ELEVEN
Primm, the Vikki & Vance casino
June 29th
10:26
Sunlight was already shining in through the gaps between the curtains as En awoke to the sound of running water. Cheyenne lay in front of the bathroom door, guarding it against intruders, though En wondered what kind of intruders Sunny would have to fear right now, apart from a highly determined pervert.
"Hi Cheyenne," she croaked, sitting up straight. She felt like she could sleep for days. Cheyenne only responded by perking her ears. En swung her legs out of bed and held a hand against her temple in a pointless gesture to ward off the headache. The only time she didn't feel her head pound was when she slept. Her bladder ached, but it could wait until Sunny came out of the shower. Sure, Cheyenne probably wouldn't stop En from going to the bathroom, but as much as she liked Sunny, she wasn't interested in seeing her in her full glory. The guys would probably all call her crazy, but to her, a woman's naked body was just… meh. Comes with being a girl, she supposed.
The water stopped and she heard Sunny sniff and grunt as she got the water out of her face. She could go for a shower too. Ringo would probably be up already, asking them what took them so long, but another half hour wouldn't matter.
The door opened and Sunny emerged from the shower, her hair down and wet, drying herself with a towel, unashamed in her underwear, something En didn't immediately see herself doing anytime soon. Then again, she envied Sunny, not just because she didn't feel bad about her own body, but also because she most certainly didn't have a body to feel bad about. En was slightly jealous at her curvy hips and her full breasts. Guys always kept hitting on Allison because of her long blonde hair and her feminine curves, leaving En mostly ignored. And to make it worse, they often said things to make En feel better, like how they thought she was pretty too, but they just liked some more curves on a girl. Yeah, that's exactly what a teenager wants to hear, assholes. The worst one she'd ever heard had been, "You're cute En, but… well, you don't want to fuck cute, you know?"
Funniest thing was that Allison usually wasn't in the least interested, always caught up in her drawings and her stories and her fantasy worlds. En guessed that was just the way life worked: you either want it and can't have it, or you can have it and don't want it.
"Bathroom's yours if you want it?" Sunny said, towelling her hair. "… Sleepy head."
En pushed herself up off the bed. "Yeah I think I'll have a shower too."
"Cheyenne will guard your honour with her life. As will I."
En grabbed her clothes and her backpack, trudging to the shower. She still felt groggy from the sleeping-in and a shower would take care of that, no problem. After taking care of that rotten peeing business, of course. Yay.
The water stung in her partially healed head wound, but it still felt great. The tear in her scalp was healing nicely, mostly due to the stims Mitchell had given her. Before stims had been invented, she'd been told, wounds would take weeks or even months to heal. The human body sure was a slowpoke without help.
So it looked like she was going back home. Well, after seeing to the remains of Ringo's caravan, that was. It had been stupid of her and Sunny not to ask right away if he didn't want to go back to the place where his caravan had been hit. After all, he'd had to hightail it out of there, and chances were, there wouldn't be any passing strangers that stopped and buried the bodies out of the goodness of their hearts.
And after that, home. She hated to admit it, but she was in fact rather relieved that she wouldn't have to go slogging after that checkered suit guy, all the way to wherever he'd slithered off to. She wanted to, to be sure, but she also wanted to go home, and well, if the trail's gone cold, no point busting your head fretting about it. Heh, 'busting your head'.
She was a bit glad the decision had been made for her, to be entirely honest. Because having to choose between getting answers and going home, that was a tough decision, especially since one choice involved danger, and the other meant never knowing why things had happened, or what role she'd played in what must be important events, even if her role had been nothing more than sitting on her knees, being brave and eating a bullet.
She could only imagine how mortified her parents would be when they saw her come home with a short-cut little head and an awful, hairless gash in her scalp. She could just picture her mom's eyes going wide and her going, in that high-pitched voice she always used when worried, "Oh my God, En, what happened to you!", and then her father, frowning and shaking his head, muttering, "I told you you were far too young for this courier business."
Reluctantly, En turned off the water and got out of the shower. She couldn't see, with the mirror completely covered in condensation, so she simply arranged her hair by touch. It's not like she could screw up too much at its current length anyway. She winced when her hand brushed past the raw skin on the side of her head.
