Utterly Mad

Timeline: ? ? ? ?
Location: [REDACTED]
Characters Involved: Dr. Hoyt Upton, Head of Security Carrol Hitchcock.

---

The relatively spacious overseer's office was debatably far more cramped once you factored in that it was being used as a living space for two people. It was one of the few relatively nice rooms in a building of cold cement and bulletproof glass and misplaced shadow so thick you could lose your hand in it.

It had an actual carpet. It was an ugly, speckled maroon and green pattern, but nonetheless, it made it feel a little more homely. There was a brown leather couch with a quilt thrown over it in front of a glass table. There were cluttered wooden filing cabinets lining the wall. And there was a grand mahogany desk, a massive, beautiful thing, positioned in front of a small bed that folded neatly into the wall for space.

There was a man sitting on the bed behind the desk, and a woman sitting on the couch with the quilt. They weren't talking. They hadn't talked for hours, and they normally preferred it that way. Not that they didn't like associating with each other. In fact, they were something akin to best friends. As close as people like themselves could have to friends, at least.
---
The woman was staring hard at two objects on the table before her. The first was a bottle of vodka, about half full. It was some premium stuff, not your run-of-the-mill rotgut. It was distilled from Californian wine grapes. It wasn't flavored. She preferred it straight and to the point. She'd already had a good amount, but not as much as she usually had. The second object was a gun.

It was a sleek, black, intimidating thing. State-of-the-art. Caseless rounds and worth a small fortune. It was a perk of the job. Hadn't even undergone military trials yet. Not that it ever would, mind you. Some PMC in South America probably had access to it from their corporate sponsors. Probably executed a few dozen kids with it. The usual. Not that it mattered anymore. She guessed those kids would be dead anyways. So would the mercs. So would everyone else outside of this building, as far as she knew at this point.

Not that they'd last much longer, either. She'd seen what was in the basement. Hell, she'd fought against what was down there. Not that it did much. Lost some of her best men and women to masses of screaming intestines and fat men with the heads of drooling bulls and roiling protoplasmic piles of eyes. Those things were locked down there, for now, but who knows how long that'd last.

At the thought, she made up her mind and grabbed the vodka. She'd need some more in her if she really meant to do the honorable thing and blow her own brains out.
---
And then, there was the man. He could sense his compatriot's internal struggle, but he did nothing to stop or encourage it. She was strong, and capable of making her own decisions, even when blackout drunk. Something they have in common, he thought, as he tipped back a small pill bottle and swallowed the last two morphine tablets within.

Before him, on the grand mahogany desk, was a book and a vial. The latter was a delicate thing, thin, almost crystal-like glass and an antique cork stopper. It was filled with something that, to the untrained eye, was a bit hard to identify, to say the least. It was a wispy, almost ghost-like powder, light blue, almost white. Its movements were hard to describe when the vial was moved. But they were off, no doubt about it.

This was of secondary importance, however. The doctor had already examined this substance thoroughly. They'd gotten a good amount, after all. He'd seen it before. Long before he'd seen his compatriot in the room blast it out of a screeching tendril with a shotgun. He couldn't remember what state it was in. New England, for sure, around where he was now. There were recollections of a basement in an estate. A corporate retreat. Meeting the donors. The reputable men and women who fund research into modded sex slavery and turning homeless people into bio-weapons. Something to do with a "ritual," robes, and other bullshit. Something to do with "true alchemy," whatever that was supposed to mean.

Now he wished he had learnt what that was supposed to mean. Damn that donor's expensive wine and uncut cocaine.

It was no large worry, though. The book held the secrets, he was sure. It was hard to glean them, exactly. It was hard to read a book written in seven languages, two of which were obviously carefully manufactured ciphers. Either that, or he had just never encountered a language made of spiked triangles and swirls before. He'd met people who could speak and write in multiple languages in the past, but never a man or woman who could eloquently, hauntingly write in English, Spanish, Italian, French, and Latin before. Especially not while combining the five, sometimes in the same sentence.

Thankfully, he had all the time in the world and more. There was a lot of steel between him and the outside world, and a lot of guns between him and the basement. He had no idea how long it had been. Time sped up and slowed down at the whim of the chemical train he was a passenger on. His friend on the couch probably couldn't tell him her own name half the time. Sometimes he forgot his own.

His reading was interrupted by a knock on the steel door to the corridor outside. It was a steady, polite sound, delivered three times by a gloved hand.

