Ain't Talkin'

An quaint wooden sign beside the road welcomed all travelers along the 50 to Stateline.

Roche was familiar enough with the old maps he’d studied in the library as a boy. Beneath Tahoe the old invisible state lines between what was California and Nevada met here. Stateline itself, the old city, wasn’t much left, but there was some civilization. That was considering that civilization in the wastelands meant only that there was gambling and liquor.

The city announced itself from a ways off. If Roche hadn’t noticed the buildings, a half-dozen middle-rise old world scrapers amidst an underbrush of stucco and brick avenues, he would have known from the ever-increasing rays of flotsam that spread out from Stateline.

Shanty towns and makeshift camps that had been erected, left behind, burned, disused and re-erected dozens of times since the catastrophe. They’d rose up during times of prosperity in the cities and fall back into the landscape and the dust when their occupants left. The time wore away on everything and by the time people nowadays found a city, it’s borders spread farther and wider than the city limits ever had before the world went to hell.

Lucky plodded along. Even the horse could tell that they were nearing something dully alive, Roche could feel it in her gait.

It was later in the day, somewhere past noon, and Roche could hear the people of the city out-and-about. When Lucky and her rider rolled into the town along the main drag, people turned to look. Locals attending market stalls and trading, folks out for a walk, children playing with whatever the could find, and the occasional copper looking just as full of piss as any copper anywhere, they all turned to glance at a newcomer in their city.

That being the case, all folk went right back about their business once they’d taken a look at the man on a horse, which on all counts was a little strange, being that it was an actual horse.

The main drag was a wide, paved street. Someone had gotten the people together to move all of the old autos out of the way and rolled them into wherever so that the road could be used for a market, and for what it was worth, it seemed the people here kept their border town a good deal cleaner than most.

Roche rode into the crowd, which was sparse. Further down the way a two-story cowboy waved and pointed to a small building, touting that ′This Is The Place’. Seemed to be as good a place as any, Roche rode towards it.

Whatever the concrete building had been in it’s former life, it looked to be a saloon now. A fence outside the main doors had a pair of synthetic horses tied to it. They sat still in the motionless, robotic way that they had. Their silicone withers and breasts did not heave with breath, and they did not toss their heads or look to see their new compatriot when Roche tied Lucky’s reins in a quick release to the fence beside them. To her credit, Lucky seemed to care about the synthetics even less.

The main doors to the building had been replaced with ramshackle wooden ones and painted with the saloon’s name ′The Place’. Roche chuckled, at least someone at some point in this bastard version of history had some sense of humor.

The walker threw the doors open and stepped inside.