Heart & Soul, part VIII
The new cohort for Kingman arrived four days after Mortuus was made decanus. Caesar wasted no time mobilizing his forces, and they left Kingman the very same day. Mortuus never even saw any of the men stationed at Kingman Caesar's departure was so swift. He did manage to say goodbye to Sarah, though.
"I don't know when we'll see each other again," he told her.
"Word is you'll head south, then east," Sarah informed him. The slaves knew more about Caesar's plans than the legionaries. Centurions didn't care if slaves overheard them and word got around in the slave barracks, "Caesar hates Kingman for some reason, and he'll do anything to not return."
Sarah regretted telling Mortuus the truth when she saw how much it upset him. She knew their relationship was lopsided, that she could never again be as raw and vulnerable as Mortuus and his affections, and occasionally she acted callously without intending to. If she were allowed to be completely honest with herself, she didn't care in the slightest whether or not she saw him ever again, but she had enough sentiment to spare the boy's feelings.
"I'll send you messages. I'll send a runner with messages for you, and they'll tell you how I'm doing, and you can send runners for me and I can hear how you're doing, and eventually we'll make our way back to each other," she held him close, like she would hold someone she loved. It wasn't so long ago that she had forgotten the feeling entirely. Mortuus Anima helped her hold on to her memories of love.
Mortuus was a child compared to Sarah, but even still he knew that he'd never be first in her heart. He could feel it in her every gesture that something was missing, that the woman he held and kissed and loved wasn't his, would never be his. That he held on to a phantom, a ghost of his own imagination. But he loved her. He couldn't not. He was scared to let her go, even though she wasn't really his. He kissed her deeply and passionately, one last time.
"I'll come back for you," he told her, "I love you."
She couldn't tell him that she loved him, so instead she kissed him back. It was the first time in their relationship that she initiated contact, and it was also the last. Mortuus would carry that kiss with him to his unmarked grave.
Sarah and Mortuus parted ways, she to the slave barracks and he to his contubernia. It had been difficult to keep control of his men since becoming decanus. He knew he didn't deserve the post. All of them were more experienced than him, and they often second-guessed his orders. Sometimes they really did know better. Eventually, he realized it was smarter if he let his men do what they felt was right, and instead of ordering them he only relayed orders to them from centurions. His men weren't so totally undisciplined that when left to their own means they acted unbecoming to legionaries.
Their orders were to join a group of four other contubernias and meet up with centurion Thoros in the south, then help him conquer Kofa. After that, they'd follow Thoros' centuriae back to Caesar's cohorts, and the whole of them would take Yuma, and then Arizona would be completely under the control of Caesar.
Getting to Kofa was another matter entirely, though. It was 160 miles of badlands, and with forty men plus thirty slaves and equipment, the trip was going to be a week and a half at least. At least they could follow what was left of route 66 with the rest of Caesar's cohorts, but that was only 20 miles. For the rest of the 140 miles it was nothing but wasteland.
The other four decanus were named Stephen, Sun-Goat, Leo, and Hadrianus, and they all came from different centuriae. They were all experienced in combat and leading, and they all worked together perfectly. Mortuus was the odd man out.
Hadrianus took charge. He was a young man who had just turned twenty years old, and had been a decanus for the past year and a half, a promotion he earned by maintaining a strong position after his previous decanus was felled in battle. He had been part of the Legion since Caesar took Flagstaff ten years ago, and had distinguished himself during his six years of training by killing a yaoi gui with his machete. Like other tribals from Flagstaff he resembled an old west cowboy. He had a prominent, hawk-like nose and a lantern jaw.
Leo was the oldest decanus at twenty-seven. He had a huge scar up the side of his face, a gift from a saber-toothed radlion whose teeth he still wore on a necklace he never took off. He had been inducted into the Legion after Phoenix had fallen, and after he was too old for the Legion training Hadrianus or Mortuus had been through. He had once been a warrior of a Phoenix tribe, and after proving his worth to Caesar he'd been promoted. Although he was only twenty-seven, his blond hair was graying at his temples. Occasionally he was referred to as Leo of Phoenix.
Sun-Goat, like Leo, had been made a full legionary right after his conscription into the Legion, although he was only nineteen. He didn't know it, but he was slowly dying of syphilis. He was kept away from the slaves, because his sexual rapacity was so out of control that if left unchecked he'd do nothing but fuck them. He'd already infected an entire outpost with his STD. He was the product of incest, two generations of interbreeding that left him with four fingers on one hand and a lazy eye. He was an incredible warrior, though. He fought like he fucked, with abandon and without self-preservation. With only the barest tactics picked up from Caesar's teachings and he was unstoppable.
