Part 1 of 1
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Tonight, Ruby finds herself coveting spaciousness amidst the undead apocalypse.
The Skinner Co. Network
206 - Ruby Departed: The Legend of the Wanderers, Part 1 of 1
[Music] Welcome to FlashPulp, episode 206. Tonight, we present Ruby Departed, the Legend of the Wanderers, part one of one. This week's episodes are brought to you by the after movie, Ditter Podcast and Blog. It's like a very nice place. Oh, how jolly. Let's find a place to sit, shall we, Margarita? A lot. Man alive. Hey, yes. What would Sir lack to order today? Well, I'd like a podcast. Uh-huh. All about film, I think. Alright. But it has to be a conversation. Hey, yes, something I can get involved in. Okay. Uh, with a nice, with a nice healthy dollop of comedy on the side, I think. And it does want fries with that dip. Yes. And ketchup. Oh, and, uh, jolly. Yes, bring me a wheel of cheese. There's a finuit for you. Very good, sir. [Music] This is the after, moving down a podcast. Only 100 calories, key, three cones, fed, and perfectly organic. It's everything you want in a film show, plus condiments. We dog it. Just go to the AMD podcast.blogspot.com website. Oh, our tunes today. [Music] [Music] Flash pulp 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, Ruby finds herself covered in spaciousness amidst the undead apocalypse. Ruby departed, the legend of the wanderers, part one of one. Written by J.R.D. Skinner, art and narration by Poponex, the audio produced by Jessica May. [Music] August 2nd, morning, quarantine day two. This is getting a little old. Quite bored, not all the guards will chat, but I've been able to learn a bit about the place. Everyone lives in the barn. Sounds as if they've got a town in there. Sort of. Ronnie refuses to talk. I keep making excuses to go to the bathroom. Well, the old school outhouse they maintain at the furthest corner of the property. Definitely feels like real farm livin'. Oh, and here comes early lunch. At least then, Ma and Pa Parker will have to shut up long enough to eat something. August 3rd, morning, again, quarantine day three. Sick of the parkers. Arguments are pretty constant now. Kimberly is sure we're being prepped for dinner. Indulton is doing a terrible job of using logic to reassure her. Who am I to step between an angry couple? I suspect she actually partially blames me for our current situation. I don't quite understand why, except that maybe I should have left McKinley to the dead folks instead of rescuing him. Speaking of, updates say he continues to live, but he's not entirely coherent yet. Apparently the doctor has been pumping him full of whatever drugs he can get a hold of. Otherwise, we'd all be missing sleep over his screaming. Mikey spends too much time looking at me. Tempted to start belting, and nobody knows the trouble I've seen until they let me out. Late. A lot of stuff happened. After lunch, we were finally set free. There was a little party with a pair of violinists and the squares drummer. Some people danced, and there was a smorgasbord of canned and fresh goods. The fence around the property is tall and strong, but they have to clean it off every morning, where it gets crowded. It allows them to keep working the land, though. There's a big garden with mixed vegetables, but most of the place is unripe and corn. It should be quite a harvest, someday. People here simply call "the farm," except a chief. He calls it "my fackin' house, ya ingreits." He appears to be their leader by default. I was told it's originally his place, but it's more than that. He's just that guy. I imagine even before all these clumsy moans were stumbling around, he was plowing his fields using nothing but horses and spite. He's got a sword. Not a mashed bit of scavenged junk metal, but a well-kept, killed a few people back in the day, family heirloom. I'd known of it beforehand, because of one of our guards, a kid who couldn't have been more than 14, who yammered on about it. Our other major topic of conversation was Bethany, which he hadn't seen, but who he had heard of. I thought it was just a kid being a kid, but my little assa guy seems to get a lot of respect here. I think it has something to do with the fact that the chief and I hold the only two professionally-made weapons. When we were first allowed out, there was a low-key ceremonial "welcome" type thing. Their "puba" largely spent the time addressing me, which I think might have tweaked Dalton a bit. He was standing atop a trailer as we approached, which was sort of odd. Not quite formal, it wasn't like he had a throne or anything, but it certainly felt authoritative. He's a scruffy old man, with a back hunched from his work. He was wearing a plaid shirt and a simple pair of jeans, and he was in the middle of rolling his own cigarette from a crumpled white pouch of tobacco. He said, "If you want to stay on, we'll allow it." Until then, he was seen a lot of your companions. We'd all been assigned partners as we left the quarantine. My sidekick is a girl of sixteen, who is only nearly my height because she's tall for her age. Rachel is a sweet, straw-haired girl, but she's gangly like a Martian tripod from the War of the Worlds. She's