With a sigh, she hoisted herself into her pants and zipped up her leather jacket. Her boots were still under the bed, so she brushed her teeth first, and when she squeezed out the toothpaste onto her newly acquired toothbrush (the Vikki & Vance people still had a few boxes of unused ones lying around), she was again warned by squiggly fireflies zipping across her vision.
She let out an annoyed, "Ah, fuck", and sat down on the lid of the toilet, hooking her fingers around the sink for stability. The seizure wasn't as bad this time, but it still hurt like a bitch, her pounding head making her pant and gasp for air, and the shrieking in her ears lasting for several seconds (which always felt like minutes), before slowly diminishing again. At least there was no throwing up or crashing to the ground this time. Gotta see the positive thing, right?
Ringo already sat in the Vikki & Vance casino foyer, playing caravan with some scruffy guy or other, and again losing, as was his wont. He hadn't been exaggerating when he'd called himself the second-worst caravan player in the Wastes.
"Ah, ladies!" he greeted when he saw En and Sunny come down, his eyes lighting up. "I trust your rest was queenly?"
With a smile that En couldn't really tell the meaning of, Sunny said, "Yeah, it was cosy."
Focusing again on his cards, Ringo replied, "Good, good." He stacked his caravan with a 3, just about the worst move he could have made at that point. "You ready to go?"
"Just gonna grab some breakfast," En answered, "and we're ready."
The man Ringo was playing against was a smelly, ugly bum who looked like he'd never seen a toothbrush or a bucket of water in his whole life. He grunted, annoyed at the conversation.
"Alright," Ringo said, unperturbed. "Just finishing up this game here and I'm good to go."
En opened her mouth to speak, but the man Ringo was playing against cut her off. "Mouth shut behind the game, stupid kid!"
"Sure," En obliged. "I understand it's hard for you to be confronted with a person who still has more than one tooth in his mouth." People like those deserved all the searing sarcasm she could give them. And maybe it wasn't always the cleverest thing to do, but she just couldn't stop herself from prodding them until they went into a towering rage.
Slowly, Ringo's caravan partner turned around. Ringo himself only looked on, intrigued.
"Sorry, want me to repeat that?" En asked, taking care to sound extra innocent. "Hard to hear with all the hair in your ears maybe?"
"Brat," the bum rumbled. "I'm gonna clean your clock if you don't shut the Hell up."
"Your time," En pointed out, not intent on shutting up, the Hell or otherwise, "would be better spent cleaning your armpits instead of my proverbial clock."
"That's it," the repulsive, rude bastard announced, rising from his chair. "I'm gonna rip you a new hole to shit from, kid."
"You're gonna sit the fuck down and play cards," Sunny threatened, the tone in her voice immediately making Cheyenne growl and strain at her leash. "Instead of playing tough guy when a kid pokes you."
Silently, the smelly oaf went back to his seat after giving En another long, menacing stare with his bloodshot eyes. That, and his purple nose made it clear that this was a drunken, worthless waste of space. En almost wanted him to take a swing at her, but she had to admit to herself she wouldn't be able to take one and end up as anything more than a crumpled, babbling half-conscious laughing stock. So yeah, best if Sunny had intervened. She really had to teach herself to shut up in cases like these, but it was so damn hard!
"Come on, En," Sunny said, her voice not without a scolding tone. "Let's grab a bite to eat and go. Let Ringo finish his caravan game."
"No need," Ringo said, chucking his five dollar bill at the vagrant. "I don't play with people who overreact when someone talks during a game and see it fit to call sixteen-year-old girls rude names."
"Shouldn't talk behind the game," the unwashed bum defended himself, speaking more to his cards than to anyone in particular.
Ringo gave him another glare, then told the others, "We eat on the road. There's an unpleasant smell hanging here."
"Enough you two," Sunny snapped. "Let it go, sheesh!"
En permitted herself to send a short, mischievous grin to Ringo, who responded in kind.
"I saw that," Sunny scolded. "You guys and your immaturity all the time." She clearly wasn't as mad as she sounded.
"I have an excuse," En said haughtily. "I'm only sixteen."
Sunny merely rolled her eyes at that. Ringo wisely refrained from coming up with an excuse himself, pushing the double doors open and letting his companions go through, into the burning sun. An NCR trooper stood next to the doors, wiping sweat from his brow with a kerchief. When he saw them, he remarked, "Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter."
