VI
Cleansing — Considerations — Spoils — Clothing — Venom Glands — Dropping Bodies — Balls
Cara, Olivia and company cleaned up town along with several Goodspringers. After a while Viana felt guilty for not helping and joined in too. They used buckets of water, mops, sawdust and Abraxo powdered hand soap for blood. They found some shopping carts to help move the pieces of a lot of radscorpions and a few geckos littering the town.
Everybody had trouble moving the three giant radscorpions. Cara didn't, so he took care of them. One was all in one piece, but the other two had fragmented somewhat.
The various people helping with the effort just dragged the various sizes and types of creatures' bodies to the eastern side of town, wherever they happened to be on the north-south axis. As Cara was moving one of the giant radscorpions, he thought to move all the bodies further east, and into the empty but for wild plants desert areas east of town, where coyotes and other radscorpions and normal flies and geckos and ants would devour them over the next week or so. Flies, especially, had already been gathering.
Cara remembered about the two Reaper drones and the Boomers as he and the others were working, and retrieved his long-range radio and called the Boomers to tell them to fly the drones back to base. They happily complied, and updated him as they returned then landed them both. The landings went well. "Talk to you tomorrow, Cara," one of them said as they signed off.
After the initial time-consuming job of clearing out the town was done they all got together and drank outside the saloon. The smarter among them drank water. They talked about the main concerns: what to do with the Powder Gangers' bodies, as not everybody knew Cara already had an idea, and loot—and also how awesome they thought Cara's plan and his execution of it had been.
One person suggested they bury the bodies. One said leave them where they'd fallen and take their shit.
"Do you really mean that?" Cara asked her. "Some of them probably shit themselves when they died."
She thought about that then said, "I shoulda said 'valuables.' Take their valuables."
Cara recapped to them all what he'd gone over before with Olivia and Trudy. They agreed that Olivia and Cara would split the Powder Gangers' gear, weapons and ammo, of which there wasn't much. Cara would get their NCR paper money. The person who suggested only keeping their valuables who'd already searched them all for it, Toni, they agreed, could keep any bottlecaps and jewelry they had on them. Only Cara and Olivia wanted the clothes.
Cara explained his plan for disposal of the Powder Gangers' bodies: He'd be wrapping them in plastic and/or gecko hides, loading them in his helicopter, flying to the camp where they came from and dumping what was left of them there.
"So . . . why do you wanna dump them there?" Chet asked. He'd come out to generously offer everybody free bottles of water, then laughed and said he was just fucking with them, as Cara finished gathering everybody.
"We hafta put 'em somewhere," Cara said. "We're not gonna just leave them lying around town. They'll gather pests. It's also—it's there, I mean, also to send a message not to attack Goodsprings. Assuming any other Powder Gangers even knew what Joe Cobb and company were doing here. Which I doubt they did. I think he did that on his own. But if anybody did know they'll give it some thought before attacking Goodsprings again."
Everyone agreed with Cara's plan, even if they thought it was unpleasant.
Ringo, who'd been helping clean up and move corpses, asked Cara, "Why do you wanna wrap the bodies?"
"So they don't bleed on my fucking helicopter," Cara said. Some people laughed, including Olivia and Cass. "It's just practical," he continued. "But also—as I just thought of this—if you didn't know it's only mess containment, since you wouldn't know how they got there, if you came upon the six bodies of your dead friends—as a Powder Ganger—and they're all oddly wrapped in something for no discernible reason, that'd make it kinda more fucked-up and weird, right?"
"Yeah, that would be kind of weird," Ringo said. There were a few murmurs of agreement.
"Right," Cara said, then added as a joke, "I just don't want 'em bleedin' on my nice helicopter!" Olivia and some others giggled.
With a few of them eyeing Cara oddly, everyone went their ways, most of them into the saloon. Olivia and Raúl, who wouldn't be disturbed by it, would be searching and stripping the Powder Gangers' bodies. Meanwhile Cara would be checking around town for plastic, gecko hides, duct tape and any other wrapping materials he could use, as there likely wouldn't be much plastic or many hides or non-porous materials around, though everyone had duct tape. He'd also be finding the giant geckos killed in the radscorpion scramble and skinning them with one of his many knives for their hides. Worst-case scenario: he might use some of the Powder Gangers' clothing for wrapping, though blood and other fluids would seep through cloth.
For Cara gathering materials and skinning geckos and for Olivia searching the bodies didn't take long.
