Deathlands 06 - Pony Soldiers by James Axler

Author:James Axler
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-02-10T16:43:45+00:00

THERE WERE SEVERAL TRAILS into the ghost town, which had been a mining center during a brief boom period in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Called Sometime Never it had housed three and a half thousand miners at its peak. Two years later there was no sign of the mother lode, and the population of Sometime Never had shrunk to twenty-three.

By 1911 it was down to four.

In the mid 1970s there was a burst of interest in the old lost towns of the Southwest, and Sometime Never boomed briefly again. The dirt road was graded and a few shops opened, selling stones, pots and glass. A couple of eateries, an art gallery and a store specializing in genuine reproduction patchwork quilts did well for a few heady years.

It wasn't the last World War that did in Sometime Never. There'd been an earthslide that made driving up the road difficult, but the nail that sealed the coffin was the establishment of a gay commune. The big AIDS scare of the early nineties brought a visit to the town, very late one Friday night in mid-December. A couple of dozen good ol' boys, juiced to the cortex, arrived in mud-smeared pickups, several with pump-action shotguns. The idea was to throw a scare into the disease-spreading wimps up on the hill.

It all got a little out of hand.

The rednecks didn't know that the gays had an armory of M-16s, in anticipation of just such an attack.

Eventually the body count reached the respectable total of fifteen, split eleven to four in favor of the commune.

Armageddon passed almost unnoticed in Sometime Never.

By 2001 there was only one inhabitant left, and he wasn't even three cents in the dollar. He'd built a small shrine in his garden to a country singer called Dwight Yoakam, who he claimed was a prophet and whose songs contained hidden clues to the coming of a new master.

The old man heard the distant sounds of rumbling explosions and saw the skies darkening all around him. But he took it as a sign of the eternal's wrath with him and he tried to play his Dwight Yoakam albums more often and louder. But there was no electricity coming up the line to his shack. The EMP had knocked out all generators and power-operated installations across the land.

It was winter, and cold at night up in the hills of New Mexico. The old man offered to fast in order to purge himself of whatever sins of omission or commission he might have been guilty of.

The fast went very well and in just under five days he was dead.

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