TIMELINE
SHATTERED ILLUSIONS
Fractals
FRONTIER DREAMING
The Wasteland Train Robbery
By Way of Arizona
Home Springs Eternal
Phone Home
The offices of Doctor Rott were a ramshackle affair befitting the gangrenous nature of its patients. As the only "doctor" amidst the Pitt's sadistic inhabitants, Rott remained a critical point of infrastructure in the raider kingdom.
Whereas scabs and slaves could be left in the street to die, the troops themselves (if they could survive long enough to make it to his auspicious offices) would need to be patched up. Not that making it to Rott's operating table was indicative of a good chance for survival. But it was better than bleeding out where they'd fallen. Most of the time.
"Rott! I've got a live one for you!"
It was Faydra, the Pitt's very own fight promoter.
By the looks of it, whatever fight she had arranged had gone very well. The woman was rosy cheeked and drinking from an open bottle of wine. Each step she made into the office was part of a psychotic little jig punctuated by another swig from the bottle.
"Guess who just pulled Gruber's head from his fucking shoulders? This little killer right here!" she crowed, pointing behind her as a trio of scabs struggled to carry a profusely bleeding body into the room. Behind them was Faydra's questionable friend Spook and Krenshaw, Ashur's second-in-command.
"Ashur wants to meet the meat, Rott, so don't fuck this up," Krenshaw said morosely, taking up a position leaning against the wall as the scabs deposited the body.
Rott nodded amicably and lowered the inhaler of Jet he'd just taken a mammoth rip from. He exhaled with a wheeze and stood up with a waver. He saluted lazily and sauntered over to where Faydra was cooing over his new patient.
"You just earned me so many caps, didn't you, killer? So many caps. Gonna patch you up nice now, killer!" Faydra turned her psychotic attentions from the body and to Rott. "Would you fucking hurry? She bleeds out and I'll fucking skin you!"
"You sure she isn't dead already?" Rott asked, making a show of pulling on a pair of filthy, yellow kitchen gloves.
Faydra grimaced at him and stuck a finger in one of the freely bleeding holes in the body. The girl, for that is what it was, writhed and screamed, eyes ripping open to reveal the massively-hemorrhaged, bleeding eyes of a chem fiend.
Placing a pair of fingers on the girl's neck, Rott took a moment to feel for her pulse as she lay moaning. He lost count and shook his head. "How much Psycho did you give her?"
Faydra snickered and drank from her bottle. "Enough. That's how much."
"She wasn't kidding when she said the scab pulled Gruber's head off. Wrenched his head around a couple times and pop," Spook added. She'd planted herself atop a sagging wooden shelf and was hugging a soot covered teddy bear. Spook was rarely seen without the stuffed toy.
"So a lot of Psycho then," Rott concluded. "That's going to make pain management an issue. That leg looks broken. Setting that's gonna hurt."
Faydra leaned down and put her body weight on the girl's chest, holding her in place. "She can take it," Faydra said with a wicked smile.
Rott smiled back at her and placed her hands on the girl's thigh adding his weight to the equation. With a push, the snapped bones of her leg ground against one another before snapping into place.
The girl howled and her back started to bow but Faydra held her in place and placed the bottle of wine to her lips to silence her cries. The girl sputtered and choked, unable to drink anything.
Continuing about his business, Rott grabbed a stimpak and the cleanest bandages he could find and went to work. One stimpak to stabilize and one to get her back on her feet to see Ashur. That should do it. Then some dressings to tie it all together and the girl's insides would remain just that.
With a snap, Rott discarded his gloves to the floor and bowed theatrically. "Another happy patient." The girl was moaning weakly. Rott leaned over her, using her recently set leg as a bench for his elbows. "So Faydra…how are you going to thank me for my excellent services? I for one think you'd look better in something a bit more…less covering?"
Faydra clinked her nails against the wine bottle. "You're barking up the wrong tree, Rott."
"Oh, come on now-"
Krenshaw cleared his throat loudly, interrupting Rott's attempt at flirting. "Is the scab going to live?"
