a better where to find

The motel had been a themed bit of anachronism even in the long ago time when there were people to understand why it was funny that there were batwings separating the dry, dark inside from the arid eternity surrounding this little eddy in the nowhere.

The pool outside sat covered. Maybe festering, filled with bacteria large enough to eat small children. Maybe some new order of life altogether. The one that would supersede these sorry old cows that might have been people once.

He struggled through the batwings with his saddlebag over his shoulder. The interior of the place had no lights. Dark fell across his vision beneath his hat and shades. Fogged with smoke, tobacco the only constant since the reordering of things. The only thing anybody always seemed to have and never seemed to run out of.

He threw the bags onto the ground in front of the bar. Took a chair, removing the hat and shades. His movements were casual and deliberate. No grace – only straightforward effort. Mechanical necessity in the slightest motion of the fingers and the wrists. He was drenched in sweat and did not take the jacket off.

The innkeeper had been napping with his head on the counter before the labored squeal of the batwings awoke him. Thin as a rail – hair patched and hands withering. Maybe he was alive to see the war, or ran away from the one after that. Maybe he voted for Reagan.

His voice a hoarse, unused warble, atrophied.

I'm uh sorruh I uh I dint see yuh come in sir uh

He looked at the innkeeper evenly, nodding as if he understood. His voice was even and without anger.

That's okay.

You uh you want uhhhhhh room?

I reckon maybe.

Got uh good rooms... KAYLA! The shout like a grenade in the silence surrounding. Kayluhhhh, man here geddim uhhhhhh room!

There was not much to the front of the motel – carved wood decor mostly, and a juke box and tables with dirty glasses on them. He took all of it in as he looked behind him, hearing the girl's barefooted approach from what must be the kitchen.

She came out, a skinny girl with the innkeeper's same face, but maybe sixteen, maybe younger. Long red hair weakened almost to a brown. It had been bright at birth. Light freckles faded from the sun – her fair skin burned by wind and light so often it had finally given up and hardened against all of it.

He had enough cash to lay down for the room, though the innkeeper was asking an awful lot, even for a shithole with such atmosphere. He was the only one to pass through the doors in a long time. He saw it on the girl's face as she stooped to pick up his bags.

Those are heavy.

In a single effort she threw them over her shoulder. Not a grunt escaped her lips. She looked at him – defiant at his warning.

He made a note of it.

In the very back of the room were stairs leading into the hallway above. He followed, counting them. Twelve. He made a note of that, too.

The hallway at the top of stairs made a sharp right, facing east to a single cracked, filthy window that overlooked the covered pool and the street from which he'd come. Briefly he wondered if the boy, like a lost dog, still followed him.

There was some modicum of sequence left in this place. Numbered rooms – evens on the left, odds on the right. She stopped at number four, halfway down the hall. There was no key or lock. A cot in the corner without sheets or pillow. A corner desk with things to write on it. A phone darkly comic in its irrelevance.

She dropped his things roughly enough and then turned to him and stepped right up to him.

You wanna now?

Want to what?

She seemed surprised.

You... don't?

I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about.

He moved past her, taking the jacket off and dropping it onto the bed. She saw his polo had rings of gold around the ends of his sleeves the same color as the unlikely collar, a name tag over his heart with faded letters.

J A C K

He started moving the corner desk into the middle of the room. Facing it toward the door. She hovered near, filled with indignation, as if stung. He turned. I think I paid for some privacy. She turned and disappeared. Her skirt swishing against the frame of the door with her passage. He shook his head at what these people allowed.

He removed the guns from their holsters, hit the magazine releases and let the magazines fall to the table – the bullets nested inside their little cradles, always waiting. Always ready.

Carefully he jacked the slides on each, letting the round in the chamber spring out and catching it with his free hand in the air. He'd taken care to execute the horse with the left. His instinct always made him go for the right, but he needed to make sure to share the burden of destruction evenly between them.

Start with the left gun. Push down on the main spring and turn the bushing counterclockwise. Push in the slide stop from right. Slide comes off with a smell of oil and a satisfying, dull ring. The barrel and the recoil spring come out, the spring wiggling like the prehensile tail of a rat. Out with the extractor pin – the firing pin and firing pin spring laid on the table, the pin like an addict's needle. He hadn't inspected it in a while, in at least a hundred rounds – but it looked in good enough shape. From the shoulder bag he removed his cleaning tools – a squirt-bottle of grease, a pipe brush and cloth. He greased all the rails, wiped all of it down with the cloth. Swabbed the inside of the barrel – didn't need to brush it, he decided. He thought about looking at the hammer assembly – it seemed maybe a little looser than he liked, but he hated toying with it and left it alone.

Everything sprang and rang and clicked and locked properly when he had all the pieces together again. He reached into the bag and took out a box of .45 ACP, made sure his fingers were clean of lubricant and clicked a single bullet into the magazine of the left gun. He slapped it in securely and flicked the slide release – the slide sprang into place with a final metallic clunk and it was ready to fire.

It was the most important rule of survival he'd ever learned – always get at least one gun ready to fire before you look into the others. He did the right gun even though he hadn't fired it – smoothly he repeated the process his hands had performed what seemed like a thousand times.