Unsurprisingly the weapons the six dead men had on them were kind of shitty, and they had very little ammo. The Browning Hi-Power—also called in the original French Grande Puissance, or P-35 or HP-35 or GP-35 for 1935 when the design was finished; John Moses Browning began its design and died in 1926 before its completion,. The pistol's design was finished presumably between waffle breaks by Dieudonné Saive of the Belgian firm Fabrique Nationale d'Herstal (National Factory of Herstal), whose parent company in the modern world before the Great War, the Herstal Group, also happened to own the American companies Winchester Repeating Arms and Browning Arms Company—was a good pistol but old, and the two the Powder Gangers had on them were in poor condition, missing parts, maybe not functional anymore. Olivia couldn't tell where or whom it'd come from but she found an old Weatherby rifle, probably a Mark V, in .270 Winchester, which had no ammo in it. There was also one varmint rifle in .223 with a thumbhole stock that had evidently been built poorly by hand sometime after the Great War. Olivia gathered a few bullet casings, 9x19mm and .223 and one 5.56mm, and four empties out of six loaded rounds still in the cylinder of Joe Cobb's revolver, a silver Colt Single Action Army, also known as a Model 1873 and ironically a Peacemaker, in .357 S&W Magnum. Two of the Powder Gangers only had mêlée weapons: a dirty cleaver that wasn't sharp probably from their prison's kitchen, and a very nicked baseball bat with some old bloodstains on it that the text "Since 1879" was mostly illegible on.
The clothing and armor they had was more or less worthless but Olivia would be selling it anyway, she told Cara, to recoup the cost of her ammunition. She mostly loaded her own .50 BMG rounds anymore for consistency and reused fired casings and still had to buy new powder and primers and often bullets, especially for match rounds, but to get new brass for loading she occasionally had to buy fresh rounds from the Gun Runners or the NCR, and at the moment .50 BMG was unreasonably expensive, despite unpopularity. Sometimes she'd just use brass she collected in other calibers and melt it down to forge new big .50 BMG casings, which wasn't fun.
Cara asked Olivia to let him know if any of the dead men's underwear—if she noticed—was in good condition because he could've used another pair or two, but none of it was, not even Joe Cobb's. She and Cara had kind of assumed he was the type of gang leader to keep all the best stuff for himself—which he was and he did, but his underwear still had holes all over and of course the dickhole button had fallen off, and they had more than one shit stain and piss stain on them. Cara looked at them more closely than Olivia, who'd only wanted to check out Joe Cobb's dick. She'd been disappointed by that too.
"Can I look at your dick, Cara?" Olivia asked, around three quarters serious.
He didn't say "What?" or "Are you kidding?" or "No," which Olivia loved; instead, he said "Not right now" with a tone of "later, yes."
"Do you wanna look at mine, boss?" Raúl asked her.
"No," Olivia said.
"Come on," Raúl said. "Look at my dick."
"I don't want to!" Olivia said.
"Just look at it!" Raúl said, chasing her.
"No!" Olivia yelled, running.
Cara was starting to consider shooting or dive-tackling Raúl when he realized it had become a joke by then, or maybe was the whole time. They only went on for a few more seconds. Almost everyone who saw it laughed.
Cara had found a lot more plastic wrap and sheeting than he expected to, enough for four of the six men's bodies. He also had a fair amount of dismembered pieces of them left over. The other two bodies and their pieces he wrapped carefully in clothing, gecko hides and a lot of duct tape.
"Do you wanna go do something with me real quick?" Cara asked Olivia out of nowhere.
Without hesitation she said "Yes," then wondered just what he had in mind, and hoped it was something very naughty.
"We forgot to take out the radscorpions' poison glands," Cara said, letting her down. "Actually it'd be venom glands. If animals produce it it's venom. I think that's how that works."
"Oh. Okay," Olivia said, and Cara must've seen it on her face then.
"What's wrong?" he asked earnestly.
"Nothing," she said automatically. He just waited, looking at her. He knew her too well; he actually paid attention, something she wasn't used to but liked. "When you said 'go do something,'" Olivia said, "I just had . . . something else in mind." She tried to make it sound off-handed.
"Like what?" he said. There was this tone in his voice like he might've done anything for her just because she wanted him to.
"Just . . . " she said.
"Was it dirty?" he said, with a bit of that in his voice. He was being a little silly, but his voice was so sexy and deep and lovely she couldn't laugh. It sounded like breaking chocolate. It just made her wet.
