The full moon hung over the spire of the Lucky 38, adding its pale light to the flickering neon of the Strip as clouds of smoke from a multitude of burn barrels and campfires hung in the chill air. Outside the walls the moon also illuminated the subterranean world in the sewer tunnels beneath the city. Beams of moonlight shone through sewer grates and storm drains, brightening the stifling darkness of the old tunnels. The roar of the crowd filling the Thorn echoed through the underground warren, heralding its bloody spectacle.
Caesar sat in the chair watching the carnage impassively from the lowest catwalk. Like a ringleader in a Circus, Red Lucy directed the battles from atop a concrete pillar near the center of the arena connected by a crude bridge to the steel catwalk ringing the arena. With abrupt hand gestures, Lucy would have various mutant animals released from old sewer pipes into the dry remains of an old sewage pool. The last spectacle had been a pack of wild dogs and Molerats who had torn into each other with snarling abandon. Now the bodies were dragged from the arena to prepare for the next battle.
Caesar didn't allow his emotions to show, but he was enjoying the bloody displays more than he expected. Caesar had agreed to come to the Thorn, but decided to add real military glory to his effort to regain control. He admitted the attack on Nellis had been extremely costly, but the prize in munitions and supplies had been huge, despite the Boomer's efforts to blow them up. As he watched the Wastelanders and Legionaries cheering and howling with blood lust, he felt he finally understood why gladiatorial contests were an integral part of the old Roman Empire. As a scholar, he had used the structure of the Roman Army as an expedient way to unify a wide array of primitive tribes. After two-hundred years, mankind seemed incapable of crawling out of the atomic dark age on its own so Caesar had taken it upon himself to do the deed. He set out to forge a new society, one based solely on personal merit and free of the old racial and societal divisions that had nearly destroyed the world. Since brute force was the only language people responded to, that was the tool he used.
Like many of his former colleagues in the Followers of the Apocalypse, he had assumed that the gladiatorial contests of Rome were a symptom of the moral decay that contributed to its collapse. Having lived with a similar warrior society for decades, he now understood its true purpose. A warrior people needed war and bloodshed to stay strong. Vulpes had been correct in his assessment that the demands of peace were weakening the Legion. The gory spectacle below kept the Legion's lust for blood strong, even in a time of peace.
Caesar glanced up at Lucius, the leader of his élite Praetorian guards. The taciturn gray-bearded soldier was leaning forward to see what was happening in the arena below, his eyes gleaming with excitement in his otherwise impassive face. Caesar nodded as he returned his attention to the Arena. He would have to make these fights a formal part of Legion culture, perhaps building an arena above ground.
"Val…Val…Val…!" The crowd was beginning to chant and Caesar leaned forward to see better. Women had a very specific role in the streamlined society he was creating, and the Thorn's champion was both a woman and a mutant which irritated him. However the point of his presence was to celebrate the Legion's victory, and if he played his cards right no one would see this "Val" as anything but an aberration.
Meanwhile, in the hall outside the arena Veronica hesitantly peered through one of the doors. She had been furious with Valeria, but half expected the big woman to return with an apology and an explanation. The next morning Veronica awoke to find Valeria's bed empty. That day Veronica began to hear the criers announce that Valeria would be fighting in the last arena event. She tried to tell herself good riddance, but as night fell and she sat in their suddenly barren room, she admitted she missed her friend. The big woman was one of the kindest people Veronica had met since the fall of Helios One. Despite her bizarre appearance, she had always been considerate and genuinely concerned about Veronica. Then Veronica remembered her years of wandering on the fringes of the Mojave, and suddenly wondered if their positions were reversed, would she have done the same? Veronica had resolved not to go to the Thorn, but on the first night of the full moon she found herself standing before its entrance.
Now Veronica crouched outside the door to the arena shaking as the roar of the crowd, the flickering light of the flames, and the reek of blood brought back a flood of nightmare images. Veronica gasped for air as memories threatened to overwhelm her of a night of blood and fury when the Legion pillaged the town of Novac. She had tried to bury the memory, but every time she saw its soldiers and felt their eyes on her she felt as if she would start screaming.
