The sun was barely crawling up from behind the hills in the distance when he got off the bus. Unsurprisingly, nobody left the vehicle after him; nobody would travel to this place if they could help it. He gave the driver a nod and a brief wave, before the bus continued its journey down the dusty, dirt-ridden trail to places of at least some kind of significance.
As he properly slung his guitar case and the leather bag back on his shoulder, Engineer slowly walked to his destination. He was still in his work clothes - minus the welding goggles - and somewhat tired from the several hours he had spent on a squeaky bus seat that day, but the arrival here had significantly brightened his mood. The unpaved road was lined with wooden houses of primitive build, looking more like a rookie architect's first draft than something to live in. These houses had endured more decades than most of the people who lived in them. One's home was part of the family here. Several acres of farmland and pasture surrounded the village's borders. Herds of cattle populated them, coloring it with brown dots from afar. Two short sideroads, one leading to some more residental property and one to the only stone building in the village, a brickwalled church, accompanied the main street.
Except for some rustling here and there, Bee Cave was still asleep, but Engineer knew this would change entirely in the next thirty minutes or so. As soon as the sun touched the rooftops the air would be filled with rattling tractor engines going off, roosters making their screeching wake up calls, and villagers greeting each other while cheerily attending to their own business. All in all, it was always very reminiscent of an actual beehive. Engineer remembered watching the diligent workers in awe back when he was a wee little schoolkid. One of his childish ideas came back, of how everyone would look in horizontal striped suits - complete with little wiggly antennae attached to their heads - and he couldn't help but grin.
Pretty much everything here brought back memories from various phases of Engineer's life: From the local mom-and-pop store he had almost set ablaze with an experiment gone wrong, to the schoolhouse where he wrote down machine designs rather than history essays. No matter how often he came back home walking down this street always felt like a stroll through a living photo album. The memories were so vivid as if they were just hours old and this feeling came to a peak once he approached his birthplace.
He stopped walking for a moment, putting his hands on his hips. Here was the house he had called home for the first twenty years or so of his life. A workshop almost the same size as the house was built directly alongside it, and the front porch was decorated with nothing but a rusty garden swing and some flower ornaments in the windows. Pretty plain and humble in appearance, the area around the house didn't really tell much about its tenants ... which was a good thing. The Conaghers were, so to say, rather notorious and there wasn't any need to further draw attention. They always had been the local source of general amusement and some jokes here and there. But thankfully it didn't get out of hand since they still got their share of respect as well. Whenever something remotely mechanical needed a true expert's care, this was the number one address to go to. A knack with machines was in their blood, flowing like oil through the veins of every Conagher.
Engineer picked up a stone that lay at his feet and threw it in the general direction of his family's property. Just a fraction of a second after the pebble hit the ground, a small but heavily armed turret popped up from the ground. Similar in design to the sentries the Engineer used in battle, it immediately locked onto the foreign object, swiftly pulverizing it into dust with only a handful of chaingun bullets. With no target in sight, the turret disappeared as quickly as it had emerged. None of the neighbors seemed to react to the gunshots. Certainly, the sound of fired weapons was nothing out of the ordinary here, as would be expected from a tiny Texan town in general and the Conagher's residence in particular.
As estimated, the noise had been noticed inside the house. The face of an old, rugged man appeared in a front window; wrinkles framed the parts of his face, and his skin was yellowed by more cigars than one could count. His stoic eyes gazed outside. As soon as he recognized the waving man next to the perforated steel mailbox, he disappeared again.
"Dell's home", Conagher Senior said to his wife.