Now we're really getting somewhere! Have a merry christmas guys, and check back sometime over what will be christmas in America, I'll have a special present for all you readers up around then in the form of the penultimate chapter to the first story arc of Nameless Grave. It'll be a double length season finale, so look forward to it next week and in the meantime enjoy the double dose over the weekend!
Thirteenth Hand – Spades
4th October, 2266
"There was a whole pack of them, but I'd managed to get the drop. They're quick though, those Nightstalkers. When you've got the advantage you have to press it or you'll be feeling it in the morning, if you last that long."
Dad's voice was muffled, far away. Why was that?
"Me and Rick, though, we knew what we were doing. We had the drop on them, and we pushed our little advantage. Gotta be a good shot with your gun; make sure you get 'em in the right places. Bang! The head's the best spot, of course. Rick was great, but he'd always preferred charging at things with that hammer of his, bulky idiot."
I was feeling really hot. Burning up. Hell, it burned so much. Yet I was wrapped in all those blankets, and I knew I should stay under them no matter how badly my body felt like it was going to burn.
That's right; mum told me my brain was confused. The sickness was scrambling the signals from the rest of my body, so when my body was freezing cold my brain thought it was boiling. So I must have been freezing.
Blazing cold. There was dad, wearing that coat of his, big and grey. It's not as bright as it was back then. The dust and blood of the desert has changed it, and after all those years there are some things that won't come out of those threads.
He was telling me the story of his scars. That's right: he said that a man's face could tell you a lot. He always said his was a road map of his slip-ups. A scar just above his brow where his old mentor had stopped a robot from cutting his eye out, the big ones from the Nightstalker pack, the patch of hair he kept intentionally shorter to remind him that fire ants lived up to their name, the chunk of ear missing for when he'd visited the Twisted Hairs and angered one of them to the point of challenging him to a duel…
"So Rick runs in, swinging his hammer, sending 'em flying off in all directions. It was really quite impressive!" dad continued enthusiastically.
There was a weight pressing down on my torso. Heavier than the blankets, lying on top of them. I couldn't see from where I was, but I knew: it was Cerberus. Keeping my body warm and keeping me company. Heh, sometimes I wonder if that shaggy thing could survive without me being there to walk beside him. Then again, I wonder how well I'd do without a companion like him.
The rusted metal roof above me had been insulated to keep the elements out. Just old blankets scavenged from around the place mostly, with extra scrap metal to keep the holes closed. Didn't want vermin sneaking in for comfort amongst the covers in the roof, that'd be yuck.
"But as impressive as it was, it was also very foolish. Remember, running into a group of enemies gets you in trouble, fast. It's always better to try and keep all your foes in one direction. If you get surrounded, you're vulnerable," dad cautioned. "Rick knew that, but he was so cocky he thought he'd just go ahead and ignore it. One of the Nightstalkers jumped at him from behind. I fired – bang! Bang! – and took it out, but there were a lot, and I couldn't risk hitting Rick, or it'd be just as bad for him as a bite, maybe worse."
Vicious, vicious creatures those Nightstalkers.
"I'm not one for melee combat; you know that by now I'm sure. You weren't even ten by the time you were managing to get the upper hand over me, hyperactive little thing you are. But Rick was a good friend, and I couldn't let him get eaten just because he thought he was bigger than he was. So I rushed on over, shooting up those snakehounds! Blam, blam, blam, blam, blam! Reload! Blam-blam-blam! Just like that!"
Mum wandered over and checked my temperature. She was pale, her tan skin considerably more white as the strain of my condition made her worry. It wasn't without reason. People had died of this sickness before. People she knew, I'd heard her say. Dad had agreed, he'd seen cases. Some lived, some died.
That scared me. That terrified me. I'd caught this sickness, and people fifteen years older than me and as healthy as can be had been killed by it.
