Never Fear Page 36

  The burritos are a sideline. I knew Manny and his crew (a gang of similarly-sharp Latino punks locally known as the Rockeros) fucked with gambling, and drugs of a spicier variety than the kindbud we already had fields of, and likely lines to other stuff that I really didn’t want to be party to. I knew this because they’d fucked with these things since we’d been buddies in New York. For all the forever ago, some things are remarkably intransient. But even if their worst habits had survived the apocalypse, their best had as well. Manny and the Rockeros were still some of my best friends.

  As for my other friends, we had business to attend to.

  ***

  Chapter 2 – The State of The Union Street

  Hatred is a science of mixology. A shot of skullduggery here, a dash of duplicity there. Its flavors can be strong, bitter, acidic, or many other varietals, but racial or national hatred is particularly unsavory. It used to be popularly served on the masters’ tabs, to make sure that the oppressed have reasons to bicker amongst themselves, rather than rise up against the real problem. This convoluted concoction suppressed useful, productive, necessary violence and misdirected it against our often otherwise attack-unworthy fellow humans.

  The tree of liberty needed to be watered with the blood of tyrants, but for a while there at the end, we were all just sipping some strange brew that exsanguinated our fellow man.

  Fortunately, the flavors of hate soon turned sour. It got poured straight down the drain, for the most part, when we learned the hard way that we really all were in this together, for better or for worse.

  I mean, the world had already been through enough, humanity in particular. Like I said, I don’t really like hurting anyone’s feelings unduly. Quite the opposite, actually.

  It’s weird to say, but the apocalypse was an awesome aphrodisiac.

  As we gathered around the first floor’s horseshoe-shaped main bar for our weekly Community Coalition meeting, it was clear that the absent privateer Captain Rudy Brough was probably taking significant advantage of that fact. I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to think about him nestled in some rickety Victorian brothel across town, or some University grad’s stony school flat, or the bunkhouse at one of the farm breweries, snuggled up with some honey who helped farm the honey that was made exclusively from cannabis-pollinating bees. That same honey (the bee puke, not the theoretical girl) was used in an ancient Gaelic alcohol recipe we affectionately called “weed-mead.” Next to the endless barrels of hemp oil the local farms produced as fuel, weed-mead was our greatest export.

  No, I wasn’t going to think about where he was right now, Captain Rudy Brough, the self-styled privateer and commander of the cannabis-carting corsair, the U.S.S. Pot Yacht. On A-Day, he’d escaped Manhattan, driving an older grocery delivery truck, where he’d been safely ensconced in the refrigerated back when things went wrong. A series of odd adventures later, the dude who’d been kicked out of the Navy in the ‘90s for smoking weed was now in charge of distributing some of the finest ganj products to ever float the East Coast. His adorable ass had just gotten into town last night, and while I didn’t necessarily begrudge him some R&R, we had business to attend to.

  The other members of the Community Coalition were already present, sipping tea and munching their own Manny-made breakfast burritos. With Rudy currently absent, that left us with a favorite few locals who, in my opinion, actually ran everything in this town that wasn’t directly University-affiliated.

  “Morning Reli,” said Officer Rick, a former State Trooper who had survived A-Day’s fallout thanks to locking himself and some of his squad in an old subterranean jail cell beneath Boston. While the rule of law here was still lackadaisical, Officer Rick and his men would still “patrol and control” where needed, which saved the rest of us a lot of trouble. “You hear the pirates are in town?”

  “It’s Valentine’s Day,” reasoned Li, the owner of the Las Diablas pirate bar/brothel down the street. “Robbo and his raiders deserve love too.”

  “Let ‘em find some mermaids to rape,” Officer Rick sneered. He’d had run-ins with Robbo (known properly as the pirate Captain Roberto Arturo) and the raiders more than once, but a rough armistice was usually reached on major holidays, if only so the raiders could party in peace.

