The CIT ruins were impressive to behold. Marian stood outside the courtyard, trying to imagine what it must have looked like before the bombs fell. She imagined young men and woman, the age she was when she left her family, walking through the courtyard to get into the building or walking away from it; oblivious to the radiation barrels which were now scattered around the courtyard.
“You know, I helped the Vault Dweller clean this place out last year,” Windowlicker said.
Marian went from trying to distract herself from the radiation she would have to move around, to being simply annoyed. “Should I put that on the tally of lies you’ve told me today?”
“You’re one to talk. How many lies do you tell every day? How many lies do you tell yourself? Oh, I know, you tell yourself you’re a pretty princess and that everyone should love you.”
“Fuck you,” she responded and started walking.
Suddenly she felt a hand grab her arm and pull her back. She used the momentum to swing and hit Windowlicker in the nose, still holding on to Faenus with her other hand.
“Owwwie!” he cried, cupping his bleeding nose. “What did you do that for?”
“Why the hell did you grab me like that?”
“I know a way through the courtyard without taking rads. I thought you would like to know that before you got yourself killed. Or are you a synth? Or better yet, a ghoul. I was a ghoul once, but I got better.”
Marian was flabbergasted. She didn’t know how to talk to this man. She couldn’t tell when he was lying or when he was telling the truth. Just when she would think she could trust one sentence, the next one would set her back to a state of disbelief.
“I don’t care what you are or were. Do you know how to get in or not?”
“Sure, the door’s right there.”
She had forgotten that everyone in the Commonwealth is insane. She could look past most insanities. But this one. This one was going to get her killed. She was going to die; she wasn’t going to be able to find Nick dead. He would die, all because she was incompetent. More likely he was safe and just got home late, but she couldn’t be sure about that.
“You go first,” she purred, letting the monster she normally tightly controlled stretch itself for this man’s benefit.
“Your wish is my…strong recommendation.” Windowlicker walked away from her, still wiping blood from under his nose. Marian watched him seemingly walk away from the building and everything. Serves him right. If he was going to claim there was a special way in, he should show it to her, not just say it and lead her into more danger than necessary.
“Hey, you coming?” he called.
“You said the door is right here.”
“There are doors on the sides. You won’t have to worry about radiation. Unless you want to walk through it. I heard it would give you a nice glowing green tan.”
“Do you ever shut up?” Marian asked as she followed him. She could feel the monster that was her pacing, wanting to kill this man. She promised Hancock that she would give him a chance, but Hancock seemed to love getting her to team up with people who she would rather shoot than work with.
Windowlicker opened a white painted door, and the two of them entered the building, to be greeted by a ghoul’s body and a dead super mutant. Both corpses had flies buzzing around them.
“Looks like there was a party here,” Windowlicker said.
Marian hurried past him and examined the ghoul. She knew this ghoul, better than she wanted to. She was both pleased and disturbed to find this person dead. It was even more disturbing finding her dead in The Commonwealth.
“Brier,” she muttered under her breath, letting the deceased’s head drop.
“Friend of yours?” Windowlicker asked.
“More like a long-standing enemy’s muscle. This is a member of the Rose Gang. A gang of slavers who had been trying to become the biggest gang in The Capital Wasteland. I’d been spending years trying to keep them from getting much more than a foothold there.”
“Looks like they are setting up shop here.”
“That’s my fear,” Marian agreed. She started examining Brier’s body. Usually she did not go through the remains of a kill when she was on a job, but in this case she was willing to make an exception. She went through Brier’s pockets, fishing out all the ammunition she could find and pocketing it. She would get it prepared for Faenus later.
“How familiar are you with this gang?” Windowlicker asked. Marian looked up to see him opening an assault rifle. Most likely it was Brier’s.
“Familiar enough that I own a weapon that used to belong to one of the two leaders of the group,” Marian said.
