The Bar at the End of the World Page 4

  Li had leaned in and pressed her forehead against the window, her breath fogging the glass. On the street below, the spot where Zeke kept his Plymouth was empty. The cracked asphalt and faded parking lines had stared back at her mockingly. He’d abandoned her. She’d cursed him and brought her hands to the glass, her fingers raking it as she stared at the empty parking space. She’d curled her fingers into fists, clenched her jaw, and marched back to the bedroom.

  She’d opened the nightstand beside her bed, pulling the knob to reveal a biometric safe. She touched the sensor and then swiped her index finger across it. The safe’s lid clinked open and the hydraulic hinge hissed.

  Behind her, from the front of the apartment, a percussive bang had preceded the crack and splinter of the worn mahogany door. She’d reached into the safe, her hand shaking, and grabbed her 9mm handgun, slapped the adjacent full magazine into the trusty weapon, and had pulled the slide to chamber the first round when she’d heard the heavy tread of boots bounding into her home. She’d spun, her finger on the trigger and ready to fire, when she’d felt the prick and sting of a pronged sensor. Instantly, she lost control of her motor functions as her body convulsed from the electric charge coursing through her. Her hand had seized, causing her to fire a single errant shot into the ceiling.

  The last thing she’d remembered was the sprinkling of plaster dust and the glower of masked men who’d leveled her with a stun gun. As she’d lain there, immobile other than the reactive twitching of her muscles, one of them had withdrawn a syringe. The bite of the needle stuck her arm, and then, despite fighting to stay conscious, her body sank onto the floor and she’d slid unwillingly into a drug-induced slumber.

  Now she was here, wherever here was, bound to a board, naked, at the mercy of the merciless.

  “We found a note,” said Brina. A hint of her teeth revealed the lack of care she’d taken with them. They were brown in spots, black in others. Dental hygiene was among the things that had vanished with the lack of water.

  Brina placed her hands onto her knees and rose from the chair. Her triceps flexed, her neck tensed, and she tilted it from side to side. It cracked and she walked away from Li, out of her field of view. Li heard her heavy footsteps on the floor, the shuffle of thick fabric between the woman’s thighs.

  Brina was large, but not overweight. She was an anomaly in a world where rising temperatures and lack of rain had wrought a slow-motion apocalypse called the Dearth. The farms went first, then the towns, then the cities. Eventually, the government fell. Now everything was rationed. Every drop of water was gold. People didn’t grow like Brina. Not anymore.

  Brina reappeared with a large blanket clutched in her mitts. She tossed it onto Li’s body, and the warm, scratchy wool covered most of her body.

  Brina watched her squirm for a moment but did nothing to help her. She lowered herself mechanically back into the chair. It scraped against the floor under her weight as she pulled it closer to the side of the plank to which Li was affixed.

  “It was in the sheets,” Brina said.

  Li looked at Brina, incredulous.

  “The note,” Brina clarified. “It was in the sheets on your bed.”

  Li’s mind raced. A note? In our bed?

  The corners of Brina’s mouth twitched. Her eyes flashed with the sick satisfaction of someone picking at another person’s festering sore. The twitch spread into a broad grin.

  “Would you like to know what he wrote?” Brina asked.

  Li clenched her jaw and steeled herself. Beneath the blanket and against the binds, she balled her hands into fists. She curled her toes. She wouldn’t give Brina the satisfaction of asking.

  “I don’t care,” she said. “The bastard left me.”

  Brina ran her head up and down the length of Li’s blanketed form, sniffing like a hound dog in a hunt. She clacked her teeth; the sound of them snapping echoed in the room. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “You’re not a good liar, Adaliah. Not a good liar at all.”

  A knot thickened in Li’s throat. Her chest tightened. Shivering, she swallowed past the knot before turning to face the ceiling.

  In the distance, the metallic click of a lock preceded the slide of a heavy metal door scraping against concrete. The awful noise reverberated off the walls. Li strained to see what she could, but it was out of her field of view. The sound of footsteps, heavy boots, clacked against the floor. There was more than one person coming.

