Utterly Mad

Nathaniel nodded at that, giving a little mmph as Lilith had grabbed him and practically pinned him against that massive chest, wrigglinfg a bit so he could actually breathe and to answer Lilith. "Alright then. We need to get some things to bring over to them. Hector, if you could? Bandages, antiseptic, painkillers, the...harder stuff..."

Hector sighed at that. "Alright. Get ready then, and I'll go gather it." he said, the knight calmly making his way towards the room where they stored the medical supplies, gathering a container to put things in. They had a decent stock of bandages, dressings, and tape to go with it. A small amount of antibiotics they could spare, medical alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, some antiseptic powder and other disinfectant.

Then he sorted through painkillers. Abundant aspirin, which he decided to include anyway even though he suspected they wanted the harder stuff. Then some scavenged codeine, tramadol, morphine, and oxycodone. He couldn't help but facepalm as he realized that, along with their other painkillers, he found a decent amount of the sort of drugs they likely had in mind. More weed and coke than he suspected should be stored in the medical cabinet, along with some heroin that he hastily packed away. "Bandit, I swear..." he grumbled to himself, before including one last addition in the form of a small vial of red potion.

---

Elsewhere, while Helen was making her final preparations for the mission, Sergei and Solomon had been cooking a late breakfast of their own, letting Lucian sleep in for the moment. By now it was ready, rather simple fare yet having plentiful use of things they'd been growing over most of the year. Sol had also set aside broth with a careful selection of the wild vegetables they had available, reasoning that they didn't have many options for fluid replacement and treatment of anemia there, which he suspected Lucian would need. He calmly made his way other to where the hunter was still sleeping in, checking the bandages before calmly setting a hand on his shoulder.

Solomon had been preparing something rather simple, flatbread along with some of the cheese spread they had available, and some of their cured meat cooked over the ashes. In addition he had the broth, most of the vegetables he'd picked for it having been boiled beforehand.

"Mostly just bread with this cheese stuff, and some meat." he answered, while Sergei nodded. "Helen's still out, stayed overnight at the farm."

Dee rolled away as soon as the restraining paw was off him before climbing to his feet. The pain in his chest, his nearly healed sternum, had flared back to life once the pressure was off and ached like a son of a bitch. He rubbed at it, trying to knead the pain out. "Hec, do you think you could bring me some of that aspirin?"

Mica wriggled and made grabby hands for Dee. "Lizard! Lizard is free! Save My-ka from mighty Lil-eth!" She cried at him. Her actions said she wanted to be saved, her playful face said she wanted him to get caught again. "Dee got to save pretty prin-sess My-ka! Save My-ka from scary tiger!"

A small and familiar robot came to see what was going on, and was fascinated by everything she saw. "What happened to Ms. Catnip and Ms. Kathrine's home?" She asked. She wasn't really too interested in the fate of the ancient structure. Her lens was focused more on the huge tree and the odd tableau being played out by the mutants present. "It has never occurred to me," she said, "That one could use ones endowment in such a manner. One ponders what it would be like to use one's mammaries to catch and trap other prey for consumption." Medeina, not imaginative by any means, mused on the mechanics and began formulating diagrams for various theoretical creatures whose primary means of catching food was as she described.

"Well, this is going way better than I thought it would. I expected a bunch of machine-gun wielding white knights to show up and either kill us all or get killed by us all." Kermit mused from his place in the passenger seat. Carrol was in the back with the girl.

"Reasonable assumption, honestly." Hoyt admitted from his own position in the driver's seat as they coasted along the open road. More featureless plains and forests. It looked the fucking same, which pissed him off, to a degree. It was the apocalypse. There were zombies animated by black blobs from another dimension. There were big fucking spiders and spider people and bio-weapons and fish-gut-head crabs that spoke in human voices.

But New England was still just fucking plains and fucking forests.

"This the way to that orchard?" Kermit's gaze wasn't on the road. He had a new book opened up in his lap, which he thumbed through in between taking sips from a cool glass of vodka beside him.

