New Title 1

by Millard, Adam

  Lou nodded. “I’ll close the store and walk across town to Kellerman’s office myself,” he lied. To hell with Kellerman and his devious plans, which now seemed to include the poor Fox girl. Whatever he wanted with her, it couldn’t be good. Kellerman was not in the business of showing respect, and the last thing Lou wanted was for Zee Fox to fall into the maniac’s grasp.

  “Okay,” Smalling said, hoisting the bag up from the counter and slinging it across his shoulder. It clinked and clanked as the goods contained within knocked against one another. “We’ll leave you to it. I can see you’ve got a lot of dusting to be getting on with.”

  Story of my life, Lou thought.

  “Oh, and you might want to towel yourself down,” Harkness said, pointing to a damp patch on Lou’s shirt. “Looks like your titties are leaking. Not had a baby recently, have you?”

  Lou laughed, and never a faker laugh had there been. He ran a hand across his chest, ignoring the strange warmth he found there. And stickiness… “Thanks for dropping by, fellas,” he said, leading the way toward the door. “Be sure to drop by again. Say, in thirty days or so.”

  Smalling and Harkness stomped across the room behind Lou; they were of a size where stomping was only natural. “We will,” Harkness said. “And don’t forget, if you see the Fox girl, send her straight to Kellerman’s office. It’s a matter of national security.”

  “Is it?” Smalling asked. He looked terribly confused. “I thought the boss just wanted a slave girl?”

  “Shhhhhhhhh,” Harkness said, shaking his head and widening his eyes, the internationally recognised signal for Shut the fuck up!

  So he wants to make a slave of her, Lou thought. Slimy prick. Well not on my watch…

  “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” Lou said. “Now, if you could just fuck off so I can get the place dusted, that would be fantastic.”

  So off they fucked, leaving Lou to his own devices, which included worrying about Zee Fox, dusting the paraphernalia, and wiping down his strangely-tender boobies with a damp cloth.

  Just another day in paradise…

  4

  A mile or so away from Oilhaven – there was no way to be sure of the actual distance, but it felt like a mile – stood four dirt- and pock-marked motorcycles (and one horse). Beside each vehicle stood a bandit. Sweaty and scarred, these bandits were, for want of a better word, ugly. They were the kind of bandits – not that there was any other kind – that one would go out of one’s way to avoid. And if one was unfortunate enough to make their acquaintance, one would shudder and wince and most probably vomit, for these bandits were, as previously mentioned, rather unsightly.

  These bandits, as most did, went by a name, a collective epithet that separated them from other bandits, and that name was:

  LOS PENDEJOS

  Now, for non-Spanish-speaking people, that name might conjure up images of sun-drenched beaches, margaritas, suntanned beauties pulling themselves through the water like centuries-old mermaids, and suitcases full of money and passports.

  You couldn’t be further from the truth, for Los Pendejos could be roughly translated as The Assholes, an apt, if not endearing, name for a bunch of bug-ugly marauders.

  The leader of Los Pendejos, and therefore the owner of the cleanest and least damaged motorcycle, was El Oscuro. Now, again, those non-Spanish speakers amongst you might, upon hearing his name, think of dark things, for it does sound a lot like Obscure, and obscure things are seldom flamboyant. His name, roughly translated (why is it always roughly translated? Does nobody own a Spanish-English dictionary anymore?), means The Dark One. An odd choice, really, since El Oscuro was the only albino bandit in the state.

  “Are you telling me, Samuel” El Oscuro said, clicking his fingers in a way that could only be described as diva-esque, “that you didn’t grab a thing. That you were chased from the store by the proprietor, who appeared to be wielding a pair of antique pistols? That said store owner tried to sell you a fake vagina, and that you weren’t even a little bit tempted?”

  Samuel nodded; that was exactly what he was telling his superior.

  “This is why you get the horse and we get the motorcycles,” El Oscuro said, lighting a cigarette filled with tobacco that had been used so many times, it couldn’t really be considered tobacco anymore. “Did you manage to take a good look around the town, though?”

  “As I was running away,” Samuel said, “I bumped into a kid throwing up black stuff in the street.”

