Where are the god damn radios? I was promised once we seized that “hydroplant” we would have radios.
After blowing up the Invincible cargo plane, and as much of the base as we could (which was not nearly as fun as I expected by the way, but it was nice of them to have explosives on hand for us to use blowing up their shit) we headed south in the Invincible cars with as much stuff as we could carry.
We didn’t massacre the prisoners. Maybe that was a mistake. There’s just something off putting about gunning down a big herd of people all at once when you’re not in battle. Funny that. I hope for their sake that there really is an Invincible convoy coming in a couple of days because otherwise they’re dead anyway on account of being stranded in the middle of the Yellowstone ash-death zone.
These Invincible cars are something else. They don’t look like much, they’re ugly white sedans, the kind of thing that you might see in cheap sci-fi movie, but once you get inside them they really kick things up fifty notches. I’ve heard the same thing about Laura Linney. FYI.
They have bullet proof/resistant glass windshields and windows with is a nice change of pace, you know being able to see what the hell is going on instead of trying to drive by looking through a mailslot. Even more importantly perhaps is that they’re grit dirt grime proof/resistant as well. Seems like a little thing maybe but since we have smog and sand and shards of glass in the air constantly it’s a big deal. Normal glass would get so filthy in fifteen minutes it would be useless.
But that’s not all! They’ve got what Martialla calls weapon ports, which is a fancy way to say a doggie door for you to shoot out of with your guns. Which is nice. No point in having armored windows if you have to roll them down to pop a cap in an ass. It’s also got a screen on the console that we think is radar but haven’t figured out yet. It’s cool and yellow and glowy though. Makes me feel like I’m in a spaceship.
The bad news was since we have no radios we have no fucking idea what’s going on anywhere. Also in the bad news column was the fact that Dirt Tooth doesn’t know how to drive, being the ignorant Thomas the Tank Engine mofo that he is. That meant that Martialla and I each had to drive one of the cars which meant that either I was driving alone or with Dirt-Tooth beside me. Both of which were fairly intolerable. Every time we stopped Martialla and I would order DT to go to the other car because we couldn’t stand his yammering about trains. He’s lucky we didn’t ditch him like I did with my sister on the way to the Grand Canyon. There was no gas station bathroom to facilitate that maneuver this time though.
On the return trip we ran into some bug people on a cattle drive, only it was pigs instead of cattle. Swine drive? They look pretty much the same, the pigs I mean. Probably because feral hogs look more or less apocalyptic to begin with. If you’ve only ever seen pigs at the state fair boy are you in for a surprise when you see one in the wild. And the bug people looked the same too, but I had only seen them on the coast before. So that was different.
The bugs said they were on their way to sell their livestock in Junktown. We told them that Junktown was under new management and there was a war on and such. They didn’t care about that, as long as they got paid for their swine. We didn’t exactly tell them that their payment would be not being shot to death by us but Martialla did give them a crash course on the military history of foraging. According to a movie I was in that really got going during the American Civil War. USA! USA! USA! I learned working on that film that not all slave states joined the Confederacy. Also noteworthy on that shot I had a little snafu with a hatchet in a scene where I attacked one of the soldiers stealing my food. Needless to say that propmaster was fired. I think the stunt union sued him too.
We ran into other groups too. People from I don’t even know where. They weren’t from the River Kingdoms or anywhere around there, they weren’t Trainiancs, they weren’t from Antolpe. Where did all these people come from? Were they underground like ants and the war is stirred them up like shaking out a rug? I tried to talk with them but without the lay of the land or context it made little sense to me. Someone says they’re from Twinblade or Ironfort or that they live on the Seven Tears River or across the Masaneaum what am I supposed to make of that?
I told these bands that if they wanted to contribute to the war against the Invincible they should come with us. If they wanted to die they should keep going north. Or East. Or West. I did tell them that it would probably be okay if they headed South. Dirt Tooth shrugged and said “We could always use more laborers.”
We had quite a menagerie with us when we got back to the “power plant”. More pigs than people but not by a lot.
