New Title 1

by Millard, Adam

  And that is exactly what happened when the five members of Los Pendejos stepped into The Barrel, except for the piano player bit. But Gerry the guitarist did the best he could with what he had and placed his ancient acoustic down next to the stage.

  “I don’t think we’re welcome here,” Blink whispered. “I think they think we’re bandits.”

  “We are,” Red surreptitiously said from the corner of her mouth.

  “Everyone just leave the talking to me,” El Oscuro said. “My father was a trained negotiator for the LAPD.” To the people of The Barrel, he said, “People of The Barrel! We come in peace!” A second later, an apple bounced off his head and rolled away, its thrower loath to make themselves known.

  “I thought you said you were a good negotiator?” said Samuel, edging toward the door behind.

  “No,” El Oscuro said. “I said my father was a good negotiator. I take after my mother, who was a shoplifter from Kentucky.”

  In the corner of the room, a darts player threw wide of the mark before angrily turning on the new arrivals. “You made me miss,” he said.

  “Erm, sorry?” El Oscuro said.

  “I’ve never missed that board before,” said the darts player, still incredulous.

  “Well, you can add it to your CV,” said Thumbs, who wasn’t in the mood for any nonsense. “Come on. Let’s get to the bar. I’m gasping.” And with that, he made his way across the room, through the tables and chairs that had been seemingly dropped anywhere they would fit. The rest of the bandits followed, aware that you could have cut the atmosphere with a blunt spatula.

  The bartender, an angry-looking man with eyes that seemed to look in two directions at the same time, regarded the Johnnie-come-latelies with no small amount of suspicion. All around, people returned to what they had been doing before the bandits arrived, and the bandits were grateful for the resuming noise.

  “We’re looking for a…” El Oscuro said, trailing off as he tried to figure out which one of them the bartender was scowling at. When he realised it was none of them in particular, he continued. “We’re looking for a whore. Goes by the name of Abigail. From what we’ve heard, she’s not much to look…” He trailed off again for fear of offending the visually-impaired barkeep. “She has a glass eye…” Fuck, it was harder than it sounded.

  The bartender plucked the filthy towel from his shoulder and set about wiping down the dust- and grime-coated counter. “You want information, you’re going to have to buy a round of drinks first.” He spat on the towel and began polishing a used glass.

  El Oscuro nodded thoughtfully. “In that case, what’ll it be?” he said, turning to his band.

  “I’ll just have a glass of water with a nip of vodka,” Red said, perusing the chalkboard hanging over the bar. There wasn’t much to choose from; and water seemed to be the main constituent of everything.

  “Can I get a millilitre of whiskey, topped up with your finest rainwater?” Thumbs said.

  “Make that two,” added Blink. “And I don’t suppose you’ve got any bar snacks, have you?”

  The barkeep growled. The Barrel hadn’t seen so much as a pork scratching or a bag of peanuts in over twenty years.

  “I’ll have a Drambuie light,” El Oscuro said, which, according to the specials board, was a quarter of a mil of Drambuie, topped up with water and finished off with a cocktail umbrella. It would be just like the old days, except that in the old days you didn’t have to buy a thousand drinks to get a bit tipsy.

  “Coming right up,” said the barkeep as he placed the spit-polished glass back on the shelf behind the bar. Then, without even a pause, he took it back down again and half-filled it with water from a rusty boiler at the end of the counter.

  “Wouldn’t want to be the one to get that glass,” El Oscuro said, laughing and nudging Thumbs in the ribs. When the bartender syringed a nip of golden fluid into it and dropped a cocktail umbrella in the glass, El Oscuro stopped laughing. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he said. “I’m going to have to get a tetanus when we get out of here.”

  When all the drinks were poured – there was nothing pretty about it; it was like watching a thalidomide clown juggle swords – the bartender lined them up on the counter and scribbled something down on a piece of paper.

  “That’ll be two gold bars or the equivalent,” he said, dropping the pen with some finality.

  El Oscuro almost spat out the Drambuie part of his drink. “Excuse me?” he said, wiping his chin.