  Brina stood from the chair and adjusted her clothing, the familiar black ensemble of the Tic’s enforcers. Brina bowed her head, submitting only slightly to whoever was approaching.

  “Sir,” said Brina, stepping away without turning her back.

  “What have you extracted?” came a low, booming voice that sent chills traveling along the gooseflesh of Li’s skin. “What does she know?”

  “Nothing,” said Brina.

  Li trembled. She couldn’t see who it was that had entered the room, but after hearing him, she didn’t need to. He was a man she’d met once before, when Zeke had gotten in trouble. The man had warned her boyfriend that mistakes were understandable as long as that was what they were and they never repeated themselves.

  He’d frightened her then. He frightened her now. He was Graham. His legend, as Zeke had nervously revealed in the dark of their bedroom in a whisper, made Brina seem like Betty Crocker. Graham was a man who relished the prospect of mixing sour violence into a batter made of fear and misery.

  He stepped into view, his shiny bald head reflecting the white circles of light from the bulbs above, and he bent over to pull Brina’s chair underneath himself. He sat with a sigh, his wiry frame ramrod straight. He wore reflective sunglasses that showed Li a warped image of herself. On his hip, in a black leather sheath, was the long bone handle of a knife. She’d heard about the knife.

  His neatly trimmed beard was salt and pepper, more the former than the latter. His dimples belied the evil within.

  “We’ve met before,” he said, crossing one thin leg over the other. “A year ago? In your apartment.”

  Li’s focus danced between the oval lenses of his glasses, not sure where to focus her attention. Although she didn’t want to look at him at all, she couldn’t help herself.

  “I remember thinking how beautiful you were then,” he said, his voice like a V-8 purring. “Quite a figure, porcelain features, and naughty sprinkled in amongst your self-righteousness.”

  Bile crept up Li’s throat. She winced against the sting as it sank back into her gut.

  “I wondered what you saw in a punk like Ezekiel Watson,” he said, waving his long fingers in front of him. “He was beneath you, I thought.”

  Graham adjusted the glasses, grasping the metallic frame between his fingers. “Or maybe you liked him beneath you.”

  Li’s fists tightened, her fingernails digging into her palms. She wanted to leap at Graham, attack him, gouge out his eyes.

  He tilted his head slightly and leaned forward in the chair. He was close enough to touch her.

  He raised a hand, and Li flinched. That brought a genuine, leering smile to Graham’s face. His dimples deepened beneath his cheekbones. He let his hand hover for a moment before pinching a corner of the wool blanket. He lifted it to peek underneath.

  Graham stared at Li’s naked body for several seconds before lowering the blanket back into place. He leaned back and whistled a catcall. “I was right about you,” he said. “You are beautiful. A little thin for my taste, perhaps, but sumptuous.”

  Li’s eyes burned with tears now. She couldn’t stop them from coming. She couldn’t keep her emotions at bay.

  “Zeke’s twice the man you are,” she blurted without thinking. Then she added, “So is Brina.”

  As soon as she spat the words, she expected, braced for, an immediate and violent response from Graham. Instead, Brina stepped forward and backhanded her across the face.

  Graham’s eyebrows arched above the rounded frames. He chuckled and dismissive
ly waved Brina back to her place.

  “Oooh,” he said, in a voice an octave higher than normal. “You’re as feisty as I’d hoped. A real wild pony. I like that.”

  He uncrossed his legs and planted his boots flat on the concrete floor. His hands were on his knees, his fingers flitting up and down like a pianist. Without taking his attention off Li, he spoke to Brina.

  “I don’t think we’ve exhausted the possibilities just yet,” he said. “I think there is gold to be mined.” His tongue hung on the last word for emphasis.

  Brina stepped forward, her hands flexing at her sides. Her expression was flat, absent emotion.

  “If you insist, sir,” she said, repeating the submissive bend she’d offered as Graham entered the room.

  Graham stood. He was a tall man, whose body seemed even longer given his thin physique. He tugged at the cuffs of his shirt, pulling them lower on his wrists. “I do,” he said and turned to leave. He took several steps toward the door, other unseen pairs of boots joining in the march, and stopped.

