anovelconsole Chapter 12: Circus
Chapter 12: Circus
Chapter 12: Circus
Daniel Wyand and I sat at the bar of the Rawhide Saloon, a pub in Shady Sands. We were sharing a drink and laughing about the events of the day. In all honesty, we probably shouldn't have been laughing - the two of us had both nearly died. But I guess laughing about it and drinking booze was helpful for taking the edge off.
Here's the long and short of what happened: the two of us had been hired to pick up a package from one of the warehouses on the outskirts of Shady Sands. Of course, neither of us had been told about the other courier. That situation was bad enough, but once that was finally settled and the two of us got to the warehouse, we found the guy who hired us dead, and the warehouse swarming with thugs who worked for the Mordinos - one of the crime families that ran New Reno far to the north. The two of us hightailed it out of there, and finally lost them after they chased us across half the city - shooting at us the whole time.
"Have you ever done anything so ridiculous?" Dan asked me, taking a drink from his beer. I let out a soft chuckle.
"Once or twice. Just wait till I tell you about the one time three old ladies tried to mug me in Sac Town. I'm still trying to figure that one out," I took a drink, and continued. "I'm just amazed we got out of there alive. There must've been a million bullets flying through the air after us!"
"But I didn't get out alive," was all he said.
That was unexpected.
"What," was all I could manage to say, once I found my voice.
"Oh, sure, I didn't die in the warehouse..." he turned to look at me, "... but death has already found me. It's just going to take him a few years to collect."
That was when I noticed the gaping hole in his head, where his left eye should've been. I could see right through his skull, straight through to the wall beyond. I jumped off my chair as fast as I could and bolted for the door. Corpses shouldn't talk or get up and move, and the fact that he was doing both scared the piss out of me. As I reached for the doorknob, I heard Wyand yell after me:
"Death is coming for us all. Even you, Courier Six."
I threw open the door and started running. For some reason, I was in a very, very long hallway. Didn't this door lead outside a minute ago? It didn't matter - all I cared about was running away from the talking corpse. The hallway stretched out in front of me so far that I couldn't see the end. I cast a glance behind me, to see if I was making any forward progress.
Crash.
Everything went dark and I saw stars. I must've crashed into a wall or something. Wasn't I running down a hallway? I blinked away the haze, and was confused by where I was. Looking around, I found myself in the main casino floor of The Tops, except there weren't any gaming tables anywhere. No slot machines, no roulette wheels, no blackjack tables... but there was one other person in the room. He had his back turned to me, but I recognized his black and white checked jacket instantly.
"You don't kill a man when he's on his knees, begging for his life," Benny said, taking a draw from his cigarette. He didn't turn around. "That was one of your rules, right?"
Instinctively, I reached for Roscoe - and panicked, when I realized I didn't have any weapons on me at all. Even the Pip Boy Doc Mitchell had given me was gone. I looked around, trying to find something... but I paused when I took a look down at my hands. From my elbows down, both hands were covered and positively dripping red with blood. I looked up, trying to make sense of what was going on.
Benny had turned around to face me... although 'face' was probably a poor choice of words. He didn't have a face. It was just a bloody, pulpy mass of meat and bone that was practically concave. I was overcome with an urge to run, and with a mounting sense of horror I became aware that I couldn't move my legs. But it wasn't just my legs that I couldn't move... in that instant, I realized my whole body felt paralyzed.
"You beat me to death," the bloody mass of what used to be Benny's face moved around sickeningly as he talked, spraying blood everywhere. For a brief second, I wondered how he was able to talk without a mouth before the fear took root again. "You didn't even give me a chance to fight back, dig?"
"You shot me in the face," I said, latching onto the one fact I knew was true in a vain attempt to power through the mind-numbing terror of what was happening. "You shot me in the face, and dumped me in a shallow grave! What did you expect me to do?" Benny laughed - a sound which was deeply unpleasant and sent a shocking chill up my spine - and even more blood splattered out of his face and onto the floor as the meat shifted again.
