The Follower by Nicholas Bowling

Author:Nicholas Bowling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan

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To begin with Vivian worried she would die from thirst or exposure, but after an hour’s hiking she was half-convinced that she was already dead. Under the high sun the prairie was a kind of purgatory, a dusty and bleached wasteland that she wandered through like a lost soul. If she was not dead then she was at least asleep, and dreaming an endless, colourless, dreadful dream.

Even though it was nearly November the midday sun was oppressively hot. She thought she could feel her hair sizzling and shrinking under its rays. When it became unbearable she took shelter in an old outhouse, so old it didn’t smell of anything, though it did still have a pin-up tacked to the wall, the shape of the woman’s naked body now just a whiteish, irradiated outline. Vivian waited on the seat for half an hour or so, hoping that the door would open on someplace completely different, but the weird dead land was all still there when she left. She found a small, broken-down tractor whose tyres had mostly disintegrated but which still had a key in its ignition. She got in the seat and tried it, not really knowing what she would do if it started. She hadn’t had a driving lesson in her life. It didn’t start, at any rate. The key wouldn’t even turn.

It was nearly evening when the dirt track met the highway – whether it was the 55, she didn’t know. She was too thirsty to swallow. Her mouth hung slightly open like a dog’s. At the turning was a bar and restaurant called Dos Amigos, which on the face of it didn’t look very different from the abandoned farmhouse the truck had destroyed, except for the neon sign of two sombreros over the entrance. There were a couple of pickups and a motorcycle parked outside. Vivian realised she was still clutching her bloodied rod. She threw it in a ditch by the roadside and covered it with dirt and gravel and approached the entrance of the bar.

Dos Amigos was a Tex-Mex place, even though it was halfway to Oregon, and leaned far more heavily towards Tex than Mex. It had saloon doors that flapped noisily when Vivian entered. Inside, the walls were hung with a mixture of buffalo heads and plasma TVs and signs that made goofy but also threatening jokes about trespassing and gun ownership and what you should expect from your wife. The barman and the clientele looked up in silence when she came in, as if she were a newcomer in some frontier town; a lone gunman.

Vivian took a stool at the bar. The barman came over to her.

“Evenin’. What can I get you?”

“I just need a glass of water.”

“Say again?”

“Just tap water.”

He stared at her, then looked at the other men at the bar. She wasn’t sure if he was having trouble with her accent, or if he was offended that she wasn’t buying a drink.

He said nothing. Then he turned, filled up a shot glass from the tap, and set it on the bar in front of her.

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