FOURTEEN
I-15, caravan ground
June 31st
06:28
It had been a pretty awful night. Those caravans were completely wasted down to the iron, and all the insulating material had been eaten or rotted away, so the bare metal offered almost no protection against the cold. To make it worse, a nearby colony of mantises had been chirping and cricketing all night long, and it was loud.
She'd shared the caravan with Sunny and Cheyenne, after dividing the bunny rabbit in five, and each enjoying their little scrap of meat. Even Melissa had been hungrier than she was proud, and accepted her piece, scoffing it down with her bare hands. At Sunny's insistence, Ringo had manacled her to a caravan door handle during the night. She'd protested about it, but honestly, En was confident that they couldn't be blamed for wanting to sleep in at least some degree of security. And hey, at least she'd had a room all to herself, even if it was uncomfortable sleeping, shackled to a door handle. Ringo, being the sole man of the group (he must be feeling like quite the harem owner), had a caravan to his own as well, and from the looks of him as he was making coffee, he hadn't exactly slept like a rose either. Sunny was still fast asleep (of course), and not a peep had come from Melissa's caravan yet, so En assumed she was still in dream land as well. Well, that, or she'd found a way to unshackle herself and ran off. Lazily, Cheyenne trotted over to where En had sat down, facing the old burned-out camp fire, and lay down next to her, closing her eyes again.
"Morning," Ringo grunted as he stirred the coffee, slowly heating on his little camping stove. He'd found a bag of ground coffee in Primm, to everyone's cheer. "Sleep well?"
"I slept like octogenarians make love."
He raised an eyebrow.
"Very badly, with a lot of stifled curses and with much soreness afterwards."
"Ah. Like that."
The coffee started to produce a nice bitter aroma, and just smelling it roused En from the drowsiness she still felt, even if it was just a little. "How's our guest doing?"
Ringo nodded at the caravan he'd manacled Melissa to. "Alright, I suppose. Fussed a bit over getting shackled to the door, but haven't heard a sound from her yet. Must have been more tired than she thought."
"Mm."
"Say," Ringo began, sitting down on his backside, the coffee pot and stove between his legs. "Have you had a chance to speak to Sunny regarding, well... her attitude towards our unwilling guest?"
"A bit, yeah." It was too early for such a conversation, dammit.
Ringo didn't seem to think so. He threw a furtive look at the caravan Sunny slept in, and quietly said, "I'm a bit worried."
Even though she didn't want to talk about such a heavy subject so early, En asked, "What about?"
"Sunny."
"… yes?"
He sighed, obviously not at ease with discussing the subject, but still considering it necessary. "Don't you think she's… well, taking all this to heart just a little bit too much?"
"What, that I got my brains shot out?" En said mischievously, knowing full well what he meant.
"I know, it's no small thing, but it happened to you, not her. She's taking it all a bit too personally. You were the one who were shot, and you're having a much easier time putting it into perspective and forgiving the woman who helped."
"I haven't forgiven her," En said promptly, wanting to get that absolutely clear.
Ringo spread his hands. "Of course. My mistake. But my point still stands. You're dealing with this far better than she is."
En sat down wearily next to Ringo. "I know what you mean. It's just because she's so taken with me. Of course she is. Just look at how awesome I am."
Ringo chuckled, but wasn't swayed. "Still, she's beating herself up over what happened to you, and it would help if you had a talk with her. Just to say you appreciate her concern and indignation, but that you're coming to terms with it, and that she should too. For her own peace of mind."
"Cool. I'll work my charm on her."
He grinned. "You do that. I'm sure your charms will serve you well."
A New Zealand-accented shout of "God damn pikin' handcuffs!" came from Melissa's caravan.
"Our princess is awake," Ringo said flatly, stirring his coffee and showing absolutely no intention of getting up.
En showed just as little. "So I hear."
"Oy!" another holler came. "You people mind gettin' off your arses and unchainin' me here?"
"So much shouting", Ringo said wearily, shaking his head in disapproval, "so early in the morning."
"I know, right?" En was enjoying Melissa's anger, in spite of herself. Let her rage for a while.
"Bloody wankers!" There was a loud rattling of metal on metal as Melissa tugged furiously at the handcuffs and the door handle they were attached to.
