They were riding on a high of psycho and a strange Mexican drug called Spanish fly. In actuality they were really just eating a bowl filled with flies, but there's semantics then there's living life. Temporarily. And constantly blown out of their minds. That's how Jim and Bobo were sure, despite all screams of the contrary, that they were completely and utterly invincible.
"Get the fuck on the ground!" Jim yelled though in reality he'd just shouted "IZ BACK OF TORN SKINS". He shoveled another handful of flies into his mouth out of the bowl Bobo was holding out to him, wildly firing a 9mm automatic at the bar patrons. Bobo used his other arm to swipe wildly at people attempting to leave through the swinging doors. All in all, it was another day in the Mojave Wasteland. Or was it?
Yes it was. I mean, down the alley nearby a woman was being skullfucked by bullets. Crazy never changes and it seemed today had decided to be especially looney toons. Bandits swarmed the small valley town of "Peaceville" making pleasantries with women then butchering them. The men, well, it was really quite impressive how they managed to strangle the suit cladded figures with their own ties. Everyone wore ties, what do you think they look like, finks?
Back to Jim, who was now attempting to chew his way through the register managed to fumble his way to the passcode. He shoved caps into his pockets then to the horror of all the surviving patrons, his pants and presumably to the nether storage regions of said pants. Bobo laughed in agreement to his friends bizarre actions, "Yes, that is necessary! We are Gods, we can't be killed!"
Bobo sliced a woman’s nose with the razor then proceeded to howl like a wolf. He swiped the flat end of the blade against his tongue, savoring every bit of life giving woman juice. Smothering the last of the flies against his face, everything had never felt so right. SO RIGHT. Jim had disappeared to the bathroom, where some crazed chanting could be heard. "I am one with Al Zinibar! I am the man fucker! Where are you, momma?"
The woman held her bleeding nose - her name being Laurie Wilcox- and scrambled behind an overturned table; then shouted to the back, "Shits gone to hell in a handbasket!" she pointed a broken table leg she had planned to use as a bludgeon to two men who were currently trying to find a way to open the windows. This was impossible, as metal bars had been installed untold years ago to prevent any random lootings, which were a common occurrence in Peaceville.
"Behind the counter, you pussies! There's a rifle, between two of you girls one of ya aughta be able to fire it!"
In all of the years that Summerteeth Jimmy and Bob Hart had been alive, well and trying to change those two facts with repeated drug use and drunken shootouts with half of the wasteland's law enforcement agencies and disgruntled townspeople, they'd never count on meeting two men that were crazier than them. There were two things that Jimmy liked to think he was good at- shooting guns and canoeing. With the apparent lack of bodies of water to canoe through at that moment and two crazed thugs choking down flies and psycho, Jimmy knew what to do.
At the behest of the woman pointing the remains of what may be a table at them as their grubby, cocaine sprinkled fingers tried to worm under the windows to pry them open, Jimmy heard three words, pussies, rifle and fire.
"Things just got a whole lot weirder," he yelled at his friend's ear, which was no less than eight inches from his mouth, "I'll grab the rifle, you keep trying to get this window opened."
Jimmy scrambled to get below the counter, opening drawers, slamming drawers, punching drawers, yelling at drawers, until he opened a cupboard, pushed aside buckets of paint and pre-war books on the rising Communist menace and "Why Nazi Germany Should Be Trusted" to get to a lever-action antique of a weapon.
Jimmy turned to the window with the weapon at the ready, firing once and shattering the glass but having the bullet ricochet off of the metal and bury itself straight in the forehead of a man awkwardly shaking and wetting his jeans with his urine in the corner.
"Fuck." Was all that escaped Jimmy's mouth.
The swinging doors were blocked by that menacing fucker named Bobo. They had decided to travel the wastes with them, if only for a time based solely on the fact that they too liked to fill their bodies, minds and souls with drugs until they were dribbling messes of men who could not tell apart a cactus from their fathers, who were absent from their lives.
"I'll have you know that in all my years as your legal consultant in all things business and pleasure, this is one of three times that I have yet to come up with a worthy and safe resolution to, Summers." Bob growled through gritted teeth while trying to find some way to harness his chi into bending the metal out of the way of his escape. These attempts proved fruitless.