“How did you get that,” Windowlicker asked, closing up the weapon. “This gun has no ammo.”
“No one ever listens when I talk,” Marian explained. “So, I tell people the truth, and they think I’m telling them lies, or then just don’t hear me. I keep telling everyone I’m a monster, and no one believes me. I was able to use that to get into the group, and then I was able to cripple them.”
Windowlicker was silent for perhaps the first time since she met him. She stood up and looked into his sunglasses.
“I think I know what you mean,” he responded. “I often lie to throw people off. Usually people think it’s because I’m trying to distract them, and sometimes that’s true. Thing is, it’s easier to believe a lie than a truth. Especially when the truth can be dangerous. So, I will lie, until I have the person’s attention, sometimes even their trust.”
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Marian found her eyes shifting away from his glasses and she began walking down the hallway, looking for more bodies. She found another display of dead super mutants and people. Two super mutants, and three people. She examined each body, pulling out ammunition and medicines that she could use. Windowlicker examined all their assault rifles.
“You’re not going to believe this,” he said.
“Why should I believe anything coming from you,” Marian replied.
“Oh, ha ha, you think you’re so funny. I’ll have you know, none of these guns have ammo.”
That didn’t make sense. One person running out of ammunition and dying before reloading happened sometimes but four people in a row having that happen was harder to explain. Especially since all four of them had ammunition that fit their weapons on them.
“Check the super mutants’ weapons, see if they have anything in them,” she ordered.
“You know, I befriended a super mutant once. He said he wanted to find the milk of human kindness so he could drink it,” Windowlicker responded as he opened a minigun.
“Did he ever find it?” Marian asked, finding herself being drawn into this man’s stories.
“I doubt it. Truth is, I think I lost belief that that exists. Human kindness that is.”
His voice had taken such a somber turn, Marian couldn’t help but believe him. She knew what he wasn’t saying, someone had betrayed his trust. The kind of betrayal that stays with someone for the rest of their lives.
“Why Windowlicker?” she finally asked.
“That wasn’t always my name.”
“I wouldn’t ever think that your parents hated you as much as I do.”
“I mean…I was part of a group. An organization. We were like a dysfunctional family, but we were family. We…helped people. We helped people who not everyone believed were people.”
“Groups like that exist in the Capital Wasteland,” Marian responded.
Windowlicker was silent for a moment before he continued talking. “Truth is, I fucked up, and it cost everyone everything. I trusted someone to join us. I threw in my good word for him. And in the end, he betrayed us. I don’t know if he never believed in the cause, or if he decided that his son was more important than anything I could show him. It didn’t matter. In the end, he led the Brotherhood of Steel to our hideout, and had everyone killed.”
“You’re still here,” Marian pointed out, leading the mourner up some stairs to examine another group of corpses.
Windowlicker sighed. He picked up a gun and examined it for ammunition while Marian examined the bodies. “He left me in Sanctuary Hills at the time. By the time I found out what he did, it was too late to stop him. I couldn’t look at him after that. I changed my name, and my face, and decided to disappear.”
Marian pocketed the last of the ammunition before standing up. She looked at Windowlicker briefly before walking on to the next group.
“Anything in those weapons?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he responded.
“I think that was the first thing you told me that I believe,” she said. “That you felt betrayed and disappeared. Why are you telling me this?”
“After the betrayal, I’ve been trying to rebuild the group. Find new members. Not so much starting over from scratch, but a new start. That, and my group had been using you for years, and I thought you deserved to know what happened to us.”
Marian sighed, maybe she liked this guy better when she couldn’t believe that he was telling her the truth. She examined another set of bodies. They all had ammunition in their pockets, and once again, none of their assault rifles had anything.
“I know you guys were using me,” she admitted. “Your people approached me years ago, asked me to join your cause. As I remember, I told your people that I believe in what you’re doing, but I don’t want to be part of it.”
