“Gambling is for fools and lazy men.” He insisted. I really couldn’t argue with that. He gave me a bag of jerky to share with Bo and relayed my message to the Tower with his Ham radio. If I didn’t run into a horde of undead or bandits, I could reach Tombstone in time to touch base with some old friends and contacts before my meeting.
Bo snarled and growled happily with his muzzle shoved down in the bag of jerky while I set a northeastern course for Tombstone, the largest producer of beef for the settlements and the place where some of the roughest, toughest and most eccentric survivors hung their hats.
3
Horse
Tombstone, AZ
The clock on the radio displayed 10:02 PM when I pulled into the gravel parking lot of the Butcher’s Block Saloon, a seedy dive bar in a rundown stucco building away from the main thoroughfare. A place where Hell Drivers, retrievers, gamblers and bounty hunters congregated to swap lies, knife wounds and gunfire. As usual, the lot was packed with a wild assortment of dust covered, bullet pocked, gore stained vehicles sitting under the dim lights that ringed the parking lot. Heavily modified off roaders, old school muscle cars on truck suspensions with oversized tires and armored to the gills, custom motorcycles and exotic sports cars sporting jet engines, all parked haphazardly wherever they could squeeze in. I surveyed the parking lot to see who was in attendance.
With some exceptions, the human being is a social animal. Nearly every settlement had at least one drinking establishment where men and women gathered to celebrate their victories or drown their sorrows. We crave the company of our own kind and congregate with those most similar to us. You don’t see a lion hanging out with a group of zebras and the same was true here. This place was a den full of lions, but it was also a place to unwind with old friends and decompress with folks who understood what it was like to venture into the badlands. That desire for companionship was what drove the thriving bar scene in this particular slice of paradise.
I eyed the ramshackle building with the neon beer signs glowing in the windows. The Butcher’s Block Saloon was my kind of joint. Loud, rowdy, smoky and full of plenty of fools that were easily parted from their money. The shelves behind the bar would be stocked with a variety of premium alcoholic beverages along with an assortment of rotgut and home brewed shine for those who were down to the last of their earnings. Sides of beef were always cooking in the twin smokers behind the bar. Rooms were available upstairs by the hour or the night. Dim lighting, ample seating and the opportunity for just about any kind of mischief a man could want, all nestled within those glorious walls. God, I missed this place. Ice cold beer and a decent cook rounded out the package. And do you know where that aforementioned booze came from? The barkeep couldn’t call up to a distributor anymore and have a case of Angel’s Envy brought in with the next load. Other than a few moonshine stills and microbreweries, alcohol wasn’t being made for widespread consumption anymore. The drivers of the outlandish machines who ventured where others feared to tread brought it in. The scavenged booze is swapped for gold coin or other valuables. The industrious barkeep sells it by the glass for a profit, in essence getting back the gold they’d just paid out. The fool who risked his neck to get it pays for the privilege of getting drunk with people he knows. Many, myself included, end up owing the house an overdue tab for drinking up a fraction of the products we brought in the first place. No one cared though. Drinking with friends was a party, and every night at the Butcher’s Block, the party was in full swing.
The patrons of the Butcher’s Block were an eclectic bunch. All with their own unique style of dress. Stepping into a retriever bar was like showing up on the set of a movie where the old west meets the future. Men and women dressed in leather and furs and repurposed armor toting Uzi’s, AK-47’s and oversized Bowie knives. Hell Drivers, the modern version of the Pony Express, clad in shiny leather jackets, tennis shoes and neon colored shirts, the fearless pilots of the high-performance sports cars with jet engines. There were plenty of self-styled cowboys and old west outlaws who chose an armored rig in place of a horse. Dusters and leather chaps were a common sight hanging on the coat rack by the door. Garish, yet practical protection when dealing with the undead, they lent an air of mystery and hinted at the romance of a forgotten time. They gathered to drink away their profits and tell their tall tales. I hadn’t met him but there was a rumor of a former football player in the retriever game who still wore his uniform with full pads and helmet to ward off bites. Some went the Matrix approach. Body hugging black leather outfits, outlandish hairstyles and faces full of piercings, all bellied up to the bar in haze of smoke and raucous laughter.
