There it was.
The American Dream.
A happy family splayed out across the front of the decaying billboard, dad chomping down on a pipe while waving out at Mercer, mom cheerfully carrying a picnic basket against the folds of her sundress, a little boy grinning ear to ear under the shade of his baseball cap, and a little girl tugging on mom's dress with one hand and gripping a doll with the other. They were standing in a field, their brand new '77 Corvega gleaming behind them, sun shining down and the world at their feet. Literally, as it so happened; the billboard was leaning from its perch about 25 feet up beside the old interstate. But the world that they had been looking out on when the paint on the billboard was still wet and Dad's car would have run you the low, low price of $199,999.99 (with 0% APR financing if you act now), that world had died a long time ago. What was left of it spilled out before Mercer, a sad mockery of the world that, like a flashbulb going off or a shadow imprint from a nuke blast, had been captured on that forgotten piece of advertising.
He had to get moving, though. Miggs and his crew patrolled this stretch of Interstate 30, and he was already three months behind on his protection fee; they had let him off with a warning the first time, there would be body parts missing off him after the next "warning". With a grunt, he shifted his backpack and press-checked his pistol, nodding a little to himself when the gleam of a dirty 10mm round in the chamber caught the sunlight filtering down through the clouds. He hadn't killed anything in two weeks, anyone in almost a year; a little longer and he might just have to start letting himself believe he was a good person. That's what she had called him, whatever her name had been. Melissa? Melinda? Couldn't remember, but then, he hadn't been really paying attention to her so much as the street urchins trying to pry his wares off the pack brahmin. When he had thought about it on the trail, later that day, he laughed. A good person? He had brought her daughter back, sure, but he still had blood smeared across his face and a little bit of skull and gray matter matted into his hair; apparently, that passed for good around those parts. She hadn't been the first person to use the phrase, either, just the most emphatic. He was stirred from his thoughts by a loud crack from across the highway. Gunfire.
Mercer readied the N99, his hand awkwardly wrapping around the homemade duct tape grip, and swore under his breath. He'd been on a good streak lately, a really good streak, with not killing anyone since he rescued what's her name's daughter. He'd gotten lucky, too; the punk had been alone, some runt fresh off his family's dirt farm with a chip on his shoulder and the family rifle. He had too much testosterone, too much pride, too few skills or notches on his belt to be picked up by any of the gangs, so he set out, probably figured he'd kill or screw or steal the first thing he saw. The kid had been young, not more than fifteen or sixteen, and the fear in his eyes when Mercer kicked down the door had been the hardest part of the whole job. All of those factors had kept him alive and unharmed then. Now, deep into Miggs' territory and three months down on his toll, packing only his shoddy 10mm that Jim had sold him, "grips not included" and the shotgun that had been out of shells for weeks now, he was not happy with his chances. Moving away from the gunfire, which continued to crackle and sputter from behind the mess of dead trees on the other side of the interstate, he clambered down into a gully that most of the interstate had slid into over time. Chunks of sun-baked concrete and rusted guide rails bent all out of shape littered the ground, slowing his pace to a cautious tiptoe. Tetanus was no laughing matter, a lot of guys got it from prospecting. They'd laugh about how the worst injury they got from escaping a raider base was from a nail jutting out of the door, and a week or two later, they'd be sitting in the clinic with lockjaw, or dead. Again, Mercer had been lucky, unreasonably so; he'd had a few scrapes from rusty metal, like anyone who lived in the Wasteland and was stupid enough to try their hand at scavenging as a business, but he'd always gotten himself into town for a shot soon after.
Town was sounding better and better to him as he climbed over a large section of eroded roadway, his pack dragging against the desiccated corpse of a sleek n' sporty sedan, perfect for weekend trips for you and the missus. Olum was a smallish place, nothing like the Fort, but it was reasonably safe. Few gangs tried to attack, knowing that the Fort took the defense of its farming communities seriously. Besides that, the town's trading community was better than most small settlements; Ortley knew his stuff, even if he was a fussy old codger. The gunfire grew fainter as he pressed forward, it was moving further away from him, back towards the ruins of the motor lodge and the burger joint. That whole tourist trap area was Miggs' base, so there was little doubt as to the identity of one of the warring parties. Maybe if his luck held, they'd kill each other off and open up the whole section of 30 through there for a while, at least until some other gang rolled in and started charging transit tolls. If not, there were always the side streets like the one he was hiking down at present, gun still at the ready. The burned-out remains of a couple of farmhouses lay close to the dirt road, but he was more concerned about getting back to town than he was picking through ashes. It was a good 30 minute walk to Olum, provided the weather held and the men caught up in the firefight decided not to make a U-turn and start heading towards Mercer's location.
