The Meat Man Rises

“There’s the shipment.”

Lilaena took the dusty binoculars from Arya, her second in command, and peered through them at the distant road.

”Right on time.” Handing back the binoculars, Lilaena pulled her goggles down over her eyes and straddled her motorcycle.

“Let’s go get that jerky.”

She made a circle with her arm and pointed at the convoy. Around her twenty motorcycles and dirt bikes roared to life, and the resistance group raced out to the road.

The Meat Baron had had a stranglehold on the jerky production ever since the vegan apocalypse. But man could not live on soybeans alone.

Lilaena narrowed her eyes and put a hand down for her rifle as they closed the distance.

From her perch on a hillock opposite, Shoney Mullins watched the convoy motor its way down the empty roadway. No one ventured out this far much anymore; those planteaters in the cities certainly avoided the transport territories well enough. And the Meat Baron took advantage.

De'Ville's resistance group was also ready, as usual.

With a smirk, Shoney turned to her small council of three who stood behind her.

"You reckon she'll get it, this time?"

Grill, with his scraggly beard and receding hairline, gave an appraising look. He spat out a stream of jerkyjuice to the dusty ground.

"Ain't no one knows. Girl is scrappy, I'll give 'er that."

She turned to the other two.

"Bones? Ducasse?"

The other two only gave half-shrugs.

"Figured," she mumbled, looking back down to the unfolding scene. De'Ville and her resistance gang were descending on the convoy like vultures.

"S'pose we should help her, then."

"S'pose we should," Bones agreed.

Behind them, a motley group of tribals stood ready and waiting, their cobbled-together Polaris side-by-sides and dune-buggies mostly silent for now.

Shoney turned to her gathered group.

"You boys and girls ready for some meat??!"

Idling engines suddenly drowned out the air in answer, and Shoney grinned.

She trotted down from her perch, Grill, Bones, and Ducasse following after her. Pulling herself up and over into the saddle of her ATV, she took a deep breath.

It was time to fill their bellies with something more than roots, fruits, and veg.

She wasn’t the first to start yelling, but as they neared the convoy the group was screaming, a throwback to the ancient rebel yell of the obliterated South. They’d been noticed, but there was no way to sneak up on the trucks anyway.

A few anxious types on the trucks opened fire while the motorcycles were too far away. Lilaena rode hers off a bump, catching air as she fist pumped, urging on her warriors.

Drawing near to the middle truck, she reached out and grabbed the side, letting her motorcycle fall as she climbed onto the truck, rifle slung across her back. Behind her others were doing the same, while Arya led the charge to get ahead of the trucks and hopefully stop the whole bunch with some well placed large gauge shots to the engine block.

The tribals descended like an ominous cloud, their ad-hoc vehicles pooling in with De'Ville's resistance group to form some amorphous glob of raiding pink meat-goop to swallow the convoy with lustful intentions of taking the delicious, meat-filled trailers. Shoney's ATV fell in behind De'Ville's motorcycle just as the other woman hauled herself up the side of the middle truck's cargo trailer. A quick dodge was all it took to avoid the floundering bike, and Shoney pulled her aged revolver from its' holster to level it at the head that poked out the passenger window of the cab. A precise shot, and blood splattered across the side-view mirror and a portion of the front windshield. The driver kept the truck steady, trusting his sentries to handle this attack.

Too bad for him that the extent of the 'invasion' was far more than just one group of meat-crazed addicts. The thought of Jerky, rare steaks, chicken quarters glazed in teriyaki and honey over an open-air spit... it did things to a person. And in a world where such things were nearly forbidden, it was a terrible motivator to say the least.

Her lieutenants helped to guide her herd, as De'Ville's own second - Arya - kept the Resistance on the warpath.

Her body folded up quickly, as she pushed herself up on a trajectory to follow De'Ville up the side of the trailer, her ATV veering sharply to the side before flipping over and rolling along the road's shoulder in a magnificent show of ejected metal parts.

Lilaena looked down and locked eyes with Shoney, a woman she’d met years ago during the Tofu Massacre, or the Soybean Uprising as the Baron had spun it. A single nod passed between them, and then she climbed toward the cab of the truck.

Wrenching the door open, Lilaena reached inside and yanked out the passenger. She climbed inside as the man skipped down the road, screaming until a trailing ATV bounced over him.

Lilaena pressed her revolver against the driver’s temple as the truck continued to race forward. “I’ll turn your brains into hamburger if my finger so much as twitches. Slow down and turn off the truck.”

The driver didn’t move, his eyes tracking sideways toward her as sweat poured down his face. “Let me just - just hang on a minute here.”

”Don’t have a lotta patience.” Lilaena pressed harder, the smooth metal of her gun kissing his salty skin.

”Okay, okay!” The driver took his foot off the gas and reached forward slowly, as if he was going for the keys.

Instead he grabbed the CB radio. “It’s De’Ville and she’s workin’ with the trib-!”

