A Winding Dirt Road Chapter 2: Business As Usual

“The hell?” Jayne asked, holding a huge crate in both of his hands as he got to the top of the hill, with Mal, Zoë and Wash behind him. “Our gorram business partners ain’t /here/, Mal,” he said angrily, turning his head to look as far behind himself as was possible.

“Oh, this is /not/ good,” the captain said as he made it up the hill, the couple behind him looking around in an unhappy way.

“Not here?” Wash repeated, looking a bit scared. “But we can’t miss this drop-off, right? We screw this one up and-“

“And we’re humped,” Mal said, finishing Wash’s sentence for him. He looked about the place with a worried look on his face.

They were on top of a hill not far from a smallish scrap yard, empty if you didn’t count all the scrap metal. There were fields as far as they eye could see in every other direction, and a small farming town could be seen off in the distance, men at work in the fields.

Serenity was parked next to the scrap yard, positioned so that it couldn’t be seen from the farming town in the distance. Its ramp was still down. The crew had judged that it was perfectly safe to leave it there, as there was nobody around but the crew itself. They knew the scrap yard was empty.

“Smiggins won’t just be wanting his cargo back, he’ll be less than pleased at us taking so long to do nothing,” Mal continued. “We come back to him with his drugs and none of the promised money, we won’t last long.”

“Couldn’t we just, you know, pay him off with our own money? It’d take a chunk out of our pay, sure, but we’d all be /alive/,” Wash suggested, looking between his fellow crewmates. They all gave him a frown when he said this, though.

“You /feng le/?” Jayne said angrily, swaying the crate around as he tried to find a position to hold it in that wasn’t entirely uncomfortable. “Don’t think we could even afford to pay him back the full ruttin’ price, /sah gwa/.”

“Jayne’s right, Wash,” Mal said with a sigh. “We jus