  “That’s hardly going to win the place any awards,” Red, the female bandit, said. Red was, as one might imagine, as blonde as they came. El Oscuro’s first lady, Red was a violent little minx. She’d once poked a hedgehog with a stick until it squeaked. Oh, yes, Red was not to be messed with, lest you find yourself on the wrong end of a particularly large stick.

  “How many?” El Oscuro said. “How many civilians did you see as you were running away from the man with the antique pistols that might or might not have been loaded?”

  Samuel did the maths in his head, which wasn’t his strong point. Eventually he shrugged. “I wasn’t really paying much attention,” he conceded. “Other than the vomiting kid and the storekeeper, I didn’t see anyone else.”

  “You see?” said one of the other bandits. This one was called Blink, due to the fact that he never did. “This is what happens when you send a boy to do a man’s job. If you’d sent me—”

  “If I’d’ve sent you,” El Oscuro said, “you would have frightened everyone in town with your strange googly eyes.”

  “That’s right,” said Thumbs, who unsurprisingly didn’t have any, and was therefore one of the worst pickpockets that had ever lived. “Look at all this sand out here, floating around in the air. Doesn’t that make you want to blink? Not even once?”

  Blink shook his head. “People spend five years of their lives just blinking,” he said. “Which means I’ll live longer than everyone else.”

  El Oscuro was on the verge of stabbing them all where they stood. “Can we just stop talking nonsense for a few minutes?” he said. “I’ve got a terrible headache, and you lot are driving me up the proverbial wall.”

  The bandits fell silent, apart from Samuel whose trousers audibly squeaked.

  El Oscuro reached into one of his motorcycle’s panniers and pulled out a map. He set about unfolding it, which was like trying to finish a Rubik’s cube blindfolded. After three minutes of cursing and struggling, he screwed it up and shoved it back into the pannier from whence it came. “Okay, we’ve got two choices,” he said. “We can skip this shitty little town and continue west. With a bit of luck we’ll come across a nice city; plenty of pockets to pick and businesses to pillage. Or, we can all take a little looksee at Oilhaven. We’re running low on supplies, and Blink’s going to need more eye-drops soon. Now, according to the map—”

  “The one you just crumpled up and stuffed in your bike?” Thumbs said.

  “Yes, that’s the one,” El Oscuro said. “According to that map, there might be nothing to the west for a few days.”

  “A void?” Blink said. “Like a black hole?”

  El Oscuro sighed. It seemed appropriate. “No, not a void,” he said. “I mean, there are no other towns or villages. We’re out in the middle of nowhere and it could be a while before we’re in the middle of somewhere.”

  “That makes more sense,” Blink said. “But for all we know, people have built new towns. That map’s an old one.”

  “Finally, he speaks some sense,” El Oscuro said. “There have been no new maps since The Event, which means we have no real way of knowing if any reservations have popped up in this area. What we need to decide is whether to risk it. Do we continue west, and hope to come across somewhere to pillage and plunder, or do we sneak into Oilhaven like the pitiful little creatures we are and have a bloody good time?”

  There were mumblings and mutterings as the members of Los Pendejos chewed it over. Red took this moment of deliberation to relieve herself be
hind a dead cactus. When she returned, it seemed that the decision had been made.

  Fucking typical, she thought. Pop out for a piss and all of a sudden you lose your right to vote.

  “It’s settled then,” El Oscuro said, throwing a leg across his mechanical steed. “As soon as it gets dark, we’ll sneak into Oilhaven and find somewhere to hunker down. Then, first thing in the morning, we’ll have a good look around. Since the only things we know about are a bilious child and a storekeeper with pistols older than all of us put together, we should have a lot of things to discover.”

  “Won’t they hear us coming?” Samuel said. “I mean, I’m alright. I’ve got the horse, but won’t they be suspicious if four Harley’s come a-rolling into town in the middle of the night? They’re pretty noisy, and noise tends to wake people up.”

  “Which is why we’re going to bury them here,” El Oscuro said, climbing from his bike and silently cursing himself for not thinking about that before now. “Yes, I’d already thought about that,” he lied. “Start digging. At least a foot down. We don’t want to be known as the bandits whose bikes were stolen by other bandits.”