As the minutes ticked by and his feet shuffled him ever closer to the town gates, his mind began to wonder once more. The American Dream. Had it ever been real, any of it? The world before seemed like a dreamland, a wish that everyone in the scorched and barren earth had held so tightly to that it began showing up on faded billboards and inside decaying magazines. Old World Blues, they called it, that heavy feeling in your heart and that tireless turning of your mind towards the fabled past. Some had it worse than him; men who locked themselves away in fantasies, filling their homes and their heads with the trash of a forgotten world, telling themselves that they could bring it all back if they just got a little more. There was a fellow he'd seen back in Coesse, before it was razed to the ground by Largo's boys, who spent what was probably his life savings on nothing but Abraxo. Some idiot trader, probably on his first caravan, had found a cargo truck that crashed off the side of the highway and grabbed as much of the stuff as he could; he probably thought he was going to be set for life with a hundred boxes of pre-War cleaning powder. Well, the guy who bought it all went home and started cleaning everything he owned. Tools, guns, clothing, everything he could get his hands on, into the bathtub it went with a fresh box of Abraxo. When the town guards finally got called out to the place, the guy was dead from the fumes, hadn't even gone through a third of his stock, but the place was spotless; even the walls and floor, it had been scrubbed so hard that tiles were knocked out of place and the plaster had been chipped off the walls. The dead guy had a huge grin on his face; not unlike, as he had heard from a trader who'd bought one of the guards a beer later that day, one of the perpetually-chipper housewives in the Abraxo posters that were all over the wasteland.
There were times when he thought about giving in, crawling into a bottle or a pile of holotapes, whichever was cheaper, and just escaping the dirt and the grime and the blood and the pain. A simpler time, they called it, and yet, it had so much that he could only dream about. It was a time when you owned your quarter acre of America, complete with a neatly-manicured Kentucky bluegrass lawn and a new station wagon sitting in the driveway. You had roast duck for dinner, slippers and a martini as you watched the news, your wife smiling in pearl earrings and a blue housedress, and a new Mr. Handy to clean up around the house. The biggest thing you had to fear was taxes or a divorce, whatever either of those things were. With all of that to come home to, every day, no wonder they didn't expect the bombs; after a month of living like that, Mercer himself would be hard-pressed to even remember the wasteland had ever existed. Yet, it all seemed so far away, like a forgotten childhood that everyone kept trying to remember. The reminders were there, if you looked hard enough at the moth-eaten clothes hanging from the bleached skeletons in the older ruins, or the rusted hunks that had once been top-of-the-line machinery. They just weren't happy reminders. It was as though he was looking at road signs, all telling him that mankind had gone too far, but he was unable to turn around and drive the other way. The analogy made him chuckle as he passed a battered piece of sheet metal that had Olum - 1 mile painted on it.
The last push got him to the gates without any great exertion, though he was looking forward to putting his feet up and taking a rest. The guard on duty barely glanced at his paperwork before signalling for the gate to open; Mercer had passed through Olum so many times that he knew all the regular guards by name, most of the rookies, too. The snorting of a diesel generator flared up as the metal gate was raised by a pulley system, with Scott waving him through impatiently; it was close to shift change, no doubt, and the man wanted to get to the bar, or the cathouse if he had just gotten paid. With a smirk and salute back to the men at the gate, Mercer walked onto the cracked pavement of Van Buren Street and pushed ahead into the city center. There were old houses lining both sides of the road, older than the ones on the Old World advertisements he'd seen, even; these ones were charming, above and beyond the charm that anything pre-War had about it, with sloped roofs and white clapboard siding (which was really more of a dull, washed out grey), double-hung windows and quaint little porches that had probably once held grandmas sipping lemonade on a warm summer's day. Most of the homes were even still there, blessedly few had gone up when the gas lines underground burst from the bomb blasts; at least, that's what Ortley had told him once, verbatim, when he'd been blathering on about the town's "good fortune". Admittedly, Olum did alright for itself. With the farms and the Fort's protection, it didn't need to pay off the gangs to leave it alone or strike up lopsided deals with the caravan merchants to put food on the table. The small town charm about the place helped set everyone at ease a little, too; the Fort, with its lumbering skyscrapers, or what was left of them, at any rate, had an entirely different aura about it. It was a place you could get lost in for days, and some did just that if they were on the run from raiders, slavers, or anyone else out there. Olum, on the other hand, was a town where everyone knew everyone; newcomers were treated with the barest degree of civility and a generous helping of suspicion, while old hands like him were practically part of the big, happy family that had grown up among its citizens.