  “My girls all seem to love them,” Li countered. “Captain Arturo and his men are free to trade their treasure with me.” Li always maintained an ultimate chill, one of a number of reasons we made good allies despite technically being business competitors. As a fellow former New York bartender who’d been stocking bottles in a sub-basement cooler on A-Day, she had only noticed her generally-candlelit bar’s whole block had gone dark once she stepped outside for a smoke. She’d simply, coolly, loaded her touring bike with all the good bottles and cash she could carry off that fated, formerly treasured island. A stunning Chinese girl who favored intricately-wrought silk outfits in avant-garde styles, her appreciation for art rivaled my own. Her appreciation for danger exceeded it.

  “Sure, but does he have some kid with him?” I asked Li. “Should we be worried there?”

  Li’s face became a caricature mask of excitement. “I couldn’t wait to tell you! He’s INCREDIBLE! Reli, this kid Pablo is amazing. You gotta hear him. I know you don’t want Robbo in here, but you gotta let this kid at the piano. You’ll see.”

  “Maybe later,” I said. “There’s a lot to get handled before the show tonight, and I’ve gotta check in with The Admiral too. Which brings us to our next point. As we all know, a slot for Admissions has opened up, thanks to one of the football team graciously heading north to serve with the Mass National Guard helping refugees in Boston. Coach Tony, who are our candidates?”

  The final member of our community cabal, Coach Tony, a.k.a. Tony Toast, had been flipping through a large binder of papers on the bar, and his striking blue eyes blasted the room like stadium floodlights.

  “We have a number of valuable candidates,” he said. “I have profiles on each of them for your perusal, but the Chancellor has made it clear he’d like the spot filled by the end of next week. There are several major candidates I’d like to bring your attention to…”

  Tony goes off all analytically, his former hotshot business-bro side showing. He’d been having a swank multi-martini lunch in the vault of a retrofitted Manhattan bank-turned-fancy restaurant when A-Day went down. To his credit, he’d made sure his private sailboat got the entire party of twenty people off the darkened island. You’d think he’d have taken up some esoteric hobby now, like numismatics or something, but he’s actually reconnected a lot with his Masshole roots. He’s the hockey coach for the University team, who plays against the brewery teams, the stray Canadians who’ve been trickling down in furry tribal swaths, or once a whole squad of Russian submariners who’d docked down the harbor when their navigation system tanked. That had been a surprise for everyone involved. Everyone had assumed at least one other superpower had anti-EMP equipped nav gear. Not so much, it turned out. They sold off their dud supplies for scrap in the port, just before the game, and gave us a lot of friendly hell for ending the world before they’d had a chance to. The school team beat them 4-2. Tony had been really proud of that.

  We called him “Tony Toast” since he’s just scorchingly handsome, and in keeping with the theme of many survivors, loves wearing nice clothes. His are mostly dressy versions of casual outfits like you’d wear if you were slumming it in the Hamptons, or sometimes really posh handmade suits for when he’s coaching a game, but I’d be lying if I said he didn’t look his very best absolutely nude–a gameplan we ran every now and then. I couldn’t lust after a pirate (sorry, privateer) like Rudy forever, especially when he apparently always had other pretty priorities in port.

  Tony finished listing some qualities of various candidates, but it was clear he was saving the best for last. He handed the binder of bios around the bar.

  “Do any of you guys recognize these images or that insignia?”

 
Li and Officer Rick passed, eyebrows raised and shoulders shrugged.

  But when the file got to me, I forgot to breathe.

  The images were copious in their coverage and perspectives. Some were close-ups of terrain, some analytically distant, some with numerical markings and charts in the margins. The most interesting were clearly thermal readouts, infrared heat signature maps clearly taken from outside the atmosphere, from low earth orbit if not higher.

  The small, winged design sketched out in the dossier sent an almost tangible electric pulse through my mind.

  The sketch was of the former United States Army’s official insignia for an astronaut.

  ***

  Chapter Three – Admissions

  The old rotary phone rang and Joy, who’d been sitting at the far end of the bar painting her nails, jumped up to grab it.

  “Trooley’s Tourist Tavern. You loot it, we scoot it!”

