Second Round: A Return to the Ur-Bar

by Garth Nix

  “Me?” asked Westerley. “Uh … I guess I’ll go … I’ll go with the …”

  “You don’t have to,” said Gil. “You could stay here.”

  “Here?”

  “Take over the bar. You understand beer. You’re a warrior. And you’ll live forever.”

  Westerley stared at him; not the recruit-scaring stare. This was the stare of someone profoundly misunderstood.

  “I don’t want to live forever,” he said quietly. “I want… I want to just live. I’ve fought four wars, at least, whatever you call them, and I … I’ve had enough.”

  “You want to stop killing,” said Gil.

  “I want to stop my boys dying,” said Westerley. He stopped leaning against the bar, stood straighter, almost at attention. “I’m twice their age, sometimes even more, and I can do so much, so little … sometimes I can stop something stupid, sometimes I can get us all out of the shit. But never enough.”

  “Surely you can go home,” said Gil. “You’ve done your time, and more.”

  “Yeah,” said Westerley. “The only home I have is the Army. That’s it. And the Army not at war is … uh … you wouldn’t understand.”

  “I was a soldier,” said Gil. “I know what you mean.”

  “How about that second beer?”

  “In a moment,” said Gil. He raised his voice, addressing the room.

  “Time, ladies and gentlemen. Please pick up your weapons as you leave.”

  Westerley turned and leaned back against the bar to watch everyone go. Tankards were quickly drained, there was hand-shaking all around, everyone filed out through the curtained exit.

  “I thought you said they’d go back where they came in,” said Westerley, as the last customer left. It was one of the US Navy nurses. She glanced back and smiled—at Gil.

  “Same door, different exit,” rumbled Gil. “I’ll get your drink now.”

  He reached under the bar and lifted out an even more ancient jug than the ones on the shelves behind him—and more firmly stoppered. Gil did not immediately open it.

  “Tell me,” he said. “You say you have no home but the Army. Have you tried to make one elsewhere?”

  “Well, I got married after Korea,” said Westerley. “That didn’t work out.”

  “No children?”

  “Nah. I wasn’t around much. Suzy got tired of it. And the beer … too much … but I needed it.”

  “You expected your Suzy to make the home for you,” said Gil. “Just as your Army does. But you have to work yourself to make a real home. Alone or together. If you want a life, as you say you do, then you must build it. Brick by brick.”

  He unstoppered the jug and the fumes of an even more potent beer flooded Westerley’s senses. This … this was the beer that might wash all clear, lift him to a bright future…

  “It isn’t,” said Gil, apparently in answer to Westerley’s thoughts. “Everything you have done and been will still be with you. But it may clear your mind enough to build your new life, whatever it will be. If you make it happen.”

  Westerley drew in a deep breath, inhaling those wonderful fumes. Instinctively he knew that if he drank, no other beer would ever after tempt him. He would have to find something else to manage the demons within him. But the beer hadn’t been enough anyway, this past year, so what would he be missing? And he couldn’t keep his boys alive, he couldn’t stop the killing, he couldn’t alter the course of this benighted war by the slightest fraction.

  He nodded. Gil poured. Westerley drank it down in a single, long swallow, set the tankard back on the bar, and released the longest sigh of his life.

  “You have about twenty minutes to get clear before the bombing,” said Gil. “It might be just enough.”

  “What about you let me out somewhere else?” Westerley asked thoughtfully. “Somewhere I might do some good? Can you do that?”

  “Perhaps,” said Gil. “It’s not entirely up to me.”

  “So what do I do?”

  “See what happens,” said Gil. He extended one enormous hand. Westerley shook it and walked away.

  When he lifted the curtain, the hallway was empty. There were no baskets of weapons, no shelf of grenades. The air smelled different, too, not so humid, and cooler, as if he were back in the Central Highlands, or maybe higher still.

  Westerley paused for a moment, just a moment, then marched forward and flung open the door, disappearing into sunshine.

  Back in the village, the bombs began to fall and the earth to convulse.

