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two shorten the road (Stardew Valley, f!Farmer & Marnie)
Summer's beaten down on everything for months, broiling the valley in a way Jake's still getting used to, but tonight everyone's been given leave. A breeze kicked in from the ocean and rolled all the way through town, swapping the humid heat for a salty coolness that's got people out in droves. She can hear the noise tumbling out of what must be the Saloon before she even clears the forest—the jukebox's guitar twangs and sharp snare snaps, punctuated by laughter, ruckus, and occasional shouts.
Jake slows to take it in as she comes up Willow, drifting to where the shadows deepen closer to the river and leaning up against the maple tree on the riverbank. She sees a few people walking through the square, the lampposts casting them in fuzzy yellow light as they pass through the soft halos. There's a few cherry red pinpricks hovering around silhouettes near the Saloon's open door, too. That old familiar smell drifts all the way over. Catches in her nose, makes her fingers twitch.
Before long, though, the wind snakes up from behind her and rattles her fishing rod. The one beam of blueish moonlight filtering through the canopy of leaves glints and writhes off her hook where it's pulled taut on an eye. It's enough to get her moving, and she keeps heading down the quiet path through the cemetery.
Which is where Jake hears something that sounds not quite right.
She stops short. Old habits die hard, Basic Training even more so—she immediately folds herself as soundlessly as a fully packed fisherwoman can behind a headstone, crouching down with her hand on the hilt of her sheathed knife. The noise came from near the alley alongside the mayor's house, but there's nothing visible along the fence there. A second passes, she realizes where she is—Pelican Town, for Yoba's sake, not the Gorotian Wastes—and the sound comes again. This time, her strained ears actually manage to decode it: sniffling, gasping, and the reedy whine of a stifled sob.
Crying. Someone's crying. And with how quiet they're trying to be, they're not expecting an audience.
Immediately, Jake wants to go back the way she came. The racket coming from the Saloon will cover her escape just fine, keep her unheard and unmissed. Her feet almost make the choice for her…
But she once again stops short.
She can run, sure. That's what she would've done in the Army. Before then, too. Someone falling apart? What they need is space, not a hanger-on. Her legs, her arms, her chest, everything tells her to turn tail and pound sand, leave this person to it. It's what she'd want herself.
But, again. Pelican Town, not a FOB. And...well, isn't that what she's here doing, playing farmer? Trying to build a whole new life—doesn't that mean making different choices?
A philosopher would've sat and thought her way through it. Jake, though, just thinks, oh, hell. She takes a deep breath, stands up, and, loud as can be, rounds the tree at the edge of the cemetary to find…
"Miss Marnie?"
Jake blinks. But the sight remains the same: Miss Marnie leaning on the mayor's fence, eyes wide, blinking right back at her. The moonlight's bright enough to see wetness on her eyelids and a few streaks down her cheeks that she immediately sets to rubbing at as she straightens.
"Oh—" Miss Marnie sniffs then coughs, like something got caught in her throat. "Jake? What, uh, what're...?"
"What's wrong?" Jake tenses. "Somethin' happen?"
"Oh—no, Jake, I'm, I'm just—what are you doing here?"
"I'm headed to the beach." Jake motions with her fishing rod. The glint of the hook goes crazy all over in the moonlight. "What's goin' on, ma'am?"
"Oh, not the 'ma'am' thing again," Miss Marnie laughs, weak and warbling. "Nothing. Really. Just been a…a tough night, is all."
Jake blinks at her. Frowns. "So…you're fine?"
"Yes."
"Not hurt?"
"No! No."
"Then…." Jake's brow knits. "Why're you way out here alone, ma—miss?"
Miss Marnie's mouth opens. Then closes. With a sigh, she runs her hand down her face, glancing back towards the Saloon. The distant, worn look she has knocks Jake right back to the Wastes. "It's a long story. Truth be told, I don't feel up to telling it."
Jake watches Miss Marnie for a long moment. She's folded up on herself, arms crossed and face pinched, looking like she'd rather be anywhere else at all than here, talking about this. The familiarity of that catches on something in Jake's head.
"Yeah," Jake says, low and quiet. She looks away, mouth screwed tight, then forces out, "I got stories like that, too. I get it."
At that, Miss Marnie's shoulders drop an inch. Her mouth relaxes into a small, tired smile, and she nods back.
"Well, miss, if you're fine…." Jake straightens up a bit, rolls her shoulders. "I can walk you back to the Saloon?"
"Oh. Um, no." Her smile wavers. "Thanks. I—I'm just gonna call it an early night."
"Can I walk you home, then?" Jake asks.
Miss Marnie looks at her for a beat longer than normal, eyebrows raised a touch. It hits Jake how that must've sounded, offering something like that to a woman who barely knows her. She scratches the back of her neck, but says nothing to dig herself deeper.
"That's alright," Miss Marnie says softly. Her smile tips into something friendlier at the corners. "Thank you very much, though. It's a kind thing to offer."
Jake nods stiffly. "You're welcome. Have a better night, Miss Marnie."
"I will. Good bites to you, Jake," she says, chuckling. Jake steps aside and Miss Marnie passes her with a nod and that friendly smile, tracing Jake's own path back through the cemetary and on towards Cindersap. Jake watches her go until she's swallowed up by the shadows, then continues towards the beach, rolling her shoulders the whole way down.
[these final two drabbles were written for day 4's prompt, "farmer." the first drabble has no "canon" characters, technically, while the second drabble focuses on Emily and Haley.]
god and mammon (title ref)
In an office, in a city, in a place lightyears from Pelican Town, a worker gets an email from her realtor. Subject: CASH OFFER! Body: Less than asking but still above cutoff. Returning vet. Escrow confirmed, see attachment.
The only information she finds on the buyer is an old blurb in the Sparson County Herald—Graduates Lead Recruitment Wave—with a picture of five scared-looking kids in uniform.
Grandpa's letter sits folded below her screen, the paper glowing in the light. If anyone deserves her passed-on fresh start, isn't it the one of them that managed to make it home?
———
blue ribbon
"What is this, dirt chic?" Haley flicks a strap off her shoulder. "Runway-ready scarecrow? Ugh. Why'd Lewis make us take over the empty grange display this year? Is this even a display?"
What it is: Haley dressed in mom's flannel, dad's straw hat, and Emily's gardening overalls dyed red clay brown. There's swatches of linen pinned all over it, each with a silkscreened black-and-white print of Haley's pictures: the mountain waterfall cascading down, a raccoon inside a fallen forest log, the Saloon lit up on a winter night, Leah and Jas skipping stones at the beach…
"Haley," Emily says, slipping the strap back on and squeezing Haley's shoulders, "your pictures look great, you look great, and we're going to do amazing. I know it." She smiles at Haley's reflection, and after a moment, Haley meets her gaze and nods.
[these drabbles were written for day 3's prompt, "merchant." the first drabble features Abigail (and, briefly, Willy) and the second features the Desert Trader and Traveling Merchant.
the second drabble is the second new one!]
per ardua ad…
"…But really, lass," Willy said to Abigail, bathed in the golden ocean sunset, "if you want to see the world, why not become a mariner?"
Those words rang in her head for weeks—even through the winter storms, even through endless finals.
She told herself the transfer application was just a lark—even after pouring weeks into it, even though she couldn't bring herself to tell a soul.
But when she checks the mail on the first warm day in spring—even though it's a huge envelope, even though the letter's printed on thick paper—she doesn't believe it until she reads the words:
Congratulations! It is our pleasure to offer you admission to the Ferngill Maritime Academy, Class of…
———
a warm port
This year, a storm blows in the last night of the winter market, its icy howls of wind running off the shoppers and chasing Ritu and her coffee onto the cart-turned-boat of Marge and Pig. All three are bundled up and laughing under the rocking trawler lamps as the rough seas roll.
"That was her counteroffer?" Ritu asks, hands wrapped around a toasty thermos. "Really?"
"Well, you know Vera," Marge chuckles around her own thermos.
Ritu nods, smiling. "Don't we both!"
"Remember, at Wanapum's fair? She started…."
The night goes on like that, warm and friendly even in the squall.
[these next two drabbles were written for day 2's prompt, "manager." the first drabble features Pam, and the second one features Emily and Sandy.
the second drabble is rated soft M, as a heads up.]
brownness at the edges of the day (title ref)
With the chill through her windbreaker and her huffs of steam on the walk over, today is the first day it's really felt like fall, is what Pam thinks as she pulls away from the curb, the old girl groaning over every bump until she finally warms up.
Normally she cranks her boombox and sings along with 95.3, but today she leaves it off, just opens the window and lets the crisp air whip over her. Even the light has a crackly brown edge to it as it streams over the foothills and washes over the valley.
Before long, she pulls into the Grampleton fuel depot and fills up. As she leans against the side, the pump counter tick-tick-ticking and birds chirping in the long light streaming through the rustling leaves, she thinks, Yoba, how'd I manage without this?
———
upside
"The guy's on lunch, but I—wow—should flip the sign to closed," Sandy groans, glancing back at the sunlight streaming through the glass door of Oasis. She writhes as Emily grabs her hips and pins her harder back against the counter.
"You were just complaining about how bored you were," Emily murmurs, lips burning a trail of kisses and bites along Sandy's collarbone. Sandy feels her smirk. "So I wanted to help."
One beat. Two. Sandy thinks, why even own a store if I can't do this, and hikes her dress up as Emily drops to her knees, beaming.
[drabbles written for the Labor Day drabble challenge hosted by the Stardew Valley Fic Writers Guild, including two written post-challenge. (also posted on AO3, if you'd prefer to read them there.)
the drabbles will be posted in pairs over the next few days. the challenge was to get them around 100 words each; some hit that, after much wrangling, and some ran a little over. i also played a bit fast and loose with the prompts.
the first two drabbles were written for day 1's prompt, "artist," featuring Maru and Penny in the first drabble and Jodi and Caroline in the second. the second drabble is new!]
wrenching
Maru's hands are so sure. Every ratchet crank, every swiftly tightened zip tie, all done with the easy confidence of years of practice. And the strength in them, too—the way she bends and winds thick wires through the curves of her machine, her tight grip on the thick piece of metal she's pressing her screaming drill bit through.
Penny knows she's watching a master at work. She says as much, every time, and Maru always just laughs it off…but Penny likes to think that the longer she watches, the more Maru indulges her in the demonstration.
———
sailing on a sunbeam (title ref)
What Caroline expects when she walks into her sunroom one fall morning: sunlight creeping in, plants shining, tools scattered around from yesterday.
What she doesn't: Jodi reading at her new table, legs crossed, steaming cup beside her.
Caroline's shocked gasp tumbles into a huffy laugh. "Happy birthday, girl! When did you get here?"
"Seven." Jodi, grinning, takes a long sip. "Pierre was very surprised to see me."
"Was Kent surprised? Or the boys?"
Jodi puts a single finger to her lips.
"What an escape artist," Caroline quips, and their bright giggles rise up and mingle with the soft brown sunshine.
[Hot Sun, Hard Work: VVIB 2. Deng Wei (Bartender, Cook) ; fallout]
(Chapter Index)
Deng Wei is the bartender and cook at Patty's, an inn built in a large pre-War train station. Patty's is notable for being one of the few areas not controlled by raiders in the Sprawl, a vast expanse of ruins about two days southeast of San Francisco and Shi-town. Patty's status as the economic and social center of the area is cemented by the small maze of shacks and gardens built in the large open area in front of the main building, as well as the guard posts at the two corners of the semi-circle courtyard directly outside the main entrance.
"We maintain the guard posts," says Deng. "They're only manned at night, though we're thinking of making it round the clock. We've been having trouble recently with people trying to shoot out our windows."
It's an impressive building. We're not really sure how it survived the War, actually, given the kind of condition the buildings just a little further east are in. But it's worked well for us, with a lot of big spaces to set up rooms and to put brewing equipment in. And then the main foyer—well, you went through it, you know how big it is, with the big paintings set into the wall and the ceiling design. It's a nice space to set up for having people hang around in. We lucked out in finding this place, really.