My parents had been doing what they could, of course, to keep my spirits up. Dad had been telling me stories about the adventures he and his rangers had been on. Mum read stories she'd pieced together about the Old World, and told me the myths of Poseidon Energy; the stories of Odysseus the Artificial Intelligence that went mad, and the person he was named after, who lived a long time before that, when the world was bigger. He'd gotten lost looking for his home, and been on many adventures during that time, doing everything he could to return to his beloved. She told me the stories of Poseidon and his brothers and sisters. Apparently Poseidon was part of a massive family who had run much of the Pre-War government, ruling over the Old World in a system of law called 'Olympus'. He and his family had been imperfect rulers, my mother said. While they were generally good, sometimes they were prone to acts of childish rage, or extreme arrogance. She believed that arrogance was part of the reason Olympus' power had begun to fail. Poseidon must have been the last to fall, because the influence of the others had almost entirely been erased by the time the Great War came about, and now only ruins of his temples remained. Humanity had stripped away the temples and worship of the other members of Olympus.
Cerberus had been named after a faithful guard hound of one of them, the one who had been tasked with overseeing the judgement of the dead. It was amazing; the Old World even had a way of measuring those who had died and assigning them places in the world beyond life based on their achievements.
The stories were incredible – some of them were exaggerated, mother told me. Legends always changed as people heard them, grew and shrank and changed so that at the heart of these legends the person who was responsible for their creation and the events surrounding it was never what you thought. Odysseus might have just been another man wandering around in search of a place to settle down and a woman to fall in love with who told everyone the story of his adventures. Centuries pass, and men become myths.
Even after the War, those myths endured. I was always fascinated by that, and my mother was always happy to fuel that fascination. Dad said I needed to think about the present more, sometimes, but he didn't see too much harm in it as long as I wasn't getting obsessive. He warned me not to let my mother get too overbearing with it. Never while she was within earshot though.
Kind of funny the way people do that. Tell one person to avoid something about another. They could just talk to the other about it. Then again, dad had talked to mum about her interest in the past, and they'd just gotten angry.
The world ended, and legends continued. Now, instead of great figures that were written about in stories, where the words couldn't change anymore, we'd gone back to telling stories with our mouths, adding glamour and intrigue to keep people hanging on our every word.
After the War, the world had become a place where anything could mutate, and legends were no exception.
Tales were still told of the Vault Dweller: the man who had stepped out of a now-empty Vault and seen the city of Necropolis taken by the Master and his Super Mutants. And alone, that man had marched across the lands that were yet to even think of the flag of the two-headed bear, and he'd rescued President Tandi before she'd been a part of the NCR, he'd descended into a great cavern that burned so brightly with radiation that warriors of the feared and then-great Brotherhood of Steel feared to tread. He'd stepped into the Boneyard, seen the Followers of the Apocalypse in infancy, and he'd saved them. He'd slain the Master in his own lair, a massive, incredible temple to his power, filled with the disciples of the new god and the mutants who obeyed him without question, born of the strange chemicals of Pre-War science and the new world's influences. He'd faced that newborn god, and he'd destroyed him, or her, or it, or whatever it had been. The legends were always different: the Master was a goddess who birthed the super mutants. The Master was a king of the Old World preserved within his temple and ready to take over the new world. The Master was a thousand people who had been forcibly merged into one being. The Master was something awoken by the end of the world, but born before it, seeking to claim the new world.
It didn't really matter at the end of the day: whatever the Master was, the Vault Dweller killed it and saved the world of America from the destruction of the super mutants.
I'd been drifting off. The fever and my thoughts about the Old World had stopped me paying attention to dad, and he was so wrapped up in his retelling he didn't even notice.
"So Rick's yelling 'get down, get down!' because he doesn't realise there are actually two Nightstalkers left, and he just can't see the one in front of me. But he says he's throwing his hammer! So I ducked, and his hammer goes flying over me and smashes into one of them, but the other one's already jumped at me, and I need to reload. Never get caught reloading, my boy," he continued to ramble, happily reliving the events almost as much for his own pleasure as to keep my mind off the fever.
"That's where these came from. The last Nightstalker of the pack jumped on me and just started going to town. Rick realised his mistake and got it off me. Thought it'd killed me for how bad it'd got me, and he got real mad. Kinda heart warming to see a friend get so angry over you that he deals out that kind of retribution to the thing that did it," dad mused. "The bite on my arm healed much better than my face, but we spent the night on the ridge. Nightstalker venom paralyses, I couldn't go anywhere! It's not pleasant, but Rick gave me a bit of morphine and I spent most of the night just sleeping it off. Not very fun, but we made it!"
