by Garth Nix
She slowed down, turned right, and followed a narrow lane to the parking lot behind the bar.
Walking back down the lane to get to the establishment’s front entrance, she had to move to one side as an old, battered sedan with more rust than paint rolled slowly past her toward the lot in back. The driver, a twenty-something man with long, lanky hair and a sallow face, gave her a lingering once-over as he went by. The way he looked at her made her feel dirty, like an object and not a woman. She was almost twice his age, with a daughter and a husband waiting for her back home.
Waiting for her … and here she was, about to walk into a bar for the first time in eighteen years. Anna almost turned around, but then she realized that she’d have to face the man in the car again. A moment later, she was around the corner and pushing her way into the tavern. It was dim inside, with a few rough-hewn wooden tables scattered around and a bar with five or six mismatched stools directly opposite the entrance. The establishment was empty, except for a lone customer sitting on one of the stools
Approaching, she saw that her fellow customer was a man in what looked like a long, dark robe with the hood pulled up so that it obscured his face. That was weird, kind of gangsterish in a way, and not really something she recalled seeing in any bar except maybe around Halloween. Still, he didn’t worry her the way the man in the car had.
She took a seat a couple places down from the robed man. Then the bartender came out of the back and drove any thoughts of her fellow morning drinker out of her head. He was tall, a head taller even than her husband, who’d once played college football, and broad-shouldered like he could wrestle a bull to the ground with his bare hands. She shook her head. She had no idea why that image had popped into her head.
Coming over, he said, “Name’s Gil. What would you like?”
“Shot of tequila.”
“Don’t have tequila.”
She frowned. What kind of bar didn’t have tequila? “A shot of anything, then.”
He looked at her inscrutably. “All right.”
The bartender turned around and pulled what looked like a ceramic jar off a shelf. Not even a bottle, a jar. She didn’t know of any alcoholic beverages that came in ceramic packaging. Still, it looked clear and dangerous when he poured a measure into the shot glass he’d placed in front of her.
Behind her, she heard somebody come into the bar, though she was too busy contemplating the drink in front of her to turn and see who’d walked in. Besides, if it was the man from the parking lot, somehow she wasn’t the least bit worried with Gil here. She barely noticed as the bartender walked away.
“You going to drink that or just look at it?” The voice came from the man sitting a few seats down from her. She glanced sideways, but still couldn’t see his face because of the hood.
“Drink it,” she answered. “At least, I think so.”
“Trying to work up your courage, eh?”
“Yeah.”
“I know how it is,” the man said. “You’ve got a problem you can’t figure out how to solve, so you reach for the thing that will at least make you feel better.” The man turned towards her and pulled back his hood. He had penetrating blue eyes, an olive complexion, a roughly trimmed red beard, and what looked like an afro that was just as red as his beard. Whatever ethnicity he was, she’d never beheld the combination before. “Except that you know that it won’t really make you feel better. And it won’t solve your problem, either.”
Anna couldn’t help it. The tears started flowing. In a moment, she was hunched over her shot glass, shoulders shaking with the force of her sobs. As she cried, she was dimly aware that the man had moved to the stool next to her and was rubbing her back in a comfortable, fatherly way, while calmly telling her that everything was going to be fine.
She looked up at him through her tears. “You don’t know a thing about my situation.”
The man shrugged and gave her a quirky smile. “How long have you been sober?”
“What?”
“It’s a simple question. I know you know the answer.”
She sighed. “My last drink was eighteen years, ten months and twenty days ago.” Since she’d found out she was pregnant with her daughter and realized that her totally out-of-control lifestyle of parties, alcohol, and nose candy had to end.
“You can call me Khalish,” the man said. “I’m afraid you’d find my full name terribly difficult to pronounce.” He looked down at her shot glass. “Offer me your drink.”
