GOODSPRINGS

It was a funny thing.

Junior was gone, and the white paint had run out. Ginny put the finishing touches on her second "KEEP OUT" sign, barely thinking about her letters, leaving them large and crude. A child's writing. She'd certainly blubbered like a damn kid, but only earlier. The waterworks had dried up.

Maybe it wasn't so funny, once you thought about it. The paint had just been one of the things she and Junior had done for caps- or shelter, or chems, or food. Every so often she'd find a particular type of scrap metal on her scavenging runs and bring a pocketful home. Junior would take a file to it, and mix the powder with old recycled oil, a few other odds and ends, and there it was. White paint. Ginny hadn't been on many scavenging runs lately, and Junior hadn't been doing much of anything since he'd taken sick.

Ginny chucked her improvised paintbrush down the hill, where it tumbled out of sight among the scrub and radscorpion burrows. She wiped her hands on her overalls and turned back to Junior's freshly filled grave.

"Whiskey Snakes Jr., you son of a bitch." The tears had all gone so she allowed herself a laugh. Whiskey hadn't been Junior's given name- it was Jack- but he'd inherited it from his father. Presumably he'd also inherited his illness from his father, who'd taken sick years ago in much the same way. Whiskey Snakes Senior had lingered painfully for a long time before the tumors finally took his life.

If she could see it, Junior certainly had been able to, and he'd had plenty of time to think about it, alone in their trailer while she'd foraged for enough to keep them alive. She'd come home today from the springs and he'd been gone. She knew exactly where he'd gone, and what happened.

Junior had always joked about dying, but he never used the words "dying" or "death". He had always talked about "giving his body to Mother Earth," or more frequently "becoming food for radscorpions." Nobody got killed by radscorpions these days unless they were stupid or really unlucky- or did it on purpose. The hard part for Ginny to think about was a brief morbid image of Junior crawling his way up the hill to the Goodsprings Cemetery. It had hurt him just to get out of bed. But walking? Impossible.

At some point he must have laid down in a good spot for a grave to be dug, and rubbed himself with a paste of herbs and rotten carp from Lake Meade. It was a bait recipe he'd learned from some tribals they'd stayed with temporarily, and was supposed to irresistably attract edible critters. It had done that, of course, and then some. The top of the hill had not only been crawling with scorpions, but also swarming with bloatflies. Before she could even get close to Junior's body she'd had to go back to the trailer and get the plasma pistol they'd saved for a rainy day- or in case the Gangers from up the way decided to do more than give Goodsprings a squeeze for some caps.

While she was there she cleaned out their trailer, down to the last bit of twisted wire. It had all gone to the municipal scrap pile, and hopefully folks would take what they needed. Ginny didn't need any of it. Maybe it would give ol' Lazy Pete something to do. Salvage was a lot better in the area than he believed, but he'd rather sit in his stinky old chair than put in the effort. She was going to miss their old trailer, just on the other side of the cistern from the Saloon.

Ginny had cleared everything out, but there was one thing she hadn't dumped in the scrap pile. She dug it out now and tossed it on Junior's grave, among the big rocks she'd piled on to keep vermin drawn by the bait from digging Junior up. It was a "snowglobe" as Whiskey Senior had called it when he gave it to them as a wedding gift, right after they had settled here. Some prewar souvenir showing a smiling idiot visiting Goodsprings. The bits of fake snow swirled inside violently from hitting the ground, and quickly settled as Ginny watched.

Not long after they'd gotten it, some shifty dude who said he was a Mojave express courier came by offering to buy it. For an obscene amount of caps. Said a wealthy collector was looking for them and willing to pay big- well, big for the lowly folks outside of New Vegas. She supposed it would only have been a day's work for a cardsharp or highroller.

They hadn't sold, as they did pretty well for themselves in trade, and didn't need much. Junior figured with how fragile a thing it was it might be unique- the only "snowglobe" of its kind, maybe. Something like that had its own value- the sort of value that could be passed down to your kids. Well, there wasn't ever going to be a Whiskey Snakes the Third, so she left it. That was it. That was all. The whole thing was done.

Well, almost done.

Early, Ginny had killed the flies and scorpions, and dropped the little energy pistol there where she stood on the road up the hill. Someone would find it- Chet or Sunny, maybe. They could put it to good use. She had buried Junior and rolled all the bug corpses down the far side of the hill, where nobody went.

She thought about those bug corpses now. They were going to draw the attention of the giant scorpions that scoured that part of the valley, and those big boys weren't anything to trifle with. Repainting the "KEEP OUT" signs had been her good deed for the day, Ginny supposed. With their home and possessions scattered, and Junior buried, that meant that there wasn't anything left to do.

"Goodbye, Junior."

It was a funny thing. Nobody got killed by radscorpions these days unless they were stupid or really unlucky- or did it on purpose. Ginny walked past her "KEEP OUT" signs, down the hill towards the big scorpion nests.