Chapter Text
Southern Passage Cliffside, Zion, August 6th, 2069
The night sky was brimming with stars, who knew nothing of her suffering down below. There was no chance for escape now. Kathy had tried to crawl up the cliff face, palms split open, fingernails torn, knees skinned, but all that blood was not enough for the canyon's hunger. She'd fallen, and now her entire lower half was still. By now she'd managed to stop screaming, after hearing the answering screams. Sound traveled strangely here, a branch snapping may be heard half a mile away, but something right up under you was indistinguishable. So there was no telling how close they truly were, by their shrieks and howls. She couldn't tell how close they were to finding her.
To stop herself from screaming, she'd shoved her fist in her mouth and bit down til it bled. Now she just sucked on it, to distract from the pain and the horrifying lack of it. From the waist down, she couldn't feel a thing. Her legs didn't even twitch from a reflex when she threw pebbles at them. At least she didn't have to feel how her shorts were full of leaking urine and shit, from the lower half she'd lost control of. But she could smell it, though she was beyond truly caring. The only wetness she felt was the matted fringe of her blonde hair, blood dripping down the back of her shirt from where she'd scraped her head against the cliff as she fell.
All she had to this point was a tangled series of moments, twisted into delirium. The shock and pain of the fall had brought a sickening rush of sobriety to her mind. What awaited her, what had become of the family. No, she wouldn't let that happen. They were once her friends, the family , but everything had gone so wrong. They'd come here for a reason, for a purpose. She couldn't turn her back on it now, as everyone else had. Even if she couldn't climb out, there was still one avenue left for escape.
The world was now constrained to meat and soil, as the hot blood that flowed from her wrists was drunk eagerly by the dry and hungry earth. Kathy's life flickered away, eyes vacant and staring up to the indifferent stars above. They went out, one by one, leaving her in nothing but in abyssal black.
Southern Passage Cliffside, Zion, August 27th, 2281
In the wasteland, if you spit a few feet in any direction, you'd probably hit somebody's final resting place. So discovering the skull was nothing surprising to the caravan guard. Before rolling out a canvas bedroll, he kicked it aside with a dust drenched boot. He didn't bother watching it skid to the slope, roll down to the ledge, where it teetered on the edge, before finally falling down, down, down into the canyon below. If he was listening, he would have heard it shatter on one of the orange rock faces. Instead, he was straining his ears to listen to the chatter around the nearby campfire.
"You've been holding out on us, Jed, I know there's still one story you haven't told us." Saying that, Stella the head guard raised a sardonic toast with her whiskey bottle to the head of the run.
Jed chuckled and shook his head. The whole time, he’d been sharing tales that had come from Legion territory, after his excursion down their roads. All manner of horror stories came out of that land. "Out of all the stories I have, of course you want the one I can't tell! I told you, that name around here makes people nervous. Bad for business to get under the local’s skin, Happy Trails Caravan is supposed to be a friendly face."
An easy, deep voice spoke up from the man in the shadows, just out of reach from the light of the campfire. The smoothness of the voice did not match the roughness of the man in appearance and manner, yet still held an air of menace to it.
"Let’s make a deal, storyteller. I'll tell you something you never knew about the anthropophage if you tell me about the Burned Man."
The man had made everyone nervous from the start, showing up and offering his services as a gun if he could hang on as they traveled to Zion. Though what Jed wanted from him was his pipboy, the map on it proved valuable enough to ignore the peculiarities of the stranger. As he shadowed the caravan, all the guards could think of when they looked at him was of a scavenging creature in wait. A perpetual tinge of carrion clung to him, the faint odor of something freshly dead, matted blood, raw meat. By his feet lay an animal that the caravaners hadn’t seen until the stranger had showed up. A mechanical dog, some guard dog with its brain visible in a blue casing.
This was the first sign of any greater talk than exchanging a few sentences from him. He seemed to be that wilderness type, more accustomed to talking to himself.
The temptation to add to his arsenal of stories, of deeper detail on that recent and vague Legion boogeyman, and the desire to establish comradery got to Jeb.
“Well alright, might as well tell it before we truly get there. Drink up, this one’s a doozy.”
"A few decades back, as the NCR pushed west, they started hearin' rumors of a place called New Canaan. Its people were elusive, claiming their settlement as a haven. In the desert, they had the best offer you could give: free and plentiful water, from some underground reservoir, untainted by radiation.
