Wasteland Warlords Episode 2 - 6 Tajira’s Totally Reasonable Request

“Can’t believe Griff got to be the one chained to a tiki bar,” Joe muttered for the thousandth time that night around the campfire. “I was right there!” He stopped sharpening Bertha’s chain to throw up one hand in disgust. “That could’ve been me forced to drink booze and eat peanuts until you guys got back.”

“Something tells me wasteland lumberjack isn’t Tajira’s style,” Alex said. “Griff, though…”

“What? No way is Griff sexier than me!”

Clay grabbed a chunk of Joshua tree from the pile of wood they’d gathered and tossed it onto the fire.

“I don’t hear anybody calling you a silver fox,” he said.

“Ageism! If I wasn’t cursed with all this youthful charm, women would be lining up around the block to chain me to their tiki bars.”

“Stop with all the yelling.” Alex put one protective hand over the little ears of the black and pink teacup pig sleeping off a tiki hangover on their bedroll. “You’ll wake up Bacon Bits.”

“Not as loud as she’s sawing logs.” Joe cranked Bertha’s chain around to a new section and went back to sharpening. “Even Bertha’s embarrassed. That there is one little oinker who cannot hold her liquor.”

Alex rolled her eyes. “As opposed to all the other day-drinking pigs that can.”

“O ye of much condescension. I got wasted with a pig or two in my day.” Joe grinned at Clay. “Remember when me, you, Bubba, and Jon-Jon fed a bunch of Busch Lite to Jon-Jon’s Berkshire during the Barnyard Zoo your senior year?” A wistful grin spread across his face. “Now that hog could put ’em down. Three Busch-els and a fifth of Ol Pappy, and that sonuvagun still could’ve beat a breathalyzer!”

“It got loose and smashed up a bunch of cars in the school parking lot,” Clay said, clearly recalling the events of that evening very differently than his brother. “Not sure that counts as holding your liquor.”

“Hey, nobody ever proved the booze was what sent Wilbur into that rampage,” Joe said. “For all we know, he’d just got into a fight with his girlfriend-sow and was dealing with some major issues.”

Clay shrugged. “Just sayin’, it was probably pretty drunk if it did all that.”

“What is a broken heart, anyway, but the drunken rampage of the soul?” Joe mused, mostly to himself.

Alex sighed and shook her head. “I leave you dorks alone together for one weekend…” She was smiling, though.

“I seem to remember you laughing pretty hard when you heard Mrs. Henning’s car was one of the casualties,” Clay said, nudging her knee with his. “Didn’t you say she deserved it for telling you martial arts wasn’t a real sport?”

Joe obviously hadn’t done enough shit-stirring for the day, because he added, “’Course, you can’t argue with her logic—basketball isa real sport. There’s teams and everything.”

“Martial arts isn’t a sport,” Alex snapped, “it’s a way of life.”

“Yeah,” Joe said. “One where nobody dunks. Boring.”

Clay’s laugh broke off in his throat. He heard a buzzing, whirring sound that made the hair on the back of his neck prickle.

Beside Joe, Chonk looked up into the night sky, ears twitching manically.

Clay stood up and snatched his M4 from where it was leaning against his chunk of concrete.

“What’s going on?” Alex picked up her Mossberg. She’d barely finished asking before the sound cut off.

Joe jumped to his feet.

“It’s a horsefly! Is it on me?” He tried to twist around to look at his back. “Get it off!”

“Shut up,” Clay said, turning in a slow circle, scanning the area for any sign of it. “There’s nothing on you. It’s a drone.”

Alex spotted it first, helped along by the night-vision she’d inherited from Katotes.

“Across the street, on that ledge.” She pointed with the barrel of her shotgun.

Clay spun around, eyes focusing on the half-hidden target.

The drone didn’t look anything like the unmanned surveillance vehicles the military had been using during his deployment. This one was about the size of a softball, and made out of glinting brass gears in the shape of a huge fly. A pair of shiny wings poked up from its back, and two geodesic eyes stared out the front, glittering in the light from their fire.

Whoever was operating the thing must’ve seen Clay taking aim. The mechanical bug shot into the air, gears whining and wings buzzing. It zoomed upward, trying to get lost in the night.

Clay led it by a hair. Just before it disappeared in darkness, he squeezed the trigger as he exhaled, slow and steady.

It was a shot he never could’ve made a month ago. With his enhanced dexterity, though, it felt as easy as shooting down a hot air balloon at point-blank range. The M4’s muzzle flashed, and a split-second later came the metallic burst of the bullet tearing through gears.

Bits of brass and hair-thin glass rained down, tinkling on the concrete.

Keeping an eye and ear out for more insectile drones, the three of them sidled over to check out the biggest pieces of the wreckage. Bits of broken glass gritted under their boots. Clay kept it covered, just in case, but the thing was definitely out of commission.