"Exactly. I shot you in the face, and you beat me to death. Perfectly justified vengeance... but you had to break one of your rules to do it," Somehow, impossibly, the meat and bone of Benny's face was sliding around and reforming into an actual face as he spoke. "What is it you always said? If you live without rules in the wasteland, then the horrors and the brutality will beat you down until one day you find you're no better than a raider, raping and murdering just for the hell of it."
"I'm no raider!" I yelled at Benny.
"Of course you're not. But you know what you are?" As he asked the question, his face finished reforming... but it wasn't Benny's face that looked at me.
"You're no better than I am."
I was looking at myself.
I tried to scream, but no sound came out. I tried to run, but I couldn't move. I tried to think, but I was too overcome with terror. I barely noticed as the Benny wearing my face pulled Maria out of his jacket. He fired, but not at me. He shot the ground near my feet, and the whole world around me shattered like glass, falling away into an inky black void. I fell with everything else as the ground dropped out from under me. I couldn't tell you how long I fell. Time was completely meaningless... a million years could have passed, for all I knew.
Time reasserted itself and I landed on my back with a painful, loud thud. I shut my eyes, but it made no difference since the darkness of the world around me had been absolute. When I opened my eyes, I could see a blanket of stars... and looming above me, like a massive tombstone, was a familiar water tower. I reached out around me, clutching at low dirt walls.
I'd fallen into my own grave.
Before I realized what was happening, I heard a familiar squeaking sound, and Victor rolled into view. I tried to get up, but quicker than I could react, I felt a cold metal claw clamp down on my face and shove me back against the dirt. The expression on Victor's face screen was the same as it always was. I tried to yell at him to stop, but the sound was muffled by the claw clamped down firmly against my head.
That was when I felt the dirt begin to pile up. A mountain of earth washed over me, burying me... smothering me... I tried to struggle, but there was too much dirt all around me. It was too heavy, and piled far too high. I tried to scream, but the dirt just flooded into my mouth, choking me. The last thing I saw before I was buried alive was the face of Victor, looking down at me... not saying a word.
I woke up with a start, completely drenched in sweat. It took a few minutes for my heart rate to slow to normal, and for my breathing to stop being so ragged. Of course it was a nightmare. Why could I never tell that I was dreaming while I was dreaming?
I rolled out of bed, trying to focus on where I was to wash away the nightmare. I was in the Lucky 38's "High-Roller" suite. I remembered that much. Victor had told me that House was going to let us use the suite: "You can bring your friends, too! Be like a little clubhouse for the gang you put together. Enjoy the digs, pardner. They're plenty fancy!"
"Plenty fancy" was certainly one way of describing it. The suite took up an entire floor in the Lucky 38. There was a large master bedroom, where I was, at least 6 smaller bedrooms, a bathroom with a shower and what looked like a large bathtub with jets in the side, a fully stocked kitchen and dining room, and another room with a pool table, 2 dart boards, and a jukebox. Everything was absolutely spotless, pristine, and immaculate. Every room had plate glass floor-to-ceiling windows, complete with sliding doors that led to balconies looking out over Vegas. It was a perfectly preserved slice of the old world, kept clean and fresh from the horrors of the real world for 200 years.
I looked around the floor, trying to find where I'd discarded my pants before collapsing into bed from exhaustion. In the darkness, I bumped into one of the desks, causing my Pip Boy to roll off and hit me in the foot. I let out a few curses and put the wrist computer on, checking the time. Then I cursed again when I realized it was three in the morning, and I'd barely gotten two hours of sleep. I knew I wasn't going to be able to get to sleep for a good long while after a nightmare like that. So I turned on the Pip Boy's light, found my pants, pulled open the blackout curtains, and exited my room out onto the balcony.