  I glared at Joy. Her goofy phone pickups were going to hit the wrong ears someday and cause me some proper hell. We weren’t some fencing operation. This was a reputable establishment. Well, reputable as one could be, these days.

  “HI!” the enthusiastic/obnoxious shriek returned. I knew the caller must be Rudy. I returned to addressing the business meeting that he should have been physically present for.

  “Tony, where the hell did you get this?”

  “The guy got into town three days ago. Says he was working at Harvard as an engineering professor but that it’s a mess up there. He claims there’s talk of an overarching plan for inland expansion, something called Operation Glades. Lotta folks are heading west or further north to Maine. Not New Hampshire, that nuke plant meltdown fucked up a lot. But in Boston, people are evacuating their asses off, the flooding’s getting really bad, and there’s too many rumors General Zhao’s gonna arrive to finish things off. The panic is real.”

  “But Zhao’s a specter,” Li piped up. “Why would he come here from China just to screw with Boston? Especially Harvard? They’re a shadow of what they used to be.”

  “Boston’s got a lot of history and artifacts still,” I reminded her. It was true, especially among some of the older, well-defended areas of the town that hadn’t been as abused by the ravages of time and turmoil. “Harvard has an awesome archive too…”

  “Maybe not for long,” Officer Rick said seriously. “My guys up there tell me your astro-bro might be right about Zhao. Folks are spooked, for sure. Even if they’re not spooked, I’m hearin’ the same stuff about Maine. Lots of land, clean water, someone’s even mouthing off about reopening a ski mountain. Look, no one up there wants to admit defeat, Bostonians are the original American revolutionaries. Some of them will stay there until the city’s underwater. That said, if folks are evacuating Harvard, we need to make a smaht move.”

  Rick’s accent often came out when he was stressed. Dropping that one “r” in “smaht” was a statement unto itself.

  “Alright,” I said. “We can’t worry about Zhao yet. We need to focus on what’s in front of us. Tony, these documents are as genuine as I can figure. I think we’ve got a spaceman on our hands. If I’m reading these thermal images correctly, it’s a report of all the bombing events worldwide. I know some of those satellites and receiving stations, especially the ones communicating with the big labs, are pulse-proofed. They would have survived the EMP, it’s just that most of the Earthbound end that wasn’t able to pick up all the data. Except this guy apparently did, from somewhere.”

  I shuffled the images again, handing a few back around. The damage was astonishing, worse than anyone would have thought. Bright red and orange heat-signatures bloomed around the globe.

  And we’d already thought it was literally the worst thing ever. Now we knew for certain that it was somehow even worse. The fallout would still be falling over many of these areas.

  “Australia’s done for,” Li noted. “Antarctica too.”

  The thermal map of Antarctica looked like multicolored swiss cheese. Massive swaths of what should have been ice were entirely the wrong hue, bright yellow or red instead of blue.

  “That explains a lot of the flooding,” Tony said somberly. “I wonder how much longer we’ve got.”

  “We’re based on better bedrock,” I reminded him. “Boston is half landfill.”

  Still… The University was far enough inland that there wouldn’t be any damage, but as for the rest of us, we were not more than a solid Tom Brady toss from the Atlantic. The subterranean shanghai tunnels beneath my bar made it less than a five-minute walk to the docks. Trooley’s, and indeed a huge swath of Union Street, could be done for if a few more glacier chunks decided to stir themselves into our mix.

  Focus. Remember what we’re valuing right now.

  “Where is this guy, Tony?”

  “I got him a temporary bunk by one of the hydroponic vegetable farms. He seems to know a lot about the process, even with our rudimentary setups. Says he can streamline things, help improve the power sources, all sorts of stuff.” Tony chuckled, his smile flashing with a nice bit of optimism. “Reli, he said he’s the former commander of the space station.”

  I looked at the military insignia sketched on the page. It was a silver pair of wings, with a shield bearing an ascending star and rocket contrail in the middle. A faker would probably have slapped the circular NASA “meatball” on their bio, or created some scientific-sounding gobbledygook that no one else could decode, but I’d always loved astronauts. This all looked authentic.