"That it is."

Hoyt wasn't thinking or feeling much at the moment. Wasn't much to think or feel. There was the prospect of an okay payday at the conclusion of this little venture, but that prospect depended on a lot of things going right. The guy on the radio seemed nice enough. But giant tiger women and a knight in a tank? Hoyt had faced worse in the past, he'd admit to himself. The first few days? The shit that poured out of the lab's fucking basement and ate half his colleagues? The shit he'd seen on the road, in the dead cities, in isolated cabins in the backwoods of whatever state they were even in? Yeah, he'd seen worse. But that didn't mean things couldn't go wrong. As they often did.

---

Carrol didn't really know the girl, even if they'd stayed in this van for a sizable amount of time together. She wasn't talkative. "She" here referring to either of them, honestly. The girl-Kath-was in and out of painkiller-induced dazes, and when she wasn't dosed up, she just seemed sad and confused.

Carrol had dealt with people like that before. Sad, confused, didn't know where they were, spent every morning waking up to the feeling of a syringe being pushed into their arm. She'd kept people like that locked in that lab for years on end. How long had she worked there, with Hoyt? How much of a haze did they need to put themselves through to forget the details? She didn't hit the hard stuff as much as him, but then again, he was the one who really did what the guys up top wanted done to those people. She just kept them contained.

The girl in front of her was one of the ones she kept contained. There was no doubt about it. Carrol didn't recognize her. Not really. The faces melded together over the years. Melded together into a big, lonely, confused morass. Not that she saw the subjects often. She was head of security, not a patrolman. Most of the work she did was silencing guilty eggheads who'd been tipped over the edge by what they'd done. But those mutations weren't cheap. They weren't homegrown sewer mutagen, that was for sure. She couldn't be one of the government subjects. Those always involved turning them into fucked-up bio-weapons or brain-twisting super-spies. The girl in front of her was a private pet project, most likely. Intended to be sold to the highest bidder at one of the lab's donor auctions. Whether or not that was better or worse than ripping insurgents apart in a chemical-induced eternal rage wasn't a debate Carrol wanted to have with herself.

"You don't seem mean to me, hon. And trust me, me and that guy driving the van? We know mean real well."

Lilith gently takes her paw off of Mica's chest, still nearly decapitating her in the process.  "Natalee.  Natalee prey?  Where'th cub?"  Removing Nathaniel from her tits is a harder task than it seemed, though.  "Nataleeeeeeeee."

Dee collected his spider and after a minute, they arrived not at Dee's workshop, but one of the row of shacks built shortly after Dee's arrival. No one had been through this door since Jimmy vanished, and now Dee stood before it with his hand resting on the knob, thinking. Mica simply watched, curious, and had been about to prod her man when Dee suddenly turned the handle and went in.

He caught it immediately. The smell of the man that had been here, but wasn't now. "Jesus Jim, where'd you go?" He thought. Dee hadn't expected such sudden pain, not of the body, but of the soul. Coming in here was just a reminder of the times before a group of them had swept through a camp of Hell's raiders. The raid had cost him two good friends. Sarge and Smithwick deserved better, but what else could he do? A little while later, Jimmy had simply picked up stakes and left in the night. Just like that.

He tried stomping around the room, but his shoes couldn't produce the resonant "knock on wood" sound he needed. "Babe," He said, regarding Mica's chitinous legs, "Do me a favor and stomp around a bit, just like I was now. Around the edge of the room and work your way towards the middle." She didn't question Dee, just did as she was told. Meanwhile, he took up the old prybar from under the bed and listened. Listened, and felt the old familiar feel of Jimmies jimmy bar.

