The bartender wiped down shot glasses with a rag. “What’ll you have?” he spoke out of the side of his mouth.
“What do you got?” asked Evan.
“This is a man’s bar.” If his comment ruffled Riley’s feathers it didn’t show, and it wasn’t obvious that the comment was meant to. “We got a man’s drink. Whiskey.”
“What are they drinking?” Anthony nodded towards a pair of rough and tumble women at the bar.
“Whiskey. What’d I just say?”
“Three whiskeys, then.” Anthony gulped.
The bartender set three shot glasses side by side and filled them without lifting the bottle once. Evan thumbed through his vouchers. When the bartender saw him doing so, he let out a low whistle. “We don’t accept Harmony script here.” He reached out and pulled the three shot glasses back towards him. “Cash-money only.”
“Here.” Riley reached into her pocket and retrieved a green bill. She placed it on the bar. It disappeared in the bartender’s hand, and the three shot glasses came forward again.
Anthony picked up his shot glass and held it up to the light. What the hell was floating around in it?
“Cheers,” said Evan. The brother and sister and their friend clinked glasses and drank. Riley sipped hers. Evan knocked his back and held his breath as the liquid burned its way down his esophagus. Anthony’s eyes teared up and he involuntarily gasped. One of the pair of women cackled at that.
Anthony wiped the back of a hand across his cheek. “Give us another.” The bartender smirked and poured Anthony and Evan a second shot each. Riley held a hand over her shot glass, which was still three quarters of the way full.
“Pay him, sis,” Anthony indicated. “Please.”
“Ask him.” Riley prodded Anthony.
“We’re looking for someone called Mad Jack.”
“Mad Jack, huh?” If it sounded strange to the bartender, he didn’t let on.
“Yeah. You know him?”
“Maybe I do.”
“You know him.” Riley’s voice was ice.
“I said maybe I did…” If the bartender was intimidated, he didn’t show that either. “And maybe I don’t.”
“That’s bullshit,” said Evan. “You know something, you tell us.”
“Feel free,” the bartender reached under the bar and laid a short, sawed-off baseball bat on it, “to come and try and make me.”
Riley eyed the man and he smiled at her. She held her hand up with a second green bill in it.
“I were you…” The bartender picked up his rag and resumed the polishing of his shot glasses. “I wouldn’t be here. But if you’re looking for someone, you might ask them.” He nodded out across the bar, towards its patrons.
Anthony and Evan turned their backs to the bar and looked around the place. Riley stared at the bartender an extra few seconds before joining them. When she turned and couldn’t see it, the bartender smirked.
“Ask them?” Anthony pondered.
“Ask them.” Riley said.
Anthony straightened himself up to his full height and was about to address the bar, when Evan knocked back his second shot, wheezed and yelled out uncomfortably loud, “We’re looking for someone named Mad Jack.”
There was a brief stir among the men and women as they looked up, their solitude and reveries disturbed by these newcomers.
“Anybody here named Mad Jack?”
Most people turned back to their drinks and concerns. The ones who didn’t cast dangerous looks in their direction. Riley noticed how one man in the shadows in the back never looked up at all.
“There’s no Mad Jack here.” Evan turned back to the bar and indicated his shot glass with an index finger. The bartender poured him a third shot.
“Let’s go.” Anthony was disappointed. There were a couple of other bars they could check out before they went to see the woman their dad had told them about.
“Hey, you still owe me for the second round,” said the bartender.
“Feel free to come and try and get it,” said Riley. The bartender scoffed and smiled at that.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Anthony.
“Wait.” Riley sipped from her shot glass. “He’s over there.”
“Who?”
Riley didn’t answer. Instead, she picked up her glass and walked to the back of the room. The men and women she passed ignored her.
Anthony looked at Evan. Evan shrugged and downed his third shot. “This stuff tastes like shit,” he told the bartender before slamming the glass top-down on the counter.
“Glad you like it,” the bartender shot back.
Evan nodded to Anthony, and they followed in Riley’s wake.
