Camping now means “another Deathlands book”, since they’re already old and don’t need to be kept very well plus also it’s not like I’m going to run out of them anytime soon. Of course, I only managed to read a tiny portion of the book while camping, because I had very little luck concentrating on any book until the last full day. And then it took me like a year to read it afterward, but that’s because I’ve been busy with too many hours of work (and lots of comics to read while there) and too many hours of TV that I fell behind on while camping, so, y’know. It’s just weird ’cause these read so easy.

You know what else is weird? Dectra Chain does not refer to anything actually in the book, and even Wikipedia Pete knows almost nothing about the word. It appears to have to do with navigation? Which, okay, is fair enough, since the book is about a post-nuke whaling village in Maine. It’s not clear to me where they got their boats or the know-how to maintain them, but I guess it’s been a hundred years, people adapt and all. If you’re anything like me, a whaling village doesn’t sound like it has the kind of serious threat that Ryan Cawdor’s band of teleporting rovers needs to take care of, except perhaps from the whale’s perspective. But sure enough, there’s a bloodthirsty captain who holds the town in a strange thrall and who our heroes naturally manage to run afoul, after which violence ensues, as it is wont to do.

But what’s interesting to me is not this so much as the fact that our good guys are still kind of assholes at times. Notably, they both ran across some French Canadian hunters[1] and chased them off and stole their food and weapons instead of just leaving them be, and then later very nearly left town without Righting the Wrong. I like to think the subsequent difficulties were karmic retribution, but I suppose I’ll instead have to get used to the idea that they’re merely the best of a bad world, and not always good in a bad world instead. However else I may feel about it, that at least has the virtue of being suitably apocalyptic.

In other, unrelated news, there may be more people teleporting around! And also a secret, more highly classified teleporter that leads to a secret moonbase? Whether these facts are related or will ever become the focus of an episode remains to be seen.

[1] Well, that’s what I assumed, all it said was that they couldn’t speak English.