"Val…Val…Val…!" She could hear the crowd roar, and steeling herself she crept through the door behind a press of Wastelanders shaking their fists in the air. Pushing between two men reeking of dirt and smoke, Veronica looked down into the arena below.
As Veronica entered the arena, one of the Thorn guards watched her with detached interest. His job was to make sure no one left the arena to wander where they shouldn't. This almost never happened, and he was ready for a boring shift of guard duty. As he looked away from the door Veronica had entered he thought he caught a shimmer in the air out of the corner of his eye. Frowning he turned to peer into the shadows. After a moment he shook his head, then leaned against the wall and craned his neck to look into the arena. As soon as he looked away, part of the shadows detached from the wall and moved with a ripple in the air around a corner and out of sight. Suddenly there was a crackle and the shimmer solidified into the form of a female ghoul in a dark hooded robe.
Sunflower finally exhaled as the Stealth Boy ran out of charge just as she had escaped the guard's detection. She had hoped it would last until she reached Red Lucy's office, but it would have to do. According to the map she had been given, the chamber where Red Lucy kept her mainframe access was at the end of a hallway lined with steel doors behind which helpless animals were imprisoned until it was time to slaughter them for the decadent pleasure of the mob. Sunflower caressed one of the doors as she hurried down the hallway.
"Soon…Soon…" She crooned to the animals imprisoned within. She had always loved animals and raised rabbits in the commune she had lived in back in Hopeville two centuries ago. One day she and the other members of her commune were protesting the war against China in front of the main gate to the missile base. Suddenly they were all being cuffed and loaded on trucks by soldiers in expressionless masks. They were taken to a concentration camp at the Big Mountain research facility, fitted with explosive collars, and left to wait as one by one they were taken away.
Eventually Sunflower was the only one left as new prisoners arrived, all of Chinese-American descent. Then came the night when the sky burned. No guards came to let them out, and one by one the prisoners died as they succumbed to radiation. For some reason, Sunflower and a handful of others didn't die, although their hair fell out and their skin began to slough off. Their collars continued to beep as they approached the perimeter fence, even after the day when Big Mountain vanished in a searing white flash. After years of a wretched existence within the squalid compound, Sunflower decided enough was enough and walked through the gate, heedless of the warning beep. Yet fate spared her as her collar failed to detonate, unlike the ones of the prisoners who tried to follow her.
Sunflower drifted and scavenged until she the Legion and imprisoned her for scavenging. Once again she had waited in the dark cell until she was the only one left. When a masked Legionary entered her dark cell she almost sobbed with relief that her long wretched existence would soon end. Instead the soldier began to question her in a low cold voice. He asked about her knowledge of tech and she told babbled everything she knew, especially her degree in computer science from her life working as an imperialist lackey before she left it all to join a commune. The soldier listened, and then dropped a heavy bag in front of her.
"I will spare your miserable existence to do a single task." He said, his voice filled with quiet menace. A loyal follower her entire life, Sunflower eagerly leaped at the chance to make a difference and was now using a map and a Stealth Boy provided by her 'benefactor' to allow her to infiltrate the Thorn. Finally Sunflower crouched before a steel door leading to Red Lucy's office. Looking furtively about for any guards, she pulled out a screwdriver and a bobby pin and began to work on the lock.
In one of the dark tunnels leading to the arena, Valeria took a deep breath as she listened to the crowd chanting her name. Memories rushed back to her of another arena beneath the industrial hell of old Pittsburgh where she had been forced to fight. She finally faced a Deathclaw in a battle that almost killed her. Only by losing herself in rage and becoming a monster as savage as the mutant was she able to defeat it. Suddenly the gate rattled up and Valeria stepped forward to the bloodstained concrete of the Thorn. The roar of the crowd swept over her like a wave as she walked to the center of the arena and looked up at Red Lucy. The master of the Thorn looked down with a smile and a light in her green eyes that looked like…joy. She then raised her hands for silence as she swept her gaze over the crowd.
"Tonight the Thorn has drunk deep of the blood beasts, but now it is time for the final tribute!" The crowd cheered in reply and Lucy waited for the noise to die down before she continued. "Before us stands one of the mightiest champions the Thorn has ever witnessed! She has triumphed in every contest but now faces the fiercest beast the Thorn has ever captured!"