“Are you Mad Jack?” Riley looked down at the man seated by himself at the round table.
The man’s upper body was covered by furs that looked stitched together from animal pelts. There was a nearly-empty bottle on the table in front of him, but no glass. The biggest, meanest-looking multi-barreled grenade launcher any of them had ever seen sat on the man’s table, and a long, polished stick of wood nearly two meters in length leaned against the table.
He looked up at them, his sideburns extending to the edge of his mouth, connecting to a mustache. The hair on his head and his face were shot through with grey.
“Goddamit, no,” he said, his voice gravelly. “But there’s only one son of a bitch would have told you I was. That sorry bastard still alive?”
“He was when we left him at the hospital.” Uninvited, Riley sat down in a chair across from him. Anthony and Evan pulled other chairs over from an empty table.
“Don’t get too close to me,” the man warned. “I’m running hot.” Anthony and Evan looked at each other uncomfortably. He’d meant he was radioactive.
“Christ, he was in some shape,” the man recalled. “Is he still travelling with the retard?”
“I don’t think…yeah.” Riley thought it was just easier to agree with him. He obviously knew she was talking about Mickey and Gary.
The man held his hand up to his mouth and coughed violently. When he finished, he looked up to the three across from him. “What are you looking for me for?”
Riley let Anthony answer. “We need a guide.”
“A guide?”
“Yeah.”
“Where you so keen on gettin’ to?”
“We’re looking for a man in the Outlands.”
“I assumed you’d meant the Outlands.” The man leaned back, and they could see the butt of a Browning Hi-Power snug against his paunchy stomach. “This man got a name?”
“Bear.”
“Now I know you’re crazy.” The man laughed until he coughed and choked. He reached out to the table for his bottle, took a swig from it, and the coughing ceased. “There. That’s better. White man’s medicine. You know what I mean?” None of them did. “Why do you want to find Bear?”
“You’ve heard of him.” Anthony sounded hopeful.
“Of course I’ve heard of him. Who hasn’t? But what makes you think Bear wants to be found?”
“I—” Anthony started, but Riley interrupted him. “We,” she corrected, and Anthony continued, “We’ve got something we need to talk to him about.”
“Do any one of you have any idea what’s out there?” The man was referring to the Outlands. “No, course you don’t. They can’t.” He was talking to his grenade launcher. “ They’ve grown up here, haven’t they, Bertha? Sheltered. Molly-coddled.” None of the three knew what the last term meant, but they could tell it wasn’t said with approval. “Let me tell you what’s out there, then. Nothing. The ruins of a civilization. Of a world. It ain’t right. None of it.” The man launched into another spasm of coughing and retching.
“He’s drunk, isn’t he?” Evan asked Riley without whispering. She silenced him with a hand.
“Yeah, I’m drunk, genius.” The man stopped coughing. “Let me tell you about Bear. Bear don’t exist. Bear’s a myth.” He gripped his bottle by its
neck and drank deeply. When he set it down, he looked up to Anthony and Riley and Evan still sitting there. “I knew him.”
“If he doesn’t exist—” Evan had no time for drunk radioactive bastards and their logic or lack thereof. “—how do you know him?”
“Bear don’t want to be found. He wanted to be found, he’d be here already. Look around.” The man gestured to the interior of the bar and they looked around. “You see him? I don’t mean here.”
“People like Bear,” said Riley, “people like the Black Angel, they saved our civilization. We wouldn’t be sitting here without people like him.”
“Yeah, he saved our ‘civilization.’” The man wiggled his index and middle fingers as he said this last word. “What’d you say your business was with Bear?”
“We didn’t,” replied Anthony.
“Our business is our business,” Evan added coolly.
“Show him,” Riley said to her brother.
“Don’t,” said Evan. “I think this guy is full of shit.”
Anthony ignored him, reached into his jacket, and produced the photograph. He placed it on the table and pushed it over to the man. The man cocked his head and eyed the photo. “Well…ain’t that somethin’. Who are they?”