Ringo chuckled at the frustrated shout, then took the handcuffs' keys out of his chest pocket and tossed them to En. "Better release her before she drags herself here, caravan and all."
"Yeah. She's angry enough to make us wear that caravan as a hat."
En got up and trudged to the caravan, calling out, "Easy there, loudmouth. I'm coming."
Ringo called after her, "To unchine your poikin hencaffs."
That got a giggle out of En as she climbed into the caravan and was met with an angrily glaring Melissa, still dressed in the same dirty leather outfit she'd worn yesterday. Undressing with one hand manacled to a door wasn't easy, En figured.
"Bout time."
"Sleep well?"
"As if you care."
"Good point," En shot back. "In fact I was hoping you'd have had some diarrhoea or a really bad case of reflux during the night, or dare I say it, a brain embolism, because I'm nasty like that."
"What," she snapped. "You think this is all a big joke, kid?"
She shrugged, kneeling down next to Melissa. She smelled of sweat and dirt. "Better to laugh over it than cry over it." It was the one-liner she always used when people reproached her of being too light-hearted about serious things. And dammit if it wasn't true. Jokes might be inappropriate at times, but at least they didn't make people sit down and give up.
She looked sincere when she said, "I feel awful for what happened to you. It's no laughin' matter for me." It only showed very faintly, but there was genuine regret in her eyes.
The woman might be abrasive and hostile, but things like that made En more and more convinced she had her heart in the right place. "You're right, it's no larfin' meddah, but you're paying for what you've done by helping us, and that's all I ask."
"You'll forgive me for not considering it as simple as that."
"You're free to consider it as complicated as you want to." She took the key to the handcuffs out of her pocket and set it against the cuffs' lock. "No funny business, 'kay?"
"I'm not a bloody sneaky rat," Melissa snapped. "I'm a Great Khan with the scars to prove it, and we still respect a word of honour."
"Then I suppose I'll respect your wurd of 'onnah too," En conceded. "I'm just saying, if you feel the temp – "
Ah, shit. Fireflies zipped across her vision. Great, what god damn timing! She fell backwards on her butt, clapping a hand across her forehead as pounding pain banged through it with every heartbeat. She heard herself let out an inarticulate whine, and her body fell against the side of the caravan with a metallic bang that sounded far away. Her stomach hitched, only once, and then was still again. Her ears followed suit, sending a short, sharp shriek through her head, then returning to silence. Despite her numbness, she felt a hand gently close around her wrist, and as the seizure passed, her doubling vision focused again, on Melissa's concerned face. "Geez, is it that bad?"
"It's… it's alright," she slurred, even though she was feeling anything but.
There were no tears standing in her eyes, but Melissa looked just about ready to cry. "I'm so sorry, En." Then she realized how she looked, and her face reverted to her traditional hard-ass Great Khan look, though some visible concern still remained. "But um, keep that to yourself, alright?"
"Yeah, well, sorry… doesn't change anything." Her head still pounded. "Help me… find that Benny bastard and… your debt's settled."
"That's what I'm doing."
"Good." The beating in her head lessened, and her coordination and strength came back. "Now, let's get you unshackled."
True enough, Melissa didn't try anything when En slid the small key in the lock and turned it. As her hand was freed, she even voluntarily held out her other hand with it, so En could cuff her hands back together. She winced as she did it.
"You hurt?"
Her eyes flashed, "I'm alright."
"Sure?"
"Yes."
She was obviously lying, flinching every time she moved her shoulder, which was probably aching tremendously from staying in the same position the entire night. But En could have guessed the GREAT KHAN would be too proud to admit she was in pain. Well, if she wanted to bear her agony in silence, then that was her business.
"Coffee, mighty amazon of the Great Khans?" Ringo asked without turning his head when En and Melissa emerged from the caravan.
Melissa bore the sarcasm in silence. "Yeah, I could use some."
En didn't sit down, going instead straight to Sunny's caravan. Lazy-pants had slept long enough. She ducked under the caravan doorway and homed in on the mop of black hair buried in a sleeping bag. "Sunny, you awake?"
A groan was her only answer.
"Better get up, Sunny. That caravan's gonna be an oven in half an hour. I'm sure grilled Sunny is tasty, but it'll mess up your complexion."
