Cain's sites remained on his target as his flesh-rotten finger slowly slithered around the trigger of his pistol, like a serpent, constricting its prey. He squeezed the trigger, sending the last shot in his round careening towards the practice dummy, it was a good shot but sadly the dummy's head moved and the bullet whittled past his head and cut off a piece of his ear, embedding itself into the post.

Some would say that it was Cain's fault for using live people for target practice, Cain would tell them to shut the fuck up and for the dummy to be more considerate and stay still.

The Ghoul growled and hopped over the wall, picking up a spiked baseball bat, the dummy's eyes widened as he saw him approach, yelling something into his gag as he shook his head, frantically trying to squirm free as he saw the spiked bat approach him. Cain roared in fury and swung the bat, straight at his face, forcing his head to look to the right as the blunt tip of the bat connected with his face and the nails cut his cheeks to ribbons.

The second blow was vertical, the bat was driven down onto his forehead, with a sickening crunch and then, finally, just to ensure that he wouldn't move anymore, Cain grabbed both ends of the bat and rammed it into his face, caving it in and reducing the skull to fragments, inside the loose bits of skin that still held his head together…

"It's almost as if they don't want to get shot." A voice said, coming from behind him and prompting the ghoul to look over his shoulder. Cain simply scowled in response to that, slowly resting his bat on his shoulder as he looked around. Behind him stood a man in a long, dark blue trench coat, wearing a bird mask of some description. It seemed almost like a venetian doctor, though on close inspection one would notice that it also operated as a gas mask.

"Heh… Don't know why not, if I was a rapist piece of fuck, I'd let someone shoot me." Cain shrugged before swinging his bat around and destroying what remained of his target's head.

"Guess not everyone is considerate like me, huh?"

"You said it." The Bird Man said, sounding somewhat bemused, anyone knew Cain on a personal level wouldn't use 'considerate' as a word to describe him.

Cain remained silent as he wandered back over to his side of the target range, hopping over the wall, dividing him and the corpse of his old training dummy.

"How's the girl?" He asked, as soon as he hopped over, getting a faint shrug from the masked man.

"How do you think?" He asked, looking over to the mutilated corpse of her attacker.

"How old was she? Fifteen? Don't think she'd ever get over that…"

"Well, she was smart enough to tell us, she might do well afterall." Cain grumbled, looking back over to his handiwork.

"So… What're you doing down here, Crow?" Cain asked, not that he minded the company but Crow only bothered him if he needed something.

"It's Linden… We had to pull out." Crow said, this resulted in a faint grumble from Cain, though it was obvious that he was expecting this on some level.

"Casualties?"

"High, both sides…"

"Well, that's something…" He observed, turning around as he leant back against the wall.

"We can take it tomorrow."

"What? After the kicking that we just took?" Crow seemed somewhat exasperated, Cain's… recklessness sometimes yielded fruit but not always. It was literally all or nothing with this guy…

"Yeah, after the kicking we took yesterday, they ain't going to expect it and they ain't going to get the numbers up in time to stop us. We have the advantage, we're on our own turf.

It's like Hitler, he bombed the British for years to the point that they were a day away from surrendering but then pussied out on that day and stopped the bombing runs. I ain't gonna do that, we keep assaultin' them and eventually we'll take Linden. Then the highway and we can drive those fuckers out of Texas."

Crow nodded, that seemed… reasonable enough in a psychotic sort of way, he knew better than to question it. Aside from the fact that Cain would probably bash his head in, Cain was far from stupid. He knew what he was doing, hell, he unified Texas. If Cain said he knew what he was doing, chances were that he wasn't bullshitting.

"There's… Something else." Crow added, meeting his gaze.

"One of our trains was stopped, someone sprung the slaves free, from the inside. Looks like a professional job… They didn't free all of the slaves, kill all of the guards or take anything, so we don't think they were doing anything but trying to smuggle into the area."

"You think they're NCR?" Cain asked, cutting through his story like a hot knife through dog shit.

"It's… Possible? Maybe someone else from California… The families or… Those Legion fucks… I don't know, I just know that something is… Going on.

We're looking into it."

"Good, make sure you find out who they are and who they're working for before you kill them."

"Pfft… I'm a professional too, remember?" Crow pointed out, looking to the side before looking back to him.

"Most of the time, yeah." Cain shrugged, with a faint mirk.

"Well, I've got a meeting, upstairs…" He added, taking his first few steps up before looking around as he reloaded his pistol.

"Something tells me it isn't going go very well…"