It takes all kinds, I guess. Jeans and cowboy boots, along with a Stetson hat and a Ruger Single Action chambered in .45 Colt were what I normally wore when I wasn’t on the job. I’ve been dressing that way my whole life and it was the most comfortable to me. When I was on a retrieve I went with a more tactical approach, a full set of SWAT gear I’d lifted from a police department and semi auto pistols along with my M4 carbine. I normally work alone so most people never saw that. Like I said, it’s an image thing and I played the game as well as anybody. If people wanted to tell stories of me dressed like Wyatt Earp gunning down zombies with a six shooter in each hand, then let them. There’s no such thing as bad publicity.
I was disappointed when I didn’t see the ambulance driven by Nurse Nancy and her partner Pancho. In all honestly, Nancy had never actually been a nurse. It was theatrics, pure and simple, a way to stand out from the crowd. Seems like everyone wanted to be a retriever or a bounty hunter nowadays, so being colorful or memorable gave you an edge against the competition, especially if you were good at the job, and she was. Nancy was a former real estate agent turned bounty hunter. Her former life had taught her the importance of presentation in a sell, and she played it up for all she was worth.
Even at the end of the world, people still wanted to see justice meted out for the worst crimes. Anyone who wanted to foot the bill could post a bounty for the capture of a bandit or raider. There were a lot of bad people out there. Death row inmates, serial killers, violent mental patients and every other kind of two-legged predator you can imagine with no one to stop them from indulging their sick desires on innocent victims. Like cockroaches, the worst of humanity found a way to survive, and the chaos following the outbreak freed them from their inhibitions.
Sometimes the catch would be delivered to the authorities of the settlement that posted the reward, sometimes they were delivered to an abandoned barn or warehouse and turned over to a widowed spouse or parent looking for a little vengeance. Some would argue that vengeance and justice were separate matters. That may have been true in the corrupt, polluted legal system of the old days, but now they were interchangeable terms. As for me, I could care less if some rapist or child molester met his bloody end screaming in a derelict building or staked out over a fire ant hill.
Nancy’s partner, Pancho was a former mixed martial artist from Mexico City, Mexico. He was a tall, good looking guy and a crack shot with any weapon and an expert with edged weapons. He had a quick, friendly smile but was even quicker with the twin H&K pistols he wore on his hips. He had a weakness for tequila, pretty girls, and was a terrible gambler, so I never missed an opportunity to buy him a drink and pull out a deck of cards. He was a solid guy in a fight though, and the three of us had worked a few jobs together. Pancho watched her back, she watched his and they stayed busy bringing in the worst of the worst. He’d told me that they met when Nancy had interrupted a cannibal barbeque where he was the main course and they’d been a team ever since. He was extremely loyal to her, and they made a formidable pair. She liked to say that she kept him around because there were some things a lady just shouldn’t have to do, but their bond was much deeper. I considered them friends and that was a title I didn’t give to many people.
They used their converted dually ambulance to transport their prisoners back to where they were wanted. The rear of th
e big machine contained a steel cage pilfered from a zoo and the cabinets that once held lifesaving equipment were now filled with all sorts of nasty surprises she wasn’t shy about using in her pursuits. The Nurse moniker was bestowed upon her due to her propensity to inject her prisoners with a cocktail of drugs to make them easier to handle. In most cases, bounties were worth more alive than dead, but for those that would rather take their chances with Nancy than the hangman’s rope, the S&W .357 she wore on her hip was there to teach them the error of their ways. Rumor had it she had taken her first bounty by injecting him with a syringe filled with saline after he’d gotten the jump on her and showed her the business end of her own gun. Nancy lied and told him it was the zombie virus in the needle, but she had the antidote available back at her base. The bandit surrendered and hopped eagerly in the cage. A few days later, she watched him swing from the gallows of the Valhalla settlement.
