Never Fear Read online

  That’s the cool thing about the end of the world. We hit rock bottom, and then started to rebuild with much better intents than most of us had ever had before. You can tell the difference, because this time, we genuinely give a fuck about each other, and for the most part, we’re happy.

  Yeah, some days I barely believe it myself. But then I wake up on the third floor of my big-ass bar, in my penthouse loft that overlooks the ocean, all the way out to the horizon. I smoke a giant homegrown joint straight into my face, maybe slap some handsome soldier or sailor or the hot hockey coach on the ass, then go downstairs with him into my beautiful bar for breakfast. Delivered from my local buddies/handymen/trading partners the Rockeros, of course. (Here at Trooley’s, we don’t keep a lot of food on hand to serve, it attracts pirates like bears in the wild. While we’re all mostly decent these days, a person with an empty belly can also be a person with an empty conscience.) Sometimes I’ll let Santi, my awesome Argentine barman, run the place for the afternoon. I’ll ride my bike out to the beach and just lay there, listening to the waves draw over the smooth little rocks of the shore, lapping lavishly like the earth is applauding me for still existing.

  Not today though. Today I was busy.

  While the creation of a new and improved civilization valued a lot of fresh ideas and attempts at things like updated policy and hardier technology, plenty of old-old things still had value. That was why I was sitting upstairs at the Officer’s Club, the private bar I’d appointed to the second floor of Trooley’s, polishing a bag of Greek drachmas, shiny survivors from some other, older apocalypse. The Greeks still had a fair shipping consortium afloat, and got off on trading with this stuff, and god (Zeus?) knows they had enough of it lying around, even just historically. When one of their freighters pulled into port yesterday, they’d forked me these for a round of weed-mead and few barrels of the local hemp oil (which all the diesel boats are running on now, usually in conjunction with solar cells.) I’m not some serious historian or anything, but the nature of my work makes it necessary to have more than a functioning knowledge of what might be valuable. The drachmas were a good enough trade for the booze and the fuel.

  As usual, I’d have preferred music (musicians, instruments, records, whatever), or exotic libations, or even literature (reading at the bar had become cool again, thanks to the EMP blast killing all those little devices we used to hunch over for happiness), but as far as old-school silver coins go, these were pretty cool. Not nearly enough to buy University Admission, but pretty cool. I polished them with a focused reverie, pausing intermittently to take small sips of my precious coffee (real, not instant), the beans of which I’d traded a Portuguese sailor six boxes of bullets for. Downstairs, I heard the echoes of Santi singing along to REO Speedwagon’s Take It On The Run as he readied the main bar for the day.

  The fervent footfalls up the stairs, accompanied by the cheery clatter of an armful of silver bracelets, meant my morning meditation was at an end.

  “Reliiiiiiii!” Joy exhorted, her preteen shriek equal parts enthusiastic and obnoxious. “Is Rudy here?” She skipped across the room, her ridiculous excess of jewelry a-clanking. That was the funny thing about “valuables”, nowadays. Some of the ones that had been in excess have now deflated to the level of junk jewelry. A ten-year-old could have an armful of Tiffany silver and diamonds, but it might not buy a cup of coffee in a place that’d sell you a slave in exchange for some sugar packets.

  My kid cousin, Joy, took this opportune depreciation to a somewhat hilarious extreme, trying for all of (the remainder of) the world to be as fancy as any debutante back in the day. Not only was she constantly laden with silver, diamonds, rare opals, and other gems and treasures, she also wore a full face of makeup, every single day, the sort of princess-play that looked weirdly cute combined with her usual utilitarian uniform of combat boots, jeans, and a hacked-up Patriots hoodie.

  I can’t really disparage her accoutrement choices. Though I save my good jewelry for special occasions, I own a variety of completely real Rolexes that I wear flippantly, and have been known to trade them for things like Stones records. Hey, treasure is what you treasure.

  “Good morning to you too, monkeyface,” I told the glittering, tittering Joy. “No, Captain Brough has not graced us with his presence yet.”

