Sleep was scant. The bed wasn’t exactly the pinnacle of luxury Vincent was used to high up in the Lucky 38. Frankly, the cheap carpet infused with eons of stale dust was looking more comfortable than the slab that moaned and creaked like a bloated corpse under the slightest movement. He would drift off though. Wake up again, uncertain of the time. But it was dark. It was always dark when he came back to consciousness. Dark. Dark. Dark… Toss then turn. Turn and toss about some more, because just as soon as sleep snuck under the door, he’d become terribly uncomfortable. It was strangely quiet too. So quiet the rushing of blood in his veins and electricity in his brains was heard, echoing in his ear canals as irritatingly soft buzz. Sierra’s breaths were even and calm, the least of his irritants of late. She lay completely still, perhaps unable to move much. In fact, there wasn’t a peep from adjacent rooms either.

Vincent waved a hand in front of his face. His good eye caught the nuances of shadows so he wasn’t blind. There wasn’t any getting back to sleep. He was wide awake now. Carefully, he leaned over the edge, groped in the darkness for his backpack and then for the pip-boy somewhere inside. He closed his good eye before the screen cast its searing assault—

Then he sprang out of bed. He flew to the window and yanked the curtains nigh off the pole. Day filtered through dark slats. He winced, shutting an eye and pressed his face to dry, rough planks. 

“What’s going on?” Sleep lingered in Sierra’s voice. 

Vincent hesitated. “Nothing,” he said for lack of a better response to the same question he had. After squeezing into his kevlar and gearing up in record time, he drug the furniture blockade out of the way.

Vast blue skies enveloped the desert. Distant mountains faded on the hazy horizon. Wind whispered to the sandy flats. The diner’s sleek chrome spoke winked at him from across the lot, once again full with retro rides wearing shiny pastels. Then Vincent turned around to face the motel. His palms instinctively curved to holstered guns. Hackles rose and goosebumps dotted his forearms. But there was no tangible enemy here. 

Weathered planks boarded the windows. The doors. Broken glass sprinkled the cracked cement walkway relenting to desert sand. The place was already decrepit before but decades were added overnight. He stood there, absorbing the scene, ignorant of the minutes passing until a small voice called for him from the room. 

When he returned to the he stood in the doorway, still sizzling from the sun’s heat. The sleepy, squinting girl was bundled in her blankets, waiting for him to move or say something, but he didn’t. He packed up. Saddled Sierra on the bike, ensured she was comfortable and secured, and returned to the highway. 

Making that gentle arc up to the asphalt, Vincent couldn’t peel his eyes off the motel lobby. Plywood sheets, graffitied with nonsense and anguished faces kept the desert at bay. His reflexes anticipated the strange night auditor to manifest at any second. Gawk at two two with his uncanny smile and empty eyes. But he never appeared. Something else did, though.  The motorcycle slowed, ready to stop but veered off the highway, slowly rolling down the unpaved slope. 

Vincent planted his boots on the ground at the storefront. The engine rumbled beneath them, discontent with the lack of action. A cough escaped the exhaust as though trying to make them get a move on, but the pilot was busy staring through the windows. Beyond the shards of glass was a shop floor that made up in junk what it lacked in customers. An array of shelves, racks, and the relics of a world long gone cast strange silhouettes against the collapsed roof at the far end letting sunlight pour in like a waterfall. He cut the engine, not wanting to give up even the slightest drop more of gas and dismounted. Sierra complied when he took the position to let her on his back, not questioning what they were doing here or why they bothered to check out the dump. 

Like its exterior, its once vibrant mint and rose accents and the checkerboard floor paled to dull memories. Both Vincent and Sierra’s gaze swept over barren shelves stocking only thick blankets of dust where snacks and other sundries once sat. The trash of those things lingered, scattered on the floor, mixing with the post-apocalyptic spice scraping under eroded soles. He kicked a tin can away. It went rolling across peeling linoleum, rattling like a skeleton until the register’s counter stopped it. Vincent set Sierra down there. Next to her, a small display held postcards of a paradise world as distant as the images were faded. 

“I’m going to see if there’s anything useful here,” Vincent stated, helping Sierra shrug off his backpack.

Trudging through the mess of overturned shelves, ceiling panels, and shards, he still listened for Sierra and the creaky display that whined every minute or so. There was a kind of intuitive know-how one gained in the wastes to gauge how many times old-world places like roadside stops were looted by merely observing what remained—aside from the shelves being picked clean. Judging by the presence of silly kids’ games contained in boxes devoured by the elements and whose creepy, malicious child faces still lingered upon, there was a good chance something useful remained.  The most obvious of useful things were picked clean long ago—chems, medicine and peripheral supplies, perishable and canned foods. When things got rough, the dog food was next on the menu. Fusion batteries and flashlights, no matter how antique, they were always sought after. Alcohol disappeared quickly too, for septic and recreational purposes. Time ate away cloth so it was hard to say when those disappeared or maybe it was just the unsalvageable bits that were ignored. 

