Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga Read Free Page B

reprieve, but ultimately we'll
achieve our aim. You must know that."
    "And just what is that aim?" Gussie asked,
accepting the proffered Sipeez cup from Torchy as the redhead drove
into a highway tunnel clinging to the mountainside. Gussie took a
long swig from the cup, which held a mixture of her own invention
called a tequila sunset.
    "Why, honey," Torchy said, switching accents
and personas so that she was no longer
Torchy-Burns-the-English-pub-singer or the slightly more upscale
former Queen of Faerie, but her American, Texican self, Lulubelle
Baker of Lulubelle Baker's Petroleum Puncher's Paradise. "I thought
you'd never ask. In some ways I'm just real excited about it
because, as you may know, one of my former titles was Queen of the
Air. If I'm not queen, at least I'm veep in charge of certain
aspects of what goes into the air. Now we control all that, you
see. What's on the air, what's in the news, what people read and
hear and see. With that power, it's just a matter of time until we
get at what we eventually mean to do.
    "I am not givin' away a thing when I tell
you this. We mean to corner us the market on myth. When we do,
we'll have it all changed around and remade to suit us. You mortals
will follow along like little of baa-lambs. Hell, honey, all you
gotta do is take off your blinkers and look around you right now.
It's happenin', sugar. It's happenin' already."
    Gussie, who was from Amarillo herself, was a
little more comfortable with Lulubelle, the persona the redhead had
adopted in South Texas when she first attempted to seduce the late
Sam Hawthorne's magic banjo, Lazarus, away from Willie MacKai. At
least Lulubelle talked like a regular person and didn't pretend to
be better than she ought to be.
    Lulubelle was given more to smirks than
upper-crust smugness and continued: "The songs are just a start,
but they've been a pretty big obstacle. Don't think it's going to
be easy for your little buddies to get back into the good old U. S.
of A. and bring back them foreign songs we done lost in these
parts. Americans want 'merican things now and no whiny songs about
people that ain't good enough or don't have the gumption to have a
nice house, three cars, and all the other necessities of life."
    "Those would be truly dull songs," Gussie
said.
    "You bet your cash box, sugar. That's why
there ain't no more songs a-tall," Torchy-Lulubelle said.
    " You're overdoing it, sugar ," Gussie said. "You sound more like a John
Wayne movie now than a South Texas hooker."
    "That don't make no nevermind. Give me
another swig of that, will you? Bless me if it ain't dry as a
desert out here." Then she cackled at her own wit because, as they
emerged from the tunnel, the headlights no longer picked up snow
and deep valleys but sand and cactus. "Welcome to Nevada," a sign
said.
    "What happened to the mountains?" Gussie
asked Torchy-Lulubelle.
    Her cackle faded to a silly giggle. "I
thought I mentioned I'm not s'posed to get high anymore."
     
    * * *
     
    Julianne Martin, Anna Mae Gunn, Brose
Fairchild, Willie MacKai, Faron and Ellie Randolph, Terry Pruitt
and her boyfriend Daniel Borg crouched beside the muddy bed of the
Rio Grande. Julianne had become even more psychic in the last seven
years, ever since she had spent a lot of time living in the bodies
of long-dead ballad heroes. "Shush, Lazarus," she said to the magic
banjo, which lay across Willie MacKai's back. Even muffled up in
rags, it was still trying to noodle out "The Rivers of Texas." "I'm
listening."
    She heard a land full of silence and noise.
Dogies, now scientifically slaughtered on the premises of their
host ranches, no longer bawled, since they were pumped full of
tranquilizers as well as other additives to make them as hefty and
tasty as Brazilian beef. Since the cattle were stoned, cowboys no
longer sang to them and could devote their spare time to reading
Bible tracts, survivalist catalogs, and cleaning their weapons in
anticipation of a chance to use them on