Once upon a time in the West, there lived a lone gunslinger with a troubled past...
There's a rhythm to train tracks. A steady beat, a metronome almost. Pounding on and on up to and beyond the farthest horizons, towards better futures, away from any past. A bar cart, not a bar car, and cheap whiskey instead of champagne, a toast to the past and a christening of the future, all swallowed down to forget, not to remember. Like the heartbeat of Arizona, that train pounds on.
The new ones, all white polymer and glass, speed along without ever touching rail, only the wind ripping along the sides and the bottom as they hover over the red sand of the American Southwest. An ivory tower turned sideways and aimed from Dallas to Los Angeles. The rich blood and dirty money looked down on people like him from behind crystal windows... it used to bother him, but only ever for a few seconds at a time before that train was only a glint on the horizon. The future didn't have time for him, or an old train, or a dying way of life.
He choked on their dust.
There's a rhythm to the road. The white and yellow lines zip past while pistons fire and whir. The heat of the battery and the singed smell of the hoverdrive hang like a veil around his motorcycle, and it's almost enough to forget the arid, sticky stench of asphalt hot enough to cook the roadkill for the buzzards. The coronas rise high into the sky, abandoned fortresses of larger than life legends that used to make this trip on horseback. They all look familiar; he's spent enough time on this stretch of road to know them all, and the all but foreclosed diners and truck stops were as much of a home as he'd ever had. Each one he passes brings him that much closer to Vegas.
He doesn't have to share the road, and there's a terrible comfort in that solitude. He's made this ride with outlaws, ate in that diner with drifters and fought lawmen outside this saloon. Each fading neon sign, each bouncing tumbleweed, each car broken down on the side of the road and left to the desert, is a husk. This whole place is a skeleton of what it used to be... this landscape might as well be a mirror. He'd been built up and torn down, and what was left bypassed the police cruisers and traffic on the interstate, a perfect line connecting Denver to Albuquerque, in the company of ghosts.
There's a rhythm to the draw. The same process, over and over again, of clearing leather, slapping the hammer back with the off hand, the four clicks so fast for a moment, the iron sounds like a rattlesnake, and the even squeeze of the trigger. Behind shady biker bars and in abandoned mine shafts, he'd honed the thunder in his hands to a fine edge. It became his ritual. Drop, clear, hammer back, squeeze and a boom followed by the crisp sound of a bottle's shattering glass. Drop, clear, hammer back, boom, crash. Drop, clear, hammer back, boom, crash. Drop, clear, hammer back, boom... thud.
Lead against ribs makes a heavy sound. It's not just glass shattering there... it's love and fear and what could have been. It's the sum of years' running packed into 230 grains of sin, and neither the flash floods of the Colorado River nor the cleansing waters of preachers' salvation could wash that away. It can only be washed down.
There's a rhythm to the movement. It's the heartbeat of this untamed land, the land that molded him out of red clay and lightning. This town to that. This job and on to the next one. This station to that, the next base, on and on and on. The next objective, the next mission, the next target, right up until Switzerland. Home is the road. There's freedom in movement. Nothing to tie you down, nothing to get attached to. It's his favorite lie, that he's free, that he's got nothing to run from, that the demons in his past aren't nipping at his heels like wolves at the hooves of cattle. But even the most timid steer makes a stand eventually.
There's a rhythm to running, but the red sun can only set on his back for so long.
No one can run forever.