Smack-dab, in the Middle of Nowhere (Waste Stories #1)

33. Anger Before the Storm (Part 1)

It was a new day. Some might have even called it a beautiful day, but that's only in the sense that those people woke up this morning, and any morning you wake up the same way you went to bed, is a beautiful day.

In reality, it was a pretty unpleasant day. The smog was feeling particularly bleak, clouds pregnant with a brooding, melancholy sort of grey snot that clogged it all up and just dared folks to travel without a raincoat. It left the landscape in a perpetual, almost shadowless tint, a black and white blanket over a world that had clearly not suffered enough. The temperature had climbed somewhat since the chill frosts of night, but this was overshadowed quite significantly by the fact that the wind was also drastically picking up. Strong gusts blasted in from the southern coasts, vandalising street signs and unstable Old World ruins, whipping up large chunks of dust along the way.

Towards the ocean side of Can't Be Buried, a vast horde of bandits was packing up camp amid the dewy landscape, and those who weren't packing up the camp were chasing the bits that weren't packed up in time. It was a rag-tag assortment of folk, to be sure, but since the violence of the night before, only minimal murder had taken place between members of the separate factions. They were superglued together, you see, with the almost literal iron fist of a solitary, small woman, who was at this moment standing ahead of the pack, gazing towards a towering mountain range that stretched as far as the eye could see both north and south. When she walked, she walked with a slight limp, and those who saw her briefly before she put on her large, flowing trench coat noticed that her arms were a brilliant rainbow of blues and purples. Her left hand, as chunky and solid as it was, seemed to have been clenched in a fist for quite some time. In fact, nobody had seen her unclench it since the fight, and it looked what you might call 'A little worse for wear'. Some had even called it 'Fucked', but they learned rather quickly that the subject was personal and their opinions were ... unwelcome.

On this same morning, high up on the slopes and indeed florpadorps of one Mount Butt, another horde stirred; one the likes of which the Waste had not seen since the destructive War of Stars many, many generations ago. An incoherent bugle beeped and bopped somewhere in the midst of this horde, which wound like a giant, black snake down a narrow mountain road. The wind howled through their ranks, channelled by the many peaks and troughs all around them. The occasional figure was lifted completely off the road and sent screaming down the slope. But nobody worried for their safety. All of these determined, black-clad, highly weaponised figures were marching down the hill anyway, and the few who took a trip off the side were just getting there faster.

Two figures strode excitedly ahead of the pack, locked in an unheard discussion. One, a moderately-built man with a billowing, armoured trench coat; the other a woman encased in a brilliantly made suit of black, white-speckled metal plating. Both kept the horde at a steady marching pace.

At the very base of the slope, a long, broken road swept past in a mad rush and stretched out for miles towards where it intersected a strip known as the Highway. It was amid the distraught rubble of this road that a rabbit-like creature with a hat sat on its haunches and stared at an approaching dust cloud. The rabbit-like creature was called Randolf, and he was a Conqueror, Ruiner of Worlds, Bringer of Shadows, and, indeed, a Lord of Rabbit-Like Kind. His black eyes shone like angry gemstones in small grey sockets, the folds of his forehead creeping down in a frown. He was on this road hunting breakfast, not to mention plotting the ultimate destruction of the human species, as well as numerous other species including but not limited to ants, wolfcats, and the sky-dwelling Devil Terrors (a type of falcon). And yet now the wandering prey he had been sniffing out for the past two hours had shat itself and fled with unfortunate haste, frightened off by the vexatious rumbling that preceded this approaching dust cloud. He began to wonder if the beast was back.