  But the bar was already gone, vanished in the blink of several eyes; gone in the moment between the shutters opening and closing on bomb-bay cameras; gone as if it had never been there at all.

  But If You Try Sometimes

  Diana Pharaoh Francis

  I was running from the Findlays when I plowed into a wall. Specifically, a cinderblock wall covered in peeling paint and mold.

  Welcome to Moldton. This hellhole was named after Daniel Moldoviani, the guy who’d thought building a town between the forks of the Dismal River was a brilliant idea. Fact was, the place was hot and humid, even for Nebraska, and mold lay over everything like a diseased blanket. Take a clean shirt out of a drawer and, diamonds to nuts, there’d be mold in all the fold creases. You kept your furniture three inches away from the wall and hoped mold didn’t grow on either. Rainbow Market’s best-selling product was bleach. On a good day, the town smelled like wet socks someone had left in the cellar for a week. On a bad day—well, it plain old stunk.

  The Findlays didn’t like me. Truth be told, they didn’t like anybody, but held a particular grudge against me ever since George Findlay had grabbed my ass at a church dance and I’d told him to fuck off and die. It wasn’t the insult so much that made the family hate me as the fact that he’d woken up dead the next day and hadn’t even known it. Not until breakfast when he bit off Me-Maw Findlay’s hand. The rest of the family had had to kill him again, because you can’t let undead folks walk around spreading disease and what have you and it seemed George was a little blood thirsty.

  Ever since, they’d been looking for revenge. That’s coming up on three months now and, so far, I’ve managed to keep out of their way.

  I can’t say for sure that I caused George’s death. Or anybody else’s, for that matter. But just in case, I’d kept my lips sealed since that day. Not a word passed them, not when I was alone, and not when three Findlay assholes were chasing me. I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to like what they did to me when they caught me.

  And they absolutely were going to catch me, because I’d run headlong into a wall. I bounced off it and collapsed onto the cracked pavement beside a steel door coated in faded orange paint. I lay there, my head spinning, big black blotches flying around me like moths. Blood dribbled down my face as I gasped like a catfish left high and dry on the bank.

  The peeling cinderblock wall had not been there last night. It shouldn’t have been there today. I lay there with my hands on my nose, trying to stop cascade of blood and catch my breath, all the while waiting for the Findlays to catch up and stomp my head to a pulp. They hadn’t been far behind. I’d been leaving the post office when three of them had driven by. I’d shifted into a sprint as Josie and Lee had hopped out to chase me. Earl raced ahead to cut me off. Ha! Joke’s on him. He’d be waiting awhile.

  It wasn’t much revenge, but you take your triumphs when you can.

  I heard the rattle of the steel door unlatching and tensed. It swung open. The corner caught my shoulder and I swore. “Watch it, asshole,” I moaned.

  I was aware of someone standing in the doorway looking down at me. I tried to imagine what he saw: a scrawny chick with a giant lump on her forehead, dirty blond hair frizzed up from the humidity, and legs that could be tanned or could be dirty. For the record, they were both. Oh, and then there was all the blood.

  “Looks like that hurt.”

  I was still gasping, so I flipped the owner of the voice the bird. Cuz right now, stat
ing the obvious was really not helping.

  “You going to lay there all day?”

  I could hear some kind of accent, but it was faded, like threadbare fabric so thin it almost isn’t there anymore.

  “Nope.” I managed the word, though my lips felt puffy.

  “When do you plan to rise up?”

  “Not going to.”

  Silence. The shadow moved and then the voice came from closer as the man crouched down. A big blunt finger ran down my cheek. “I am intrigued.”

  Bully for him.

  “How do you plan to leave if you don’t get up?”

  “Pretty sure the Findlays will be along any minute to drag me off,” I said.

  “Friends?”

  “Not so you’d notice.”

  “Enemies, then.”

  “That’s closer.” I was starting to breathe easier, but my vision still hadn’t cleared up. My head ached like someone had cracked it with a sledgehammer.

  “Perhaps they won’t find you.”

  “If not today then tomorrow or the next day.”