Caesar leaned forward to see the mutant Vulpes had described. His Frumentarius had been correct, the mutant was a freak and to his eyes only vaguely feminine. However she was carrying a super sledge with no apparent effort, so her grotesque musculature wasn't just cosmetic. Caesar's eyes narrowed in thought as further away in the crowd Veronica unconsciously chewed on a knuckle as she waited for Red Lucy's announcement.
"From the great rift in the southern wastes, I give you the Mountain Yao Gui!" Another gate rattled open and a coughing roar echoed from the dark tunnel, silencing the crowd for a moment at its raw fury. Then the Yau Gui hurtled from the shadows, a living engine of hatred and destruction. Red Lucy almost laughed with delight at what was to come. The Thorn would now witness a truly worthy contest.
Surprised by the speed of the giant bear Valeria leaped aside avoiding a paw swipe that tore bloody furrows down her side. The Yau Gui spun toward her as she whirled and swung her hammer. Valeria felt bones snap under her blow, but the crazed mutant lunged forward with a howl and smashed Valeria to the floor.
Veronica gasped in horror as Valeria vanished under the bear's bulk, her hammer spinning away. Veronica covered her eyes as the giant bear roared and drove its gaping jaws toward Valeria's face. Veronica cringed as she listened for the end, but the cheering only increased in volume. Then she heard a scream, not of pain but of rage and Veronica jerked her arm from her eyes. Valeria had seized the Yao Gui's slavering jaws and was holding the mutant's head inches from her own. Valeria's eyes blazed as with a shriek of fury she savagely wrenched the bear's jaw, dislocating it with a sickening crunch.
The Yao Gui howled in agony and thrashed its head as Valeria released her hold on its lower jaw and rammed her bloody fist down its throat. The crowds' roar of approval shook the walls as with a scream Valeria yanked out the Yao Gui's tongue in a fountain of blood. The bear fell back, gagging on its own blood as Valeria lunged for her hammer. Her hands closed on the haft and she spun to face the dying mutant as it managed to rear up on its hind legs. Coughing gouts of blood, it fell toward her a dying mass of hair and hate. With a scream, Valeria leaped to meet it, whirling in mid-air to smash her hammer into the side of its head. The Yao Gui's skull exploded in a shower of brains and bone and its massive bulk slammed twitching to the arena floor. Valeria was still screaming as she smashed her hammer again into the corpse, then screamed wild-eyed at the howling mob above her.
Caesar sat stunned by the savage spectacle. Against all odds, the mutant woman had killed a Yao Gui practically with her bare hands. Once the bedlam died down, he would have to publicly acknowledge the astounding feat and place himself in the moment. He would then meet with Vulpes and arrange to have the mutant killed. She was clearly too powerful to be allowed to live as a potential focus for opposition.
Veronica reeled from the edge of the arena in shock. She knew Valeria was a fighter, but never in her wildest imaginings did she picture the primal fury she had just witnessed. Veronica turned and pushed her way through the mass of packed humanity trying to escape to the exit. The air suddenly felt thick and choking, and Veronica blindly fought to escape from the reek of blood and the howls of both the crowd and the monster in the below.
"Yes!" Sunflower cried in triumph as she hacked into the mainframe from Red Lucy's terminal and powered down the Thorn. Immediately the entire complex went black except for flickering glows from the burn barrels, and almost lost in the chaos was the clang of the doors confining the beasts of the Thorn sliding open.
Red Lucy looked up in fury as the lights went out. At first she assumed it was a power bump from the ancient generators powering the complex, but then she heard gunshots and scream of agony before all hell tore loose. Bewildered and terrified, the crowd became a mob that tried to flee for the exits only to meet the mandibles and claws of giant radscorpions. The buzzing nightmare bulks of Cazadores squeezed through the doors and launched themselves into the panicked press stabbing with their poisoned stingers and mandibles. Hissing and howling, Nightstalkers materialized slashing and tearing into victims with their poisoned jaws. Valeria was still blinded by a red haze when a howling squealing mob of mole rats and dogs erupted back into the arena through the darkened tunnels as people pushed by the panicked press began to fall into the arena.