Windowlicker was quiet as he checked the super mutant weapons. “I know. There’s not much communication outside of ‘need to know’ between different sectors of the group. But there were stories and rumors that got here. I heard that you found Oasis to be rather welcoming as far as settlements go.”
Marian was silent for a moment. She liked visiting Oasis, she enjoyed spending time in Harold’s company. The guy could be a bit much at times, but he was nice. He would tell her stories, and sometimes let her read to him. She remembered how he told her that he liked having her visit him simply because she didn’t worship him but saw him as a friend. The fact that she was finding ghoul refugees was the only thing that comforted her on the belief he may still be alive. If a sympathetic family from the fractured Brotherhood of Steel had claimed that area, then ghouls could stop by Oasis without being killed on their way out. A xenophobic family would have killed Harold Tree, burned down his forest, and kept any ghoul pinned in the Capital Wasteland until they succumbed to the inevitable.
“Harold Tree was a good friend,” she said. “I would prefer to believe that the abundance of resources and work from there to Rivet City was incidental.”
The man didn’t bother arguing with her. She didn’t want him to. Instead, she wanted to find Nick Valentine. She wanted to focus on the here and now, and not think of the people dying helplessly back home.
She thought for a moment, how was it that there wasn’t a single bullet in any guns, but every corpse still had rounds on them. She had run out of bullets before, more times that she could count but she didn’t keep any in her pocket when she could reload her weapon. Unless, they weren’t out of bullets when they died. What if someone took the bullets after they died. But who? Someone who could use them, or someone who knew someone who needed them and could use them.
“They were here,” she finally announced.
“You mean the Rose Gang, it’s hard to argue with that,” Windowlicker said.
“Not them,” she corrected. “I mean RJ and Nick. They were here. That’s why the guns are out of bullets. RJ probably scavenged them. He’s always done that. He often distributes them when he has a chance. He always figured someone could protect you best when they had ammunition to fight with.”
“But why aren’t they still here?” Windowlicker asked.
That was a good question. Marian stood back, looking at the corpses and the buzzing flies. “Slavers have a place to deal in the Capital Wasteland. You can buy and sell anything in Paradise Falls. There isn’t a place like that here. So, a group setting up to buy and sell people would need to start from scratch. They would need a place to keep the people they are trying to sell, and a place to show them to prospective buyers.”
“Like a place to hold the people when they aren’t on display?” Windowlicker asked. “I remember seeing a place like that. About a year ago, I was helping someone clear out a place that was holding some feral ghouls for keeping. Sick bastard was using them for food.”
Marian couldn’t help but feel a little sick at the thought of someone eating a feral. It did sound like a likely place to start looking. Windowlicker may be annoying and a pathological liar, but Hancock trusted him, and Hancock wasn’t a fool. She had to trust him on this.
“What was the place like?” she asked, looking down at Rapin’s remains. “Tell me what you remember of the layout.”
“It was a factory. Big and open, with a conveyor belt taking up most of the space. Everything else was room for people to watch the robots work without getting in their way.”
“Where did he keep the ghouls then?”
“There was a basement. The prior owner tried killing my friend and me by disrupting the platform that took us down there locking us with the ghouls. They were behind a cage, but it wasn’t very secure.”
“How did you get out?”
“We fought through the basement, and found another entrance to the basement. It was secured, but we fought through that.”
“They would probably secure it again,” she muttered to herself. Her mind raced, she tried thinking about how she and by extension the Rose Gang, would use this area to secure humans. “They are low on members, there’s no way they got here without casualties, and most of the corpses were from my time with them.” Marian couldn’t help but smile at the idea they were unable to grow much after her trist with Hank. “Most likely would lock people in the basement the same way. Two armed guard to secure the only other exit would keep down any escape attempt. Yeah, it might work.”
She looked up at Windowlicker. She realized he let her work things out her way, something most people would be uncomfortable watching. “I have a plan,” she announced. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to part ways.”