After we crossed the Troll-bridge we ran into an Invincible patrol, which at least means we’re in the right place. I think the military people call that skirmishing. Maybe we should have continued on foot instead of taking the chicken truck. It’s too slow to be of any use in a fight and it made us much easier to find. We didn’t even think about it, we just saw a working vehicle and we got in. I blame Martialla and Lucien, they’re the tactical experts. I also blame Paul and Shwyrm, they’re the ones who live in this shithole and should know better.
If I want to let them off the hook at all, which I do not, when did you ever see Mad Max walk anywhere? If there’s one thing that LA and the dead world of today it’s that you must have a car. The end. If there are two things that LA and the dead world of day have in common it’s the car thing and that the land is ruled by violent gangs. If there are three things that LA and the dead world of today have in common it’s the car thing and the gang thing and the traffic is literally murder. Etcetera, etcetera, joke continues, no one reads, the air is poison, short attention spans, no trees, deadly radiation, roads are terrible, mutants. I love LA! We love it!
I was up front in the chicken truck driving with Paul riding shotgun (with no gun, irony!) and Martialla, Lucien and Shwyrm in the back where they had built a sandbag (dirtbag actually) bunker that would have collapsed and crushed them in short order if the vehicle was capable of making any sharp turns or exceeding eleven miles per hour. I spotted two junk-wagons headed right at us from our two o’clock.
For intelligent people heading onto enemy territory we were shockingly unprepared for this turn of events. I blame everyone other than me. If I want to come to their defense again, which I do this time, we had gotten used to tooling around in an unbreakable supercar that allowed us to take the initiative anytime hostiles showed up. I’m sure there’s some military aphorism about complacency leading to failure to adapt your tactics (such as they were) leading to horrible horrible death.
The thing is that being in the future/present rots your brain. Everything sucks. The food sucks, the water sucks, the air sucks, the sky sucks, the people suck, you’re sick all the time which sucks, there’s no TV which sucks, you’re infested with parasites which sucks, etc. etc. There’s a kind of mental fatigue that comes over you when everything sucks so bad all the time. You have nothing but time to think about how to better your situation, to prepare for things like this, but instead you just think about how much everything sucks and wouldn’t it be nice to be back home.
When the enemy appear we were in the vicinity of a burned-out gas station former homestead surrounded by a field of cars that looked like they had been hit with bombs or heavy weapons so I headed for that. One of the Invincible scrap-wagons moved to cut us off while the other one moved in to bracket us from behind. Would have been a good move on their part but the moron in the lead truck drove directly into an impact crater like a moron. I saw one of the guys in the back of the truck fly in an arc out like he was shot from a catapult and the mofo hit the ground running without missing a beat, headed for cover. It was fucking unbelievable.
It would have been a lot more impressive if Lucien hadn’t shot him through the neck before he covered ten feet after touchdown but it was still something to see. I guess if nothing else a slow-moving chicken mobile makes for a better firing platform.
I had barely managed to drag the chicken truck into the car wrecks field when the other Invincible wagon shunted us. That’s what they call it when you get rammed from behind. If you know what I mean. The back of the truck crew would have been crushed by their own dirtbags at that point if they hadn’t already bailed out. I suppose that’s another benefit of a slow vehicle, you can pretty much disembark whenever you want. The damn thing is basically a Halloween haunted hayride. Or it was I guess since the back end sloughed off after it got smashed and now it’s nothing.
The Invincible driver had their only modern gun (and by modern I mean from the past obviously) a fat ass six shooter, which seems like a bad plan to me since the driver is going to the last one in the fight generally. It certainly didn’t do him any good when Shwyrm jumped on the side of their truck and stabbed him through the ear.
Four of the six other truckpeople had spearguns or scrap-built shit pistols. One of them had a blunderbuss of sorts. One of them just had a club. It’s too bad for them that they had crappy weapons and had to get close to engage, they could have stayed away and picked us off easily with their superior vehicle if they had better range. That must be why we’re still alive, we have (not now but generally) the fast machine and the longarms.
But they did have crappy weapons and they did have to get close so we blew them away. Or rather Martialla and Lucien did. For once I wasn’t being lazy, I’m trying to conserve ammo. Having a customized super-pistol from Gunmetal City is good and all, but the problem is finding more bullets to put in the damn thing. Too bad the Invincible revolver is too gigantic for my dainty lady hands, I could use a decent back-up weapon. Or front-up weapon. Whatever.
Two more people managed to crawl out of the hole the first truck disappeared into and were rewarded by Paul machete-ing them to death. No one else came out by we set the truck on fire anyway just to be sure. Not because we’re horrible pyromaniacs but because we weren’t fucking going down there to find out if anyone was alive and waiting to strike. Based on the screams there were.
The good news is now we have a better truck. We also picked up a few odds and ends from the Invincible corpses (oxymoron?) but the real find for the day was in one of the burned-out buildings in the middle of the field of carts. There was an old (again I guess there’s no other kind now) hunting rifle and a wooden box of shells, half of which were still good. We found a baby monitor that might work as a one-way walking talkie if we can power it and best of all we grabbed a box of unopened Seagram’s 7.
I’ll say one thing for the apocalypse, it’s certainly made me appreciate a wide range of booze I never would have touched before.
Rocket Cat 