A couple of people waved to him from their wraparound porches, others from the dirt farms that had been planted in the remains of lawns and flower gardens. He waved back, smiling a little at the sight of it all; it was the closest he'd ever gotten to seeing the Old World. Sure, the cars were all rusted beyond any hope, the homes were unwashed and half of them were run through with wood rot and termites, and the people themselves weren't any cleaner, but the community worked, it stuck together while towns like Coesse and Busco and Hunterton got swallowed up by the wastes. Ortley himself was a pretty competent leader, keeping the riffraff out and keeping the good people from moving to the Fort or elsewhere for greener pastures. More than a few times, Mercer had been offered a house there at a reasonable price, even a steady job that would allow him to pay off the home in a few years and keep himself comfortable. He'd almost been tempted enough to take it, more than once, but he'd held out, telling himself that he'd come back for it, after he'd found what he was looking for. Explaining that reasoning to others, or trying to, never worked. People said that he had Old World Blues, simple as that; he earned his keep picking over the long-dead corpse of another world, of course he'd get nostalgic about it. Maybe there was some of the Blues in him, he wouldn't deny it, but there was something else, some drive above and beyond the general malaise and disillusionment with the world that all the men with the Blues had about them. He stopped at the intersection of Walnut and Van Buren, looking ahead at the looming brick facades of the storefronts along the main drag. People had gathered outside the Baptist church just ahead of him, yelling discontentedly at a man at the top of the stairs.
"No, no, you don't understand," he insisted in a slight Southern accent, "we have to keep our wits about us, that is the only way we'll convince him!"
"As if Ortley would even listen to us," another man shouted, raising his fist, "the old bastard's lucky we don't run him out for this!"
"Do you suppose this town could last one year without him?"
The man held his tongue, glowering at his feet.
"I thought not. People, if we are to have any kind of progress on this matter, we need to have order! You there, merchant!" He called, gesturing animatedly towards Mercer, who held up his hands and stepped backwards with a wry grin. Ahh, small town politics.
"Mercer, hey! You talk to Ortley all the time, tell him that-" one woman started before she was cut off by a tall, gruff man beside her.
"Tell Ortley that we're not going to let him take our food away from us! Tell him that we'll throw him in the prison if he doesn't change this deal he's made with the Fort!"
"Guys," Mercer started, struggling to sound unconcerned about the confrontation, "I just stopped in to sell off some salvage and rest for the night. If you really want, though, I'll tell Ortley that you're not happy with whatever he's doing. God knows it wouldn't be the first time he's had an angry mob after him."
A ripple of laughter spread through the crowd, easing tensions all around. The man at the center wiped the sweat off his brow and into his greasy hair, throwing Mercer a nervous grin and a nod of approval. With a few more snide comments about Ortley exchanged, the people eventually meandered off, apparently satisfied with Mercer's compromise and impromptu appointment as their spokesperson. The man with the Southern accent approached him as the last of the protesters wandered away, one hand extended in greeting and the other smoothing the wrinkles out of his cheap suit that was one size too big.
"I can't thank you enough, sir. Another few minutes and I believe the whole lot would have hauled me off to the stocks, perhaps as a prelude to Ortley. James Ambrose, at your service."
"Mercer," the aforementioned murmured as he shook Ambrose's hand, cringing slightly at how slick it was with sweat. "You don't need to thank me, though; I already know that Ortley expected this kind of backlash with, well...whatever it is he did. The man's smart, he knows how people tick. Sooner or later, whatever the people were so up in arms about will happen and they'll either pitch a fit again like they did today or they'll move out of town. Your best bet is to not be in the middle of them again, should they get all riled up later."
Ambrose laughed, a little too loudly and a little too long, and shook Mercer's hand with increased fervor before letting it drop and slicking back his hair once more.
