**A long way and a couple of years down the road, "Jack" is a lot more comfortable around people, though he's still cautious and doesn't trust many as he hides among them and works his way slowly to the place where his heart tells him that he must go. O_o
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Reaching for the towel on the passenger seat, he wiped the sweat from his forehead, making sure to get the last bits which were hiding in his eyebrows. Until his travels had brought him to the southwest, he'd never sweated a drop in his life.
A last pass over his upper lip and he tossed it back. The engine temperature was holding in the heat, so he was good there, he thought. For the first time in his life, he'd have liked to use the air conditioning, but in this part of the world, he didn't know if he'd need the little extra range that leaving it off might provide.
He looked at the GPS, and saw that it had pretty much nothing but little dots here and there which represented towns and settlements connected by the thin line that he was riding. He knew full well that it was pretty much a coin toss as to which ones might be alive and well, and which could just as easily be ghost towns out here. The ghost towns outnumbered the living ones. He'd know which category the next one belonged in about another minute now.
It was a mild surprise to see what looked like a functional gas station up ahead and he hit the turn signal to pull in as he pulled his hat down.
He waited at the pumps for some signs of life, but nothing happened for a few minutes until he noticed the old woman waving to him through the heavily-barred window, so he walked over.
"You pump your own gas here," she said in a distrustful sort of way, adding, "Pay first, then pump."
"That's ok," he said, "but I'd like to fill the tanks on the camper and then the ones on the bike there on the trailer. It'll take a little while."
"Pay first," she said.
He sighed and did the math before handing over $250 through the cash drawer. Twenty minutes later, he'd locked every tank and asked for his eighty-three cents change. She slid it through to him as though it was killing her to part with it.
"I could use a beer," he said just a little hopefully. He really didn't care all that much for what passed as beer here, but he'd found that stopping off to have one now and then could get him more information than if he'd bought the road atlas. Besides, he already had one of those.
The woman pointed to the bar next door.
He walked through the doors and found himself in another worn out old bar like about any other one that he'd seen out here in the past month. The woman who stood at the bar might have been the same one who ran the gas station if it weren't for her different outfit.
He ordered his beer and took a pull on it, offering up a mild prayer that this woman had nothing to do with the ancient sign out front which read "Topless Entertainment."
Since he was the only customer, he was already regretting his decision to stop in for a beer, unless he heard something interesting from her, he thought.
The waitress looked at the long blonde hair spilling over those shoulders topped by a lowdown Stetson. He was the nicest thing that she'd seen in a month of Sundays.
A look out of the dirty window told her the direction that he'd been going in. "Where you headed, Handsome?" she asked him. "There's nothing much out that way until you get to Handen."
"That's roughly where I'm going," he replied, "but my GPS says there's another dot on the way there. Someplace called Tanglewood, it says."
"Handen's 120 miles or so," she said, "Tanglewood's just under 50 miles out from here. But don't you be stopping there, friend. That ain't no place to be.
There's just a couple of old mines, they was for gold and lead, I heard back in the day, but that day's long over a hundred years gone now. There's a couple of people who live there still, but I don't know what's keeping them alive. They run a bit of a half-assed hotel, last I heard. I just hear bad things been going on there for the last fifty years or so. You'd do well just to keep motoring right on through there and don't stop if you're going to Handen."
He sucked on his beer and looked at her as he set it down. "What sort of bad things?"
She rolled her eyes, "Don't tell me you're one of them paranormal investigators or somethin'. We get them through here every once in a while and they ask, and then haul ass over to there, but we never see them come back through here."
"I'm nothing like that. I was just curious, that's all." He decided that he'd just finish the beer and get going.
She looked at him and decided that he sure couldn't be a bylaw inspector, so she poured herself a draft.
"They say there's some demon that runs around out there at night. She catches you out there alone after sundown and it's all over for you, bud."
He blinked at her, "What sort of demon? What does she do to people that she catches?"
"Oh, hell, I don't know," the waitress said, "The stories been coming out of there since I was a young girl. I've heard everything from she rips 'em apart to she sucks out every drop of their blood to she screws them to death. Maybe it's all three."
She laughed, "I'm just telling you not to stop off there for anything, that's all."
He slid a tip across the bar as he got up. "When was the last time that you were through there?"
"Oh, I haven't been there in I don't know how long. Must be forty years since I stopped there."
She looked a little sad and her voice turned a bit distant. "I was lookin' for my boyfriend. A bunch of us was shootin' the breeze one night, and his best friend said that he'd heard there was a really nice-looking girl there that he had it in his mind to meet, but we'd all heard the tales. My boyfriend went along the next day just to see if there was such a girl. Mostly he was going to keep his friend's courage up."