She looked into his eyes and couldn't lie: "Yes," she said. To her, her voice sounded stupid and small, but to him it and the admission was sexy. He hesitated, and didn't act on it right then. It just seemed like now wasn't the right time, even if what happened between them was really good.
He smiled ambiguously, but clearly liked the idea of Olivia thinking dirty thoughts or at least didn't disapprove of it. She hoped he wouldn't have a problem being with a woman who touched herself and liked to masturbate, and knew what she liked and sometimes even liked to talk dirty and stuff. She hoped he could keep up with her. But she was sure he could.
Olivia got a great idea right then. It involved mistletoe. I'm gonna do it, she swore to herself. Maybe tomorrow.
Radscorpion venom glands were in big bulbs at the ends of their tails, a receptacle tipped with a stinger. Larger radscorpions tended to have more than one gland in them. Cara and Olivia used scalpels to cut the glands out of the dead flesh, both scalpels Cara's: a very high-end obsidian surgical scalpel, and a medical cutting laser—a handheld laser scalpel, another pre-war medical technological innovation. Cara had the more mundane obsidian one on his person like normal and the laser one in his trauma bag, in the dumpster by the general store only a few seconds away, so he went and got it. The laser was for her, for him the mundane one. The laser was the harder to use, at least in combat, because it had loads of settings and flexibility and the controls weren't intuitive, and it was sensitive, meant for sterile surgical environments, not open deserts, but it was much better and quicker and easier for cutting radscorpion venom glands out. With the mundane scalpel you had to crack the bulb thing open first, like with another knife, or a knife and a hammer if you didn't happen to be using a ridiculously high-quality obsidian scalpel, whereas the laser just went right through the exoskeleton, like a chainsaw through cheese.
Cara had to take a minute to instruct Olivia in some of the basics of laser scalpels, because she'd never used one before, using two of the small radscorpions as test dummies because they were the most particular, the hardest to get the venom glands out of with the least room for error and the thinnest skin. Then he watched her do one more small radscorpion to be sure she had it down, which she did. She told him she was shit with medical stuff but she did fine.
They split up and worked quickly separately. It took less than two minutes to extract the venom glands from the rest of the radscorpions because they ran between corpses.
They just threw all the venom glands in Olivia's leather backpack when they were done, and then Cara put the laser scalpel back with his gear.
Then they finished organizing all the Powder Gangers' stuff and clothing and armor they'd be selling or keeping, and Olivia and Cara talked about what to do next. She'd break down most of the Powder Gangers' ammo, but the gunpowder would all be useless because while there were some more common types of it for pistols or shotguns or rifles, it would still be impossible to identify properly, and science was just too dangerous to fuck with. For all she knew the Powder Gangers might've loaded some or all of their bullets by hand dangerously badly, like using rifle powder for a pistol, or maybe moisture had seeped into a badly sealed cartridge and got in the powder and ruined it, or who knew what else; a lot could go wrong. Powder and ballistics weren't quite as simple as they seemed. Cara wanted to go dump the bodies; Olivia wanted to sell some shit then go dump the bodies. He had the gear to dump the bodies at night if he felt like it but he wanted to get it done during the day.
"How about this," Cara said. "I'll go get Viana and move the Black Hawk and load the bodies. By the time we finish you'll probably be done selling stuff."
"Selling 'shit,' I said," Olivia corrected jokingly. They smiled at each other. She said, "Anyway, that works for me."
They did just that. On the way, Cara collected the stuff he'd set down in the dumpster by the general store.
Viana had landed the UH-60M Black Hawk in the northern part of town in a clearing, Cara could see. He found her before going to it; she was back in the saloon getting a drink and talking to Ringo; and took his HK417 back from her then asked her to help him with the Black Hawk.
"You pay me for that," Viana said. "You don't have to ask." She didn't seem to be hitting it off with Ringo.
"Yes I do," Cara said. "You can refuse."
Not appreciating the distinction, she walked with him to the Black Hawk.
Cara strapped down his gear in passenger seats for the moment and locked his SRS and HK417 in the weapon rack. He'd expected to see Olivia's Hécate 2 there, then remembered she was still carrying it around strapped to her back.