But there was a catch, as there always is. The NCR has seen its share of cults, but the New Canaanites were a special breed of old time religion, a strict and strange practice from long before the bombs fell. Only if you submitted to their baptismal rites, to abide by their rules, and believe in their god, could you gain entrance.
It shouldn't come as a surprise then for what it could have given birth to. As the legion popped up in Arizona, it turned out Caesar's first war chief, the Malpais Legate, was a New Canaanite. Joshua Graham. Legend goes that Graham was the meanest, toughest son of a bitch in the whole damned Legion. He was Caesar's right hand, doing the dirty, bloody business while Caesar sat on his throne and dictated. You wouldn't think a man of God could be so brutal, but by god he was.
But the third member of that fateful party, Bill Calhoun, spoke of a different side to Graham. That he was a tragedy, that the younger missionary who acted as translator had begun to listen to the two followers and question his oppressive old world religion. But what ended up happening was that he replaced his God with the son of mars.
Being the first of the conquered or the co-founder, either way, the Malpais Legate finally met his match at Hoover Dam. Hanlon and Oliver kicked his New Canaanite butt right back over the river. Caesar had to make an example for the others, to show them that even at the highest level, failure wouldn't be tolerated. He had Graham covered in pitch, lit on fire, and thrown into the Grand Canyon. They say he didn't even scream as he burned, even as he fell, didn't make a sound, didn't give them the satisfaction....
Not long after, some of the slaves and tribals started to talk. Said Graham wasn't dead. Shouldn't have been any surprise. All this talk bothered Caesar, so he forbade anyone from speaking his name. Wanted to erase Joshua Graham from history, and he got his wish. Joshua Graham disappeared. And in his place came legends of the Burned Man walking the wastes, wading in the rivers of Zion, haunting these very canyons.
It's probably just another ghost story. Probably a coincidence of legion frumentarii hiding amongst caravans, slipping out into the wilds, but never coming back. There's plenty of other dangers here. Maybe the Malpais Legate is dead. Or maybe Joshua Graham did crawl out of that canyon, and finally found his way back home."
The uninterrupted tale was a nice change of pace for Jed, with no need of another belt of brandy to fortify himself against any heckling. How the rising wind was moving through the canyon, the eerie ambience created, had help shush the party. As Jed leaned back, spent and tale told, Stella let out a chuckle. “Now that’s just foolish. The man woulda been smashed on those rocks, no way he’d be able to crawl out.”
“Never said it was all true, it’s just what people say. Now, your turn, hunter.”
Stubbing out his cigarette on his knee, the man laughed, a nasty laugh, more reminiscent of a wild dog. “Fair is fair, and that was quite a story. I’ll tell you about the second time the anthropophage faced the reaper, and spat in its eye.”
“That the theme of the night? Things that should be dead refusing to stay dead?” one of the guards muttered. The bounty hunter continued like he hadn’t heard him.
“With all the enemies the anthropophage had, it was only a matter of time that someone got the jump on him. But this wasn’t someone he'd pissed off personally, no, they didn’t have a clue who he was, only that he had something that was needed. The two accompanying him as muscle knew when they’d gotten the drop, and knew what they’d done and were hoping to swiftly put him down before he came rearing back up. But the orchestrator wanted to look him in the eyes, savor the power he held over his prisoner, cleaning up some loose ends. He wasn't a fink, dig?"
"What kind of a man was the orchestrator?" Jed asked.
"And what's a fink?" followed a guard.
"He was a smooth talking city boy, wearing a fancy suit, with a golden gun." The man hissed. "The anthropophage couldn’t believe this was what would take him down. As he tried to make his speech, he just laughed in the man's face, mockin' the would-be king of bright Vegas lights. Even as the gun was pointed to his temple. When the trigger was pulled, he just went down with a grin… but he had the last laugh you see." With a bark of laughter, he concluded the tale. "Cause he crawled out of that grave, all the way to the suit's casino, and struck him dead when he felt safest.”
Stella shook her head with uneasy scorn, swallowing the last of her whiskey. “I don’t know which survival is less believable. Getting shot point blank in the noggin isn't something you bounce back from."
“Now, I don’t know about Graham, but I can vouch for this story…” Coming closer to the fire, the hunter lifted his hair from his forehead. What could clearly be seen in the firelight were the scars left by the two bullets put into the anthropophage’s skull.