If there were still soaps and hygiene things on the shelves then wastelanders hadn't found the treasure trove yet. A large carousel halted Vincent in his path. It was another sand-weathered, creaky thing like that on the counter. He turned it to a new face, finding a mostly orderly display of a variety of colorful magnets. He plucked one off and squinted at it. “...come get your kicks on route 666.” Vincent rolled his eyes, tossing the waste of resources aside. If terribly gaudy magnets and souvenirs were still lying around, indeed no wastelanders before him were here.

Then there were the other things people forgot about or couldn’t put to use. Like the ties, ratchets, and carabiners he would make something out of if the girl was going to be hanging on his back closer than his own shadow. He returned to the counter with his haul and immediately went to work. Sierra was engrossed with her postcards, picking out and noting whether she had been there or wanted to go there. A meager pile of “been-there’s” collected, topped by something from Arizona that looked gratuitously more green than it should. 

Vincent wasn’t paying close attention to this until she laid down a card that was an ancestral echo of Freeside. He paused his looping of ratchet ties and stared at the faded card. He was there only a couple days ago, across from the Queen’s flashing glitter and white stripes, fighting the golden hour peeking through the slit of towers as some pitiful old man pleaded for him to find his daughter. He found someone’s daughter, but he wasn’t sure who needed his help more. 

“I’ll show you Vegas,” he said, but more so for his own conscience. When he finished his improvised over-the-shoulder-Sierra-holder, they put it to use. She hung on his back more comfortably with his backpack acting more a seat for her while her legs were suspended by rope loops, and she didn’t have him in a chokehold. However, there was another problem. The niggling little issue found on asphalt that didn’t seem to go anywhere, no matter how many miles they drove. Vincent wasn’t privy to giving up easily. In fact his greatest strength was his bull-headed nature he inherited from his mother.  Unfortunately, asphalt was stronger than bone, and lasted longer than ethanol gasoline. Once again, they found themselves rolling under the shade of a diner’s roof, then moseying inside and settling in at, coincidentally, the same two bar stools at a boomerang counter manned by one hot-heeled waitress while the other slacked off. 

Two pristine leatherette menus slid across the counter,  very unlike the ones that made fingertips sticky the night before. “Y’all decided to stay a little longer?”

Lonnie’s sickly sweet smile met Vincent’s irate glance. “This place is a lot different at night.”

“At night?” Lonnie’s grin faded and her thin brows furrowed.

“Yeah. Found the DMV you mentioned, but nothing and nobody helped. We came back here. At night.”

“Oh sweetie, we ain’t open after dark. Would you like breakfast?”

Breakfast was certainly something he hadn’t seen before. Not like this. Sierra didn’t seem to mind it, in fact she devoured the thin pan-cakes slathered in a goopy sauce like a Freeside drifter huffed jet. They were much too sweet for him. Vincent slid over his plate to the girl who could use a few extra pounds on her skeleton.  He sipped black coffee instead, puffing gradually on a cigarillo and watching what was quite the feat from the stool next to him.

When the door jingled, he instinctively looked over his shoulder and his irate scowl returned. The officer noticed him just as quickly. Sour-faced under his dark aviators, he marched to the odd-pair at the counter.

“I recall you overstayed your welcome.”

“Well, y’know what…” Vincent slid off the stool, taking to lackadaisical lean on the counter should he need his guns. “I was gleefully putting this place in my rear-view mirrors when I suddenly ran out of gas. So, here we are. But, maybe if you chip in some for my bike I might not have to turn around next time.”

“There’s a gas station up the road,” the officer said flatly. “I’ll escort you there.”

“I can find ‘up the road’, thank you.”

“I don’t want to see you here again.”

“The feeling’s mutual.” Vincent's gaze battled the stare hidden behind dark lenses. The seconds felt longer than hours. Idle eyes around them watched discreetly— Sierra’s unblinking gaze didn’t, however. Vincent took a sip from his cup of coffee, hating that it might grow cold for no good reason at all. The officer peeled away from him, continuing his march down to the other side of the boomerang bar.

“Take your time. You want more, you get more,” he said to Sierra before gulping the last of his coffee. “I need me another roach in a bath.”

Vincent kept a mean eye on the officer. He didn’t like the look of the man, from the way he carried himself with an arrogant swagger down to his pair of shiny riding boots that walked more on people than ground. The officer left before them.  Eventually they would too, but only after the leather-clad-wannabe to save face, and before Sierra ate herself into a sugar comatose. However, once outside, sitting on the rumbling mechanical beast, the sun beating down on the back of his neck, and catching a glare of Sierra’s helmet in the rearview mirror, he was faced with the recurring conundrum. 