  And so Red and Blink, Samuel and Thumbs, all began to dig. Since they had no tools, they dug with their hands, and the sand was awfully dry and took a fair bit of digging.

  “No, not the horse!” El Oscuro exclaimed, for he had taken his eyes off the diggers for just a moment. “Get him out of there before he chokes to death on sand.”

  And the horse did some whinnying as he was pulled from the freshly-dug hole. He also did some headshaking and some sighing, for Mordecai had once belonged to a very sensible farmer from Ohio, and knew very well that he was in the company of idiots.

  When the holes were dug and the motorcycles buried – in a fashion – El Oscuro took a step back and inspected his crew’s handiwork. “Not bad, not bad,” he said, though it wasn’t good, either. “Looks like someone got fed up of Take That, but it’ll have to do.”

  And the sun began to drop toward the horizon, as was its wont, and the heat…well, that remained, for The Event had royally fucked up the climate. Even at night-time the temperature levelled off at around ninety. Many pyjama factories had shut in the months following The Event, as had boxer-shorts warehouses, nightie distributors, hot-water bottle manufacturers, and cuddly toy plants. Across the world, however, cold-water bottle sales had tripled, and liquid-nitrogen duvet sets were now an actual thing, thanks to an investment from the three surviving members of Dragons’ Den.

  “So what do we do now?” Thumbs said, plunking himself down in the sand.

  “Give it another half hour,” El Oscuro said. “And then Oilhaven will be ours.”

  5

  The Fox house was built on good foundations, meaning it didn’t fall down quite as often as everyone else’s. It was also built right at the edge of town, which gave the family a great 180-degree view of the desert, not that anything ever happened out there, though Tom Fox, the unfortunate middle-child, had once watched a plastic bag float from east to west, which had killed ten minutes.

  As the only parents of young children in Oilhaven (Zee, Tom, and Clint) Roger and Rita Fox knew a thing or two about sleepless nights, and bore the wounds to prove it. Thirty-nine and forty respectively, Roger and Rita Fox looked twice their age. Both were grey and brittle, a result of going without for so long. They were, in fact, the perfect advertisement for why the apocalypse was no place for raising kids.

  Roger, when he wasn’t trying to sleep, worked at the Oilhaven mine. It was his job to sift out the bad dirt and bag it up, a thankless job if ever there was one. There weren’t many uses for the bad dirt, but like fluffing midgets for porn movies (Snow Tight and the Seven Whores, The Gobbit, Lord of the Brown Rings), someone had to do it…

  Rita Fox was a stay-at-home mother, which meant that she had the unenviable task of chasing two pre-pubescent boys around the yard, occasionally hitting them with broom-handles, whilst trying to keep a seventeen-year-old girl from going off the rails. Roger moaned about his job on a daily basis, but he wouldn’t have swapped places with his wife for all the dirt in the mine.

  As a family, they sat around the youngest member with concerned expressions etched upon their countenances. In other words, Rita hoped Clint stopped being sick soon; she’d spent the majority of the day sweeping it out the front door, and it was getting to be quite bothersome.

  “He’s starting to look a bit better,” Roger said, noting the colour upon his exhausted son’s cheeks. “That medicine Lou gave you seems to be doing the trick.”

  Zee smiled and stroked her youngest brother’s head. “He said it was something called pa-ra-cee-ta-mol,” she said.

  At the mere mention of the magical remedy, Rita and Roger’s faces lit up. “Well, that’s a blast from the past,” Roger said. “Do you know, I haven’t heard that word for almost…must be twenty years.”

  “We used to take paracetamol all the time,” said Rita. “Usually to stave off the effects of a particularly nasty hangover.”

  “What’s a hangover, Mommy?” Tom asked, pulling his favourite dirty blanket around him. It wasn’t cold, but Tom sure did love his blan-kee, more than he loved not dripping with sweat.

  Roger and Rita exchanged knowing glances, as was their custom when recalling things from the past. It usually meant something long and tedious was about to follow, something of absolute inconsequence.

