of prey deciding whether the pickings were worth the effort, sat a figure. Their hands moved over the disassembled pieces of a combat shotgun with the kind of intimate, unhurried reverence most people reserved for lovers. Fingers slid a shell into the magazine tube—click—then another—click—each motion liquid-smooth, mechanical in its perfection. No wasted energy. No hesitation. The kind of muscle memory that only came from doing the same violent arithmetic thousands of times.

A faint, crooked smile tugged at the Ghoul’s ruined mouth. Most folks would’ve flinched at the casual display of hardware; he felt his shoulders loosen. Danger had long since stopped being a warning bell and started sounding like home.

He hooked two fingers through the empty glass, letting it dangle loosely from his grip, the rim catching a weak gleam from the overhead bulb. His gaze flicked down to the tumbler for half a second, then returned—steady, predatory—to the hands on the shotgun.

When he spoke, the voice rolled out low and gravel-scraped, pure irradiated drawl, carrying easily through the near-empty room. “Fixin’ to turn somebody’s skull into modern art, darlin’?”

He lifted the glass a few inches, tilting it forward in a lazy salute, the universal wasteland gesture for ‘keep ‘em coming’. His head cocked slightly to one side, eyes narrowing with amused interest as those precise fingers finally paused over the receiver.

The cocky edge that lived permanently in his tone sharpened just enough to cut.

“‘Cause if ya’ are…” He let the words hang a beat, lips curling wider to expose the jagged remains of teeth. “…might wanna pour me one more before the red starts flyin’. Hate to miss the show on account of an empty glass.”