"Yeah," En responded, bored. "I bet you say that to all the girls."
Ringo came up with rice crackers he'd cajoled out of the owner of the Vikki & Vance casino, holding them aloft like a trophy. "Our last food, ladies and gentlemen. I was this close to winning some money we could use to buy provisions with, but miss En kindly ruined my game for me."
"Tch," En blew. "You were losing harder than the old Khans."
Ringo grinned. "That I must admit."
"We can always swing by Mojave Outpost, a ways South of here," Sunny suggested. "We still have that gun we looted from that bastard Cobb," she shuddered involuntarily when she pointed at it, "and the NCR pays well for weapons."
Ringo nodded. "God knows they need them. Very well, Mojave Outpost it is. It's not far from here anyway."
"Yes, but what about your caravan friends?" En asked.
He shrugged. "Nothing can bother them anymore. Half a day won't hurt anyone."
"Sure?" Sunny asked.
"M-hm. Let us be off, fair damsels!" And with a look at Cheyenne, he added, "and bitches."
The two 'ridiculous statues' Ringo had called them were already visible when they left Primm. It was an hour or two to walk at most. Looking jolly, as he always did when a long walk lay ahead, Ringo hooked his thumbs into his backpack straps and paraded off, Cheyenne trotting along with him, barking happily.
"What do you say, sweetie?" Sunny asked En. "Do we follow that buffoon or keep our distance?"
"Hard to say," En mused, stroking her chin. "If we stay too close, people might think we know the guy."
"I heard that," Ringo sang out merrily. "You perfidious wenches."
"Dang, we need to be more subtle," En said quietly, but still loud enough so Ringo could hear.
"Hey everybody!" Ringo suddenly shouted at the sky, the hills and the road, still trotting on, while Cheyenne jumped in circles around him, barking with joy. "These are my friends, Sunny and En! They are two meanies, but when nobody's looking, they're cute as cuddly teddy bears! I wub them so much! Especially when they tell me stories about unicorns before they tuck me in at night!"
A passing patrol of NCR troopers looked at him awkwardly, one tapping his temple with his finger.
Laughing, Sunny shook her head. "Alright, you big embarrassment, we'll stay close to you."
The trip took them along a ridge tucked against the hills. The view wasn't very spectacular though. Below lay an ugly landscape consisting of small pools of brackish brown water, half-submerged cars and here and there, a small shack that still had a wall or two standing up. The narrow ridge they'd travelled by turned into a broad road at the foot of the hill leading to Mojave Outpost. The road itself was completely congested with rusted, useless car wrecks. Apparently there'd been a traffic jam here when the bombs had fallen. Here and there, human remains, reduced to blackened skeletons, still sat in the car seats. Nobody had bothered to clean them up.
Up on the hill lay Mojave Outpost. The statues were even bigger up close than they had seemed at a distance, at least ten metres high, and built of old scrap iron, so it seemed. The monument depicted two people shaking hands, one figure wearing a long trench coat and some kind of strange helmet, and the other wearing what looked like cowboy clothes, compete with stetson hat and all.
"That's... not at all tacky," En remarked sarcastically.
"Yeah," Sunny agreed. "The idiocy of it makes my nose tickle."
Ringo explained, "Supposed to be a monument celebrating the unification of two Ranger groups. Desert Rangers got absorbed into the NCR Rangers. Mostly a political move to give the NCR the opportunity to expand eastward."
"You gotta wonder," Sunny thought out loud, "how they can devote so much time to compressing and recycling scrap metal to use for those silly statues while the road leading to their base is still cluttered with car wrecks."
En wondered the same thing. Seemed bombastic statues were more important than making sure the road was actually usable. But why the NCR boys hadn't used the car wrecks as material for their statues was beyond her. Ah well, probably a plan figured out by some fathead who was paid more a day than the money for all of En's courier and repair jobs put together.
They climbed the road, finding their way between car wrecks as they went. There were over a hundred cars, all clumped together on the road, and of each and every one, the trunk had been forced open and any valuables inside taken. Must have been easy pickings for the scavengers who'd found this piece of road first. En did chuckle at the bumper sticker on one of the cars, that said, 'honk if you have poor impulse control!'.