"Not a scab no more!" Spook said with a giggle. "She's one of us now."
"Is she going to live?" Krenshaw repeated, ignoring the still giggling Spook.
Rott shrugged and pushed himself up from the girl. "If nothing starts turning green and falling off, I'd say yes."
"Good. When she can walk, bring her to Ashur. He wants to see her. You can party later," Krenshaw said, staring Faydra down until she rolled her eyes and nodded her assent. With the orders passed along, he left without saying anything else.
"He is just Mr. No-Fun, isn't he?" Rott asked, fishing around his desk for more Jet. He held up a canister to inspect before tossing it over his shoulder as empty. "Not like me though, I'm full of fun." He tossed another empty to the ground and gave up his search. He smiled lecherously at Faydra. "But seriously Faydra. When are you going to let me look under the hood? I've got all the good drugs, you know."
Faydra was looking at the girl on the table again and hadn't seemed to hear him at first. Rott opened his mouth to repeat himself and she cut him off. "Not on your best day, Rott. Besides, I'm not chancing it."
"Oh come on now, it's not like Ashur actually outlawed it!"
"Fuck Ashur. I'm not chancing getting knocked up with some diseased, mutant baby! Fuck off."
"But whatever do you do when you've just got that itch?"
Faydra snorted. "That's what Spook is for." Spook started giggling again and waved her teddy's arms at them.
The girl on the table started to gasp weakly. Her lips shuddering with silent words. Rott frowned as Faydra ignored him in favor of the girl. She smoothed a hand over the dual mohawks the girl sported and gently rubbed a thumb along the scar on the side of the girl's head. It was a frighteningly maternal gesture from the sadist.
"Looks like my little murder-machine is waking up, aren't you? You did it, killer. You made it to the other side. Now you're part of our little family." She kissed the girl on the forehead and ran her hand through her hair again. A tear started to fall from the girl's Psycho maddened eyes, but Faydra flicked it away with a finger before it could fall.
"Welcome to the family, killer."
Ava woke up screaming. Just as she had most nights recently. She clawed her way out from under the threadbare blanket she'd been sleeping under and scrambled on the concrete floor of the relay tower's control room. She scuttled backwards on all fours until her back met the wall.
Across from her, Knox sat up ramrod straight from the cardboard mat he'd made for himself. His eyes were bleary and unfocused but to his credit, he had his pistol out immediately and was checking the corners of the station for attackers.
Breath reaching a frantic tempo, Ava's lungs burned for air as she gasped and her fingers jittered for the hood of the stealth suit. She pulled it up and over her head and chinned the activation switch. She vanished with an electrical crackle.
This was becoming an established pattern ever since they'd left Arizona. Whatever had gone down for Ava had continued to plague her as they made their way to Nevada. At first Knox had just supposed it was withdrawal from the Mentats. It'd taken nearly a full week for them to be able to find a caravan in Arizona willing to sell chems under the table.
Each passing day without the chems, Ava had grown surlier and more jittery. Already prone to long, sullen silences and sudden distractions, she had instead grown increasingly scattered and her silences were punctuated by sudden inquiries and conversations that seemed to revolve around nothing in particular. She swore she hadn't started hearing or seeing anything that wasn't there but Knox wasn't quite sure he believed her all the time.
All the same, it was a blessing to find one unscrupulous salesman willing to do business. Knox had hoped the mentats (a hideously sweet, berry-flavored version) would help snap her back but it had been a mixed blessing. Sure she wasn't backsliding any longer but whatever was haunting her was now even more at the forefront of her thoughts. Not that Ava told him any of this. Her demons were evident in their own right.
Knox yawned and rubbed his palm against his eyes, gun hand dropping to his lap. "You want to talk about it?"
He couldn't see Ava but he was willing to assume she was there.
"No," came the disembodied voice.
