Everyone Dies in the End #54

Jack

Jack Lang shifted the M-16 on his large stomach, settled into the Vinyl passenger seat of the Toyota truck, and smiled. He figured he was doing all right. This apocalypse thing had really screwed some people, but the end times, if that was what these were, had been very, very good to him. He had roof over his head—the remnants of a condo down on 2^nd street, food in his belly, and a place in Vader’s army to keep him safe. A good place, a place in charge of a penning crew.

 Beside Jack a guy called Spider steered the truck. The driver was spindly, dark, with bright eyes that shown from a frame of black, shaggy hair. Maybe he did look like a spider. Maybe he streamed silk from his butt, Jack didn’t know where these kids came up with these names, and he couldn’t have cared less. As long as they did their job they stayed on his good side. And if they didn’t? Well, no one wanted to be on Jack’s bad side. Folks on Jack’s bad side usually got thrown in with the days catch, and the days catch got thrown in the pens.

Outside the cab of the small Toyota truck, eastern Pennsylvania rolled by. The nearest nukes had fallen in Washington and New York. Jack didn’t know why Pennsylvania had been spared, but it had. Nevertheless, spared was a relative term. The vegetation didn’t look…well, it just didn’t look right. It wasn’t dead exactly, but the green was paler, and the trees were not only losing their leaves earlier than usual, but the beautiful fall colors that Jack was so fond of were muted, browned. Of course everywhere he looked he saw destruction—burnt out cars, derelict buildings, and worse. But that stuff didn’t bother him too much now. You got used to it. You stopped thinking about it. The roads weren’t bad in this part of the state; Vader had cleared them. Not that they were in pre-missile condition. Nothing was in pre-missile condition, but the Toyota was rolling along at a reasonable thirty-five miles an hour.

Fast enough to cover some ground. Fast enough to corral some blood sacks.

Refugees, stragglers, blood sacks—whatever you wanted to call them— were getting a bit harder to find now, there was no doubt about that, but Jack figured the faster his team moved the better chance they had of surprising some. Enslaving humans was another thing Jack had gotten used to. There really wasn’t any choice. If you didn’t like the work, Vader would find someone who did. It was something else he didn’t really like thinking about. The thought about not thinking caused him to glance in the side mirror at the pen truck, following a couple of hundred feet behind, the large steel cages prominent of the flat bed. It was empty now, but it wouldn’t be empty long.