The little settlement area out front is an interesting story. My parents wanted to clear out this entire south wing over here to set up more of my mother's brewery equipment, since that was when we'd just started getting into more large-scale production with it. But the wing was where most of our longer term residents were staying, either the people who rented a room from us every week or two or the people who were out and out living here. So to get the wing back, my parents told them, hey, we'll help you set up little shacks and gardens outside, and then you'll pay us a little rent for the land, and then after you pay us off for supplies and labor and other costs, you'll own it outright.
Most of them jumped at it, and those were the first few folks that we had out there. Then other people got interested in setting up their own places, and that's how that sort of little village started up. They've got all sorts of things growing, too—tatos, mutfruit, the usual stuff, but also some grapes and apples. Some of the people toward the outskirts own a brahmin or two, so they make fertilizer for the rest of them. We work with the growers to get seeds and fruit from them, which we then use in our fields, which ends up getting brewed into new drinks. So it's a real back and forth we have with them. My father and I mostly negotiate with the folks out front, and then my mother takes everything and tinkers around with it to make it into the drinks we serve.
"My mother and father are from Shi-town, originally. My mother was a researcher who worked on making new kinds of fuel and finding different ways to power things, and my father was one of the farmers that worked with the agricultural research division. They were both kind of weird, is what they told me—they didn't fit in very well. That was how they met, actually, was they both noticed that the other hung around outside the different groups, so they started spending time together and one thing lead to another….
"My mother's always been the kind of person who's very interested in travelling around, exploring, finding new things and learning about them, and I suppose that wasn't a big thing to do in Shi-town. Or, it was, but not so much interacting with other folks. So my mother got married to my father and not too long afterward ended up leaving after some kind of big…well, I don't know if it was a fight. But they told me that leaving isn't looked on very well, especially if you're a researcher, so for my mom to do that was a big deal. But she was getting restless, so she convinced my father that they'd be better off striking out on their own. This was around '52, a few years before I was born. So she and my father managed to get out of Shi-town and headed south, following the bells [built alongside a route locals call the Real, one of the main roads into San Francisco] until they made it to the Sprawl, where they settled down. And here we are, over twenty years later."
It was my father's idea to start up Patty's. Once they got here, it was rough. The Sprawl isn't a nice place to live by a long shot. The raiders were a lot worse when they first arrived, if you can believe that. There were a lot more of them, and they were better armed and a lot meaner. My parents were out on the very outskirts for a while, which is where they had me, and they survived through scavving and selling off what they could. So it was pretty tight for a long time for us…but then things started clearing out around here—a lot of the bigger gangs started moving north up along 880 or northeast back along the Real, and they were passing by where we lived pretty often, so my parents decided to head further into the city.
Eventually they found this place, and after staying here for a while, my father said he wanted to turn it into something permanent, a home for the three of us. A bunch of raiders had been in here for years before we came, so it was just trashed with a lot of nasty stuff. He and my mother worked to clear it out, and afterward they both thought it would be a good idea to set up some rooms to rent out. Word had started going around that the Sprawl was getting to be safer, so those first few years most of the people that stayed here were scavvers picking over the buildings. A lot of business, then. I was about…10 at that point, maybe, so I'd say that was around '65.
The name comes from a sign that they found in an old building just a little ways outside the houses out front. [Deng points up at a rusted metal sign hanging above the bar: "Patty's Inn - Since 1933."] They liked the design of the sign and the ring of name, I guess, so it's stuck with us.
We opened more rooms and set up a small general store and kitchen for the travelers. But then my mother found some small-scale brewing equipment out in an old restaurant while she was scavenging north of here. She and my father hauled it back here, fixed it up, and then she jumped into playing around with it, seeing what kind of alcohol she could come up with, and that was how we decided to open up a full bar. Before that we'd sell, you know, some homebrew beer or whatever hard liquor we could salvage, but with the equipment my mother found we could make larger batches, and we could make it higher quality than we'd been able to do.
We started selling so much booze that the general store aspect pretty much just fell off to the side, especially since we had people starting to come out specifically because they'd heard of what we were brewing up and how good it was. There aren't a lot of places this far west that make their liquor fresh, you know? It was mostly beer, at first, since we'd already been growing wheat and so it was easiest to just work with that, but we moved up to vodka once we got our hands on enough tato seeds and land and water to make that viable. Whiskey, too, once the corn started coming in.
My mother loves it, loves tinkering around with recipes to get different strengths and flavors. She was getting kind of stir-crazy after a year or two of just running the inn with my father, so once she got her hands on something she could experiment with she just ran with it. Thank god, because I think we might be out of business at this point if it weren't for what she comes up with. Recently, she's been playing around with something involving mutfruit, and she's working with two of the guys that live out front to track down enough grapes to make some "real wine," as she calls it. I started off helping my father serve drinks, then once I got a little older and we expanded our fields out to what they are now, and added in the animals, my father took over the outside production and I was in charge of the bar. Which is how it is now.
Running the bar works fine by me. Cooking's a real treat. My mother managed to fix up the grill-slash-stove back here to run off of coals instead of piped gas, and we've held on to some different pots and pans and other utensils that we've found in our scav runs. With the brahmin we have and some occasional meat that traders bring through, plus what we grow and the couple of chicken nests we have, I can make some really interesting stuff, compared to what I think most people can put together themselves. How many places have you been to that have a menu anymore?
Sometimes my father and I swap places, mostly so I can get experience working the fields and with the animals, since it's going to fall on me someday. Our fields are out to the right of the station, the area that's pretty well fenced off—used to be a parking lot, so we had to tear up the concrete that was left—and then we have the pens and the coops out to the left, in another parking lot we converted. We're thinking of expanding it further, teaming up with the folks out in the village that have brahmin and making it something where they can roam around and graze a little more than they can right now. But we'd have a lot of work cut out for us with all the clearing that would require, so…we'll see.
The best part of the job, I think, is getting to talk to people like I do—the regulars, the ones I see every night, as well as the people that pass through. I'm very good friends with a lot of the original people that built homes out front, since I've known them pretty much my entire life, and since I've been working I've gotten to know the others that set up here later on. Some of them even had kids here way back who are some of my best friends now, since we kinda grew up together. That's pretty amazing, I think.
We've actually had some of the people in the local gangs come through because they heard we had the best brew for a hundred miles. They're…rowdy, and rude sometimes, but we've had talks with them and told them we wouldn't serve them if they kept making messes. That, plus a bunch of locals with their guns out, got them to calm down, and now they're pretty much regulars, more or less. I like telling people about that; they never believe me, so it's always interesting seeing their faces as they hear about it. I mean, come on, when have you heard of raiders that just come in, pay for their drinks, spend some time around, then leave peacefully?
I hear a lot from folks that pass through about how rough things are out there—even NCR folks who grew up in the Hub, Boneyard, Dayglow, the little towns in between, had a lot of rough times. A lot of things up in the air, like food and shelter, or they were always dealing with raiders or bandits or other people trying to take what they had. People that left and never came back, or that died in fights right in town. Maybe the picture I'm getting is rougher than it actually is, but I'd bet it isn't that far off. So, you know….
I've thought about going out and seeing the world more, but I don't know. People have asked me if I'm bored of being here, since Patty's has been around pretty much my entire life. I am, but I'm not. At the end of the day, it's good work, and I'm proud of what we serve. It's a hell of a lot of energy to keep everything running, sure, but I'm proud of it, and for right now I'm happy with what I'm doing. So I'm not seriously thinking of wandering off any time soon, no.
And anyway, we've had some NCR people out here talking to us about the railroad, given that we have the rail lines that run through our building. They're looking to come out into this area, mostly to try and get closer to the Shi, I think. They want to set up the railroads again between here and some larger settlements out east. Vault 15, NCR, maybe all the way out to that big city past the mountains. That'd be good for business—very good. We'd be a major travel hub, traders and everyone would have to come through here. So we're hopeful about it, overall. Things are tough out here but we're getting by just fine, and I'm happy with that. Thrilled, even. That's not something you hear about very often, things working out for people. Just hope it keeps going.
You see this? [She draws a revolver and holds it up in the air.] You do anything I don't like and you're going to be making friends with it. Understand? I can shoot a tin can off that fence over there with an eye closed, don't test me.
Rocket is a woman who is "single handedly responsible for making most of the jet in the Southern Core Region." She's agreed to meet and talk with me provided I don't give her real name or location. We meet outside a burnt out shell of a diner and she leads me on a trek to her house, a fairly spacious place.
I've been in this business for nearly a decade. I'm the only one around from ten years ago. You know why? Because I kept my nose to the ground. Everyone else was parading their shit around, acting like they were the baddest motherfuckers to walk the earth. Now they're dead or otherwise got themselves messed up. Guess it was a good lesson in keeping my mouth shut until I had something worth opening it about, though.
I got started by—shit, how does anyone get started in this? I needed some cash and a friend of mine was looking for a partner to cook with. Said that it was real easy money, provided I didn't flake out on him or run. He showed me the ropes, we started cooking, the caps rolled in, and I was all, "shit, this is all I need to do to make some serious cash," so I stayed on with him. We made a small fortune over the summer and then he went and kicked it later that year. Overdose. But hell, he taught me to cook and gave me a lesson in not using your product—can't really ask for a better teacher.
People get really batshit with their cook methods and their formulas. Like, very protective, I guess. Which I get, but I mean, c'mon, it's not a state secret or something. How much better is your special filtering system gonna make the brahmin shit fumes people are huffing? Or your pinch of peppers or salt or whatever the fuck those other guys try and put in it? There's stuff you can do to make your jet stronger, sure, but not without really raising the cost of production. I played around with that for a while when I first went out East, really wanted to make an impression on the local drug scene. Well, I found a way to do that. You heard of rocket? Mostly local to the Mojave. That's mine. Hence the name. [She gestures to herself.]
I actually—[laugh]—rocket came around while I was mixing up a small test batch with some other stuff, like Abraxo, which I'd heard could give it more kick, and I spilled my Nuka into it. And I was like, "shit! Well...we'll see how it turns out." And it just kicked the ass up out of all my testers. But the rate I produce at, it gets too expensive to keep getting Nuka and Abraxo and the other ingredients on that scale, so I went back to my original formula. I still cook some up from time to time, as a kind of special thing, a limited edition or whatever. But that's rare. Mostly just use the same formula we've all been using for decades, plus a couple extra flairs I've added in over the years. It's still brahmin shit, though, when everything's said and done.
I don't cook with other people anymore. That old friend was one reason, but the big one was the time I was cooking with a girlfriend of mine, which—listen, never mix jet and your love life, okay? Fucking disaster. And I never liked it after that first partnership. People always have their way of cooking and they don't usually match up, and it's a big pissing match whenever you get a bunch of cooks in a room. I've been solo for nearly five years and it's been much better. I do what I want, how I want to, when I want to. More work, more stress, but hell, that's the price to staying alive anyway.
Do you ever sell it yourself?
[Laughs.] Fuck no! I cook it, I don't sell it. That's some other asshole's job. Fuck no, I just make it, get paid, and hand it to the dealers. Are you kidding me? You couldn't pay me enough to go out and do that shit now, especially since I'd be going up against some of the stiffer raider groups in this area. I've seen what happens with that….
When we get to Rocket's house, she waves me over to a table set up on the porch and goes inside for a few minutes. When she comes back, she hands me a Sunset Sarsaparilla and sits down across from me with her own.
I used to sell, though, way, way, way back in the day. Like, before I was even cooking it. My folks were, uh, really not happy with me and I ended up on my own pretty young, and when you're a scrawny fifteen year old who can't really do shit then you end up falling into one thing or another. I met some people who told me, "hey, take this and go get people over at the local bar to buy it, then bring the caps back to us, we'll give you a cut." And I did that and that's how I made enough to eat for almost…I'd say about three, four years. Moved up to some small time dealing to cut out the middleman a bit. But the pay was shit and the lifestyle's shit, so when I finally found a way to the real game I dropped it.
God. I was pretty much living on the streets, just trying to get enough every day to buy some fucking radroach meat to cook and eat so I wouldn't starve to death. What an awful time that was.