  Li was looking at the ceiling again, considering what torture awaited her. She wasn’t looking in Graham’s direction, but couldn’t have seen him if she were. He was too far from her field of view, yet he was close enough for her to hear his voice, for her to understand his parting message.

  “He never loved you,” the monster said as an aside. “That’s what his note said. He wrote that he never loved you.”

  The metal door screeched open against the floor, the scraping sound deafening from its echo off the hard surfaces of the room. Straining against the wet leather binds that held her to the plank, Li screamed at Graham that he was a liar, that he was trying to get to her, to make her offer information she didn’t have. Her wrists and ankles were raw. Her body shivered with cold. Her mind raced with fear.

  The door shut with a clang. The lock clinked. The room was silent again. Li’s pulse throbbed in her ears.

  None of this was supposed to happen—not Zeke, not the Tic, not torture at the hands of this woman above her.

  “He’s lying,” Li said to Brina. It was as much a question as it was a statement. “Graham is lying.”

  Brina pulled one hand from behind her back. In it she held a piece of paper ripped from an old notepad. The pale yellow paper was decorated with muted pink and blue flowers at its corners. Li recognized it as her own, from a drawer in her kitchen. But it wasn’t the paper that sucked the air from her lungs.

  It was the familiar scratch at its center that left her breathless. It was barely legible in its careless haste. It was, with no doubt, Zeke’s handwriting.

  “It wasn’t real,” it read. “Nothing about us ever was.”

  She read the eight words again. And again. And again. Did he know something? Was it a code? Or did he really mean what he’d written before leaving her alone and trapped?

  Brina pulled the paper away, and Li’s attention drifted to the woman’s other meaty hand. In it was a pair of pliers.

  Chapter Four

  Commander William Guilfoyle splashed cold water across his face. The sound of the running faucet was musical, and the rush of the water from the decorative brass faucet into the deep porcelain sink reminded him of the time he’d stood behind a waterfall, cocooned inside a mossy grotto hidden from the rest of the world.

  As he spun the faucet off and reached for a plush cotton towel, he wondered if waterfalls existed anywhere anymore. That was something he wanted to know. It was something he had to know.

  He inhaled the herbal aroma of the towel and blotted the last of the moisture from his brow and neck, then dropped the towel onto the heated marble floor. He plodded barefoot across the expanse of the bathroom and onto the plush Berber carpet of his suite. The light changed once he’d crossed the threshold, from the artificially blue-white illumination of the bathroom to the warm, natural glow of the sunset beyond the seamless floor-to-ceiling glass panels that wrapped the expanse of the living quarters.

  He dipped his hands into the deep pockets of his silk robe and strode confidently to the overstuffed leather chair he affectionately and only half-jokingly called the command center.

  “Theo,” he called as he sank into the leather, the air whooshing from the thick cushion. “Theo, can you hear me?”

  A well-groomed man in an impeccably tailored gray suit atop a white collared shirt and glossy black leather shoes appeared from another part of the large suite. He walked briskly and stopped at the foot of the command center. He tugged gently at the French cuffs of his shirt so that a hint of his lemniscate-design platinum cufflinks peeked from underneath the jacket. “Yes, Commander Guilfoyle, sir,” said the pinch-eyed Theodore Pannopolis. “How might I serve you?”

  Guilfoyle planted his elbows on the wide arms of the chair and ran his palms across the soft grain of the leather. It was more suede than saddle, and it tickled the tips of his fingers.

  “Are there any waterfalls?” he asked musingly.

  Theo blinked. His plucked brows angled toward one another. “I’m sorry?”

  Guilfoyle waved his hand like a magician producing a coin from thin air. He looked up at Theo without raising his chin. “Waterfalls,” he repeated. “Are there any left?”

  “Where, sir?”

  Guilfoyle huffed with frustration. “Anywhere. Do they exist, or are they extinct?”

