Sasha Rogers
Scavenger, Entrepreneur
Sasha Rogers initially meets me around mid-morning at a bar in Cottonwood, a very small mining town about a day's walk south of Redding. ("I'm out here waiting on my scout team to tell me if there's anything worthwhile up in the hills," she explains when I ask about her choice of meeting place. "Here's hoping, because this beer's gonna be overpriced garbage otherwise.") She's wearing an old, faded blue three piece suit with "Shrapnel's Scavenging and Salvage Service" written on a cloth pinned to the back of her blazer. Soon after we meet, Rogers receives word that her scouts came across a promising find out to the east of the town, and she invites me to go out with her and "see the machine at work, really give you something to put in that book of yours."
You wanna know how I got started in salvaging? I'll tell you. I was broke. Broker than broke, figured I was gonna starve to death somewhere outside New Reno. I was strung out on jet and Med-X. I was alone except for the damn geckos that were gonna eat my body once I kicked it. And one night, I thought I'd hit the Med-X too hard, I was nodding real bad—I know this sounds like a damn lie of a story, but hand to God—I was staggering around, trying to keep my eyes open, and right before I passed out there was this rumble, this deep, earthy rumble, like the ground itself was talking to me, and it said: "Sasha Rogers! You damn fool, get up! You're lying in the field of your salvation!"
And sure enough, when I woke up I was in an old scrapyard way up the 99 just feeling like I—like I was supposed to find something there. So I looked around in the buildings and rooted around in cars until I found a lever to a secret compartment in the trunk of this old Highwayman that had three cans of water, a suit and hat, a pistol with a box of bullets, and $1000 in pre-War cash. Can you believe that shit? The kind of luck or divine intervention…and once I was done hollering about that find I said, "Lord, this feeling—I'm gonna take this and run with it," and I did, all the way back to Reno. Been digging around in rustbuckets and half-collapsed buildings ever since. Still got that pistol, too—she pulls her blazer aside and turns; there's a small, blued 10mm pistol in a holster at her hip.
The trick to salvaging is to go out and put your neck on the line. Put your damn neck on the line. Right after my revelation, once I'd cleaned up a little, had some cash on hand, I headed out to the East. Way east. I headed out to the Plains Commonwealth area, with the Brotherhood of Steel—now those are some mean, mean boys they've got out there, let me tell you. I was looking down a lot of laser rifle barrels travelling through there. The tech, though, absolutely incredible, especially up near Devil's Graveyard, that area. Worth all the burn marks.
So east, northeast, then further east. Spent a few years poking around the big cities out there before I decided everything's better back here. Part of that is—Eastern Commonwealth was probably the hardest hit by the bombs, I'd say. New York, Boston, D.C., you'd expect those places to be chalk full of good scav sites, but there wasn't all that much, compared to back West. All rubble. You get grass in the NCR, trees here and there, but out there? Barely anything. It's all dead, all the radiation's kneecapped it. I still don't know how they ain't all ghouls, or how they find anything to eat.
Somewhere past Springfield I got ahold of a map and I started marking the good spots I was coming across, the areas with good tech and all. The bunkers, the factories, the Army bases, the corporate headquarters, all of it. Talked to locals. Put my neck on the line. This one time, I was scouting for an old bunker I saw marked on some Army docs I picked up on my way through Dog Town, and I ran into a Brotherhood patrol. Lord! You can't talk your way out of anything with them, they're so damn tunnel visioned. Walking on the road? You're a threat. You got a gun? You're a threat. You're breathing? You're a threat. Those tin cans chased me nearly half a day north until I got to Rock Falls and lost them because they got distracted by some raiders picking over a house. Like dogs with a bone.
How would you describe the scrap and salvage business?
Oh, salvage's a nasty game. Nasty. 'Cause everyone's in it, one way or another, you know—we're all salvaging something from the Old World. Everything good we have came from the Old World, one way or another. So people think, hey, what do I need some scavver for? Since I can take apart an old alarm clock and not—boom!—blow myself up? That's baby steps. You gotta go deeper than that to get at anything worth having. Go out in the wastes, find the big scrap, spend three months neck deep in a ship full of robots that wanna kill you, or ghouls that wanna kill you, or other scavengers that wanna kill you. That's the kind of shit I and my crew go through to get the government the schematics they use to build the bombs they're hoarding to cause all this all over again.