The stealth suit. Knox had barely seen her take it off in recent days. She wore it all day, she slept in it all night. Honestly, they'd stopped to jump in a blissfully, not-radioactive stream a week ago and that had been the only time he'd seen her without it since Dobe. There were times when they'd make camp where one moment Ava would be there and the next, she'd have disappeared. She didn't go anywhere, she'd just sit there invisible. It had been particularly nerve wracking the night he'd caught a rocking chair moving of its own accord on the deck of a courier camp he'd led them to. Ghosts had nothing on Ava in her stealth suit.
Knox fell back flat again and started trying to make himself comfortable. Tomorrow didn't need to be an early start but smart caps were on it being one anyway.
They were practically there to be honest. Tomorrow they'd start north up the Long 15. They'd be in Primm by lunchtime easy and after that on to Goodsprings, the terminus of their months-long journey. Originally, the plan had been to cross the Colorado to the north at Hoover Dam. Knox had wanted to take Ava through the main stretch of the settled area, let her see the lights of New Vegas as they walked.
However, considering the knowledge they'd gained while in Dobe that Caesar's Legion was making another concentrated push into the region, Knox had instead opted to take them through the steep south. Less likely to run into NCR through that stretch of desert. No NCR meant no Legion there to fight them. Just tumbleweeds and cacti to keep them company.
It was a brutal stretch of desert to be sure. They'd been rationing their resources each day to go just a little further. The nearest resupply was in fact not near. The Mojave Express had restored a relay tower atop a forgotten butte in the empty desert. It'd have supplies there. Its blinking red light had served to guide their way and taunt them at night, always there but somehow never closer.
More importantly than the supplies (at least to Knox) was the fact that the relay tower had a working radio transponder. The Mojave Express had three such towers: one near its home offices in the town of Primm, one just north of New Vegas, and the one they had trekked to on the edge of the New California Republic.
The towers allowed a jump in communication in the region. Instead of dispatching courier's from all over the Mojave, the message runners themselves could make it to a tower and send the news they carried miles ahead to be picked up by another courier along the line.
"Won't do much good in getting something to Goodsprings, we'd beat our own message there. But it'll be good to let the company know I'm back in the territory," Knox had said.
He was ripping open a control panel to reassemble a few bits of equipment that had been creatively disabled to keep random passersby from flooding the airwaves. With his torso in the computer bank he was unable to see that Ava was only paying the slightest attention.
With a shock, a yelp, and a curse Knox fired up the console and sat down to type a quickly coded message with his newly-singed index fingers. Ava silently judged his typing form (two fingers like a giant mantis) as she wandered the station and opened various crates and boxes for food. Or better yet, something to drink. The water barrels stored in the station tasted like iodine something fierce, a distinctly awful flavor.
She'd found a few empty bottles of Nuka that some other courier had thoughtfully left behind but nothing that remained uncapped and carbonated.
"There's nothing good to eat here," she said, falling flat to the ground and resting on her bag. Knox didn't respond and she repeated herself with an increasingly grating whining affectation. "KNOX."
"I think I saw a bloatfly buzzing down the path. You want, you can nab that and we can cook it up."
The thought was not appetizing and Ava didn't bite. "Come on! You always know where all the hidden stuff is! There's got to be something here."
Knox finished typing his message and hit send. For a brief moment, the room hummed as ancient computer banks transcoded it and sent it off to the sky to bounce around until received.
"I really doubt we've got anything unfortunately. This station doesn't see a lot of use anymore. Used to be all the message traffic from the Boneyard on the coast would get broadcast all the way here. Two hundred miles like that." Knox snapped his fingers and then shrugged. "However, the Boneyard hooked up with Shady and joined the NCR. All postage and message lines were incorporated with the state. Boneyard and this tower stopped talking to one another shortly after."
"Why would they do that?" Ava asked from the ground.
"Political play. NCR wants the Mojave territory but the Mojave is a loose protectorate of New Vegas. Which might I add, NCR also wants. Everybody's got diplomatic ties and whatnot of course; there's an NCR embassy on the Strip and most of California is running off the power generated by Hoover Dam. However, everybody is also always looking for any pressure they can leverage to get a better deal. So the news flow cut off. If anyone in the Mojave wants to talk with someone in the NCR, you're doing it through the NCR or you're paying an arm and leg for a courier to hump my ass there and back."