"Bobo, these flies, they're worthless and you know that! That lizard man you bought these from wasn't even a real salesman and he's driven you insane! What would your mother think of you in this moment, you addled beast?" Summerteeth shouted from behind the counter, taking cover and clutching the lever-action to his chest.
"Frankly Jimmy," Bob turned to his friend, "I don't know what else we can do. The last place we were at where they got this blown was a vagabond's camp and the only thing stopping them from shooting us was the fact that we were shooting the homeless people too."
"These are dire times we find ourselves in; I'm not quite ready to accept my fate, yet. I'm also not quite ready to do as much drugs as needed to be able to communicate with those two crazy bastards in a language they might understand." Jimmy said, picking at his elbow, where he was sure that a beetle had crawled inside to raise its young, though he had taken three-quarters of a cup of jet, half a bottle of tequila and some juice that had dribbled out of a cactus outside of the door.
"I'm sorry, Laurie!" Summerteeth shouted as he grabbed Bob by the collar, leapt over the counter and flashed a middle-finger to Jimmy in the bathroom. They wildly scrambled upstairs and in their drug-addled minds had found the reptilian fuck who had sold Bobo and Jim their bowls of flies and psycho.
"You inconsiderate fuck, you've burned this town to the ground!"
"It was just business, my crazed friends!"
Jimmy answered with a .45 placed firmly into the man's brain. Turning to one of the rooms inside this back alley bar, he kicked the door open, revealing two unnaturally large spiders rubbing their appendages all over each other in some sort of twisted, hellish spectacle of depravity only seen in secluded streets in Thailand and some circus shows around the Horn of Africa. In reality, they had managed to stumble into a room where a man was tied to the bed, being wailed on by an emaciated woman of an indiscernible age, presumably late twenties, if Jimmy had to guess.
"Dear God, what hope is there for us in this hellhole?" Summerteeth let out his best warcry, which sounded more like a prepubescent girl being scared by a beloved family member popping out of the corner, or a murderer, either of the two are comparable to the shrill cry of fear and desperation.
The woman was dispatched by sharp kick to the crotch, then another, and one final one before Jimmy leapt onto the bed and screamed something in Spanish, "Me dispenso de ti, demonio mal"
And with the swiftness of a kodiak bear that had been surviving on nothing but Karl Marx books and psychedelic mushrooms, Jimmy managed to cave in the face of the wicked Spider-Man Hybrid before crazily whipping his sweaty face to the window. The window was open. A slight draft was stupid enough to enter into this bar that had turned into the ninth circle of hell, sending chills of relief and crazed, unadulterated, child-like and somewhat nauseating happiness down his spine.
He vomited right onto the chest of the dead Spider-Man beneath him before leaping off of the bed, screaming the Marine Corps. motto and bashing the window to pieces with the butt of the lever-action.
"Should we jump?" Bob asked.
Jimmy's eyes widened and his jaw clenched, whipping around to clutch his friend's collar in a grip not unlike the pressure of a dying star, "No, you fool," a generous amount of spittle spritzed the face of his close friend, bringing his face within inches of his own, "We climb."
Someone already had the same idea, it seemed, a rope ladder slid over the window as if beckoning them to a call they had always wanted to heed. It stretched far up to the top of a belltower that stuck out from the repurposed church they'd found themselves fleeing from. It was crooked, wrong, pieces of wood sticking out with banners sporadically around the columns cracked visage. Each banner had a peace sign that gave mixed messages considering the shape of the banner was a mushroom cloud. And there were plenty of dead bodies hanging from the poles as well, mostly bandits and at least one man who'd been executed for "excessive cult worship". As they climbed up, it almost seemed as if his eyes snapped to their panicked movements.
Nearing the arrival of the top of this tower of horrors, a pale woman peered over the ledge, eyes with aflutter with a madness that the two only wished they could achieve. They bulged and flicked, they saw what others saw not, and her mad grin snapped a twig near the local militia quarters. "Guys! You're back! I thought I lost you in the winding whims of the Great Manfucker!" She crawled back, bumping back against the towers functional bell then slipping beneath, prepared to ring in a new era of the infinite. Of bunnies, bunnies so perceivable that their fluff created an itch that could only be solved with the sound of a bell and med-x. Lots of med-x.
