It's not everyday one sees a working vehicle out in the wasteland; the plume of dust rose for miles, blazing a trail that was all too easily picked out of a sky so blue and cloudless it looked like a fake studio backdrop. Most people avoided that kind of attention, but then, Ashe wasn't most people. While he disliked drawing attention to himself like anybody, what he didn't mind was making an impression. Rolling into town on the only working Lone Wanderer motorcycle anyone had seen in a lifetime had an effect on people.
Most took it as a sign to keep the fuck away. Suited him just fine.
Heading west had been more out of necessity than desire. He was sick of the Capitol, wanted nothing to do with Boston, and nobody went to fucking Appalachia unless they had a death wish. He skirted well north of Texas and the bayous, lest something truly monstrous take a swipe for his hide, and so he'd ended up right in the middle of where it all began. From what he understood, this was where those fuckups in the blimp had come from, this was where those radio broadcasts about a "new government" originated, and this was, very likely, the last place anyone would know the name James Keene.
Now, though, he was running low on coolant. The bike said he had about forty miles before the reactor redlined and he'd have to put it out of its misery. He really didn't want to do that, after the work he'd put into getting it rolling again after 200 years. He had the knowhow to synthesize coolant from readily available materials if pressed, but sometimes if he was very lucky he could find a few bottles at abandoned gas stations... and most people didn't realize that coolant had basically the same ingredients as the preservatives those prewar chemists used to make food last so long without spoiling. Good old ethylene glycol -- and sure, a few kids died back in the day, because dumbasses couldn't keep chemicals up where the brats could reach, but there was a lot about the old world that, in Ashe's opinion, had been predicated on corporate greed and disregard for human life. So he angled that silver bullet off the broken road at the next turnoff, where the familiar trident iconography indicated a Poseidon Energy gas station lay crumbling in the desert sun.
Hopefully that smoke that was rising was an old tank of robot fuel that popped in the heat...