Marti Picture

Between them they carried a propane tank. Julia couldn't keep her side aloft and the metal scrapped stone and Pills chastised her. It wouldn't do if the pressurized gas prematurely expelled, not when they had such great plans for it.

"Vegas is a big drain where trash collects," Pills lit a cigarette with her free hand, "Water inevitably takes the path of least resistance, so do people."

She took a big drag then passed the cigarette to Julia.

"Most of them are desperate. Scared. Lost. Not bad people, just people without any options left. They squat on the edge of town or in the sewers and they hurt themselves all the time. Sometimes self-inflicted. Had to stitch up a guy's face once because he got hopped up on psycho in his tetanus-farm of a house and drove his face through the wall. Had a huge gash on his forehead that he hadn't treated for the twenty-four hours before he came to see me. Apologized, said he was so hopped up on psycho he hadn't even noticed. I told him it was alright, but I never saw him again. Probably died of infection."

"Oh wow," Julia said, "That, uh, reminds me of a story. Um, one time when I was living with the Twisted Hairs..."

"I didn't actually get sold to the Slither Kin at first, honestly. Twisted Hairs aren't desperate enough to end up in Vegas and why would the Slither Kin go anywhere else when all the fresh meat comes to them? So I actually got sold to Marti Picture and the 5 Pictures, who were a 'brass band' made up of five brothers, two bent trumpets, a tuba that only played D flat, a plastic guitar, and one big ass drum. They all promised my mother that they wouldn't fuck me if she fucked 'em all so I was just there to carry stuff. Anyway, they figured they could get room and board for playing in Vegas and they were right, but the Slither Kin only had 'em play one gig before deciding they'd rather slit their throats in the night and steal their stuff than listen to them. That's how my mother and I came to be owned by the Slither Kin. I saw my mom only once after Marti died. She'd just been gang-raped, and the stress of it was so much she screamed when I tried to touch her. She didn't even remember me."

Julia lived at Hoover Dam for four months. In that time she spent as much time as she possibly could with Pills, which wasn't a lot since Pills was often busy.

"Alright, this is safe," she told Julia and gently sat down the propane tank on sun-bleached stone. They retreated a distance away and Pills unslung her rifle while stubbing out her cigarette. She handed it to Julia, saying, "Your turn."

Julia accepted the rifle, just a .22, and checked the chamber just like Really taught her to. It had a bullet loaded, not that the area around the Dam was dangerous, at least not usually. After Mayor Winsor's attack the area was peaceful.

Vargas discovered Mayor Winsor was behind it from interrogated prisoners, who were then stripped of weapons and armor and sent scurrying into the wastes with what was hoped to be enough rations to discourage banditry, even though all the Rangers knew better. Julia asked why they didn't just execute the raiders one by one, to which Ghost Woman matter-of-factly grunted, "Bad spirits. Bad karma. Don't want the shadows to grow any longer or wider."

Vargas explained it was a matter of ethics. It was morally wrong to execute unarmed prisoners, he claimed, that it was something raiders did and so to distinguish themselves and prove they were better than the degenerates of the wasteland they never executed prisoners. To Julia the more ethical solution was killing the prisoners, since letting them go all but guaranteed they'd hurt or kill someone later, probably even multiple people.

"You can't kill someone for something they might do," Vargas told her. She muttered that any raider they let go probably already did enough to warrant execution, but wasn't interested in arguing the point any further. She was much more swayed by Really's argument, that mercy was for practical reasons.

"Back when I was Queen Cobra I never woulda negotiated with the Rangers if they'd been killin' all my Vipers. Lotta violence avoided 'cause Rangers don't kill prisoners," she explained when Pills also wondered aloud why they didn't just kill them all. Whereas Julia was persuaded by Really's insight, Pills remained unconvinced.

Despite their initial hostilities Pills and Julia became fast friends. They were still young, the youngest among the Rangers, and they had more energy and less cynicism. Nobody in the wasteland got to be any age at all without some terrible tragedy to mark them, but compared to Rangers like Ghost Woman or Christine or especially Thrasher Pills and Julia were still foolish girls, and when they were together they acted like it.

When Pills went on expeditions for the Rangers, sometimes for days at a time, Julia holed herself up in the Dam and took advantage of the small library Vargas assembled in his 'office.' In a few short weeks she read more than she ever read in all her prior years, so much so that the old man started affectionately calling her 'bookworm,' a name she found distasteful (having never heard of a beneficial worm) but was willing to tolerate in exchange for access to more reading material.

The pride of Vargas' painstaking collection was a fifty-volume set of books labeled "HARVARD CLASSICS: THE FIVE-FOOT SHELF OF BOOKS," of which he had almost all fifty. The leather-bound volumes were notably older than the other books he owned and she was drawn to their austere dignity. Vargas noted her interest and with naked hubris bragged about them.

"All the liberal education anyone could ever need in a five-foot square shelf. The best of the best determined by the wisest of the old world," he said. Julia was awestruck. She poured over the books like they were divine.