"I dreamed", Sunny muttered hoarsely, her eyes still closed, "that we ran into one of the folks that shot you, some rude battleaxe with a god-awful haircut, and we took her along."
"And I dreamed," En countered, "that you were just as rude to her as she was to you."
Sunny chuckled, the sound muffled by her sleeping bag. "I'm still sleepy."
"So am I, but we need to get going."
An irritated groan was her only response.
"I know, Sunny. Look at it this way, in sixteen hours, you can crawl back into your sleeping bag. Think of how good that'll feel."
"I don't want to feel good in sixteen hours, I want to feel good now," Sunny whined overdramatically.
With her tongue mischievously out the side of her mouth, En gently kicked the lump in the sleeping bag that was most likely to be Sunny's backside. Sunny let out another nasal whine and swatted lazily at En with one hand. "Come on Sunnyyyy!"
"Gah!" Sunny exclaimed, sitting upright. Her hair stood up in corkscrews. "Annoying brat."
"There's coffee," En singsonged as she headed back to the burned-out remains of the campfire.
Next destination was Nipton, past Primm and down the I-15 to the Southeast. Benny had passed through the little town, but Melissa didn't know where he'd gone from there, or she knew and wasn't telling. The atmosphere at breakfast had been tense, with Sunny doing very little effort to thaw towards Melissa, and the captured Khan doing even less. At least Ringo had broken the ice somewhat with a funny story about his late caravan mates, though he'd grown a bit wistful at the end of it. They'd broken up camp right after, walking South to Primm and making good time. After a stop for lunch in Primm, Johnson Nash had told them someone had brought a fission battery to replace the old eyebot's melted one, installed it and taken the little rust bucket with him. So much the better.
After thanking Johnson and Ruby Nash for the exquisite lunch of carrot mash and boiled beef, the journey had gone on, following the I-15 as it went east, towards Nipton. The town lay on a hill, overlooking the Wasteland around it. It had all the appearance of a normal town, except for the smoke rising from the rooftops, and wait, were those…?
"Why are there crosses at the edge of town?" En asked, mystified. Surely this wasn't some religious commune?
"Those aren't just crosses," Ringo answered, looking very worried. "That is to say, they're not there for religious reasons."
Sunny squinted at the town in the distance, probably unable to make out anything except vague shapes. Poor silly Sunny.
"Looks like the Legion's stopped for snacks and crucifixions," Melissa said flatly.
Wait, what? "Uh, crucifixions? Nailing people to crosses like in the old Roman Empire days?"
"The same," Ringo said dourly. "They're not called Caesar's Legion for nothing. They rummaged through the Roman Empire's history, took out the bits that they liked, slavery and crucifixion first and foremost, and built themselves an army."
"And not just a little one. The entire lands East, all the way to the Colorado, are Legion territory these days," Sunny explained. "They're a barbaric bunch of homos, but they're incredibly disciplined and efficient."
"NCR's broken its teeth on them on more than one occasion," Ringo said with a nod. "And while the NCR's troops are spread thin and low on supplies, the Legion seems to have an inexhaustible amount of men and resources. With more and more people joining their ranks every day. Like flies buzzing around the biggest pile of excrement."
"They just want to be on the winning team," Melissa said, her voice still emotionless.
Sunny's eyes narrowed at that. "What about you? You want to be on the 'winning team' as well?"
Melissa calmly shot back, "I don't think my political persuasion is relevant." Holding up the cuffs, she reminded them, "I'm just a prisoner, right? Trash you're hauling out of necessity."
"What could possibly possess you, though," Ringo asked, out of interest and to shift the focus of the conversation away from Sunny and Melissa's enmity, "to make excuses for people who join the Legion while their own brothers are enslaved and their sisters made into whores?"
Melissa shrugged at that. "Survival of the fittest."
"Sure it was a good idea not to shoot her?" Sunny asked En.
"Yes," En replied. "She's talking stupid, but we can't go around shooting people for being stupid."
"That's not what the Legion thinks," Ringo chuckled. "So in case our friend here thinks she can side with them, that they'll let her join instead of using and discarding her, then the problem of her stupidity would be self-correcting."
