The Bar at the End of the World Read online

  Uriel raised her rifle, pulling its butt to her shoulder. The muzzle was aimed at the street, but her finger was on the trigger guard now, and she scanned one side of the street to the other. The rumble of a heavy truck droned in the distance.

  A TMF transport roared across the intersection ahead of them, almost mowing down the family of four. The father jerked to a stop, tightly holding onto his child and wife. Arms pulling taut, one of the children stumbled to the ground.

  Uriel planted her feet and raised the weapon. She tracked the slow-rolling armored vehicle with her scope. Her finger moved to the trigger.

  Zeke started to reach for his revolver, but with the family in the way, he pulled back. He was beginning to dislike the limitations of his weapon thanks to its overpowered nature.

  The transport kept moving through the intersection, headed elsewhere. Uriel removed her finger from the trigger and lowered the rifle. The father up ahead held the child who’d fallen. His son’s face was cradled in his shoulder and neck, and they crossed the intersection in a hurry. The transport’s rumble faded as it moved farther from the street, the boy’s muffled cry filling the void.

  “I’ve got to get another weapon,” said Zeke, patting his untucked shirt where the grip strained the fabric. “This thing, as great as it is, has way too much potential for collateral damage.”

  Uriel pouted, the corners of her mouth turning downward in an exaggerated display of pity and annoyance. “I’m gonna say the gun’s not your problem,” she said, motioning with her head to keep moving.

  Uriel relished being a critic. Zeke was sure of that. A dozen pithy retorts fluttered through his mind. None of them made the cut.

  “Oh yeah?” was all he managed, then cursed himself for not having the guts to tell her what he thought. Even in death, Uriel was intimidating.

  Uriel didn’t acknowledge him, marching faster up ahead. When they reached the intersection, she turned left, following the path of the transport. Until now, Zeke had led the way. He was about to question her about the turn, but she spoke first.

  “You think you’re focused on the mission?” she said. “You think because your head didn’t explode when you saw your dead body hanging from the building, you’re doing a good job of managing things?”

  Raising the rifle again, Uriel aimed at the dark storefronts and broken windows that lined the sides of this new path. Her attention on these potential targets, she continued her diatribe.

  “Everybody freaks a little bit when they figure it out. Some get to that point earlier in the process than you did. I’ve seen newbies understand they were dead when they were running from the Horde. I’ve seen them straight up confront Pedro about it when he offers the first drink. Others take longer. They’re either thick or in denial, pinching themselves or willing themselves awake. They’ll make many irrefutable arguments about how they couldn’t be dead. This couldn’t be purgatory. It was too familiar to the world they knew.”

  A clattering noise drew her attention to the right and she whirled around. An emaciated cat hurdled through an open window and sauntered onto the uneven sidewalk to the right. It was the first cat Zeke had seen in months, maybe years. Cats and dogs weren’t long for the protectorate. Every part of them was too valuable: their hides, their bones, their meat.

  He’d never eaten either of them himself, but his mind drifted to the young boys he’d seen with their parents minutes earlier. What had they eaten to survive?

  “You’re doing it now,” said Uriel, shaking him from the distraction. “Your head’s in other places. It’s not here, where it needs to be. All those other people I mentioned, the quick ones and the slow ones, regardless of how long it took them to understand their predicament and accept their possible fate, the vast majority find their focus because of what’s at stake.”

  “I’m focused,” said Zeke. “I’m present right now.”

  “Then stop with the questions,” said Uriel. “I’m the first to wax philosophical when confronted with the wonders of existence…”

  She said the last sentence in a way that made it clear she wasn’t the first to wax anything when it came to the wonders of everything. Zeke didn’t interrupt or show in any way he found her hyperbole unnecessary.

  “…but I know the time and place for that stuff,” she finished her thought. “This is neither the time nor the place.”

  Uriel leered at him.

  “Got it,” said Zeke. He did. He’d always been a man who thought three and four steps ahead. It was how he’d avoided getting caught as a bootlegger.

