Merchants of War

by Rick Partlow

  “You should go, too,” Patty told him, eyes on the floor, fumbling for the door knob. “We all should. We should get out of here and leave this fucking worthless place to the Russians. I don’t even know what the hell they want with it.”

  “We’re all doing what we can to try to rebuild things the way they were,” Nate protested, but it was mechanical, automatic, as if he were reading from a script. “If we let the Russians operate here without opposition, they’ll strip all the resources they can and then move west and do it again and we’ll just have to fight them there, or keep running until there’s nowhere left. We have to take back the United States.”

  Patty turned back from the door, and now he didn’t seem resigned or resentful anymore. He was angry.

  “Nate, do you know where I live?”

  “Kentucky.”

  “Frankfort. Do you know what it’s like there? Do you know what it’s like in the rest of Appalachia?”

  “I’ve never been there,” Nate admitted. Neither had the Prime, unless that was one of those unimportant discards.

  “We get nothing from the federal government,” Patty told him. “Not a damn thing. We barter for supplies and the corporate banks run everything, own all the land, all the businesses that still hire. You do what they say, you work for who they tell you to work or you don’t fuckin’ eat. And if you’re sick and can’t work and you miss a payment or two on your house, they rip it right out from under you, whether there’s anyone else to sell it to or not. People starve to death out there, Nate.” Patty’s eyes were wide now, his nostril flaring, and Nate’s right hand drifted toward the Glock still holstered at his right hip.

  “They wander the streets begging for food,” Patty went on, his voice intense but not raised. “They’re fucking shadows, skeletons that everyone pretends not to see because no one has anything to spare. And then you find one of them dead in an alley and the cops come and take him away and bury him in an unmarked grave.”

  Patty snorted, yanking the door open. It shrieked in protest. “That’s gonna be all of us, this whole country. We’re all just shadows wandering in the streets, and someday we’ll just fade away.” He paused in the doorway, fixing Nate with a stare. “There’s no going back. Not out here. If you want anything like your old America, you should go move to Kansas and hope reality doesn’t catch up with you before you die.”

  Patty stalked out and Nate hesitated just a moment before he followed him. Roach was still out in the reception area, kicked back in a folding lawn chair they’d scraped up from some abandoned house months ago, while Ramirez was just coming back from the armory. Patty started to stride past them, but Nate spoke up, stopping him.

  “Wait,” he said. Patty turned back and Ramirez and Roach looked up at him expectantly. “Look, I know we all got a lot on our plate, trying to find the Russians and with what happened to Dix, but…” He shrugged. “We aren’t going to accomplish anything until we get our heads right.”

  “What’d you have in mind, Boss?” Roach asked him.

  “We’re living in each other’s laps here. We need to get out of here and cut loose a little.”

  “You mean into town?” Ramirez asked, eyes going wide. “But that’s…”

  “Against regs?” Nate shrugged. “Sure. But I’d rather risk a fine from the DoD than everyone going nuts and killing each other.” He motioned to Ramirez. “Go set the alarms and lock everything down. Change out of your flight suits and get a shower. We leave in an hour.”

  Nine

  Granby Street used to be a happening place, or so Nate had been told. He remembered reading that the NorVa performing arts center had been voted one of the top venues in the United States fifty years ago or so. Now it was a crumbling heap of bricks and wood, half of it burned to ash in the fires after the nuclear attack.

  What would it be like, he wondered, to go to a concert with tens of thousands of people? To crowd into an auditorium like that and not be afraid of a terrorist bombing or an enemy attack? He couldn’t imagine it.

  “This place is a little depressing,” Roach murmured aside to him, keeping her voice low enough the others probably couldn’t hear it over the hollow sounds of their own footsteps on the deserted street.

  “It’s better once you get to the Fry,” he said, shrugging it off.

  “If you like drug dealers and hookers.”

  He eyed her sidelong. “You think it was a bad idea coming here?”