Stephen had joined the Legion willingly and proudly. He was from a small community of wastelanders that had fled a vault a few generations ago. Caesar's Legion had saved them all from being wiped out by Scorpion's Bite raiders, after which they all pledged undying loyalty to the Legion. Although he was a few generations removed, he still had the vault look; clean-cut, even haughty. He looked healthy, or at least healthier than the tribals that made up the Legion, although he looked more childish, too. Uncommon to the Legion, he used a rifle to fight, but it had made him successful in battle and so he had earned the rank of decanus.
All four men were paragons of Legion brutality and efficiency, and by the time the party reached Kofa all four were dead, along with most of their men and all of their slaves.
They made it down 66 just fine, but a day after splitting from the main body things started going wrong. They made camp after marching for ten hours, secured a perimeter and posted guards. They had made camp for an hour and a half when the decanus convened for a meeting and they noticed Sun-Goat was missing. After searching, it was discovered that right after they secured the camp Sun-Goat had walked away to take a piss, and no-one had seen him since. Hadrianus took a head count of everyone and discovered that besides Sun-Goat, three slaves were also missing.
"Shit!" Hadrianus said when the count was finished, "That bastard's off fucking slaves!"
"Not surprising," Stephen admitted, "Without any centurions to keep him off it, he's having his fun. I don't know what Centurion Tse-gah was thinking."
"Sun-Goat's an idiot, but he knows we'd report him if he acted out of line," Leo defended him, "I don't buy it."
Mortuus stayed silent. Being the least qualified decanus combined with how little he knew his peers had caused him to revert to old ways. It was better he stay silent, he reasoned, lest he say something stupid and undermine his fragile authority. The other decanus ignored him anyway, not knowing he was promoted unjustly but sensing it all the same.
In the end it was decided that Sun-Goat would find his way back, and that he was only fucking slaves. As a concession to Leo camp security was tightened in case there was a threat. Sun-Goat never came back, but no one else disappeared that night.
For the next several days, they continued to hemorrhage legionaries and slaves a few at a time. No matter what they did, people kept disappearing in mysterious ways. Scouts wouldn't come back, guards would go missing. More terrifyingly, legionaries would lie down to sleep and in the morning they'd be gone, or slaves would enter tents to get supplies and never come out. Panic began to grip the contubernias. Leo, who was from Phoenix and thus knew the area a little better started to work on a theory as to what was wrong, but wasn't going to tell anyone until he proved his theory right.
"Tonight, everyone sleeps on rocks. Big rocks," he told the other three decanus. They set up tents on big flat rocks, as many as they could find. The camp was spread wide, but the way Leo ordered it and the fear of the mysterious disappearances gave Hadrianus and Stephen no room to argue.
Nobody disappeared that night, but the weakened defenses gave a horde of endless walkers the opportunity to strike. More than twenty screaming ghouls appeared from the dark shadows of the badlands and descended on the legionaries with their animal ferocity. Leo was killed, along with most of the slaves and a whole contubernia's worth of legionaries, including Water-Axe from Mortuus' contubernia. The ghouls fought to the last, not one of them retreating even when the Legion turned the tide of the ambush.
The next day, the camp was approached by ghouls again, this time friendly. It was a group of fugitives from the reservation, half-mad themselves from the sun but much more familiar with the area than the Legion. The guards nearly killed them on sight, but when the leader began to talk in english, rumpled hat in hands, they let them through to the decanus.
"Betcha wondering why folks disappear out here," the leader growled. Hadrianus and Stephen reacted with disgust to the man and his radiation-ravaged appearance, but Mortuus listened intently. A group of ghouls from the Mojave wasteland used to trade with the Twisted Hairs, and Mortuus had always found them fair and friendly. He'd never been exposed to Caesar's anti-ghoul rhetoric like Stephen and Hadrianus had.
"These're disapperin' lands. We had 'em near the rez. Folks go out into 'em an' don't come back," the ghoul was excited to teach the Legion. He had encountered the Legion a few times in his travels, and he and his friends had become enamored with the way the Legion took what they wanted.
"Get on with it wretch," Hadrianus sneered.
