Utterly Mad

Jennifer had been rather impressed with the organization on display at the orchard turned ranch, until she and Cherise got a closer look at the place. The first thing they found was a man, not a mutant or cyborg, nailed to a cross in the God's Army fashion. Cherise hadn't been able to look at it long, but Jenny did. The man was wasted away. Not as a man who had been hanging for a week, but like a man who's body was blown out by hard drug use. His eyes sat sunken and empty in his head, cheeks sallow and thin, body a sagging half starved sack. From the condition of the body, they could tell he'd had been alive recently as well, though the women would have had a hard time calling what this man had done before being nailed up "living." A fly buzzed around the feeling body and landed on one glazed over eye and Jenny grimaced before averting her gaze downward. There was a note, a simple scrap of card stock, stapled to the man's chest with industrial staples that read "thief" in long spidery letters. When it came to those desperate for a fix it seemed, this Hoyt didn't fuck around. In the distance, maybe a half mile, they could still barely see the steady line of smoke from a chimney, the orderly trees with people milling here and there among them, cattle in a more distant field, and a run downish looking two story house next to what was either a barn or a processing shed. The wind shifted and they caught the smell of the place. The spiced tang of apples, the stink of manure, and the unpleasant sickly sweet stench burnt plastic and ammonia.

"What do you think?" Jenny asked, trying to look like she was appraising Cherise reaction.

"I think I'd like to shell it and crucify it's occupants." Cherise growled in response. She pulled something from a pocket and Jenny wasn't sure what to think of it until the woman extended it.

"Is that a telescope?" Jenny asked incredulously at Cherise's old fashioned looking glass. Cherise started to raise it, then stopped.

"What? It's lighter and easier to carry than a pair of binoculars." She stated. Jenny pulled out her own pair of looking glasses at that, a small pair of basic folding binoculars that fit comfortably in the palm of her hand. Instead of commenting on it, Cherise simply grunted and peered through her antique while Jenny smirked and raised her own. The people in the orchard were much like the man on the cross. Wasted, sallow, unhealthy. Junkies, most of them, by the look. Their haunted, hunted, eyes told Jenny everything she needed to know. The people in the orchard were working all right, but they were hooked through the bag as well. The two women moved down the dirt road a ways to get a better look at the lay of the land and spotted a man and woman leaving the barn structure, headed for the house. The woman looked tough and wary, and carried some kind of large glaive bouncing on one shoulder. The other, the man, wore a lab coat that flapped gently in the breeze just as his hair was whipped a bit by said wind. His sun glasses glinted with the menacing humor behind them.

"Beware beware," Cherise said, "I think that's our guy." The words sent a shiver up Jenny's spine. Unlike Cherise, Jenny knew for a fact that it was their guy. Hoyt, the candy man. She knew it because Cheena knew it. The animal inside her could feel it, feel the poison in the man's veins. Smell the poison in his being. This man was at home with death and dealt in all the things that "his" kind took for pleasant but would quickly turn them into raving idiots and slaves to him. Cheena didn't like him, but Jenny didn't need Cheena for that. She looked somewhere else just so she wouldn't have to look at the unpleasant scene, and spotted the antenna. Judging from it's position she guessed it to be somewhere around the edge of the distant pasture. "They're looking our way fox girl." Cherise suddenly said matter of factly. Jenny swerved her gaze back down to see the man headed for the house, and the woman walking briskly in their direction.