Ringo led the way, his thumbs still hooked into his backpack straps, still marching along like a boy scout in an especially happy mood. They passed under the eyesore of a monument and reached the top of the hill. The Outpost was far less pompous than the monument, thankfully, consisting of mostly barracks ringed with waist-high sandbag walls and razorwire. Not exactly homely, but then, it was an army base, not a tea salon.
"HQ is right over there," Ringo pointed out. "I've got an old friend I should visit for a second, won't take long. Bar's next to HQ if you want to relax and have a drink."
En nodded. "Don't mind if I do."
"Well look who dragged his tender tootsies in here!" a butch female voice came from above and behind them.
"That would be my old friend," Ringo explained. Turning around, he waved at the NCR trooper on the roof, armed with an impressive-looking sniper rifle. "Heya Ghost!"
Ghost (what a ridiculous nickname) seemed to be Grand Commander in the Order of the Manly Lesbian. She had short-cut platinum blonde hair, a suspiciously masculine build, and oversized aviator sunglasses on her nose that obviously were supposed to make her look tough.
"Y'alright, Ringo?" she shouted back.
"Sure thing. Hold on, I'm coming up there. Might be easier to chat." He turned back to En and Sunny as he walked to the ramp leading to the barrack's roof. "I'll just be a minute, see you later."
"Well, looks like she won't be much competition," En remarked to Sunny.
Sunny seemed intent on being coy. "I have no idea what you mean."
En gave Sunny a hard nudge with her elbow. "Sure you don't."
"Yeah, well, Imma score some food at that HQ place, alright?" Sunny ended the conversation with a grin.
"Mind if I go have a drink?"
She shrugged. "Sure, I'll see you in a few minutes."
The bar itself was a pretty sad affair, a square gray barrack with a boring stone bar set in the middle that was as gray as the rest of the place. A weary-looking woman stood washing glasses, while the only patron, a young woman with a completely idiotic-looking straw hat sat at the bar, knocking back shots of whisky.
Ah well, boring or not, at least they had cold drinks. She sat down on a bar stool and motioned for the bar tending woman.
"Yeah?"
"Have a coke, please?" She laid ten bottle caps on the bar.
Silently, the woman turned around, set a bottle on the table and uncapped it, pocketing the bottle cap straight away before taking the ten En had laid out.
En said a "Thanks," but the woman had already turned her back. With a sigh at the woman's disinterest in her job, En set the ice cold bottle to her lips and took a swill. But what gulped in her mouth didn't taste of coke at all... It was more of a root beer taste. What the Hell?
En looked at the bottle and grunted. "Hey, miss?" she asked the bartender.
"What?"
"If I look in your toilet bowl, will there be brake fluid in there instead of water?" When the bartender blinked, she explained, "Because I think you've got a bit of a problem keeping different liquids apart."
The woman rolled her eyes and sighed. The young woman in the straw hat looked on, seemingly getting irritated too, for all the business of hers it was.
"See, I asked for a coke, and what I got was um," she read the label again, "... Sarsa... pa... rilla, or whatever the Hell this is."
The woman leaned forward across the bar. "You pronounce it 'sasparilla', brat, and sarsaparilla is the Mojave's coke."
"Um... no," En argued. "Sarsaparilla is the Mojave's sarsaparilla. Coke is coke."
The bartender shrugged and made to turn away again. "No refunds, kid."
En looked at the bottle questioningly again. "This tastes like ass. No wonder you're such a sour prune if you have to drink this crap all day."
"Hey kid," the young woman with the straw hat butted in. "Why don't you shut your snooty face and drink your sass like a good girl?"
"I'm sorry?" En asked. "I don't recall this concerning you?"
Straw hat knocked back another shot and refilled from the bottle set beside her glass. It was more than half empty, and En could only assume she'd started when it was full. "You're whining, you spoiled brat. And it's gettin' on my nerves."
"Yeah, yeah," En said, taking care to sound as dismissive as possible. "Keep knocking back those whiskies. I'm sure your liver should be annoying you far more than I possibly could."
The woman clapped her shot glass down on the table and refilled it. "You don't know who you're talking to, do you?"