  “Shoulda guessed. You’d be tryin’ ta smooch him if he was. Whatcha got?” She plunked down next to me at the bar, her eyes agleam at the shining coins.

  “Ancient arcade tokens.”

  “What’s an arcade?”

  This happens more often than I mean for it to. I reference something from the not-distant (though apparently very distant) past without realizing that Joy has grown up in a completely different realm than the one that any previous kids had.

  “We used to have big rooms full of video games. It was something fun to do. Kids then couldn’t shoot real guns as often as you can, not kids in cities at least.”

  “Sounds boring.”

  I didn’t offer a rebuttal. Best she never worry about what she missed back then. If it’s one good thing the apocalypse did, it was foster a sense of renewed enjoyment of simpler things. Particularly for kids, which still seems amazing to me, given that as a two-year-old, Joy had known how to flip through an iPad to get to gaming apps. Although the bar kept a stash of all the great analog games, which were played by young folks and less-young alike, the old computerized conditioning was long gone, and a healthy respect for outdoor adventures had taken its place.

  Sometimes, too much so.

  “Guess what?” Joy piped up through a stolen sip of my coffee. “I saw Robbo’s raiders!”

  “You know Captain Arturo would cut your tongue out for not addressing him properly?”

  “One was a kid!” she barreled on, the threat not deterring her in the slightest. “He was playing piano on the deck at Las Diablas and they were all cheering for him! Do you think they’ll try to trade him?”

  “Not here they won’t. Captain Arturo knows we don’t traffic humans. Anyway, The University doesn’t need any pirate kids. They need people that’re gonna use their skills and smarts to help the world.” What’s left of it, anyway.

  “He’s really good, though,” she continued. “Like, crazy good. Like that Doors band guy. Or Chopin.”

  Of all the loot I’ve scored and hoarded in my bartender/barterer life as of late, I have to tell you, I’m probably most proud of the record stash. It takes up so much room in the sub-basement that upstairs we need three-ring binders like karaoke books full of the titles, if you want to buy, trade, or spin something. It’s a diverse and vast archive of everything from 45s to 72s, with various vacuum-tube devices around rigged to spin and amplify them. Joy’s quite the little crate-digger, I’ve seen her select some serious gems from stashes that get slapped up for trade. Of course, it only figures though, given her mentors. Between me and Santi blasting everything from Aerosmith to Zeppelin on the regular, with classical, reggae, ska, punk, metal, and jazz, if tipped well for it, Joy knew her stuff.

  Oh also, The University housed every living legend of music we could find. That helped her education too. A few of them were slated to perform at the bar tonight, as usual for Fridays.

  “How d’you know he’s good?” I challenged. “The hell Li let you inside Las Diablas.”

  “I heard the music all the way down the block, so I rode down the side street and looked over the fence. The kid didn’t look so good. He was playing like crazy though, Reli, you shoulda seen it.”

  Fucking figured. My kid cousin, sneaking off to pirate bars while I’m supposed to be teaching her how to run a reputable establishment. How the hell did I end up setting such a bad example? I used to be so much worse than this, and I became at least a little better (I think.) But that didn’t matter at the moment.

  “Robbo was bragging they made him play for ten hours last night. The kid looked it too…”

  I tossed the last drachma into its bag.

  “All tha
t music and chatter in Spanish and you still heard that?”

  Joy scowled, “Your boring-ass lessons actually work. You should be proud.”

  “Well, it’s not nearly as fun as hanging out with pirates, that’s for sure.”

  Joy changed tack, appealing to what she somehow knew was a soft spot for me, although I never mention anything about it.

  “Rudy’s a privateer, though,” she said proudly.

  I sighed. “I know he says that all the time, but ‘privateer’ is just a fancy word for ‘pirate.’ Just because your dad said Ru… Captain Brough could liberate stuff from all over the place and keep it safe at The University doesn’t mean he’s not a pirate.”

  “Does that make my dad the pirate king?”