  “Two gold bars or the equivalent,” said the barkeep. “I know I’ve got dodgy eyes, but stuttering’s never been a problem for me.” He stared them up and down, and two at a time, which was a remarkable feat.

  “I wish you’d told us that before you made the drinks,” El Oscuro said, snatching Red’s drink from her just before she downed it. “We’re just a humble band of travellers. Surely you can see we’re not nobility? That we don’t have two gold bars to rub together?” And if they did, The Barrel would have been the last place on earth they would have been spending them.

  “If you don’t have the means,” the bartender said, “then you’re in a lot of trouble.”

  “Really?” Blink said, glancing around the room. “Because we haven’t seen a cop, a deputy, or sheriff since we got here, and you don’t look like the type of guy to—” He was cut off mid-sentence, which was understandable due to the large fist wrapped around his throat.

  The bandits took a step back, apart from Blink, whose feet were several inches off the ground. On the end of the giant fist wrapped around their comrade’s throat was a giant arm, and attached to that was…well, you get the idea. This hulking mass of rock and sinew was visibly steaming, and not in the way one might expect in an establishment of alcohol.

  “Do you want me to break his neck, Roy?” the giant asked the barkeep, who was smiling now, happy that he had acquired the upper hand.

  “I don’t think that will be necessary, Tiny,” replied the barkeep. To El Oscuro, he said, “So, where were we? Oh, that’s right. You were about to pay for your round.” He held out a hand, palm up, knowing that it wouldn’t remain empty for long.

  El Oscuro sighed and rolled his eyes. “Can somebody pay the man?” he said. “I’ve left my wallet at home.”

  “We didn’t even want the drinks to begin with,” Red said, reaching into her bra and coming out with a handful of freshwater pearls. She slammed them down on the counter, eschewing the barkeep’s open palm altogether, just to be a nuisance.

  Tiny growled and released Blink, who crumpled to the floor like a sack of mouldy cauliflowers. “Is that enough, Roy?” asked the giant.

  The bartender scraped the pearls into his hand and, after inspecting one with a magnifying eyepiece, stuffed the lot into his ass pocket. “Just about,” he said. “Enjoy your drinks, folks, and then might I be so bold as to suggest you piss off elsewhere?” He turned his back, as if to go about his business, but El Oscuro was having none of it.

  “Hang on,” he said. “You didn’t tell us where we can find this whore…this Abigail.”

  Roy the bartender turned around. “She’s sitting in that corner over there,” he said. “You walked right past her when you came in.”

  They all turned and cast disapproving glances toward the mess sitting in the darkest cranny of the room. It was, if they were being honest, the best place for her. Abigail the whore must have been on the wrong side of seventy. Her boobs were sitting on the table; inbetween them was a pint glass, half empty (or half full, depending on which way you looked at it). The woman looked hopeless, desolate, and liable to kill herself if one more person rejected her.

  “Come on,” El Oscuro said, picking his glass up and taking a long gulp. “Let’s go and secure us somewhere to sleep.”

  And so, across the room they went, nursing their expensive drinks as if they were apt to explode if treated too carelessly.

  *

  It had been a long week for Abigail Sneve. A long and demoralising week. It h
ad been the kind of week she should have, as a whore working in a world that no longer saw sex as a viable business model, been used to by now. And yet she could never get used to it. All the knockbacks, all the excuses, all the dirty looks from disapproving survivors – The Event could have done her a huge favour all those years ago and wiped her off the face of the planet along with the seven billion others that had perished.

  Her only bit of luck that week had come in the form of one of Kellerman’s goons; which one, she wasn’t quite sure. And it had been…fun while it lasted. The goon had paid her, which was always a bonus, and so here she was, drowning her sorrows in the only bar within a hundred miles, maybe more.

  “Excuse me?” a voice said from somewhere above. At first, she thought it was God, calling her home, and her hopes were falsely raised, for when she looked she found four rough-looking fellas and a blonde girl staring down at her. It was the one at the front that did the talking. “We were told you might be able to help us.”