When Pills was around, though, she spent most of her time with Pills. Due to her enslavement by the Twisted Hairs and then by the Slither Kin, it was impossible to know just how old Pills actually was. She guessed that she was about twenty years old, or roughly five years older than Julia. She birthed a child around six years ago, give or take a few months, but that didn't mean anything, as Julia had seen girls as young as ten and as old as twenty-nine give birth. As far as Pills knew the child (it was a boy) was still alive, but she had traded it shortly after it was born to a friendlier Vegas tribe for security. Julia thought it was odd the way Pills spoke of her son. It was similar to the way she talked about bullet provisions or tactical encampments, in a detached but appreciative way. It unnerved Julia, but she acknowledged it didn't make Pills a bad person. Life was tough in the wasteland, and everyone made sacrifices with varying degrees of success and morality. Pills' sacrifice wasn't so cruel and it was evidently very successful. Sometimes that was the best anyone could hope for. In any case, Julia didn't press Pills about her child and Pills didn't offer much.

She was much more excited to shoot guns with her. They checked assault rifles and SMGs out of the Ranger armory and shot whatever random junk they could find. They shot stuffed bears, they shot bottles both empty and full. Sometimes they shot their own names into rusty sheets of old metal. Unlike Really who was more careful and calculated, Pills' technique was more spray-and-pray. She reasoned that if she filled the air between her and the enemy with enough bullets, one was bound to hit its mark, statistically. Thrasher, who served as reluctant quartermaster, derisively called her 'the bullet eater,' but was so unconcerned about their supply that he gave Pills all the ammo she ever asked for.

At first their reckless expenditures made Julia nervous and scared. Among the Twisted Hairs bullets were sacred, fetishized objects of great and terrible power. Finding bullets that would not only fire but wouldn't take your hand at the same time was difficult in Arizona. One time, she remembered, her grandfather beat her with a stick for touching some ammunition he left out, as though by her touch she laid a curse on them. He even cleansed them with an old Twisted Hair purification ritual.

Even Really carefully monitored her ammo usage up the Colorado. At the Dam, though, they tore through hundreds of bullets in a single afternoon. The first time they did so Julia was terrified there wouldn't be enough bullets left in the event the Dam was attacked, although she pretended not to care because Pills didn't care and Julia didn't want Pills to think she wasn't cool, even though she was sweating their use of bullets. Her faith in Pills was rewarded, though, when she finally caught a good glimpse of the Ranger's ammo stores.

"More bullets than you've ever seen, huh?" Pills smirked confidently, "We got enough ammo here to fight a war," she claimed. When tested later, her boast turned out to be less than accurate, but still mostly true.

"You'd be amazed at how much gets done without 'em," Really said when asked how the Rangers could have such an arsenal, "Try to avoid gunplay much as possible. You'd be surprised how many people prefer compromise to it. They can get real reasonable with a gun pointed at 'em. No need to waste bullets shootin' a reasonable person."

Pills corroborated that indeed the Rangers favored diplomacy over violence, but expressed some thinly-veiled distaste at the notion herself. She implied Really was a hypocrite for promoting nonviolence yet in practice was one of the more deadly Rangers. To Pills violence and death were a way of life, and she hadn't felt any compulsion to change that since joining the Rangers, especially since as a Ranger the violence and death at her hand was ostensibly in service of virtue and the greater good. As a doctor in Vegas she killed plenty of people, but it never felt quite as morally right as it did in service to the Rangers. Not that she wanted to kill the people she operated on in Vegas, she explained, but all the same death had long been a part of her life.

"Me, too," Julia told her, even though through good fortune Julia never once lost a patient among the Twisted Hairs. Plenty died later, but never in her care. Before she met Pills she was proud of that.

"The best technique, I find, for hitting any target is to picture whatever it is as someone you hate. Just picture that person's smug fuckin' face and pull the trigger. Pow! Works every time," Pills instructed her. Often their fun was justified as target practice, even though Pills' wasn't the shot or the teacher Really was. She still offered advice, but that was the only one that stuck with Julia. She lined up the propane tank in her sights, aimed a little up and to the left to counteract the wind, then pictured the propane tank was her grandfather and fired. The .22 caliber bullet hit its mark and the tank exploded brilliantly. The girls cheered.

They shot propane tanks rarely. Every so often, before Julia even knew she was back, Pills would surprise her in a dark corridor in the Dam and excitedly invite her outside, where a new tank was waiting. The first time, Julia couldn't understand why Pills was so excited, which is why Pills got to shoot the first tank after several minutes of coercing Julia into helping her lug it away with promises of extraordinary payoff, upon which she delivered a safe distance from the Dam. Enamored by the pyrotechnics Julia demanded they shoot another, but Pills told her it was a rare treat and made her promise not to talk about it at the Dam. Julia kept her promise and waited patiently for the next time. Her patience was rewarded when she got to shoot the next tank, then Pills shot the next, then Julia again. After they blew it up they made their way back to the Dam and Julia asked Pills a personal question.

"Who are you thinking about when you target something?" she asked. She knew Pills probably had a dozen answers that would mean very little to her, but she couldn't help but be curious.

"Marti Picture," Pills answered darkly, "for breaking his promise."