Cara and Viana went through checklists and moved the helicopter, setting down about where Cara had earlier, southeast of the saloon on the road by where a telephone pole had been standing, close to where Cara had put the plastic and hide-wrapped Powder Gangers' bodies. The landing didn't draw a crowd this time. They accidentally blew some parts of the Gangers away in the helicopter's rotor wash as they landed. After shutting down and fulfilling checklists again, Cara got out and collected the air-dispersed Powder Ganger bits. He thought he found all of them. Viana thought he took too long trying to.
He started loading the bodies into the middle of the cargo compartment of the Black Hawk. He intended to do it himself. Viana got out to help. He said no thanks. She insisted. He had her stand in the helicopter and help pull the bodies up in. The more intact ones, anyway.
Afterward he said thanks and Viana was drinking from a bottle of water when Olivia came up to them. ED-E, Rex and Raul were with her. Olivia said they wanted to come, but that Cass wanted to hang out in the saloon with Sunny and Trudy. Powder Gangers had been harassing and doing worse things to caravaneers and the NCR along the I-15 for a little while now; Cara was surprised Cass didn't want some low-level revenge on them, like watching their bodies treated disrespectfully.
Jean Airport was about 8 miles away from Goodsprings. Crossing the beautiful orange and pink cloud-dotted southwestern sky in the Black Hawk seemed to take seconds, not long enough to appreciate the sight of it. The western Powder Ganger camp was just south of Jean, Nevada, only two minutes' walk away on the I-15, which went southwest.
From a few thousand feet up in the air, the camp didn't look like much. It looked like almost nothing. Cara and Viana lowered the helicopter smoothly; wind and gusts weren't bad; and when they got lower and closer and the camp loomed larger below them it continued to not look like much. It was aside a big, tall, rusty and antique semi-trailer truck from before the war with a long semi-permanent trailer attached to it, the trailer angled down a slope and spilling into the big radiation swamp behind the camp; and walled off by the truck and its trailer was the camp area: open, a table with a folding chair by it, a few boxes and barrels, planks of wood for seats around a small campfire in the middle; and a little white camper on the left.
On the Black Hawk's intercom Cara asked Viana if she would keep them at a hover; they were maybe 50 feet off the ground. Viana said she'd be happy to. Cara went back into the cargo-or-crew compartment, touching Olivia in her chair on the arm as he passed by, then carefully sliding the wide side door open. Wind whipped around inside. The constant whine of the engines and rotors holding them up seemed louder.
Cara started dumping the bodies, interspersing them with limbs and chunks of torso and spilled organs.
The bodies fell, flopping and turning and rolling in the air as they dropped. They kicked up big plumes of dust as they landed, ones clearly separate from the waves the helicopter's rotors caused constantly. It was sort of sad to Cara, but Olivia found it funny/awesome and liked and respected him even more for thinking of and then doing it. She could dimly hear some of the bodies impact, or thought she could.
One landed in the campfire, which might've been an accident.
One hit the camper, left a dent and rolled off.
One hit on the slope and slid down into the huge radiation swamp by the camp.
Cara aimed well enough that all the bodies landed within the campsite, and he was pretty sure all the pieces landed inside it too, though it was harder to tell with them. Olivia helped; it was smooth for him with his hands in green flight gloves, but her bare fingers stuck to some of the plastic, and some of the gecko hide wrappings were a little fresh. The bodies weren't warm anymore, and fortunately weren't squirty, but they were still squishy and heavy. She could tell Cara had good aim because no powder charges went off around the camp. Powder Gangers always planted little bombs around their campsites. Then again, she and he had probably gone through there recently to disarm and take them all. His aim was good, anyway.
Olivia helped with the last bodies, just watching at first.
Cara was astounded afterward when he didn't see any blood or shit on the floor of the helicopter, but he still washed it out later.
Olivia looked down at the bodies for a moment as Cara went back into the helicopter's cockpit. She thought about everything he'd just done. She went up to the cockpit to talk to him and tapped on his shoulder. He looked back at her. She mimed "take your helmet off." He did. They couldn't hear each other well from the noise of the helicopter flying, so they had to yell a little; The Black Hawk wasn't designed for comfort, it was designed to move stuff.
"I LIKE YOU. YOU HAVE BALLS," Olivia said to him, kind of yelling; just audible over the rotors and engines, it sounded odd, a yell somehow like a normal inside voice.
Cara smiled and then laughed along with her. Viana, who heard it too, laughed, but neither Cara nor Olivia noticed it and she didn't get the reference.
"YEAH?" Cara said.
"YEAH," Olivia said. "I LOVE YOUR BALLS."