  Sort of, I was tempted to say, but thought better of it. Martin O’Daye, a.k.a. Joy’s father, a.k.a. The Admiral, a.k.a. The Chancellor, a.k.a. my uncle Marty, had built an actual empire out of what remained from about fifty other major ones. He ran The University, which folks far and wide knew to be the safest, healthiest, smartest live-in educational facility in the Northeast.

  Although now, in all honesty, it was probably the best place anywhere to live, work, learn, and otherwise cooperate to survive.

  Uncle Marty had been a merchant seaman before quitting the open ocean to teach geometry at a nice prep school outside Boston. He’d worked his way up the administrative ladder, but hated the politics and eventually took to teaching at the former University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, now known simply as The University. A remarkable campus built in the Brutalist style of layered, formerly-”futuristic” looking assemblages of concrete, the school had survived the worst of everything and still stood in its Stonehenge-styled circle, nestled neatly on acres of land that his students had carefully coerced into becoming arable. Other students had learned engineering, or oceanography, or medicine, or any number of useful skills from a worldwide array of professors who had survived and who’d made their way to this educational enclave.

  But Uncle Marty, for all his former maritime badassery and genuine genius at running an institution of higher education, values one particular skill over anything, and a lot of people are surprised to find it’s the last one they expect.

  Sure, when everything had first gone wrong, the people we needed to collect were farmers. Hunters. Doctors. Soldiers. The usual complement of survivalist types. Many had found their way to The University, and had been welcomed for either offering these skills or offering to learn them in exchange for labor that aided the school and community. But now that a rough rendition of society was back in place, Uncle Marty valued keeping the civility in civilization more than anything.

  Which was why, stashed in one of the great and mysterious Brutalist buildings of The University, ensconced in near-nukeproof concrete halls and tunnels, my Uncle Marty, former geometry teacher extraordinaire, had amassed a collection of art and antiquities that rivaled the greatest museums the world had ever seen.

  And yeah. More than a little bit of piracy had been involved in the collection thereof.

  Well, privateering.

  No one could deny that it was a safe and smart move. The world’s great museums had been located near-uniformly in the world’s greatest cities, all of which were lucky if they still had enough infrastructure left to house roaches. Quietly and carefully, missions had been launched over the course of the last few years to “reconnoiter, respond, and recover” some of the greatest works of art the former world had ever seen, and the current world might otherwise have never seen again be it due to weather, elements, animals, and decay (general or societal). Were some of them part of previously-private collections? Probably. Were those collection’s owners still alive? Probably not. If they were, they were welcome to come take up their claim with uncle (Chancellor, Admiral) Marty.

  No one had yet contested any of the holdings.

  So, judging by the number of wide-eyed travelers that came through New Bedford every day from both land and sea, even among the mere million human beings we’d estimated to be the remaining population worldwide, word had clearly gotten out about this. For better or for worse, the care of the value (and the value of the care) had made The University a near-heavenly haven. Although we tended well to those who arrived in town, the schooling, living conditions, food, medicine, and just sheer fucking possibility of The University made it a beacon of benevolence.

  It didn’t even inspire the pirates to heist The University’s collection so much as contribute to it, in exchange for an interesting array of things. The most valuable of those things was, of course, to be formally inducted into the esteemed ranks of the student body. To somehow, by superb skill or knowledge or treasure or humanitarian heroics, be worthy of gaining Admission.

  The University was currently operating at maximum capacity, and it was no small deal deciding who earned a coveted class placement when one opened up.

  Thus, thanks to my proximity both genetic and geographic, I didn’t just sling local beer and weed-mead for a living. Trooley’s Tourist Tavern was also a default admissions office.

  “If you asked my dad nicely, you think he’d he give the kid Admission?” Joy entreated.

