Da Ork Null City Hire Trukk Kumpany.
Author's wordy bit at the start: hi all, username MA7 here giving one of those insufferable author monologues. As I have mentioned in other author notes, I have a science degree, AND a scientific diploma, AND blah blah blah. After years of study gaining first my degree and then my subsequent qualifications, I, like many people with science qualifications, naturally became a hire car driver/cab driver. (As you can tell I'm not bitter about my career trajectory at all...)
Anyway, job market, no jobs in science, massive layoffs, yadda yadda, I now drive a vehicle picking up members of the public and driving them where they want to go. On a good day I earn over $10 an hour, on a bad day I earn $3 an hour, some people tip, most people don't tip, boo hoo sob story, moving on.
You have never really seen the full spectrum of humanity until you have worked in public transport, some of the shit I have seen is stranger than fiction, and a lot of stuff is just horrible (especially watching domestic violence against defenceless women happening in my own fucking vehicle!). I have seen some strange shit (for example the drug addict who was savagely off his tits on God knows what who simply refused to get out of the vehicle when I took him to his destination. He instead spent like ten minutes saying "too much STRESS" and scribbling all over my work book until his girlfriend finally managed to coax him out of the vehicle. It was fucking bizarre.)
But when I am not seeing strange and bizarre shit, I see TRAFFIC, endless, sanity eroding, road rage inducing, maddening TRAFFIC. An entire shift of traffic jams is enough to drive you mad. On a slow day I park somewhere waiting for customers and write FanFiction, but today was not a slow day at all. Today what I saw was TRAFFIC!
By the 9th straight hour of my shift today, I had spent the entire fucking day in traffic jams, and the temptations of Khorne were strong in my heart as I was stuck behind some fucking asshole going 40 in a 60 zone during rush hour traffic, and I had an overwhelming desire to just RAM THE FUCKER OFF THE ROAD, the way you do in these situations.
In this moment of weakness I found myself dearly wishing that I was an Ork in a Trukk with a big ass ram on the front of it so that I could just ram this fucking asshole. As I value my job, I of course didn't do any highly satisfying ramming, but the experience gave me an idea about what an Ork hire car company would actually be like.
So, still in my work uniform, freshly home from WAY to much driving, and more than a little sleep deprived, here I am writing this story (either that or falling asleep here on the couch).
Chapter 1(Ork)
Deep in the guts of the sprawling dark eldar city of Commorragh, down below even the shitty districts that Bhirae and her fellows live in, lies a place known as Null City - the xenos districts of Commorragh where most of the xenos mercenaries live.
To say that Null City was a dump would be an insult to dumps everywhere. It was like the trash heap that other trash heaps dump their own trash in, it was even nastier than that trash planet in the new Thor movie (seriously watch Thor Ragnarock, however it's spelt).
Null City is, on a good day, a continent sized squalid shanty town full of perpetual civil war. On a bad day, Null City is a flattened landscape under a mushroom cloud, but it is always rebuilt quickly afterwards.
Orks, humans, Kroot, Tau, Vespids, mutants, those weird frog monsters, an alien race where every single member was named Kevin, gaseous fart monsters, that really obnoxious alien race that has no concept of personal space, ALL of these xenos and many more could all be found here in Null City.
It was the most diverse melting pot in the galaxy, and as the constant civil war testified, diverse cultures in the 41st millennium get on REALLY well when confined together in a single squalid shanty town.
Like most shanty towns, no one had ever actually DESIGNED the layout of the buildings, no one had thought "hmm we really need to be sure that we have a proper road network", nope none of that. The zoning process basically went "oh look, here is some empty space, let's build a shanty building on it with no regard whatsoever for how this will effect other people."
Null City didn't really have "roads" as such, more like meandering gaps between the buildings that formed a maze of twists and turns. This didn't bother the motorists too much, they simply drove right through buildings in the way, making their own roads that over time grew larger and more travelled.
The owners of said shanty houses often did not like the fact that someone just drove through their fucking house, and they tended to get rather violent. It was in fact a big contributor to the constant civil wars, the situation when the battle between pedestrians and motorists went, just a little bit, too far.
In this squalid shit hole, just getting from A to B was a big challenge, and it was for this challenge that Da Ork Null City Hire Trukk Kumpany had been born.
***...
LeadFoot da Ork driver stomped his foot down as he noticed some git going too slow in a vehicle out in front. The big red Trukk roared it's engine, and the mighty metal ram on the front slammed into the back of the git, flipping the slow vehicle over to crash out of the way through a side wall.
"Careful you brute! I didn't hire your services to get me killed!" The pointy eared dark eldar git of a customer shouted.
