Thrasher, Angela Deth, and Caesar
Every once in awhile Julia got to meet a new Ranger. They filtered in from all corners of the Mojave, a new one every four or five days. Always she met them the same way. She'd wake up in the barracks of the Rangers (where even Vargas and Thrasher slept, except when Thrasher's leg was bothering him and he'd sleep in the moldy easy chair in Vargas' office."It's not the missing one," he'd grumble, "It's the one I still got!") and a new person would be sleeping on the cot to her left. Although the routine was the same every time the people themselves were varied. Some were men, some were women, some looked to be vaulters, some looked to be tribals. Some of them slept in their clothes, some slept in underwear, and one slept completely naked. In all her stay she never saw any of them twice. Curious, Julia decided to ask Thrasher how many Rangers were active in the wasteland.
"Huhn. Hmmmmm," was his discouraging response, "I don't know. Let me see if there's a number in Vargas' desk, here."
He got up and hobbled over to the old oak desk Vargas sat at to debrief returning Rangers. He shuffled some of the papers on top, mostly Vargas' write-ups and maps. Using his key he unlocked the drawers and shuffled through dry pens, bottle caps, and pulled out two ledgers kept tied with frayed twine. He opened one and discovered it almost exclusively contained hundreds of identical gray and green strips of cloth, each bearing one of three different portraits. That didn't surprise Julia, as she often saw Vargas alternately give or receive handfuls of the ornate napkins to the Rangers he debriefed. Thrasher blushed and hurriedly wrapped up the ledger and put it back in its drawer.
"It's indecent to look at that much money," he nervously quipped. Julia accidentally blurted, "Money?!" she was so surprised. Legion coin was heavy and metal, not cloth and paper. Once again Julia was shocked at the Ranger's wealth. Thrasher sheepishly ignored her outburst and opened the other ledger to find hundreds of papers that were so official and formal as to be completely obtuse. Vargas walked in on them ransacking his desk.
"We're trying to find out how many Rangers there are," Thrasher didn't look up from a paper full of unlabeled numbers. Vargas shook his head disapprovingly and put the ledger back together.
"That's in the filing cabinet," he groused and pulled the filing cabinet in the corner of the room open. He pulled out a manila envelope and flopped it on the table, then a three-ring binder and set that down gently. Inside the three-ring binder was the collected and collated contents of the manila envelope.
"This is whatever identification any of them could give me when they started," Vargas tapped the envelope, full of over-exposed photographs, old dog tags, amateurish medical reports from the Followers of the Apocalypse, and hand-made identification cards, "This is all of it put together," he thumped the binder appreciatively. The binder was full of page after page of name, age, blood type, place of origin, and an identifying number assigned by Vargas. The last name in the book was number two-hundred, forty-nine, but Vargas assured her that wasn't an accurate count.
"A lot of these numbers are crossed out," he flipped through the binder. When Julia gave him a questioning look he explained further, "We don't really have any accounting. I debrief every Ranger that comes back to the Dam, but every once in awhile we get a complaint that someone is terrorizing people in our name. Most of the time they aren't actually Rangers, but sometimes they are, so we send other Rangers out to kill them. Sometimes Rangers die in the line of duty. I make a note of it when I hear, but I don't always hear," he pointed to a crossed out name, 'Charlize Rogers, number 212' "Turns out she was dead for two years before we got word. We knew she was goin' out to clean up deathclaws outside Goodsprings, but we didn't know they killed her for a long time."
Julia was less than impressed. In her short time as tribe healer she learned that information was key, that keeping good records was more important than firepower. Granted, the records she kept were more of her own memory than anything tangible, but she wasn't thinking about that as she examined the Rangers' logs. Discovering how poorly organized they were so soon after another reminder of their resources made Julia nervous and curious.
"Yeah, I dunno," Really returned to the Dam two days later, fresh blood stains on her coat, "Vargas and Thrasher put on festivals sometimes, y'know? I think the most Rangers I've seen together was... fifty? But, yeah, not a whole lot of organization, or whatever. Most Rangers work solitaire. Got the skills, eh?"
"So what's the big deal? What's keeping people coming back?" Julia asked. Really shrugged. It was not the answer she was looking for. She added, "Sometimes it's good to get a little help, but I dunno why it's gotta be from the Dam 'specially," she suggested Julia ask Vargas.
"Snake'll know better'n me. I mean, I been here only twice before I met you. Didn't always used to come back here erry week!"
She resolved to speak to him the very next day. Pills was away so Julia was holed up in Vargas' office reading more Harvard Classics. After Vargas finished debriefing another Ranger Julia met that morning (he let her sit in his office and read while he debriefed Rangers, which didn't seem odd to Julia at the time but in later years mortified her. The tendency for people to overlook her like that became her best espionage technique) she asked him what made a Ranger. What, if there was no accountability or family or necessity, caused people to call themselves Rangers and keep coming back to the Dam, why they bothered sharing resources. Vargas stared at her blankly for a moment and then burst out laughing.