"And couriers only do that for people who put their braina back in their head after getting shot."
"Bingo."
Ava sighed. "So there's really nothing hidden here that doesn't taste like the box it's kept in?"
"Well, we've got more Berry Mentats…"
"Fuck. No. Absolutely not. Those things are going to make my gums bleed." Ava lifted her head from the floor to glare at Knox. "Not to mention that because of them all I can do right now is remember every meal I've had for the past year in vivid detail which includes the fucking ritzy ass restaurant I used to have access to!"
Chuckling, Knox stood up to rifle through the boxes Ava had already searched. He lifted a selection of military, boxed rations whose labels had long worn off. He threw one at her. "I thought you liked all this pre-War crap."
"I like the pre-War consumer crap," she corrected as she caught the bag and glared at it. "Whatever this is, it doesn't belong next to a white picket fence."
"But it does have enough preservatives to mummify a small animal," Knox said, opening his own bag and returning to his seat. "And anyway, you should savor our road meals while you have them. This time tomorrow we'll be getting dinner at the Prospector Saloon in Goodsprings. Might not be a 'ritzy ass restaurant' but Trudy's kitchen is damned good."
Silence weighed heavy on the room as Knox mentioned Goodsprings. He took a few experimental bites of his meal with stoic fortitude and watched Ava. She hadn't moved so much as to open her food and was staring vaguely through it. Once upon a time, Knox would have assumed she was lost in a memory but he'd known her long enough to discern which silences were the chems and which were Ava. This one was authentically her.
"You feeling nervous?" he asked, chewing the words around a bit of stubborn gristle that was masquerading as food.
"What have I got to be nervous about? People fucking love me." Her voice was deadpan. The walls were up. So that was a yes. She was nervous. "It's not like everyone I've ever trusted has abandoned me or anything."
"Gonna just ignore the fact that you and I have been traveling together for months and I apparently don't rate your 'trust' list," Knox said.
Ava didn't look at him. "Oh, I'm sorry, were you planning on staying in Goodsprings?"
The comment was bitter. It wasn't fair and was most definitely fueled by the growing panic Ava had been feeling as they neared their terminus. Traveling across the country with Knox had almost been escapist. With the end of the journey she would have to face what that meant for her. Ava was not good at facing these sorts of internal crises.
"Boo-fucking-hoo for you then."
Ava's eyebrows dropped and she finally looked away from her unopened meal to glare at Knox. He was smiling at her from his seat by the console and waved.
"You want to throw a pity party, go right ahead. Life has used you as a punching bag for a good long spell, and I'm sure I don't even know the half of it. A good dose of self-pity would make sense. So go ahead. Wallow. However, don't you forget that you got yourself out of Tenpenny Tower. You kept yourself alive. You got your head right. And you've walked this whole goddamned way with me to see if you could find yourself something new. Something better."
Bracing his hands against his knees, Knox pushed himself up and walked over to Ava. He plucked the military ration from her hand, opened it, and handed it back.
"I don't know if Goodsprings is what you're looking for, Ava. But Doc Mitchell is there and he's the sort of man to help you find your path wherever it takes you." He started to turn away but stopped. "And another thing. I'm not big on cross-country trips. The Mojave is my home and I like staying in it. So for fuck's sake, if you need to track me down, just drop a message in a Mojave Express drop box and you'll be hearing from me wherever the fuck I am."
Ava looked up at him suspiciously. "Are you trying to tell me you haven't enjoyed our journey together?"
"Which part? Getting thrown off a moving train twice? Or revisiting the site of all my childhood trauma?"
Knox extended a hand to Ava which she took. He pulled her up and they walked over to the seats along the radio control console and sat to continue eating their meager meal. Neither said anything as they muscled their way past the stale flavoring of the food. Words would have just complicated the already difficult process of chewing and stomaching the rations.