"The thing about jet is that, y'know, it's terrible. I know it's terrible, you know it's terrible, there's no one here that really believes it's good for you. I'm not going to sit here and pretend to be in it for some great, wonderful reason, because I'm not. But how much worse is it than any of the other poison people are going around and getting into, really?
I don't run in circles with people that aren't in the game, one way or another, but you know, I go out sometimes to Reno or Vegas or wherever, looking to have fun, and it seems like I can't walk five feet without running into someone moaning and groaning about how bad jet is, about how terrible it's made things. And they're shouting about how chems just need to be outlawed, how the NCR needs to start finally putting their foot down and stamp out all those nasty chemlords poisoning our youth. These are people that have their hunting rifle and their shotgun strapped across their back and they've got twin .44s in their hip holsters. And I'm like, seriously? Are you kidding me right now? What kind of two-faced….
"I'd say guns are a lot fucking worse than jet, personally. Guns have killed a hell of a lot more people than jet. Don't stand there armed to the teeth and lecture me about how much jet's screwing up the world. It's like, how many people have you killed? I can guarantee you it's more than what my product's done. I'm lucky that half the government's so tied up on chems that they wouldn't dare try and pass some sort of law that would screw that up. God bless the bureaucrat junkies."
Some of the older folks in the game talk about getting out of it at some point. I say, why? What's the point? This is the best way to make money. I'm good at it. I'm established. Can you imagine, someone my age trying to find something else to do? I don't want to die broke, some old woman, where a good samaritan wanders across my corpse and buries out in the wastes somewhere. Do I like it? Who cares? I don't like anything, hardly, and everything I do like comes from cooking, one way or another. No reason to quit now.
I know a lot of outsiders would say, well, God, Rocket, don't you get tired of standing over a brahmin shit vat? Don't you want to contribute to society by doing whatever the fuck I've got on my mind today? No. I'm satisfied with what I've got. I'm not reaching any higher on the hog. Doesn't much matter to me if other people think it's not worthwhile. Half the time they're the ones with their thumbs sticking up their asses hollering about god knows what, anyway, something like that damn NCR-run courier service or whatever.
So I've been in the game a while. Longer than most. At this point it's all about the money, mostly. I make more caps and dollars in a month than most people make in their entire lives. That's not just dickwaving, that's fact. But I'm not an asshole about it. I mean, hey, if someone wants to get in a pissing contest, then I'll go, but other than that…you can see how I'm dressed. My house. It's a nice house. But not too nice. See, out here, you get things that are too nice—you're just asking for trouble. Not worth it, not at all. So I enjoy myself, and enjoy having a lot of money in my pocket, and I go to sleep easy with all that.
What do you do with the cash?
[Laughs.] Whatever the fuck I want, whenever the fuck I want. It doesn't matter. I could up and move all the way across the country if I wanted to, just for the hell of it. If anything, you get kinda bored with this sort of cash on hand, or stressed out, always waiting for the next trouble, the next idiot trying to pull a gun on you for something. Always looking over your shoulder for one reason or another. But who cares, really? You've got that kind of stuff going on anyway, living how we live. I've got what I want, more or less, and at the end of the day that's all you can really ask for. People talking bigger than that are the ones with their head really in the clouds, you ask me.
[Hot Sun, Hard Work: Vice, Virtue, and In Betweens ; fallout]
(Chapter Index)
"This is the kind of world where people are going to do what they need to so that they make it to tomorrow morning. Is that good or bad? I don't know. I don't know if that's even a helpful way to think about it anymore. It is what it is. What happens, happens."
Sasha Rogers initially meets me around mid-morning at a bar in Cottonwood, a very small mining town about a day's walk south of Redding. ("I'm out here waiting on my scout team to tell me if there's anything worthwhile up in the hills," she explains when I ask about her choice of meeting place. "Here's hoping, because this beer's gonna be overpriced garbage otherwise.") She's wearing an old, faded blue three piece suit with "Shrapnel's Scavenging and Salvage Service" written on a cloth pinned to the back of her blazer. Soon after we meet, Rogers receives word that her scouts came across a promising find out to the east of the town, and she invites me to go out with her and "see the machine at work, really give you something to put in that book of yours."
You wanna know how I got started in salvaging? I'll tell you. I was broke. Broker than broke, figured I was gonna starve to death somewhere outside New Reno. I was strung out on jet and Med-X. I was alone except for the damn geckoes that were gonna eat my body once I kicked it. And one night, I thought I'd hit the Med-X too hard, I was nodding real bad—I know this sounds like a damn lie of a story, but hand to God—I was staggering around, trying to keep my eyes open, and right before I passed out there was this rumble, this deep, earthy rumble, like the ground itself was talking to me, and it said: "Sasha Rogers! You damn fool, get up! You're lying in the field of your salvation!"
And sure enough, when I woke up I was in an old scrapyard way up the 99 just feeling like I—like I was supposed to find something there. So I looked around in the buildings and rooted around in cars until I found a lever to a secret compartment in the trunk of this old Highwayman that had three cans of water, a suit and hat, a pistol with a box of bullets, and $1000 in pre-War cash. Can you believe that shit? The kind of luck or divine intervention…and once I was done hollering about that find I said, "Lord, this feeling—I'm gonna take this and run with it," and I did, all the way back to Reno. Been digging around in rustbuckets and half-collapsed buildings ever since. Still got that pistol, too—she pulls her blazer aside and turns; there's a small, blued 10mm pistol in a holster at her hip.
The trick to salvaging is to go out and put your neck on the line. Put your damn neck on the line. Right after my revelation, once I'd cleaned up a little, had some cash on hand, I headed out to the East. Way east. I headed out to the Plains Commonwealth area, with the Brotherhood of Steel—now those are some mean, mean boys they've got out there, let me tell you. I was looking down a lot of laser rifle barrels travelling through there. The tech, though, absolutely incredible, especially up near Devil's Graveyard, that area. Worth all the burn marks.
So east, northeast, then further east. Spent a few years poking around the big cities out there before I decided everything's better back here. Part of that is—Eastern Commonwealth was probably the hardest hit by the bombs, I'd say. New York, Boston, D.C., you'd expect those places to be chalk full of good scav sites, but there wasn't all that much, compared to back West. All rubble. You get grass in the NCR, trees here and there, but out there? Barely anything. It's all dead, all the radiation's kneecapped it. I still don't know how they ain't all ghouls, or how they find anything to eat.
Somewhere past Springfield I got ahold of a map and I started marking the good spots I was coming across, the areas with good tech and all. The bunkers, the factories, the Army bases, the corporate headquarters, all of it. Talked to locals. Put my neck on the line. This one time, I was scouting for an old bunker I saw marked on some Army docs I picked up on my way through Dog Town, and I ran into a Brotherhood patrol. Lord! You can't talk your way out of anything with them, they're so damn tunnel visioned. Walking on the road? You're a threat. You got a gun? You're a threat. You're breathing? You're a threat. Those tin cans chased me nearly half a day north until I got to Rock Falls and lost them because they got distracted by some raiders picking over a house. Like dogs with a bone.
How would you describe the scrap and salvage business?
Oh, salvage's a nasty game. Nasty. 'Cause everyone's in it, one way or another, you know—we're all salvaging something from the Old World. Everything good we have came from the Old World, one way or another. So people think, hey, what do I need some scavver for? Since I can take apart an old alarm clock and not—boom!—blow myself up? That's baby steps. You gotta go deeper than that to get at anything worth having. Go out in the wastes, find the big scrap, spend three months neck deep in a ship full of robots that wanna kill you, or ghouls that wanna kill you, or other scavengers that wanna kill you. That's the kind of shit I and my crew go through to get the government the schematics they use to build the bombs they're hoarding to cause all this all over again.
[Rogers gestures around her.] You like living in this hot, dry ass wasteland? 'Cause it's coming round a second time, and worse yet. Just watch. And go ahead and put that in your book, too, I'm not scared of some government hubbub.
You're not?
Hell no! They need me. They're not gonna kill me when they need me and everything Shrapnel finds for them. I've got—you know how big this country is? It is a big, big country. Got a lot of land to cover. Got a lot of scrap out there, all over the place. And you know who knows where a lot of that scrap is? Us! Those scavvers no one's got the time of day for. I know—you couldn't imagine the kinds of places we know about, that we've got on lockdown until I get people together enough to sweep them. We're the best damn salvagers in the business, they can't leave any of us dead in a ditch somewhere.
At this point we've been riding in a Brahmin-pulled cart for about an hour and a half. The mountains in the distance have been drawing steadily closer until the scout ahead of us motions for us to pull onto a newly (and roughly) forged road heading off into a rocky forested area. Rogers sits next to me, steering the Brahmin with one hand and holding on to the large rifle in her lap with the other.
Scavver's such a—people say that word like they're spitting it at me. Spitting. I resent it. You know how hard I work for my money? How long it took me to get the money and the people and the resources together to say, "yes, I'm Sasha Rogers, of Shrapnel's Scavenging and Salvage Service, what can I salvage for your nasty, hypocritical ass today?" Years! That shit took years! But nobody's got two words of thanks for me or my crew, just all kinds of—the looks I get. You know, it's lucky I'm a scavver, so I know how valuable a bullet is, otherwise [she clicks her tongue] there'd be some real problems. Ooh! I hate it.
One of the reasons I decided to open up a business, a real business, with offices and payrolls and this, that, and the other thing, the whole shebang, was because I was so tired of getting treated like the dirt on the bottom of some city folk's shoes. So I decided—to hell with them! I want to get together all my salvage friends and start up something we could really call our own. It's difficult to claim your work as yours sometimes in salvage and scavenging, since everyone just thinks you're taking trash and trying to sell it as treasure. Everyone treats you like a con artist. So I wanted a group of us to come together and make a real outfit of it, a firm, like those law firms that are cropping up everywhere here. And we did! Shrapnel's. Named for how much of it we've all gone through to get here, literal and not.
Now Shrapnel's is something special. It really is. We do normal hauls and jobs, but it's coordinated and way bigger. We've got hierarchies and shit. The five founders—me, James Trimble, Screw-Eye [McCall, a famed scavenger in the extreme northern regions of the NCR], Lithuanda Sykes, and good ol' Betsy Hutton—are the chief salvagers, we're all in charge of the jobs going on in different areas. We're focusing more on the West Coast right now, NCR especially, but we're going to be expanding hard in the new year, provided business holds steady. Then below us we've got the scavengers that head up the different missions. Before we even go in for a haul we've always got to do an exploratory mission, map out the site and area in detail, figure out the threats and deal with them. After that is the clearing crew, the muscle that take care of whatever bad stuff the exploratory crew found, and then the inventory crew that does all the actual salvaging. Then we work with the caravans and trade posts all over to move and sell what we find, so we've got liaisons with them. Everyone works hard, works together.
And the ground we're covering. People don't realize the kind of distances we need to work in order to turn enough salvage to break even, let alone make a profit given how many people are on our payrolls. We're an outfit of…nearly fifty? At least forty and growing. And we're some of the first to really be doing this kind of organizing. People look at us and they can't go, "oh, those damn scavvers, damn ruffians." They look at us and see a real business, something like the Crimson Caravan. We already had contracts with the NCR, the individual five founders, but when we came together we told them we wanted to renegotiate, and now it looks like we might have a contract with the whole outfit, as a business. Because the government really relies on a lot of that pre-War scrap! Not just the big stuff, like blueprints and prototypes, but the basics—metal, nuclear material. Equipment. We're expanding into that, actually, getting all the eggheads we can and putting them to work refurbishing and repairing and yadda yadda yadda. I'm not in that part so much, I can't keep up with all the details, but Sykes could tell you more.
When we get to the site the scouts mentioned, it's in a small gulch up a long and winding foothill road and is enclosed on almost all sides by steep, rocky cliff faces. The site itself is crawling with people in dusty clothes and guns strapped across their chest and waists, even though it appears, at first sight, to just be a number of old, run down houses and storefronts, similar to what you would find in most areas that managed to avoid taking the full brunt of the Great War. But as we get off the cart and walk around a narrow bend past the buildings, we find a cluster of five people around a metal door set into the mountainside.
