We saw an Invincible plane today. Good thing we were in an Invincible truck huh? My immediate thought was to abandon our current mission, I love abandoning missions, and try to follow it back to the airbase so we could steal a new plane and/or blow it up like those British guys in all the old movies. Sadly I had to abandon my abandonment plan when the many challenges of trying to follow a plane by land were pointed out to me.
After that disappointment we came upon a waterpowered sawmill with some actual wooden buildings made out of wood to be buildings clustered around it like chicks around a hen. Around that cluster was an actual wooden wall made out of wood to be a wall that was supplemented with barbed wire (or concertina wire as Martialla insists on calling it) and a machinegun nest.
It wasn’t much of a machinegun, it looked like the kind of thing my uncle Art would build in his garage before the federal marshals took him down, but it was a machinegun nevertheless. While Martialla and Lucien were speculating wildly on its abilities and rate of fire and range and so forth, not to mention if the damn thing was even functional, and while Paul and Shwyrm were looking for ways to infiltrate by means of stealth for some good old-fashioned machete and knife work I raised an excellent point.
“Do we think this is it?” They all turned to stare at me like confused meerkats “It’s a sawmill. Do you think that the rampaging army conquering the West Coast would have a sawmill as their secret weapon?”
Lucien made some remarks about the importance of processing facilities in this world of scarcity, but it was so lame he couldn’t even believe it himself while he was saying it.
“Not only that” I pointed out excellently “those are children down there, see? Do you think the Invincible bring their kids with them on campaign?”
That was actually a false argument, I have no trouble believing that the “armies” of today would include children up to and including babies, I mean when did we “civilized” people stop doing that? There were twelve year olds running messages and playing drums and getting shot during the Civil War. I know that because of the movie Made of Honor, where I played a girl posing as a boy in the Union army to try and find her brother. Not a bad flick.
Point being, I think you have to advance to a certain level of societal comfort before anyone starts giving a shit about child welfare, I mean weren’t they still sending kids into mines in the 1950’s? Don’t quote me on that one, I was in a movie about the West Virginia Mine Wars, but I was just a day player, I got paid scale, so I have no idea. Actual point being that I made that argument anyway because I knew it would work on Martialla and Lucien, being rubes, while Paul and Shwyrm wouldn’t speak up even if they knew better.
Rather than charging into a machinegun nest, which sounds like a bad idea no matter the quality of said machinegun in said nest, we waved the white flag of parlay at them, which was in fact a dingy brown rag. After some shouting back and forth we moved to the side of the wall, outside of the machinegun’s field of fire and spoke with some faces through the barb wire.
A dude with an old man sunken face who I don’t think was an old man did most of the talking, but there was also a woman who looked like the lady who ran the flower shop by my apartment in the old world and a buck-toothed bumpkin with Cindy Brady man-hair.
It was my turn to make a colossal blunder. Because we were in an Invincible truck they thought we were Invincible. It never even occurred to me to try and bluff them and pretend that we were. It didn’t end up being a problem but I feel like after three lapses like this in a row recently the next one is bound to kill us all. Or at least everyone but me.
I’ve lost track of which side of which river we’re on, but the people on this side here were beholden to some warlord before the Invincible showed up and massacred those people and told the timbermillers they were no beholden to them and make with the timber thanks. We barely even had to say anything, they just assumed we were there to liberate them and gave us the lay of the land. To the northwest there are a couple of timber camps which feed timber to the mill. Straight westish there are two other client villages growing mutated beets for everyone to eat.
But upriver that’s where the action is. According to them if we head north along the river we’ll come to a hydro-electric plant that the Invincible have just gotten up and running. Electrical devices are being gathered to get in on the sweet flow of lady electricity. That’s where they’re holed up, probably enjoying their hair dryers and lamps and radios.
When the Invincible showed up the millers instinct was to beg Old Ela or King Hollywoodland for help, judging them correctly to be better masters than Duke, but the Trollfather had them trapped on this side of the river and unable to supplicate themselves. We told them that the bridge was now open on account of we had shot that Troll guy in the face. So they could flee if they wanted, but Old Ela wasn’t going to stick her old neck out for them unless they showed they were worthy of help first by working with us seize control of the hydroplant.
It’s probably even true. That’s what makes it such a convincing lie.
I was supposed to play the daughter in True Lies you know but Eliza Dushku told the casting director that I have a vestigial penis. I hope when the apocalypse arrived she survived long enough to really suffer.