Anna tilted her head and looked at him for a moment. He had blue eyes in a weathered face that made it hard to guess his age, although he certainly wasn’t young. There was a strange intensity to his gaze, as if her offering the drink to him was somehow important in a way that she didn’t understand. She pushed the shot glass in his direction, though her emotions were in such a whirl that she couldn’t have said precisely why she did it. Except that, somehow, she trusted Khalish.
He smiled and reached up to gently cup her cheek in his hand. “Go clean yourself up, Anna. When you come back, you can tell me about your problem.”
Anna nodded, unable to speak, suddenly hopeful that maybe there was a way out of her situation. A way for her husband and daughter to survive the catastrophe that had befallen them. It didn’t occur to her to wonder how Khalish knew her name.
* * *
After Anna left to find the bar’s facilities, such as they were, Khalish crooked his finger and beckoned the bartender over.
“I see you tricked your way into getting a drink,” Gil said.
“It’s not trickery,” Khalish answered. “She gave me an offering. She needs our help.”
Gil raised his eyebrows. “Our help?”
“Yours, really,” Khalish admitted. “At least right now.”
“How do they say it nowadays?” The bartender pretended to think for a moment. “Yes, I remember now. Screw you. I don’t do the bidding of the gods, not even a minor has-been like you.”
Khalish laughed. “Don’t get uppity with the gods, Gilgamesh. It didn’t work out so well for you last time.”
Gil leaned over the bar, which might have been intimidating to most people, but intimidation emphatically didn’t work on Khalish. As divine beings went, he was barely on the scale, but if intimidation had an opposite, opposing force, he basically embodied it.
“Gil,” he whispered. “The man at the table by the door has been trailing Anna to make sure she follows the instructions she’s been given. Since she hasn’t, he’s going to kill her as soon as she leaves. I admit, you don’t have to do anything I tell you, but if you don’t take him out, her blood will be on your hands, not mine.”
“Why don’t you do it, then?”
Khalish sighed. “I’d be happy to. The man’s a murderer, a rapist, and a thief. But I’m bound to influence, not to intervene directly. It’s better this way. We really don’t need another fiasco like Pompeii.” He shook his head. “Just help her, Gil. Please.”
Gil grimaced and walked away. Khalish turned to watch as the burly bartender stepped out from behind the bar and approached the man at the table.
“Why have you been following that woman?”
The man cursed at Gil, then fumbled his jacket open and started to draw a gun. Gil struck out with a fist that smote like lightning, knocking the man backwards out of his chair and slamming his head into the wall. While the man was still dazed, Gil reached down with both hands and grabbed his head. Twisting, he deliberately snapped the thug’s neck.
Then he picked up the man’s body, threw it over his shoulder, and carried it past the bar. “Nobody threatens me with a weapon in my own bar. I assume you can dispose of the body after the bar closes?”
“Yes,” Khalish said. “That I can do.” His lips quirked up into a half-smile. “Being dead and all, I hardly think that will count as an intervention.”
Gill nodded. He shouldered open the door to the storage room and dropped the body inside with a dull thud.
* *
*
Anna returned from the restroom with her face scrubbed and her hair pulled back and tied. She plopped herself onto the stool next to Khalish and fixed him with an intent gaze. “How did you know my name?
“I’m a god,” Khalish said, smiling. “I’m supposed to know things.”
She gave him an incredulous look. “You’re God?” To think, she’d actually taken this loon seriously. Her family was in danger and she was wasting time with this idiot. Of course, she was an alcoholic in a bar during a crisis, so he wasn’t alone in being a total idiot.
“Not God, or at least not the one God you’re thinking of. I’m an old god, Anna. The God you speak of is but a baby compared to me.”
She rolled her eyes. “You expect me to believe this? Seriously?”
“You are the descendant of countless generations of forgotten ancestors, the last in a long, long chain. Before the Sumerians, the Assyrians, and countless other tribes and civilizations lost in the deepness of time, I was there. I was the voice whispering in the back of people’s minds, helping them conqueror their fear of the darkness, of the ravenous forest fires that plagued their migrations, of the ever-encroaching ice, and their unreasoning horror of the glowing eyes in the shadows beyond their campfires. I was perseverance and fortitude and courage. I was the spirit that never gave up hope, even when all was lost.”