Rogers immediately steps in and takes charge, getting updates on the find and what the workers have tried to get the door open. The scouts report that some skeletons in the town were wearing tattered U.S. Army fatigues, and that between that and other Army-issue equipment found in and around the buildings, as well as the sturdiness and model of the door, it's a good bet that whatever's on the other side was military in nature. (Roger's eyes light up at this news.) Once she gets a read on the situation, she splits up the workers so that a third of them are clearing the buildings of possible threats—radroaches chief among them, though there were a few feral ghouls in one of the stores and a cellar—a third are picking through the cleared buildings for supplies and salvage, and a third are working on getting the door open. The groups work for a good three hours until dusk, when Rogers calls it a day and directs everyone to set up camp for the night. We continue our conversation after dinner, in an office overlooking the large campfire and the people mingling around it.
So Shrapnel's been around maybe two years now, right? So a year ago, when we've gotten past most of the groundwork and the set up and things are going real well…I've been making that map of mine for years and years, nearly the whole time I've been in this business, and it's—gold, pretty much. But it wasn't anywhere near complete. Still isn't. I never got down South, nowhere near Gatorville or Atlanta or anywhere below…God, maybe Junction City's the furthest south I've ever gone past the mountains. But a lot of my friends have travelled all over the South, know it real well, or they're even from there. So I took their knowledge and I added it in. All the spots and nooks and backwater bayous they know of, I put 'em all on there. So we've got a pretty complete looking map, now—still light on the North, the old Canada area, but looking pretty good. Much more filled in.
And we take that map, and we sell versions of it to other salvagers, and to the people who want to know what's where. That's our real bread and butter, outside of what we get for hauls. That's one of the things the NCR wants to contract us for, is to do more detailed expeditions and mapping. So maybe soon it's going to be "Shrapnel's Scavenging, Salvaging, Repairing, and Mapping Service" written on my back. I'm gonna need a bigger patch.
What's all the success been like for you?
Mixed bag. Mixed bag, sure. I like the money—Lord, I like the money. I'm a poor kid at heart, I see caps and I want 'em. I like the respect. The power. Bargaining chips, it's all about those when you're working on the bigger picture level, and when you're working with a good chunk of the scavengers in the country, you've got those. You can make even the bigger folks bend to you.
But it's difficult work. I don't like working with the NCR—it's money, but it's fishy money. Trouble money. They were real, real haughty when they first started talking to us, tried to tell us how we had to do our job and all. I wasn't in on those first negotiations, I'm too hotheaded, but I heard about them and ooh! So we shut them down for a while until they came back with their tail properly between their legs. But still. I don't know much about whatever goes on behind their closed doors, but I've got a gut feeling it's bad news. So that's stressful.
And the crew…the bigger we get, the more personnel issues it seems we have. We've got a solid crew now, but it took a lot of weeding to get there. I think when you get the cash rolling in, things change, dynamics and relationships and all that. Do I worry? Sure. Lots of nights I'm up trying to see the future. Sometimes, and I'm going to be real honest with you here, it looks bleak. We've got a long road ahead of us, digging our heels in, finding ways to stick around in a world that doesn't like us a whole hell of a lot.
But—alright, look. The past is pretty bad. I don't like looking back, I think it's a waste of time. But if you'd told me at twenty two that I'd make it to thirty and would be putting something like this together? I'd have laughed in your face. And now? [Rogers gestures around her, at the campfire below and the broad night sky above.] I get to do this a lot. That was something I was worried about, starting up Shrapnel's, was that I wouldn't get to go out anymore. But we managed to set it up in a way that has us founders out with the expedition and clearing and inventory teams most of the time. And I love it, it reminds me of everything about working salvage that made me pick it for the long haul.
So yeah, the business, running everything, it's scary. Stressful. Dangerous. A whole lot of lines we've got to keep putting our necks on. But would I trade this chance in for anything? Hell no! Hell no. We're really—how often do you get to make an institution? Get to be part of that? I think we're busting the doors open on this field. The first time someone called me a scavver like it was a bad thing, I got so mad. Now? Tell it to my cap-bedazzled, crew-leading, history-making ass. Ha! Straight to it.
Why the fuck did I become a caravaneer. [Laughs.] I ask myself that question every day. Why the fuck did I become a caravaneer…well, shit, your guess's probably as good as mine. C'mon, what do you think? Bad childhood? Gambling debt? Too shit-for-brains to do much else? Might be right on that last one, actually.
Ash Carson is a caravaneer—"actually, shit, don't call me that," they say after we start talking. "All I do is run a caravan. 'Caravaneer' makes it sound like some hoitey-toitey big official thing with offices and all that. My outfit's two brahmin and a couple of hard-headed, strong-backed folks carrying stuff from place to place. I mean, we're damn good at carrying stuff, but god, don't call me a caravaneer, please." They laugh. "I'm not ready for that sort of commitment yet."
You're probably looking for some big origin story, right? "Oh, my pa ran a caravan, and his pa before him," and so on and so forth. Nope, nothing like that. Truth is, I got arrested way back for—god, some dumbass thing I did, I can't even really remember what it was—and I got let out on parole, and I spent about a week bouncing around from friend's house to friend's house until one day I woke up and went, "shit, I've gotta get a job today!" That was one of the terms of my parole, was that I get a job within a week of my release, and if I didn't…so I get up and I throw my rags on and run out of my friend's house right as the sun was starting to come up over the mountains, and I hit the pavement all day.
This was in the Hub, right? So I'm going from shop to shop, going, "hey, please, I'm looking for work, do you need some help?" No one. Nothing. I looked all day and there wasn't a single job to be found. I even tried to—god, this is embarrassing—I tried to bribe some people to lie to my PO [parole officer] and be like, "yeah, they work for me," and I couldn't even do that. I mean, y'know, granted, I was offering them twenty caps to break the law, but still! I couldn't pay someone to hire me. Jesus, what a nightmare.
So anyway, it's getting down to the wire, right before I was supposed to check in, and I'm like, "shit, I'm definitely gonna get thrown back in jail," so I sprint back over to my buddy's place and borrow his travelling coat and boots and grab a box and some rope, then I sprint back over to this guy on the outskirts of Downtown and beg him to let me rent out his brahmin for an hour. Guy agrees, and so right as my PO's walking up with this huge grin on her face I'm strapping this tiny ass box to the back of this brahmin and going, "oh, hey there!" [laughs] And I made up some total bullshit story about how I was really turning over a new leaf with this brahmin that I managed to scrape together enough caps to buy, and I was gonna set out and do some good, hard, honest work with ol' Betsy at my side, and things were finally coming together for me, on and on and on. I don't think that woman bought it for a second but hey, as far as she could prove I didn't have anything illegal and I had enough to qualify as a "job," so she couldn't do shit. The look on her face when she walked off! Like I'd pissed in her coffee or something.
And the old guy I rented this brahmin from was standing there watching this whole thing, of course. So when the PO takes off he comes up and he says, completely deadpan, "I gotta buy you a beer after that performance, it's the funniest thing I've seen all week." We got to talking and it turns out that he used to be some small-time caravaneer who ran all up and down along the roads from the Boneyard to Klamath for years and years before finally making enough to retire in the Hub. Go figure, right? And he's like, "listen, you need a real job or else you're gonna end up a raider, in jail again, or dead." Like…shit, when you put it like that…so he offered to set me up with a brahmin and everything and told me to get a couple of guards together, and then he sent me on a few runs for him to see if I'd actually be any good at this.
Turns out I was. Good enough to stay alive and make some money, at least. Eventually I got on steady enough ground to go into business completely for myself and I've just been going since then. I run a lot of the same trails as he did, actually, and I've forged a few of my own as well, especially through the hills way up in the north and along the coast. But I'm staying down south for a while, y'know, waiting out the winter up there. You ever been in rad snow? Awful shit. You can feel it in your bones for weeks after.
What kind of runs do you do?
Nowadays, it's mostly the kind of the general stuff you'd expect a caravan to do—some weapons, some food and drink, some building and crafting supplies, a lot of stuff that seems like junk until someone breaks it down or twists it up or whatever. We used to do a lot of really specialized hauls up and down the NCR, though, like taking ore and scrap from the Redding area to the Hub to get melted down and sold, weapons shipments between smaller settlements, stuff like that. And we got a reputation for it—small outfit, but fair prices and great service. Now that the Crimson Caravan has its hooks in everywhere, though…running a caravan is expensive, always has been. But with that kind of competition? Gets harder every run. It's lucky my crew and I are such hardasses about it, we'll hang in there until McLafferty herself comes down on us. Still, it's tough.
"This one time early on, I got kind of a weird job—woman gave me 500 caps to haul ass up north and deliver this tiny wooden box with some kind of writing carved on it to someone up in Redding within the span of a week, on the condition that I personally carry it, I couldn't strap it on to Betsy or nothing, and I couldn't open it. I was still pretty greenhorn back then, so, y'know, part of me was like, 'something feels off about this,' but that part got shut down real fast by the jingle jangle jingle of a ton of money. We were already headed up that way with some mining supplies, pickaxes and such, and this old lady is giving us almost as much as we're getting paid for that haul just to carry a little box? Hell yeah, sign me up. This was all in the Hub, and right before I was about to leave the city limits I run into my old buddy that got me started, and we're talking for a bit before he looks down and sees what I've got in my hands, and he freezes then looks me dead in the eye and says, 'you gotta throw that out right now.'
"And I'm like, what? Why? And he tells me—apparently there's some kinda weird…between NCR [the city] and Redding, on that stretch, a number of caravans have gone missing. Like, completely missing, not even bodies or a carcass left to bury them with. Eventually people started noticing that a lot of the ones that go missing have weird jobs sending them north, just like mine. Sounds like a damn ghost story or something, I know, but I argued with my friend for half an hour over it, and just the way this pretty quiet, steady guy got all worked up…I told him fine, you're so worried, I'll go find the woman and talk to her about the job, show you that it's on the level. But I couldn't find her, not even after looking for hours. I talked to people to see if they'd seen her and no one else had, not anyone in that entire town. And while I was looking I was getting this sinking feeling, like this real bad gut feeling about the whole situation, so when folks started saying, "nope, never seen anyone like that come through the Hub," that sealed the deal. We built a fire on the outskirts of town and burned the damn box. Easiest caps I've ever made, though."
The travelling's hard but I love it, for the most part. I've always been bad at staying in one place, so this works for me. Seeing new places, trying new things—I mean sure, there are downsides to it, but for the most part I love it. Really do. Gives me something to do, which is half the battle with staying out of trouble. I'm too damn old to keep ending up in jail all the time.
But what I really like about the job is…everything's on you. The whole thing, all the success and the failure and everything else between that. Because, y'know, at the end of the day, it's a dog-eat-dog world. You either make the sale, or you don't. If you do, congratulations, you get to eat tonight. If you don't? Well, fuck, better hope you have some Cram left over. The rush of it all is exciting—at least until you get home to an empty table and an empty stomach. Keeps you on your toes. Is that scary? Sure it is, especially when it's your neck on the chopping block and you and your crew haven't eaten anything substantial in days. But part of me likes it, likes the control. I don't answer to anyone anymore, at least when it comes to running my crew. For one of the first times in my life I call the shots, I make the decisions, me doing well or doing badly rests on my own choices and not someone else's. It's a lot of responsibility but it's a rush too, at least when you get it right.
And that's true still, how much I like seeing everything I see, being in the driver's seat, it's all been true since the beginning. But things change, of course. Nowadays, I got someone who's just—head over heels for me. And I'm the same for her. You don't meet a lot of people out here who you can trust with a hundred caps, let alone your life, but her? Shit. I'd walk over five miles of radioactive barrels for her and I know she'd do the same for me. How many people you know who would do that for you?
