Mycenea, N.M.

Episode 19: Exit, Stage Left

The heat is pulverizing--suffocating. Even in the cockpit of a burning Curtiss Hawk, which caught fire on the runway, you've never known such heat. At least back then, the heat had a source--a blazing control panel, fire licking at your uniform. Out here... in the desert beyond Mycenea, this blasted land seems to cook you from all sides. There is no escape.

The light reflecting off the Airstream trailer is blinding, and you hold up your hand to block the glare. The white-silver glow coming off the cheap aluminum seems to radiate some unwholesome essence, a foul wind blowing off it.

Choking you.

Your curiosity is beaten and battered, barely alive. But you still find the strength to rise from the car and hobble towards the Airstream. There are answers inside--the answers to everything. You thirst for those answers like a man desiccated for days, crave them like a drug. You will have what's yours--your memories, the truth. Escape.

CeeCee and the ranger stay behind, waiting. They seem to know this isn't their time, that only you can enter their sanctum. The demesne of the grand old man.

Mayor. 

All Western languages split off from Latin, branching out from it, growing like tumors. Metastasizing into English, Spanish, French, German... The plague of Babylon. You don't know the origin of mayor and you were never much for Latin. But you do know the word someone has painted on the side of the trailer, in bright red paint blistering and peeling in the sun:

TYRANT.

There are wars, out here in the dust. Shining knives flicker in the heat... Stories carve each other up--Bo Crusty and the hacksaw, the ranger and his shiny antique gun. The man in the gas station, licking his chops.

On and on, ad infinitum, the ancient tales will devour each other. Unless you do something about it. Unless you end this cycle, the not-men and their story coming here to devour yours.

But what?

There's no room left in the world... no space for wonder. Science and the scorching strength of war have stolen all the world, burned it in piles of books in Berlin, cooked it in people-ovens, stabbed it out of humanity on distant Pacific shores. Any wonder that might remain is buried along with the wreckage of the old tales. All you can do, a frail dying story, is soldier on.

And maybe you'll take one more bogey with you, before you go.

Reaching out, you grip the trailer door handle--and recoil, fingers blazing. Removing your shirt, you wrap it around the white-hot metal and pull it open. Inside the suffocating light turns to suffocating dark. You hurry inside and shut the door.

The air is superheated, burning your lungs. An oppressive smell of age hits you, the stench of forty thousand years, the reek of dusty carpet blasted with humidity. The blindness of your sun-flashed eyes struggles to adjust to the dark.

Inside the trailer there is a bureau, a table, and a very old man.

The man sits in a wheelchair. He is frail, shrunken, but his bones stand out strong and prideful under sagging skin. A long white beard crowns his olive-colored face, dotted with moles and liver-spots, his bald head scattered with blue veins. He watches you through eyes so rheumy and decrepit that you wonder how they can function at all. 

On the table in front of him is a chess set, with two pieces in play. Both are queens: white, and red. He's got his hand on one of them... slowly sliding it around the board, then sliding it back. If you don't take your hand off a piece, of course, the move isn't complete. But he doesn't seem satisfied with any of the spaces he could move to. They only put him in more danger.