I smiled. Dad loved telling stories. He'd been born into the rangers, so from day one he'd been having adventures on the road, and I don't think he even comprehended how any other kind of life could be fun.
I'd always been on the road too. My mother wanted me to have a choice in joining the rangers instead of just being born into it like dad, so I wasn't actually one of them, but I could feel it in me that I'd love wandering for a long time.
~ Primm: The other New Vegas! ~
8th November, 2281
"Hey, seeker! Wake up!"
The courier's eyelids slowly drifted back up, giving him blurry, sleep-filled sight.
He felt something tap his head, and he rubbed his eyes to see better.
"Morning," he yawned, blinking a few times to will his eyeballs back into sight.
Veronica. Upright and mobile. Up before him even.
Good, the poison was burned out and she was back to business. He must have fallen asleep reading beside her bed sometime into the evening prior.
Yawning again, he stood up, closing Tales of a Junktown Jerky Vendor on the page where Mick had decided to finally cut his losses and go solo. Not as interesting as Theseus, but it'd have to do.
"You're looking chipper," he said happily.
The young woman smiled and gestured to the empty tent. "I thought I'd let you sleep in, get to know the NCR a little bit. Not every day I get an excuse to spend time in one of their posts, even if it's just a supply farm," she explained.
"So how late is it?" Courier Six wondered, checking the chunky wristwatch on his left forearm. Nearing nine in the morning. "We should have been moving hours ago," he said.
"You looked so peaceful!" Veronica stated. "Like a little angel!"
"What's an angel?" Six wondered as he checked his belongings and then headed for the tent's door flap.
"It's, uh… something to do with religion. Winged people," Veronica replied after a moment thought.
"So because I'm asleep I look like I have wings? Wish I could do that while I was awake, but it must be one of those unconscious things. I'll add that to the list of reasons I don't like Benny: 'murdered me, stole my delivery, blew my memory apart, broke Trudy's radio, betrayed the Khans, stopped me from consciously looking winged and religious'. List's getting bigger," the courier observed with a chuckle.
"You know you're right, that saying never made sense," Veronica agreed. "Just another thing from Pre-War days people keep using without knowing how or why."
"Ain't it grand?" the seeker laughed.
A few hours later they were on the move, Veronica, Six, and ED-E, striding through the streets of Vegas with a more alert eye than the previous day, and both of them wearing some more durable armour. The heat made it harder to bear, but the farm had a collection of salvaged threads, most of it just collected from Fiends. They were mishmashes of metal and leather made for protection by unskilled hands, but Six and Veronica had picked out two sets of the more competently made stuff and were now wearing them under their respectively unassuming garments; Veronica's unimpressive sack robes and the Courier's grey coat.
A conversation with one of the soldiers told them that if they followed the fence-line and then kept going in that direction once it ended they'd come to Freeside's gate after a bit of travel. A recently collapsed building had slowed them down a little, but overall they didn't have much ground left to cover anyway.
Freeside, as Veronica had explained from what she knew and based on what Six himself had gleaned, was a walled off section near the Strip, and one of the only places from which one could actually get into the heart of Vegas. It wasn't a pretty place – most gamblers who went broke on the Strip ended up there, making it essentially the slums of Vegas.
Some were actually there by choice, and others willingly stayed too, but it was a hard place to be in. Crime was a daily occurrence, and the more violent casino patrons turned to muggings and worse to get another shot at the big league tables.
None of that mattered to Six though, he was interested in getting into a casino for a different kind of gamble, and his prize would be a rather different kind of chip.
As they walked through the streets they passed a factory that still had a thin plume of smoke wafting from the smoke stack. People wandered around it behind the chain-link fence separating it from the rest of the area. Guards with weapons. Six wondered what was going on in the factory. Maybe it was a drug-lab. Far enough from Freeside to avoid any rabid junkie trying to knock the doors down.
Not long after that they found themselves looking at the gate to the slums of Vegas. A large thing that had clearly been built after the War, just like the wall that closed the small community off from the harsher elements of the Outer Vegas region. It was a large arch, built from multi-coloured metal that had been painted and cobbled together to form some kind of ceremonial entrance. At the top it was mostly yellows and reds, as if to simulate the rising sun. Between the pieces of metal and wood a chain link fence could be seen, topped with rings of razor wire. The wall extended all the way around both the Strip and Freeside, keeping the Fiends and other undesirables out, and in some cases keeping the slum-dwellers in.
