The The Wasteland Saga: Three Novels: Old Man and the Wasteland, The Savage Boy, The Road is a River by Nick Cole Read Free Book Online Page B

evil.
    East is cursed.
    Yes, and I too am cursed.
    What was its story?
    If he knew its story then maybe he might find salvage. If there was salvage to be found.
    But the rooms and the office told of a hermit. “Loners” the village called them in the years after the bombs. People who had run so deep into the desert, they didn’t know of villages. Didn’t know others survived. Hermits didn’t last long. Seven years was the longest he’d ever guessed of one making it on his own.
    This man had a hotel. Some power. The road nearby.
    He thought of the power system. A salvage of that was beyond him. He could return and tell of this place. Then the villagers could come and get the power.
    And the water. It might be good to have a place with water if the village ever wanted to come this far.
    They would not come this far. “East” was enough to prevent them from ever considering it. So the solar power was no salvage.
    Finished resting, he continued to search the rest of the rooms. In the last two he found the story. But he wished he hadn’t.
    The first room held the desiccated corpse of a woman. Her long blond hair framed the rictus grin of a skeleton laughing or screaming.
    Probably screaming.
    The handcuffs at each end of the bedpost said screaming. Arms still connected to bony wrists thin enough to slip through as the victim must have once wished to. One leg lay on the floor. There were no clothes.
    Was she the one who tried to warn me?
    In the next room at the end of the balcony, the last room of the Dreamtime Motel he found the bags. Bags upon bags full of the last remaining possessions of lost wanderers. Wanderers who had come in from the wind and fire of the bombs. The long winter that followed. The years of sun afterward. Empty rotting bags from uncountable travelers.
     
    H E BURNED IT. He stood watching in the charred remains of the gas station across the road that had once been something more than twisted and blackened metal. Even the ash that must have once covered the station, covered the entire world, had long since gone.
    He leaned against a blackened cement pylon. He took pains to avoid the black blooming flower of metal that the pumps had become on that long-ago day when they had gushed forth jets of fuel on fire and burning hot.
    Now the motel burned in the late afternoon heat. The Old Man started the fire in the room he had slept in. Started it with some paint thinner and a few other solvents. It consumed the bedspread, and by the time the Old Man had backed away from the motel door, the drapes were aflame and belching black smoke. Forty years of sun and the parched wood and lathe were more than ready to burn.
    By the time he crossed the road to watch it all burn to the ground the fire was already visible behind fluttering curtains in the second-story windows.

Chapter 12
    He ate some of the fox he’d dried, drank a little cold water, and counted the extra bottles and canteens he’d salvaged from the motel, now tied in a loose bandolier. Before setting the fire he’d filled them all with the cold water from the faucet in the office.
    That faucet had almost been enough reason not to burn it all down. He could have put a sign on the road or painted the word “WATER” in big red letters across the sides of the motel. A modern oasis for travelers.
    But there had been too much evil. Too much wrong had happened within the gold curtained rooms. Too many lives ended in a drugged stupor as Mirrored Sunglasses brained or bashed or shot, by the look of some beds, those who had wandered out of the destruction and found the Dreamtime Motel.
    The Old Man guessed the shotgun, buried under the rattlesnakes, was empty. Emptied long ago into the back of another victim. He found a box of shotgun shells. It was empty. Along with the shot-shredded rust-stained bedspreads, the empty box told the story of the shotgun beneath a pile of snakes.
    The handcuffs themselves could have been salvage. But when the Old Man went to