Rambling Nomads

The stench of the piled corpses had seeped into the flavors of every meal we cooked. The dead-body-walls weren't so disturbing or distracting anymore. They were kind of useful to tell you the truth. If any of them shifted or even seemed out of place, the suspected incongruence served as a pleasant warning that the Rambling Nomads were returning.

The downside wasn’t that these drug-fueled mad bastards killed you, it was that they were so strung out on the expired psychiatric medication and bush league speed that they cooked in their camps they couldn’t shut up long enough to kill you. They’d beat you senseless, maybe dismember an appendage or two while blabbing nonsense about tax reforms, the first time they licked a snake's dick, or how many snowflakes it took to drown someone before the drug-crash started kicking in and they needed a new fix. Once they got it, they’d run a few dozen miles before they realized they were clueless about their new location, so they’d just set up a new camp. If some of them wound up alone, they’d just hook other travelers to their paltry narcotics.

Even the delirious had enough awareness to understand that no one could survive this era completely alone.