Get this—one time we were in a bar, you know, having a good time, and this jackass comes up and says to her all that, y'know, hey babe, your dress looks real nice tonight, the light makes you look like an angel, all that sort of shit. So I go, hey, who the hell are you, and he's all, "fuck off pipsqueak, I wasn't talking to you." I got so mad! And I was about to ask this asshole who the hell he was, some sloppy drunk fuckwit coming up and interrupting our date, but her, she—[laughs]—she just hauls off and cracks this guy right in the nose. No warning, nothing. And he buckles over yelling and shouting about what a bitch she is, how dare she do that, and she says, "I'm busy on a date with someone who isn't a dick, so beat it."
Holy shit, right? I knew then that she was a keeper. I'd do anything for her. Anything she wanted. There's maybe three people I've ever met who've really had my best interests at heart when they tell me something, and the other two are my guards. I've had friends and all, or people I'd call friends, at least, but these folks are something else entirely. I'd die for them. Hell, I'd live for them.
And it makes me wonder. Or worry, I guess. A lot of folks in the business eventually settle down, pick whichever town they like the best and put down roots there with their family. I never really thought about that before I met my girl, and before I got real close with my crew, but now…I mean, it's dangerous on the road. That's a given. It's dangerous not on the road, too, but it's a different set of dangers. And with how all the independent outfits are scrambling for runs now, there's a real edge to it—there just aren't enough runs for how many people are trying to get their hands on them. But now I've got people that I don't want hurt, and that I don't want to get a letter or news from some old grizzly stranger about how they found me dead in a forest, robbed of everything except my underwear. I've got people looking to me, counting on me to be the ones handing them enough money to keep them and theirs going. So that's tough. I love the work still but I'm looking at it differently now.
Do you think you're ever going to stop caravaning?
Oh lord, I don't know. [laughs] I'd have to have a plan for my future to be able to answer that question. I mean, christ, the only reason I got into it was because I was rushing around looking for something to hold off my PO with, I'm guessing that says a lot about my planning skills. But I've thought about it, sure. With all the people in my life now I'm thinking about it more. My girl's a miner up in the hills east of Redding, and I've talked about it some with her and with my crew. Talked about…I don't know, getting a big chunk of land, building some houses, and farming or ranching or something like that.
[They pause.] Part of me wonders if I'll ever be able to stay in one place that long, though. Buying land, setting up a home like that, you get stuck there, in a way. Having a place to call home in the first place means you've got anchors somewhere—it can be a steadying thing, but it also keeps you from moving, too. And putting down roots means that you start having to rub shoulders with the locals, because now you're a local, and let me tell you, that usually doesn't go well for me. So, no, I don't know if I'm ever going to stop caravaning, at least right now. But I'm thinking on it. We'll see, I suppose.
[Hot Sun, Hard Work: C&D 6. James Ackerman (Gun Shop Owner) ; fallout]
(Chapter Index)
James Ackerman runs Ackerman & Burton Arms in the Hub with his partner, an older man who introduces himself as Ken Burton. Originally from Philadelphia, Ackerman has also worked as "a caravan guard, a bartender, a field medic, a scavver, and a few other jobs that escape me at the moment. None of them were pretty, though."
I think the big reason Ken and I got into the gun business was because we were looking for a place to do more than just cool our heels. Up until that point, I'd been travelling around with a caravan, and before that I was a field medic with a small merc group up north, so I hadn't had a set place to live for...ten, fifteen years, maybe? Somewhere around that long. Time passes differently when you're alive for centuries, but it was a while, even for me. And Ken had been with the caravan way before I ever joined up with them, so at that point he'd been on the road for nearly twenty years. We were getting tired of always staying in run-down motels and people's back rooms. We wanted a place that was ours, you know? So we talked about it and eventually decided to set up shop here in the Hub. That was maybe about...what would you say, Ken, five years or so? [Ken nods. "Might be six, actually."] Yeah. Five or six, that sounds about right.
Why guns? Well, mostly because the gun business isn't all that difficult. You get guns, you fix them up, you sell them. You make friends with caravaneers so that they save some of the guns they come across for you. It looked like the easiest business to get into coming out of caravaneering, since we already had half of that equation down. Hell, the same folks that supplied us when we first started out are people we've known for over a decade, and they still come around every week or every two weeks with new shipments. Like I said, you get your guns, you fix them up, you polish them a bit, and you sell them. Nothing to it, really.
Now, of course, there's a lot of chestbeaters in some of the bigger cities, guys with sticks up their asses about how their guns are so quality, so top-notch, that you better not even look at their shitty stock wrong or they'll show you how good a shot they are. Really, if you're not the Gun Runners then you don't get to brag about how good your stock is, because everything aside from their guns are shades of junk wrapped together with duct tape and hope. And damn near everyone in the NCR knows it. But the stock at shops like ours, even the top tier pieces, are still leaps and bounds cheaper than what the Runners' guns go for, so that's our edge.
But still, I guess a nuclear holocaust hasn't changed how people will fall for flashy advertising. I've seen a lot of places go up with a whole bunch of fanfare, run hot for a month or so, flounder along for three more, then close up before they're half a year old. I think a lot of the new shop owners run into trouble by thinking they can compete with the Runners when they have the same recycled stock the rest of us have. The way to last is to sell a quality product for a reasonable price. And also to fix guns, weapons, and equipment on the side. Honestly, most of our income comes from the repair part of the shop; if it weren't for the fact that everything breaks so damn easily, we'd be out on our asses without a cap to our names. That's the big secret—repair and consistent quality. That's what keeps people in business.
[Pauses.] I used to be really anti-gun, you know. Back before the War. I worked in an emergency room for a while and I used to see people get brought in with some nasty gunshot wounds. Didn't make it a lot of the time. Now, though? Well... [Shrugs.] Times change. Hell, I don't set foot outside without my .223 or my Colt. You really can't go walking around very far from a big town without a gun or weapon of some sort.
You don't like the idea that everyone has to arm themselves?
Hell no. That's ridiculous. There's people who can't afford a gun or ammo, and people who won't carry anything for personal reasons. I don't think they deserve to get shot or stabbed or worse. Honestly, I think that there ought to be tighter gun laws to make it so that it's harder for this sort of stuff to fall into the wrong hands. There are people who would get all up on their soap boxes about that, really start ranting about "personal security" and the "right to bear arms" or whatever. The way I see it, though, having to carry a gun around because every other asshole out there is carrying one doesn't make me feel any safer. Just adds to the weight I have to lug around whenever I want to go outside.
[Pauses, sighs.] I guess I really shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth too much, though. Since Ken and I started A&B, we've never wanted for food or a place to sleep. Nowadays, guns are like liquor and drugs—the market never really takes a hit. Everyone needs guns. People that don't aren't people that end up out in places like the Hub.
Still, though. Would I rather go out of business because everyone decided they were done with guns? Sure. There's always other business to start, other ways to make money. Acting as a glorified death merchant isn't something I consider to be my life calling. Ken and I have talked about it, actually, cutting out the gun part of the shop and just being Ackerman & Burton Repair. But...well. [Sighs.] Money problems. We wouldn't be able to get by on just repair. So, we stick with guns.
I won't lie, the idea of some innocent kid getting shot with a gun from our shop...I don't know. The more time passes, the more it gets to me.
"Way back before the world got blown to hell, I was a doctor. Probably pretty tough to believe, with these hands—" He holds up his hands and wiggles his bent, gnarled fingers. "—but I was one of the better surgeons in Sacramento. I worked in the burn unit at the UC Davis Medical Center, this big hospital that UC Davis owned and operated."
He pauses. "University of California at Davis. One of the state colleges in California, like that medical school the Followers have down in the Boneyard except that they had a lot more subjects. Agriculture, veterinary care, med and pre-med, other stuff. By the look on your face, I'm guessing you didn't have a damn clue what I was talking about, which I suppose isn't too surprising. Not many people do nowadays."
I've been around for too goddamn long, honestly. I've had more jobs than almost all of the people that come through here. I suppose being alive for over two hundred years tends to lead to that sort of employment history, though. I've thought about retiring—I'm not exactly doing this for caps, at this point. But what's the point? What else would I do? Half the reason I decided to settle down with this shop is because all the walking around started to be more of a hassle than it was worth. Not just because of the jackasses out there, but because it's rough, hiking around the wasteland. My legs hurt all the time. My shoulders, elbows, hands—all of my knuckles—you could name any joint in the body and I can guarantee you, it hurts. Everything hurts. Humans aren't meant to live this long. We just aren't.
Do you miss anything about the world pre-War?
[He pauses and gently rubs his chin.] Cheesesteaks. I really miss cheesesteaks.
A customer talking to Ken on the opposite side of the shop speaks up: "'Cheesesteak'? What's that?"
A sandwich we used to have in Philly. It's steak sliced really thin with melted provolone—that's a sort of cheese—piled on an Amoroso roll. When I was a kid, we lived right around the corner from a cheesesteak place my dad's friend owned. They made everything in-house. Best damn things I've ever eaten.
The customer laughs. "A sandwich? That's what you miss from before the War?" Ackerman looks over at her and the smile on his face fades.
I miss my dad. My mom. My friends, my girl. I miss the house I grew up in, the apartment I lived in out here when everything went to hell. I miss walking into the main foyer of the hospital and being able to say that the worst part of my day was having to do some paperwork. I miss being able to walk down the street without worrying about getting shot and the smell of freshly mowed grass on early summer mornings. I miss not waking up with bits of my skin on my dirty ass mattress, I miss having more than a few patches of my hair on what's left of my scalp, I miss being afraid of what radiation would do to me. I miss not having to deal with jackasses asking if they need to drag me out to that toxic waste dump a few miles south to "freshen me up."
But you know what? I don't usually feel like thinking about all that stuff. Because it's not coming back even if I do miss it. And I do—I always will, probably, up until the day my body finally decides it's had enough and I keel over on my workbench. But missing it isn't going to do shit but make me feel bad, so when someone comes in and asks me what I miss about the world before it got blown to hell, I say cheesesteaks. It's the easiest answer, and besides, I do miss being able to eat a sandwich that doesn't taste like ass and doesn't set off a Geiger counter. You runts don't even remember cheese.
[He pauses again, then laughs and shakes his head.] Jesus, I never thought I'd be talking to anyone that didn't remember cheese. What a world we live in.
[family ; original ; tw: suicide (mention), drug use (implied)]
"There's always going to be an addiction," she mumbles into her nearly gone cigarette, eyes sliding shut for a few seconds before she cracks them back open again. "That's just how it is for some people. Some people have God, some people have friends, and some people—"
She coughs, long and deep and rattling. Her cigarette very nearly slips out of her shaking fingers and the woman she's talking to claps her on the back a few times.
"Jesus, you okay?"
After a moment, the coughs peter into barking, raspy laughs. She straightens up and leans back against the wall, fights gravity even though her quads tremble and her body aches for the ground.
"—and some people have addictions. That's how it goes, sometimes."
The haze surges and makes her head too heavy to hold up, makes her eyes burn too much to keep open. When she lifts the cigarette back to her mouth she misses and hits herself in the cheek with the filter.
"You might want to think about cutting yours off. Seems like they're getting to you a little too much."
The woman's words feel like they're coming from the other side of a transcontinental train tunnel—very faint, too far away to take in aside from their pinpricks of light way off in the darkness. After a long few seconds her head lightens a bit, just enough for her to look up at the woman beside her, nod, and laugh before she slumps back over again.
"Maybe. You might be right. Probably are, actually, but...." The words slur into each other and get lost in the sharp December air. She tries to take the final drag again and, this time, succeeds. More coughs rip through her chest. "And some people, the lucky bastards, somehow have just the first two." A pause. "I'm a born again Christian, actually. Converted in the hospital."
The woman glances over at her. "What were you in the hospital for?"
"Nearly threw myself off a building when I was drunk one night." She flops her head back and forth, tries to lift it up again and fails. Her eyes slide shut again and she doesn't bother trying to open them. "I tripped over my own feet on the way up, though, and my super found me sobbing in the stairwell."
The soft sound of rustling clothes and a weight shift bounces down the tunnel toward her. The woman can't meet her eye, not that she can really look up and open her own to offer it anyway. "Are you...?"
She snorts. "Don't ask questions you won't like the answer to."
