Traveler trilogy Book 2, updates every Friday!
Five years after killing Levi Cornwall, Arthur Morgan is happy. He has a wife who loves him, an honest job he enjoys, and two beautiful children named Sadie and Hiram. All of it is turned on its head, h...
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Arthur hated Rhodes.
It was probably his least favorite place on Earth, including Guarma and Beaver Hollow. The people here seemed kind on the surface, but a darkness lurked beneath the town's pretty facade, hiding a reality that was far too grim and rotten for his tastes. It was like cutting into a carcass that appeared perfect on the surface, only to find its insides wriggling with parasitic worms.
He remembered one time when he'd been hunting rabbits, and had managed to shoot one cleanly through the head with an arrow. He'd strapped it to his horse's back and carried it back to camp to skin for supper. As he'd done so, he noticed an odd lump on the animal's skin and watched with horror as a massive bot fly grub had wriggled from a hole in the animal's skin as the carcass cooled.
It was one of the most disgusting things he'd ever seen, and the feelings of revulsion as he watched the grub wriggling around on the table was the same feeling he got when his eyes slid over the Rhodes sheriff's office, and he thought of Leigh Gray inside, with a badge pinned to his chest. He thought of Sean's body lying lifeless in the street, with a crater in his skull, splattered with exploded bits of meat and brain matter.
The longer he spent in this town, the more his anger grew, but he had a reason for being here. Tori wanted to see it for herself, in its heyday as opposed to the sad, dusty ghost town it had become by the year 2027. Apparently, its decline had happened around the end of Jim Crow laws. The town was already in decline in Arthur's day due to its dependance on slave labor to fuel the cotton trade before the civil war.
There had been plenty of black sharecroppers and servants here in 1899, but towards the end of Jim Crow in the mid-1960s, many of the town's black residents began moving north, to cities like Boston and New York, where there were more opportunities for them. The cotton market collapsed, and as it had been the main powerhouse of the Rhodes economy, the town dwindled and wasted away like a starving hound until there was hardly anything left of it but skin and bones.
By 2027, it was only a poor settlement on the outskirts of Saint Denis with too few people to even consider itself a town. It was just a place where travelers stopped to put gas in their cars before moving on again. Where modern farmers stopped to get feed for their cows and diesel for their large, fancy cotton pickers that could harvest an entire field in a matter of hours, with the labor of only one man.
In the modern age, Rhodes was a mere shell of its former self, rife with poverty, crystal meth, and neo-nazi skinheads. It was the sort of place one didn't stay in too long, or after dark, especially if one's skin happened to be anything less than pearly white. But back in 1899, it still had at least the appearance of a pretty town, and so Arthur accompanied his wife to give it a look.
He'd finally cut his hair and beard. There were too many people in this town who might recognize him, and the more he looked like his old self, the better. Hopefully, folk would just assume he was the old version of himself, and there would be no questions asked.