Even at three in the morning, the city of New Vegas was lit up like a sea of brightly colored neon lights below me. There were still people in the streets below, skittering around like tiny insects. Off in the distance, I could see The Tops; House's Securitron robots were standing guard at the entrance, dissuading anyone from entering. Looking out at the city below, I didn't understand how it could still be this lively this late at night.
"Trouble sleeping?" a voice to my left made me start. I looked around, and I saw that Boone was on the balcony with me, having presumably come from his room. Despite the darkness, he was still wearing his sunglasses. In fact, he still looked ready for combat, complete with his beret on his head and his rifle slung over his shoulder. He was leaning against the railing, looking down at the city with the same dour expression he always had.
"Yeah... Had a... nightmare. I think," I said, trying to stay away from any details. "What about you? What are you doing up?"
"I'm just awake, that's all." When he said it, an odd series of facts hit me like a cinderblock to the skull: when I first met Boone, he was the night watch sniper and I caught him near the beginning of his shift. Then, later on the next day, he showed up when someone who worked the night shift should have been sleeping, and stayed awake at least until after one in the morning. And here he was, up again.
"Do you ever sleep?"
"I sleep enough. I just don't..." Boone cleared his throat and continued. "I don't like sleep. Whenever I sleep, I see her."
"Carla?" I guessed. He nodded grimly.
"What in the hell is that, and why'd you only put three drops in? You put in more hot sauce than that!"
"This is the special ingredient," he said, carefully screwing the dropper-top back on the vial. "Epinephrine. It's artificial adrenaline." He slid the drink across the bar towards me, and smirked with a smile that showed way too many yellow teeth. "Here ya go, drink up. This'll keep you awake for as long as you want. That'll be 25 caps."
I eyed the drink with suspicion, but tossed my caps on the bar anyway. I lifted the tall shot glass up to my nose and immediately wished I hadn't; my eyes started to burn.
"Fuck it," I said, holding my nose. "Down the hatch," and swallowed it in one gulp.
That was all it took. I coughed furiously as it burned down my throat, but the world immediately shot into stark focus. In an instant I felt more awake and more alive than I'd ever felt before, but at the same time everything was spinning wildly out of control. I vaguely recall hearing my Pip Boy's Geiger counter clickety-click a few times.
"Good, isn't it?" I heard the ghoul say. The room stopped spinning, and the world righted itself just in time for me to see him pass a glass of water my way. I grabbed it, and downed the water greedily.
"It does the job," I managed to cough out with a smile after I finished the glass. "But I wouldn't call it good. Not by a longshot."
"Eh, Joey wouldn't know a good drink if it bit his rotten ass off," I heard a high pitched voice say from next to me. I looked around, trying to find the source of the voice.
"Down here, jackass," I heard the voice say at the same time I felt someone pull on my left pant leg. So I looked down and to my left, and there was a very tiny man, wearing a very unpleasant and dour expression on his face. He was all dressed up like a clown - complete with a red ball nose - and carrying a tray in one of his hands.
"Could you move? You're in my way," he said. So I got up, more in confusion than anything else. He reached onto a handle on the bar next to where my leg had been, pulling out a set of steps that let him climb to the top.
"How're you doin', Seamus?" Joey the ghoul bartender asked the tiny clown with the drinks tray. "Still angry at the world, I take it?"
"Piss off," he said to the ghoul.
"Aw," Joey said with a laugh. "You do care!"
"Table three needs a bottle of wine, and table six needs a trio of wasteland tequila shots."
"Got it. Half a sec," and Joey disappeared around the other side of the bar. Seamus sighed, removing the red ball from his nose and stretching his jaw.
"I hate this place," he said with so much bile, it was almost palpable.
"It's not that bad," I heard another voice from my right speak up. I looked around, and saw a rather hefty looking bald man sitting two stools away from me. "Hey Joey, when you're finished with those drinks, can I get a glass of Absinthe?"