LeadFoot punched the sissy Eldar in the face, stole his wallet, and threw the mouthy git out of the Trukk to let him walk if he thought so poorly of LeadFoot's driving ability. LeadFoot then sped off to leave the talky little git to it, ramming other vehicles out of the way as he drove back to the depot.
(And I fell asleep on the couch zzz).
(The next day now)
LeadFoot's big red trukk roared as he repeatedly pressed the "go faster" button, a big red button that, strangely enough, made the trukk go even faster than usual. The trukk rammed aside every slow git in his path, opening up the traffic in a highly satisfying manner.
The traffic up ahead jammed right up so heavily that even LeadFoot's ram couldn't shift them, so LeadFoot simply drove straight through the walls of a row of shanty buildings beside the "road", imaginatively bypassing the traffic completely (and leaving a trail of destruction behind him).
People who lived in these shanties screamed as the big red trukk slammed the living fuck right through their living areas, flattening furniture (and occasional people) under the big fat rubber tires of the trukk. LeadFoot chuckled jubilantly as his trukk bounced crazily over the various stuff under the tires, slamming through wall after wall, blinded by junk covering the windscreen.
LeadFoot consulted the "GPS", which he thought stood for "Gork Finds Stuff" (,yes "Finds" doesn't start with a "P", but LeadFoot is an Ork so didn't let stuff like this bother him). The GPS used some strange magic to show the way to the depot, and LeadFoot blindly drove in the direction it said, blindly flattening absolutely everything in his path.
Eventually the trukk slammed into a row of equally dead-'ard Ork trukks in the "parking lot" of the depot, and stopped dead in its tracks. The sudden deceleration was brutal enough to send the pile of debris covering the windscreen flying off so that LeadFoot could see.
LeadFoot booted open the door to his trukk and staggered out of the badly battered vehicle. He walked into the depot carrying the pointy eared git's stolen wallet (having already taken his own share of the money it contained), and went to see his boss, who, funnily enough, was named Kevin.
"Oi Kevin, I finish drivin dat pansy Eldar git, here 'is wallet boss." LeadFoot said, handing the stolen wallet to the boss.
Kevin smiled and counted out way more than the expected fare from the wallet.
"Dat Eldar must've been a real good tipper," Kevin said with a happy orkish grunt.
LeadFoot nodded stupidly and asked about his next pick up.
"Ok, ya need ta go to da sissy airport bit at willy-town ta pick up some techie tau gits named Ka'unt Fa'sy." Kevin explained.
"Cunt Face?" LeadFoot asked dumbly.
"Um, yeah close enough I guess. Go pick em up an take em to da Tau casino place at Tau Town." Kevin explained.
LeadFoot nodded and wrote down these instructions on a bit of trash paper with a stick of graphite he kept in his pocket for such occasions.
LeadFoot left the slabby stone depot building to find a bunch of grots refuelling his trukk with a bunch of oil squigs (,squigs that naturally excreted a diesel like oily substance out of a special gland that Orks use to run their vehicles on). LeadFoot cheerfully tipped the helpful little buggers for filling up his vehicle and got back in his trukk.
The trukk, whom LeadFoot had affectionately named "Bob", rumbled into life, and LeadFoot checked the battered GPS to point him in the vague direction of willy-town airport.
With a very vague idea what direction to point "Bob da trukk", LeadFoot put his namesake foot down and sped off through all the intervening buildings in his way.
Many people rendered homeless later, LeadFoot was parked outside the space port terminal at Willy-Town, shouting "Cunt Face" at every Tau he saw. For some reason this pissed off the local Tau people, and LeadFoot got to fill in the time having a swell punch up with a pack of outraged tau.
"Are you our driver?" Asked a new group of tau who had just exited the terminal.
"Um, I is 'ere ta pick up some tau called Cunt Face," LeadFoot explained.
"It's pronounced Ka-unt Fa-SY, not Cunt Face," the tau party said offended.
"Close enough, get in ya gits," LeadFoot told them.
The tau group got in the back of the bulky armoured red trukk and asked to be taken to the main tau casino in Tau Town district of Null City.
The tau then spent the rest of the trip screaming in terror as LeadFoot avoided the "roads" and instead took a more... direct, route through the intervening buildings.
(Author's note, I can't stop laughing as I write this stuff).
LeadFoot put on some death metal music to drown out the sounds of the passengers screaming, and had a great time as he plowed his way through the flimsy shanty buildings in a more or less straight line.
Eventually he crashed into an immovable metal pole in the outskirts of Tau Town, and the passengers absolutely insisted on walking the rest of the way. They fearfully gave LeadFoot a very large tip "to go away", and LeadFoot thanked them warmly and told them to recommend Da Ork Null City Hire Trukk Kompany to their friends. The tau nodded dubiously.
LeadFoot reversed away from the pole he had crashed into and sped off through the intervening buildings.