  “Well,” Rita said, “back in the day, before The Event, alcohol was in abundance. You couldn’t move for the stuff. In fact, there was so much of it that people were addicted to it. They would spend all their benefits on cider and whiskey and vodka and lager and, if they were feeling really flush, mojito.”

  “But didn’t they need to eat?” asked Tom.

  “They did,” Roger said, stroking his face in that way father’s do – with a dirty, half-chewed fingernail. “But these people eschewed food in order to buy more alcohol.”

  “They were what we called alco-holics,” Rita said.

  “Or pissheads,” Roger added. “But for the social drinkers, such as your mother and I, we reserved our drinking for the weekends.”

  “That’s right,” Rita said, smiling up at the empty space in front of her as if in fond remembrance. “Your father and I would go out on a Saturday night, and we would dance. And drink. Often at the same time, which meant a lot of spillages on the dance-floor.”

  “But that didn’t matter,” Roger said, reaching across and taking his wife’s hand. “As your mother said, there was plenty of the stuff.”

  “And so we would drink and dance until the early hours of the morning before hailing a taxi,” Rita said.

  “Mommy, what’s a tax-ee?” Tom asked, for he was quite the inquisitive little runt.

  “A taxi,” she said, “was a car that smelled of sick and dog-shit. What you would do is, you would signal a taxi down, and then you would climb in and tell the driver where you wanted to go. Then, when you got there, you would pay him.”

  “Sounds ridiculous,” Zee said, shaking her head. “Why would anyone want to get into a car that stank of shit and sick?”

  “Nobody wants to get into a car that stinks of shit and sick,” Roger Fox said. “But at three in the morning, when your kebab’s going cold, the smell isn’t all that important.” He stroked Rita’s hand with sickening affection; Zee gave Clint another spoonful of medicine, just so she didn’t have to watch their hands fucking.

  “So what’s a hangover?” Tom asked, for he was still waiting for an answer.

  “A hangover is how you feel the morning after all that drinking and dancing,” Rita said. “It’s like a headache and a stomach-ache rolled into one.”

  “It’s what paracetamol was originally invented for,” Roger said, though whether that was true, he didn’t know.

  “Did the alco-holics take it?” Tom asked. “When they had a hangover?”

  Roger stretched and yawned. “Well, the thing with the pissheads,” he said, “w
as that they drank so much of the stuff that they became immune to it. Some of them, the really bad ones, well they didn’t stop drinking long enough for a hangover to set in. A hangover’s what happens when you stop drinking, so a lot of them kept it up around the clock.”

  “Clever bastards,” Zee said as she walked across the room and emptied Clint’s sick-pan out of the window.

  “I don’t think they thought so,” Rita said, wringing dirty water out of a mouldy facecloth before draping it across her son’s face. Her son was too young and too sick to protest.

  “I can’t believe Lou Decker gave you the medicine for free,” Roger said. “I had him pegged as the kind of guy that would charge you three silver buttons just to use his commode.” And, Roger thought, with good reason, since he’d once paid three silver buttons just to use Lou’s commode…

  “Well, he was really nice,” Zee said, placing the empty sick-pan down beside her brother. “I think he’s getting soft in his old age, and having to look after his poor, dying mother, too.”

  Rita tutted. “Freda Decker has been dying for the last twenty years,” she said. “It all started because of an ingrowing toenail, and since then she’s been on her back. I think she’s one of those Munchausen women.”

  “What?” Roger said, scratching his head. “You mean she’s barren?”

  Rita didn’t have time to correct her husband – or reproach him for such a terrible joke – as there came a heavy knock upon the door. It was the knock of someone who clearly wanted to come in, as most knocks were.

  “Don’t all get up at once,” Roger said as he climbed to his feet. His knees audibly cracked. He walked across the room, which was lit only by three candles, but they were nice candles; the kind of candles that gave off a spicy smell.

  “Wait a minute,” Rita said, suddenly concerned. “You’re not going to answer that, are you?”

  Roger looked at the door, and then at his wife, and decided that, yes, he was going to answer it, as was the done thing with knocked doors. “It’s probably nothing,” he said, more to convince himself than anyone else.