[Rogers gestures around her.] You like living in this hot, dry ass wasteland? 'Cause it's coming round a second time, and worse yet. Just watch. And go ahead and put that in your book, too, I'm not scared of some government hubbub.
You're not?
Hell no! They need me. They're not gonna kill me when they need me and everything Shrapnel finds for them. I've got—you know how big this country is? It is a big, big country. Got a lot of land to cover. Got a lot of scrap out there, all over the place. And you know who knows where a lot of that scrap is? Us! Those scavvers no one's got the time of day for. I know—you couldn't imagine the kinds of places we know about, that we've got on lockdown until I get people together enough to sweep them. We're the best damn salvagers in the business, they can't leave any of us dead in a ditch somewhere.
At this point we've been riding in a Brahmin-pulled cart for about an hour and a half. The mountains in the distance have been drawing steadily closer until the scout ahead of us motions for us to pull onto a newly (and roughly) forged road heading off into a rocky forested area. Rogers sits next to me, steering the Brahmin with one hand and holding on to the large rifle in her lap with the other.
Scavver's such a—people say that word like they're spitting it at me. Spitting. I resent it. You know how hard I work for my money? How long it took me to get the money and the people and the resources together to say, "yes, I'm Sasha Rogers, of Shrapnel's Scavenging and Salvage Service, what can I salvage for your nasty, hypocritical ass today?" Years! That shit took years! But nobody's got two words of thanks for me or my crew, just all kinds of—the looks I get. You know, it's lucky I'm a scavver, so I know how valuable a bullet is, otherwise [she clicks her tongue] there'd be some real problems. Ooh! I hate it.
One of the reasons I decided to open up a business, a real business, with offices and payrolls and this, that, and the other thing, the whole shebang, was because I was so tired of getting treated like the dirt on the bottom of some city folk's shoes. So I decided—to hell with them! I want to get together all my salvage friends and start up something we could really call our own. It's difficult to claim your work as yours sometimes in salvage and scavenging, since everyone just thinks you're taking trash and trying to sell it as treasure. Everyone treats you like a con artist. So I wanted a group of us to come together and make a real outfit of it, a firm, like those law firms that are cropping up everywhere here. And we did! Shrapnel's. Named for how much of it we've all gone through to get here, literal and not.
Now Shrapnel's is something special. It really is. We do normal hauls and jobs, but it's coordinated and way bigger. We've got hierarchies and shit. The five founders—me, James Trimble, Screw-Eye [McCall, a famed scavenger in the extreme northern regions of the NCR], Lithuanda Sykes, and good ol' Betsy Hutton—are the chief salvagers, we're all in charge of the jobs going on in different areas. We're focusing more on the West Coast right now, NCR especially, but we're going to be expanding hard in the new year, provided business holds steady. Then below us we've got the scavengers that head up the different missions. Before we even go in for a haul we've always got to do an exploratory mission, map out the site and area in detail, figure out the threats and deal with them. After that is the clearing crew, the muscle that take care of whatever bad stuff the exploratory crew found, and then the inventory crew that does all the actual salvaging. Then we work with the caravans and trade posts all over to move and sell what we find, so we've got liaisons with them. Everyone works hard, works together.
And the ground we're covering. People don't realize the kind of distances we need to work in order to turn enough salvage to break even, let alone make a profit given how many people are on our payrolls. We're an outfit of…nearly fifty? At least forty and growing. And we're some of the first to really be doing this kind of organizing. People look at us and they can't go, "oh, those damn scavvers, damn ruffians." They look at us and see a real business, something like the Crimson Caravan. We already had contracts with the NCR, the individual five founders, but when we came together we told them we wanted to renegotiate, and now it looks like we might have a contract with the whole outfit, as a business. Because the government really relies on a lot of that pre-War scrap! Not just the big stuff, like blueprints and prototypes, but the basics—metal, nuclear material. Equipment. We're expanding into that, actually, getting all the eggheads we can and putting them to work refurbishing and repairing and yadda yadda yadda. I'm not in that part so much, I can't keep up with all the details, but Sykes could tell you more.
When we get to the site the scouts mentioned, it's in a small gulch up a long and winding foothill road and is enclosed on almost all sides by steep, rocky cliff faces. The site itself is crawling with people in dusty clothes and guns strapped across their chest and waists, even though it appears, at first sight, to just be a number of old, run down houses and storefronts, similar to what you would find in most areas that managed to avoid taking the full brunt of the Great War. But as we get off the cart and walk around a narrow bend past the buildings, we find a cluster of five people around a metal door set into the mountainside.