She had goosebumps on her arms. For just a moment, she believed him, then reason took hold again. “You’re insane.”
“No.” Khalish shrugged. “Just operating on a plane you’re not used to.”
“Yeah, right.” She turned to the bartender. “This guy’s like, you know, totally out to lunch.”
Gil stopped wiping down the bar top and fixed her with a steady gaze. “Well, he can be like a sharp stone in a boot sometimes, but he is a god, though not a very powerful one anymore.”
“No worshippers,” Khalish said, smiling sadly. “It happens to all of us eventually, I suppose.”
She stood up, the stool sliding backwards as she did so. “I’m outta here, guys.” She shook her head. “This is way too crazy for me.” She walked away from the bar.
Before she got to the door, Khalish said, “They won’t honor their promise, you know.” Anna stopped in her tracks, her back still facing him. “They need to make sure all the witnesses that can identify them are dead or their little streak will come to an end.” She turned around and glared at Khalish, her chest heaving with suppressed emotion. “You’re just the latest in a long, long line of robberies in cities all across the country.”
“You’re in on it.”
“Never,” Khalish stated flatly. “My oath on that in any form you’ll accept.”
“He’s not involved,” Gil interjected helpfully.
“You gave me an offering. Do you want my help or not?”
Anna stalked up to Khalish and looked him straight in the eyes. With her low heels, they were almost exactly the same height. He met, and held, her gaze without flinching.
“Yes,” she said, finally. “I want your help. But if you’re playing me, I will rip your heart out and feed it to the crows.”
Gil said, “I think I like her.”
Anna shook her head tiredly and gave Gil the kind of look that women give men who aren’t housetrained. Khalish patted the stool next to him and she took a seat.
Khalish picked up the shot glass and downed it. Anna had the sense that a bargain had just been finalized. “Ah, the good stuff.” Looking over to Gil, who was leaning on the other side of the bar, he said, “You never give me the good stuff.”
“She’s prettier than you.” Gil chuckled. “And you never have any money, so you’re lucky I pour anything for you at all.”
Khalish sighed, then turned his attention to Anna. “Tell us about your predicament.”
“I thought you knew it all, being a god and everything.”
“Well, I’m not an all-seeing, all-knowing god, though I do get flashes. I know enough now, I think, to understand the basic shape of your situation, but it’s best to fill us in completely. Especially since Gil’s involved now, too.”
Anna could feel her eyes welling with tears, but she refused to cry again. “My husband, Scott, went out the door this morning to go to work. They were waiting for him outside with baseball bats.”
* * *
Anna sat at the kitchen table, nibbling on an English muffin while Patty, her eighteen-year-old daughter, prattled on about her summer vacation plans. She heard the front door open and didn’t think much of it. Scott was always forgetting something and then coming right back in to get it, like his laptop bag, his lunch bag, or his access badge for work. It was amazing how such a smart man could be so forgetful.
Patty got up and headed for the door to the living room. Grinning, she said, “Dad, did you forget—” Then she screamed as she rounded the corner. Still screaming, she backed up hurriedly as two men stepped into the room, pushing a bleeding and obviously badly beaten Scott before them.
Scott was being held upright by the larger of the two men, possessed of a jutting jaw and long, Southern-style sideburns that curved at the bottom. The man slammed Scott headfirst into a kitchen cabinet. Scott crumpled to the floor, unmoving. A small pool of blood gathered around his head. Anna remembered that head wounds bled copiously, then wondered why she was so calm. Maybe it was shock. She found herself still holding her English muffin a hand’s width in front of her mouth.
Patty was still screaming. The smaller man turned to his companion. “Shut her up.”