"Keep sayin' that to yourselves," Melissa said fiercely. "You'd speak differently if I wasn't in cuffs and outnumbered. But that's what you people are good at, right? Bandin' together out of weakness and forcin' your will on strong people by majority rule." She almost spat out the two last words.
"We're not travelling together out of weakness," En explained patiently. "We're a group because we care about each other."
"Damn right," Sunny agreed ostentatiously.
Whenever she spoke directly to En, Melissa's attitude became much less hostile. "Look, I've grown up relyin' only on myself. I'll pay my debt to you, but once that's done, there's nothing that binds me to you. So don't try and change me or educate me or whatever. You're entitled to my help finding Benny, but nothing more."
En shrugged. "Fair enough, I suppose, but I'd be happy if we could at least make the time we have together somewhat pleasant, so we might part with a positive feeling."
"You can't expect us to care about you if you're being purposefully antagonistic," Ringo added.
Melissa's attitude instantly went back to belligerent when she was no longer talking to En. "Yeah, well, I don't need your carin' bullshit. Bunch of flowery wankery's what it is."
"Funny how that flowery wankery's saved your damn life," Sunny pointed out. "Or would you rather we invoked the right of the strongest, like the Legion does, when you were on your knees and at En's mercy?"
Melissa snorted. "Your friend made the decision not to pull the trigger. And don't get me started on the right of the strongest. God damn murdering NCR know all about killing defenceless people."
"You know, Melissa," Ringo snapped, "I'm doing my best here to try and make this whole thing as pleasant as possible, for us and for you, but if you're going to break your own windows by antagonizing us, then I'm done wasting effort on you."
Standing proudly upright, Melissa declared, "I'm sayin' what I think, and I don't care if you agree or not. You all hate me 'cause I shot your friend here, which I'm genuinely sorry for, but to you two, I don't have anything to apologize for. So stick this friendly pretence up your arse."
"I'm done with this," Ringo grunted. "Let's head into Nipton. Maybe this underdeveloped bogan here will change her mind once she sees what kind of things the Legion does to good people."
En gave it one last try. "Melissa, I'm asking you, not because you owe me, but as one person to another, to just do a little effort. We could have beaten or tortured information out of you, but we're not that kind of people. Respect that and at least try to ease up on the hostility."
Her only answer was a closed-jaw, "Speak to you alone for a bit?"
Sunny sighed and rolled her eyes, and Ringo shook his head in disapproval, but regardless, En said, "Yeah, sure." And as Sunny opened her mouth to speak, En knew what she was going to say, so she called, "Cheyenne, here girl!"
Looking peeved at not being able to tell En out loud it wasn't safe to spend time alone with Melissa, Sunny let out a grunting sigh and told Cheyenne to, "Go on, girl, it's fine."
Cheyenne trotted over to En and kept close to her as she and Melissa walked a distance away from the rest.
"Right. What is it?"
Melissa stole a furtive glance towards Sunny and Ringo, then said, "I just want to be clear on something."
En motioned for her to continue.
"I'm paying off what I owe to you, but your two mates don't have anything to do with that. So cuffs or not, guns or not, if they keep bossin' me around, I'll – "
"You'll what?"
Melissa's jaw worked, but she couldn't find a suitable reply, so she instead said, "I'm hoping you'll make it clear to them that my business is with you, and not with them."
Even though her way of telling it was completely wrong, and even though the demand was rather ludicrous to make when you were in cuffs, and should be happy to be alive, En figured it might not be a bad idea to throw her a bone. After all, they'd all benefit from better relations with each other. "Alright. I'll talk to them, but it can't be a one-sided favour. In exchange I want you t – "
"Yeah, alright," she admitted with a roll of her eyes. "I'll do some work too. But only because you're askin' me. Just so we're clear."
En nodded. "Cool."
"And tell that uptight cobber of yours that I don't want to hear the word bogan anymore. Not even once."
"Uh… okay?"
"Right."
She just had to ask now. "Okay, I'll bite. What's a bogan?"
Melissa looked up, gave a grunting sigh, and stuck to, "Nothing flatterin'."
Whatever, it didn't matter what it meant. "Yeah, okay, fine."
"Good."
Sunny and Ringo stood waiting, looking impatient and annoyed. "You done?" Sunny asked without much friendliness.
Despite the tone of the question, En nodded, "Yeah. Let's go see what happened to Nipton."
