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Tonight our zombie slaying heroine finds herself taking advice from a mad woman while avoiding the hungry mouths of the roaming corpses that threaten them both.
The Skinner Co. Network
FP311 - Ruby Departed: Pecking Order, Part 1 of 1
Some days, gloomy, my hours are slumberless Dearest, the shadows I live with find nonetheless Little white flowers will never awaken you Not where the bright culture sorrow has taken you Angels have no fire ever returning you Or they're angry if I sort of join in you Welcome to Flashpulp, episode 311 This evening we present Ruby Departed Peking Order, part one of one This week's episodes are brought to you by two chairs, no waiting An Andy Griffith Show fan cast Andy Barney, Opie, Goober, Floyd the Barber That's some of the names from the Andy Griffith Show Drop by two chairs, no waiting, the Andy Griffith Show fan podcast And we'll visit with some of those folks Along with tribute artists and fans And just all kinds of things related to the Andy Griffith Show I'm your host Alan Usum and you can find the show Two Chairs, No Waiting at twochairs, no waiting dot com Or on our teams [Music] Flashpulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age Three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings Tonight, our zombie-slaying heroine finds herself taking advice from a mad woman while avoiding the hungry mouths of the Roman corpses that threaten them both Ruby Departed, Peking Order Written by a Jarrity Skinner, are in narration by a Popon X And audio produced by Jessica Mann [Music] Dusk, exhausted Don't have my watch anymore But explaining why is gonna be a bit tricky Ok, I was still out with the cavalry cycling through the countryside like it was a Sunday sightseeing trip As if we could just roll away from our GDC F of all morning And really, we'd been lucky We haven't seen a dead guy for maybe an hour I know I've mentioned it before, but we've spent a lot of that sort of not a crisis time telling ridiculous stories I think it's worse because our posse was mostly farmers And despite the loss of their home, there's still a belief amongst them that they're somehow handling things better The farmers look down on the wanderers, and the wanderers look down on the dry gases Their new nickname for the slowest peddlers And the dry gases talk shit about everyone else Worse, each clique believes the weirdest crap concerning the others Conspiracy theories have never been my thing, but some of the BS that comes from these folks mouths would make a flat earther blush I feel like the only part of civilization that really survived was the gossip You might think it would be better to be quiet, considering the zombies But we're the forward scouts, and the rest of the mob certainly doesn't do quiet Besides, it's not like in Ottawa You rarely hit groups out here It's, at most, pairs and trios And you want them to know you're coming, so they show themselves early You don't want to sneeze and suddenly have a milky-eyed yokele at your elbow Anyhow, as I was saying It'd been smooth rolling for a while, just the chatter and the warmth and the back roads If you keep your eyes on the gravel, you don't notice the burnt-out farmhouses Where the spots in the field where scavengers are circling What I'm getting at, I guess, is that we would have yammered on and rolled right past her If the old lady hadn't started screaming at us She was on top of a garage, a two-door building separate from the main house The kind of thing you see constantly in the country, but never in town And there were three dead guys stumbling around by the flip-up doors I approached the middle one Number 89 He was maybe 25 when he died Hard to say what killed him He was mostly rotten underneath his Charlotte Hornets jersey He had a lot of meat to lose, though And his already sagging arms weren't made prettier by the few months of decomposing in the sun By the time I'd worked Bethany's tip out of his eye socket Monroe and Jimmy, the loudest of the bunch I was riding with, had knocked over the other two Then I got my first good look at the woman I'd heard so much about The rat-trapper If the drag-asses are the bottom of her own hierarchy, then she's considered barely a step up from the dead The story says she'll eat anything Her favorite dish is a rat They say half the time you're talking to her, she's nibbling on a little red and leaking leg I remember the shaggy-haired 12-year-old boy tell his friend that he heard the trapper Like to find a place where a well-stuffed pantry had gone bad And lured in a pack of four-legged vermin She'd button it up and live off the invaders until the food supply ran low Then she'd peel the boards off a window and move on to the next place The other kid asked where she pooped The first didn't miss a beat before saying "wherever she wanted" I have no idea if any of that is true But it might be I've also heard that she eats the flesh off the rotters that reach through the windows That she's contracted some sort of weird rabies because of her dining habits And that she so diseased that she was once bitten by a zombie But the zombie dropped actually dead on the spot All of these things, I am sure, are bullshit The line gets fuzzy from there though Her opening words were "you could have gone around them" That immediately got Jimmy muttering that she cared about the stumblers more than seeing real life people I kept what she meant though, if Monroe hadn't rushed in I probably would have The rat-trapper wears a bulky patchwork coat and I'm guessing doubles his armor It's covered in