James Axler – Road Wars

“Yeah.” Abe felt sick, and the pulque had given him a ferocious headache behind the eyes.

Trader stared at the dark mountainside behind them, seeing no sign of life. “That’s done then,” he said confidently.

Chapter Thirteen

Wetherill Springs was typical of thousands of frontier pesthole villes. There was a narrow main street that choked you in dust during the summer and drowned you in thick, black glutinous mud throughout the rest of the year.

The boardwalk was mostly rotted through and was lined by tumbling, leaning houses. There were a couple of stores, remnants of a church or a school, a row of outdoor privies with their fetid odors and swarms of glistening flies, a saloon with bat’s-wing doors and stinking brass cuspidors that overflowed onto the stained planks of the floor. Most time you found that the gaudy and the drinker were in the same building. Occasionally it might have a name like The Silver Dollar or The Lucky Chance. Other times there could be a hand-lettered sign, weathered by rain and wind and frost, that would simply read “Sluts.”

Ryan and J.B. must have visited hundreds of similar places and knew the variety of common factors that you always found in them faro dealers and barkeeps with false smiles permanently pasted in place; drink that would peel the enamel off of your teeth if you were too slow in swallowing it. Food was rudimentary, with grease as the common unifying factorfried eggs, blackened at the edges, with fried bacon, fried bread, fried tomatoes, fried chicken, fried potatoes and fried mushrooms.

The gaudy whores all looked the same. Ryan had once read an old guidebook that said that the big motel chains were so cunningly designed that you could wake up in one and not have the slightest clue whether you were in Tallahassee or Nantucket or Chinle or Missoula.

Sluts were like that.

You could wake up in bed with one, the remnants of a hangover throbbing at your temples and the sickly taste of bile in your throat. You’d look around the cheap room with faded pictures tacked to the plasterboard walls, the jug and bowl, unmatched or chipped or cracked, the narrow bed and rickety chair with one leg shorter than the rest.

Tawdry clothes hung on a rail behind a half-drawn curtain, stained and torn underwear on the floor with down-at-heel shoes or midcalf boots, the leather cracked and grease-stained.

And the nameless woman snoring at your side. Her cheeks would be puffy from the booze, or haggard from the jolt that made life barely tolerable, broken veins in the backs of her thighs and across the face, mouth hung open to show the broken teeth standing proud among the gaps, like the old telegraph poles strung across the high plains country.

And the indescribably appalling cavern of Eros at the junction of her flabby legs, a valley that truly concealed the shadow of death.

Her customers would also be interchangeable, hardly varying from one pesthole to another. You might get more Hispanic types in the Southwest, more Asiatic-looking men up toward the far Northwest. Hunters and farmers. Cowboys and wranglers. Local good old boys with brains the size of teacups and an infinite capacity for drinking, whoring and fighting.

Yes. Wetherill Springs was much like any of the thousands of frontier pestholes.

Only it was currently hosting a couple of dozen buffalo hunters, following the herds of animals as they moved restlessly across the prairies and mountains.

THE CARAVAN ARRIVED from the south in the middle of the following morning. Ellie drove the first wag, holding the pair of lions, with her daughters bringing in the other rigs. Ryan came along at the rear in the LAV-25, J.B. perched in the turret, riding shotgun on the big armored wag.

The gaudy house rejoiced in the name of The Shangri-La. There was an old orchard out back, with a broken picket fence partly enclosing it. There were ancient, blighted apple and pear trees, all with immensely long, spindly branches, some of them with a single withered fruit at their end.

After a quick tour of the small ville, Ellie picked that abandoned paddock to put on their show.