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When she first met Cass, Veronica thought she'd never understand someone like that. Two people couldn't be much more different; Cass' Wasteland weathered edges sharp as Veronica's curves were smooth, unmarred by the demands of survival. In truth, she wasn’t even sure if she liked Cass when she has first met her.
Veronica and Six had stumbled on her in a shitty bar at a shitty NCR outpost where they’d decided to hole up for the night after barely escaping the never-ending stream of Legion assassins screaming that Caesar had marked Six for death, no doubt for the payback Six’d delivered for the “cleansing” of Nipton.
That had been before she’d met them, and Six wasn’t particularly forthcoming about the details of what had transpired that day, but she’d seen the way they set their jaw when the pair had passed back through. SIx had wanted to quote “give something to someone” and no amount of pestering questions got any more information out of them. They were stubborn like that.
Veronica understood though, when they passed through the ghost town that was Nipton. The smell of burned bodies hung in the air like a warning despite the fact that the burning pyres of tire and debris, now covered in charred bone and bits of melted fat and metal had stopped smoldering some time ago.
Worse still were the bodies still left hanging, nailed to makeshift telephone pole crosses; death by crucifixion a trademark of the Legion designed to leave their unique flavor of bitter dread on the Mojave’s tongue. The now slightly bloated corpses of Legionaries and their killer mutts baking in the mid-afternoon sun like those of the assassins they now encountered nearly every other day as they trekked across the Mojave.
Maybe eight or nine total, but it was difficult to tell from the carnage, with an unholy number of rabid mongrels that Six had apparently taken on alone. Veronica kept her mouth shut.
Turned out, “someone” was a Powder Ganger by the name of Boxcars whose legs are bent at nauseating unnatural angles, clearly mangled beyond an autodoc’s capabilities of repair even as she stood more than 15 meters away framed in the doorway of the Nipton General Store.
Unable to tear her eyes from what Veronica assumed were once the pants of his prison uniform, now soaked through with dried blood, nearly unable to contain the swelling Six gently pushed past her into the store. They rifled through their pack for a moment before pulling out a handful of chems, mainly Med-X, which Boxcars snatched and began ripping caps off syringes with his teeth, all the while muttering under his breath about Legions and Couriers and the lottery.
Six kept digging through their bag, placing an assortment of items like ammo and food on the floor into one heap, and a staggering amount of Med-X and syringes in another beside it. Veronica felt like she should say something, maybe ask Boxcars or Six or both what had happened, or tell Six they should try to get Boxcars to slow down as he jammed one, then another, then 2 more into his thigh in rapid succession, maybe try to ration them out to last until Six could bring more, or suggest they try to move him or maybe cut his pants to relieve some of the pressure, that they could give him some Psycho to help him bear the pain because some doctors out East use it as an emergency anesthetic, or….
Her thoughts raced through her head a thousand miles an hour, her brain screaming for her to do SOMETHING, ANYTHING to help, but she found herself unable to move. It wasn’t as though Veronica was entirely unaccustomed to witnessing this degree of gore, it wasn’t as though she had a weak stomach for that sort of thing, but something about the way Boxcars’ legs looked, coupled with the stifling heat of the relentless Mojave sun and the musty closed-in stench of the room Boxcars evidently hadn’t left for several days was sickeningly reminiscent of something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
The sudden realization, instant like a bolt of crackling lightning ripping through the air of the Mojave’s frequent electrical storms made her stomach turn. Sausage; bursting at the seams like those overstuffed sausages hawked by vendors just inside the entrance of Freeside Old Ben had told them were at one point made primarily of human flesh.
She felt bile start to rise in her throat and made a half-hearted attempt to get Six’s attention, and half-mumbled, half-croaked, “Six, I— Some air. Outside”
Veronica didn’t stop to see if they had heard her before shoving the door the rest of the way open and letting it slam behind her. Her pace brisk, Veronica walked pointedly, as if she had anywhere to go, unsure of where, just that she needed to put as much distance between herself and that place as she could, without leaving Six completely abandoned in this place.
