town or hamlet is the same as Mocsin. Sure there are plague pits all over the
place, but you could probably live your entire life out without seeing one.”
Krysty stood up, faced him, her deep green eyes diamond hard, defiant. She swept
a swath of scarlet hair from her face and it tumbled back over her shoulders.
Ryan felt sudden and intense desire for her.
She looked at him and said, “I’m going on to the Darks.”
Chapter Six
“AND CHECK YOUR BOOTS,” said the Trader through his cigar smoke. He waved the
cigar at J. B. Dix. “See they do it, J.B.”
“Don’t worry. They always do.”
“You, as well.”
J.B. didn’t say anything. He glanced at Ryan, a pissed-off expression on his
thin face.
“And don’t look like that!” barked the Trader. “I know what I’m talking about!
It’s the little details. You forget the little details, you might as well be
dead. Hell, you forget ’em and you will be dead!”
Ryan reflected that it was ever thus when they were approaching what the Trader
invariably referred to as a “pest hole”— town or area controlled not by men and
women with a certain standard of civilized behavior, but by men and women for
whom there was no law but their own, no rules but those that they invented on
the spur of the moment to satisfy some passing whim or desire. Mocsin was just
such a place. It was not the worst, but it was well up— or, depending on how you
looked at it, down—the scale.
Back a hundred years or so it had been typical small-town America. A long main
street with cross streets cutting it into blocks. A movie house, a bank, a
couple of realtors, ice cream and pizza parlors, supermarkets, drugstores, bars,
a half dozen greasy spoons, a couple of upmarket but still essentially tacky
restaurants, a Lutheran church, a sheriff’s office with a small jail facility
for drunks to dry out in, two motels. The edge-of-town streets had trees on
them, well-shaved lawns in front of medium-sized dwelling places for the
moderately well-off. There was a small industrial complex: a machine-tool plant,
a couple of lots where electrical components were stamped, a coast-to-coast
shipping warehouse, a small plastics factory. Near the industrial part of town
the homes were drabber, the streets grimier, the bars grubbier, the nightlife
darker.
Mocsin dwellers of the past, had they been able to skip a hundred years into the
future, would have both recognized the old hometown and not recognized the old
hometown. The outline was there. The bank was there, the church, the movie
house: everything was still in its place. The Nuke had not hit Mocsin, just the
aftereffects.
The bank wasn’t a bank anymore, the church wasn’t a church, the movie house
wasn’t a movie house. There were places where you could eat, places where you
could sleep, places where you could buy food, but in no sense of the words were
these places restaurants, hotels, stores. All were more or less rat pits. What
flourished in Mocsin were the bars and the gambling houses and the whorehouses.
Perhaps “flourished” was not quite the word: there wasn’t a hell of a lot of
bartering strength in Mocsin, except at the top.
The top was represented by Jordan Teague, who certainly had his fair share of
flesh; and his so-called chief of police, Cort Strasser, somewhat less well
endowed in body, though not in brain.
Strasser, nowadays, ran things. Teague still gave the orders, was still very
firmly in charge, but Cort Strasser kept the show on the road, did all the hard
graft necessary to keep things from falling apart completely. Largely this meant
cracking down viciously on anyone or anything that looked as if he, she or it
might buck the system, a system that had grown up over a period of twenty years,
based on Teague’s highly dubious claim but iron grip on the gold mines to the
southwest of town.
The road through Mocsin was the main route to the northwest and the north.
Travelers, heading into the Rockies in the hopes that there they would find
fresh fields, had to pass through Mocsin and consequently had to pay for the