"I'll have to keep that in mind, Mercer. Honestly, I was just at the church for some family records and happened to get mobbed by the people on my way out. I think they believed I was some kind of representative from the Fort and started asking all kinds of questions I didn't have the answers to; to save my own neck, I tried my best to arbitrate their woes, but it wasn't going well."
"I noticed. You from around here? Your accent says no."
"My accent would be correct, sir. I'm from Knoxville, but we had relatives who lived up here, before the War. I was trying to track down one of their gravestones to make an etching for back home."
Mercer looked further down Van Buren, not immediately registering Ambrose's reply, and saw a pair of brahmin hauling the chassis of a deuce coupe on makeshift wooden wheels; a man sat atop the rusted hardtop with a whip, calling out commands and laughing to himself, while another man slouched on the bench seat inside, reading a book. The trunk of the car had been propped open with a metal rod and was absolutely stuffed with all manner of parcels and bags, all held together by bungee cords to keep it from spilling out onto the cracked pavement behind it.
"Oh, I see, that's interesting. Say, I'll talk to you later, Ambrose. Try not to find yourself in the middle of any more angry mobs."
Ambrose laughed, again, too loudly and too long, and began to launch into a farewell when Mercer cut him short by jogging down the street to meet the brahmin cart. The man on top was oblivious to the trader, focusing more on driving the creatures under his whip forward, but the man in the back sat up as soon as Mercer stuck his head through the passenger window, putting his book aside with a stunned expression.
"Mercer, this is a surprise! I thought you were out by 'Ton! What's got you back in Olum so soon?"
"Couldn't get through to 'Ton, the whole interstate was a warzone just after Larwill. I spent the night there and turned back around."
"So you're available, then," the merchant asked eagerly. "We've got a-"
"Easy there, Pete," Mercer said with a chuckle, "I haven't even been in town ten minutes and already I've gotten offers to lead a revolution against Ortley for some deal he's made with the Fort. I think I'd better get a day or two to shake the dust off my feet before I head on out there again."
Pete scoffed.
"You've never been able to stay in one place for long, don't know why you're fooling yourself with this two days nonsense. Anyways, the pay's good, it's through a caravan company in the Fort. We've been taking contracts from them since April, they don't skimp. We leave town tomorrow night, just let me know when you're ready. Get some ammo, though, and a better weapon than...that," Pete groaned, nodding to the N99 poking out of Mercer's hip holster. "Duct tape, really? What, was it your first gun or something, you just keep it fixed up for sentimental reasons?"
"Old Jim sold it to me, if you can believe it, with the grips 'not standard'," Mercer grinned.
"I can believe it," Pete sighed, rolling his eyes. "He tried to stiff me on a delivery of Nuka-Cola last month, saying that it was flat and his customers didn't want to drink it warm. I told the smartass to go stick them in the fridge, and if it's flat, maybe he ought to fart in the bottles, that'd put some bubbles back into 'em."
The men laughed for a bit as the brahmin driver slowed the creatures to a stop just outside the (mostly intact) brick facade of the Grant Building. Pete leaned over to the driver's side door and reached out to give Mercer a tap on the arm.
"Hey, I've got some business to take care of, but I'll be at the Eagles Club later tonight," Pete noted, nodding behind him to the squat building across the street where a few men were milling around outside and smoking cigarettes. "I'll buy the drinks this time."
"Thanks," Mercer stammered with a warm smile, "not like you to be the one buying."
"Guess I just wanted to get even after all the rounds you've bought me," Pete replied, smiling back. For a moment, the men said nothing, then Pete shifted on the weathered fabric of the seat, the springs creaking with age. "Now get; you've got more important things to be doing than standing here jawing at me all day."
Mercer stepped away from the car as the brahmin driver rushed past him to get the trunk unloaded, smile still present. Pete winked at him as he stepped out of the car, then joined his companion at the rear of the cart, leaving the scavenger back to his wandering through downtown Olum. The clouds were still overhead, but starting to break up on the eastern horizon; if they kept it up, there'd be enough sky showing through in the west for a nice sunset. A gust of wind blew the tattered flag that hung from the Eagles Club rooftop, sending the Stars and Stripes into a flurry of movement for a brief moment that brought another smile to Mercer's face.
The American Dream.
He was getting closer, he was sure of it.