"So on a scale of 'pretty bad' to 'never again' how bad are these?" Knox asked, gnashing his teeth on yet more rubbery gristle.
Ava held all nine of her fingers up. "Never ever again."
With a show of force, Knox managed to swallow the last of his food and tossed the empty bag aside before beginning to cough loudly. The food was unwilling to be swallowed.
"Noted," he managed to say in between hacks.
"So the food is better in Goodsprings?" Ava asked as he finished clearing his airways.
"Two things Goodsprings has: as the name suggests a good spring and clear water, and some pretty well maintained farms. Crops, animals, the like. So yeah, the kitchens there do okay for themselves."
"Farms…maybe I'll be a farmer. I bet I could do that. I like animals."
Knox raised an eyebrow. "Well, I know you've got no interest in it but I'd brace for Doc Mitchell trying to make a place for you doctoring the town with him."
"Yeah, that's not going to happen."
"Figured as much."
They let the conversation lapse again and wandered back into silence. Knox set about cleaning his weapons with the same meticulous care and precision he always did while Ava wandered around opening boxes and containers at random to see if she could ferret out anything more appetizing to eat.
From one box to the next, Ava's brain cycled through the contents of each, dedicating it to memory. She went back and forth alphabetizing, numerating, and re-ordering a million different ways. She didn't want to think about what tomorrow held for her.
Who was this Doc Mitchell, really? A grandfather she'd never known? Some small-town doctor?
And who was she to believe she had any place in some nice, quiet burg?
Unbidden and unwanted, the Mentats told her. Killer, mercenary, traitor, raider, gladiator, hero. The last word stuck in her mind, overshadowed and outmatched by the litany of horrors she'd been party to or had inflicted upon her. Who was she to deserve a second chance? She was no hero and had never wanted to be. So what right did she have to believe her scale was anything but tilted towards death?
These questions continued to haunt her even as she attempted to distract herself. She found a stash of old letters some courier had left behind and read her way through them. The long forgotten dramas of the people in the letters did little to take her mind to better places.
She badgered Knox into a game of cards. With the Mentats boosting her memory she had finally started to believe she could beat him. She could remember all the cards in the deck as they came after all. Somehow, he would still win which just reaffirmed her belief that Knox was cheating but she had yet to catch him in the act.
Still no distraction. Her mind kept spinning along its grim axis.
She'd been reborn in a dying, murderous world. Whatever person she could have grown up to be had been killed away. The girl who could have a grandfather was gone. She didn't deserve the happy, little town of Goodsprings. And it didn't deserve to be cursed by her.
The evening whiled away and the sun set. Tomorrow it would all be over.
Ava lay down that night, eyes heavy and wary of the veil of sleep. What fresh hell was her brain going to bring her. She gently touched the scar alongside her head. Nothing. No pain, no burning. So what was this fear that plagued her?
She closed her eyes that night with her heart heavy and her thoughts clouded. There would be no keeping the nightmares away.
Ruby Nash sat back at the front desk of the Mojave Express outpost in Primm and leaned until her eyes were just above the glaring blade of setting sun that was coming in the front window.
She'd have roused her husband, Johnson, to lower the curtain for her but his knee had been troubling him today. Ever since he'd lost his leg during a raider attack, he'd end up mighty sore after spending too much time up and about on his prosthetic.
A vague shadowy blob wavered down the street beyond her window. Its silhouette was being consumed by the desert sun surrounding it. Ruby leaned forward and squinted her eyes until they were bare slits.
"Johnson, honey! He's here!"
The shape was resolving itself into one the many couriers her husband managed for the Mojave Express, a man by the name of Stinger, Courier 14 on the ledger.
Johnson could be heard rousing himself in the back office with a huff as Stinger stepped into the shop, the rusted can hung above the door heralding his arrival.
"Mrs. Nash," Stinger said through his profusely ungroomed beard. He bowed slightly.
"Stinger," Ruby said back to him.