The gates themselves were large and iron with slotted wooden panelling, some of which could be slotted out to check what was outside and admit accordingly. The word 'FREESIDE' had been haphazardly painted in a diagonal slant, faded over time, and then been reapplied near but not quite on its original label.
More recently some proud idiot had sprayed 'NCR AND PROUD OF IT!' on one gate. Everything but 'NCR' had since been crossed out, and above the graffiti someone had charmingly added 'FUCK' to adequately explain their dislike for the New California Republic.
Right now, being the middle of the day, the gates were slightly ajar, letting people get in single-file without rushing them.
Six stepped through first, and the smells of Vegas suddenly increased tenfold as the squalor of Freeside struck his nostrils with full force. It had been something of a background noise before, but now it was considerably stronger. The smell of smoke actually helped make it better.
"Wow," the wanderer choked, shaking himself.
"Whoa," Veronica spluttered, walking in behind him and being greeted by the same sensation.
ED-E simply bobbed in and beeped as if the two of them were being silly. With no nose, the little robot was spared the smell of the slums.
"You watch yourself, now," a man warned in a peculiar accent. It was somewhat grandiose and heavy, trying to sound deeper than it actually was and more charming than it could possibly be in this place.
It was an off-putting way to speak.
"What?" he found himself wondering. He'd understood perfectly, it was just such a strange accent he couldn't help but mentally double take.
"This is Kings territory. You make sure you behave yourself or there'll be trouble," the man said in the same suave voice.
As he walked away, Six could see he was wearing a black leather vest with a picture of a crown on the back, and 'The KINGS' in big block letters. His hair was in some odd style that flowed upwards at his brow and was sleek and well-kept. Surprising for a slum-dweller. Especially one in a gang.
"Did you…?" Veronica began.
"Nope," Six finished.
They both stepped forward into Freeside. The street they were in stretched on and then opened out to the right onto something that might once have been a small garden. Now it was dead brown weeds. Many of the buildings up either side of the road were divided on whether they were overly secure or completely open; some had smashed windows and no longer kept doors, while their neighbours looked like they'd stolen the door and used it to board up their windows for safety.
Lying facedown in a gutter on one side of the street was a headless man with a charred and twisted metal collar lying between his head and the rest of him. Both parts were disgustingly old and had been rotting in the heat for at least three days. The other side of the road had another body, but this one was alive. A man blubbering and occasionally attempting to sit up, only to drop back down with a shrug – jet withdrawal.
"Ugh," Veronica sighed, wrinkling her nose as they walked. "What a minute, is that a bomb collar?"
"Veronica, I know you're a little quirky, but that's a bit kinky even for someone who fists things with a pneumatic gauntlet," Six sighed and kept walking.
ED-E exploded into a chorus of beeps and chirps. Little bastard was actually laughing at Six's joke. Inappropriate humour tickled the little sphere's funny… wire. How bout that?
The Brotherhood member joined the laughter, and then somehow managed to return to a serious face so fast it made the courier laugh too.
"Bomb collars are the kind of tech the Brotherhood uses-keeps. The kind of tech the Brotherhood keeps. They can't be taken off without disabling the signal and they… kinda blow your head off if the signal changes in the wrong direction," she explained.
"I reiterate: way too kinky. I like you, but no way I'm getting a collar that blows my head off strapped on just so I can get my head blown off," the wanderer said flatly. Wow, thirty seconds in Freeside and he was already right there in the gutter with his humour. Way to go Freeside, that's immersion and culture. Of a sort.
ED-E continued laughing, weird little orb. He was getting more personable with all the travel, maybe. Courier Six knew some AIs were actually programmed to do that: learn from the environment around them and evolve their programming based on it. Essentially it created a program that was the mental equivalent of a baby, but through observation of the world around it its programming mimicked a human growing up, getting more complex and intricate until eventually it might as well have been a real person for all the electrical signals and self-evolving systems contained in the metal shell.
