Strangely we never had a chance to examine the bumpy-headed people up close until after the airfield raid. They’re pretty good at not getting killed. Or there were anyway, am I right? Murder high five! I assumed those bumps on their heads were pockets of fat or big goiters or something but they’re hard. I wonder if that’s bone and their skulls are actually bumpy. If Paul was still alive he’d cut one of their faces off for me so I could check it out. Probably Shwyrm would have too if she wasn’t also dead.
I can once again replenish my position that these people may be an evil menace out to destroy freedom but they are by a wide margin the most bangable strain of future people. Excepting of course any “clones” of me still running around out there. Aside from the bumps and the alopecia and steroid-bodies they look like normal people from my time. I tell you this much, any dude that’s into female domination and chicks with muscles would be in heaven if they woke up here like I did. Or they would be for a while until they died of dysentery a few weeks later.
I tell you who wasn’t in heaven, the two Invincible pilots that were out flying around when we took over their airbase. Boy were they in for a rude surprise when they landed. We probably should have tried to take them alive so we could torture them for information but no one was in the mood. Torture is a whole thing you know? If Paul was still alive he would have done it no complaints. Or Shwyrm would have if she wasn’t also dead. Martialla scolding me over not trying to capture them but Lucien and I could tell she was just going through the motions.
I wonder how many more of them might show up.
The good news is that one of these other pilots showed up in a plane that Martialla is willing to fly. She called it a Grumman Ag Cat and if you ask me it’s the worst one. It’s about the size of a cat. Martialla is afraid of all the other planes but at least they have some size of them. The one she likes doesn’t look like it even has room for an engine, it’s just the cab (or whatever you call that on a plane) with the wings directly attached to it and barely any tail. When I said as much to Martialla she gave me a condescending look.
“You think it’s easier to keep something big and heavy in the air than something small and light?”
I made the universal gesture for ‘what are you talking about’ “Small planes are much more dangerous than big ones! Everyone knows that!” I thought for a moment “Aren’t they how JFK Junior died?”
“That’s true if the big plane is made by Lockhead maybe” she pointed at a bright red hunk of metal with stubby wings “who do you think made that thing? The reason small planes have more issues it because of the pilots that fly them more than anything else.”
I gestured back at the Ag Cat “So you’re saying that this thing, which you said was probably built in the nineteen-fifties, which was, let me check, a HUNDRED and FIFTY years ago, and is smaller than some of your bowel movements is the safer way to go?”
She nodded “Yeppers.”
Long story short (too late) Martialla and Lucien loaded up all the fuel they could stuff in the flying alley cat to head back west to see what’s going on and I’m heading back east to continue drumming up support for the war effort.
It was more than a little insulting how worried Lucien and Martialla were about me going off on my own. They gave me directions, which were just go east until you hit the river and then follow it, so many times I wanted to shoot them. I get it, I don’t have the best track record when it comes to not getting lost but Jesus Christ, I’m an adult woman. I’ve killed like fifty people. Don’t treat me like a child.
I was mush more legitimately worried about them crashing and dying immediately after take-off in that flying jalopy but they didn’t. Somehow that thing that looks like a hang glider with a cement mixer attached to it got in the air and stayed there until it was out of my sight.
I mentally wished them well and hopped in the Invincible truck where I had an uneventful journey back to the Riverlands.
Just kidding, all manner of eventfulness happened.
Image is from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, which I have never seen. In case you were wondering.