  Every bellwether moment in his life had infinite possibilities, many of which he’d consider each time a new one presented itself. The lone exception to the behavior that had served him so well was his rash murder of Mogilevich. He hadn’t processed the ripple effect of that decision, hadn’t thought about the various life paths it might forge.

  When he’d angrily shoved the broken liquor bottle into that leech with enough adrenaline-fueled force to bury its jagged edges deep into his body, severing blood vessels that essentially exsanguinated the man on the floor of his own bar, he’d been in the moment.

  That was what Uriel was asking of him now. It was what he needed to do. He needed to be in the moment.

  Zeke reached to his waist and drew the enchanted revolver. Its heft was comforting now. The weight of the weapon wasn’t intimidating. She was right, the gun wasn’t the problem. He was in his own head and he needed to get out.

  He pictured Li in his mind. She was all that mattered now. Getting her to safety, freeing her from whatever the Tic had done, was his sole purpose. This was where he proved his mettle, where he earned his redemption and a shot at somewhere better than this forsaken wasteland oasis.

  They reached the next block, rounding a corner to follow the audible rumble of a TMF transport, when Zeke stopped them. He held a finger up to his lips. Uriel stood virtually motionless, the rifle pressed against her shoulder.

  After a moment, Zeke whispered, “You hear that?”

  “Yeah.” Uriel looked up, scanning the deepening blue sky. There wasn’t a cloud above them or in sight. The sun was dipping. It was low enough it cast shadows from the taller structures and dead trees that stretched the length of this new east-west street in both directions.

  “I think there’s more than one transport,” Zeke whispered.

  The rumble was growing louder again. That was only possible if there was more than one.

  Uriel nodded her agreement. “You’re right. I don’t think they’re here for us though. If they were, they wouldn’t have driven past us before. I know that driver saw me with the M27 leveled at his face. He didn’t react.”

  “Yeah,” said Zeke, his voice above a whisper now, “that’s not the TMF’s MO. They harass everyone for everything. If that driver saw you and he didn’t have somewhere else to be, we’d be roadkill right now.”

  “Dude,” said Uriel, “you are roadkill. Or whatever the hanging-from-a-building-while-varmints-chew-on-you equivalent is.”

  Zeke suppressed a chuckle. “You said varmint. Never make fun of me for anything ever again.”

  Uriel beamed. “So, you have spunk. C’mon, varmint, let’s go rustle up transports.”

  The two of them hadn’t moved twenty yards east when the sound of automatic gunfire thumped through the air. Zeke couldn’t tell where the gunfire emanated from or where it was targeting. But the cracking echoes, displacing the air like shards of summer lightning, told him they weren’t in any immediate danger. He crouched and followed Uriel, who bolted to one of the single-story brick buildings on one side of the road. It was in better condition than most, with an overhang, and offered relative obscurity from any threats.

  Focus on the moment, he reminded himself.

  The gunfire was incessant. It sounded like war.

  Uriel counted aloud. A sharp divot creased her brow.

  “That’s at least a dozen weapons. Most are M27s. I can’t tell what the others are, but there
’s a lot of them.”

  She looked at Zeke like she was searching for something.

  Does she want guidance? Affirmation? Reassurance?

  Zeke didn’t know. He was aware that, for a split second, Uriel was freaked out. Whatever was happening was on a big scale. It was violent. And even if she couldn’t die, he understood that human nature, or the nature of sentient beings, was to survive. Fight or flight. It was instinctive.

  “Whatever is going on,” she said, “it has to have something to do with why we’re here. The timing isn’t a coincidence.”

  Zeke balled his free hand into a fist and playfully punched her in the shoulder. Then he held up his weapon at eye level between them. “I’ve got two shots left. What are we waiting for? We’d better find out what’s happening firsthand.”

  The worry on Uriel’s face dissolved into a smile. The divot relaxed. She nodded toward the direction of the reverberating gunfire. “Ladies first,” she said, but stood still.