"It's open." He rasped, unused to the clicking of his recently fanged teeth.

The door retreated into the slot at its side at the knocker's touch, revealing a relatively tall silhouette dressed in a lab coat much like his own.

"Ah. Ilyushin. Come in, sit."

The figure stepped forward a few paces, a stiffly pronounced gait, obviously somewhat tense.

"If this is about the dead guards, I've already notified you. They're to be fed to the subjects. We're low enough on food as it is.
 Hell, might be an improvement for them." He coughed into his coat's sleeve, the woman on the couch finally looking over from the sound.

"It isn't about the dead, Hoyt." There was a pregnant pause, and a more pronounced tensing of the figure's form. "It's about the living."

One of the figure's gloved hands slipped into his coat pocket. There was a telltale mechanical click as he pulled the hammer back.

Carrol nonchalantly watched as Hector laid Mica down on the grass. The fumes had gotten to her. Seemed her mutations were more than just cosmetic. They were basic, seemingly, and horrific, but not as primitive or as deforming as some others she'd seen. Carrol didn't answer for a bit, as she was too busy lighting up another pungent hand-rolled cigar. Hadn't she just finished one?

"You don't. Starts to feel good after a while, though." She muttered disinterestedly, puffing a ring of smoke out of her mouth as she watched Lilith and Mica. She looked like she'd been a rather pretty woman, once. She still was, but it was a bit tainted. Her eyes looked too old. The whites were the color of egg yolks.

Hoyt, for one, wasn't paying much attention to Nathaniel speaking to Kath. In the fleeting moments Hector had gone into the van, he'd surveyed it much the same as Nathaniel. Normally, people'd stare at either the drugs or the guns. Which Nathaniel did. Hector, however, had paid far more attention to Hoyt's little library and the items it contained.

This interested Hoyt. Unhealthily so.

He leered at Hector through the open door of the van. Not menacingly, really. It almost seemed involuntary.

"We did our parts, pal. Wasn't much, honestly. You got labs summoning demons and experimenting with world-subjugating fungus, and we got givin' people cat ears and little fangs, eh?" Hoyt answered Hector, flashing his own razor-sharp, needle-like teeth. "Sometimes, yeah, you get something important, military contracts, private security sculpting, stuff like that, but that's rare, I'll say. Just why you don't see many Liliths around, heh."

Carrol's mood probably would've been soured if she'd heard Hoyt talking about their line of work, but she was too busy staring at Lilith. She didn't seem fazed whatsoever by the snarling or the fact that she was ten feet tall. When the bio-weapon flexed somewhat ridiculously, even, Carrol only smiled and quietly clapped. She only shrugged at Mica's question, having barely heard her.

"Bug get cub in a second, Lilith. Everything's fine." Hoyt added, looking to the two men again. "Anything else you wanted to add?"

Hoyt nodded to the men as he unfolded the little table, which now rather visibly had two white cardboard boxes on it. He rested two bottles beside the boxes, one tall, one stout. When he was good and sure the surface was stable and the bottles were safe, he looked back up and addressed them.

"Hoyt Upton." He pointed to the woman. "Carrol Hitchcock. Kathrine's fine. I saw to that. The woman who hurt her is dead. She didn't go nicely. I also saw to that. The chat's optional. The payment isn't. But you people seem nice, and you've got to be strong. And I like to know nice, strong people. And this is some damn good vodka."

The ride to the motel was a rather long one. The road that led to it winded north for a decent while, before looping around to another road that winded south for a decent while. The drive itself was uneventful in that the RV didn't encounter anything besides the occasional squirrel, raccoon, or possum scurrying across the side of the road. Inside the van, however, it was a different story.

Kathrine was still in the back, as usual. Whether she was unconscious or not, nobody else knew. She was quiet even when she was awake. The other three occupants were up front, and they sure as hell were not unconscious.

"FUUUUCK! FUCK! FUCK YEAH!"

Hoyt's scratchy, frenetic voice rang out loud. He was driving, as usual, with Carrol sitting next to him, and Kermit next to her. Hoyt had his eyes on the road, but his mouth on the glass pipe Carrol was holding beneath his head. There was a lighter beneath it, and something crystalline burning inside. His pupils almost swallowed the whites of his eyes. Carrol herself was staring at the road, too. She'd gotten used to multitasking. Once Hoyt was finished, she resumed her earlier task-fastening the old-fashioned bulletproof vest she had on fully, and arranging perfectly the massive assortment of knives, hidden and obvious alike, spread across her body.

