Eyes were watching them from a distant mountain peak. The lens of a high-powered sniper rifle brought them all closer, almost at arm's reach.
A moaning desert sigh kicked up a cloud of sand and dust so high, it blotted out the morning sun. Their red and black silhouettes vanished in a thick curtain of arid earth.
It was too late to move forward and onward - not with the cover of darkness so many hours behind. The rifle was lowered, and the wanderer made shelter to rest.
Night was far too dangerous to spend alone in the arms of slumber, so for now she slept, and let the daylight hours burn.
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Brutus surveyed his kingdom from a cliffside watchpost, cloaked by a million twinkling stars and swimming within in the deep purples of a pre-dawn sky. His beer was piss warm by now, but he drank it anyway. The Mojave stretched on before him and beneath him for endless miles. Through his old-world binoculars, he peered across the lonely expanse of highway 95; nothing stirred amidst the blackness, save the many gaping radioactive mouths in the earth - an endless spew of toxic breath lingering into the night.
As if in protest of his presence, a howling swirl of winds whipped up against the rockface, enveloping the lookout in a fine mist of sand and pebbles. Becoming annoyed, he dusted himself off and took another swig. Drinking - especially on the job - was a risk punishable by death under the right circumstances, but Night Watch was the one chance to indulge beyond the omniscient eye of the Proletariat. It was also the only means of passing otherwise painfully idle time.
"FUCK!" he shouted abruptly, spilling beer all over himself and down his armor. To his dismay, the relentless winds had slipped him a fist full of desert in his lager.
Warm, sandy piss.
He knocked the bottle off its ledge and bitterly rejoiced in listening to the glass shatter along the sun-bleached boulders below. He would reek of alcohol before his elders, and could come up with no excuse to save face; he could only hope to later slip away back to his quarters unnoticed. Brutus grunted and shifted his sights back to the desolate band of busted asphalt winding wildly into the starry horizon.
Minutes ticked away in uneventful silence. He drummed on the wooden ledge of his post with sun-blistered fingertips, feeling the clutches of boredom taking hold. His eyes slowly slipped closed, then fluttered open again; this pattern repeated for some time, until the band of his binoculars suddenly closed around his throat in a familiar lynch.
Brutus tried to scream, but a high-pitched wheeze was all that could escape. Surprised eyeballs bulged from sunken, tired sockets; his hands clawed at his neck to no avail. All he could do was throw himself backwards against his attacker, but to his dismay, the noose only tightened - so much so that the flesh of his bloated face deepened to the same maroon of his bastard flag.
He struggled in hapless agony as his world slowly faded away, like static snow sparkling on one of them old black-and-whites. His body eventually slumped forward, quiet and still.
The end was cold, just as Brutus had always wondered.
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Hell, you see, is other people.
And war never,… well,… you know.
Even many hundreds of years thereafter, civilization was riddled with human cancer and devolved reptilian-brain survival instincts. In the centuries following The Big Boom, overall life expectancy had withered to 32 years (if you were lucky, that is), and the population of the Broken and Divided States only grew by about 479 beating hearts each year. Dead babies outnumbered the living 4 to 1, and more often than not, their mothers were sent to the earth's crust alongside them. Humanity was once again plagued by a myriad of diseases and infections which science had been one breath away from treating and curing, almost as if humans had literally blown themselves back to the dark ages. All things considered, life in this new world was little more than the dimly-lit waiting room of death.
Sprawling megacities no more, all these survivors could gather together were tumbled brick and tin-shanty towns built into the piles of rubble that were once glistening skylines and lush suburban sprawl. Fewer more had settled by the sea - the only place where the true wreckage of the modern world was not immediately apparent. Denial is a powerful drug, and those along the coasts could stand at land's edge and pretend as if life had gone on interrupted. Reality is not evaded so easily, but they kept the Mirelurks well fed.
