Utterly Mad

Cole McKinsey and his brother Wade were having a bad day. It had all started the day before when the contract holder had finally reached out to them with instructions for delivery. It was the realization of who they were delivering too that had brought around the first tingles of trouble at the back of Cole's head. Their company had continued in seclusion after the Cataclysm, running as though they had been prepared for the lawless world that would come. From the people at the top to the men like Cole and Wade at the bottom, it was good business. Sort of. Making deliveries to people like Hoyt wasn't exactly what they'd originally been in for, but the men up top needed guys like the candy man to operate here and there. Make money in the foreign markets and all that. God knew they had their fingers in every pie up north already.

The second thing had been the nearly sleepless night of trying to contact Hoyt while fending off the undead, then later trying to contact Hoyt and his army of junkies while fending of Hell's Raiders. They'd managed to fight from street to street with the South's brand of unusually unkempt hordes while keeping their langourous cargo within their armored trailer safe with relative ease and success to find themselves only a few miles later being harried by the men and woman on motorcycles and in startlingly nimble trucks and cars. Stops and starts all night it had been until Cole had made the fatal mistake of trying to plow his big rig between two trucks making up a barricade across the road. On the other side, the rig had met the real trap. The bump. A log, split down the center and laid flat side down onto the road. The rig hit it at only slightly reduced speed, sending Cole's ass bone up into the back of his skull, Wade's teeth scissoring into his own tongue, and the rigs suspension up into the engine compartment. It had been less destructive than the raiders had thought it would be, Cole surmised from the dimly heard conversation outside the locked and armored cab, but it had disabled the semi.

When he came to his senses, Cole saw the man straddling a motorcycle pointing some kind of small automatic at him and slammed his fist into the emergency shutter switch on the dash. A split second later, the first two bullets punched into the seat between the brothers and then the shutter was between the shooter and them catching the rest of the slugs.

"Holy shit Cole!" Wade shouted, throwing an arm over his face. It sound more like "hoewee shid koh" coming from Wade's damaged mouth. Cole slapped the door locks in the same movement, and sealed themselves in. The brothers had been robbed on the road before, you couldn't well not in this day and age as a transporter of goods and services. He tried the radio again and got nothing, then he tried the short range and got the fizzle of static that said someone was transmitting. Every now and then, the ghost of a voice or other sounds would drift through the short waves tiny spraker. The two men sat in the cab and listened to that and sounds of the people outside trying half heartedly to get in. Wade took the time to stuff his mouth with gauze while Cole tried again and again to raise somebody, anybody, on the radio but nothing happened for a long few hours. Then, someone outside was addressing them.

"Excuse me, I need you to come out. We're taking your trailer." Said the voice. It sounded like a woman, good natured enough but authoritative. Next to Cole, Wade was shaking his head back and forth wildly and Cole could understand why. The men they worked for were not to be fucked with and neither was the man they were delivering to. "Hello in there?"

"Fuck off, ya hoser." Cole shouted, then nearly slapped himself.

"Hoser? What?" The woman asked, seemingly to someone else.

"They're Canadian..." Came a mans voice, "Quebec plates."

"Oooh. Okay." The woman quietly exclaimed, then to Cole, "Now come on, if you come out now I can at least make sure these guys don't decide to blow up your truck or cut their way in and string you both up. Your truck may still be running, but I gerauntee you it's not moving. We've already unhooked your trailer and are gonna have to tow your truck out of the way anyway. Make it easier on everybody and just come on out."

Cole could see them through the small slot he and his brother had cut into the armor playing over the windows. A woman with a luxurious fox tail, a taller more well built woman, and a man in a leather jacket. Beyond them was a collection of nasty looking folk smoking cigarettes, passing around a bottle of who knew what, and spitting the shit waiting for the action to start again. The two women were talking quietly to each other now, waiting for his response. "Wade, hand me the rifle." Wade did as he was asked and passed over the hunting rifle he kept behind his seat, but with a look on his face that said "Sure, I'll hold your beer, but you better be sure about this." Which wasn't far off the mark really. Cole did feel as though he was about to do something that warranted a request to 'hold his beer.' "I said fuck off!" Cole cried as he jammed the barrel of the rifle into the driver side porthole and squeezed off one quick shot. The man in the leather jacket dropped while the woman with the fox tail went into a dive/crouch that was too fluid to be anything but trained. The taller woman though flicked her wrist and drew some kind of rod and charged. There was blue fire, shouting, and before the brothers knew what was happening, they'd both been pulled from the trucks cab.

"Y'all right Hussar?" The fox woman asked the taller woman.

"I'll be fine. Burned myself worse when I was a little girl reaching onto the stove. How about them?" 'Hussar' said back. Wade was smoking lightly from his lightly charred jeans, but Cole had come through the still cherry hot cavity carved into the trucks armor with plenty of holes burned into his clothes and blisters forming on seared skin. The bandits checked over the man Cole had shot and determined that he'd be fine, and while they were at it others came and moved the McKinsey brother's semi, thoroughly looting the clients other orders from the back cab.

"Okay, that's good then. Fine work guys, get that other semi over here and hook it up so my me and my fellow ranger can take it back to our people. Send a rep from your clans to the location we talked about earlier and we'll have a cut ready to hand over, like we discussed." She looked around while the bandits went about the work, then let a broad warm smile cross her face. "I'm so proud of you lot working together."

"Atomos, what do with do with these two now? Should we take them back with us or..." Hussar asked, punctuating the 'or' with a little fingering of the rod in her hand. 'Atomos' gave the question some real consideration before asking back; "I mean, technically we are the bad guys here? I think?" Hussar shrugged a little. "Eh, we could just leave them here. It's your call."

"Yeah... Okay, we'll leave them tied up here and as soon as we've gotten a fair distance away, the Sun Dogs can decide what to do with them. That sound alright with you guys?"

The cheers that brought up was enough to tell Cole that the day was only going to get worse.