And after that there are no words for a while, just the soft taps of raindrops on rusted car roofs and patched up buildings, the firm scrape of her boot grinding the dead cigarette into the ground. She roots through her coat pocket for the pack; when she finds and opens it with trembling fingers, there's nothing inside except the empty dime bag. A sigh, then a wavering grin.
"I'm better at friends and addiction than God, though," she murmurs as she slides down the wall to slouch on the sidewalk. "As it turns out, I'm a shit Christian."
"You're talented," she says as her eyes scan the paper. She takes a drag off her cigarette and glances up at you. "Like, really. You've got something."
You shrug. "Just something I needed to get out."
"Wish I could release pressure like this."
Time trickles by as she goes over it again. You run your feet along the industrial carpeting of her apartment, lean your head heavy in your hand as you watch her read. There's little quirks in her face as her eyes flick down the paper—a soft nod, the corner of her mouth twitching up or down, her eyebrows raising or scrunching.
Your own brow crinkles as you notice all this. She looks so...alive, considering what she's reading. You frown a little, roll your shoulders as she looks back up at you.
"Are you still here?"
Your head snaps toward her. "What?"
"Are you still here?" She shakes the paper. "Wherever you were when you wrote this."
"Oh. Uh...." You roll your shoulders again, rub the back of your neck. Run your fingers through your hair. "Not much, nowadays. Sometimes."
"Sometimes" catches in your throat for half a second and "not much" wavers enough for your chest to tighten, but she only nods, slow and solemn. For a long minute the only sound in the room is the AC unit kicking on again, stuttering in the dry summer heat as it tries to keep up with the thermostat. She just stares at you, then back at the paper, then at you again before sighing and turning to collapse back against the couch.
"You scare me a lot," she murmurs. Another drag; the smoke comes out in a long, straight trail. "I'm so scared that I'm gonna wake up one morning and find out that you jumped off a building or something."
"I wouldn't do that." It's always been pills, or a train. A gun, if you could ever get your hands on one. You clench your jaw and try to want to catch her eye; lucky for you, when you turn to do so, she’s just looking up at the ceiling and shaking her head slightly.
"Don't tell me that if you're lying."
"I'm not."
"I'm so worried." Her voice cracks on the last word and the cigarette starts to tremble in her fingers. "I'm so worried about you and I don't know what to do."
"You don't have to do anything."
"It's not about having to do anything, it's about you writing stuff like this and then turning around and telling everyone you're fine." And now she looks at you. There's tears beading along her lower eyelids and the familiar tug of guilt starts up right beneath your sternum. "And I don't know what to do about that. I'm scared you're gonna kill yourself and I won't have been able to do anything to try and stop it."
And despite that guilt hanging heavy off your rib bones there's something about her statement that sends sparks flying across your mind, that puts sharper words are on the tip of your tongue—I don't need anyone to do anything for me, there's some things that you can't just stop, I'm not a fucking charity case looking for someone to come rescue me from myself. I don't want to talk about this anymore.
But you manage to keep your worn down teeth closed tight against each other and speak when you have something marginally better to say: "You're doing enough. And really, I'm okay."
She holds your gaze. You eventually break and look off to your right at the wall again. When you glance back, she's back to staring up at the ceiling.
"Promise you'll call me if it's bad."
"I promise." There's a thin wobble to the whole sentence this time. Her head snaps back to you and she sits up slightly.
"Promise me. I need you to promise that you'll call me before you do anything." She follows your gaze at it drops to the worn couch cushion. "Please. Please promise me."
Her eyes bore into your head and you struggle to keep from squeezing yours shut and curling up into a ball and rolling out her front door to somewhere else. To anywhere else.
"Please."
"I will."
A beat, two beats, and she pulls back. After a few trembling breaths the smell of her shampoo is washed out of your nose by her secondhand smoke and you rub your face with your hands.
"I'm sorry you're going through this," she says eventually. Her voice is small, so much smaller than you're used to, and hoarse to the point that whole syllables are lost in the air that catches on her strained vocal chords. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. This much pain...I can't even imagine."
She takes a long final drag off her cigarette and stubs it out in the ashtray on the coffee table before looking back at you and shaking her head. "You're talented and beautiful in so many ways, and I'm just so sorry that you are where you are right now."
You hold her gaze for a moment before pulling her into a tight, long hug. When you split, there's a chill in your body that keeps goosebumps running along your spine and arms long after the AC kicks off for good.
[Hot Sun, Hard Work: C&D 5. Shu Leung (Debt Collector) ; fallout]
(Chapter Index)
Shu Leung is a debt collector who also works for Nash & Johnson. She is one of the firm's "low level" debt collectors, who are sent out to talk to people who haven't responded to letters about their debt or who don't have a set or known address. "Officially, we're referred to as 'initial contact.' As in, we make initial physical contact with people." Originally from the Boneyard, she works primarily in the southern part of the Core Region.
I haven't been in the debt collection business all that long. I was hired about six months ago. Before this, I was a bounty hunter for two years, and before that I was involved with the Followers. I took up this job mostly because of money—bounty hunting just wasn't paying the bills and getting food in my mouth. I was passing through the Hub and happened to catch sight of a "help wanted" sign on a door. Stepped in, talked to this lady for a while, and they sent me on a trial run with one of their more experienced collectors. Probably should've just declined the job after that run, but...y'know. The money was good, and everyone seemed impressed when I came back. So I took the job.
"I thought the Followers was going to be where I was for life, but I ended up leaving after four years because they just weren't for me. I mean, they do great stuff, and I admire all the people that stick with them, but it was a little stagnant for me, personally. I've never been interested in the doctor stuff and probably wouldn't have made the cut for the school anyway, so I was stuck between being a scribe and a research assistant. I joined them because I really wanted to make a difference in the wasteland, and here I was copying passages out of books and watching experiments. Didn't feel like I was really doing anything meaningful.
I appreciate everything they did for me, and I did learn a hell of a lot about pretty much everything while I was with them, but I figured out that I wasn't meshing well and decided to just break off before I started being more of a hindrance than a help."
Collecting's not a particularly straining job, all things considered. I think most people think of collecting as a really rough 'n tough job—y'know, go out and beat people up and take their money. But it's not like that. At least not at the lower level, where I am. Most of my time's spent travelling from place to place, tracking down leads on where so-and-so lives. Then knocking on doors and talking to people. I spend very little of my time actually collecting any payments, and when I do, the money's never in my hands for very long. I mean, it's good, and I'm glad that I'm not a high level collector, really. They're the ones that get in fights. I don't fight, not really...only when there's not another way out. [Laughs weakly.] One of the reasons I wasn't a very good bounty hunter.
Some of the scuzzier people I've met—outside of the job, not debtors—have asked me if I ever skim money off the payments, ever report a smaller payment than I get. I mean, some of the debtors ask me that, too, but it's not a business proposition like it is from the skeezy people, it's a "you're taking my money and I want to make sure you're not gonna run off and blow it on booze and chems" question. I would never, not in a million years, steal that money. I'm not a scumbag, and anyways they'd catch me as I was slipping it in my pocket. I swear, when it comes to money Nash & Johnson runs a tighter ship than the government. They keep track of every cap. Every single one. No way anyone who wasn't some sort of accounting genius would be able to steal anything from them without them knowing. It's admirable, in a way. You have to respect that sort of efficiency and thoroughness, even if it's not really pointed in the right direction.
What do you think about the DCRA?
The what?
The Debt Collection Restraint Act?
Oh. Is that that new law that they passed? I haven't heard the name of it before now, so...well, honestly, I haven't heard much about it at all. My handler at HQ's mentioned it in passing a few times, but nothing in detail...apparently it doesn't go into effect until next year, anyway. From what little I've heard, though, I like it. I like the idea of it. I've heard horror stories about collectors doing some really, really bad stuff to debtors to get them to pay. People working on commission or whatever, you know, the desperate sort, apparently they're not adverse to breaking a few bones. Or worse. I'm glad there's going to be hard-set limits and punishments. I hope the NCR really follows through with enforcing it. I'll have to look into it more...
"When I was a kid I wanted to be a superhero, like you see in some of the pre-War magazines and holovids. I wanted to go out and fight evil, beat down bad guys and throw 'em in jail and everything. My mom made me this cape and I used to wear it everywhere, all the time. I grew up a little and realized things weren't as cut and dry as they are in comic books, but I never stopped wanting to take down bad guys. Kind of a far cry from what I'm doing now."
I mean...I don't like my job, no. There's days when I really hate it. Some of these people...you can just tell they've seen bad shit, been through bad times. And here I am, knocking on their door—when they have a door—and telling them, "hey, you need to pay this money." They don't have that money. Sometimes it's because they were irresponsible and lost it all, or didn't plan well, but sometimes it's just because...they don't have any money. And it's not their fault, it's just because they're poor. Maybe they lost their job, maybe they got hurt and couldn't work, and so they got a loan or they got something on credit and they knew they couldn't pay it back, but it was go into debt or die right then. If they had money to pay this I wouldn't be knocking on their door.
And these people look at me and sometimes they scream and holler and shout and all, saying "well, I'm not gonna pay this because blah blah blah," but a lot of the time they just sorta...nod, or tell me they know, that I'm not the first person to knock on their door about this. Sometimes they cry. That's the worst, when they cry, because I want to comfort them—say "it's okay, it's alright, just because you owe this money doesn't mean you're bad or anything, you're still a person, just a person in a tight bind," because I think a lot of collectors and agencies want to make debtors feel like they're not even worth the air they breathe. But at the same time, I can't, because I've got to ride them about this money because the company's paying my bills and... [She pauses for a moment, wiping away tears and steadying her breathing.]
I don't get the collectors that can just see them all as blank faces or whatever they tell themselves to get through the day. They're not blank faces. They're people. Real, live people, people that've seen things and felt things and have personalities and memories and dreams and fears and...I'm not cut out for this at all. I can't help but see people as people, even if they're in a bad situation, even if they've done bad stuff. I wonder about their parents. What would they say? Do they have family that knows about this debt? The worst visits are when the person has a family, when their wife or kid comes to the door. What do you say to them? Sometimes they don't even know. "He owes what? She owes what?" It shouldn't be a stranger breaking that news to them.
I go home or wherever I'm staying and lay down and can't go to sleep because I just think about this. All the time, I think about what I do, about the things I do to people. I'm not cut out for this at all.
[Hot Sun, Hard Work: C&D 4. Leslie Bernard (Regional Head of Operations, Collections Agency) ; fallout]
(Chapter Index)
Leslie works for Nash & Johnson Collections, a collections agency based in the Hub, and is head of the firm's operations in the Mojave. Her son is enlisted in the Army and has been stationed near Sac-Town for the past year.
I've been working in collections for about fifteen years. I was actually one of Nash & Johnson's accountants when they first formed. They started as a small collections office in the Hub, working with some of the smaller caravans that were based there. About a year after I was hired, we caught a lucky break when the Crimson Caravan started looking for a new firm to handle their debts. They hired us on right as their most recent upward swing started. We've grown with them.
I moved from accountant to supervisor in about four years. My official promotion was in '69, right when Nash opened its first office outside of the Hub in New Reno. I was sent as part of the management team to oversee the transition. I was thrilled for the opportunity—I was born and raised in the Hub, and while I love the city I'd always wanted to see more of the republic. On top of that, I was happy to be moving up. Being an accountant wasn't boring, exactly, but it wasn't exciting either. I was the head accountant in the firm at the time, which is just a step below the managerial positions, and I was looking for more of a challenge in my work. [Laughs.] The promotion certainly took care of that. As a manager, when you walk into work every day you're not sure what you're going to do. You could have a slow, boring day where you don't have much to do, or the entire world could've come undone overnight and you're left to put it back together. I like that sort of challenge in my work.