The Old World was an incredible place. He wondered how many of those AIs might have been operating back then. How many had died as their processors corroded and the elements tore through their fragile circuits? Had they died as humans, terrified and in pain? Or had their programming not evolved in such a way, incapable of perceiving pain in a state of wilful ignorance to avoid the damage it could cause? Surely losing functions and signals would be pain of a kind for a machine, especially if it was self-aware and understood that once those programmes ended it would go dark forever and die.
If ED-E continued to grow as he seemed to, would he eventually reach the state of human awareness where he would comprehend pain? Would he, like so many come to fear death, some kind of electronic reaper that would one day claim him with time or damage?
Six looked at the orb, Veronica's retort lost in his sudden fall into the profound thoughts and questions. A metal ball. A metal ball that hovered, shot lasers, and apparently contained a wealth of hidden data within its frame. He reached up and patted it, and it tilted away and turned to look at him, beeping inquisitively. A metal ball that was his friend.
Courier Six smiled. His nose wrinkled.
Wow, Freeside smelt disgusting.
"You okay?" Veronica wondered, looking at him. "If you come back now I won't do it after all!"
"Won't do what?" he blinked.
The scribe grinned. "Never you mind," she said coyly.
Confused and slightly interested in what Veronica might have said, Six decided to ignore it instead and keep walking.
A sign to his right, relatively new, identified an old shop that had been taken over and reused as 'Mick & Ralph's'. Sitting in front of it, smoking a cigarette, was a man with a suspiciously affable grin and a leather jacket with full pockets. He watched them both as they walked down the street, his face smiling, but his eyes were scoping them for some purpose or another.
A small group of men sitting in a triangle playing cards paused as one threw a king of spades onto the pile. They looked up at the three travellers, looking first at the strange metal object hovering through the air (how much is it worth?), then at the woman striding confidently through the street (what's she look like under those robes?), and finally at the courier in the grey coat sparing a glance over at them (how much money does he have?).
Leaning up against a wall was another of the suave gangsters wearing a leather 'The KINGS' jacket with greased hair. He watched them like the other men had, but his smile seemed more genuine: his face smiled, but unlike the others his eyes smiled too, giving off something of a quietly warm welcome to the travellers.
In the distance a woman screeched loudly. It was cut off abruptly, worryingly. The gang member took off towards it at high speed, leaving the three travellers unwatched as they turned a corner and walked down towards the park area.
A large group of people wearing frayed clothing stood around an old drum can talking. A rodent of unusual size ran down the street squeaking loudly as a small group of children chased after it with knives. A woman dressed in just about nothing strutted down the street and paused to start talking with one of the greasers.
Beyond the park was a large wall, concrete and brick, walling off a section of town. The high walls looked difficult at best to scale. Whatever was on the other side must have been important.
Six looked up through the buildings, those who had decayed and those who had been preserved by both skilled hands and those desperate enough to resort to duct tape, and saw the great tower of Vegas looming over the city. It was so very close now, spearing up into the sky like that, four prongs reaching outwards as if holding the enormous disc in the centre, and the needle above it, accusing the skies.
It was no Colossus of Rhodes, but it was majestic and iconic all the same.
And in its shadow, plotting deviously, was Benny. The snake.
All that stood between the courier and his delivery was Freeside.
"Let's go," he said, though they were already moving.
The walls bordered on a crossroads, and away to their left was the Strip. Freeside's other gate stood along the right, near the heavy wooden doors to the fort. A sign in front of it identified it as the 'Old Mormon Fort', probably some kind of historical landmark.
His scar beginning to twinge, Six turned towards the mighty tower and started walking. Veronica and ED-E followed without hesitation.
An old school bus with one half torn open formed a sort of gate into the next area of the district, its side door pushed open, but presumably capable of being closed and locked as a way of fortifying a location.
Pushing it open, Six stumbled backwards, his nostrils burning. Pinching them, he barrelled through the 'gate' where some individual had used the driver's seat as a toilet and emerged on the other side still alive but feeling decidedly more filthy for the journey. This place was awful.
Veronica coughed and spluttered her way through. ED-E fired a few bolts of energy into the other end of the bus. The smell would probably linger for days anyway, but Six would rather the smell of scorched metal to what was there previously, and hopefully the little robot's laser fire was enough to overpower the other stench.
Freeside's name came from the street they were on, which stretched from the northeast side of the walls down to the Strip itself: 'Fremont Street'. Between the Strip and Freeside was another wall, and another gate, this one with tighter security than Freeside's two entrances, and glamorously advertised as 'The Strip' in neon lettering above the enormous metal double doors.
