Iron Line Mike - A Fallout New Vegas: Promise Land Story
The man stepped over the ochre-painted corpses crumpled in piles where they had fallen around the empty limestone altar, their dead eyes glinting in the pink light of sunset over the mesa. He had rested much of the day, helping himself to his former host’s provisions, in one of the few tents not already occupied by more corpses. The village was silent save for the buzzing of the flies drawn to the scent of viscera as the only living thing that stirred amongst the shadows began to hunt for his next quarry. He walked with a limp, his dragging foot leaving a trail of dashes like some inscrutable message in morse code scratched across the earth. The hastily wrapped bandage around his thigh revealed the source of his condition, the arrow that had caused it now-removed.
Iron-Line Mike had been here many times, not this precise material place but this kind of event has predicated much of his life. Truth be told the job was already finished, the people who were once here won’t be having misunderstandings about land with his colleagues anymore. A man with less drive and determination would have headed home and enjoyed his already well-earned reward. The Clementes had never particularly cared about what came next, but Mike understood its necessity. He understood better than anyone.
He pauses his search as he catches sight of his prey’s trail, a rivulet of blood that had dribbled across the sand away from the other puddles of gore and off towards the horizon, a trail of crimson breadcrumbs. “Dumb fuckin’ animal” he says, contempt in his voice, as he rewards his find with a smoke break. “Any explanation on why this thing is even such a big deal?” he asks one of the bodies at his feet, an older man whose mouth hangs open as a fly walks across his eye, kicking the corpse to elicit a response and grinning when he finds none. “That’s right” he says, adding “You see it now, don’t you?” and tossing the remnant of his cigarette in the dead man’s face before walking out into the scrub.
He follows the trail until he gets the sky has almost completely darkened, whispering “Persistent motherfucker” to himself as he opens his canteen and downs enough to sate his thirst. “Maybe those bastards were onto something, making all this fuss about you” he adds, putting his water away and pulling a pair of binoculars from his side, getting one final glimpse of the horizon. Nothing. He spits on the ground in disgust and continues on.
His leg hurts and the red bloom in his bandage steadily grows, crimson drops beading like dew through the gauze at its center. You’re built for this you big dumb bastard, he thinks to himself to goad the damaged limb forward. What? You never expected to go through life without seeing what an arrowhead can do to you? He grits his teeth and pulls his rifle from his shoulder, drawing the cocking handle back and looking through its sight. The shine of the gunmetal in his hands made him feel safer. Not materially safer, that was something he had never particularly doubted, but it made him feel secure of his place in the world. You aren’t hunting with spears anymore, the gun told him as he switched on the flashlight suspended beneath its barrel, the crimson trail to his objective standing out in the wash of illumination.
He entertained himself as he limped forward with thoughts of civilization. The scent of fryer oil, the sound of a saloon’s jukebox, the perfume-scent of a hotel room full of working girls. He smiled at the sensations as they washed over his mind, reminders not only of what awaits him when this is finished, but also reminders as to what this is all for. He preferred the exciting parts of civilization to the mundane, but they all beat life as a mud-caked barefoot nomad. That’s what you were, he tells himself as pleasant thoughts of vice and comfort give way once more to anger. What was back there, praying to fetishes and dancing around the fire. That’s what you were saved from. A life of pagan ignorance and fear. That’s what you saved them from, too.
Mike’s thoughts waffled back and forth like a tide between sentimental longing for the amenities of The Republic and ruminations on his past brought about by memories about his old, dead life until the howl of a band of coyotes brought his awareness back to the present. He looked around and could see nothing on the horizon but a black smear topped with a wash of stars. “Nothing to worry about, boys,” he says as he lifts the sight on his rifle to his right eye and switches its night-vision capability on “I’m not here for you.”
The coyotes presented themselves in his rifle-sight as a trio of green smears bounding about in circles around an unfamiliar shape, a gently moving mound nestled amongst a cluster of creosote. Looks just about the right size, he thinks to himself as he instinctively pulls the trigger three times. The coyote calls cease. He stands and makes his way over to the sight of the commotion, his rifle pointed forward to light the path before him. That's when he finds it.
A bighorner, its coat grey and wiry and painted with sigils Mike did not recognize or care to understand. “There you are you little bastard” he coos gently at the wounded creature as it huffs at him in fear “Not making your way up to the Hill Mother now, are you?” he teases, his light switching off with a click before his rifle is slung back on his shoulder. “You know, my people had shit like you,” he began to explain “We didn’t have any Hill Mother, though. No, we had the Great Engine,” he pauses to laugh, the bighorner stirring in fear as he draws a serrated knife from a sheath on his hip. “But the Great Engine needed homage, just like your Hill Mother. Isn’t it funny how that works? This fucker is up there controlling the weather and time and life and god-knows-what-else and yet they still rely on savages who can barely clothe themselves to do their shopping for them?” He pauses again to squat so he is eye level with the creature, wincing in pain at his wound as he does so.
“I suppose that should have been a sign,” he says, his free hand grabbing the beast’s left horn and lifting its head to expose the tendons of its throat while it squirmed weak and helpless. “You see, when Caesar came knocking my people were convinced that they wouldn’t need to fight. That the Great Engine would arrive and take us away.” He gently traced the patterned lines tattooed across his bare arm with the tip of his knife “After all, we mark our bodies with the great rails it travels on don’t we? We devote our entire lives to literally following in the footsteps of The Great Engine, traveling the sacred Iron Line that gave us our name. It owed us. So we offered up everything our rail-shaman said was needed. Cattle, machines, valuables, weapons, medicine. Everything. And you know what happened?” He plunges the knife into the beasts throat and feels its bulk go slack as gallons of blood wash over his hand. “Nothing.”
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Old Bill flips through the Business section of the previous week’s issue of the Sac-Town Sentinel as he smokes a cigar on his porch overlooking the South Fork River, his eyes scanning the horizon for the courier who punctually brings him the latest copy every Wednesday. He smiles at the sight blurry silhouette cresting the path amongst the oak and maple that spanned his family’s vast acreage almost all the way down to the shoreline, where fishing dinghies can be seen trawling the water for trout and mussels. Old Bill frowns as the man grows near at the sight of a rifle barrel poking over his shoulders, a weapon he would not expect his paperboy to be using. He grabs the heavy ten-gauge shotgun that leans against the table where he sets his glass of pre-war bourbon, the man’s footsteps in the gravel now close enough to be heard. “You better have a good shot at me,” the stranger says, his voice betraying him as no stranger at all.
“Mike! Mike the savage! Old sport! Fresh from the plains of the equally savage Amargosa, I presume?” he teases, the source of the voice now materializing within blurred cataract-ridden vision as the man who was indeed his head of security.
“Not savage anymore” Iron-Line Mike responds, close enough now for Old Bill Clemente to see the bundle of wax paper he carries tucked beneath one arm.
“Very good, my man. Very good,” the elderly man says, stowing the shotgun back where it leans against the table “Forgive my alarm old sport, my eyes-”
“-aren’t what they were, I know old man” the visitor teases, patting his employer on the shoulder and tossing the bundle in his lap “I got you a gift, have Bella cook it up tonight” he explains as Old Bill looks up in amused surprise. “Go on, have a look.”
Bill Clemente did as he was told, unwrapping the wax paper to reveal two cuts of fatty marbled meat. The flesh was a dark red and salted. “Bighorner?” he asked, incredulous
“Not quite, old man. Not quite,” Mike responds “What you have sitting right there is a meal meant for a god.”