  I couldn’t keep ahead of them forever. I was getting tired of leaving the house before dawn and sneaking back whenever they weren’t looking. Not that they put that much effort into catching me. Too lazy, thank God; every single one of them had the attention span of a gnat on an acid trip. When they saw me, they chased, and when they thought of it, they dropped by to graffiti my trailer.

  On the other hand, they knew I wasn’t going anywhere fast, and that they’d eventually corner me, and that nobody would bother to help me when they did. They’d noticed I hadn’t been throwing any curses at them, so they’d stopped going out of their way to think up ways to trap me or knock me out, so I’d run myself into a rock wall just to show them.

  “They’re what you’d call tenacious. Rabidly tenacious.”

  “Come.”

  It might have been a command or an invitation or both, but it didn’t matter how I might have responded because he grabbed the waistband of my jeans and dragged me close, then lifted me up and carried me inside.

  The door closed and the light went from a harsh, steely sort of light, to a dim we-can’t-quite-afford-enough-electricity sort of light. The bar—for it was a bar—looked like it had seen better days. Down one wall was a scratched and dented wood bar top with an array of part-full bottles huddled together on plywood shelves behind. Booths with cracked red vinyl seats and gray formica tabletops lined the walls and tables crowded the rutted and scraped oak floor. I could see a couple of quarter pool tables through a doorway into another room, along with a couple sagging couches facing a TV. Wood paneling slathered the walls and faded tin painted oxblood covered the ceiling. Spiderwebs clung to the corners.

  “You need a new interior designer,” I said as my rescuer—or kidnapper, depending on how this went—set me down in a chair at one of the rickety tables in the middle of the bar. He pulled some paper napkins out of the dispenser and handed them to me. I took them in a wad and pressed them against my nose to stanch the bleeding. That’s when I got a good look at my companion.

  He was a giant. I bet he barely had to hop to dunk a basket. Dr. J only wished he was that tall. The rest of my potential kidnapper was well formed—broad shoulders, slender waist, muscular thighs, taut forearms. He folded said arms, looking down at me, his gray-green eyes piercing. I didn’t pay much attention, distracted by his braided black beard. The braiding was complicated, with gold, silver, copper, and bone beads woven through. The bottom was squared off like someone had taken a weedwhacker to it.

  It looked positively Biblical. I wonder how many hours he had to sit in a beauty chair to get that done. No self-respecting barber would be caught dead braiding beards.

  I opened my mouth to ask what the deal was, then snapped it shut. Shit. I’d been talking. I could have said something that hurt him. Even killed him, like George Findlay.

  Thing is, as ridiculous as it sounds, I did curse George to death. I deserved everything I was going to get from his kin. Not that I’d meant to, and not that I’d ever done it before. But when the words left my lips, they went with a power that came from deep inside. The old country power, as my Nan would have said. I recognized it, though I’d never felt it. There was no missing the rumble of power through my body, the vibrations that trembled down into a place inside me I didn’t even know existed.

  The words stabbed into George like thrown knives. I saw them hit; saw his body flinch and his face turn pasty. Then I’d turned and run like my ass was catching fire.

  I didn’t know he’d wake up dead. Maybe it happened because of guilt. Telling him to fuck off and die, and then regretting the command enough to call him back to something like life. Either way, I killed him with words and I’d meant never to speak again. I had no idea how to control this ability and I didn’t want to hurt innocent people. Or even the Findlays.

  But bash my head once against a stone wall and I started blathering like an idiot. I raked my brain for what I’d said. It was all fuzzy, though I remember I’d flipped him the bird. I hadn’t otherwise told him to go do anything like die or stick his head up his ass or anything else.

  I looked around the bar. It smelled of beer and something savory and delicious. I realized a couple of patrons occupied the corner booth. Both wore dirty coveralls and ratty ball caps and I could smell the gas wafting off them from across the room. Other than that, the place was empty but for me and Mister Barbie Beauty Center, or maybe it should have been Mister Ken.

  “Bathroom?” I asked after considering whether that single word could do any harm.