When he'd finished and there was nothing more to be done with his machines, he looked out the window into the street to the north of the motel. The parking lot was there – an old Jeep with a cloth cover for a roof sat neglected, the cover itself in rags, the paint rusted through to the chassis. Another horse stood there as well. It did not see him – otherwise it would have spewed forth another advertisement. The newest models knew his mind – whoever designed them had lodged the vocal assembly somewhere so near the robot's core that he couldn't risk dismantling it.

He did not wonder who owned the horse.

The room was good for one thing – there was cool there, if nowhere else. Rooting around in the saddlebags produced a candle, and with the lighter he lit the candle and took out the notebook and pen, finally the small pony. The pony was a figurine with cartoonish features, yellow with some facsimile of hair – the mane purple, a brand of a rainbow coming out of a cloud across its right rump. The eyes were large and indigo and might have been fawning or simply misty – it depended on which angle he looked at it.

He wrote until sundown. There was no hurry, nor anybody to judge him, nor any deadline to meet. When the candle's flame waned it was dark outside. He took off his boots and laid on the cot with one gun hanging in the bandolier on the bedpost within easy reach.

---

He did not remember the dream when he woke up, but in it he stood in the middle of the desert, and a rolling layer of blood washed from across the expanse of it and choked the scorpions and fire ants. Only the vultures, covered as they were in gore and slurping it up, seemed to be enjoying themselves. He drowned in it and woke up some hours later with the girl sitting at the desk watching him and the first bruised hints of daylight outside.

---

The answer to how they all ate was behind the motel. A deep cave dipped into the earth, shaded above by a flat rock that simmered with heat in the sun. A rush of cold water bursting from one rock before splashing down into another tunnel. Always fast-moving, always cool. He wondered when the pressure would run out. There were plants of some kind growing in the soil along the walls and on the ground – he smelled onion, lettuce, tomato.

In the dark it was a vast, echoing cavern. A verdant paradise below the dusty tyranny of the surface.

To his surprise, a toad landed on a rock right next to him and looked at him with a bored expression.

He picked it up in one hand. The creature offered no resistance. Looked at him peacefully instead, its neck bulging for a moment – the eyes blinking.

I thought you were all gone. I'm glad you're not.

---

He drank and drank and drank from the spring, but did not eat anything. Ownership was always an unsure thing, but he did not want to take from what he had not sown.

He climbed out with reluctance, and it was if the place had only been a dream. He wiped the sweat that burst from his brow at the first ray of sunlight. He'd left the hat back in his room along with the saddlebags and shoulder bag and jacket. The guns sat on his hips still. The other townsfolk remained inside at his approach.

He could keep moving. He had enough money to buy another horse. The last time he'd asked for any sort of directions he'd been told there wasn't anything out this far west. He knew they must trade some of the vegetables for other things. The girl Kayla probably made the innkeeper some money when traders came into town – though when the last time that had been was questionable, based on the state the place was in.

He doubted that he'd learn anything useful if he asked after what waited for him to the west. Down the street again, looking to and fro for some sort of clue as to what to do next. Wait? Death. Run? Slow death. Go back? Crazy-ass death, Patrick would have said.

Up the street he did not see so much as feel the boy Henry watching him. He knew the boy to be hiding behind a large dumpster sitting aside the strip mall. The guns itched, and he forced himself to ignore them. The dark storefront called to him again, nestled as it was inside. He could not ignore that.

Stay? Probably death, too.

The boy Henry sneaking along after him, he walked back into the brick-paved courtyard to the video store that was part of the grand tradition that had given him his uniform, and walked back inside.

This time the boy followed him all of the way. Stood watching as the clerk turned all of the lights on, started up the computers, tested the TVs hanging from the ceiling. The clerk paid the boy no attention, and the boy did not mind. He watched with the reverence of the young. Mystified at the old arts the man knew. When it was clear the clerk would not speak, the boy did.

What are you doing?

The clerk did not look at the boy – did not halt the efficient process of opening up the store. His hands moving the same way they did when he worked the guns. I'm opening.

Opening what?

The store.

Oh.

This is a store. You buy things from it.

You mean... with moneys?

With money, yes.

Oh. Okay.

The register rang as the drawer popped open. He nodded at the cash inside. Whoever had left the place had left it ready for a new day – fifty dollars sitting in the drawer in small denominations. Rolls of pennies. Always pennies. One broken open and sitting in a scattered pile in the little depression on the far right side. He lifted the drawer and looked underneath it – a small paper note, written in a hand from who knew how long ago.

Sorry if I left a mess. Solar panels on the roof need cleaning once a week. I leave here a better where to find. - Unk

Unk. Thanks, Unk.

Who's Unk?

The clerk folded the note and slipped it into his back pocket.

Nobody. Do you want some money?

I don't ever buy anything.

That's because you don't have any money. If you take the ladder over on the back wall and this spray bottle and this roll of paper towels and you clean off the TV screens, I'll pay you six-fifty an hour until you're through, and I'll let you take a movie home.

We don't have a VCR at home.

Oh. He'd forgotten about the whole downward spiral of technology. Well, depreciation being what it is, I reckon a day's work would equate to a VCR.

Huh?

If you clean the TVs, I'll give you a VCR and a movie to take home. You got power?

We never turn it on.

It works though?

Yeah.

Like the store always works?

Yeah.

Everybody else, their places have power and it always works?

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

The clerk gave silent thanks to Unk, if for no other reason than giving him some small sliver of comfort near the end.