“We don’t know.”
“And neither do I.”
Riley jumped in. “Bear will know. The man in this picture has some kind of relationship to my brother here—”
“I think he’s my dad.”
Evan gave Anthony and Riley a look like they were saying too much, but they didn’t heed his warning.
“—and Bear will know,” Riley finished. “That’s why we need to find Bear.”
The man studied the photograph for a while longer before looking up. “This one does favor you,” he remarked to Anthony. To Riley he said, “You think Bear is going to know this?” To the three of them he asked, “You think Bear is going to, what? Tell you?”
“Yeah,” Anthony answered simply.
“You think, what? You’re going to go out there and find Bear?” He looked at Anthony. “And then what? Find yourself? Well, let me save you a lot of time and effort. I’ll tell you what you’ll find out there. Death. Death in a thousand-million nasty little varieties. And—” the man fixed Anthony with his gaze “—it’ll be the death of your friends too. Look at me. I’m living proof.” Another spasm of violent coughing wracked the man.
“He doesn’t sound so good,” Evan said.
When he stopped coughing, the man looked back to the three of them. “You want to go?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “If you want to go, we leave tomorrow. At dawn.” He looked at the bottle on his table. “Better make that noon.”
“What’s your price, mister?” asked Evan. “You haven’t named a price.”
“You can’t afford me. But, in the long run, it’ll be the satisfaction of knowin’ I was right all along. You ain’t gonna find the kind of answers you’re lookin’ for out there.” The man swigged from his bottle, emptying it. “In the short-term, you can buy me another bottle of whiskey. And you better have a few more for the road.”
“Where can we find you?” Riley asked. “Where are you staying?”
“You seen that bench outside when you come in?”
“Okay.”
“You kids change your mind, no sweat off my back. Be the smart thing to do. I wake up tomorrow and you’re not there, I’ll think me and Bertha imagined all this anyway.”
“What do we call you?” Riley inquired. “Mad Jack?”
“Shit no, don’t call me that. Call me my name.”
“Which is?”
“Krieger. And this here,” Krieger patted the grenade launcher, “is Bertha.”
“Bertha.”
“Yeah.”
“What is Bertha?” The hostility in Evan’s voice had been replaced by curiosity.
“Haven’t you ever seen a HAWK MM-1 grenade launcher before? No? Hmmm.”
“We’ll see you in the morning,” Anthony promised, although he wasn’t certain in his own mind. He rose from the table. “Let’s get him another bottle.”
* * *
Tommy was waiting for her late that afternoon when Little Red walked into the camp, MacKenzie struggling to keep up with her.
“Red.” Tommy’s face lit up, relieved to see her.
“Tommy.” She acknowledged him, knew he’d been standing there with his shotgun in hand awaiting her return ever since he’d gotten back to the camp with Dalton and the truck three days earlier.
“You look good.” Tommy blushed as soon as he said it. It was an awkward thing to say, or maybe it was the way he said it. “I mean, you look healthy enough. Safe, I mean.”
Red smiled, despite her exhaustion. She knew what he meant. The son was not as smooth as the father and never would be. But that was one of the endearing things about Tommy. Not that it inclined her towards reciprocating his interest. This life—their lives—were not meant for happiness. Or so Red thought.
“I feel like ass.”
Tommy laughed.
He was a good looking guy, Tommy, an able guy. Unlike his brothers, he was apparently unmarked by the radiation. There were women in the camp who were interested in Tommy. Red wished he would set his sights on one of them and forget about her. Not that he was ever a pig about it. The way Tommy was with women, it wasn’t the way Rodriguez was or MacKenzie had been. MacKenzie had changed, though, or so he claimed. That remained to be seen. But Red was confident.
Mac, her convert. He seemed sincere about his change of ways, and Red believed him. If it turned out he wasn’t, Red would finish what he’d started.
“Him, on the other hand,” Tommy said of MacKenzie, “he don’t look so good.”
“He’ll live.”