  Abigail couldn’t believe her luck. Her sadness dissolved quicker than her first husband’s penis on their wedding night. “’Ere, I knew it!” she said, clearly delighted. “Don’t tell me. You all want a piece? A slice of old Abigail? Well, let me tell you, there’s plenty to go around, ain’t that right?” she said, somewhat proudly to the entire room. When nobody answered, she pressed on. “Anyway, what’ll it be? Ain’t nuffink out of bounds, let me tell you. I’ve had it in every ‘ole, so I have, and I’ve even ‘ad new ‘oles put in, just in case. Oh, this is gonna be so fuckin’ great! Listen…” Now she was only talking to Red. “I’ve ‘ad birds before, you know, but nuffink quite like you.” She licked her lips, and Red, who couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing, swallowed down a mouthful of bile. “So, where do you wanna do it? We can go back to mine, if you’d like. O’course, I’ll wanna come back ‘ere afterwards, you know? Spend me winnings, and all that. You lot look a bit sick? You ain’t gonna give me nuffink, are you? I’m as clean as they come, I am.”

  El Oscuro sipped furtively on his drink, and arrived at the conclusion that there was nowhere near enough alcohol in it. “We’re not here for an orgy,” he said. “But we were pointed in your direction by a naked alleyway man, who said you might be able to help us with a slight accommodation issue we’re having, and will continue to have, for the next few days.”

  The whore visibly deflated. “Oh, you’ve been talking to Bollock-Naked Mick, ‘ave you? And ‘e reckons I can ‘elp you, does he?”

  The bandits nodded in unison, and also in hope.

  “If you could put us up for a few days, I’m sure we can come to some sort of arrangement.” El Oscuro didn’t know what that arrangement might be, but he was almost positive there would be no sexual intercourse involved.

  Almost positive.

  Abigail licked her lips, something she’d been doing for many years, if the scabs surrounding her mouth were anything to go by. “You’re not from around these parts, are you?” she said, and then without waiting for an answer, added, “Nah, didn’t think so. ‘Ere, you ain’t gonna tie me up and steal me stuff, are you? I don’t have a lot, but what I do ‘ave, I’m quite fond of.”

  Red, wide-eyed as if affronted by such a remark, said, “I, for one, am appalled. Appalled that, in this day and age, a band of bandits can’t walk into a town without the finger being pointed. It’s this kind of small-mindedness that prevents us from making a decent, honest living.”

  Abigail waited for the woman’s diatribe to finish before saying, “But you just said you were bandits, and I ain’t stupid. Bandits is bandits is bandits.”

  “Okay,” El Oscuro said. “If you let us crash on your floor, I’ll make sure that Samuel over here makes use of your, er, services.”

  At that, she brightened. Somewhere behind, Samuel almost choked on his water-vodka.

  “Deal,” the whore said, holding out a liver-spotted hand, which El Oscuro shook, albeit reluctantly. “Give me ‘alf an hour and we’ll get you settled in.”

  El Oscuro grinned, for they now had a base of operations, and it had cost him nothing.

  It had, on the other hand, cost poor Samuel dearly.

  11

  Sleep had never been a problem for Lou Decker. As a child, he’d dozed through earthquakes, terrorist attacks, volcanic eruptions, and the mailman; his mother used to call his name from the bottom of the stairs, “Lou! Lou! Loooooooooouuuuuuuuuuu, you lazy fucker!” and even that wasn’t enough to rouse him. Eventually, Freda Decker would take a more hands-on approach: a bucket of water, a sack of rats, thirty-thousand volts. Oh, yes, Lou Decker was well-trained in the art of sleep.

  But, it transpired, pissing milk from one’s nipples was more than enough to keep him awake for the rest of the night. What started out as a trickle, easily dealt with by his sheets and a filthy towel he kept at the foot of his bed for ‘other’ purposes, became so much worse. A deluge. A flood. There was only so much of it he could drink himself, and so in the end, he’d made his way down to the kitchen, where he now stood, surrounded by pots and pans and cups and jugs and upturned hats, all of which were filled with milk…

  His milk.

  Milk from his nipples; nipples that had no right to be producing milk, or anything else, for that matter. In just a few hours he’d filled every receptacle he could find, and several gallons had been lost to the sink, for there was nowhere else to put it.

