A bit more bad news

(Cont.)

So the workforce that Moses was guiding (or not so much guiding as being swept along with) took all these cities: and the division then bled subdivisions, for portions of the laborers broke away from the outfit and took residence in the district of the Infraboreans, and others chose to settle down in Heckland and the villages thereof. For Heckland was the hometown of Santa Claus, the President of the Infraboreans; but a portion of the Empire’s ex-workforce fought against this former kingpin of the sticks, and took all the badlands out of his hand, even unto the Distant Shores. That’s why they that speak in hymn-slang say:

Come into Heckland, 

Let the city of Old Saint Nick be reconstructed; 

For there is a fire gone out of Heckland, 

A flame from the city of Santa: 

It hath consumed Woop Woop of Tohu Bohu, 

In the sticks of the badlands, 

And the lords of Podunk and Bumhump, 

Over against the high places of the Distant Shores. 

Woe to thee, dwellers in the sticks! 

Thou art undone, O people of the No-Go Zone, 

Whose earth is charcoal: 

Your offspring are taken into captivity. 

For President Santa of the Infraboreans catapulted gifts: 

But we batted them back! 

Heckland is perished, all the way to Blandvale, 

And we have laid them waste 

Even from Antiregion to Cyphersuck.

Thus a fraction of the workforce that had wandered astray took root in the land of the Infraboreans. Eventually Moses also sent a covert military unit to spy out the dust bowl of Jetlag, and they took the hovels thereof, and drove out the Infraboreans that were there.

§

Then, what was left of the caravansary went offroad and somehow ended up in Reno, Nevada: and Fat Ug, the biggest businessman on the planet, came out against them, with all his lawyers, to have a meeting at the El Cortez Hotel.

And Moses said to the portion of the workforce that was still with him in the wild lands: “Fear not Fat Ug; for, the way that our luck is going, he shall be delivered into our hand, along with all his retinue, as well as his city here, which is known as the ‘Divorce Capital of the World’ on account of its relaxed laws concerning that procedure. We shall conquer his hirelings and commandeer the hotel, just as we vanquished President Santa who dwelt in Heckland, by initiating a surprise shootout. Certainly, El Cortez shall be ours.”

So they smote Fat Ug, and his entourage of attorneys, and all the clerks and interns who served him, until there was nobody left alive anywhere in the city. Even the people who had just come to visit Reno for the six-week period that was required to obtain a divorce were caught in the crossfire. There was blood smeared everywhere, and mangled corpses riddled the landscape. It looked like exactly what it was: the aftermath of a massacre. Fat Ug and his fraternity were now exterminated, and Moses’ troops took over the land.

Then the remainder of the caravan set forward, and pitched an encampment in the sticks, near the Midianites and other dwellers of the wilderness, out on the edge of the desert plains.