2 Months Later

I was dead in every way except physically. And in these dark days my dreams became the only place of solace. I’d make love to a beautiful woman and she’d tell me everything would be okay and that we’d find that small corner of heaven that was just for us. Then I’d wake up. There was no Vic; no bustling sounds of Los Angeles to greet me. It was only the small dingy quarters of a brothel in a desert that had no name. Out of this cursed saloon, a girl would go missing in the night only to be replaced by another who spoke a tongue no one understood. This was the loneliest of all possible worlds. Only the insipid interactions with Karl, Old Jim, and the Madam kept me company. But they, like me, were spiritually dead. We lived only in the decaying and depraved dream of Randal J Furie.

Each night bled into the next. A John overburdened with whisky and a crumbling life would refuse to pay and only Karl would take joy in altercation. The diminutive bumblefuck had one John beaten and bloodied and chained in a shack out back for days on end. When I found the John, he was severely dehydrated, lacking money, and begging for his release. I confronted Karl about this. “I completely forgot about leaving him out there,” Karl explained.

“He’s in dire need of medical attention,” I said.

“What do you suggest we do?”

I didn’t have the heart to put a bullet in his brain. One night, I escorted the John to the foot of the mountain range in a UTV and sat him right outside of the pass. “Follow the light flutter,” I told him. “And don’t come back.”

He was never seen again.

I’d sit at the bar, emptying my paycheck into the cash register of the Candyland Saloon. Money was meaningless out here. Burl would sling me one beer after another and I’d drink hoping that this night would be my last. Yet each morning I’d wake up still begging for death. Sometimes I’d pray to the 3am god then look out the window to that mountain pass and wonder if I should follow the path of that fateful John. My life was over. And even if I did escape, I’d never escape the clutches of Randy.

“How long have you been out here?” I’d ask the Madam.

“You should never ask a woman her true age,” she’d say.

“But what does he have on you? How can you stay happy living like this?”

She wouldn’t answer.

This was life from now on. No cable TV. No long walks on the beach. No late night beer runs to the gas station. No belligerent driving down Sunset Boulevard. No antagonistic conversations with baristas. This was it.

I was dead.

Then one night like any other night, I was sipping on a Natty at the bar when I heard a familiar voice. He was yapping away ceaselessly at Burl who stood silently with arms crossed. It was all the shit I’ve heard countless times before: a cheating wife, bosses making unreasonable requests, and threatening to bring a loaded firearm into a federal building and ending it all.

It was Dale.

While drunk on cheap beer, I crawled off my stool and stumbled towards him. I reached my arms around him in a loving embrace. “Dale, I’m glad to see you!” I say.

Without acknowledging the wild coincidence of meeting in a place like this, Dale rambles on. “James, I’ll tell you what!” he said. “I finally had enough of that bitch once and for all! After they laid me off at the toilet factory, I told my wife that she better get the fuck out of Los Angeles or else I would light this trailer on fire! Did she want that on her conscience? She cried and cried before getting a restraining order and I told her that I ain’t afraid to die! So she better meet me by the railroad tracks or else I’d be ran over by a train! But that bitch never showed up! Goddamn I miss her.”

“Dale, will you shut the fuck up?!” I said. “I’m trapped out here against my will! Can you do me a favor? Can you find a man named Vic Weathers and send him out here to rescue me? Tell him to arm himself to the teeth!”

“Ya know, I was trapped in a whore house in Vietnam. That’s where I lost two inches off my cock for…”

I slap him across the face. “Goddamnit, will you listen to me?! This is serious! Tell Vic that I’m trapped in the desert in what is probably Nevada…”

“Nevada?!” Dale exclaimed. “I thought we were in Utah!”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” I said. “Utah? I should have known that Mormons were somehow involved in this. Anyway, find Vic Weathers in Los Angeles. Give him this location. Tell him to bring guns, machetes, explosives, any and all weapons he can find….”

There was a light tap on my shoulder. I turned around and saw Karl flashing his yellowed and grimy teeth. “You’re not supposed to be conversing with the customers,” he warned.

Emboldened by my drunkenness, I tell him to fuck off. “I’m gonna tell the Madam you said that,” he told me.

“What’s she gonna do?” I ask. “I’ve been fucking her every night since I’ve got here. So do me a favor you ugly rat shit, go take a long walk in the desert!”

Karl cried and walked off the I looked back to Dale. “Quick! Go back to LA,” I said. “Time is of the essence!”

TO BE CONTINUED…