The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist's Guide to Louisville: a novella

by Stephen Lawson

  “It’s why I sit here most of the day while the rest of the clan bustles around on the fourteenth floors of all these old banks and hotels—that and it’s cool down here. Golly, I miss air conditioning. Those were the good old days.

  “Anyway, I let my engineers and planning staff run their shops in the Galt House, since that’s where the most people live, but it’s also easier for me to walk to court from here.”

  “So,” Thursday said, “Will you help me?”

  “No,” Oliver said, “You’re clearly a spy and an adept liar.”

  Oliver waggled his finger at the four men who stood around Thursday.

  “Get him in the shackles,” Oliver said. “I’ll be up in a minute to watch. Can’t have spies running around doing reconnaissance, can we? He’s already done enough on my old friend Cornelius. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the Churchill clan’s been overrun.”

  ~~~

  The men, indifferent to Thursday’s protests, fastened a chain around his waist and put shackles on his ankles.

  “Looks like he broke his wrist,” one of the men said to another. The other man seemed to be the leader of the group by virtue of being the largest, and having his squinty eyes close together on his face. “Should we take this brace-thing off? It smells like girls.”

  “Nah,” Big-and-squinty said, “leave it. Don’t want him getting hurt, do we?”

  They all laughed at this, but they looped the chains over his splint. It was immensely painful, but he didn’t feel the bone shifting too much.

  Then Thursday’s world inverted, and he found himself watching Oliver walk out to sit in the same chair as before.

  Below him, pigs grunted and shoved each other for the second meal of the day.

  The man with the cord pulled him, and then let him loose to swing above the herd.

  The man at the crank turned it, slowly.

  Clunk.

  Clunk.

  “Don’t do this!” Thursday yelled. “My grandfather—”

  “Yes,” Oliver said. “You said that already. He gave you a bat to prove he sent you, but you don’t have it.”

  The chain rattled lower, and Thursday felt the weight of blood in his head as he swung slowly over the pigs. Another link clunked through the gear, and the pigs started shoving each other to be right under him when he reached the bottom.

  They’d been conditioned.

  Back and forth he swung, and his vision grew darker. He looked down, and saw one pig biting another’s ear to get closer to the man-treat. Thursday’s sweat dripped down and splattered on the pig’s head. He wondered how many more seconds of life he’d get if he could do a sit-up and fold himself in half.

  Maybe he could slam his head down from that folded position and head-butt a single pig to death.

  Maybe the others would eat that pig and forget about him.

  Why did everyone want to eat him? Weren’t there enough other things in the world to eat that Thursday needn’t be one of them?

  At least, he thought, the pigs might catch whatever he’d been infected with and carry it to—

  “Hey!” Thursday yelled, as another link clunked him lower. He could feel the herd’s body heat under him as their nauseating stench wafted up.

  Oliver raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.

  “I’ve been infected with a disease,” Thursday said. It was hard to talk while swinging upside down, but the idea was a good one. “If your pigs eat me, and you eat them, you’ll get what I have. I’m pretty sure of it.”

  “Sure you have, kid,” Oliver said, then waggled a finger to keep lowering Thursday.

  Another link clunked through the gear, and Thursday heard the pigs grunting with anticipation. One jumped, and if he hadn’t pulled his head up, it might’ve taken part of his ear with it.

  The ambitious pig squealed when it landed on another’s head.

  “There’s a note!” Thursday said, pulling his head up again as he swung back over the lowest point in his arc. “There’s a note in my bag! That bit did survive the trip. It’s in a little capsule. I washed out the disease dust, but it says what they did to me. You can read it yourself.’

  “Hold,” Oliver said. The man at the crank stopped turning, and Thursday thought he heard a sigh of disappointment.

  Oliver watched Thursday swing one full arc before waggling his finger up a bit. The gear turned back a single link, putting him just out of reach of the most athletic pigs.

  “Are you telling me you can read and write?” Oliver asked.

  Thursday remembered the conversation with Wendy, and the thing about educated assets.

  “Yes!” Thursday said. “I have a disease that you don’t want to get, and I can read and write.”

  “Well that’s a heck of a résumé, kid,” Oliver said. He picked up Thursday’s pack and handed it to the man next to him. He whispered something to the man, who began looking through it.

  “I have a proposal for you,” Oliver said, smiling. Even swinging upside down on a chain, Thursday noticed that Oliver didn’t smile with his eyes.

  The man who’d taken the pack produced the note from Synapse Sentries. He showed it to Oliver, who glanced over it briefly. Oliver nodded, and the man took the bag away.

  “Could you let me down first?” Thursday asked. Another bead of sweat dripped from his hair onto a pig.

  “Well, I’d like to see what you say to my proposal,” Oliver said. “If you say ‘no,’ Foucault will have wasted a lot of effort hauling you back up, just to lower you all over again. I loathe inefficiency.”

  “Can I just give you a tentative ‘yes’ on whatever you’re proposing?” Thursday asked as he swung. “I feel like it’ll probably be a better job than the one you have me in now.”

  ~~~

  Thursday cut into the baked whatever-this-was in front of him with feverish urgency. He’d never tasted anything like it.

