Nevada: High Roller (Fallout New Vegas)

Chapter 36: One Sleepless Night (And The Great Checkered Slipper Heist Of 2281)

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When my eyes blinked, blearily opening, dirtied white tarpaulin stretched above me, so familiar that every stitch, every stain, every slight rip affording a glimpse of the bloodied sunlight pouring through had been committed to memory long ago, refreshed every night.

What once, beneath my back, had been a mattress, had since been replaced by the dry, rough earth, crunching with my weary movement that struggled to push myself upright into a sitting position. Something locked me in place there -- something unseen. Ropes bound my wrists and ankles, the scratching twine digging fresh, red indents into my flesh, marking where they had once been and, every night, would be, all over again.

All over again.

               All over again.

                              It was all happening all over again.

And my clothes -- my clothes were gone, torn to shred in a messy pile of red, white, black, lime-green and leather brown in front of my bound ankles. That was always the case, too.

No amount of morbid familiarity comforted or prepared me each time I woke back up inside that tent in Oleander Grove, the sickening silhouettes bearing unseen faces I knew too well drifting past against the red light-stricken, dirty white tarpaulin.

Each second dragging by with the three pairs of heavy footsteps pacing with a monotonous crunch over the dry earth felt like an eternity. Any noise I made became strangled, my tongue turning rough and parched like the desert soil beneath me.

               My lips felt cracked, dry as a bone. Each breath took effort, burning up a fever in my lungs, which ached with every labored, yet forcibly rapid, shaking rise and fall, rattling my heart against the bars of my ribcage.

Suddenly, the tent vanished, burning from bottom to top in a wall of blackened flame and putrid, clogging smoke that weaved upwards into the scarlet sky, void of a sun yet illuminating the reddened desert below all the same.

The silhouettes revealed themselves at the disappearance of the tent, standing before me, circling me.

Marc Gallus stood to the left, his armor-donned body battered and dripping with the same red that stained the sky. His face stared towards me, dead-eyed and gushing gore from the bullet hole marking the center of his forehead. His blonde, half-flattened curls were matted and sticky with blood, leaking out a slow, thick, steady spew of rotten brain matter down his face.

Caius Arentino stood to my right, his body scorched and reddened by crusted, charred blisters. Sickly strong, ever-burning flesh lingered around him, growing all the more pungent the longer that he stood there, patches of his skin peeling and melting in a perpetual, invisible fire that clung to him. A dribbling red line crossed his throat, teeth marks etching themselves into his face, cutting deep grooves through flesh and muscle, exposing reddened bone.

Between them, Tiberius Sallow -- those cold, narrowed blue eyes of his fixed upon me behind the viewfinder of a Polaroid camera. His other hand raised, holding a splayed selection of pictured misery I knew all fourteen hours of all too well.