  Zeke waited for her to move before understanding what she’d meant. He smirked and moved past her toward the battle.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Brina heard them coming before she saw them. The TMF transports might have been a preferred mode of mobility for the Marines, but they weren’t stealthy. The rumble of their engines and the low vibration of their hulking armored hulls gave her, and the awaiting Tics, plenty of time to steady themselves and take aim.

  Then the thundering approach, which was growing louder, abruptly ceased. There was quiet again. A radio at her hip squawked. She twisted the volume lower and unclipped the radio, bringing it to her ear. A half dozen of the others had matching radios, all dialed into the same frequency.

  “This is position four. I hear ’em,” said one of the men. “I don’t see ’em yet. Over.”

  “Copy that, four,” replied another. “This is two. I hear ’em. From the sound of it, there are at least two transports out there. Over.”

  “This is five,” said a third. “We copy that. We have eyes on one. It’s three blocks east of us. It’s sitting there. Not moving. Over.”

  “Copy that, five,” a voice chimed. “This is position two. We see the same transport. Engine running. Stationary. Over.”

  Brina knew most of the teams by sight. Naming the enforcers who Graham had told to volunteer, however, was another matter. Matching the voices to their faces was near impossible. So all the chatter might as well have been strangers. Then a familiar voice, and its accompanying name, called out over the radio.

  “Brina, this is Graham. What’s going on out there? Over.”

  Brina moved the radio to her mouth and pressed the transmit key. “Copy, Graham,” she said. “Approaching vehicles stopped. Over.”

  “Say again?” Graham asked. “Over.”

  She needed to be careful about what she said, not wanting too much information being broadcast should the Marines compromise one of the other positions.

  “Approaching vehicles stopped,” she repeated. “Over.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Wait. Out,” she replied, telling him she didn’t have the answer but she would try to get it to him. Until then, she was finished talking to him.

  “Copy that,” said Graham. “Out.”

  Brina pushed a series of buttons on the radio transceiver’s face and switched communication channels. On a new frequency, unknown to the other Tics and Graham, she issued one more message over the radio, this time to her spotter. “Scout, this is Brina. What do you see? Over.”

  Before the Tic troops had deployed to their positions, she’d privately communicated with one man she wanted to serve as a lookout. She wanted him farther away from the action in a location that might give her a heads-up to the TMF’s arrival.

  The young enforcer had already communicated with her once, when he’d seen a transport roll by him minutes earlier. There was a familiar-looking woman in the front passenger seat of a TMF transport. He told her he’d thought he’d seen the woman in a Tic bar.

  Brina thanked him for the intel and asked him to move closer to the street they’d readied for their ambush. The described woman could have been Li, but he couldn’t be sure yet. He was to alert her to any other findings. Brina knew there must be more than a single transport on its way.

  He hadn’t provided any additional information since. She tried again.

  “Scout,” she called, “this is Brina. What do you see? Do you copy? Over.”

  The radio crackled for a split second before a short high-pitched tone showed someone was about to transmit. Brina lowered the volume and held the transceiver up to her ear to listen. The voice wasn’t the scout’s. It wasn’t even male.

  “I copy, Brina,” said a woman on the other end. “I’m coming for you.”

  A chill ran down Brina’s spine. She wasn’t scared of many things. Her mentor and his proxy, Graham, had made certain her fears were compartmentalized in the deep recesses of her being. She was to access them only when they could provide fuel for her tasks.

  This was not that kind of fright. It was a sensation, completely unfamiliar to Brina, which came with being hunted.

  Sliding her fingers to the transmit key, she pulled the radio to her mouth.

  “Who is this?” she said, staying as low as possible. “Scout? Is this you? Over.”

  Brina let go of the transmit key. The muscled enforcer, not used to finding herself cowering from anything, shifted her body and moved the radio to the side of her head. The response was instantaneous. It was clear and the voice was devoid of emotion.