"Peaceville," Jimmy mocked with no sense of humor, just a hate so deep it made him lightheaded for a fleeting moment, "more like Fucking Stupidville."
Jimmy fixed his sunglasses and lit a thinly rolled cigar procured from the denim coat he was wrapped in.
"This is quite the predicament we find ourselves in, Bob, my Mexican friend."
"I'm Samoan."
"Bob, my Carribean friend." Jimmy corrected himself with a smile, finally feeling some small hint of what felt like relief wash over him, slapping his lanky friend on the back.
"Woman, what are your intentions with ringing this here bell. We need to leave," Jimmy said before leaning down to look her in the face, "We need to be far away from here in about thirty seconds and twenty of those are gone now!"
"The bunnies! Rabbits all, they are late and I am late and sometimes I feel an itch in my abdomen and I scoop it out with a spoon and the spoon melts and...and..." she yanked at the bell rope violently, hoping to stop the rhythmic pounding in hands, the jittering in her teeth, and the burning in her belly button.
The sound of the bell wormed its way to the bandits below, one stopping mid victorious crotch thrust to look upon the bellowing sound. Victory bells, victory swells, penis. These were the thoughts of intelligent men finding intelligent thought in non-intelligent action. It always ended in dick, that is to say. And what it looked like, was that the tower was saying it, roughly phallic shaped, had a bigger dick than the lot of them. They couldn't have that.
Back upon the tower there was a very short period where Jim and Bob could have jumped. This period was quickly expulged by a riotous shaking, then the downward tilt of an entire god damn clock tower. They were sliding, then falling, onto land that was ever faster rising to meet them.
"You've killed us, woman! I'll cripple you in the afterlife and dear ol' Jesus will help me!" Jimmy screamed at the top of his lungs, his hands pounding, punching and slapping all around to wrap their drug-addled fingers around some kind of hand-hold they could get around. There were many things that Jimmy would rather be doing right now. All of them involved whores and angry, swear-filled and alcohol-fueled sex. Lots of it. But, instead, he was stuck here with two crazed men, his friend from Samoa, an island in the Caribbean, for sure, and some crazed harpy of a woman with an obsession for rabbits.
Self-immolation seemed a better and far brighter prospect than this ever would and could be.
Several hours and a well full of bucket water later, the three found themselves tied to chairs in a stone room. One mirror, one entrance, one table, and five furious men with peace sign shaped badges waving around lead pipes. The table was a bust, having been beaten to a splintery mash. The room swirled around, image distorting to a vast cosmos of stars and lights.
A ringing noise shrieked into being. Zelzibel jerked out of her own rope prison, somehow managed to forge a shank out of a toothbrush and tin foil in less than half a minute, and waved it in front of herself in a Z shape. It became apparent she wasn't dueling Danglars, betrayer of the Count of Monte Zelzibel, but inside of a cell dimly lit with light that poured out of a barred vent above.
The marching approach of men spurred Zel to action. This wasn't the first time she'd found herself in a prison without hope, without pants. Except she was in pants, that problem she solved in half a jiffy, sliding denim off with horrible ease.
When the Warden was about to reach the first two bars, he stopped. Between the bars gaps a shanking arm stabbed through and he caught it. "You weren't joking." he muttered, looking to his companion, the Sherriff, poised beside him. After breaking her arm in one swift jerking motion, he set himself to stand with disapproval towards the zoo of new freaks he had come to observe.
Zel was huddled in a corner trying her best to chew her own snapped arm off. Jimmy and Bob were awaking and with awaking the Warden commented, "That's Jim and Bobbo huh?"
Jim, while making a show of acting like he was still asleep beside his Samoan friend, backs against the poor amount of lumbar support the rickety wooden chairs gave, uttered out as best he could without moving his mouth, "Don't wake up, Bobby, I have a strong feeling these men mean to rape us."