  “I’ll find out, sir,” said Theo. “Off the top of my head, I’d suggest there aren’t many, if any. But I’d hate to give you incomplete information. Is there anything else? I was preparing your meal, but I am happy to—”

  “How long have you been with me, Theo?” he asked.

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  “How long?” repeated the commander. “How many years have you worked for me?”

  Theo folded his hands in front of him. Usually, his pensive look appeared well-rehearsed. He and Guilfoyle knew Theo had volumes of information easily accessible from his steel trap of a mind. Feigning to search his memory was something he did for his employer’s benefit, so as not to make the commander feel inferior. This look was different though. Theo appeared genuinely stumped.

  “I couldn’t say, sir,” he answered after opening and closing his mouth several times. “I know it’s been years, but time tends to run together for me. All I can say is that it’s been a pleasure and feels as though it was just yesterday you saw fit to entrust me with your person.”

  “Fantastic,” Guilfoyle said, appeased. “I don’t know what I would do without you, Theo. You’re the best sounding board I’ve ever had. And your chicken tetrazzini is impeccable.” The commander pinched his fingers together. “Impeccable,” he repeated.

  Theo adjusted the tie at his buttoned collar and offered a slight bow. “I’m flattered on both accounts, sir.”

  “What am I eating tonight?” asked the commander, changing the subject without addressing Theo’s admission. “I hope it’s not the engineered tilapia again. It’s bland and unsatisfying, regardless of your skill.”

  Theo shook his head. “No, sir. I took note the last time I was remiss. Tonight, I’ve prepared a wonderful game hen with an organic vegetable and root medley. The herbs are fresh from the garden.”

  “And the wine?”

  Theo held up his hand and copied the finger-pinching motion Guilfoyle had just performed. “A fabulous and earthy Pinot Noir. It has notes of cherry that complement the robust flavor of the hen.”

  “Great,” said Guilfoyle. “As you were, then, Theo. I’d like to know about the waterfalls by the time I’ve finished the bottle.”

  “Of course,” said Theo, and the man hustled from the room with the same fastidious jaunt that had brought him to Commander Guilfoyle’s side.

  “Oh,” said the commander. “Don’t overcook the hen.”

  “Yes, sir,” Theo called from the kitchen.

  Guilfoyle turned his attention to the view beyond the glass in front of him. This was his favorite part of each day, the moments before the light slipped from the sk
y and the colors were their richest.

  He was thirty stories above the city, or what was left of it. His was one of two skyscrapers functioning as intended. There was ample power without the threat of brownouts, and water, hot and cold, that seemed in endless supply. And the climate controls were as accurate as they had been when everything was in abundance.

  His tower, the Torquemada, was residential. He lived in the penthouse atop the building. The entire floor was his. Other high-ranking Overseers lived in the levels beneath his. Some floors were divided; others were not.

  The other tower, which stood fifteen stories tall, was for business. It was the central government headquarters for the Overseers and was known as the Fascio.

  Where the residential building was glass and steel and gleamed against the sunlight, the governmental edifice was built of stone and mortar. It was adorned with avenging angels and gargoyles. There were centaurs and lions, two-headed dragons, and beckoning sirens.

  An underground tunnel connected the two buildings, allowing for ease of movement and for protection from outside forces that might seek to harm the Overseers’ position atop the hierarchy of this world.

  As he did every night, Guilfoyle scanned the orange horizon, searching for the hints of purple that might reflect off distant clouds. Once he was satisfied, and the sun had reached the final stages of its descent, the commander would shuffle the short distance to the glass and take in the full scene of the kingdom below.

  It was brown and gray. Dust hung in the air. Plumes of it rose like smoky wakes behind the engines of transport trucks, angular armored vehicles, and the occasional passenger car.

  Aside from the two towers, the rest of the city was low slung. It was a mixture of single-story structures, the sporadic two-story bungalow, and open-air markets obvious by the connections of drab tarps and tents cloistered into blocks and irregular circular collections.

  Near one collection of tents was a long line of people. It snaked for three city blocks, and from Commander Guilfoyle’s vantage point three hundred feet above, those in the queue looked like ants awaiting an audience with their queen.