There were times when Doc simply didn't make any sense to anyone.
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The white lettering was inside a store window a few yards down the street. But it was obviously written before the neutron missiles were dropped over the Louisiana bayous.
"What do we do, Ryan?" asked Krysty, glancing up and down the street. Behind them, a small armadillo scuffled across the street, but otherwise the avenue was deserted.
"We could try and make it through the swamps to the gateway. But I figure them Cajuns are going to be looking for us. And there's those dead and alive fuckers to keep clear of."
"What about that warning?" asked Finn, pointing back at the first of the freshly painted signs.
"Place like this..." Ryan began, pausing as he looked around the rows of long derelict buildings, "...place like this could get you cold-cocked from anywhere. Man with a good blaster could pick us all off before we got a sight on him."
Both Ryan and J.B. had outstanding memories for trails and maps, and both had a clear sense of where they were in relation to the rest of the ville. If the Baron that everyone was shitting their pants over ruled most of the region, then West Lowellton looked like the best venture, they decided. But if there was this street-gang holding it, then they had to find some place large in which to hole up.
"Big motel," suggested J.B.
"Yeah," Ryan nodded. "Yeah. There was something called a Holiday Inn. We passed it 'bout a half mile back. Be a good place."
"There was an old vid-house near there, with a real pre-chill name. The Adelphi." J.B. shook his head at the absurdity of the names in the prenuke ville.
"Probably showing some anticommy prop-vids. I read that was all they showed round that time." Finnegan was leaning against the wall of a store, Barney's Beanery, that had once sold health foods. There was an addition to the sign: and gun store.
Faded by thousands upon thousands of days of sun and wind, there was some crude lettering on the wall of a store across the street.
"GOD WANTS YOU," it said.
Underneath it, in the same white paint as the earlier graffiti, was written: "THEN LET HIM FUCKING COME AN GET ME."
Krysty heard the sound first.
It was a faint tinkling noise, thin and metallic, a long way from where they stood. It had an insistent rhythm, clicking away, first two fast beats, then a slow one. Two fast, one slow.
Ryan considered running for the rows of neat white houses behind the stores to lie in ambush for whomever was coming. But it didn't take a tactical genius to figure out that their attackers would have better local knowledge than they did.
"There's a chill in here," said Finnegan, flattening his snub nose against the dusty window. "Just bones heaped together."
"Nothing else? No blasters?" asked J.B.
"No. Big poster on the back wall, half-torn. Says, 'Brownsville Texas is the fucking pits.' Oh, and one other over a door. Big heart with the words 'I love Lafayette.' That's all they wrote."
The chinking sound was growing closer. Krysty looked at Ryan. "You know there's two, mebbe three of them , doing it?"
"I can hear that."
"So?"
"Let's, go find us that Holiday Inn place we saw on the map."
Grimacing, Doc straightened, pushing at the base of his spine with his right hand. "I fear I am not so supple as once was. Did you say we were all going to seek out a Holiday Inn in which to rest?"
"Yeah, Doc."
"Then let us trust that the best surprise we get will be no surprise at all."
"Sure," replied Ryan, wondering what the old man was babbling about.
The large sign that had once welcomed Kiwanis, Elks, baseball teams and homecoming queens had rusted and fallen to the dirt, probably half a century ago.
"What the fuck is a Kiwanis?" muttered Finnegan, not really expecting an answer and not getting one.
As they left the shopping street on the edge of West Lowellton, the metallic drumming seemed to fade away. Krysty swore she heard someone laughing, crazed and long, but she might have been mistaken.
Ryan led them at a brisk pace, with the Armorer at the rear constantly checking that they weren't being followed. Here the streets were narrower, with older properties built on either side. Most had rickety mailboxes, many still showing the dragon's-head logo of the West Lowellton Comet and Advertiser. Off the main drag they saw more sun-bleached bones scattered here and there. On a wooden porch several skeletons were jumbled together as if a family had chosen to die together.
The sun shone through the long branches of the whitebeam trees that lined the dappled suburban streets. Intermittently they came upon the rotting remnants of automobiles, their tires long gone, settled on their hubs. They were overwhelmed by the visible tragedy of the Big Chill of 2001. It wasn't like just reading about it, or hearing from some old tapes. This was nowand this was real.
The Holiday Inn stood on a slight mound in the center of a maze of small waterways. Some had silted up; some had dried to lush valleys of moss; some still flowed with gurgling muddy water. The motel itself was a sprawling single-story structure, originally painted white and built with central pillars and columns in the American Colonial style. On its western flank a tall sycamore had died and fallen, breaking three windows. The flowering shrubs that once bad been carefully tended now ran wild, with azaleas and bougainvillea rampant, clear across the circular drive and parking spaces, flooding into the railed swimming pool with its turquoise slide. The permanently green Astroturf was covered with lichen.
The six of them stood and stared. Finn spat onto the dusty road, then started and peered down by his boots. "Fucking tracks, Ryan."
Ryan mentally cursed himself for being so careless. He'd been so interested in seeing this motel, preserved like a fly trapped forever in yellow amber, that he'd been ignoring basic safety. Like keeping his eyes open.
Finnegan was correct. The thick dust on the blacktop was overlaid with the familiar tracks of the swampwags. He knelt down to run his fingers lightly over the marks, then stood and scrutinized them from a different angle. He walked a few paces toward the imposing bulk of the motel, looking back at the tracks.
"They all turned here, J.B.," he said. "They come this far, then they go right around and head back toward the main part of the ville."
"Yeah. I read it that way."
"Mebbe this Holiday Inn place marks the edge of Baron Tourment's secure territory."
Ryan looked at Krysty. "Could be, lover. This gang runs part of West Lowellton. This baron maybe hasn't enough sec men to come clear out the nest of rats." That made sense.
They could imagine no other reason why the tire tracks should stop so abruptly about a hundred paces before the tangled skein of waterways and narrow bridges that circled the building.
From the south came the sullen rumbling of thunder. A deep purple cloud moved menacingly along the southern fringe of the sky, its upper edge touched with vermilion.
"Nuke storm on the way," said Finn.
"No," said Doc.
"What?"
"Not a nuke storm. I spent a summer here, way back in... my mind sort of trembles when I try and recall dates and places. I spent a vacation with Emily... Was that her name? Emily?"
Only once since Ryan Cawdor had met Doc Tanner had the old man mentioned Emily. It was just another ill-shaped piece in the jigsaw puzzle of the man's mysterious past.