staring at me while I write this. If I smile at her, she smiles back, but she doesn't pretend to pay attention to anything else. She takes her duty very seriously. Anyhow, we said thanks, and he said you're welcome, and we asked questions, and he reminded us that guests shouldn't be nosy. Then we ate. Frankly, by that point, I needed a little distance from Ronnie and the parkers. Chief gave it to me after the feast, in the form of a bonfire. They talk a lot here, to cover the groans, and everyone, eighty-six people, gathered around the Inferno to tell stories. I wanted to hear how they'd all come to be there, but my suggestion was shouted down as boring by a dozen children. Rachel clucked at them like a soccer mom, a gas that one of her kids had dropped an F-bomb at a church picnic. But I'm a firm believer in entertainment through democracy. "What would you like?" I asked the tiny, chanting rioters. "The wanderers!" they screamed back. "Never heard of it," I replied. The steely mustache drummer stood up. He didn't have his instrument with him, but he's got one of those James Earl Jones voices that makes you want to listen. Little truth is known about the wanderers. Though the tellings of the rat-trapper, catching Olivia's raised eyebrow, are storyteller clarified. She's a woman who we have occasional dealings with, just as we've had with your men compatriot, Ronnie. I tried to find our former host in the crowd to see how he was reacting to having his name mentioned, but he didn't seem to be on hand. There's always people ducking away from the fire's edge to walk the perimeter. They go in pairs, and some of them come back with a lighter step and redder face than when they left. There's no obvious drinking around the blaze, though. It was a beautiful night. The stars are crisp, and the breeze is just cold enough to be a relief after a sunny day. I only wish I could have heard the crickets over the muttering corpses at the fence. This is how I remember the story. The wanderers are a group of some three dozen who accept no permanent home. They move over the land as if locusts, leaving half-eaten canned goods and smashing anything they can't carry with them. They sleep on rooftops and bathe only in the rain. It is said that they have experimented with cooking the flesh of the slaughtered undead with disastrous results. But that worse still, they'd fed the tainted meat to their own children as a preliminary test, driving the little ones into death and zombification. It might have been a kind fate, however. The rat-trapper had considered an alliance with the group, as she believed they might have had a chance of encountering items of value to her that would be otherwise discarded by the group. It was her thinking that a trade might be struck, in which she would provide a ready source of clean meat for batteries and the like. Locating the vagabonds is easy enough, if you can determine in which direction their snail's trail wasted supplies is headed. In attempting to make her proposal, she'd managed to chase the band down, but found a solid mass of the dead between them. They'd lingered too long on a particular rooftop, and a mob, perhaps a hundredth strong, had taken to rocking the bungalow. Our chronicler does not report violence and discord amongst their ranks. Instead, as one, they turned upon the weakest link in their group, a balding man of fifty, with a shattered arm dangling at his side. Every man, woman, and child revealed a blade then, and some too, they approached as a wall, prodding the air before them with their weapons, making clear their intention well before they'd reached their victim. With no option, their quarry could only inch towards the surrounding gutters, while shouting pleas at his former comrades. Within seconds he fell, screaming into the rotting hands below, and with their distraction in place, the wafers scuttled from their confinement. Even as the rat-trapper lost sight of them, the fallen man continued to beg for assistance, from the sister he'd apparently left above. It would have been easy to intercept them then, but our friend no longer had interest in buggening with the wanderers. The kids squealed at the climax. We need to get back to network television. This old-fashioned storytelling crap strikes me as way too violent. Right, it's late. I'm not terribly tired, but I should try to sleep. They set us up in a little private area in the barn, but I'll have to discuss it tomorrow. I can hear a lot of snoring, and it's sort of comforting. I just hope Rachel will stop staring after I turn off this flashlight. Flashpulp is presented by Flashpulp.com, and is released under the Canadian Creative Commons attribution non-commercial 2.5 license. Text and audio commentaries can be sent to skitter@skinner.fm, or the voicemail line at 206-338-2792. But be aware that they may appear in a future flashcast. We'd also like to thank the Free Sound 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, please check this episode's notes at flashpulp.com. And thanks to you for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please tell your friends. ♪ Sunday is gloomy, my hours are stumbled. Here is the shadows I live with are stumbled. (dramatic music) (upbeat music)