Bounty hunters, Hell Drivers and retrievers lived hard and partied harder, often losing their whole stakes in a drunken night of debauchery. A payoff from a job that took weeks to plan and execute at the risk of life and limb would swap hands at the poker tables or line the pockets of the girls that practiced the oldest profession. Good looking guys and flirty waitresses flowed through the crowd, topping off the drinks and collecting the gold coins from the men and women deep in their cups, sometimes deftly lifting a little something extra from the pockets of the drunks eyeing their firm breasts or finely toned muscles. Others watched from the wings ready to trade in information that would lead to the next big score. The tip jar at the bar would be brimming with gold coins and jewelry from drunken revelers caught up in the moment and celebrating the acts of daring they had barely survived. Gold was everything and nothing to this ragged band of roughnecks and cutthroats. Some people turned their noses up at us wasteland runners, said we were immoral, unscrupulous and that our days were numbered. I preferred the term morally flexible, usually deciding what I was willing to do or not do, based on the amount of gold on the table. Life in this world was hard, violent and short and only the most ruthless stood a chance outside the walls of the settlements. You could eat or be eaten, it was that simple.
Money was a weird thing in the aftermath of the virus. For guys like me, all it was good for was entertainment. Anything material I wanted, I just went and found it and took it. The Lakota system was more for the people who lived inside the walls, a way to give worth and value to the things they made for sale, services they rendered and to buy the things they needed to survive. Community farms and livestock yards made sure no one went hungry. Most of the settlements had an abundance of vacant homes, so no one was homeless unless they wanted to be. Lakota gold had replaced the dollar bill completely. Paper currency was useless unless you were out of toilet paper. Most every cash register in the settlements had a scale sitting next to it along with a sharp pair of pliers to nip off the appropriate amount of gold.
“Keep an eye on things, I’ve gotta see a man and wash the dust out of my throat.” I said to Bo.
Bo snarled in reply and curled himself up on the passenger seat to await my return and the bag of food that better accompany me when I got back.
I headed for the doors, making sure to avoid the deep shadows where the lights didn’t reach. No need to tempt anyone lurking there waiting for an easy mark to stumble by. I made note of the sleek Bell Ranger helicopter and the two men armed with the excellent Heckler and Koch MP-5 submachine guns that guarded the helicopter. I wouldn’t mind adding one of them to my arsenal. The last one I had was at the bottom of a pond I’d had to dive into three steps ahead of a particularly nasty zombie wearing full riot gear. I wondered if the two were up for a few friendly hands of poker as I pushed through the double swinging doors and inhaled the scent of leather, tobacco smoke and slow roasted beef. I heard my name shouted and stopped to speak with a pair of drunken retrievers, Ian the Hunter and Eric the Blackhand. They’d just returned from jobs in heavily infested towns and were licking their wounds over a shared bottle of Irish whiskey. They invited me to join them, I told them another time and headed for the bar.
I slid onto the corner bar stool and nodded at the bartender who held up a finger for me to wait my turn. I rolled my eyes at her, she stuck her tongue out in retort. She topped off a frosty mug from the tapped keg sitting in a barrel full of ice with a practiced ease and set it before a customer who was focused intently on the tight black tank top that she wore.
She sidled towards me with a seductive sway of her hips, tossed her bar towel over her shoulder and leaned on her elbows to face me. She blew a puff of sweet cigar smoke in my face, “Look what the cat dragged in.”
Noble Butcher was the owner and proprietress of the Butcher’s Block Saloon. Another lost soul saddled with an odd name. Rumor had it she’d been held by some of Casey’s Raiders at one point and bought her freedom with a rusty icepick and a whole lot of Old Testament style vengeance. A patch covered her right eye from some injury she didn’t talk about, and I respected her too much to ask. Thin white lines of scar tissue spider webbed out from the edges of the patch, marring an otherwise beautiful face. Everybody who survived the outbreak had scars, internal and external. Some were more obvious than others.
“Wasn’t that patch on the other eye the last time I was here?” I smirked at her.