"We should be cautious though, the Legion might still have men there," Ringo cautioned, eager to put the whole uncomfortable situation behind them.
"They dangerous?" En asked.
"Mmmnot unless you provoke them, usually. But if they're on a slave run, they might just decide to add us to their loot. You never know with those halfwits."
"Don't think it's a slave grab," Melissa said, her tone surprisingly (and thankfully) neutral. "Wouldn't crucify people if it was. I'm guessin' a punitive expedition or something."
Ringo draped his jacket over Melissa's wrists again. "Still, it's best to be careful."
With a nod, Melissa agreed, "Always." Well, she was doing some effort.
They slowly approached the town, but they saw no movement apart from the black smoke that lazily swirled up to the sky. As they went up the slope, they could make out the forms of bodies hanging from the crucifixes. En's stomach clenched when she saw it. Dear God, these people actually performed crucifixions.
Ringo and Sunny simultaneously raised their weapons as a man came running toward them, looking hysterical, flailing his arms and whooping in what sounded like joy.
"Hold it right there," Sunny commanded, backed up by a threatening growl from Cheyenne.
The man briefly checked, then went on laughing shrilly.
"What are you so happy about?" Ringo called to him.
"I won the lottery! I won the fucking lottery, man!"
"What'd you win?" En asked. "A kitchen appliance set? A lifetime supply of light bulbs? A battery recharge pack on your sexbot?"
The man shrieked with laughter at that. "No way, man. You have no idea!" Then he took off, bolting to the side of the road and running off into the Wasteland. A small paper ticket flitted down to the ground as he ran.
"I think", Sunny said sourly, "I know what kind of lottery this was."
Melissa merely shook her head and said, "This is some shonky business right here."
En didn't know what that silly word meant, but she could guess. And she agreed.
Welcome to Nipton, the sign at the entrance to the town enthusiastically displayed. Yeah, welcome indeed. En was pretty certain that these people wouldn't have welcomed the band of murdering slave drivers that had granted themselves access to their little settlement. Nipton itself lay half-destroyed, no longer than a street long. Houses had been rebuilt on either side of the street, but most had been torched, the wood blackened and smouldering. At the end of the street stood a large mansion, probably city hall. And on both sides of the street stood crucifixes, with men and women tied or nailed to them. Most hung motionless, but here and there, a head still lolled slowly as the crucified person moaned, sounding as good as dead.
"My God," En breathed.
"I don't think God was looking when this happened," Ringo muttered.
"Well, who knows, they might just spontaneously break into song about looking at the bright side of life," En joked wryly, earning her a glare from Sunny and Ringo. "Not appropriate?"
"Not at all. Time and place for jokes, miss En? Remember that conversation?"
"State, nunc!"
What the Hell? Statay noonk? What the Hell kind of language was that? Reflexively, En and her companions stopped and whipped their heads toward the source of the voice. She heard Sunny mutter, "Ah, shit," when they saw the men standing between two houses, their guns trained on them. They must be part of Caesar's Legion, seven men dressed like ancient Roman legionaries, though instead of using old blacksmithed armour, they wore an ensemble of salvaged modern armour plates, mix-and-matched to form legionary armour. Ringo and Sunny hadn't been kidding when they'd said they were emulating the old Roman Empire. And shit, they had guns aimed at their heads and would kill them all before even one of them had the chance to raise a weapon. En's stomach shrunk to a painful ball when she realized she didn't want to end up like those poor saps, crucified and suffering a slow, horrible death.
One of the legionaries, a man whose helmet was covered with what looked like the skin of a cougar with the lower jaw removed, so that above his face was the opened maw of a raging predator, stepped forward imperiously, sizing up the man and women who'd entered the village.
En and the others stood still, waiting for the man to speak. He cocked his head at the jacket covering Melissa's cuffs, stood for a moment, and then pulled it off. His face became slightly less disdainful. "Servam quoque habetis? Non requiretis abscondere." Then nodding at her hair with a sneer, he added, "Belli crines, lupa."
"We are… not fluent in Cicero's language, centurion," Ringo told him, sounding only slightly insecure. "But yes, she's ours... that's what you asked, right?" Melissa set her jaw at the indignation, but was thankfully silent.
