The lights grow nearer, looming through the dark. For a moment you're reminded of bogeys over Osaka--flickering, luminescent, promising mysteries and delivering terror. But then the memory fades, and you see the motel.
It juts from the side of the mountain like a temple unearthed by erosion. Elongated, yellow and decked with signage, it follows a pueblo-style architecture that melds with the earth with jarring fluidity. In the dark, you can see that only the lights of the lobby are on.
Strange place to run a business.
Dirt roads, leading to nowhere, scar the mountainside all around. Sighing with relief at your escape from Mycenea, you roll down the windows to try to get your bearings. Trying to just... be, for a second. To exist, without hammering fear in your heart and iron-flavored terror in your mouth.
You've been through the shit, lately. No mistake. In the panic and the strangeness and confusion (what was that thing that flew over my car, outside of town?) you haven't been able to think, to form much of a plan beyond Getting Out.
The not-men will follow. They always do. But you've bought yourself a little more time, a moment to enjoy the open air and a few more breaths of life. Those breaths might be dragged over a ragged, scarred lump of tongue-tissue, but hey. At least you're out of that goddamn town.
You get out the pickup and lean against the hood. The engine block is so hot and overworked that it brings out sweat on your back within minutes.
Standing there, you look at the motel. In the cool, dry dark of the mountains, your mind wanders.
You had a girl, once. Well, you never had her for good, not really. She was the kind of girl who bursts through a man's life like a candle knocked on a pile of books. Crisping up all manner of history, wiping clean his mind and leaving him with nothing but desire. She was wild as hell, a headstrong dame, and she made a damn fine martini.
In quiet moments like these, you feel a misty longing. She was from before Osaka, before your life got turned inside out and shaken like a wimpy kid on a playground. There was normality when you met her, or something like it--before the Japanese, when the Harbor got blown to shit and the "day of infamy" got beamed into every American brain. It wasn't a good life, the one you built before the war, but it was a stable one. A sane one.
Sanity has since taken a vacation.
A shadow passes through the lobby. You can't make it out--the glass on the front doors is bubbled, a new-wave style. But you think you saw a hunched, craven figure... bent like the letter "L" got up and started walking. You tense, and think of the gun in your jacket--your thoughts go back to it over and over. A mental scab.
Everything about this miserable patch of desert, dry and dead and heat-blasted, and the people in it brings out your fight-or-flight. Turns you to a parody of a man, scrabbling in the dirt and swallowing your basic decency to survive. You have no way of knowing who to trust--that cop was the closest thing you had to a friend, and somehow you don't think he's going to follow you up here. Not in that low-hanging cruiser. Assuming he's even still alive.
But you force your hand away from the heavy, hanging payload of death in your pocket. You're a good man, dammit. You don't draw on every bastard who crosses your path, just because you're jumpy. That's not training: it's just fear. And you don't want to give in to that.
Fear is their weapon. As long as they can bring it to bear, you're at a disadvantage. But if you can collect your wits, find a way out of this... find a way to get out from under their colossal, mysterious thumb... you might be able to win the day yet.
No more running. Whatever happens, we make a stand.
Whatever this place is, it's where the war starts.
My war.
It makes good sense. Turning around, you see the whole valley beneath you--a surprisingly beautiful purple-and-black expanse, dotted by lamp-light and the alien, cool glow of electricity in places. The drag of Mycenea is a strip of dead tar in the middle of a wandering, flat-caked desert. Cacti and boulders dot the hills below... and overhead, a myriad star-map spins its beauty to the furthest reach of the horizon.
Not a bad place to die, if I have to.
YOU ARE READING
Mycenea, N.M.
ParanormalYou wouldn't even call Mycenea a town. Not in the traditional sense. It's a small strip of tumbledown homes, off a length of unfinished highway near Route 66. Even in the year of our lord 1949 the U.S.A. still makes mistakes, and this town is one su...