*thump* *thump* *thump* *thomp*

"Stop! Right there!" Dee rushed over to Mica with the bar and gently moved her aside. "Let's see if you left any of that shit behind Jimmy." Dee mumbled. He seated the bar in the tiny gap between two planks and pried. As he did so, he noticed there weren't gaps between most of the other boards. Not big ones like this anyway. In the instant before the board gave, Dee thought that maybe he'd have to get an axe or something, then all at once, there was the shrieky squeak of the nails holding it down giving. After a bit of rummaging in the cavity revealed, Dee came out with two tightly bound bricks of something that looked like sugar to Mica's eyes.

"What is? eh?" Mica asked Dee who was just looking down at the two packages.

"Coke." Dee said distantly, "I can't believe he kept it. Jimmy, he was a friend of mine before you showed up babe, he found this stuff in a mansion safe we all cracked together. I hacked the electric lock, Smithwick did the rest. Just another coke snorting big wigs mansion, keeping the rest of us under his thumb."

To Mica's surprise, he was crying a little. "Bolivian marching powder boys!" He said, holding up one of the bricks in an exaggerated manner and making a voice Mica had never heard him adopt before. "That's what he said when we popped that safe and..." He made a choking noise and began to weep in earnest. Mica had never seen him doing that before. It seemed wrong for her lizard to be crying like that. "They saved me, after I got out of that other place that made me like this. They didn't even know I was being chased. Picked me up off the side of the road. Just pulled over and... and this guy sticks his head out the window and says, 'Hey kid, you look ok, get in!' So I did and after that..." He waved his hand in the air as if to say "the rest is history babe."

She wrapped her arms around him then and wouldn't let go. "Later, we got absolutely boogered on pot, the good stuff, Toledo Windowbox, and they listened to me talk there ears off about 'the capitalist pigs' in DC."

---

A little while and a lot of hugging later, they emerged from the old shack and Dee gave Mica the bricks of Cocaine. "It's uncut, tell them that when you guys make the exchange." He explained, "I know you don't like drugs, but just think of it as a way of getting rid of it ok? If they want this sort of thing, they'll take it. If not, we can toss it in the river or put it back under the floor for some other trade someday. Ok?" Mica nodded slowly.

"Does lizard need more huggins?" She asked.

"No, but he want's some kissin's." He responded, leaning in a little. Mica gave him what he wanted, and gladly.

Atomos walked. She could have bummed a ride back to the center, but she wanted to enjoy the open air and freedom of the topside world. A huge centipede appeared on the path ahead, disgusting her with it's inherent creepy crawlyness made large. It didn't notice her and simply moved on, and she allowed it to go unbothered. Her tail swished behind her saucily. She hadn't been so aware of it's luxury before, not for quiet awhile anyway. At the center, Atomos would be self conscious about it. She knew she would, she couldn't help it, but out here she would enjoy it. At around noon, she dozed away the last residue of Roxanne's prank and dreamed the afternoon dreams of a contented woman.

---

Medeina tried for one of her proxies, any of them, but all the ones she'd had before were destroyed by the tigress. The two she had left were her old reliable crawling eyebot, and the chicken walker. The chicken walker was unreliable though, it made her a little crazy. "Little" being an understatement. She hoped it would get manageable, the chicken walker was what she was gonna be stuck with until her body was complete. Instead of hopping around between her two remaining proxies, she checked her connection to the center from the farm. A bit on the weak side, but nothing she couldn't work with. The wait would have been bad, but at least she had the center to toy with while she did it.

Medeina withdrew a little. They could still see her of course, she wasn't making any effort to hide herself on the centers systems and their wasn't a whole lot they could do to keep her out if they decided. She flashed up a schematic of the chicken walker she'd stolen from the vault and then found that she couldn't speak to them audibly over the connection she had. Back to text it was then. "Northrup ATSV, registration 0109531CW. Farm out of 40mm, send more, will pay in farm resources."

After a short pause in which Catalina sarcastically thought, "Sure, send the AI high explosive. Grand idea." Medeina added to the message, "Don't do that. ATSV AI gone, base code remains. Anomalous effects on myself. Enjoyable, but dangerous. Dangerous for you I mean, not me. Enjoyment is had by me at the expense of others around ATSV."