  “You know who this is,” said the woman.

  An image of a drenched, broken Adaliah Bancroft materialized in her mind. Those were the exact same words Brina had said to Adaliah when the Tic bar whore was strapped to a board and she was trying to extract information for her.

  How had she lost so much leverage?

  A burst of gunfire jolted Brina away from the window, followed by a percussive blast that knocked her onto her behind. A spray of plaster rained down on her head. The radio shot from her hand and flew across the room, hitting a plaster wall, shattering into several pieces.

  Dazed, and deafened by the volleys of return fire on all sides of her, Brina crawled back toward the window.

  How had the ambush not worked?

  Brina clenched her jaw. There was no way that Adaliah and a small band of TMF Marines could get past the number of Tics she’d placed along the corridor of buildings that led to the compound. And then there was the compound. What awaited the Marines in there, if they got that far, would be more than a little surprising.

  Brina tucked her arms underneath and rolled to the other end of the large window. There she reached out and found her own rifle. She wasn’t used to the protectorate’s ubiquitous automatic weapon, but given that the Tic trafficked them, she’d handled the rifle before and knew how to fire it.

  She got to her feet and moved along the wall toward the door that would lead her downstairs and out to the street. Being hunted didn’t agree with her. The chill that had run along her spine and tingled the ends of the hairs on her neck and arms had metastasized into an acidic nausea that crept from her gut and into her throat. The only way to keep it at bay was to go on the offensive. That was what her dear Semion Mogilevich would have wanted her to do.

  When she moved into the hallway, the sounds of the gunfight dampened for the moment, and she could hear Mogilevich talking to her. His gruff voice was a source of comfort. It helped her focus.

  “Remember the rules about fear,” he’d said once. He was a man of rules. “Number one: Fear is a weakness exposed. It is a weed evident of deeper roots. Cut weakness at its roots and you’ll know no fear.”

  It was a silly metaphor now that she considered it, sweat dripping into her eyes, the rush of adrenaline surging through her body.

  The rifle’s grip was comfortable in her right hand, and she grazed the bottom of the trigger guard with her finger. Rubbing it nervously,
she moved her left hand to a better position underneath the barrel and drew the stock to her shoulder. She pressed it there, remembering that if she fired without holding it tightly against her body, the recoil would slam the butt into her arm or chest. The weapon could fire thirty-six rounds per minute, depending on the temperature outside. It could do serious damage if handled improperly.

  The sounds of the battle, an earsplitting combination of gunfire and men shouting, amplified as Brina neared the exit of the building. The door was open, and outside she saw the orange-purple sky. It was dusk. They’d be fighting in the dark soon.

  Two men rushed past the doorway, hurrying east along the street. A third, with red hair and pale skin, stopped near the opening, shouldered his rifle, leaned into the scope, and fired. The weapon rattled in his hands, the gas-powered rifle spitting a burst of smoke-emitting rounds from its sixteen-and-a-half-inch barrel. The enforcer lifted his head, glanced over his shoulder, and bolted forward.

  Brina reached the opening and stepped outside, swinging her rifle and her body to the left. The percussive snap of automatic fire was deafening now. She’d entered the chaos of urban war.

  Sticking close to the building, she advanced east toward the enemy. Ahead of her, against the building, was a trio of men. Two of them returned fire. One stood, one kneeled, and the third was facedown on the street, his legs splayed awkwardly at the curb, the rifle under his body. His left hand twitched. Nothing else moved. Brina noticed his red hair before she saw the growing pool of blood leaching from his head onto the asphalt. She forged ahead. In the street, twenty yards from her, two more men were down. One of them was moaning and trying to drag himself to safety. The other was motionless.

  She reached the two enforcers in front of her and called out to them. She dropped to one knee.

  “How many are there?” she asked.

  Neither man answered her. They were engaged with the enemy. The one on his feet stepped away from the building and into the street. He whirled to his left and ripped a short burst from his rifle before moving back to the relative cover of the building.