The wind blew strong around Camp McCarran; an old air port pre-war. Sand smothered any sight worth seeing, any air worth breathing. Yes, it was indeed a Mojave sandstorm. A rare occurance, so much so that the base had been set into a lock down since it began. This wasn't unfounded, several corpses littered the runway. Some khan, some scorpion, and at least one hunched old man that had looked suspiciously like a very large Gecko. War, war never changes.
At 2123 hours a courier arrived. He scurried past the bodies, often being stopped at gun point by wary soldiers. It took less than a minute to explain the urgency of his delivery. His bulky coat was stained with grit, head cowled and jaw wrapped in cloth. The man was anything but conspicuous.
When he finally arrived in the Terminal building, found General Lee Oliver, and handed him a letter; the seasoned war vet was already in a terrible mood. The General read it and immediately guffawed,
"This? This is what you gave the chicken shit recruits out there a heart attack for? Some green light and a...wait. Wait a damn second, there was an egg shaped unidentified aircraft?"
The courier nodded.
"Being flown by two ghouls?"
He nodded again.
"Yelling something about doomsday? And brain liquefaction? This is real?" the general checked the seal on the letter. A sleek and shining image of a two headed bear standing proudly atop a craggy hill. Leafy half circles surrounded the iconic mammal, the words "In the Republic, we trust" boldly emblazoned beneath. Below this seal, the letter was signed Colonel Jimmy Swarchhound in a flowing penmanship that could only be described as inspiring. Yeah, it was real alright.
"Shit, this is from Jimmy? I told him, if I heard one more fucking request for reinforcements after some random disaster blew up in our face around his piss ass excuse for a camp, I'd send him to a desk job so fast he would be soldered to that damn chair!"
The courier made no comment, offering a second item: a folder filled with information regarding the events. It was less than ideal information. According to the map, the place the green light had landed didn't even exist. Some unnamed, undiscovered town in northeast nevada, right at the borderline between legion and NCR. Troops from Camp Eliza were sent to investigate, never came back. There had been disappearances prior, though this had been mostly attributed to sinkholes. Legion seemed to have taken a notice as well, though they were only as many as two sent out at a time.
"That dumb piece of shit didn't think of getting this here sooner? We have Morse code! We've always had Morse code! Why do I never, ever get a damn Morse code before we pay one of you fuck-ups to deliver the message?"
What Lee didn't care to remember, was the reason he had never received a Morse code: Lee had told Sergeant Felix to do something more important than relay every single beep and boop that went his way. Maybe go, I don't know, teach the privates how to operate a rifle without shitting themselves each time the barrel jammed. Do your job Felix, for the love of Kimball I respond to Jimmy 'Pussyfoot" Swarchhound when I have time. So help me God I will strip you of any power you have. So help me God.
The Marsh
In the northern Nevada marshlands stood a town surrounded by high scrap walls that had once been high enough to hide the fact it was even a town. Each jagged plate sunk into the earth. In a few decades this would be a landlocked Atlantis, buried beneath the muddy waters for an archaeologist to find and say "Why. Why would anyone build this here. Were they genetically retarded?" Perhaps they picked such a precarious place to dissuade intruders. Regardless, it was built like a fort. Rising behind the walls was a flagpole with a dirty flag reading "Welcome to Radmarsh now fuck off" in sloppily painted red lettering. How no one had mapped the location prior was a mystery for the ages. There was an entrance way on the southern side, a opening between the scrap walls with a arching sign nailed to both ends that stated the towns name: Radmarsh.
The surrounding marshland popped, gurgled, and moaned unsteadily. It's radioactivity was off the charts established by Radioactive Dave, who had once shouted out his radiology procedure while swimming in a radioactive murk.
-GREW AN EAR, SHIT
-WELL GREAT I FUCKING HAVE A SECOND COCK NOW
- DANDY DEE WILLICKERS, I'M DYING
- I ALWAYS LOVED YOU MARTHA
- FUCK YOU MARTHA
- DEAD
According to this system, FUCK YOU MARTHA would be the radioactivity given off by select parts of the Marsh. Thankfully, there seemed to be a several hard earth paths going through the Marsh that seemed to be slightly less radioactive. Perhaps DANDY DEE WILLICKERS or WELL GREAT I FUCKING HAVE A SECOND COCK NOW.