It had a vertical, multicolored sign advertising air-conditioned rooms and color TV, and one of those decorative concrete fences they stopped building in the early sixties. The fence and the motel itself were white with baby-blue trim, which didn’t exactly complement the red-tiled roof. The paint looked like it hadn’t been touched up in a few decades. I drove through the covered entrance and pulled into the small interior parking lot. The place was crawling with soldiers. There were six of them out in front of the office, and I saw several more standing in the open doorways of motel rooms. I got out of the Lincoln and walked to the office. One of the soldiers was a white guy…more or less. I recognized him. It was Anton. His skin had gone a kind of yellowish-brown, almost like we were in the Between, but otherwise he didn’t look too bad. He was wearing shades, so I couldn’t see his eyes. He had a revolver tucked into the front waistband of his track suit and he was holding a machete.