Two small walkways had been built in front of it, connected by a bridge, and on top of them were more machines like Victor: the Securitrons. Big bulky things with single tires and enormous blue shoulders, hose-like arms extending down from them. Victor's face was a beaming cowboy, but these missions displayed a cartoon policeman with a big round nose sternly facing out from their screens.
Between the bus/gate and the Strip's gate though there was a long portion of Fremont Street left to traverse. The large road was split into two, with street lights, withered grass and what remained of the concrete crash barriers between the two lanes that previously allowed traffic to pour towards and away from the heart of Vegas.
Now it was just feet and hooves that followed the roads, the cars on top of them had been pulled away long ago, used to bolster walls or in other displays of gaudy impressiveness.
A large street wound down to the right with a crier on either corner, loudly declaring the services that their employers offered.
"Hungry? Thirsty? Horny? The Atomic Wrangler has got you covered!" one said loudly as the wanderer and his company wandered by. Down the road he could see the 'Atomic Wrangler'. An unassuming building that had a large neon sign above it showing a cowboy riding an atom and the building's name spelled down so that it was just above the doorway. A little further down the street was a large building that might once have been a hall of some kind. A sign above that identified it as the 'Silver Rush'.
Considerably more bizarre however was what lay on the left of the street just a little further down Fremont Street. An enormous building on the corner covered with neon signage, its entrance opened out directly onto the corner and was crowned with an enormous neon guitar silhouette. Its neck was covered in stars, and in bright lettering within the heart of the guitar it stated charismatically: "The King's".
Stretching along both street-facing sides of the three storey building were more neon signs, blue frames with silhouettes outline in purple showing a figure that seemed to be dancing, or at least standing somewhat awkwardly and pointing down at anyone looking upon them. They flanked the guitar, and stretching away towards the other sides of the building in big golden letters were the words 'School of Impersonation'.
"The King's School of Impersonation," the wanderer read. "Wow, look at that place."
"Guess that's where the gangsters hang out," Veronica assumed. "Nice place. Wonder if they've got toilets."
"Y'know I met a guy who might like this. I'm saying that based purely on the big guitar though, I suppose," Courier Six thought, looking at the building as they passed.
Sure enough, one of 'the Kings' was leaning against the wall by the door, and two more were conversing just a short way away.
"Really? The place looks a little jarring for the slums around it, don't you think?" Veronica pointed out.
"Sure, but he was a performer. Standing in the most noticeable spot around was part of his thing. He actually said he'd write a song about me," the courier chuckled. "If you hear someone singing a song about a courier in the future, just remember, it's about me."
"I'll make my criticisms of the historical inaccuracies harsh and provide the embarrassing truths to amend them with with pride," the scribe promised.
ED-E beeped again.
"You're a true friend," Six said with a chuckle.
They neared the checkpoint in front of the Strip. The bulky robots guarding it watched them as they approached. As they got closer they could hear music being played on the Strip, a charismatic track about the moon, despite it being mid-afternoon, setting a suave and well-cut atmosphere for the heart of Vegas.
The huge tower was so close here, its thicker base obvious from where Six stood, rising behind the protective wall. Another large sign rose up, facing down onto the road of the Strip, but visible here from Freeside's gate alongside the enormous building it named. The silhouettes of two women with one leg in the air each, sitting with their backs to the stylised name 'Gomorrah'.
The drifter smiled triumphantly. Just a little longer. By the end of the night he'd have some answers.
A man wearing dirty cotton clothing bolted past the three, heading for the Strip. One of the Securitrons rolled towards him and a hand rose, but he ignored it and kept running, panting loudly and heavily.
"You have entered a restricted area. Remove yourself!" one of the Securitrons barked in an authoritative and slightly tinny voice.
The man ignored it, going for the gate.
"Cease now, or lethal force will be used!" a different Securitron warned in the same voice.
The man reached for the gate to the Strip frantically, trying to reach it before security came down on him.