I started off as a supervisor for the accounting crew, which meant most of my job consisted of me reviewing the reports the head accountant sent to me about the branch's expenses and finances, both internal and client-related, and making decisions based on those reports. Sometimes that meant closing a case that was taking up too much of our time with too little payoff, sometimes that meant upgrading a case so that more of our resources were focused on it, and sometimes that meant cutting back or expanding our branch's staff. I was also responsible for each accountant's performance and okaying their changes to the cases and accounts. If someone made a ten dollar mistake, that ten dollars would have come out of my paycheck. Same if it was a ten thousand dollar mistake. But my accountants had sharp eyes and sharper heads, so that was never a problem. In the five years I was there, we had one mistake. It was for three caps. That's amazing, for this business. That's practically unheard of. Like I said, great accountants.
I stayed in that position for about two years, then I was promoted to assistant branch manager, and, a year later, branch manager, which entailed about everything you'd think it would. Mostly more decisions and more report reading, only the reports were thicker and your decisions carried a lot more weight. It's more responsibility, but more reward—financially, of course, but career-wise, too. You can make an impact and really see it from up there. You can see growth much more than you can in the lower levels, where it's mostly just transfer orders and rumors.
Over the five years I was in New Reno we opened branches in a few other cities, like San Francisco and New California Republic, but the big move has been out east. We set up a branch in the Mojave in '74, right after the New Vegas Treaty was signed and formalized. I spearheaded a push to move out this way back in '72, once I started to see the potential in the area. The Mojave's a good market for collection agencies; we were getting inquiries from some of our clients about whether or not we offered collection services that far east all the way back in '71. It took a few years, but now we have a branch set up here in Primm, and I was named chief operations officer in the region, second only to the regional head. I took care of the day-to-day matters and advised the head about how we were doing, what we should set our sights on for the future. Then the regional head retired, and I was promoted to his job.
Contrary to what you might think, it's not all that different from being a branch manager, except for the fact that I get flooded with reports from collection services on top of accounting reports, and that I report straight to Nash and Johnson themselves. But it's a lot of the same work—making decisions, trying to see the future. Steering the firm in the way that I think will pay off for us in the long run. Out here, it's an entirely different environment than back west, and that means different factors to consider. We have the Strip to think about, the different political conflicts in the region, the different business interests to play to. I look at that. My branch manager takes care mostly of running the actual physical location; I deal with the imaginary and the intangible. But it's the same motions, a lot of the time. The only big difference is scale.
[She pauses, takes a sip of water, and continues.]
I'm good at my job, and I like it. I know there's a lot of reason for people in this business to not like their jobs. Honestly, I've had my share of reservations about it over the years, and still have some now, but at the end of the day I like what I do. I really like what I do. I'm not going to try to make it pretty, or glamorous, because Nash & Johnson isn't a pretty or glamorous firm. We're debt collectors. We aren't monsters, and we aren't heartless—which are things I've been called several times. We're hired to perform a service, and we perform it with respect to both sides. That's what I tell people who side-eye me when I tell them what I do. People think it's blood money—it's not. Not for us, at least. I sleep easy at night.
"My son Joseph is in the Army. He's wanted to enlist since he was about six or so. His father was a military man—a captain. He was killed in action. I've never been comfortable with Joseph wanting to follow in his father's footsteps like that, but as he got older...the light in his eyes when he talks about serving. I couldn't bring myself to stop him, and I doubt he'd listen to me if I did. I worry about him so much, sometimes, even though he's in a 'safe' area. Safer than the Mojave, anyway. In his letters, he says he's more worried about me than I am about him. Honestly, I don't know what to make of that..."
Some recent legislation has put restrictions on what we can do to collect a debt, to protect the debtors. The Debt Collection Restraint Act. The less reputable agencies are grumbling about it, but honestly, the limits aren't all that restrictive for anyone who was already engaging in good practices. It's morbid, but there's a saying in this business—"a corpse doesn't pay." Unfortunately, there are people who are willing to go right up to the line on that one. It's sick, the things I've heard when talking to collectors. The second hand stories you get...
Personally, I'm glad to see something like the DCRA. I mean, it won't have any bite to it unless the NCR is willing to send people out to enforce it, but I like that this sort of groundwork is being set up for debtor protection. Up until now, there's been no supervision over this industry on the government's part whatsoever. Collectors could go to almost any lengths to collect their money, up to and including physical assault and what basically amounted to turning people into indentured servants. Almost all of the established collection firms didn't go that far, but there were some that did, and many of the "independent" debt collectors are known for being particularly brutal. Hopefully this new act will be enough to scare people off from those kinds of methods. Or at least punish them if they do.
On top of that, the act makes our job easier, as well. Now we have more legal steps we can take with debtors that refuse to pay, or that can't afford to pay. While we have clear lines drawn between what we can and can't do, we have more guidance and support from the government when we're working inside those lines. With some of the more aggressive debtors, we can even request assistance from local police or the Rangers. Granted, I'm...not entirely sure how I feel about a military division stepping into civil matters like these, but I'm also not out on the ground. I've talked about it with a few of our more "high-level" collectors—collectors that deal with debtors that owe quite a bit of money, or that have repeatedly refused to engage with us on any level but a hostile one—and their reactions have ranged from indifferent to happy. Rangers are the last resort, of course, but I think a lot of collectors take comfort in knowing they've got that level of support if they really need it. At least, they have that level in theory. Like I said, we'll see how all this actually works in practice.
I know a lot of the more brutal collectors have used the government's distance from private debt collection as an excuse for why they do some of the things they do, and while I don't agree with the lengths they go to, I do think that the lack of government involvement has been a problem for a long time. On both sides. The DCRA protects us and protects the debtors in equal measures—I'm very excited to see how it all pans out.
What do you think of the debtors?
For all the years that I've been working at Nash, I've never been able to see them in a bad light. I know that probably sounds rich, coming from me in my position, but I don't. Not many people at the agency do, or if they do they keep it out of their work. These people aren't statistics, or blank faces, they're humans. They've made mistakes—okay. We get it. We try and work with them, set up payment plans and generally be relatively flexible. Other firms don't do that. Independent collectors definitely don't do that.
Everyone at Nash & Johnson is committed to being humane while also doing our jobs and doing them well. We treat people like people. I like to think it's one of the reasons we're the most successful collections agency in the NCR.
[Hot Sun, Hard Work: C&D 3. Tom Alfero (Courier) ; fallout]
(Chapter Index)
Tom Alfero works as an independent courier in the northern Core Region. After "getting his ass handed to him at the Mojave Express and in Vegas," he moved back west and started taking up messenger jobs on his own.
The most important thing in courier work is the shoes. The gun? Eh. I know a lot of soldier-types that would punch me in the face for this, but to me, a gun's a gun. If it shoots, there's not a lot that's special about it. But shoes? Oh, shoes'll make or break you as a courier. Or as anyone who walks around, really. I've seen some younger kids set off to walk to Reno or Vegas in these shitty boots, or worse, these flat things that are just a step above walking on pavement in your bare feet, and I just cringe and go, "Why? Why would you do that? You're not gonna make it a mile!" Greenhorn mistake.
Now see these? [Alfero swings his foot up onto the diner table.] Now these are the kind of shoes you need. They're made by this small place in San Francisco. I had to pay nearly a hundred and fifty bucks for them, but they've lasted me three times as long as the crap things I used to buy, and they've still got a good two months in them. I could walk to the moon and back in these boots and not even feel it. When I lay my head down at the end of the day, my feet ache a little, but they're just fine after a good night's sleep. You don't wake up exhausted and in pain before you even hit the road.
Shoes are what make a courier, not a gun. Anyone who's been working in this business for longer than a month or two will say the same thing.
"I'm originally from San Francisco, but my dad and I started moving around a lot after my mom died when I was ten or eleven. My dad was the sort of guy who was never good at staying in one place—runs in the family, I guess. Ended up in Redding before I got restless and decided to strike out on my own. That was, oh, when I was sixteen, maybe. I was young. Stupid, too. Can't say I'm a lot smarter, really, but I'm not as much of an idiot. I've learned a few things wandering around.
"Originally I was going to join up with the army, but right before I left home I got word that a good buddy of mine got killed in action. Shook me right off the military path. Considering what seems to be going on out east, I'd say that was a good thing. And I'm crap with a gun, anyway, so I wouldn't have been any good to anyone. Maybe I would've been a good clerk, but a soldier? Jesus. Can't imagine it."
I think part of the reason I started doing courier work in the first place was because I was already walking around a lot. I was kind of a drifter when I first set out on my own. Went around, did odd jobs for people. Got in trouble. A lot of trouble, at times—I ran my mouth like nobody's business, but didn't have the punching skills to back it up. After a year or so of bouncing around from job to job, I was rolling out of this one small town when this lady came up to me and asked if I was going to...I don't remember where. Modoc, maybe. I didn't know where I was going, so I said, sure, I'm heading out that way.
And she says, "Well, if you take these letters and drop them off with so-and-so, I'll pay you fifty caps right now and you'll get another fifty from them." I was a stupid-ass kid with no money, so of course I'm all, "Oh, yeah, lady, I'll carry those letters for you! No problem!" I didn't have a clue where this town was but hey, yeah, I'll deliver your letters. I got lost no less than four times and I nearly got shot to death by some guy that lived in a cave, but I delivered those letters and came out of it a hundred and fifteen caps richer. Been a courier ever since.
Some couriers, they're just in it temporarily, just as a way to earn some quick caps. But me? I'm a lifer. I've worked a few other jobs, of course; I worked at a brahmin ranch right after I left home, then I was a bartender for a bit after I ran into some trouble and got scared off from courier work for a while, and several years ago I tried setting up shop in the Hub but that ended up not working out. I've always come back to running things for people. I don't know, there's just something about it that I like and that I'm good at. At this point, I think I'd be bored stiff in any other job.
A lot of my business actually comes from small towns on the outskirts of the bigger cities, or from people that live pretty far out from everything. I have some people I see regularly, some folks that are too old or too sick to really travel far on their own. I pick up food or water and such and bring it to them, run their mail to them every week. I know these people really well. A few of them even let me shack up with them for the night. Really nice people, all of them.
My other work comes from business people who need a letter or contract taken from here to there, a mom sending a package of something to her kid living off somewhere. Some jobs from a firm out of Sac-Town whose owner I know, which are kind of dangerous, because their packages mostly have money in them or sensitive information. Good pay, though. I've gotten a job from the NCR maybe once or twice in all the years I've been doing this—they've got their own people to run their stuff, and the things they run aren't the kinds of packages you want to be carrying around, anyway. Government stuff. Might as well paint a target on your back.
Lately, there's been talk of some sort of state-run courier service. But there's been talk of that for years, ever since I started as a courier. Personally, I don't think the government's going to make good on the rumors. It'd be too expensive, and with all the dust they're kicking up in the Mojave, they don't have cash to spare. Independent couriers are going to be here for a good while longer.
So you're not worried about possibly being out of a job?
I don't think there's anything to worry about, no. Not in my lifetime, anyway. Let those kids worry about it thirty, forty years from now. We'll probably be done with the war by then. [Laughs.]
It's not as hectic as it used to be. Back when I first started I was running up and down the Core Region, from the Boneyard to New Reno and back, doing these crazy deliveries on ridiculous schedules. Oh, I used to be very well known in the right circles. "Fastest feet in the west" was a name I heard if I walked into certain bars. But now I've got my steady routes up here in the north, and I like it. Whenever I run across an old buddy they laugh and say, "Hey, how's retirement treating you? How many steps between Redding and Modoc?" I see the same view every week or so, sure, but I've gotten to like the consistency. I need a bit of it as I get into my old age. [Laughs.] Forty four...jesus. Time flies.
Nowadays I'm seeing fewer and fewer of my old courier friends, getting news of their...well, y'know. The wastes are still dangerous, even to us old timers. Especially to us old timers. You get cocky out there or start feeling too safe, you get a bullet to the head, or you get your arm ripped off or poisoned or something. I've had a few close calls, myself. This one time I was up near Sac-Town, somewhere near the 50-80 split, when I saw this gang coming down the road. Looked like a bunch of 80s, and well-armed, too. I didn't want any trouble and they were a ways off, so I figured I'd just duck out and hide somewhere along the road. Well...they caught sight of me right as I hopped the guardrail. Long story short, I spent six hours cowering in a shack while they were banging around trying to find me. Worse stuff happened in Vegas, if you can believe it. Never let it be said that the wasteland's been tamed.