Joey came back around with the drinks for the tiny clown, and all Seamus could do was laugh bitterly. "You know, it's a hell of a thing," Seamus said to me as he put his nose back on. "When he was a kid and living in Vault 21, the owner of this shithole always wanted to leave the vault and join the circus. Now the son of a bitch owns the circus."
"Don't mind Seamus," the rotund man nearby said to me as I watched the tiny unpleasant man climb down the steps and walk off. "He's always like that."
"So... you've seen him before then, I take it?" I asked.
"I ought to, I work here," he said just as Joey set down a glass full of green colored liquid in front of him. He thanked the ghoul, and then reached for the glass - but not with either of his hands at his sides. A third hand, with only three fingers, emerged from the folds in his coat and clutched the glass, sipping gingerly at the green liquid.
Apparently, I had failed to contain my shock, because he looked at me with a face approaching amusement and set his glass down.
"Before you ask, yes, it's real," As if to emphasize the point, he waved at me with his three fingered hand and said "Hello. My name's Eddie."
"Uh... hi. I'm Sheason. You said you work here?"
"Yeah, I'm part of the Freak Show. Every circus has gotta have a freak show, right? Honestly, I think I'm kinda lucky."
"Lucky?" I asked. "How do ya figure?"
"Well, y'see, I look at it like this. Most people, when they're exposed to massive amounts of radiation, they just get sick and die in a pool of their own vomit. Then, some people, like this handsome chap here," he motioned to the ghoul, who just laughed, "they turn into ghouls. And then there's the one's like me - the mutants. It's not all bad. The third arm helped me land a job here on the Strip. It's steady work with a steady paycheck. Besides, with the exception of Seamus, all the people here are really nice, so I can't complain."
"Freak show..." I repeated, trying to wrap my head around the concept.
"Yeah. What, you've never been to a freak show?" I shook my head. "It's an experience, let me tell you right now."
"So... forgive me for asking, but are they all... er, mutants like you?" Eddie shook his head, and took another sip.
"Not all of them. I mean, yeah, Mean Sonofabitch was technically a Super Mutant. He was a freak because he was 'tame' and he'd had his tongue cut out, but he doesn't work here anymore. He left about a year ago. Last I heard he found work as a bodyguard somewhere out in Westside. But there are some normals in the freak show as well - like the guys who 'eat' swords and fire and stuff. And then there's the people who are just born freaks, rather than the radiation mutants. Like Denise, the Yak Woman."
"Yak Woman." I deadpanned.
"Yeah. She's a sweet gal. Ugly as sin, I admit - got a pair of horns growing out of her head - but she's a hell of a good cook. And then there's the Red Menace. They're a pair of Chinese conjoined twins who came down from Chinatown a few years ago, so they got that going for them. But they pull double duty because they're both bodybuilders too, so they take on the strongman act as well."
"And that's a freak show? What, do people just come to stare at you then? I mean, no offense, but that's kind of what it sounds like." Eddie shrugged.
"I'll be honest, most people come just to look at crazy sights and not have to worry about getting shot at. But really... a freak show is beautiful. It's a showcase of man's heroic triumph over medical adversity and extreme pessimism." He laughed, and took another sip of his drink.
"I think you're talkin' out of your ass Eddie," The ghoul said with a smile. Eddie shook his head and waved his third hand.
"Nah, that's not me. Vince is the guy who talks out of his ass." He turned to me with a smile and said "Now that's something to see, let me tell you."
It was about an hour later when I stepped out of Bazooko's Circus. The inky blackness of night was starting to turn just a hint of royal blue. The air on the strip smelled of smoke, and... grilled meat, for some reason. I took one last look up at what was possibly the strangest casino in the entire world, and just felt myself start to laugh. Just a chuckle at first, but then I couldn't restrain myself and I busted out laughing raucously. I walked away from the circus, and said out loud, to no one but myself:
"When the fuck did my life become so weird?"