"EXTERMINATE!" one Securitron screeched, and all of them opened a volley of laser fire from their hands, blasting the desperate man. His body disintegrated, his flesh and organs becoming a stain of vaguely human shaped ash part way up the Strip gate. His skeleton remained a little longer as the rest of its mass was blown off it and into the surface in front of it before it too smashed into the gate, crumpling to the ground and then disintegrating into a neat little pile of ash.
Courier Six swallowed his enthusiasm.
One of the Securitrons turned and rolled towards him. He had no shame in admitting that he was intimidated after how thoroughly they'd dealt with the last person who broke their 'rules'.
"Submit to a credit check or present your passport before proceeding to the gate. Trespassers will be shot," the stern police face demanded.
"Credit check?" Six blinked, not understanding.
The television screen went blank, and a small horizontal beam burst from it, starting at Six's feet and then sliding up his entire body.
He jumped back instinctively, but he felt nothing as the beam slid up his body and above his head. The Securitron repeated the process for Veronica, and finally ED-E.
"I'm sorry, but your balance does not meet the minimum balance," the policeman face said, returning as if sliding up from under the screen. The display seemed to glitch every now and again, the picture bouncing up and down in its frame before reaching its initial place again.
"But I need to get in!" the courier exclaimed loudly, the Securitrons refusal pushing him further back from his goal, a development that he did not appreciate.
The Securitron was unmoved by his disdain. "If you are unable to meet the minimum balance requirement, an official passport is an acceptable alternative," it explained without emotion.
Irritated, Six's hands clenched into fists. "Robot!" he demanded. "Let me past!"
"No," the policeman face said flatly. "Please return when you have sufficient caps or a passport."
The courier who rose from the grave at Goodsprings turned on his heel and walked away from his destination. Not by choice, but by circumstance.
"Well, now what?" Veronica asked, knowing that neither were about to give up. It was a simple equation, really. Perhaps it would be a little tricky, but they could still get into the heart of Vegas and find Benny, all they needed was to make a little money.
"We need a passport, or a lot of money," the courier said simply.
ED-E had a long winded rant about something in electronic form bobbing up and down, and then tuned into a radio station that was played a song about a highwayman who slew soldiers and stole women's trinkets.
"No, we're not stealing our way into the Strip. We just need to ask the right people," the courier replied, looking at the eyebot quizzically. "Might as well start with the bar."
They walked back down Fremont Street feeling rather less optimistic, but ED-E's song was surprisingly upbeat, going on to describe the highwayman being hung and then switching perspective to a sailor who drowned, to a man who worked on building Hoover Dam, and finally to a man who flew a 'starship', all of whom despite having been supposedly killed were still alive.
Blinking in disbelief, Six realised ED-E was a great deal more observant than he'd first given him credit for being. He was a courier now, but he could have worked on Hoover Dam. He could have been a highwayman. Sailor, whatever that was, maybe not, but the point was that despite death itself, or what appeared by all accounts to be just that, these men lived on. Perhaps even prospered.
Courier Six was a man with a life that he'd lived. He had a father: Damien, who had taught him how to fire a gun, whose grey coat he had inherited and who's wandering ways he'd gladly followed. He had a mother whose name he could not remember, but she'd taught him how to read, given him knowledge of the Old World to give him perspective on the one that lived on after it, and who had striven for the pursuit of knowledge above all things. He'd once had a faithful companion, a great shaggy black dog who had been named Cerberus, a call back to the legends before the War. He'd been murdered, but he lived on. In time, he might return to who he had once been. He hoped he would. But, ultimately, he may merely be a single drop of blood on the drenched plains of the Mojave.
Which would it be?
"Excuse me," came the suave voice of one of the gangsters. "I couldn't help but notice your desire to get into the Strip."
The small party turned to look at the young man with slicked back hair and a leather jacket. Underneath that was a shirt with thick horizontal stripes, black and white. He was a few years younger than Six, with a harsh face. The courier said nothing.
"I represent a very important man here in Freeside. You're in need of help, and I think that maybe he could have a use for you," he stated.
Six exchanged a look with Veronica. "What kind of 'use' are we talking about?"
The man smiled without feeling and extended a hand. "You'll learn when you pay your respects," he said.
Six shook his hand, looking at him suspiciously. "To who?"
"The King."
~Spades: A playing card suit of the modern French deck, associated with the classical element of air, an untameable and wild force. Its equivalent in the tarot deck is 'swords'.