Despite their profound wealth and pervasive expansion, stability was fleeting (and, ultimately, futile) as the New California Republic had come to realize while burying countless comrades in barren corners of the wastes. They were a faded, bloated replica of pre-war power, much to the chagrin of locals; a scant few welcomed their presence, but most considered them to be the walking ghosts of the old world apocalypse.
Rival tribes unloaded clips, scattered shells and severed heads from New Vegas to New Caanan with little bias. Live gunfire was the melody of the Mojave, frequent explosions her percussion. The pre-war world had almost become a tall-tale handed down through the centuries from cynical elder to curious vault dweller. In the passing of years and spilling of so much blood, it grew increasingly difficult to imagine what the wild west had been like well before the NCR stood on its grizzly haunches and reached for the muscular, veiny throat of Legion.
The Great Bear skulked restlessly about the borders of New Vegas, biding its time with blackjack and hookers. Soldiers drunkenly danced down the brightly-lit drag of the Strip from sun-up to moon-down, and Not-At-Home watched it all unfold from the towering spire of the Lucky 38 with jaded concern.
Across the remains of America, raiders and warring factions gored, flogged, shot, incinerated, imprisoned and impaled one another. Humans still dug up old reasons to hate, invented new ones to destroy one another now as they had for millennia - bombs or no bombs.
So onward struggled man, the good somehow barely outpacing the bad; but the bad grew far, far worse, and the good shrank backward in its imposing shadow.
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Caesar sat atop a throne of gold and red velvet; sixteen severed heads sat atop the pointed ends of wooden stakes lining the path to his tent. His eyes were narrowed, concentrated; to his guards, his gaze seemed to burn a hole through fire itself. They said nothing, waiting tensely. None of them would ever admit how much fear his presence instilled in them – how his authority petrified them, made their testes quiver in their fragile little ballsacks.
Edward Sallow was no fool; his war prowess was acutely matched by his insight into the human condition. Legion warriors were men of strength and idiotic loyalty, not intelligence, so it took little coercion - save the promises of glory and conquest - to earn their trust and unyielding allegiance. They were the new world order (or so they had been brainwashed to believe).
"Ave Caesar!" Gallus announced, entering the tent. A brooding wall of a man, he was equal parts Legionary Decanus and sycophant, not averse to boot-licking of the most egregious kind. His brethren found him mostly intolerable, but his rank left their true feelings caught in their teeth.
The guards standing erect along the hallway to the throne returned the greeting in echo, and Caesar withdrew his attention from the pit fire.
"What brings you here, Gallus?" Caesar asked, his voice taking on the usual flat, grave tonality.
"This," Gallus scowled, his right hand wrapped around the slender, filthy arm of a female prisoner of war. He dragged her into view and tossed her to the dirt at Caesar's feet. The woman hung her head low, face covered by flowing, sand-encrusted hair. She was a lovely feral creature not yet broken by the almighty boot of Legion.
"She was found boring a hole through the inner perimeter," he explained. Caesar's expression remained neutral, and this disappointed Gallus; he had been hoping for some form of recognition, no matter how trivial.
"Leave her," Caesar ordered. "I'll address this myself."
Gallus bowed out and exited as swiftly as he had arrived. Bright beams of desert sunlight filtered in briefly as the tent flaps fluttered closed.
Caesar rose and stood before the capture, observing the slave collar around her neck. She refused to look at him - not out of respect or even fear, but of an all-encompassing hatred. He bent down and grasped her face in his calloused hand, squeezing firmly.
"You know escape is suicide, yes?" He said tenderly, condescendingly. She still refused to look him in the eye. Revulsion bubbled over inside her like a pot of water boiling out of control.
"Do you not like your new home? We feed you, clothe you, give you a purpose here."
Terse silence.
"And you dare betray us?"
The slave snorted indignantly, her eyes finally meeting his.
"You have succeeded," Caesar paused emphatically, "in betraying only yourself." The words came out in a sinister serpent hiss, and he squeezed harder, more aggressively.
Her whole body shaking with untapped rage, the slave reared back and slapped him across the face. The sound of six machetes suddenly unsheathed from their holsters split the air in unison.
"Devil!" She cried.
