Way of the world. A baron fell, another rose to take his place. Like a well-swung scythe aimed at tall stalks of wheat in the field, if they were cut down, more would come back.
Patterns within patterns.
They-Ryan, Doc, J.B., Jak, Krysty, Lori and that other poor unfortunate, Rick Ginsburg-all of them were at the fuel refinery where the gasoline that kept the baron in power was processed. Three large storage tanks were sticking up tall against the backdrop of the mountains. A score of rocking-donkey pumps bobbed up and down in patient, unchanging motion, great metal monstrosities bringing up the thick crude and sending it into a long warehouse-like building where the actual refining and processing of the gas were accomplished.
There were several low walls but only one possible entrance into the complex.
Ryan had chosen this as the locale of their final stand against the new baron and his followers, using the site’s allure to bring in their foes, even as they fled out the back. Behind them, a stream of refined gasoline was gaining speed, the oily stench of fuel hanging in the air. Jak had opened all of the main valves on the three oversized fuel containers, and now thousands of gallons of gas were flooding through the complex, along the roadway and toward their murderous pursuers.
The hot exhaust from one of their foes’ chrome-and-leather-enhanced Harley-Davidson motorcycles ignited the released fuel into an explosion of cataclysmic proportions.
The wretched ville of Snakefish was burning. The worshippers of the giant sand serpents went up in flames, abandoned by their reptile god to twist in the heated wind.
Time to go. Smoke hung in the air, and Doc felt himself cough as he tried to take in a fresh breath. Thick black smoke billowed around him like a hot fog, an ashen blanket draped around his shoulders.
“Run, dammit!” The cry came out of the fire. Who had issued the order? Ryan? Yes, that was the voice of command the one-eyed leader wielded so well, motivating all of them past death again and again.
And there she was, running as fast as she could across the withered pavement, her blond hair shining like a beacon, glowing brighter in the light of the fires.
Lori Quint, a seventeen-year-old beauty with a body like a newborn colt, all legs and stumbling, running for her life, her high-heeled boots of tooled red leather slapping down on the road. Doc listened. He could hear the tiny silver spurs on her footwear jingle with their trademark thin clear sounds, a fault hint of merry music hi the overheated air. For long months after the tragedy about to occur, he’d heard that very same faint jingle in his nightmares.
Nightmares such as this.
The jingle was coming up fast behind him, reaching out for him, begging him for help, each jingle whispering his name.
A seventeen year old, with a woman’s body and the mind of a much younger girl.
Even as a man hi his mid- to late-thirties, and truth be told that was his real biological age, Doc felt a twinge of cradle-robbing when enraptured in the throes of passion with Lori. He was a man who appeared and acted over sixty years old, and she wasn’t his lover in appearance, but more of a daughter.
During his earlier lifetime in the late 1800s, one of Doc’s wealthier friends from Oxford had arrived at the local men’s club on a weekly basis with a new young woman on his crooked arm-his nieces, he called them with a nudge and a wink. “Theophilus! Come over here, you scowling brigand, and meet my niece!”
Doc had smiled, allowing his colleague to present his lie to everyone’s amusement. It was harmless enough, since the man’s wife had been dead seven years and his children now adults with their own love affairs to conduct.
It wasn’t until after Lori was dead, her nubile frame engulfed and turned to ash by the firestorm, that Doc realized that though he grieved for her he hadn’t loved the girl. Oh, he’d cared for her, and sought comfort in her arms, in her embrace, in their lovemaking. She’d made him feel alive once more, whispering his name, shuddering with pleasure at his touch…even as she’d later chisel away at his self-esteem by pointing out her own vitality against the damages of time inflicted on his body.