  As well as sleep, Lou had always been good at speaking. Words were his forte, inasmuch as he used them on a daily basis, and seldom got lost for them.

  But this…this had rendered him dumbstruck. No matter how hard he tried, nothing would come, and so there he stood, tits dripping like a snotty-nosed dachshund, mouth opening and shutting like a fish out of water, trying to get his head around what was happening to him. He was still standing like that an hour later when a voice from the door behind said:

  “What in the name of all that is good and pure is going on in here?”

  Lou spun, so quickly that milk from his teats geysered across the room and slapped into the face of his mother, who recoiled in horror, as was her wont.

  “Mom!” he said, suddenly very embarrassed. Though not because of his naked body; she’d seen all that malarkey before. “What are you doing out of bed?”

  She wiped the white liquid from her eyes and gagged. “I…I heard you moving about down here,” she said. “I thought you were a bandit.” Indeed, the hatchet in her hand suggested that, if he had been a bandit, he would have been leaving in several parts.

  “Not a bandit, mother,” he said. For some reason, the milk was coming thick and fast now. It was almost as if his mother’s presence hastened the flow, as if the sight of her, standing there covered in it, provoked his nipples to ‘Make more! Make more milk, you lactating sonofabitch!’

  “What in the…” She stepped off the stairs and cast her eye over the overfilled receptacles haphazardly spread around the room. “What is all this? All this…stuff?”

  “It’s nothing, mother,” Lou said, though it was very clearly something. “Go back to your deathbed.”

  Freda walked through the kitchen, nudging pots and pans with her gnarled feet. She, too, was naked; her skin was almost…serpentine, as if she could shed it at any moment. That was one of the downfalls of spending so much time dying in bed. The sores.

  “Mother, this is very embarrassing, and you being here is just making it worse.” Lou leaned over the sink just as a long gush of milk evacuated his body. “In fact, none of this is real. Go back to bed. You’re dreaming. All of this is a dream. A very fucking bad dream.”

  “It’s not a dream,” his mother said, crouching next to an upside-down fedora. She dipped a long, gnarly finger in and then pushed it into her mouth. It was Lou’s turn to gag. “Is this…is this milk?” she said, astonished.

  “Mother, can we talk about this in the morning?” Lou said, plonking himself down at the kitchen table. The spray no longer mattered; what mattered was that he was
going to be the laughing stock of Oilhaven. “What have I done to deserve this?”

  Freda Decker cupped her hands and drank freely from the fedora. She hadn’t tasted milk – or seen it, for that matter – in over ten years. She’d forgotten just how lovely it was, how sweet and earthy and delightfully creamy; it all came flooding back to her in an instant, and she had to cross her legs to prevent the orgasm that threatened to buckle her knees and send her sprawling into the myriad pots and pans.

  “Oh my God!” she gasped. “It is! It’s milk! You’re making milk! How the fuck are you making milk!?” She drank some more, only coming up for air when it was absolutely necessary.

  “Can you not do that?” Lou said. “It’s very distracting.”

  Wiping her thin, hairy lips, Freda Decker smiled sheepishly.

  “It started yesterday,” Lou said. “I thought it was just sweat. I mean, you know how warm and sticky it gets in the shop. Then, a few hours ago, I woke up covered in the stuff. I could feel it pumping through me, like some creamy enema.” He wiped the tears from his eyes; milky tears that were warm and sticky to the touch. “I tasted it,” he said. “God, I tasted my own milk, and it was…better than I expected, actually.”

  “It’s fucking gorgeous!” said his mother, lapping at her palms with a black and repulsive tongue. Lou shot her an exasperated look and she stopped.

  “Anyway, I was in a right mess, and there seemed to be no end to the milk, so I had to get up, and I came down and…” He gestured to the filled vessels all around. “The rest is history.”

  Freda Decker let all of that sink in for a moment. And while it was sinking in, she walked across the room and picked up an aluminium flask from the countertop. Lou had already filled it up with his milk, and Freda Decker emptied it in just three long swallows. “Okay,” she said, wiping the white from her lips. “Let’s look at this scientifically. Nothing has changed. Your diet is the same? You haven’t noticed any strange marks, say, a 666 on your scalp?”