  “You know The University’s full,” I admonished. “Until they finish the new expansion, it’s already busting at the seams.” This was an understatement. People were willing to sleep in the dorms’ halls and ride bikes or horses or hempoline-converted vehicles from neighboring towns miles away, maybe just to catch a single lecture hall class. Still others were happy to put in a day’s work that could be exchanged for feast-caliber food and drink at their well-kept cafeteria. As for medicine, The University had an astonishing record of patient satisfaction for an institution that was basically operating with the same equipment as one would have had in the middle of the last century.

  “Ask him for me too, Reli,” Manny lilted, cruising in with a bag of his famous burritos hanging from one ornately-tattooed arm. “No, actually, don’t ask him. I love my starving artist lifestyle, and if I survived the apocalypse without learning math, I don’t need to learn it now.”

  “Starving, my concave moon-tanned ass. Thanks for the burritos, dude.”

  “No problemo,” Manny smiled, his bright white teeth lighting up his caramel-colored face. Like Joy, Manny prided himself on maintaining a height of fashion in these apocalypse-afterparty times. His well-greased Elvis haircut with its studiously-placed forelock, pegged dark jeans, inexplicably shiny patent leather boots, and tight black T-shirt give him a charming throwback look that would have made him cool in any decade over basically the whole last century. But the sheathed Spanish sword hanging from his bondage belt, copious sharp silver skull rings, and .38 caliber bullets worn in his ear gauges make it known that for all the flash, he was still always ready for a fight. Or at least, that’s the image he put up.

  He nodded at the bag of drachmas. “Hey, what’s with the subway tokens? We goin’ to Rockaway Beach?”

  “Hah. I wish,” I smirked. “It just wouldn’t be the same in a radiation-proof suit, would it?”

  “Hell, I’d wear one of those at Coney Island, even before shit went down!”

  We laughed. Manny pulled out a detailed drawing and unfolded it before me.

  “Speaking of the old stomps, check this out.”

  The sketch was a somewhat architectural one, a diagram of a bench. It looked for all the world like an old New York subway bench, one of the wooden ones, except Manny’s design had it made from all sorts of compressed layers of things.

  “You remember these?” he asked.

  “You remember Manhattan?” I laughed. “Of course! You making this?”

  Joy, accustomed to wrenching my attention back when she wanted it, grabbed a drachma from the bag. “Heads or tails?” she asked.

  “Tails,” Manny told her. Joy smiled affirmatively as it landed in her palm. “Yeah,” he told me. “If I can borrow some of your tools. I got the basic frame down, but I wanna sand it better.�
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  “That’s cool,” I said. “Look at you, being all tribute-y to the public services of yore! Or is this a prank? Did you build it out of crushed train parts or something?”

  He winked. “Prank, public service, same thing.”

  Joy flipped the coin high in the air. “Heads or tails?”

  “Heads,” Manny and I said at the same time. Joy dropped the drachma, which rolled under one of the plush leather library chairs.

  “Same thing?” I joked to Manny. “That’s not what the judge said on your, what was it? TWELVE counts of Transporting Instruments of Graffiti and Defacement of Public Property?”

  “The man’s always tryin’ ta crush my art. That subway tunnel never looked better, and you know it.”

  I did know it. Though I hadn’t been tagging walls and dodging train cars for the greater artistic good like Manny had, being trapped deep underground in the Manhattan subway on A-Day is one of the only reasons I was still here. But that doesn’t matter right now.

  “Have Santi take you down to the vault,” I told Manny. “I gotta get to the Community Coalition meeting. Joy, up and at ‘em.”

  Joy crawled out from under the library chair, clutching the drachma. “It was tails.” She clambered back over to the bar next to Manny. “Can I see your drawing?”

  “Keep it,” Manny said, pushing her the paper. “Joy, girl, you show your daddy that sketch. He’ll want one of them bitches… excuse me, one of my lovely benches… up in his office lobby, like, yesterday, mi amor.”

  Manny kissed Joy on the head and she hopped off the barstool, grabbing his hand to lead him downstairs. I hefted the bag of burritos, one of the many marvels that materialized from Manny’s workshop down by the docks, and made sure all the oil lamps were extinguished before I headed downstairs too.