Lilaena’s revolver painted his brains all over the cab and the truck swerved sharply.

She was atop the cab when the entire truck lurch to the side, and Shoney cried out as her hands gripped the edges of anything she could grab a hold of. De'Ville always played fast and loose. Seemed the driver hadn't got the memo. a juke to the left, then to the right, and she founds her body slung about like a spineless stalk of corn. Corn. The main ingredient to The Devil's Syrup.

Her legs spread out to splay into open air before pitching downward past the driver's side window. Finding purchase on the doorhande, Shoney cursed to the wind as she eased herself further down.

The door was yanked open, and the lifeless body of the driver tossed out before she slid into the cab as effortlessly as possible. Which, all things considered, wasn't effortless at all. It was like watching a flailing spider monkey from old videos from the Before-Times scrabble for a branch.

Her ass hit the cracked leather of the seat cushion, and her hands slapped over the steering wheel to steady the entire rig.

"You got a funny way of making sure shit don't get damaged!", she yelled over the whistling wind.

“Well, hell.”

Lilaena was gripping the dashboard, pulling herself out of the footwell where she’d been tossed when the truck swerved.

”Nice to see you too, Shoney!”

In front of them the first truck abruptly slowed, an explosion in the engine sending a fireball sky high as Arya and the others did their work. Lilaena grinned, her teeth white against her dirty face, goggles still in place.

”We’re gonna eat well tonight.”

Shoney made a face as she reigned in the lumbering beast of a truck, practically standing on the brakes with one leg and pushing in the clutch to downshift. It was a bizarre dance, but this wasn't her first rodeo. She'd been tagging convoys for a long enough while now; the Baron and his steakbrained cronies could huff and puff on their fine-cigars all day long. It didn't matter a lick out here on the transport lines.

What mattered out here was go-juice, a rare bit of meat, and enough muscle at your back to fight off the protein-scavvers.

"We gonna be eatin' shit and dirt if'n the Hogs seen that explosion."

The Hogs. They would pick a convoy like this clean in no time at all. Out here, they were the real danger. They'd even been known to raid the smaller Vegetarian co-op sects that sprang up on the outskirts of the larger cities.

They knew there weren't meat there. Not animal meat, anyway.

The Hogs weren't all too discerning when it came to what they ate.

And that included Long Pig.

“Fucking cannibals.”

Lilaena hopped out of the truck and called to her raiders.

”Protect the perimeter!”

Arya rode up, her motorcycle loud even among all the other engine noises. “Nothing heading our way from the Baron. Yet.”

”Good.” Lilaena strode to the back of the truck, her hand on the lock. “Watch our for Hogs, the tribals say they’re in the area.”

”Roger that, boss.” Arya nodded and peeled out.

Lilaena tugged on the padlock and then stepped back, bringing her rifle to bear on it. It only took one shot to break it, and she threw the back of the truck open, revealing the orgasmic array of meat within.

”Come and get it,” she muttered, jumping into the back.

With the rig idling, Shoney jerked down the e-brake to make sure the hulking thing wouldn't go anywhere. She didn't dare turn off the engine. If they needed to scram, having to start the beastly thing up would waste precious time.

She hopped from the driver's seat to the ground, ignoring the metal-grate step over the top of one of the go-juice tanks.

"Ducasse!"

"Ma'am?"

Franwill Ducasse darted around the front of the dusty cab, a shoulder-slung AK held back to allow him freedom of movement. His trusty fillet knife was clutched in one white-knuckled fist, and already slick with red blood. His narrowed brown eyes were deepset in a weathered face that looked as though he'd sat in front of a sandblaster for most of his life. He was tall, lean, and had the look of perpetual dissatisfaction about him.

"Get with Arya and make sure our folks know to keep their eyes peeled. I don't think were in proper Hog territories, but I don't want to take any chances. I don't want those jittery fucks near us, and if you see even just one head pop up, remove it from the shoulders it's attached to."

"You got it, Shoney."

Making her way down the trailer, she heard De'Ville's rifle go off, and knew without a doubt that the other woman was already jockeying to inspect the haul. Couldn't blame her.

"Bones! I want that drone up in the air NOW! If the old Baron is paying attention, he probably knows we jacked his convoy. I want to know if that mangy bacon-swindler has his boys on the way!"

The truck was a veritable meatsapalooza, and Lilaena couldn't help cracking open a crate and pulling out a shank of jerky. Chewing on the hard protein, she shoved her way into the furthest reaches of the truck, the chaos of motors outside fading in the distance.

"Oh sweet Jesus," she breathed. "He's got ham in here."

Lilaena looked up from the stacks of smoked and cured hams, over her shoulder and around the other crates to the opening where Shoney was probably about to board and demand half of the loot. People had killed for less than this. A lot less.

Her hand tightened on her rifle as she moved back through the crates to the trailer doors.