Stinger was an unpleasant man. Of poor hygiene and taciturn character, he came across as just uncivilized enough to be suspicious of. Ruby understood that the couriers her husband paid came in all shapes and sizes, she just wished she could see (and smell) less of Stinger.
However, despite the man's shortcomings, he was willing to hoof it to Primm every other day from Relay Station Bravo and he was shacked up with Michael Cairn who was a more-than-capable radio technician. The two took no vacations, needed no reprieve and were content to live out their days together at the lonely radio tower. So Michael received and sent the radio transmissions and Stinger brought the inbound and outbound records to Primm. It was a more than amiable arrangement for the Mojave Express and Ruby was willing to tolerate Stinger's shortcomings.
The man was due nearly an hour ago. Which meant either trouble on the road down to town or a late inbound that Michael had to decode and resend. And the only time Michael was willing to do that was when a priority transmission came in. Ruby suspected a priority notice. The road Stinger had to walk was a quiet one.
"Late notice," Stinger grunted as Johnson walked in. He handed the logbook over to him.
"Priority?" Johnson asked. Stinger nodded and Ruby checked off in her head that she'd been right.
Johnson unwound the cord on the logbook and motioned for Ruby to hand over that day's outbounds to Stinger. With another curt nod, Stinger accepted them and retread his steps right back out the door and into the setting sun.
"Who's the notice from?" she asked as Johnson read.
Her husband's wispy eyebrows rose. "Heh! From Mr. Knox! Boy it's been a while since I've seen that name."
"Knox…the one who used to work here?" Ruby asked.
"Yeah, back from the dead once again it seems." Johnson handed the book over to Ruby and pointed at the line item. "Mr. Knox, Courier 6. Still signs that way, I see. Overnight express to the city. With payment for the New Vegas Deliverators to hand deliver ASAP. That's quite a price tag for our Mr. Knox."
Ruby checked the associated caps and whistled. "From the New Vegas account? Knox is working out there these days?"
"Seems so."
"Then what the hell is he doing out in the boonies at Charlie Station?"
Johnson shrugged and reclaimed the logbook. He limped away to stow it with the rest. "Who's to say? But he listed his forwarding post as Goodsprings. So who knows, maybe we'll see him passing by."
"See we shall. Man always seemed like trouble to me," Ruby said, pulling open another ledger to check the accounts. "You'd still have your leg if it weren't for Knox."
Johnson smiled at her. "Honey, I'd be a dead man with two legs if it weren't for Knox."
Ruby ignored him and tallied up some quick math in the ledger. "Well, trouble or not, he's costing the Lucky 38 a fortune with quick relays like this."
"Good thing they can afford it," Johnson said, crossing back over to his wife and planting a kiss on her head. "Can't blame Knox for moving on with caps like that involved." He slid the ledger away from Ruby and gently plucked the pen from her hand.
"I'll take care of this. You mind getting the stove stoked up?"
Ruby nodded and kissed her husband back before disappearing off into the back. Johnson watched her go and then began crossing out the entries she'd carefully written into the ledger before reconsidering and pulling the whole page from the book. It'd go into the fire alongside the entry from the relay tower's logbook.
The Lucky 38 most definitely did have the caps to pay for all manner of services. Including privacy. No records, no copies, no logs. If Knox was caught up in that, well, that was his business.
"Coffee or tea?" Ruby called.
"I'm feeling tea," Johnson answered as he crumpled up the pages and joined his wife in the kitchen, tossing the records into the flames beneath the stove.
"You misspell something?"
Johnson smiled and kissed her head again. "You know me. Can't be trusted. I don't know why you let me near the books at all."
His eyes flicked down to see the last bits of paper being greedily snatched up by the fire. He just caught the last glints of 'Mr. Knox, Courier 6' as they disappeared.
A/N: Welcome to Home Springs Eternal! A hopefully nice wrapup to the cross country trek begun in The Wasteland Train Robbery.
If you want to be kept up to date, give the story (or my account) a follow and be notified each week when I post a chapter.
Not much else to say other than that! See you next chapter!
the author