Left of the diner was down the road. Vincent wasn’t sure why or if it even mattered but he was certain if he went left he would wind up at the DMV again. So, he went right. He wouldn’t admit it but he was hoping there was a “gas-station” somewhere out here. The diner disappeared behind them as they rolled over miles. How odd he felt so eager to get home and off the asphalt he did his best thinking on. Faded white dashes switched on his autopilot. Dusty peaks on the horizon that had seemed so far gradually began to grow while the strange feeling in Vincent’s gut shrank. Not a single cloud in the sky interrupted hot rays cooking the road but staying at a steady pace let the two riders keep their cool. 

The odometer rolled over another mile. 

He glanced at it again, thinking it couldn’t be right. The engine was swallowing gallons of gas. The tires were eating mile after mile. Yet they were getting nowhere. The sun loomed dead overhead. Had his gas not evaporated, Vincent wouldn’t believe any time had passed. Just when he was beginning to think that maybe the highway was on a conveyor belt, something winked at him on the horizon. 

There was a line of them across the road. Vincent slowed the bike and came to a timely stop some distance ahead of them. Engine spits filled the gap. He counted their numbers, their armaments. Five Vaqueros and the woman commanding them. Exhaust pipes hacked as she pulled off her helmet, but Vincent had a hunch who she was already. The Vaquero guards hunched over their bars, brandishing rifles and pistols that would fire before Vincent could spin around. They had the courtesy to cut their engines. Only Vincent’s quieter, sleeker beast was left rumbling in the wasteland gothic standoff. 

“You are in the presence of La Caballera,” she announced proudly. Her arrogant smile faded the longer Vincent was silent. “You seemed to have found my little sister,” she hollered across the asphalt. Vincent said nothing, keeping still as though they couldn’t see the girl behind him. Red lips curled and her eyes rolled. The Caballera tilted her head and said to Sierra, “I was worried about you, sweetie.”

Sierra retreated behind Vincent. She squeezed his shoulders she had only been anxiously clutching before.

“Finders keepers.”

The woman’s lips twitched in a split-second. “That’s not how this is going to work. I have more guns. More bikes. More men.”

Vincent bit back a snarky remark that last claim. Usually the situations were reversed. He had them surrounded, outnumbered by machines, delivering the ultimatums. Vincent glanced to Sierra’s reflection in the rear-view mirror. He weighed the risk of giving her up, and if he could get her back. It sent his stomach plummeting in his gut because it might be the only way both of them would make it out alive. 

“You’re on my time!” The woman threw up her hands, pantomiming aggressively, but Vincent focused instead on the figures rising from the heat mirage dancing on the road far behind her. Asphalt shimmered like water. The ground began to vibrate. The Vaqueros took notice, turning around to face the black cloud barreling down the highway and straight towards them.  Sierra cinched Vincent’s waste. He already had one foot off the ground. He whipped his head around, poised to spin the bike 180 while they were distracted. The Vaqueros jumped along with Vincent. Each one had their sights on the man that suddenly materialized. The stampede closed in. The line of Vaqueros was crushed.

Obsidian bulls parted where the three stood safe and untouched by even a spit of debris. Vincent was stunned. He blinked at the figure, unsure if he could trust his own eyes anymore. There wasn’t anything different about the old man, except he was made of stone. His rough, jagged texture didn’t suit him. The weary gray coloring him was unlike his mood and wisdom he often bestowed on the man gawking at him. Wayne’s voice thundered in Vincent’s head, husky and omnipotent like he had forgotten. Vincent wasted no time turning around to stampede with the bulls. Their smog smudged the bright and expansive blue sky, inverting its hue to hazy wasteland orange. Maroon mist snuffed the sun. Cold chilled the sweat droplets still clinging to him and now he was shivering like the girl behind him. The herd thinned when the blood haze set, giving way to the black of night in minutes. But on the horizon a neon halo called to them. Its sharp spoke gleamed the most.

When Vincent woke from his trance, he was sitting on the bed in the motel room.  Adrenaline shakes had yet to wane after being there for a few minutes in silence. He blinked and went over a mental checklist. The door was barricaded. The curtains drawn. The lights dim. Sierra was laying on the bed across from him, hugging the spare pillow and staring at the floor between glances at Vincent. He got up, retrieving food and water for her thinking that’s what she was hesitant to ask for. She nibbled gecko jerky in silence, still eyed the man intently who was lost in his thoughts hunched over at the foot of his bed. Her soft voice found some courage and whispered, “who was that?”

Vincent was slow to rouse from his contemplative pose. “The gray man?”

“Who is he?”

“He…” Vincent hesitated. His elbows sunk into his knees staring at outdated and overly complex carpet patterns so dirty they were almost the same color. “I don’t know.”