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iv. BRUTE AND BRUTUS ━━━━━━━━━━━━
"Hey. You, uh, you got somethin' on your face."
Sylvia frowned and brought her hand up to touch her cheek. Her fingers came away slimy with some unidentifiable gunk― probably brain matter, but she couldn't exactly be sure.
"Is that all of it?" She asked, wiping her hand on her pants.
Ray winced. He wiped at her cheek with the sleeve of his jacket, then gave a small jerk of his head. "Should be."
She nodded and glanced around the convenience store they'd stormed. It hadn't been pretty. The whole place had been teeming with feral ghouls, and while they cleared it in no time, the ghouls put up a good fight... Hence the smears of unknown filth on their clothes.
Ximena had dragged all the bodies of the feral ghouls to the center of the room and looted them one-by-one. She looked up from one of the bodies and nodded to them, then went straight back to digging around in the pockets of its tattered clothes.
Joel hung back at the edge of the pile of ferals. He nudged a limp, withered hand with the toe of his boot, then looked away. When he wasn't looking, Martha May took an experimental bite out of the hand. Ghouls must not have tasted good to geckos, because she made a retching noise a moment later and scampered off.
"So," Sylvia began as she scooped cans of preserved food into her arms, "you like being a King?"
Ray shrugged and said, "Dunno anything else."
"Really? You were a King from day one?"
"You know the Garrets? The folks who run the Atomic Wrangler?" He asked, and swiped his arm along the top shelf. "They about raised me."
"James and Francine?" Sylvia grinned. "Yeah, they're good people. For Freeside, I mean."
"Nah, their parents. Jimmy and Fran are like siblings to me."
"Jimmy and Fran?"
Ray shrugged, leaning on one of the shelves. "That's what I always called 'em."
"And you got into the Kings... How?" She asked. She had to squint in the dim light, but she could've sworn she saw a faint blush on his cheeks,