“It’s Gearhead’s,” Joe growled, shaking his head. “That mad Aussie bastard finally did it. He made a pact with the Satan of insects—the horsefly. I expected better.”

“Okay, so maybe we don’t stop for the night,” Clay said, lowering his rifle.

“Why not?” Joe stomped on the eye parts of the mechanical bug, grinding the lenses into the street under the thick sole of his bone studded Skeletal Warboots. “You already killed his evil spy bug, we should be fine.”

“That thing would’ve been sending surveillance back the whole time. Coordinates, too.” Clay looked toward the sleeping bags and fire, where Bacon Bits was still snoring, blissfully unaware. “Sure, it’s possible he’s all the way back at Camp Liberty, but odds are good he’s a hell of a lot closer than that.”

“Think he’s still mad about his workshop?” Joe wondered, nudging the broken bits of the drone with the toe of his boot.

Alex’s mouth popped open. Even for someone as quick on the draw as she usually was, that took a second to recover from.

“You mean is he still mad about how we stole his stat potions, gave his mech golem a nuclear meltdown, and blew up every bit of advanced technology he’d built?” She shook her head. “Why would someone be mad about that?”

“Yeesh, I was just thinking out loud,” Joe said. “It takes all kinds of people to make this world go round, you know. Sure, he was calling us bloody buggers and shrimp on the barbie and other Australian stuff, but I think underneath all that rage, he seemed like a pretty reasonable guy.”

“Agree to disagree.” Clay headed back toward the fire. “We need to get out of here, asap.”

“Seconded.” Alex shuddered and hugged her Mossberg closer. “I’m not staying the night where some dickhead Incant was just spying on us.”

“Well, give me a second.” Joe set Bertha down and grabbed his ruck, then started scooping bits of broken drone into a side pocket. Chonk scampered over to help him. “Waste not, want not, right little buddy?”

***

They didn’t hear any more drones, but Clay kept them moving through the night anyway. Most likely Gearhead’s spy machines were equipped with thermal imaging, but just in case they weren’t, he figured they should make use of the natural cover of darkness. Besides, the more distance they put between them and the last place Gearhead knew they’d been, the better.

At least they didn’t have to worry about getting lost. Alex had been given a quest marker when they accepted Tajira’s task, and she fed them directions from her Incant interface. That helped them maintain a steady pace rather than having to constantly stop and check their position by the stars.

They only had to engage with hostile creatures twice, once near the caved-in ruins of an old city park where a band of crocturnals had been staked out, and later when they got jumped by a Skeletal Corpse Viper at a burnt-out In-N-Out Burger.

Because they were all on heightened alert, the ambushes weren’t the easy pickings the wasteland monsters had been hoping for. Clay chased off the crocturnals by using Control Lights to change their crank flashlights to UV lights. Like Griff had mentioned, the light burnt their scales and sent them running. The Skeletal Corpse Viper was a different, gorier story. It had lunged out of the shadows at Alex, probably assuming it was picking the weakest out of the herd. What it hadn’t been expecting was for this pint-sized wrecking ball to launch a fist like a railroad hammer through its skull. It didn’t even have a chance to realize its mistake; its head exploded like an overripe watermelon with a cherry bomb inside.

Both skirmishes were over almost as fast as they’d begun, and while the crocturnals got away without dropping any loot, the Viper left behind a long brown leather duster with a decent armor rating and +2 Magicka boost.

“Guys, who am I?” Joe swung the duster onto his shoulders and squinted one eye. “‘Well now there, lads, I reckon mayhap yonder.’”

“I don’t even need a ruling on that,” Alex said. “None of it made any sense.”

“What? That’s how he talks. Clay, tell her.”

“Let’s keep moving.” Clay took the jacket and stuck it in his pack for Griff. He hadn’t seen the stats on the old weed’s current duster, but it was looking pretty beat to shit. Anyway, if the new one wasn’t what Griff was looking for, they could sell it to the Sooq.

Gray seeped into the sky as they left behind Santa Clarita and took the ancient Soledad Canyon Road up into the mountains. On one of the abandoned ranches outside town, they found a weather-beaten machine shed, surprisingly uninhabited. By unanimous vote, they decided to catch a few hours’ sleep inside where Gearhead’s drones wouldn’t be able to spot them.

The place was packed with rusting off-roading frames, crumbling knobby sand tires, and motheaten five-point harnesses. Alex wrapped the snoring Bacon Bits in an old pair of pjs and laid her in a chewed-up bucket seat, while Clay unrolled their double sleeping bag on the dusty floor.