  “I’m Gil,” was not a helpful reply. His brows rose, prompting me to reply in kind.

  I flushed. “Melissa. Missy.”

  “Which?”

  “Pick one. Where’s the bathroom?” I prompted again. I wanted to wash my face and take an account of the damage the wall had inflicted on me.

  He eyed me a moment, then pointed me in the right direction. I stood up. Immediately my head started spinning and pounding, like a dozen Budweiser Clydesdales galloped in circles around the outside of my skull. I caught the back of my chair to steady myself, blinking hard to clear my blurry vision.

  Taking a breath, I strode across the bar hoping I didn’t bounce off any furniture or collapse in a heap.

  I made it to the bathroom without incident. Like the rest of the place, it was a lesson in how-not-to-decorate-a-bar. The door was made of unfinished plywood and sagged from two pieces of chain looped through holes on the side of the plank and bolted to the jamb. I pushed it open and squeezed inside the tiny one-hole bathroom. A stained urinal on the wall indicated the bathroom might be the only one of its kind in the bar. Must make for long lines on a Saturday night. Or maybe not. The place gave dives a bad name. Probably one bathroom was enough for the handful of customers that ventured inside. I just couldn’t imagine how or why Gil’s bar had ended up in Moldton. You didn’t build a place like this overnight. Except that’s exactly what had happened. Either that or it had dropped out of a tornado like the house in the Wizard of Oz. To be honest, both seemed equally viable options.

  I went to the sink and examined myself in the hazy mirror. I looked like hell. Blood had stopped flowing out of my nose, but I was going to have at least one black eye, probably two, and I had a bad feeling my nose was broken. Like I could afford to get that fixed. The scrapes on my forehead and chin had scabbed over already.

  I washed my face and hands and did my best to clean the blood off my clothes. My BeeGees shirt was toast. Not a bad thing. They sang like their balls were in a vise.

  Once I was as cleaned up as I was going to get, I returned to the main room. Mr. Tall, Giant, and Weird stood exactly where I’d left him. He watched me cross back to the table, his face inscrutable. I resisted the urge to smooth my hair.

  I stopped in front of him. “This place wasn’t here yesterday,” I said, my mouth taking over without any consultation with my brain.

  My resc
uer nodded. Was that a yes or a “No shit, Sherlock?”

  “Why did you run into my wall?”

  Like I’d meant to. Like he was somehow put out by my temerity in bashing myself headlong into his damned building. I hoped I’d left a bloodstain he couldn’t get out.

  “Seemed like a good idea at the time.” I gave him a shit-eating grin. I expected the big guy to get irritated, but instead, the interest in his eyes sharpened. Not the lust kind, but the bug-under-a-microscope kind. What was wrong with him?

  “Were you running to something or away?”

  “Both.” To home and away from the Findlays.

  “Sit.”

  I don’t know if it was a command, a suggestion, or a request, but it got my back up. I folded my arms, my chin jutting stubbornly.

  Giant Gil just waited like he had all the time in the world. I mentally settled in for the long haul. I’m known to be that girl who cuts off her nose to spite her face.

  After a couple minutes, it seemed to dawn on him that I was ready to wait him out. He frowned. “Why do you stand?”

  “I don’t take orders. Not from you, not from anybody.” Which wasn’t entirely true. I could take orders from bosses, as long as I didn’t disagree with them.

  He scratched his jaw. “I will get you a drink.”

  He walked off before I could say no or yes or anything else. But then, he clearly wasn’t interested in whether I wanted anything or not.

  Catching my bottom lip between my teeth, I contemplated the doors. The Findlays were probably still out there. Even if they weren’t, it didn’t really matter. They were going to catch me, sooner or later. What’s the worse they could do? Maybe I could get away with a simple tar and feathering. On the other hand, the Findlays took family bonds seriously and it wouldn’t hurt their feelings to get some payback. I didn’t think I’d like torture.

  I sighed. Maybe I just needed to leave town. Walk out and start somewhere fresh. I grimaced. And maybe on my way, I could get raped while hitchhiking. Or Leatherface could cut me into cat food.