The man who’d just hurt her husband reached behind him and pulled out a baseball bat that he’d tucked into the back of his pants. He lunged forward with the bat as if it were a sword and drove it into Patty’s stomach. She folded up like a wet tissue, ending up in a fetal position on the floor and gasping for breath.
Anna dropped her English muffin and stood up so fast that her chair tipped over. “Leave her alone!”
“Or what?” The smaller man casually set his own baseball bat on the counter, then pulled out a gun. Anna decided he was the dangerous one, and not just because of his firearm. His dark hair was shaved short on the sides, but long and combed back on top. There was a teardrop tattooed next to his left eye. He looked stylish and dangerous, like a Hollywood movie villain. It seemed like a carefully cultivated look.
She didn’t say anything. It was clear who had the upper hand.
He stepped closer to her, extended his arm full-length, and held the gun up to her head. “Oh, hey, did we catch you eating breakfast?” She was petrified. Nobody had ever pointed a gun at her before.
“Who are you?”
He smiled, though it never reached his eyes. “I’m Moe and my large buddy here is Larry.”
“W-w-what do you want?”
“Well, honey, we gotta talk about the Rules.” He waved his gun around casually. “See, you follow my Rules, you all get through this just fine. If not, we’ll kill you. You gonna follow the Rules?”
“Yes,” Anna said. Like there was a choice.
“Good,” Moe said. “The first Rule is, you gotta provide a most excellent breakfast. And not this hoity-toity muffin shit.” He took a few steps back, turned his head to look at Larry. “Check the fridge.” Anna wanted to just collapse and start crying, but she needed to be strong for her family.
Larry opened the fridge. “Hey, we got steak and some eggs.”
“Rule Number Two. You will wear nothing but bra and panties in our presence. So, take it off, lady.” Moe gestured with his gun.
Anna just stared at him. She’d heard the words, but it was if she was having a problem processing them.
“Larry, she needs some encouragement.”
Without a word, Larry walked over and swung his bat down on Scott’s arm. She heard a crunch that sounded like breaking bones.
Numbly, Anna stripped out of her dress. She watched, seething, as they made Patty do the same.
There were more rules: giving up their cel
l phones, staying away from windows, not answering the door, and more. Moe had a list that he pulled out of his pocket. But even Anna was surprised at their end goal.
* * *
“They made me cook them breakfast in my underwear. Steak and eggs and bacon and toast with jam.” She clenched her jaw with anger. “While my husband lay bleeding on the floor.”
Gil slammed his mighty fist on the bar. “If I could leave this abode, I would smite them for you.”
Anna cocked her head quizzically.
“Gil has the bad habit of pissing off the gods,” Khalish said. “He’s cursed to never leave this bar.”
“Oh.” Anna supposed that once you started believing in obscure, has-been gods, nothing else should really be a surprise.
“Go on,” Khalish said, gently.
“They want me to rob a bank for them.” She wiped her eyes furiously, struggling to keep from crying again. “They already picked it out. First National, on Jefferson Drive, because it doesn’t have any barriers between the cashiers and the customers. They gave me instructions on how to make sure I got all the cash, but none of the die packs. And a sawed-off shotgun with no ammunition, so I’d have something to threaten the bank employees with. They said if I didn’t do it, they were going to kill my husband, then rape my daughter and kill her too.”
Gil said, “They’re eventually going to kill your family anyway, even if you give them what they want.” At Khalish’s questioning glance, he responded, “What? I was a king once. I’ve put brigands like these to death before.”
Khalish nodded. “He’s right.”
“I thought about the police,” Anna said, “but I don’t think Moe is the kind of guy that will give up.”
Khalish looked away, as if he was gazing into a far-off vista that only he could see. After a moment, he said, “There are very, very few probability lines where police intervention works.” He turned and fixed his blue eyes on her face. “Their training is to contain the situation and then negotiate. As you’ve surmised, these men will go down fighting rather than be taken.” He shrugged. “Your best chance is to ambush them and kill them.”