"Desert stalkers," the ghoul said, "Ants with big piercers. They wait in the sand until yer vulnerable, then they jump up and bite ya, drag ya down," the ghoul pantomimed, "That's what's happenin' to yer men. They all got sucked down by the desert stalkers."
Hadrianus disregarded what the ghoul said, but he allowed them to leave camp. The ghoul offered to stay and help, but the decanus rejected his offer. Hadrianus was a strong warrior, but he was arrogant. The legionaries, now down to twenty-six men and four slaves and badly demoralized continued their journey.
They came to a wide expanse of red dirt and Reave caught Mortuus by the elbow.
"I don't like the look of this. I have a feeling," he told Mortuus. There was fear in his eyes, and Mortuus commanded his contubernia to hold back.
"Oh please!" Hadrianus noticed Mortuus' reticence, "You really believe that hideous freak? Ghouls are garbage, Mortuus Anima. Whatever he said was a lie."
Hadrianus ordered all the men to start marching and took the lead. Mortuus and his men continued to wait. Hadrianus made it eighty feet into the red sands before he realized they weren't following.
"Decanus!" he screamed, "You! And your men! March!"
Mortuus was about to comply, when a huge set of tan pincers burst out of the ground underneath Hadrianus, piercing him in the chest. All around the men desert stalkers burst from the ground, grabbing men with their giant mandibles. Hadrianus screamed and tried to fight the insect off, hacking at its pincer with his machete. Mortuus and his men drew their weapons and ran to help the other legionaries.
Stephen tried to fire his rifle into the desert stalker that had Hadrianus, but the bullets hit the ground harmlessly. A desert stalker came up behind him and wrenched him to the ground. His rifle flew out of his hands and hit the ground, going off and hitting Hadrianus in the thigh. The pain caused Hadrianus to stop struggling for a minute, allowing the stalker to drag him into the ground to his waist. It looked like the legionaries were done for, until a hideous howl overtook the legionaries' screams.
The ghouls had come back, and were helping Mortuus and his men rescue the other legionaries. They tore the desert stalkers apart bodily, fighting side-by-side with Mortuus and Reave and Otho. They pulled the stalkers off of men, pulled the men out of the earth. In the end, the Legion only lost five more men. Hadrianus was the last to die. By the time Mortuus reached him, only his head and arm were above the sand. Mortuus held his hand and tried to pull him up, but it was too late. The desert stalker crushed his ribcage underneath the ground, and he died. His hand went slack and he was sucked under. No-one knew what happened to Stephen, but his rifle was all they found of him.
"They aren't that strong," the ghoul leader told Mortuus, "They prefer easy targets, and even then they mostly kill 'em by suffocatin' 'em with dirt."
Mortuus accepted the ghouls into the remaining party. He was the sole remaining authority, and none of men questioned his decision. They owed their lives to him and the ghouls. Even his own contubernia, who had been less-than-enthusiastic about his promotion before now listened to him. With the ghouls they were back up to twenty-seven men. Under Mortuus' leadership and with the ghouls' help they made it all the way to Kofa without any more losses.
Centurion Thoros wasn't happy to receive nearly half the forces he had been promised, but he was incensed that Mortuus had adopted ghouls into his men. He explicitly referred to the remaining legionaries as 'twenty-one' men, and when Mortuus corrected him he made it very clear that the ghouls were not legionaries, that they weren't even men. Even when Mortuus defended the ghouls, told Thoros how bravely they fought and how strong they were, that they were good warriors, Thoros still ordered him to kill the ghouls.
Mortuus wasn't happy at the orders. He knew not to question the centurion, but the journey from Kingman to Kofa had changed him. He was no longer uncomfortable with his position, and he no longer second-guessed himself. He was a true decanus, now, and he wasn't scared to make decisions, even when they were difficult. He agreed to Thoros' orders and left the centurion's tent.
He returned an hour later.
"I need more men," Mortuus told the centurion. Thoros, even angrier that his supposed support now needed resources from him, asked Mortuus why.
"I told my men," Mortuus emphasized 'men,' "to kill the ghouls."
"What's the problem then?" Thoros snapped.
"My ghouls defended themselves," Mortuus shrugged, "Two of them are dead, but the other four are still fine, and I'm down to three men."
In the end, Mortuus won. His supplementary forces already depleted, Thoros wasn't in a position to refuse Mortuus' ghouls their service. If there was any doubt left in Mortuus Anima's leadership, no one expressed it. His new contubernia fought at the front of Thoros' centuriae and won handily. The legend of the Dead Soul began.