Utterly Mad

    “Hey, hey, hey, we are in luck ladies.” Kyle put on an accent Catnip didn’t recognize. Dee did something similar when he was trying to be clever, but Catnip understood the references Dee was making about as much as she would understand the finances of the towing company which owned the small building she and her new friends had come to.

     The sign above the door claimed that the building had been a branch of “South by Southwest Towing.” Catnip read this with the laborious slowness of one who has only recently gained a grasp of basic reading comprehension. “What’s towing?” She asked. L gave her a look that Catnip was coming to understand was disbelief.

     “Exactly what we are looking for girly. If the batteries are still good in any of these auto-tows, we could go back and haul the truck here for repairs! We should have remembered that this was here, Mark probably wouldn’t have been such a dick.” L said. In new england, Catnip had never seen an “auto-tow.” The auto-tows were lined up along the front of the building like a small fleet of refrigerators on wheels. Each one reminded Catnip of the robotic street sweeps that Hector had pulled back to the farm for her to salvage for parts except that instead of a scoop and a series of brushes, each auto-tow was equipped with two wedge shaped things and a pair of cables with hooks above those. Catnip could see how they worked right away, the wedges would adjust, and had a depression to hold a vehicle's wheels in place while the cables ensured that the car being pulled wouldn’t slip off the back. She was willing to bet that some straps would have been slung over the top of the wheels to add a bit more stability. She checked one, and found a set of exactly that in the auto-tow’s storage compartment.

     “What do you think Catnip?” L asked a little nervously. They’d only been on speaking terms for a day, but already L had begun to differ unto Catnip for the question of mechanics, and it made her feel a bit smug.

     “I think the batteries are dead.” Catnip said after a cursory examination of only six of the ten devices. “They’ve been sitting too long in some kind of idle state, these things will never move again unless they can get recharged.” She pulled at a plug attached to the front of one of the auto-tows, and found that the plug was attached to a self winding spool of electrical cable. “That’s clever.” She commented off hand. “Maybe they have something else we can use, we can at least look through all the cars out here to see if any of them still run. She shaded her eyes from the harsh light, and wondered if she might convince L to help her find a hat. Kyle saved her the effort by emerging from the towing office with a baseball cap in her size. “I noticed you squinting a lot Nip, not used to the sun? How about the auto-tows, any of them usable?” She explained the situation, and he sighed. “Alright. You're right, I guess we could find something else. Hope for the best and expect the worst, you’ll never be disappointed. If you ladies wanna get started, I’ll join you in a sec. I’m gonna go around back and tap a kidney.”