  “Naw, the boys needed it.” She nodded toward Ramirez and Patty, who were shoulder to shoulder, speaking in low tones about something Nate couldn’t make out. “Especially Patty. He’s about to pop a cork.”

  “He wants out of his contract,” Nate confided. At her look of shock, he put a finger over his lips. “Keep it to yourself. But yeah, he’s missing his family big-time, I guess.”

  “Shit.” She shook her head. “How the hell would we replace him?”

  “Well, we fucking can’t right now,” he declared, snorting as if it were obvious. “I told him I’d put a request into the DoD contractor procurement web, but how fast do you think they’re going to get back with us?”

  “I know you got Ramirez and me through Dix’s connections,” she said. “Was Patty from the procurement system?”

  “He was,” Nate confirmed. “And I put the request in a solid year before he showed up.”

  Bright lights shone and loud music carried around the next corner, signaling their arrival at the Fry. Nate didn’t know where the name had come from, but he knew it had been post-war. He’d heard various explanations for it, from the idea that it originated with the food carts offering fried rat to the more appetizing if also more depressing possibility that it was named for the charring of the taller buildings from the edges of the flash of the nuke at the harbor.

  Either way, the Fry had grown from a few food carts to what passed for a night life in postwar Richmond. The buildings were mostly unsafe still, which meant only employees went inside to bring out stores or cook food, while customers and sound equipment and a few surprisingly talented live bands huddled under tarps stretched over the street, hung with mosquito netting because the portable lights sure as hell attracted them. Nate slapped at one on his neck and grimaced as his hand came away with a stain of red on the palm. He picked up his pace, pulling even with Patty and Ramirez.

  “First round’s on me, boys,” he told them, clapping Patty on the shoulder. “After that, you’re on your own.”

  “Geez, you get a Captain’s salary,” Ramirez complained. “How about buying a poor Technician First-Class dinner?”

  “Only if you put out, Mule.”

  None of the “establishments” in the Fry had signs. You knew where you were going if you lived there, and why the hell would you be there at all if you didn’t? He led them past the dance floors blasting old electronica, past the sit-down restaurants charging the better part of an average worker’s weekly salary for actual cow meat imported from down south, and past one of the few occupied buildings, a brothel whose customers risked potentially unsafe buildings to have most certainly unsafe sex.

  The tent he took them into wasn’t quite as crowded as the others, but he preferred the atmosphere. A live band played on a stage made from storage crates, acoustic instruments belting out tunes that had been old when the Prime was a boy. There was a bar where you could order drinks and food and both weren’t cheap but weren’t outrageous either. Tables were whatever could be cobbled together from leavings, ranging from actual outdoor tables salvaged from pre-war restaurants to wooden spools that had once held electrical cable for utility companies, and the chairs were equally eclectic.

  The clientele here was a step up from the rest of the Fry’s denizens. Fewer “edgy” types with body mods and dyed skin and more normal worker types just trying to make a life in the ruins of the city, or coming in from the suburb enclaves to have a little fun. They’d dressed to fit in, since wearing flight suits out here in the World would have been an invitation to a
ny crackpot conspiracy theorist or desperate junkie who wanted to take a shot at them and try to claim a reward from the Russians.

  Nate fell into a folding bag chair with the logo of the Washington DC baseball team from a time when either of those had existed and the others sat with him for a moment, gathered around what had once been the dining room table of some nearby family. Nate sat and listened to a credible performance of “Proud Mary” by a pudgy, bald man with a curly beard down to his chest while a couple who looked to be in their sixties danced in an area clearly not designed for it, their denim vests sorting matching logos from an outlaw motorcycle gang.

  “You do take a girl to the nicest places,” Roach leaned over to enunciate in his ear over the music.

  “We gonna get those drinks?” Ramirez whined, wincing in appreciation of the music.

  Nate rolled his eyes at the kid and pulled a handful of silver coins out of his pocket, handing them over to the team Mule.

  “Get me whatever beer they have on tap,” he told Ramirez. “I’m feeling adventurous.”