"I guess all the travelling around I did as a kid stuck with me, because I've never been able to just settle in any one place. There's been a few times where I've thought about getting a house somewhere, getting some place I could really call home, but...I don't know. It's just never worked out. Never really had a reason to, I guess—I travel so much that all my house would do is cost me money and gather dust. And I've never really had time to find anyone I'd like to settle down with, anyway. I'm sort of turned off to the whole idea of 'settling down,' at this point."
Courier work is nothing special. Really. A lot of kids like to romanticize it, I think, especially kids from small towns where they don't get to see a lot of the world, but it's not very glamorous. The most glamorous my job ever was was when I was doing those crazy runs, and even then it wasn't all that glamorous to most people. In terms of my job, I'm a pair of legs with a bag slung across my back and that's about it. If it wasn't me, it'd be someone else.
Now, I don't necessarily mind that, but some people try to make me feel like shit about it. I just laugh at them. Who's the one that can cover twenty six miles on foot in a day and rest easy at night? Not any of those brahmin ranchers. Who's the one that's going to bring you those letters and packages that you need to make that big deal? Not some casino bigshot. So I just shake my head at people that think I'm not worth giving the time of day to. Who needs 'em?
It's hard work, but I enjoy the job. I'm not saving the world or anything, but I like what I do. I get to travel, get to see all sorts of things. I know the highways and roads like the back of my hand by now, and people respect that. It's nice to walk up to a house and have people come out and smile at you. Beats hiding from some raiders in a shack any day of the week.
[Hot Sun, Hard Work: C&D 2. Adrian Ubina (Buyer for Strip Travellers) ; fallout]
(Chapter Index)
Me? I live in Westside. As soon as I get done delivering a case of special colored Nuka to a client at the Ultra-Luxe, I drag my ass home and hope I don't get shot before I make it to my mattress. It's—honestly, it's bullshit. I serve people living in the lap of luxury, and most days I come home to find some drunk passed out on my bed. It's ridiculous.
At 25, Adrian Ubina has built up a business as a "'procurement specialist'—which is just fancy Strip talk for a walking, talking shopping cart that brings stuff right to people's hotel rooms." Ubina is originally from New Reno, but moved to the Mojave soon after the New Vegas Treaty was signed to "see what all the fuss was about down south."
I hitched my way down to Vegas with an old caravaneer and her guards when I was seventeen. Luckiest thing to happen to me—some bright-eyed kid wandering down 80 with not much more than shitty old gun and a backpack full of food and water? There's no way I wouldn't have run into trouble. Luckily, I caught up to this little caravan outfit not too far from Reno. Bought a beer and got to talking with the caravaneer herself, and she offered me a spot as a "junior guard." Looking back on it, I'm pretty sure she was just taking pity on some teenager that she didn't want to see get smeared up and down 95, because I never so much as drew my gun. If I ever see her again, I'm gonna buy her a bottle of whiskey or something to give her a proper thanks.
My luck ran out when I actually got to Vegas, though, funny enough. Place was all lit up, though I don't think I was as dazzled by it as a lot of the tourists. Grew up in Reno, so, y'know, I like to think I'm used to light shows. It was still impressive, though. Must take a hell of a lot of electricity to run all that, but hey, NCR's got that dam up and running, right? Anyway, place looked nice on the outside, but I got stranded out in Freeside the first night I was in town. "You need a passport," all that shit. Might've tried making a run for it, but I was exhausted. Good thing I didn't—I've seen what those robots do to people.
So I stuck around in Freeside for a while. Place was on its way to becoming a shithole then, too. Took a while, but I managed to earn some caps doing odds and ends for people—some repair work, worked as a bouncer at the Silver Rush back when it was a casino—and managed to get myself a decent suit and a passport. Vegas is nicer on the inside, obviously, but if you don't have money to spare, it's a boring place to get ripped off for drinks.
Bounced around the casinos for a day or two before I came across this guy at the bar in the Tops. Big guy, looked pretty flashy—rings and stuff, a big gold cross, y'know, stuff you don't see on anyone but people looking to show off their money. Somehow, we got to talking, and my little stint with the caravaneer came up—I didn't mention that I was a "junior guard," figured the guy would drop me like yesterday's trash—and he goes, "Oh, so you're good with a gun? Know your way around the area?" What was I gonna say? "Nah, I'm so new I don't know where to go to take a piss"? I told him yeah, I'd been around the area for a while, and he offers me some caps to go pick up something in Freeside. Some fancy something or other he'd ordered at a shop.
Now, I'm no one's errand boy—or, well, I wasn't—but he offered me two hundred caps to go pick up this package and drop it off. Two hundred caps for a fifteen minute walk! I was still a dumb greenhorn, so I didn't ask, y'know, is it chems, is it a bomb. I just said, "Yeah, I'll go." Still had a little bit of luck going for me, though, since the whole thing turned out to be just as boring as I expected. I go, pick up a box, deliver it, and bam, two hundred caps in my pocket. Easy money.
And so I figured, "hey, maybe I could make this into a bit of a business." You know these Strip people, they don't like getting their hands dirty. Only reason they'll set foot in Freeside is if they're on their way in or out of Vegas. But they still want all the local goods, y'know, they want to feel like they're "locals" or whatever. But they only want the right local sort of stuff, stuff that'll show everyone how rich and travelled they are. None of those squirrel sticks. And here I am, and I'm not exactly a local, but I can learn fast enough, and I'm okay with a gun—well, I am now, I was crap at it until a ghoul sat me down and showed me how to hold one so I wouldn't break my hand when I pulled the trigger—and hey, why not? I could be a middleman. A buyer. Go out, pick stuff up, buy stuff they might like, come back and make deliveries and sales pitches, get paid. Just until I got on my feet. Easy money.
[Laughs.] Yeah. That was seven years ago and I'm still doing it. "Just until I got on my feet," yeah...
But I do like the job. I get to get out and see the world—I check out caravans and see what they've got, travel around and hit up other places like Novac and the 188. Some people just want more chems than they can get on the Strip or want them without actually having to show their face to buy them, but a lot of the clients I have are looking for exciting stuff, stuff they can take home and show off or give as "authentic New Vegas souvenirs." Sometimes they're looking for specific pieces, sometimes they don't have a clue, so I usually need to have a pretty good selection of items for them to choose from. Every week or every other week I usually take a few days off to go make my runs. Though it's more like every other week, now that they've got part of 15 shut down. Makes the trip a lot longer, but I guess it's better than getting mauled by deathclaws.
I suppose I should probably hire someone to actually do the legwork of going from place to place to shop around, but I don't make a lot of money, and anyway the legwork's the part of the job I enjoy the most. I've always liked travelling. When I was a kid I thought I was going to be running my own caravan by now, actually. I figure this is—well, maybe not the next best thing, but a step or two down. Not too bad. I'd be lying if I said there aren't days where I want to break off, get another brahmin, and sign up with the Crimson Caravan, but I've got a pretty good lot here, too. Better than a lot of the people I see on my way to and from the Strip, anyway.
A lot of my clients I meet by just talking to them at the bar. I mostly hit up the Tops—good bar, good casino, that stage they've got, it's a flytrap for people that want to show off their money but can't afford to get into the Ultra-Luxe. I do hit up the Luxe, too, though it's a crapshoot if I'm going to get in, and even if I do a lot of the people that go there just turn up their noses and act like we don't even speak the same language. Vault 21's not exactly the sort of place where people who want a buyer go. I like kicking back there from time to time, though—it's nice, laid back. Just not rich. Gomorrah...good money, but skeezy. All the clients that've screwed me over I've met at Gomorrah. The place is just bad news. I mean, all the casinos have their sketchy people, but Gomorrah...I don't know. I think it's the lighting. Place feels like a damn cave, even on the casino floor.
Regardless of the casino, though, the process is basically the same. Mostly you just have to go up and talk to people, get them comfortable with you. People don't trust you when you're just having a conversation, they're definitely not going to trust you with their goods. It's all about the relationship you have with people. If you're not a people person, there's no way you could do this. You've got to get friendly with them, booze and shmooze, get them laughing and talking about themselves—their money, what they've got going on back home, why they're here. What they like about Vegas, what they don't like about everywhere else outside of Vegas. Then you mention, "Oh, yeah, I can get why you don't like Freeside. Place is dangerous if you don't know the right people. But, y'know, I know the right people, and let me tell you what you're missing..." You go in for the kill. If you set yourself up right, it's easy money.
Do I like the people? Well. Some of them I like quite a bit. There's some people that are smart, funny, that aren't jerks with their money. They don't think it makes them fundamentally better than you or me. I can sit down with them, have a few beers, and really have a good conversation. Those are the clients I like best. Others...they really like to show off with their money, think it makes them so damn special that they've got a thousand caps they can piss away without too much worry. They talk about everyone else outside of Vegas like they're pieces of shit, me included. I try not to hang around them too much before they start thinking I'm their damn slave. Those people I don't like at all, no.
I don't think this is a big business. Honestly, most of my clients don't stay long anyway. There's a few who actually live on the Strip proper, but most people are just here for a few weeks. My client turnover's pretty horrific, but that's how it goes. This place runs on tourists, and tourists don't stick around. They do tip well, though, at least most of them. There's fewer crap-outs than you'd think. Most people like paying their bill, I think, so long as it's in their sweet spot, because then they get the satisfaction of knowing they have the money to pay their debts and get nice things without actually spending a lot of money. Or what they think isn't a lot of money. These people...
But really, there's no one else doing what I do. That's part of the reason I feel okay talking to you about all this, aside from the fact that most of my clients aren't permanent. I'm not worried about competition. It's not that other people couldn't do it, but I'm pretty sure people don't even know about it. Most people, I tell them I'm a buyer for people on the Strip, they go, "What? What the hell's that?" When I explain it to them, they go, "That's dumb, who would pay you to do that?" I mean, they usually phrase it a little nicer, but that's the gist of it. I don't blame them—if someone came up to me and told me the same thing, I'd go, "Well, what the hell use is that?" It's not prestigious work, not at all. But the way I see it, yeah, my job isn't exactly necessary, but it's not necessary to go and blow money on card games, either. I'm just playing to the market.
Besides that, it's hard work. It's like running a caravan except you don't get the same sort of respect. Most of my clients don't even know my real name—I go by another name when I'm introducing myself to Strip folks. Adrian Ubina just doesn't have the same sort of ring to it, and here, the ring is everything. Your image has to be top notch, absolutely polished. You've gotta look perfect, like everything else, or people just spit on you and laugh. It's rough.
One time, a few years ago when I was still sorta new to the whole business, I woke up a little late. I was in a rush, so I didn't do my whole morning routine—I have all these things I do in the morning, so I look as good as I can. You don't know how many clients I've gotten because someone likes my hair. [Laughs.] So anyway, instead of doing my whole morning routine I just brushed my hair back, threw on one of my suits that wasn't so nice. I wasn't going to be in it long, anyway, since I was starting on a run later that day. But I had to talk to a client on the Strip about some money issues first, and none of my clients are gonna say two words to me if I show up in travelling clothes.
So I run over to the Strip in this not-great suit, and I run up to where the guy's staying at the Tops, and—it's not early, exactly. Maybe, what, ten, eleven in the morning? Like I said, I overslept. So I run up and knock on their door, and the guy that answers isn't wearing anything but some ratty old robe. And get this—he's dressed like a damn hooker, and he says to me: "God, what happened to you? You look like you got caught in a brahmin stampede."
This guy, saying this to me! And his robe's probably over a hundred years old and probably belonged to some dead old lady. And he owed me fifty caps. I wanted to tell him where he could shove his brahmin stampede, but...well... [Sighs.] You've gotta make money, you know? You can't tell every asshole to shove it, much as you might like to. You do that, you're gonna find yourself without a dollar to your name. It's horrible. Some people treat you like dirt and you just have to smile and take it. I just wish people were a little nicer sometimes. We're all stuck in this hellhole together—you'd think we'd smile at each other a little more often.