Veronica was hurled back as the mob fled from the door as a Cazadore erupted through the opening, its orange wings humming and its multifaceted eyes glittering in the moonlight. Veronica tried frantically to get to her feet when another surge from the crowd knocked the wind out of her and flung her off the catwalk. Veronica hit the ground and screamed as she felt the bones in her arm snap.
Caesar's Praetorian guard closed ranks around their master and drove their powered gauntlets into the panicked press trying to clear a path to stairs off the landing. Their blows killed and maimed indiscriminately, but the panicked mass of humanity drove them back from sheer momentum. Lucius forged ahead of Caesar, blood splattering from his blows when a Nightstalker leaped from above, landing on his back and its fangs into his neck. Lucius staggered and went down and Caesar was swept back in the panicked crush until he was hurled into space as well.
Caesar slammed with bone crushing force among the bodies strewn on the bloody concrete. The Med-X coursing through his veins made him only faintly aware of the pain as he tried to push himself to his feet. With a curse, Caesar realized his leg wouldn't move and he looked down to see his thigh twisted at an unnatural angle. Suddenly he heard a high-pitched squeal and his head snapped about to see the shadowy forms of Molerats as they swarmed over the bodies of the living and dead. One of the hairless mutants charged, its chisel-toothed mouth gaping wide and Caesar howled in rage, and then the mutants were upon him.
Sunflower was almost giddy with joy as she heard the sounds of the animals fighting for freedom from their oppressors. She crouched inside the door to Red Lucy's room, and then activated her stealth-boy. There was no electric tingle, as the field activated, no crackle, nothing. Frantically she pressed the buttons again, and still nothing. Then the door clanged open and Sunflower looked up into the barrel of a shotgun held in the bloody hands of Red Lucy. The former master of the Thorn glared at the ghoul through the blood pouring from her torn scalp, then with a snarl pulled the trigger.
Veronica's arm seared with pain as she heard the sounds of animals tearing into people and knew she was as good as dead. In desperation she began to scream Val's name as she staggered to her feet, as the wild dogs and Molerats fought in a bloody tangle. Suddenly, as if in slow motion Veronica saw a dog leap toward her, its bloody fangs black in the moonlight. Veronica closed her eyes than heard an explosive crunch. Her eyes flew open and she saw the corpse of the dog flying away in a shower of blood from the impact of Valeria's hammer.
Valeria didn't say anything, but leaned down and picked Veronica up in one arm as she slung her hammer. Weak with pain and fighting panic, Veronica clasped her good arm around Valeria's neck and closed her eyes; ignore the slimy feel of the blood that covered the big woman's body.
"Hold on Ronnie!" Valeria rasped as she turned and ran toward one of the open tunnels. A Molerat charged out of the darkness, its blood smeared maw gaping only to drop with a crushed skull from a kick from Valeria's steel soled boot. Veronica refused to look up from Valeria's shoulder as they ran through the darkness. Valeria ran up a ramp then stopped at a steel gate. She hooked her fingers through the heavy steel mesh and with a jerk slid it open. Valeria found herself looking down a darkened hallway at a large group of bloodstained and wild-eyed Legionaries. Valeria whirled and ran down another tunnel as the soldiers charged after her.
Bullets began to screech past them and careen of the walls as the soldiers with guns began to fire wildly after them. Gritting her teeth in desperation, Valeria frantically searched the darkness for a place she could make a stand and effectively defend Veronica. Suddenly a view screen with the monochrome cartoon image of a smiling cowboy appeared out of the darkness before her.
"Y'all better duck." The Securitron drawled pleasantly as its segmented arms raised before it. Valeria skidded into a crouch as the robot's clawed hands roared with gunfire, scything down the pursuing Legion soldiers in a hail of bullets.
"I'd love to stand and jaw a spell, but y'all better follow me before more of them Legion fellas arrive."
Valeria stared in bewilderment into the robot's flickering screen, then quickly nodded.
"All right pardner, lets get a move on." The robot announced before turning on its single wheel and rolling into the tunnel. Veronica went limp as she lost consciousness, and Valeria carefully lifted her friend and followed the robot into the darkness.