  “I’ll have a shot of whiskey,” Roach ordered. “Make it two,” she decided just as he was getting up.

  “Make it four,” Patty added. He still seemed morose, Nate thought. Maybe the night on the town would loosen him up.

  “I gotta carry this shit all by myself?” Ramirez looked at them, scowling.

  “You already know the answer to that, Mule,” Roach said, waving him toward the bar.

  The kid was still muttering as he left and Nate laughed softly. If they did find a replacement for Patty, at least Ramirez wouldn’t be the Mule anymore.

  “Hey Boss,” Patty said, interrupting the thought and the music. He leaned forward over the polished oak table, jaws working at the chewing tobacco crammed into his cheek. “I just wanted to say, I know Dix was your friend, and I’m sorry about what happened. I did respect him. He was a hell of a mechanic.”

  “He was that,” Nate agreed, wishing he already had a drink in his hand. “He learned the hard way, in a combat unit where you had to repair your own shit, just like ours. It’s how Ramirez is going to have to learn, if he has the natural skills for it.” He sighed out a breath, letting the table take the weight of his elbows. “And he was a guy you could count on having your back, which is even harder to find than a mechanic.” He nodded to Patty. “By the way, I wanted to tell you, you kicked ass against those Tagans. You probably saved my life and Roach’s getting fire on the first one so quick.”

  “Being fairly fucking sure you’re going to die tends to focus a man,” Patty said, shrugging the praise off as if he weren’t comfortable with it. “Desperation makes you fast.” He spat a stream of tobacco juice into a cup he’d brought along for the purpose. “Anyway, I just wanted to tell you again I was sorry I missed the funeral.”

  “Funeral’s for the living,” Nate told him, shaking his head. “We all have to deal with death in our own way.”

  Roach didn’t say anything, but Nate noticed her poorly-hidden scowl and gathered she didn’t agree. For once, though, she kept her mouth shut for the sake of team harmony and he smiled encouragingly to her. She rolled her eyes, but still remained silent until Ramirez returned with the drinks. He’d borrowed a serving tray and made a show of wiping down the table with a cloth while holding it above him one-handed.

  “You spill my drink showing off,” Nate warned him, only half-kidding, “you’re going to be buying the replacement with your own money.”

  “Jeez, hard crowd,” Ramirez said, but lowered the tray and handed Nate a plastic cup full of something that might have been beer and was definitely brewed locally and recently.

  Nate sipped at it tentatively, then shrugged. It wasn’t the worst he’d ever had, which was about all he could expect under the circumstance. The band had switched to another song by then, something he assumed was called “Come As You Are,” though he couldn’t quite remember the name of the group that had originally played it.

  “Who sang this anyway?” he wondered aloud. Patty and Ramirez pretended not to hear him, but Roach slammed down one of her shots, then shrugged.

  “Quien sabe?” she said. “All way before my time.”

  “Oh, never mind.” He took another sip. Dix would have known the answer. He had loved old music.

  Patty tipped back his second shot, slamming the glass down to the stained wood table and gasping out a breath. His eyes had rolled back slightly at the bite of the drink and when they came back level, he leaned forward, seeing something behind them. Nate glanced around but only saw a few people walking past just outside the mosquito netting.

  “I’ll be right back,” Patty told them, rising up from the table. “I think I saw someone I know.”

  “How the hell does he know anyone here at all?” Roach asked, her second shot clasped between thumb and forefinger. She looked down at the amber liquid, sniffed it and made a face. “This stuff is shit,” she added before drinking it anyway.

  “Maybe he comes here on his off time,” Ramirez ventured, shrugging indifferently and nursing his beer. Nate tried to remember if he was old enough to drink it.

  “When have we had any fucking off time?” Roach shot back, glaring at the younger man.

  Nate stopped paying attention to their back-and-forth when the next song began to play. It was one of his favorites, one Dix had introduced him to. It was an older song, by a group called REM. He remembered the name because of the sleep studies he’d researched trying to figure out how to beat insomnia. Rapid Eye Movement. The song was called Nightswimming and he wasn’t sure why, but it always touched a nostalgia for a youth he hadn’t had the chance to experience.