Rogers immediately steps in and takes charge, getting updates on the find and what the workers have tried to get the door open. The scouts report that some skeletons in the town were wearing tattered U.S. Army fatigues, and that between that and other Army-issue equipment found in and around the buildings, as well as the sturdiness and model of the door, it's a good bet that whatever's on the other side was military in nature. (Roger's eyes light up at this news.) Once she gets a read on the situation, she splits up the workers so that a third of them are clearing the buildings of possible threats—radroaches chief among them, though there were a few feral ghouls in one of the stores and a cellar—a third are picking through the cleared buildings for supplies and salvage, and a third are working on getting the door open. The groups work for a good three hours until dusk, when Rogers calls it a day and directs everyone to set up camp for the night. We continue our conversation after dinner, in an office overlooking the large campfire and the people mingling around it.
So Shrapnel's been around maybe two years now, right? So a year ago, when we've gotten past most of the groundwork and the set up and things are going real well…I've been making that map of mine for years and years, nearly the whole time I've been in this business, and it's—gold, pretty much. But it wasn't anywhere near complete. Still isn't. I never got down South, nowhere near Gatorville or Atlanta or anywhere below…God, maybe Junction City's the furthest south I've ever gone past the mountains. But a lot of my friends have traveled all over the South, know it real well, or they're even from there. So I took their knowledge and I added it in. All the spots and nooks and backwater bayous they know of, I put 'em all on there. So we've got a pretty complete looking map, now—still light on the North, the old Canada area, but looking pretty good. Much more filled in.
And we take that map, and we sell versions of it to other salvagers, and to the people who want to know what's where. That's our real bread and butter, outside of what we get for hauls. That's one of the things the NCR wants to contract us for, is to do more detailed expeditions and mapping. So maybe soon it's going to be "Shrapnel's Scavenging, Salvaging, Repairing, and Mapping Service" written on my back. I'm gonna need a bigger patch.
What's all the success been like for you?
Mixed bag. Mixed bag, sure. I like the money—Lord, I like the money. I'm a poor kid at heart, I see caps and I want 'em. I like the respect. The power. Bargaining chips, it's all about those when you're working on the bigger picture level, and when you're working with a good chunk of the scavengers in the country, you've got those. You can make even the bigger folks bend to you.
But it's difficult work. I don't like working with the NCR—it's money, but it's fishy money. Trouble money. They were real, real haughty when they first started talking to us, tried to tell us how we had to do our job and all. I wasn't in on those first negotiations, I'm too hotheaded, but I heard about them and ooh! So we shut them down for a while until they came back with their tail properly between their legs. But still. I don't know much about whatever goes on behind their closed doors, but I've got a gut feeling it's bad news. So that's stressful.
And the crew…the bigger we get, the more personnel issues it seems we have. We've got a solid crew now, but it took a lot of weeding to get there. I think when you get the cash rolling in, things change, dynamics and relationships and all that. Do I worry? Sure. Lots of nights I'm up trying to see the future. Sometimes, and I'm going to be real honest with you here, it looks bleak. We've got a long road ahead of us, digging our heels in, finding ways to stick around in a world that doesn't like us a whole hell of a lot.
But—alright, look. The past is pretty bad. I don't like looking back, I think it's a waste of time. But if you'd told me at twenty two that I'd make it to thirty and would be putting something like this together? I'd have laughed in your face. And now? [Rogers gestures around her, at the campfire below and the broad night sky above.] I get to do this a lot. That was something I was worried about, starting up Shrapnel's, was that I wouldn't get to go out anymore. But we managed to set it up in a way that has us founders out with the expedition and clearing and inventory teams most of the time. And I love it, it reminds me of everything about working salvage that made me pick it for the long haul.
So yeah, the business, running everything, it's scary. Stressful. Dangerous. A whole lot of lines we've got to keep putting our necks on. But would I trade this chance in for anything? Hell no! Hell no. We're really—how often do you get to make an institution? Get to be part of that? I think we're busting the doors open on this field. The first time someone called me a scavver like it was a bad thing, I got so mad. Now? Tell it to my cap-bedazzled, crew-leading, history-making ass. Ha! Straight to it.