CHAPTER ELEVEN

The morning sun found the Old Man in the office. Locked, he had broken it open with his crowbar.

First he laid out his bedroll and removed the pistol. He checked the rounds within and then went back to the edge of the pool. Mirrored Sunglasses stared skyward, his neck twisting to meet his body. The snakes were already covering him, seeking his fading heat in the predawn chill of the desert.

The double-barreled shotgun lay nearby.

Salvage. But at the bottom with the snakes it is as good as gone unless …

I could burn them.

And damage the gun no doubt.

He returned to his satchel and considered rerolling the bedroll with the pistol inside.

There might be others here. Maybe if I am going farther into the wasteland I need to keep the pistol within reach.

Once the office door was broken, the Old Man found a dirty kitchen at the back of it. It smelled greasy and old and like the snake he had eaten. Though the sink was dirty its faucet gave up a cool stream of clear water.

Well water.

He drank and drank again. He was still thirsty so he continued to drink. His head was clearing from the fogginess. Beside the sink, at eye level as he bent to drink, he noticed an old steak knife. A half-cut pill lay nearby.

He drugged me.

The rising sun turned the tiny office golden. Magazines littered the racks and the front of the office.

Was Mirrored Sunglasses truly blind?

What did it matter?

For the rest of the morning he searched the office, which contained little in the way of salvage. Boxes of coins and paper money. A few tools, but the village had these tools and often in great supply.

He took the cards that unlocked the rooms and went to the first room. A motel room like the one he had slept in. It was too bright to see if another message had been written on the ceiling. The other rooms for the most part were the same, except for the rust-stained bedspreads sometimes shredded and torn. One room seemed to be permanently lived in. The room Mirrored Sunglasses had come out of. He found an old toothbrush too disgusting to be used again. An abundance of clothing, crossing a spectrum of styles. Drawers full of medication from the year of the bombs. Prescriptions for people named Harriet Binchly. Or Kevin Adams. Or Phillip Nuygen. Take once a day with water.

Sitting on the bed for a moment the Old Man considered returning to the office for more water. But then he felt he must finish the rooms first. Make sure the place was clear.

This place is evil.

East is cursed.

Yes, and I too am cursed.

What was its story?

If he knew its story then maybe he might find salvage. If there was salvage to be found.

But the rooms and the office told of a hermit. “Loners” the village called them in the years after the bombs. People who had run so deep into the desert, they didn’t know of villages. Didn’t know others survived. Hermits didn’t last long. Seven years was the longest he’d ever guessed of one making it on his own.

This man had a hotel. Some power. The road nearby.

He thought of the power system. A salvage of that was beyond him. He could return and tell of this place. Then the villagers could come and get the power.

And the water. It might be good to have a place with water if the village ever wanted to come this far.

They would not come this far. “East” was enough to prevent them from ever considering it. So the solar power was no salvage.

Finished resting, he continued to search the rest of the rooms. In the last two he found the story. But he wished he hadn’t.

The first room held the desiccated corpse of a woman. Her long blond hair framed the rictus grin of a skeleton laughing or screaming.

Probably screaming.

The handcuffs at each end of the bedpost said screaming. Arms still connected to bony wrists thin enough to slip through as the victim must have once wished to. One leg lay on the floor. There were no clothes.

Was she the one who tried to warn me?

In the next room at the end of the balcony, the last room of the Dreamtime Motel he found the bags. Bags upon bags full of the last remaining possessions of lost wanderers. Wanderers who had come in from the wind and fire of the bombs. The long winter that followed. The years of sun afterward. Empty rotting bags from uncountable travelers.

He burned it. He stood watching in the charred remains of the gas station across the road that had once been something more than twisted and blackened metal. Even the ash that must have once covered the station, covered the entire world, had long since gone.

He leaned against a blackened cement pylon. He took pains to avoid the black blooming flower of metal that the pumps had become on that long-ago day when they had gushed forth jets of fuel on fire and burning hot.

Now the motel burned in the late afternoon heat. The Old Man started the fire in the room he had slept in. Started it with some paint thinner and a few other solvents. It consumed the bedspread, and by the time the Old Man had backed away from the motel door, the drapes were aflame and belching black smoke. Forty years of sun and the parched wood and lathe were more than ready to burn.

By the time he crossed the road to watch it all burn to the ground the fire was already visible behind fluttering curtains in the second-story windows.