"Let me guess," En shot at her. "Someone who coulda been a contender? Because all I see is a sad drunk playing tough girl without realizing she looks like a total clown with her silly straw hat." She knew she had to back off, but she just couldn't help herself. People like these deserved all the verbal acid she could give them.
The drunk woman made herself a little more drunk and again refilled her shot. "Kid, your big mouth is writing checks your ass can't cash."
"Oh my!" En exclaimed. "Aren't we proud of our ability to repeat hackneyed movie lines. I don't know which is more ridiculous: your hat, or the fact that you think you impress anyone by quoting pre-War movie tough guy-oneliners."
Straw hat drained her last whiskey shot and got up from her bar stool, swaying on her legs, absolutely piss drunk. "Kid, you're gonna regret the day you picked a fight with Rose of Sharon Cassidy."
An inner voice told her to stop aggravating the damn drunk, for fuck's sake!, but En heard her mouth say, "Congratulations, your name is even more ridiculous than your hat."
The next thing she knew, the woman had grabbed her by the collar, and in a flash, En saw the other's head from extremely close, and then she heard a thwock as the woman's forehead, straw hat and all, butted into her cheek. Before she even realized what had happened, a fist smacked into the side of her face, knocking out her vision. As she staggered back, she heard the straw-hatted woman shout, "You like this, brat?" There was no pain, oddly, just ringing in her ears, and the dumb and blind urge to keep herself from falling over.
The hands took her by the collar again, and the woman snarled, "Let's see how smart your mouth is when I kick you out of here without your shirt, you snooty tart!" The hands tore at her jacket, but the leather was far too strong to get torn by bare hands.
"Let my friend go right now!" a familiar voice ordered, accompanied by furious barking.
The hands let go of En and without her legs able to support her, she fell over, on her ass, in a corner of the bar. Her head whirled and her face felt numb. Slowly, a pounding pain began to pulse in her face and inside her brain pan. She was so dizzy she wanted to vomit.
"Are you fucking crazy?" Sunny snarled, "Attacking a sixteen-year-old kid, aren't you ashamed?" A pause. "You fucking drunk. God damn."
"Put the gun down," straw hat slurred, the alcohol finally audible in her speech, as if it had waited to manifest in her tongue until the fight was over. "Your punk-ass friend was asking for it."
En's vision slowly unblurred again, though it still spun. She tried to get up, but she only succeeded in swaying back and forth on her ass. It felt as if she had no control over her body, like being drunk (she still remembered that one time a year ago), except with a somewhat clear mind.
"You alright, En?"
En could only reply with an inarticulate whine.
"I think she's learned her lesson," straw hat muttered smugly. "She's definitely learned not to piss people off when they're drunk and so depressed they want to kill themselves."
"My heart bleeds for you," Sunny said flatly. "Now sit down on your god damn bar stool and go back to drinking yourself to death."
"Hey Cass," the bartender finally joined in. "It's time you went home, yeah?"
Still dizzy, En saw the straw- hatted woman turn to the bartender, still swaying on her legs. "Lacey, don't be such a damn bore."
"Come on, Cass," the bartender insisted. "Come back tomorrow, okay? You know I hate it when people fight in my bar."
The drunk pointed at En, still on her ass. "She started it."
"Cass," the bartender threatened. "Leave, or I'm calling in the MPs."
"Might want to listen to her, woman," Sunny added. "Or the MPs won't be in time to save your drunk ass."
The woman called Cass let out an inarticulate, dismissive groan and made a throw-away gesture at the bartender. "Candy-asses." Then she swiped her bottle off the bar. "I'm takin' this though."
"I'll put it on your tab," the bartender stated matter-of-factly.
Another inarticulate mewl, and the woman staggered out, bottle in hand.
"You okay, En?"
En managed to get to her hands and knees, probably looking like a complete moron, but that didn't matter too much now that her ass had been thoroughly kicked. Because now the pain began to pulse with full vigour. The head butt had got her in the cheek, right on the hard, jutting bone, and the right hook had whacked her in the molars, making her jaw feel as if it had been taken out, thrown under a steamroller, and shoved back in. At least she still had all her teeth and nothing broken. "I'm... okay, I guess. Felt better."
"Head?"
"No seizure yet, surprisingly."
"Whoa," the bartender stopped them. "Seizure?"