  “Hey,” he said, nodding to Roach. “Want to dance?”

  Her eyebrows shot up in disbelief.

  “To this old-ass shit?”

  “Humor an old man.” He stood and offered her a hand.

  Roach sighed and rolled her eyes but took the hand and walked with him out to the open area in front of the makeshift stage. The Outlaw Biker couple was still dancing, their pace and step more sedate than it had been for the faster songs, and Roach and Nate fell into step in a rotation opposite theirs, two sets of celestial bodies in orbit around the same center of gravity.

  “You sure you want to lead?” Roach asked quietly, smirking as he spun her awkwardly.

  “I ask myself that question all the time,” he admitted, eyes downward, watching his feet.

  “We got some real problems here,” Roach said, apparently intuiting that he hadn’t just been speaking of dancing.

  The band had a violinist, or possibly a fiddler depending on which sort of music they were playing at the time, and she hit the two-note section between verses that always hit him right in the gut. He didn’t even know enough about music to put the right name to it, but whatever genius of a previous generation had written it had known how to get to someone with just a twin strum of a violin. He dipped despite the twinges in his knees and shoulder and elbow, bringing her back up smoothly. She was solid muscle and probably a good sixty kilos.

  Why, he wondered inanely, am I not attracted to her? She’s pretty, funny, spirited, intelligent… Not that he’d do anything about it—they had enough problems without the commander getting involved with one of his subordinates—but it bothered him he never even felt the stirring. Was that something else the cellular degradation was stealing from him?

  “If you mean my dancing, I agree,” he said. “If you mean with the team, I still agree. Unfortunately, neither is likely to improve in the immediate future.”

  “Maybe we need to withdraw from the area,” she suggested. “We could tell DoD we needed the time to regroup after losing Dix. That’s gotta be some sort of good reason for us to break contact.”

  “We do that,” he told her, sobering, “we lose out on our current contract. They don’t pay us for any of this deployment unless we finish the term.”

  “Shit,” she murmured, eyes clouding over at the thought. “I need
that money.”

  “I think we all do. Especially Patty.”

  The song ended and Nate clapped in appreciation while Roach looked around, eyes narrowing.

  “Where the hell did he go, anyway?” she wondered.

  Nate followed her gaze, couldn’t find a sign of the Kentuckian anywhere.

  “We’d better go see if we can find him.” He fished another silver coin out of his pocket and tossed it to Ramirez on the way toward the door. “Mule, get me another beer and order me a burger, will you? And get yourself another drink. We’ll be right back.”

  The night breeze had picked up outside and he felt it carry away the thin sheen of sweat the stuffiness under the tent had built up on his brow. Patrons and workers wandered around outside, some leaning against crumbling facades to catch a smoke, others tucked into the shadows of alleyways locked in heated embraces. Some of those would be prostitutes, freelancers who didn’t work for the brothel. They were pretty rough-looking, gnawed at and eaten away by drugs and disease, and a man would have to be pretty desperate to choose that option.

  Norfolk is the right place to find desperate people, though.

  He and Roach wandered down the plaza from the bar, checking alleyways and shadowed corners, until they’d circled back around almost to the entrance.

  “There he is,” Roach said, touching his arm.

  She didn’t point, knowing better than to draw attention to themselves. He followed her eyes instead to the near distance, under the edge of a canopy set up for food vendors. Patty was there, hands tucked inside his pockets, shoulders hunched as if waiting for the rain to fall. Facing him was a woman who almost certainly did not belong in the Fry. She was tall, probably as tall as Nate even without the high-heeled calf boots, and slender and did wonderful things to the jeans and turtleneck she tried to pass off as casual wear, and Nate suddenly discovered that yes, he was still interested in sex.

  “Jesus,” Roach breathed. “She’s so far out of his league, they’re not even on the same planet.”