She tried to slow her panicked breathing, first tilting her chin down to her chest and squeezing her eyes shut, then physically shaking her head as though she could shake the horrifying image out of her head. Realizing how foolish it was to walk with her eyes closed in the Mojave even when it wasn’t crawling with Legionaries out for Six’s blood, as well as her own by association, she stopped. Slowly, she opened one eye, then the other, blinking disorientedly in the bright sunlight.
Luckily, her legs had carried her back into the center of Nipton, rather than away from the town towards the large stretch of desert occupied with an alarming number of mutated ants. Unluckily, this put her at the base of a row of crosses.
Seeing the bodies of Legionaries or even Fiends she’d killed with her pneumatic gauntlet, gory, up-close, and personal didn’t bother her the way people like this did. On the other hand, raider hideouts decorated with corpses mutilated almost beyond identification, even people killed in the fallout, so long dead all that remained was the cleaned bones of their skeletons locked away in inner rooms of abandoned buildings had a dizzying effect on her.
She heard blood rushing in her ears, and her vision began to swim, looking up at what had once been a person who probably never even considered this might be their fate in the shadowy recesses of their darkest nightmare.
The clothes still on them looked like any ordinary Wastelander. Maybe a store clerk, a farmer or a trader but it was apparent they weren’t a soldier, weren’t fighting for anything other than the right to exist in peace.
Somebody ought to remember them. Nobody was left to memorialize this except Boxcars who sounded like he was on his way out anyway. Somebody should remember these people, even if she didn’t know their names, she could at least remember their faces.
Deliberately, painstakingly, she lifted her chin upwards to look into the face of the person on the cross; a woman, no more than a kid, really maybe 19, 20 years old, with dark skin and eyes. Dried blood caked one side of her face, and splattered her neck and shirt, as well as the coating the cross behind where her head now lulled, identical to the man on the next cross, and the one on the next.
Scanning the line of bodies, each one sported the exact same injury on the left side of their head. Nothing like the spear wounds she’d seen on Six’s abdomen when their shirt rode up as they tossed in their sleep, nothing blunt or any type of cutting blade used by the Legion could have done it, even a weapon as nasty as the spinning blade of Ripper which Six had tried to sell to Michelle Kerr at the 188 Trading Post while both they and it were still covered in blood after they’d plucked off the dead Frumentarii down the street.
Unmistakably, a gunshot wound. Small caliber, not like the Cowboy Repeaters scattered abandoned among the legion corpses which damn near blow a targets head clean off. Even then, Legionaries like the ones Six fought here favored melee weapons, too clumsy and unpracticed to be given 9 or 10mm handguns like the squads of Assassins no doubt currently hunting down her and Six.
Veronica stared, considering, but the shooting was less Legionary scattershot and more expert marksman, three shots each, the exit wounds on the top right, near the back of each corpse’s head, each in exactly the same place just below the left ear on every single body.
She felt the cogs in her head churning wildly because it didn’t make any sense. The gunshots, small caliber, precise and from below because the blood-spattered up, where the exit wounds were on the back of the head meant they were still holding their head up, rather than slumped limply forward as they were now.
Still alive and relatively kicking, three shots each, to make sure they’re dead, its if its intentionally fatal, the point of crucifixion was to make the victim suffer, the word excruciating was invented just to describe what it felt like to die this way, sometimes taking three or more days as the victim slowly suffocated as their shoulders dislocated or as their kidneys or their liver shut down.
Then it all clicked. Returning here with more than three dozen vials of Med-X, more than enough to stop a charging Deathclaw dead in its tracks, much less a man with legs mangled in need of relief. Three dozen vials and three shots each.
Precise overkill even, overprepared like lugging around some 400 pounds of gear between them because it wouldn’t do to leave anything to chance even in a mercy killing.
Three dozen vials and three shots each.
Six.