"Nevermind," Sunny said tersely. Then she extended her hand to En. "Come on, on your feet."
Lurching, En stood, not entirely stable but on two feet at least. "Thanks, Sunny."
"Hey, I may have saved your ass," Sunny suddenly snapped, "but drunk or not, I kinda believe that chick when she said you had it coming. This isn't New Arroyo, En," she fulminated on, "where there's a cop on every corner of the street and you can go around mouthing off to just about anyone you want to!"
"Yeah, I kn - "
"No, you don't know," Sunny shouted. "You could have gotten killed over this! People here, they don't think twice about stabbing someone in the gut for having a big mouth. You're lucky this woman settled for a few whacks to the face."
"I said I got it, Sunny," En snapped back, irritated, holding her face. She'd already had her lesson, there was no god damn need to get it twice. "Can we just forget about this now, please?"
"Yeah," Sunny breathed, settling down. "Yeah, I guess it was an educational experience for you."
"It was, now can we leave this behind us?"
"Mm."
"You'll have to," the bartender told them. "Because I don't tolerate inflammatory behaviour any more than I do bar brawls. To be honest, you got what you asked for." And then to Sunny, "Same goes for people pulling guns. So both of you, out."
"I would like to sincerely apologize," En said, still swaying on her legs, "for my... 'inflammatory behaviour', as you so plastically put it. But at least I livened up things a little around here."
"Come on," Sunny grunted, grabbing her by the collar and leading her out. "Don't push it."
The sunlight hurt En's eyes when they came back out, Sunny still holding her by the collar as if she was a naughty child. Which, she had to admit, she kinda was. Still, she roughly shook herself free when they'd left the bar. "Alright, Sunny, that's enough."
"Ah-ah," Sunny scolded, her good mood apparently returned. "You've been a bad girl, young lady."
"I'll have the bruises to show for it, mom," En joked back, thinking it'd be better to just laugh with it and put it behind them.
"Mm. Hope you learned from this though."
She nodded. "I have, now let's move on, 'kay?"
Sunny turned to En and looked at her intently. "We will, right after you assure me you're alright?"
"I'm fine, Sunny. Got smacked around a bit, but not even a little seizure, so that's good."
"Mm. Now where's that lazy-ass Ringo?"
On the roof, sitting on a folding chair and chattering away to that sniper with the silly nickname, sat Ringo. He seemed perfectly comfortable, drinking soda through a straw and laughing at something funny that had just been said.
"Yo, Ringo?" Sunny called out to him.
"Be right there." Usually when people say that, they meant they'd be right there in an hour or so, after the fat had been chewed 'til there wasn't any left. But Ringo, surprisingly, got up and said goodbye to the NCR soldier. Then he trotted down off the ramp and asked, "So, what'd you get for the rifle?"
Sunny patted her backpack. "A few cans of bean casserole, a litre bottle of water, half a litre of sarsaparilla, and about a hundred caps. Not bad, right?"
Ringo nodded in acknowledgment. "Your shrewd tradesmanship is commendable."
"And," Sunny couldn't resist pointing out, "Miss En here took a few fists to the face after riling up the locals."
She didn't get the reaction she'd hoped for, as Ringo looked at En, worried. "Are you well, En? Did you get a seizure?" An NCR trooper shouldered between them, muttering only a token apology.
"No, no, I'm fine."
"Good." And with a disapproving frown at Sunny, he said, "I'm glad you think it's funny."
"Come on, lighten up," Sunny tried to turn things around. "She's alright, so it's okay to make light of it, yeah?"
Ringo harrumphed. "I suppose, though I don't see what's funny about our friend getting a beating in some dive and us not being there to protect her."
"She's right though," En settled things. "I had it coming, and there's no harm done. Might as well laugh about it."
"Hmm."
"Shall we get going then?" Sunny suggested, apparently eager to put the uncomfortable situation behind her. Cheyenne barked in agreement.
"Yeah, let's hit the road," En agreed enthusiastically, the pain in her face forgotten. They'd be nicely swollen and discoloured bruises tomorrow, but all in all, it had just been a few punches. No bones broken, no organs perforated, no harm done.
And so they set off. Next stop was some quarry up North, and then home. En couldn't wait to get back.