Kermit had his eyes on the large box in his lap. It was usually his job to do what he was doing, though Hoyt liked to sometimes. Once he'd loaded all seven pistols in the box fully, he turned to the three shotguns next to him, and he loaded them up too. One was a Remington, a nice utilitarian item from the back of a police car. The other two were full-length double-barreled things, lovingly cared for, probably with a good few ducks and deer under their belts. Once he was good and ready, Quintero pulled three of the handguns from the box and fastened them to his holsters. A long-barreled, old-fashioned Colt .45 1911 on his belt, plain for all to see, a slightly less conspicuous Five-Seven in a side holster beneath his jacket, and a compact .38 Ruger snub-nose in an ankle holster above his boots. The jacketed bullets in the cylinder twinkled in the light of the van. He reached into his pocket and produced a nerve-calming lump of hash, which he ate with a bit of Hoyt's jerkied venison so as to not upset his stomach.

---

The van coasted on over to the motel soon enough. It was a desolate, lonely place. The paint was peeling and the windows were broken. It might've looked like that before the Cataclysm. No way to tell.

Hoyt turned the van over to the little parking lot, between the main building, pool, and something like a gazebo. There were other ruined cars here and there, but Hoyt's van was obviously not among them. He'd be visible enough. He opened his driver's-side door, leaning his legs out of the van itself. He didn't get out, though.

Carrol did. She stepped out through the side door from the back of the van, before looping back around the vehicle and stopping at the hood. She leaned on it nonchalantly, a potent rolled cigarette clamped in the corner of her mouth.

Kermit wordlessly left from the passenger door. There was a rifle in his hands. It was huge. He was somewhat small, but he carried it as well as anyone as he walked up the motel's stairs.

They pulled in soon enough. The place was relatively unchanged.

A spacious orchard, right off a small dead-end dirt path, with a little colonial-style barn and storage and a more modern processing plant. It was beautiful, not that anyone commented on it. The distinct lack of being lived and worked in didn't have a negative effect on this place. It looked abandoned, sure, but the way the grass grew so high gave it an air of fantasy. The trees were spread out across a large field, a little further than the eye could rightly see. Apples, Granny Smith and Red Delicious, grew around smaller sections of seckel pears and sour baking cherries. A huge dirt lot separated the barn and storage from the processing plant.

Hoyt slowed the van down as they coasted in by the storage building. The van was switched into park, but everyone stayed sitting in the car. They'd stayed here a few weeks ago, and from the look of the place, it hadn't been inhabited since. But the van was home, and they didn't feel like getting out just yet.

During the brief silence after the park, the transceiver's microphone rang out. Farm boy.

"All's good with me, buddy. However you can get it to us. Don't care if you use a fighter plane to drop it all off. You could roll up in three APC's and I'd be fine, long as I get my narcotics, heh." Hoyt paused for a second, before speaking up once again. "There's an orchard. Somewhat north of your apparent location. We're there. Girl's fine. Wants to go back, seems like. We'll talk more once you get here. I don't have to lecture you on funny business. You sound like good people. I'm interested in business once this is all over."

"Didn't say I could take 'em, buddy, said we could take care of ourselves!" Hoyt lightheartedly yelled into the transceiver, before silently waving at it as Nathaniel left to tell his compatriots.

"M701, eh?"
"Expected 'em to have something like that, honestly."
"What do we have like that?"
"Rocket launchers, grenades, a fuckton of guns, an armored truck, and stimulants. Also, Carrol."
"Fine. Fair."

Elsewhere in the RV, Carrol turned over to Kathrine from her seated position, one of her potent cigars clamped in her teeth. "Catnip, huh? That the girl the little boy on the radio mentioned, darlin'? Guessin' you'll be seeing her pretty soon, don't worry."

"Eh, let's equate the food with some more of option numero uno, eh? Oxy, codeine, morphine, heroin, whatever you've got on hand. You can go ahead and guess a reasonable amount." Hoyt answered the first of the three questions, before deliberating on the others. "Hell yeah, she's doing alright. Shouldn't be in much pain at all since her little accident, and I consider myself as skilled a cook as I am a doctor, I'll tell ya."

The third question was a bit more confusing. "Guy we cold clocked? The little fella who shot the guy trying to save her? If he's with you guys, sure. I don't care who gets it together."