  “Slow down, kid,” Oliver said. “You’ll make yourself sick.”

  Thursday paused briefly between forkfuls. He liked this building a bit better than the Seelbach, perhaps because he was being fed instead of tried as a spy.

  When he looked out the window, he realized it was one he’d passed on the way to Fourth Street Live, though he hadn’t seen any signs of life before. They’d arrived not via the street, but by a fourth-floor rope bridge.

  “What is this?” he asked, still chewing.

  “It’s a Hot Brown,” Oliver said. “It was invented right here in the Brown Hotel in 1926. What you’re eating is an open-faced turkey sandwich with bacon, heavy cream, Romano cheese, Roma tomatoes, paprika, and parsley on Texas toast.

  “It’s not quite Fred Schmidt’s original recipe, but this is how they made it when I was a kid. You wouldn’t believe how much work goes into one nowadays. Pretty much every restaurant in Kentucky had their own version of it, but I always thought the original was the best.”

  “Bacon?” Thursday asked with a snort.

  “You ended up on this side of the fork today,” Oliver said. “Count yourself lucky.”

  Thursday finished the Hot Brown and found himself shaking with a nervous energy. He’d never tasted food so rich, and his heart was racing from the experience of so many calories so quickly. He clasped his hands together under the table in an attempt to control them.

  “Maybe you are Cornelius’s grandson,” Oliver said. “He always had a knack for being who he needed to be to survive. You look like him too, a bit.”

  “What is it you want me to do?” Thursday asked.

  Oliver studied him before smiling his cold smile again.

  “I have friends in several inhabited areas across the country,” Oliver said, “and we trade things to make each other’s lives easier. We’re trying to make free trade a thing again. Who knows? Maybe someday we’ll have a country again, once we figure out how to kill the swarms and rebuild the highways.

  “Anyhoo, in the interest of upping demand for our unified transportation network, I thought it migh
t be a good idea to tell folks what they can find in other areas—you know, places that aren’t Louisville—the places you’ll need to go through if you’re going to get to Seattle. So I’ll make you this deal: Since you can read and write, take notes of what’s left of civilization in each stop you make on your way. Write me a travelogue—a tourist’s guide of sorts—and in return, I’ll write you a letter guaranteeing the aid of our roughly-hewn trade network.

  “I’ll have my quartermaster set you up with a notebook. For every page you fill in with details of the larger world, I’ll give you some of my surplus food and dry goods when you come back.”

  It was Thursday’s turn to study Oliver in mild disbelief.

  “Tourism?” he said finally. “You think people want to be tourists? Do you know how many people have tried to literally eat me since I walked out of Churchill Downs?”

  “No,” Oliver said, looking away and flicking a speck of some invisible thing off the back of his booth seat. “How many?”

  “All of them,” Thursday said. “Outside of a fortress, every single human being wants to murder everyone they meet, and eat them. That’s not something tourists want to experience.”

  “Well,” Oliver said, “maybe leave out most of the cannibalism. Just focus a bit more on the historic architecture and monuments, and... well, and food like the Hot Brown. That was good, wasn’t it? Anyway, this won’t be like tourists’ guides before the ships came. Those were boring. This’ll be The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide. Doesn’t that have a nice ring?”

  “No,” Thursday said. “It does not, and I don’t think I’ll be able to look myself in a mirror again if I do this.”

  “However—”

  “However,” Thursday said, realizing he’d gotten carried away, “a lifetime of guilt is probably better than being eaten by pigs today.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Oliver said. “You’re definitely Cornelius’s offspring. He was always good at seeing silver linings too. One last thing, though.”

  Oliver pulled a small object from his pocket and set it on the table.

  Except, it didn’t sit on the table.

  The gray cube, roughly two inches on each side, floated just above the table’s surface. Thursday lowered a cheek to the table to get his right eye even with it, but nothing supported the cube.

  Oliver nudged it toward Thursday with his finger, and the thing floated, frictionless, toward him. Thursday stopped the cube with his hand, and it remained floating at the same height. He pushed it downward with his index finger, and it resisted his push more the closer it got to the table. Thursday heard the grains in the table’s wood begin to crack. He let up on the cube, which returned to its previous height.

  “This is alien tech, isn’t it?” Thursday asked.

  “It is,” Oliver said. “I recovered it several years after we left the Mega Cavern. I led a scouting expedition to Mammoth Cave, and found a ship full of dead aliens floating over the campground. I took a few other pieces, but I keep this one with me to play with while I’m thinking.”

  “Did you find any sign of what killed them?” Thursday asked. “What kept them from wiping us all out?”

  Oliver smiled, and this time his eyes wrinkled at the corners.