Caesar was rather surprised to find himself becoming aroused. He withdrew his hand from her and placed it atop the palpitating welt on his cheek. A hideous grin slithered across his lips; both eyes twinkled with insidious delight.
"Such bravado," he murmured, still grinning. The atmosphere was thick with suspense. Morra squeezed her eyes shut and wished for the end to come swiftly, knowing all too well she would be tortured for weeks before they finally allowed her to die.
His guards stood ever ready with their swords drawn, though Caesar raised a hand in wordless disengagement. They reluctantly re-sheathed their anxious machetes.
He looked her over with an expression of mock sympathy, frowning slightly. Caesar then broke her nose all over her face with a quick swing not even his guards saw coming. She crumpled backwards, stained a deep red with her own blood.
"You, profligate, are alive only because we allow you to be," he lectured as she lay motionless, staring somewhere beyond the ceiling. Tears freely escaped her eyes in silent surrender. Caesar paced the length of the tent, hands clasped loosely at his back.
"This is an opportunity to serve your people - to make yourself something of use in this new world. You could have the honor of birthing the next great conqueror from that gaping maw between your little legs, you know."
Morra dared not reply.
"Our leniency was met not with gratitude, or even some semblance of dignity - but with the typical self-righteous insolence expected of you low-life buckets of shit. Pity."
He knelt down and clutched her face again, relishing the sensation of her hot blood spilling over his fingers. A muffled, defeated groan arose from her chest.
"There is no devil…. only me."
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Diffused light from the setting sun stretched across the web of canyon ridges lining highway 95; rugged mountain ranges bleached from millennia of scorching ultraviolet rays bid farewell to its relentless solar glow and lit up like lighthouses for miles around. Amidst the calm of coming twilight, twin sand-twisters danced erratically across the valley; rope-like grooves left in their wake gave the impression of the humble earth first learning to draw.
Cottonwood Cove had been built up from a modest slave-trafficking port (and the Legion's first established plot on Nevada soil) to a sprawling encampment and bustling hub of shady activity. Its location and swelling size was a rather confident 'fuck you' to the NCR. The Great Bear, nervous and calculating, had in response constructed a small lookout perched precariously at the top of the sloping path which led straight into the wicked heart of Legion territory. The guards stationed at the entrance had taken immediate notice of their meek presence, moreso out of amusement than legitimate concern.
From the canyon walls encroached by shadow, a pair of angry eyes surveys the area and falls upon the silhouettes of six Legion men, outlined by the light of twin parallel rows of flickering torches. Four Recruits and two Primes stood at the gate of their camp, ambling from foot to foot in restless wait. To their immediate right were two wooden crosses - on one hung a skeleton picked clean by birds of prey, on the other a man very close to death. His bones looked as if they would soon break through his gruesomely sunburned flesh.
Jericho, a Great Khan drug runner, had lost the energy to groan in agony two days ago. He had tried begging for release at first, then mercy killing; his pleas were met only with ridicule. Now mute with despair, the soldiers often forgot he was there, though the vultures and ravens lingering nearby were awaiting his end with terrible patience.
Perhaps an overbearing, obtrusive army could not so easily surprise (or cripple) the angry bull…. perhaps one lone wanderer could pierce that wicked heart from the black depths of anonymity. Endeavors of morality, superiority, or blind conquest were steeped in human flaw, often spelling failure for even the most organized military-grade enterprise. Her drive for retribution was thicker than blood, far more toxic than acid - this was personal.
The coming attack itself was one thing; the assailant – a woman – was another. She readily welcomed a sloppy, omnidirectional, testosterone-fueled tsunami of Legion rage, hell-bent on retaliation. It is well known that the wise remain calm and cunning, but the foolish grow angry and stupid - and in some sadomasochistic way, it would be an honor for the ugly eye of Legion to shine on her.
What this wanderer had not expected, though, was an eagle-eyed ally perched a half-mile away in some corner of the mountains, waiting...