The man with the cougar-or-whatever-skinned helmet harrumphed. "Uncivilized peasants everywhere. Then I suppose English will have to do. And I will pretend you did not misaddress me as centurion, but only once." Coyote, not cougar. It was a coyote head.
"We're not here to make tr – " Sunny began, but she was promptly interrupted by an enraged, "Orem claude, scortum!" The last word in particular was snarled in a particularly disgusted way. En guessed she knew what it meant. Then he turned to Ringo and said, "What is your business here?"
Thankfully, Ringo had the sense not to look to En for confirmation, and simply said, "We're looking for a murderer. A coward who shoots unarmed and bound people."
"I see." The legionary's sharp, thin face did not betray even the slightest hint of emotion.
"So we're uh… just passing through, and have no wish to interfere with your business here."
En didn't really agree with Ringo on that one, but she supposed it was the wisest thing to say. She guessed Ringo, like her, wanted nothing more than to nail these dirty murdering bastards to their own crosses, but common sense had to win out over honesty in this particular instance. Live to settle it another day and that.
"Do you know what has happened here, and why?" the man asked, projecting his authority with what looked like no effort at all.
Ringo cleared his throat. "I'm guessing, a punitive expedition?"
"Ita est. The people of this town were punished. And I shall tell you why, so that you understand why it was necessary."
"By all means."
He put his hands behind his back and slowly walked towards Sunny. "The people of this apertio culi of a town are cowards, liars and vermin. First, the NCR approaches them with honey-flavoured venomous lies, preaching their nonsense of collaboration, solidarity, and protecting the weak." His cold blue eyes fixed on Sunny for a moment, then he walked back to Ringo. "The stulti of this town of course buy into the NCR's merda asini, and agree to betray those pathetic escaped convicts that they've been doing dirty dealings with."
Passing Ringo and walking to En, he went on. "But then, when they realize that they can gain even more, they hatch a secret, even more foolish and cowardly plan: to let both the Powder Gang and the NCR converge upon the town and then turn them over to us."
"So they sold them both out?" Ringo had to ask the questions, because they knew this man would not tolerate a second word out of a woman's mouth.
"They did. We had very little trouble killing or capturing both the NCR and Powder Ganger fools. Those we did not kill, were given a place on our crosses." He pointed at the side of the street, and indeed, three powder gangers and an NCR soldier were crucified, the Powder Gangers with nails, the trooper with rope. All four looked to be dead, or as good as. En hoped Ringo would be able to contain his anger.
"So they did you a favour? Then why crucify the townspeople?" Ringo asked, doing a good job of concealing his rage at the crucifixion of the NCR soldier.
He turned away from En and answered, as if he was explaining something completely logical to a dim-witted child. "What fate then, would you see fitting for these traitors? These snitches, selling out the people they'd sold other people out to? The NCR is a band of weak fools, but betrayal is betrayal, and it must be punished accordingly." Sounding proud of what he'd done, he then announced, "So we had them play the lottery."
"They who win the lottery get to keep their lives, correct?"
The legionary held up a finger, looking pleased with Ringo's understanding. "Indeed, though it was slightly more complex than this. We gathered all the scum on the street, and let them draw tickets. They knew what the lottery entailed. They knew there were only two or three tickets which spared their lives. They knew the majority of tickets meant a swift but certain death, and that a small amount meant a slow, deservedly agonizing death by crucifixion."
"I see. Forgive me, but punishing a whole town for the greed of some… isn't that a little excessive?"
For fuck's sake Ringo agree with the man don't piss him off or we'll end up on those crosses and die after the crows pluck out our eyes and we're too weak to defend ourselves
En let out a quiet sigh of relief when the legionary again held up a finger, with a self-satisfied smugness on his waspish face. "You would think so, would you not? But that was the purpose of the lottery. They all stood, holding their tickets, staring at them, willing them to be one of the winning ones. And as we took their mothers, their fathers, their sisters, their brothers, their children and their lovers, as those we took for shooting or crucifixion begged and wailed and clung to their arms, their eyes never came off their tickets. To them, that ticket was all that mattered." He pointed at a mound of bodies, all shot in the head at close range. "And those we took did not resist. They obeyed the rules of the lottery like sheep."
"So they just… let you kill their loved ones?"