"Kid, I don't know," he chuckled and rubbed his paunch. He was getting fat. Julia got pissed off. She was sick of not hearing answers. He saw that she was mad, and said, "Y'know, I've been cooped up in this room for a couple years now. I used to be out in the field with the rest of them, but somebody has to stay here and make sure we have a place to come back to..."
She let him gather his thoughts and hoped he could come up with an actual answer. Although she couldn't tell why the Rangers formed or what kept them together, she knew it had to be something. A plant didn't grow without water, and people didn't come together without a reason. In her experience it was necessity or obligation that kept them together, but that didn't explain the Rangers. None of these people needed each other. She wasn't even sure if they were an organization. As far as she could tell there was nothing organized about them.
"I was there for the beginning. It was me, Thrasher, Hell Razor, and Angela," Vargas explained, trying to gather his thoughts as he spoke them, "Sort of. The Desert Rangers started out as just another tribe. Old army engineers, former American soldiers, like the Brotherhood. Holed up in the Jean Conservancy, a pre-war women's prison," he chuckled, "That's where I was born. Me and Angela. Used to be the Rangers were the power in the area. The tribe, I mean."
"But it isn't a tribe now?" Julia prodded.
"Nope!" he answered, cheerfully hiding the pain he still felt from the loss of his former tribe, "the people that used to be known as the Rangers all scattered. It's just us now. But the old Rangers kinda had the same idea."
Julia tried to understand what he meant, "Like, they sent people all over the Mojave?" he nodded.
"The tribe had the most resources and the best memory. Over generations the military tradition of self-sacrifice for the greater good became part of our DNA. Also the military tradition of using violence to solve problems," at that he smiled sardonically, "Me and Angela were following tribe tradition when we set out to help the people of Vegas. Over time, other people joined us. Hell Razor, Gilbert, Christine. Talented people. We weren't quite the tribe anymore, but we were close enough and dangerous enough that the original Desert Rangers started facing a lot of pressure from a lot of bad forces. They couldn't get at us, but they could get at the tribe. As powerful as they were, my people weren't soldiers anymore, just families trying to survive. I tried to return one day and everyone was gone. By that time my Desert Rangers had secured the Dam, so I tried to spread the word and hopefully some of the tribe would come find me, but no one ever has."
He paused before continuing, "I suppose what keeps us together now is a sort of common ideal. We're just a loosely confederated group of people who believe in doing more good than harm. Nominally Thrasher and I are in charge, but really we just keep the Dam tidy and keep some records. Sometimes we pass along rumors to anyone looking for some good to do."
"So... nothing is keeping the Rangers together?" Julia asked. Vargas smiled.
"Ideas aren't nothing. If anything, they're more powerful than blood or money. After all, a nation is just an idea that people share. The Rangers are just good people doing good things. We all work together and help each other out, but it's not like the army before the war and it isn't the tribe the Rangers used to be. So what keeps people coming back?" he paused, "I don't really know, but as long as they keep helping the people of the Mojave, I don't really care."
The two of them sat in silence for a few minutes, digesting what Vargas said. It suddenly seemed to Julia that he was a very small man in a very large room. While she was not satisfied with his answer she accepted it. She realized why she had such a problem understanding the Rangers. From her perspective, with the resources and manpower they had, they should be doing so much more, not spread out all over the Mojave and solving problems piecemeal. They had enough bullets to fight a war, so why were they merely maintaining the status quo?
For some reason her thoughts turned to Caesar's Legion. One volume of Vargas' Harvard Classics contained a biography of a man named Caesar, and when she noted to him that there was a man in the book with the same name as the man in Arizona he conceded that while they were not the same person, the modern Caesar certainly wanted to be the classic Caesar. What the book told her about the classic put the modern in a newly-positive light.
The new Caesar had direction and ambition. He and his men had less resources and less skill than the Desert Rangers, what little they had was in poorer quality than anything the Rangers had, but they did so much more with it. Sure, she heard plenty of bad things about the Legion, but if the new Caesar was indeed modeling himself after the old then it was all in service of a nobler good. Certainly better than the status quo.
The Rangers had accepted her as family, but just as her old family was deeply flawed, so too did seem her new. The idea to go out in the wasteland and do good appealed to her in a way that she admitted to herself was more deeply felt than the bonds of family had once been (Vargas was indeed right about ideas), but she found fault with the Rangers' methods. Maybe I can help guide them to greater things, she thought. She knew they could save the wasteland. She knew that she could lead them to save the wasteland.