There were times when Doc simply didn’t make any sense to anyone.
Bedrock bedding prices. Buy now tomorrow may be too late .
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.