The smugness on the legionary's face widened to a proud, wicked grin. "They did. And with every losing ticket, they proved a little bit more that they deserved them. Even they who won, those few who were granted mercy far beyond that which they had right to, squealed in joy, so relieved that they were to be allowed to live, that they did not care for those dear to them, only for that scrap of paper they held." He paused for effect. "Do you, all of you, now realize why this was necessary? They did not fight for their loved ones. They did not even fight for themselves. We were nine, and they were forty. But instead of fighting, they chose to cling to that tiny, meagre chance that their lives would be spared. Those paper scraps made them docile."
"I understand."
En hoped he was just saying that.
"Now, as for you," the legionary continued at a more businesslike tone. "Normally we would simply round you up and make slaves out of you, but I have a better, more long-term use for you." He fell silent, his eyes fixed on Ringo's.
"… yes?"
"As those who won the lottery, you people will remember what happened here, and why. And you will spread the word of what has happened, wherever you go. Every NCR outpost, every town, every vault, every trail camp. You will carry this lesson into the world, and the world will know that Caesar's Legion is inevitably, unstoppably planting its flag into the soil of the entire Mojave. And with this flag will come the eradication of all that is weak, treacherous, cowardly and corrupt."
"You want us to… tell people what you did here?"
"That is what I said. Or do your ears require unplugging?"
"Uh… no, no," Ringo hastily said.
"You are entirely entitled to attempt to overpower us, and I would, in a way, respect this course of action," the legionary said, "but be assured that if you do, the cost of your failure would be", he pointed at the crucifixes, "very severe indeed."
"We have not come here to commit suicide, servant of Caesar."
He nodded. "A wise decision. You are more useful to me alive."
"I don't understand what your purpose is, however," Ringo carefully attempted.
"This is what I do in Caesar's Legion," the man proudly proclaimed. "I am a frumentarius, those who have the honour of announcing Caesar's coming. To instill fear in the hearts of the weak and the deceitful. My name, and remember it well, is Vulpes Inculta."
Ringo's eyes narrowed as he searched for the meaning of the words. Apparently he knew some Latin. "Vulpes… that's a wasp, right?"
Not in anger, but with a weary disdain, the legionary grunted, "Wasp is vespula, you primitive."
"Ah."
Not giving En's group another glance, he turned sharply on his heels. "Legionarii! Exterminandi sunt!"
The men accompanying the Woolpes Inkoolta-character promptly lifted their weapons, and without a word, without a glance at each other, they fired simultaneously, the shots ringing out as one, each round striking one of the crucified men and women in the chest. Three legionaries fired a second shot, terminating the three remaining townspeople. It was all done with cold, ruthless, almost businesslike efficiency. It was something En couldn't comprehend, how you could shut off your feelings like that, the pumping of icy blood being the only remaining function of a cold, cold heart.
The frumentarius, as he'd called himself, turned back to En's group, and with a thin, cruel smile said, "In case you were feeling compassionate for these vermes immundi." And back to his men, "Legionarii, imus."
One of the legionaries, with an assortment of frayed red plumes in his apparently converted motorcycle helmet, struck himself on the chest with his fist and confirmed, in an overly loud and pompous voice, "Sic imperas, frumentarius. Caesari fidelis." He shouted it just a little too loudly for comfort.
"Frumentarie," the wasp-faced man corrected, with a weary voice. "Vocativum noscis decurio?" The squad leader turned beet-red with shame and began making fumbling apologies.
"That's right," Ringo muttered to En, quietly so the Legion bastards couldn't hear, "Because if you're going to butcher innocents, at least don't do it with incorrect Latin declension."
"Ite," the man with the coyote-hide helmet commanded to his decurion, shooing them away, visibly irritated with the apparent ineptitude of his men. "Et velociter, caudices!"
Still flushed, the decurion replied, "Ita," and they marched off, perfectly into step, except two of them, helmeted and their faces covered with scarves and their eyes with dark sunglasses, who kept their weapons on En's little group until the majority of the squad was a safe distance away. Then they ran off, after their leaders.
En and the others stood in the burned remains of Nipton, quiet and unsure what to say, just following the two running legionaries with their eyes.
After a few moments of silence, Melissa finally pointed out, "The one on the left's got nice legs."