rodent skulls that she's sewn on And she carries a string of them on her neck Her constant hand motions leave her tiny wrists rattling in the big sleeves Like a bell clapper caught in the high wind The farmers and the wanderers may think of her as nothing more than apocalyptic hobo But they certainly get eager eyed when she lays out the spread of items she collects for trade When we finally got on the roof, we chatted a bit between rounds of bartering Motioning towards her decorations, I asked Did the trophies keep away the stumblers? No, and they don't keep me warm either I just like to remember He's way fellas laid down their life for mine, only seemed right Monroe seemed disgusted at the mention of eating Mickey Mouse But I couldn't help but think of my own list of the dead At least she's mostly slaying small animals Catching his twisted lip, the trapper added I like to carry a pregnant woman when I can afford to It's like having a portable garden with you Tied to her neck by what looked like a bathtub plug chain It was one of those hamster rolly balls And in it was a fat white bundle of fur The sphere rocked with every cackle and pocket search But the critter inside snored along happily Jimmy had to turn away and take in the trees But I got to thinking about my time in the city And the hours of hunger that came with being surrounded by hammering hands and moaning mouths I asked her if she had any tips for locating a snack Hunting in a town or city's best Out here all you get is the occasional field mouse But there's too many deadens in the built up areas He gets tired from having to be on guard And straining your ears for those delicious squeaks I like to go in for a week or two Collect as many pelts as I can snare Then come back and pay a visit to the people in the bush and eat myself fat The simplest way really is to find a hardware or grocery store With the old wooden string traps They're easy to reset And if you cook the meat of one of the occupants over a brick You can use the first victim to lure in his pals Find a nice safe spot not too far away And wait Sometimes I think of it as landfishing While she talked she was swapping lighters and shiny trinkets That'll never be worth anything again For string and paperbacks You ever name your uh, gardens? Always We do our best to stay friends with each other for as long as possible But my pets and I are realists We know it's just a matter of time before one of us bites the other That said, I've told you quite a lot Teach a man to fish, you know Maybe you'd be so kind as to say where you're headed After catching some warning glares from the knot of quieter farmers I realized that she probably didn't actually care That she only wanted to see if I'd tell her They certainly wouldn't have Well, we're headed to Cornwall Personally I'm trying to get to New York though It's stupid that we've fallen into a place where I even showing a stranger that much trust Or frankly Just showing that level of not disrespecting her Means something She smiled at me Not her sales lady grinning but Uh, oh you got me a box of candy smile Oh now coming back from there myself I got closer to the river this time than I'm used to But it was worth it My meals were fat And they hadn't been reminded that they weren't the top of the food chain in a while Still you want to be careful There's a crowd of folks living on the shops there that stretches all the way into downtown Now I'm going any further from home than they have to though Monroe stopped staring at the copy of the stand that he was weighing against the worth of a box of birthday cake candles What? Like organized survivors? Oh yeah I've had some idea someone was over there for quite a while But I usually try to avoid that part of town because of how much attention the glamour draws This time though I got near enough to see they've built a bunch of walkways between the buildings And have set up tents Smells and fires cooking Beans and chef boy ready from the neck of town And plenty of kids running around too Actual civilization? Why didn't you stay? I had no more interest than when you mock diggers asked me to alongside your bonfire Oh looking like a pal if high schooler asking I go to the prom at a pity I hadn't heard that tale But I could see them taking it as a snub I wonder if it's why they started telling so many stories You've been living in the field so long you've lost sight of what it's like to be clean What? Clean? Isn't it better to eat fresh meat than to live off the scraps of a dead world? What are you gonna do when the shelves are candles super empty? I got me when we used to call a renewable resource You're doing much canon lately No, no will happen when you finally run short on food It'll be just like them eating each other like a bunch of filthy animals At that point it was Monroe's turn to walk to the edge of the roof and watch the trees for a while The chatter went on a bit but we had to get moving when the rest of the bike crowd arrived I've got a rat now though, Margaret She's pregnant, I think I can't eat a watch Flashpulp is presented by flashpulp.com and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial 3.0 Unported License Text and audio commentaries can be sent to comments@flashpulp.com But be aware that they may appear in a future flashcast We'd also like to thank the FreeSound project found at freesound.org For a full listing of effects used during the show, as well as credits for the users who provided them Check this episode's notes at flashpulp.com And thanks to you for listening If you enjoyed the show, please tell your friends [Music]