  “I guess they’d served their purpose,” he said. “If you find more of their tech in your travels, though, bring it back to me and I’ll reward your efforts. They had weapons and engines like nothing mankind ever imagined. We might actually be able to civilize Louisville again if we use them. Then everyone will be able to travel, and my work will get easier too. I’ll be able to see the rest of the world.”

  ~~~

  Thursday walked to the gangplank of the Belle of Louisville, and a large man held out a hand to stop him.

  “Ticket,” the man said.

  There were no other passengers behind Thursday, and none on the boat. He remembered, though, the piece of paper Oliver had given him. He handed it to the man.

  “You must be Arnold,” Thursday said, while the man looked at the ticket.

  Oliver had chuckled while he’d written, “Arnold smells of pig fodder,” on the ticket.

  “Yep,” Arnold said. “It says right here, ‘Admit One, goin’ to St. Louis,’ and in the boss’s hand, too.”

  Arnold ushered Thursday onto the deck before returning to his post. A man in overalls noticed Thursday, approached, and introduced himself as the captain.

  Thursday set down his pack to shake the captain’s hand. It was the warmest greeting he’d ever received in his life.

  “Most of what we haulin’ is barley,” the captain said. “But there’s crates of bourbon too—Angel’s Envy, Evan Williams, Bulleit, Jim Beam. Mr. Lawrence gets wheat, sugar, salt—all kin’a things in exchange for liquor that’s just been sittin’ in warehouses for the last fifty to sixty years. Just gets better with time, too, in them oak barrels.”

  “This boat,” Thursday said, “It looks like it predates the invasion. How is that even possible?”

  The captain smiled.

  “Son, you’re standing on the oldest operating river steamboat in the world,” the captain said. “She was even before them homewreckers showed up. The Belle started out as the Idlewild, and then she was the Avalon for a bit. She started out a packet boat too, before the trains came and the folks that owned her started selling ‘excursions.’ That hardwood floor on the second deck, the one where all the barley and crates is—well that was a dance floor for a bit.”

  “A dance floor?” Thursday asked.

  “Folk would come out on the water to party and dance the night away. There was a bar up there and everything. So she come full circle, I guess. She a packet boat again. She went from coal to diesel, and now she coal again too so them biters don’t come eat us. Can’t crank a big diesel without glow plugs, and that’s all electric. Small diesel, maybe, but nothin’ big enough to move the Belle. Nowhere to get fresh diesel around here anyway. Good thing for us coal don’t spoil.

  “Anyway, I got last checks to make before we shove off. Put your stuff anywhere you like. Boss said you’re a writer, so we ain’t usin’ you as a deck hand. You’re our only passenger, though. Just no candles after sundown—sometimes the packers get squirrely and shoot things at us. No candles near the cargo regardless.”

  Thursday nodded, and hoisted his pack again.

  He was thankful for the hammock Oliver’s quartermaster had given him, since the only bunks seemed to be meant for the crew, and he didn’t think they’d let him sleep on the barley sacks. The man had also given Thursday a single, leather bound notebook and a pencil.

  “I’m probably going to need more paper than this,” Thursday had said.

  “Most folks can’t read and write out there,” the quartermaster had said. “Paper’s not good for much but burnin’ so I reckon you’ll be able to find plenty laying around. This is what the boss told me to get you started with.”

  Thursday had asked for weapons too, though, and the quartermaster had snickered before handing him a riding crop.

  “We don’t just hand out weapons here, son,” the quartermaster had said. “Can’t go equipping the civilians for an uprising, can we?”

  “I’m not a civilian,” Thursday had said. “I’m a tourist, and a writer.”

  “Don’t like the riding crop?” the quartermaster had asked. “I thought you’d want to take a bit of ancient history with you. Here let me see it—I’ll trade you.”

  Thursday had handed him the riding crop, and the quartermaster went back into a dark supply vault to rummage around. He'd returned after several minutes, and handed Thursday a rusty spoon.

  “Good luck out there, kid,” the quartermaster had said. “It’s a dangerous world.”

  Thursday didn’t attempt a second trade.

  Epilogue

  Thursday found a space on the main deck, stretched his hammock between two loops in the bulkheads, and lay in the soft glow from the engine room. He stared at the overhead, feeling his m
ind rapidly shutting down from sheer exhaustion.

  His body went limp for a total of two seconds.

  He jerked awake, having just thrown Molly from the roof again. He’d heard Filson screaming in pain, and hoped he had enough time to save him. In waking, he realized that it was too late. He felt that if he let exhaustion take his mind back into sleep, he might not wake a second time.

  He remembered Wendy, and the offer she’d made when he left the Conrad-Caldwell House.

  Thursday thought, as he steamed down the Ohio River, that it was the best deal anyone had ever offered him.

  Perhaps it was the best deal any man ever got, especially in the new world.

  END

  To find out what happens next, check out Episode 2:

  The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide to St. Louis by David VonAllmen.

  About the Author

  Stephen Lawson lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife, a rabbit, and some bees.

  Stephen spent five years on active duty with the Navy after high school and deployed three times aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt. His carrier battle group deployed on September 19, 2001 as part of the immediate response to 9/11, which eventually became Operation Enduring Freedom.

  He has a business administration degree from Asbury University, and is currently pursuing an MBA.

  He divides his time between church, writing, education, and a career as an officer in the Kentucky Army National Guard.

  He considers his biggest influences to be Michael Crichton, C.S. Lewis, Robert Heinlein, and team-writers Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.

  A complete list of Stephen's published works can be found on the Published, Pending, Press page of his blog, which is linked below.

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