End of the Road Read Online Free Page A

and then he
heard her turn, felt her leaving as though something had sucked his
soul out of him. But he didn’t look back. He couldn’t allow himself
to. There were some things that made a man softer, better even, but
those things had no place out here.
    Not today.
    When he’d first seen them, riding in
too-tall trucks, arrogant exhausts matching their drunken whooping
as they barreled past him, he’d been mending the fences so the dogs
wouldn’t get out and cause trouble, or worse yet, get hit by the
occasional rancher tearing down the nameless rutted dirt trail that
led south, into a desert that offered nothing but suffering. His
property stretched as far as he could see in both directions, and
the road ran alongside it, tracing its boundary with mechanical
precision. It had been there as long as he’d been alive, and as
long as his father before him, and his father before that. The
road. As permanent as anything in his world, as immutable and
unchanging as the plain itself.
    A corroding rust-colored iron gate,
padlocked on the exterior, sat sentry over the cow catcher rails
he’d helped install twenty-five years ago, as a teenage boy full of
strapping energy and furtive dreams. The war had taken both out of
him, and when he’d returned, he’d come back a man, hard, too much
in this world, come back to his home to bury the father who’d
raised him when his mother had passed to her reward.
    Funny, that, he mused, wiping perspiration
from his brow with his sleeve – that dying could be called a
reward. He absently wondered who had come up with that sleight of
hand, that euphemism, having seen death in its many forms on the
battlefield, fighting an enemy for reasons nobody could logically
articulate, an enemy that he’d been told he needed to kill in order
to save. War for peace. War to protect against imaginary threats;
better to be safe than sorry later. Everyone sure they were going
to their reward, even as unspeakable violence robbed them of their
humanity.
    No atheists in foxholes, his master sergeant
had been fond of saying before an insurgent round sent him back to
Iowa in a bag.
    But he’d never been in a foxhole.
Firefights, ambushes, having to wipe brains and blood and bone off
his face after his squad mates had earned their rewards – he was
more than passing familiar with that. But not foxholes. Those were
for older, nobler fights, where right and wrong were better
defined, clearer, more absolute, or at least they were to those who
wrote the history books. Not like his war. Not like the things he’d
seen, the memories visiting him on bad nights, bringing the sweats,
the shaking, the nagging coil of fear he’d wake up with, soaked,
eyes darting around the darkened room trying to place himself, find
something tangible to reassure him that his visions were only
phantoms from a past now left behind.
    A scratch in his throat reminded him that
there was water waiting for him.
    His eyes narrowed as he took another look,
stoic as he clutched his old-fashioned Winchester lever-action
rifle, then shifted and glanced over his shoulder.
    A half-gallon jug waited, sweating in the
middle of the drive.
    His reward. Or at least a respite from the
sun's unrelenting blaze. Which was close enough right now.
    He moved to the container and drank from it,
then stopped himself after five greedy swallows. A man had to know
his limitations. Wouldn’t do to allow himself to start thinking
about more pleasant things – water, food, love, hope…that would
just distract him from what he was there for, what he was going to
do.
    The second truck had slowed, its brake
lights broken, and then reversed, the whine of the tranny as clear
as a locomotive hurtling down a mountain track as it approached his
position by the gate, flanked by his two dogs, Bart and Tag,
brothers from a litter where the others didn’t make it. Survivors.
Like him.
    The driver’s window had rolled down and a
red face had leered out at Curtis, music