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Octavius stood with his brothers under the pale light of the moon, frantically scratching the groin of his armor. He could not reach the source of his discomfort and shuffled heavily on foot.
"This shit is itching the fuck out of my nuts!" He tried scratching again from a different angle with no luck.
"You sure it's not your vagina bothering you again?" Nero quipped.
"Ascendo tuum, culus (Up yours, asshole)," Octavius snarled. Cato had been quietly observing the dock area but was now watching their pissing contest with mild interest.
"Pudor tu (fuck you)," Nero half-heartedly replied, then looked up to the NCR stakeout and sighed. "Man, what I wouldn't give to have a fuckin' drink or two." He yawned loudly and stretched, feeling the onset of exhaustion working its way into his bones. His guard duty double-shift would end around 3am and he was still debating whether he would first have his way with his favorite slave, Iuliana, or just head back to his bunk and collapse into bed. Nero's young libido was busy having an argument with what little reasoning he had in his head, so he didn't catch the verbal smackdown Octavius had laid straightaway.
"Oh, why's that? The beer would drink you... Pussy."
Nero came to and wasted no time in tearing the sword from its place of rest on his hip.
"Speak with thy tongue again, DOG, and I'll carve it from your facehole!" The machete's blade tore through the air and stopped just short of his comrade's nose. For a split second, a minute gleam of fear flickered in his eyes; Octavius then smiled, his upper lip curling slightly into a sneer.
"Your reaction time is pitiful, brother." The machete did not move.
"Ladies, shut the fuck up and get back to work," Cato barked. His patience with the Nero and Octavius waned by the day. Lately, he had been toying with the idea of casually dropping their names to the Praetorians the next time they lined the boys up for Decimation.
Nero frowned at his superior and disengaged, making a mental note that Cato was to be drawn and quartered should he ever rise to some level of power.
Unfortunately for him, Nero would never get the chance to rise to power, nor would he ever introduce Cato to the Grim Reaper. His head centered in the crossbeams, one fluid motion requiring little conscious thought or moral scrutiny clutched the trigger and blew apart the poor fucker's skull before he even knew what hit him. His cohorts flinched away in horror as what remained of Nero painted the midnight landscape around them. Angry shouts and calls to action ricocheted along the canyon walls, only then drowned out by gunfire and a sea of bullets clinking like a concerto across the desert floor.
Skunt sighed happily and gave her trusty Anti-Material Rifle a kiss. She quickly returned her right eye to the scope and picked off Octavius while he thundered up the path with his semiautomatic singing brightly in the dark.
She relished in the joyous (but brief) triumph of two head shots in rapid succession just as Cato crested the hill in a mad dash, firing wildly in her general direction. Skunt briefly abandoned her rifle and reached for the remote control at her side.
Cottonwood Cove was rudely interrupted by an incredible explosion at its center. Cato whirled around to watch, mouth agape and immobilized. His attention was captured long enough for Skunt to quietly amble over the rockface down to his position.
"…THE FUCK?!" he cried, and was for a moment lost between the urge to disembowel his assailant, or investigate the attack on his base. Skunt made the decision for him - his head was freed from his body in a much cleaner manner than the fate which had befallen poor Nero. Cato's neck became a red fountain as his headless corpse sank to its knees and toppled over. Skunt was morbidly delighted to find that Cato's open-mouthed expression of shock was frozen onto his disembodied head, and roared with laughter as she watched it roll down the path.
Dozens of soldiers poured out of their barracks and buildings, flooding the camp with confusion and rage. This was the moment she had been waiting for: with the flip of a switch on her controller, she remote-detonated a second launch – the first had been a High-Explosive missile, this one a mini-nuke. From somewhere atop an adjacent mountain plateau, a whistling projectile hurtled downwards into the chaos and made perfect impact. The sky lit up like daybreak as a miniature mushroom cloud materialized among the scrambling bodies of its victims. Structure and human alike were instantly incinerated its ensuing firestorm.
Skunt was having trouble believing that her plan actually worked.
"Well,….. shit," she said with a goofy grin, to no one in particular.