  Social media is not something I miss, not by a long shot, but I remembered having been “friends” with quite a few spacefarers back in the day, if only to follow their adventures through their astonishing pictures and video. I asked our astronaut’s name. Tony told me. I explained that, at least visually, I could confirm who he was.

  “Joy, when did Rudy say he was getting here?” I asked.

  “ASAP,” she replied.

  As soon as he pleases. To be fair, he’d been at sea for the last two months, and he’d have had no idea we had an Admissions slot open, or that we were discussing new candidates. Still, his opinion was important to our group when he could offer it, and I wanted him here. Fine, alright, maybe not even just necessarily for his opinion.

  “If we’re in agreement that this guy is our pick, I can go swing past the hydro farm and bring our guy to the campus. Li, find me this mini-Mozart and he can come too, at least for a physical. Reli, you and Rudy can meet me there once that lazy stoner surfaces.”

  Tony collected the thermal images, though I took a lingering final look at them. Australia and Antarctica were straight fucked. Ditto much of Africa, and a uniquely unsettling preponderance of Asia, including the Orient, the subcontinent, and most of Russia. We’d known from the trading boats that Europe had taken some hard hits, but these showed exactly where. Basically only small patches of non-bombed area remained. One of images depicting the area from space didn’t show very many lights at all, where once much of the continent had appeared a luminous diamond from above.

  Speaking with their traders, you’d never have guessed how bad it was. Europe, as usual, was still keeping a stiff upper lip, and like us had also conquered themselves back into a sense of community. We traded with ships from Ireland, Spain, Germany, France, Portugal, Greece, Britain, and some of the Scandinavian nations too, and while most mentioned things were bad, it was clear that they were playing up their perseverance.

  We (the human We, or in this case, the rather inhuman We) really had demolished damn near everything.

  “Hah,” Officer Rick noted as he handed the images back to Tony. “Look at the fucking Mid-East. Nighty night, sandbox.”

  We openly laughed. Who fucking cared about the Middle East. Of course no one could really prove it, but it was more than speculated about who’d hit the light switch six years ago. About how reports of an Arabian space program had all been a front for the EMP satellite. About how American military bases in the region were on high alert for weeks beforeh
and. About how some faction group of militant morons had tried to claim responsibility on the internet, before realizing they’d self-censored their victory tirade by tanking America’s entire computer-based infrastructure.

  They got to revel in their long-term Luddite lifestyle now. Good riddance. We had better things to do.

  The phone rang again. Joy grabbed it and met my side-eye gaze as she chirped, “Trooley’s Tourist Tavern! You clip it, we flip it!” Immediately, however, her smile dropped. “Yessir,” she said seriously. “Yessir. I’ll tell her. Thank you, sir.” She hung up. “Your astronaut just talked his way into a chat with The Admiral. He wants the whole intel file immediately.”

  “Well, looks like our choice has been made,” Li noted. “Shall we adjourn?”

  We all rose, shaking hands and clapping backs. Made promises to reconvene here for the show this evening. It was sure to be a good one, hell, with the musicians we’d spent time rescuing, our weekly jam sessions are better than nearly any stadium show you’d have seen back in the day.

  Tony gave me a quick kiss as he left. “Happy Valentine’s Day. I know you’re probably all excited that Rudy’s back, but…”

  “We’ll talk later tonight,” I promised him, replying with another kiss in turn.

  He flashed that winning smile, the one that’d sealed countless huge business deals back in the day, and I was more than a little happy he was as enthusiastic about seeing me. I stared unapologetically at his athletic ass as he left, his designer jeans proving their old thousand-dollar price tag’s worth of quality even now, amidst all this anarchy.

  I was so distracted that it took me a second to recoil when a tall, gangly man stepped into the bar’s doorway in front of me. Rambo, our badass bouncer, wasn’t in until the evening, and my hand instinctively fell to the ball-bearing sap at my side.

  The guy’s gray eyes gleamed and glared as he leaned in, feeling too close to me. I stepped back and yelled for Santi.