“Tommy!” As beat and bloody as he looked, MacKenzie had a smile on his face as he reached Thomas’ son. “You have no idea how good it is to be back.”
Several people milled about them now, welcoming Little Red and MacKenzie. Tommy called out, “Let’s get some medical attention over here for Mac.”
“Re-duh.” The smile on Merv’s face was a mile wide. Red had long ago learned to look past the boy’s cleft lip and palate and not hear his speech impediment.
“Merv.” She clapped him on the shoulder.
Tommy’s other brothers limped up. Johnny and Phil were conjoined twins who shared a torso.
“Red, you’re back!” said Johnny.
“We missed you!” added Phil.
“Missed you guys, too.”
“Red.” Gammon nodded at the girl and she nodded back.
“Ed.”
“The old man wants to see you.” The old man—Thomas—and Gammon were best friends. Red knew they’d been through a lot together.
Red wound her way through the camp, passing people she knew. Most of them said nothing to her. They were scared of her, of what they all knew she was capable of. MacKenzie’s wife saw her as Janis rushed to the bally-hoo, hoping to find her husband. Janis didn’t look at Red.
“Dalton.” Red greeted the man who stood outside his cabin by a fire with his wife and four children, two of whom were deformed. Dalton reached up and touched his knit cap by way of greeting. He’d always been a quiet one.
“Hey, Red.” The brothers, Keith and David, were standing around a fire outside their cabin. They were older men, but not as old as Thomas or Gammon. It was Keith who had called out to her, his AR slung over his back. “What do you call a deer with no eyes?”
“No idea,” David answered.
“What do you call a dead deer with no eyes?”
“Still no idea.”
Red smiled at them as she walked by.
“Hey,” Keith asked, “if they had the chance—what would Rodriguez and Mac be doing to a dead deer with no eyes?”
“Fucking still no idea,” replied David.
“I think you’ll see Mac’s changed,” Red remarked as she walked by.
“Hope so,” Dav
id said to his brother.
The brothers were always talking some nonsense, amusing themselves. They were Red’s closest friends in the camp outside of Thomas and Tommy and Thomas’ three younger sons, outside of Gammon and Dalton.
Thomas was their leader, but his cabin was just like everyone else’s. There was nothing ostentatious about it. Thomas was a man who led by example. He would never set himself on a pedestal, even if others did.
Paulson was outside Thomas’ cabin. There was no need for a guard. No one could imagine hurting the old man. Thomas was much beloved. And if they tried? Well, Thomas was getting on in years, but he could still hold his own. Paulson loved the old man, and liked being around him enough that he often stationed himself outside of Thomas’ cabin.
Red nodded at Paulson and he nodded back. She knocked on the door and when she heard Thomas say come in, she stepped inside.
“Red. It’s good to see you back.”
“Thomas. It’s good to be back.”
“Come on in. Sit down.”
The interior of the cabin was Spartan. There were few furnishings—a wooden table with three wooden chairs. A bookcase filled with books. Thomas had made these all himself. Some meat dish was cooking off in the kitchen, its delectable smell wafting throughout the cabin.
“How’s Homer treating you?” Thomas asked her about the book he had leant her.
Red sat down at the table across from him. “Achilles is desecrating Hector’s body.”
“Yeah, he did go a little overboard there. He reminds me of you, you know? Achilles that is.”
“Because we both have red hair?”
“How’d it go out there with Mac?”
“I think we’ve got ourselves a penitent.”
“Well, I gotta say good job then, Amy.” Amy. Thomas was the only one to call her that. Everyone else called her Red or Lil’ Red.
She nodded.
“Anything out there I need to know about?”
“We attracted twenty-five Zed.”
“Twenty-five, huh?”
She said yes.
“Well, twenty-five is a lot, but it’s nothing like we used to face. You’re too young to remember, but there was a time we’d have thousands of those things wandering around.” A look came over Thomas’ face, the look that always stole over him when he was remembering the way things had been. “Millions in the cities.”
Resurrection (Eden Book 3) Page 8
