“That your advice, too, Mike?” Ryan asked. “Stand aside from the racists?”
“Easy and safe,” the farmer mumbled, shuffling his scuffed boots in the roadside gravel.
Doc rapped the ferrule of the swordstick on the highway. “All it takes is for the decent people to stand aside when evil passes by.”
J.B. had been polishing his glasses furiously, a sure sign that he was thinking deeply about a problem. “Let’s lay this on the back burner,” he said quietly. “Something we can tackle when we have to. Meanwhile, time’s passing….”
THEY SAW MORE SIGNS of civilization as they made their slow way west, along the break-back remains of the highway, stopping twice to refuel from the bowsers.
There were little hamlets and isolated sodbusters’ homes, shacks and shanties surrounded by a few miserable acres of windswept crops, dark-skinned faces peering from curtained doorways. Broken-down wags looked as if they’d been settled there on their broken axles since before skydark, and instant suspicion darkened every eye.
“Friendly,” Jak said to their driver.
“You live close to the edge and you get friendly to strangers,” he replied.
“If you only got a little, then you don’t take to anyone got even the smallest tad more,” added the shotgun guard, a one-armed, grizzled man riding on a high shelf seat behind Doc and the albino teenager.
“Truest words I ever heard,” Doc said, nodding wisely. “That lies at the root of most of the world’s evils over the last millennium.”
A GAWKY BOY in faded coveralls, looking about eighteen with a melon-shaped head that lolled on narrow shoulders, came running from a ditch and threw a stone at Mike Sullivan, missing by inches. Ryan drew the SIG-Sauer and would have blasted the kid off the broken highway, but the farmer laid a hand on his arm.
“Thanks, but no thanks,” he said, raising his voice above the crackling rumble of the powerful old engine. “Won’t make the world a better place, Ryan.”
The blaster was holstered and Ryan felt the sting of the reproach, aware how easy it was to live by your own set of rules, forgetting that some people operated differently.
Chilling wasn’t always the only answer.
AN INDICATION of the appalling way that the total nuking of a century earlier had altered the land was the bizarre sight of a series of five small volcanoes, ranged to the north of the highway. None was more than a thousand feet high, but all were sending out thin tendrils of pale gray smoke against the blue afternoon sky, streaking southward, carrying the taint of sulfur.
“Used to be the Chickasaw Rustic Park, so folks reckon,” Sullivan said, gesturing with the stem of his corncob pipe toward the odd little line of volcanoes.
Ryan was standing, letting the wind blow through his black curly hair, stretching his legs, and he pointed ahead of them. “Smudge along yonder. That Country Row?”
“See the billboard on the right. Be able to read it when we get a mile closer. Tell you everything you want to know about Country Row.”
GERT WOLFRAM INC. Presents Country Row. For Your Enrichment And Pleasure. Country At Its Best. Old And New, Borrowed And Blue Songs. All You Ever Heard And All You’ve Ever Wanted To See.
There followed a series of smaller boards, listing some of the attractions that were on offer in Country Row the car where Hank Williams had passed his last, lonely, dying hours; Dolly Parton’s finest stage wardrobe, including her star-spangled underwear; Johnny Cash’s guitar; Carl Perkins’s blue suede shoes; Garth Brooks’s top five Stetsons.
The list seemed endless and included displays of waxworks, living positronic-activated representations of some of the biggest and best.
Ryan recognized a lot of the names, but a number of them were obscure and meaningless.
Meanwhile, the smudge was growing closer and was resolving into a number of buildings. It was possible to make out a large rectangular block that Sullivan told them was the nerve center of Country Row, holding the main exhibitions. Clustered close around it were the bars and eateries, nearly all with country themes, with the tawdry glamor of sparkling lights twinkling around them in the fading evening dusk the Lone Star, Green Coyote, Guitar an’ Pick, Golden Mouth Harp, Alamo, Merle and Earle, Eggs’n’stuff, Blue Bayou, Lonesome Eats.