Zombie Road: The Second Omnibus by Simpson, A. (e ink manga reader .txt) 📗

only being polite to get a bigger tip but enjoyed her flirtations nonetheless. What man wouldn’t? She was kind of old, but she wore it well. Her hair was red, curly and long. Her breasts were big and her hips had a little wiggle when she walked. There were twenty other cowboys boot-scootin' and two-stepping in the roadhouse who had eyes for her. She could have her choice of any of them, he knew she didn’t really have any interest in an uglied up stranger. She was half drunk and just being nice.

“I want that dance now before the other guitar player passes out,” she said and reached over to take a sip of his beer. “Lordy, this place was crazy tonight. Haven’t seen this many folks since before the fall.”

She jumped up and started pulling him after her. He resisted, he didn’t want to make a fool out of himself. He’d never country danced in his life.

“You quit that now, you promised me a dance!” she scolded him. “I don’t think there’s gonna be another song, they’re gonna keel over before they finish this one!”

She was probably right. Jessie had no idea what they were playing, he was pretty sure the fiddler and the one guitarist still going at it were playing different songs. Everybody was drunk, the place was hot, and who cares if he couldn’t dance. He wouldn’t be seeing these people again for months and they’d probably forget his stomping around by then. Besides, he couldn’t be as bad as some of them, a few fell down every couple of minutes. She led him out to the floor and just started shaking her stuff in some sort of rhythm only she could hear. There certainly wasn’t any beat to follow from the band, so Jessie followed the song in his head. He spread his legs wide, started hearing the beat of his favorite Imagine Dragons song and started dabbing. He couldn’t help himself, he had just enough alcohol in him to let go. It was all so loud and hot, and everyone was laughing and moving to their own beat, and the music was so bad he actually started smiling. It was so dim and smoky, you couldn’t hardly see across the room and no one was looking at his face. He threw on the best moves he remembered from watching YouTube videos, dabbing to the left and dabbing to the right, feet tapping, hips shaking, arms flung and head tucked. Pretty soon, half the drunks on the sawdust-covered dance floor were doing the same thing, everyone covered in sweat and laughing uproariously when the final guitar picker tumbled backward over his amp. With one last jangling screech of feedback, the party was over and the bartender was yelling for everyone to finish up. They didn’t and he kept pulling beers and pouring whiskey for them, writing it down on their tabs. He’d have more goats and potatoes and chickens than he knew what to do with by next week. He asked Sandy to come back to work, he needed help, but she told him to kiss her grits. It was her turn to have fun. But she did spend a few minutes helping him catch up whenever she went up to refill hers and Jessie’s drinks.

When the eastern horizon was just starting to show the faintest tinge of color from the sun climbing its way into the sky, Sandy took his hand and led him upstairs. She wouldn’t hear of him sleeping in his car or on one of the booths with the dozens of other passed out cowboys. Jessie tried to resist, the game had gone on long enough. He’d had fun, he was able to forget for a few hours that he had an ugly, scarred up face most people couldn’t stand to look at, but it was over now. He didn’t want to see her avert her eyes when she looked at him in the light or be embarrassed in the morning when she realized she’d gotten drunk and had been dancing with a disfigured troll. When he pulled away at her door to go back downstairs, she stopped him. In the dimness of the hallway, lit only by a candle at one end, she held his hand with both of hers and looked into his eyes. “Is it because I’m too old?” she asked. “You don’t think I’m pretty?”

“No,” he replied. “No, that’s not it, I...

I just…

I’m…”

He couldn’t say it. Couldn’t bring out the words that he told himself every time he looked in a mirror.

“You’re scarred?” she asked softly. No malice, no pity. Just saying something plainly, something everybody thought. Something he knew to be true.

Jessie just looked at her in the faint light, nodded his head once.

“My husband got stomped in the rodeo,” she said and reached up to trace her finger along the jagged line that ran from his eye down to his lip. “Fifteen hundred pounds of pissed off bull stepped on his face.” She leaned in, stood up on her toes and kissed the scar where it started under his eye. She kissed it all the way down to his lips, pulling his hand to her chest and holding it over her heart.

“You feel that?” she whispered.

Her heart was hammering hard, matching his own. Her breathing was shallow, her hair smelled like flowers and tobacco, her lips tasted of bourbon.

“He had scars,” she whispered and pulled him gently into the room, closing the door behind them. “You’ve only got a scratch.”

15

Casey

This place was really pissing him off. It had looked good on the map and nobody had any complaints when they took off for Mexico. It would be kind of fitting, he thought. Like the old days when the banditos would go south of the border and live like kings with their stolen money. They would winter on the beach, their injured from the battle of Lakota could recover in a tropical paradise,