Chapter 131: David Martinez
The other new face was a young man named David Martinez.
His mother, Gloria Martinez, made a hard living flipping second-hand cyberware on the streets. She had been a reliable, if not close, supplier for Maine's crew for some time, and their relationship was decent.
The turning point came on an ordinary evening.
As usual, Gloria was driving her beat-up car to pick David up from Arasaka Academy.
Disaster struck without warning. On a main thoroughfare in Heywood, their car was caught in the crossfire of a sudden gang shootout.
A stray rocket or an out-of-control vehicle—it was impossible to tell in the chaos—slammed violently into their car.
The chassis crumpled instantly. Glass shattered like rain.
David, in the passenger seat, was dazed by the impact. Blood streamed from a gash on his forehead, blurring his vision, and his arm screamed with the sharp pain of a fracture.
But his own injuries paled in comparison to the horror of seeing his mother, Gloria. She was pinned tight against the driver's seat by the twisted steering column and metal frame. Blood was pouring from her head and abdomen. Her breathing was weak.
The agony contorted her movements, but a mother's will to protect her child overpowered everything.
Using the last dregs of her consciousness, she sent a brief, desperate distress signal, mingled with gasps of pain, to Maine: "Save... David..."
It was this signal, condensed from her final will, that caught Maine's attention.
When Maine, Dorio, and Rebecca arrived at the coordinates, they found the boy, David, dragging his injured arm, uselessly trying to pull open the mangled door, while Gloria's life signs faded rapidly in the driver's seat.
They quickly pried the door open. Maine made the call instantly, directing the crew to rush the dying Gloria and the injured David to Glen, their trusted ripperdoc in Watson.
Thanks to the timely arrival and Glen's unconventional, if rough, street-medicine skills, Gloria's life was barely saved. Though the procedure was crude and left significant complications, she was alive.
But survival was merely the beginning of a long, painful ordeal.
The subsequent treatment, the repair of her damaged spine and nerve clusters, and the potential need for expensive custom cybernetics to replace failed organs and limbs... the cost was an astronomical figure of despair.
Gloria had saved some money from her side hustle, but almost all of it had been poured into David's exorbitant tuition at Arasaka Academy and their daily expenses.
Raising a son capable of entering Arasaka Academy had drained the single mother of everything.
Maine's crew, honoring their past dealings and the sheer will of Gloria's final plea, fronted the initial emergency costs and Glen's fee. But they were not a charity. They could not, and had no obligation to, bear the long-term burden of her endless medical bills.
The cruelty of reality, like the shadow of Night City itself, quickly enveloped the Martinez family, who had just survived a brush with death.
As Gloria lay on the bed in Glen's clinic, surrounded by the smell of antiseptic and blood, wrapped in agony and deeper despair, David stepped up.
The boy who had always been sheltered under her wing, who had even seemed timid at school due to his background, shed his usual immaturity. For the first time, a look of undeniable resolve burned in his eyes.
He approached Maine. Though his fingers curled nervously, he clearly stated his request: to work for the crew, to earn the eddies needed for his mother's treatment.
He tried to make his voice sound reliable, unconsciously puffing out his thin chest. "I have fast reflexes. My implant compatibility tests were high scores... I learn quick.
"I can keep up with the Arasaka Academy curriculum! I think... I can be useful."
A tremor still leaked into the end of his sentence, but the intent to shoulder the responsibility was clear.
Hearing her son's words from the bed, Gloria became instantly agitated.
She gripped the stained sheets with her barely functional right hand, forcing a broken protest from her throat. "No... David... no..."
She had sacrificed everything, walked the edge of the law flipping chrome, all to keep her son away from the blood and filth of the streets, to put him on the "bright" path she imagined.
Now, because of her own incompetence, was she to drag her son into the darkness she had tried so hard to shield him from? This was more unbearable than the physical pain.
However, reality was an unmoving mountain.
The latest bill Glen wordlessly handed over was a dull knife cutting her heart.
Without continued treatment, nerve damage and organ failure would consume her. She would become a complete invalid, bedridden, or worse—dead.
Then, David would truly be alone.
David's persistence was a rock, and the cruel reality was an inescapable cage.
Gloria's protests faded before her son's gaze—mixed with fear, yet unusually firm—and the cold string of numbers on the medical bill.
She finally fell silent. Tears slid silently from her eyes, mixing with the dried blood at her temples.
In that moment, her heart was torn in two: half filled with endless panic and guilt for her son's imminent descent into danger, and the other half with an unspeakable, bitter solace.
Her child, in the face of disaster, had not retreated. He was trying to grow into a man capable of supporting the family.
This contradictory emotion gnawed at her, filling her with a piercing regret for her own helplessness and for becoming her son's burden.
To save every eurodollar for the bottomless pit of Glen's bills, David quickly gave up their small apartment in the city—the place that held countless memories for mother and son—and moved to the Badlands bastion, finding a corner among the crew's quarters to sleep.
Maine and the others couldn't harden their hearts completely. They helped move Gloria, who was extremely immobile and required constant assistance, to the bastion as well, settling her in a relatively quiet, separate area.
Now, Gloria spent most of her time lying stiffly on the bed, staring at the crude ceiling, unable to care for herself.
Her body was imprisoned on the sickbed, but her mind was trapped in a deeper cage.
The heart-wrenching worry for her son's safety every time he went on a mission, the deep regret for becoming a burden and leading her son down the path she least wanted for him... these emotions intertwined, often leaving her gaze empty and complex, bereft of the resilience and light she once held as a mother supporting her family.
(End of Chapter)