In spite of having just pulled an all-nighter on the march, Joe wasn’t interested in setting up camp. He wandered around the shed, touching parts, picking them up, wiping dust off their number plates with an odd reverence that only a redneck tinkerer can have for rusted out mechanical garbage.

“Man, this stuff was the cream of the crop when the Merge hit. They probably got a hundred thousand bucks in parts just sitting here, filling up with sand.” Joe let out a low whistle. On his shoulder, Chonk made a cooing trill, probably because racoons didn’t have the lip structure to whistle. “Boy howdy, if I had a week and an air compressor…”

“You don’t. You’ve got a couple hours and a death-trap carnival.” Clay kicked off his boots and climbed into the double sleeping bag with Alex. “Get some rest so you’re ready for it.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely,” Joe said hastily enough that Clay knew he wasn’t listening. God love his brother, but Joe probably couldn’t hear anything over the sound of the engines revving in his head.

Clay turned over and curled around Alex’s tiny form. Best to leave the grease monkey be and get some shuteye so he could pull his and Joe’s weight if he had to.

He dozed off to the metallic sounds of old parts being sifted through—

—And bolted up out of a dead sleep to the scream of a pneumatic impact wrench.

“Mmwhatssit!” A sleep-panicked elbow from Alex sliced toward Clay’s face. He pulled his head to the side and threw out both arms to stop it before her new Ettin strength caved his skull in like that Skeletal Corpse Viper’s.

From her bucket seat nest, Bacon Bits was squealing bloody murder. “Who dares disturb the Great Blue Wyrm! I’ll have your blood for a drink mixer, your bones for toothpicks, your scalp for… for…”

“A hat?” Joe offered.

“At the very least!” the teacup pig cried.

Clay scrubbed his gritty eyes. “What the hell, Joe?”

“Sorry, guys, that’s my bad.” Joe popped up on the opposite side of a half-built dune buggy, the impact gun in his grease-covered hands. “You all were sleeping so hard, and this gun says ‘quiet performance’ right on the side”—he tapped on the labelled in demonstration—“so I didn’t figure a little tinkering would wake you up. See, I found an old air compressor and got it running with a Fyuela rune, and there’s about ninety percent of the parts we’d need for—”

“Clay,” Alex groaned, pulling the sleeping bag up over her face. As in, I can’t deal with your brother right now. Please do something, for the love of all that is good.

He kissed the back of her neck by way of an I’m on it and slid out of the sleeping bag. There was no way they were going to get Joe to put down the tools and leave the dune buggy alone, so Clay went for the next best option.

“Come on and help me roll this thing outside.”

Once they got the buggy, the air compressor, and the engine block outside under the lean-to, Joe dove back in, head-first. Clay considered grabbing a little more sleep, but the brilliant desert morning light and his redneck git-outta-bed-and-git-doin’ upbringing outweighed the exhaustion from the night before. Besides, Bacon Bits and Chonk had snuggled up on his side of the sleeping bag—the coon sprawled out like roadkill and the little pig nestled in Alex’s hair like a cat.

So he stayed up and helped Joe rebuild the rest of the buggy. Two eyes watching for drones was better than one, anyway.

Once Clay got into the project, he had to admit it was going to be good to have some kind of transportation again—especially one that could off-road. They hadn’t had the luxury of riding in a vehicle since they crossed the containment wall into the IZ. Alex’s car had been sold way back when they were still trying to stay ahead of the medical bills, and though they’d held onto his truck for as long as they could, it had finally gone along with the house for the money and gear to strike out west. They’d been on foot since they stepped off the train in Fresno, and buddy was he looking forward to sitting back and riding a while.

People who didn’t know Joe very well might’ve written off his messing with the rust-bucket buggy as a waste of time, but Clay had seen the miracles his brother could do with machinery that should’ve been well beyond the point of salvage. Old lawn mowers, busted four wheelers, locked-up tractors, crushed derby cars—give him an engine and four wheels, and no matter how badly degraded the parts were, Joe would turn out something that ran. The cobweb-encrusted, dust-clogged dune buggy was no exception.

By noon, the pneumatic wrench had sung its last song. Joe slapped a Fyuela rune onto the engine, then touched the stripped ends of the brittle, mouse-chewed ignition wires together.

The engine rumbled to life.

“Hot damn!” Joe crowed over the noise, slapping a hand against the dash. “She’s a beaut, ain’t she?”

“She runs.” To Clay, operational wasn’t a synonym for beautiful, but he knew to Joe they were basically the same word. “Still thinking no on the muffler?”

“And silence that sweet melody?” Joe lovingly patted the coolant reservoir on the exposed engine. “That would be sacrilege, Clay, and I didn’t come all this way to commit sacrilege. I came to whoop ass and solve carnie puzzles.”

Clay grinned. “Then let’s get everybody up and on the road.”