“Asshole,” she muttered. “Didn’t you have a full set of fingers last time you tried to mooch a free drink?” I subconsciously rubbed the nub of my left pinky. She set a pair of glasses in front of me and pulled a bottle from under the bar. It was her personal reserve, at least a fifteen year old bourbon with a deep amber color, not the watered down stuff she served to the rowdy crowd once they were too drunk to know the difference. She poured three fingers worth into my glass, then filled one of her own.
She raised the glass in my direction in an unspoken toast to all the friends who hadn’t made it. I mirrored her movement and tossed back half the pour. I relished the pleasant burn as the aged bourbon slid down my throat and savored the warmth that spread through my body.
“I’m supposed to meet a man from the Tower here tonight.” I said. “I imagine that pretty helicopter out there is his.”
“Fellow named Carter? He’s back there in the corner. Made arrangements for some overnight company with one of the girls and an upstairs room for one night. Been here a couple of hours, a British fellow. Fancy suit and shiny shoes, but don’t let his appearance fool you, he’s no desk jockey.”
I nodded. “Let him wait a little longer. I’m thirsty and you are a lot easier to look at than some chap stuck on the wrong side of the pond. By the way, once I get squared up, I’ll take care of my overdue tab.”
She snorted. “Don’t bother, when I found out he was here to meet you, I added your tab plus interest onto his room plus a nonrefundable damage deposit. Last time you were here, I was shut down for two days replacing bar stools and windows, scrubbing blood out of the floor, patching bullet holes in the walls and getting the pool table recovered.”
“I seem to have a knack for attracting the worst kinds of attention.” I agreed.
“That’s the damned truth. Don’t underestimate that guy, Rye. Couple of the boys wanted to start some trouble with him. He laid them out before they knew what hit them. Didn’t even wrinkle his suit. Would have charged him more had I known I was gonna be mopping up their blood and broken teeth from my floor. He’s as bad as you are about breaking the customers.”
“Thanks, Butch.” I grinned. She hated that nickname.
She stared at me hard. “What I’m getting at, is when you two inevitably butt heads, take it outside. You know this place is all I have, and I have to protect it. I can’t go out there in the wild places, not anymore.” A look of sorrow, some unbidden memory flashed across her face for an instant. She didn’t talk about before, ever, but sometimes I’d catch her rolling the diamond ring on her left hand in circles with a faraway look in her eye.
“It’s not my fault some
people don’t know when to get out of the game, or don’t appreciate my unique personality.” I started.
She waved me off with a roll of her good eye, the façade of the take no shit bartender firmly in place. “I’ve heard it already. It’s never your fault. But Butcher, he was cheating at cards, or he insulted my dog, blah, blah, blah. Just save your bullshit excuses and don’t trash my establishment for once. Don’t make me have to shoot your ass to protect my livelihood. Rye, you’re hard on the furniture, the customers, and a girl’s heart, but damn it’s good to see you sitting in here again.”
“You too. That calls for another round.” I slid my empty glass towards her.
“Any news I might be able to turn into gold?” I changed the subject while she poured. She pulled a hefty commission off any jobs she brokered, but the price was worth it. Going into the field halfcocked was a good way to wind up in the middle of ten thousand undead or slow roasting on the spit at a cannibal luau, screaming while the flames caressed your body. Her intel was always solid and her position behind the bar made her privy to the movement of the hordes and the raiders.
“Heard a few rumors of some big jobs, nothing concrete yet, but I’ll keep you in the loop if they pan out. Pascal has money on you after that mess down on the border, five grand I hear. You know that kind of money would go a long way towards fixing this place up.” She smirked.
“Any takers?” I asked. I had more than my fair share of enemies. I had a lot of friends out there too, but big money like that had a way of testing loyalties. If there was anyone considering coming for me, I’d prefer to be forewarned. Getting shot gunned to death on the seat of an outhouse wasn’t my idea of a heroic death.
“Last week McCullough was flapping his gums about taking the job himself. He’s still sore at you about that 1911 you won off him.”
Road to Riches: Deadline: Book 1 (Zombie Road) Page 4
