CROSSROADS III - "The Tall Man"

Welcome to Texas, the mid-1880s, and a tiny incidental desert hamlet named Crossroads. It's a little known, seldom spoken of frontier town, snugly nestled beneath majestic mountains along the southwestern border between Texas and Mexico, and morally poised between virtue and corruption. It's a mundane community barely on the maps of this vast region, a unique shade of gray in this harsh black and white world. It's a tiny society unto itself where the sublime sometimes means the surreal. It is a place where wandering souls come for a variety of reasons. For some it's to seek a better life away from the increasingly modernized mayhem of progress. For some it's a place to hang their hat before moving on to their destiny. Still for others it's a sanctuary from the past, a last chance of sorts to start anew.

So welcome, my friend. Welcome to a town where last chances meet new beginnings. Welcome to a town on the edge of the American spirit, where the unimaginable is cultivated from the seeds of the human condition. Welcome to a town where the past and the present roll the dice with the future hanging in the balance.

Welcome... to Crossroads.

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CROSSROADS

"The Tall Man"

by LW Thunder

II=====II=====II * PROLOGUE * II=====II=====II

Portrait of a desperate man: meet Stanley Braxton, a man on the run. He is running from something hidden just beyond the dark veil of his failing memory. As a result, he now finds himself driven to flee keeping one eye on the road ahead and one eye looking over his shoulder. Desperation, fear and paranoia are his travel companions now as he makes his journey through the shadows of his mind, for you see, Stanley Braxton is about to enter that place where light and darkness intersect and where his frantic sojourn will make its last stop... at Crossroads.

II=====II=====II* CHAPTER ONE * II=====II=====II

'Keep running, Stanley!'

The thought keeps running through the mind of Stanley Braxton as he staggers over the burning sands of the San Toranado Desert. He can't remember why; all he knows is that he has to keep going or else he will find him. He couldn't remember how long he'd been on the run. The hot, dry days seemed to blur together in an unending eternity. His skin was burned and red courtesy of the scorching mid-afternoon sun above. His wrists ached and his feet are burning. He licks his cracked, blistered lips and tries to ignore his throat's incessant begging for water.

'I've got to keep moving' he thought. 'Why? Why am I running? What did I do?'

He stumbles again and falls face first into the searing sand.

"Hah!" he pushes himself up from the ground and spits the sand from his mouth in anger. "C'mon Stanley, get yer hide a-movin' boy!"

He staggers to his feet, dusting off the sand from his clothes. He squints hard and looks in the distance. There is a ridge about five hundred feet from him. He attempts a smile and says under his breath "Water's gonna be there, I just know it!"

From somewhere in his soul, he mustered up the strength to run towards that ridge. As he approaches the lip of the ridge he again stumbles to the desert's floor. He continued on crawling forearm over forearm the remaining twenty feet to the ridge itself. In his mind's eye he could taste cool water on his tongue as he approached the precipice. He peers over the edge of the ridge and his widen with excitement.