Killifornia. March… ish, ’77 AB. It’s storming outside, and Diver’s got his boys out today. They talk in hand signals, don’t make any sound until they’re kicking the door down. I should be alright, Bago’s got a full tank of gas. Stopped now to eat, but I plan on driving all day. Gonna cross the border soon. AEZ’s hard territory, but I hear that Long Texas is starting to get downright comfy. I’ll take a dozen little warlords that hate each other over Diver’s kingdom. Maybe with abuelita’s books I can set up a little doctoring spot and make myself liked. Good will is better than most currencies when it comes to getting what you want out of folks, I find. Or maybe that’s just the Carnival talking. Hope it holds true out there.

Holt Marcel Huggins, signing off. Catch me on the flip-flop.

Holt crinkled an empty Ding-Dong wrapper and stuffed it into a shopping bag hanging from the passenger seat headrest. One more swig of brown Faygo- the only color that told him he could tolerate the taste- and he’d be setting off again. He stuffed his ratty spiral-bound journal in the glovebox, turned the key, and pressed a little toggle switch under the steering console to turn over the engine. The Bago grumbled to life, her heavily-modified camel of an engine whoofing and wheezing up to speed. She still guzzled gas worse than most, but all the other requisite fluids would last and last and last.

The sky was green, and thunder rolled overhead. Holy Diver loved to get his thugs out in the streets during weather like this. They arrived in huge, round clusters of welded-together trash called Diving Bells, expendable vehicles built to be broken, exploding open like a shrapnel bomb full of shark-suited ninjas to harass this community or that before they could react. If you fought back- fought back any kind of capably, at least- they’d put a bag over your head and make you one of Diver’s boys, whether you liked it or not.

The Bago only had one route of ingress or egress, and Holt kept his sawn-off shotgun within arm’s reach for quickly firing through it. Usually the sight alone was enough to make one of Diver’s boys think twice, but Holt wasn’t above pulling the trigger if push came to shove. He had a legacy to protect. Nobody came by a doctor easy in Killifornia unless they came to someone like Holt.

He caught his reflection in the rearview and rubbed his forehead. The lines were getting deeper. Was it stress, or was he getting old? There weren’t too many gray hairs in his sideburns, so he settled on stress, further steeling his resolve to get the hell out of Killifornia. His route was as straightforward as he could make it- knowing exactly where he was had been trouble at first, but one of the older jesters at the Carnival had assured him that he was in a place that used to be called “Fresno.”

So he drew a line across a map. Well, a restaurant menu with a map on the back. Fresno Carnival to Lost Vegas. Lost Vegas to the Flagstaff Pueblos. Flagstaff to the AEZ. Hard to say what he’d find in Albuquerque, but “exclusion zone” didn’t bode well. He’d then floor it from the AEZ to Dodge City, Long Texas.

That map was tacked down to the dashboard, and Holt would be doing his best to follow the greasy black line he’d drawn across the southwest in just a few hours. For now, though…

Holt Huggins had a last stand to make.

The Fresno Carnival had been under siege for a long time. Months, maybe more than a year. One of Diver’s chief punks, a freak named Block Party, had taken over one of the Juggalo encampments entirely, driving them out and using their homes to host his boys. Block Party’s weapon was twofold- he could make a lot of noise, and he could build a lot of walls. The Carnival was too vast to surround in his usual fashion, so, like a hungry amoeba, he was surrounding and consuming chunks along the edges, working his way inward to the core. Once he surrounded a piece of the Carnival with rolls of chain-link fence, the amplifiers rolled out, playing a dirge of blasting bass that shattered windows and deafened the victims inside- leaving them ripe for the recruiting, since they’d be speaking in hand signals anyway.

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Then the bastard would roll up his fence, scoop up the shattered people inside, and load them into a hollowed-out bus in piles to be shipped off to a training camp. Stripped of their makeup. Deaf to the music. Declowned and declawed.

Holt had given up the black and white paint willingly, as a signal that he would doctor anyone who came to him. That, and as he learned more about the world through abuelita’s books, the magic in the songs appealed less and less to him. But the juggalos had fed him and raised him, even taken him back in after he ran away as a teenager and ended up trapped in a Diver-owned “fast food” joint, dumping random vegetables into the Every Potato Slicer and trying to keep his first crush out of trouble with the boys.

No time to think about Jack now. You can’t win ‘em all, Holt.

But this thing with Block Party, this he could win. He could break the siege and do his people one last solid before taking off forever. He stomped on the brake, threw the Bago into reverse, and eased around a corner, backing up to the rear of Block Party’s most recent claim. The bus to the training camps was wedged in diagonally across the alley, keeping anyone from approaching from the safety of a vehicle. Any would-be assassin would have to turn up on foot and go through the bus. Vulnerable.

Nu-uh. Not when the Bago could pull a stunt like this. Holt grinned and waited for the boys to come swarming around. He counted down from ten in his head and the banging started, just as he expected. When a skinny man in a black diving suit thudded onto the hood of his RV, he pretended to be surprised.

“Eheh, don’t you worry now, made a wrong turn. Just tryin’ to settle in for a bit of commerce, sell a little of what I found,” Holt called through the windshield. He didn’t dare crack a window. Give these boys an inch and they’d take a mile. His claim did give the man on the hood pause, and he glared skeptically through tinted goggles and held up his thumb.

A friendly enough gesture, if it didn’t also mean “go up, end the dive.” Holt supposed it didn’t matter whether the man could read his lips- the message was clear. Get out of here, and do it now. So Holt nodded and held up a finger, speaking with his mouth open wide to be as easy-to-read as possible.

“Custom job. Crank driven. Just a second and I will be gone.” He knew enough of their hand signals to add in a “calm down,” “watch me,” and “okay.”

He then turned a crank next to the gearshift, activating a magneto assembly pilfered from a run-down tractor he’d found in a long-dried orchard. This assembly was mounted just beneath the Bago’s tailpipe- so when he finished turning the crank and reached up to the ignition switch, the gust of diesel exhaust blew across an open stream of sparks, erupting into a fireball which briefly blinded the swarm around his truck, engulfed the bus spanning the alley- and critically set alight all of those fancy “defense amps” with their custom, cotton grill cloth featuring Holy Diver’s standard.

No time to enjoy the show. That fireball would chase the fumes right back up the tailpipe and blow him up if he didn’t make some distance, and now. Diver’s boys thudded off the Bago’s walls and scraped at it with their jagged fishing knives futilely, but Holt zigged around a corner and zagged around another, getting into an open thoroughfare where the falling rain could kill the oncoming plume.

It was too late for the camp, though. All that tech under all those tarps, nice and dry… he watched the orange glow in a side mirror and shook his head amusedly. All melting now.

He drove circles for a bit, spiraling away a block at a time, rounding back to see if he was being followed and then pushing out a bit further. Maybe Block Party had simply died in the inferno. Could he have broken the siege with one well-placed prank?

I shouldn’t even think shit like that, he groaned to himself, as a deafening blast of bass rattled his windows.