The Bar at the End of the World Read online

  Mogilevich worked the bar along with another man named Markus. The two of them took and filled the liquor orders from Li and another waitress named Rose. Li and Rose filled the beers themselves.

  The pay, what there was of it, was lousy. The place stank of stale beer and cigarettes. The concrete floor was sticky, the lighting was poor, and the ambience was decidedly crummy. All of it was worth it, though, when a thin young man with a boyish face, kind eyes, and blond hair sat down at a table by himself on her third day of work.

  “Hi,” he said to her when she eased up to take his order. “How are you?”

  He was the first person who’d asked her how she was doing. Other men had complimented her appearance, some of them graphically, but not Zeke.

  “Good,” she answered. “You?”

  He shrugged. “Okay. Thirsty.”

  In her experience, most men in this type of place would have taken the opportunity to answer her with some pickup line. He hadn’t.

  “What can I get you, then?” she asked.

  “Beer.”

  “You got it.”

  She sauntered away and glanced at him over her shoulder when she reached the keg. He wasn’t looking at her. He wasn’t giving her that elevator stare like all the others. He was deep in thought, pinching his nose and leaning on his elbows.

  She tilted a mostly clean mug under the tap and filled it with what passed for beer. Anything water-based, which was nearly everything, was rationed and controlled by the Overseers. The Tic circumvented that control. They ran a parallel service, even if the quality of what they ran wasn’t always the finest or purest.

  The Tic was loved as much as it was feared amongst the regular people constricted by inequality and oppression. It gave them things the legitimate, and totalitarian, government would not. And in that, the Tic had its power.

  She carried the beer back to the table and set it in front of the young man. It sloshed a little and shook him from whatever had held his concentration.

  “Sorry about that,” she said, tugging a bar rag from her waist and swiping up the foamy puddle. “My apologies.”

  He peered up at her. “No problem. Thanks for the drink.”

  “You look serious,” she said. “Most guys come in here ready for a party.”

  He took a swig of the beer and wiped the foam from his mouth. “I guess I’m not most guys.”

  She extended her hand. “I’m Adaliah. My friends call me Li.”

  He studied her and put the mug on the table before shaking her hand. Electricity sparked between them. She hadn’t expected that. Her heart beat against her chest.

  “Does that make me a friend?” he asked. “I’m Zeke.”

  “Zeke,” she said with as flirty a smile as she could muster, “I guess it does.”

  Their eyes locked long enough for the electricity to spark again. Then his drifted past her at the same moment she felt the grip of a heavy hand on her shoulder.

  “Rule three,” said Mogilevich. “First warning.”

  She lowered her chin. “I’m sorry,” she said to her boss. “My bad.”

  “It’s not a problem,” said Zeke. He pushed his chair back from the table and stood, his balled fists on the table.

  Mogilevich stepped to the side of Li and closer to Zeke, staring up at the taller man. From his hip pocket, he withdrew a three-inch blade set into a four-inch handle. He touched a button, unlocking the blade. It clicked and opened.

  He brought the knife up toward Zeke’s face and turned it over, the dim bulbs of light reflecting off its Damascus steel. “If I say it’s a problem, Zeke,” he exaggerated the vowels in Zeke’s name, “then it’s a problem.”

  Zeke, surprisingly fast, grabbed the bar owner by the wrist with one hand and used the other to free him of the blade. He flipped it around in his palm and slid the blade back into the handle.

  Zeke smirked at Li before tightening his expression and eyeing Mogilevich. He took a step toward the proprietor. “Look,” he said to Mogilevich, planting a finger in the middle of the man’s chest, “I’ve had a rough day. I think you know without guys like me, guys like you wouldn’t have a place like this. So, I’m going to ask you, as politely as I can, to let this woman talk. I’ll even pay you double for the beer.”

  Mogilevich hesitated. Zeke wasn’t a big guy by any stretch, but Li had a gut feeling he could take Mogilevich in a fight. Still, there was something about the way Mogilevich responded that told them he was allowing Zeke to win the battle, if not the war.

  Mogilevich nodded. “All right,” he said, avoiding making eye contact with Li, “this once. I’m good with it.”

  Zeke put his hands on Mogilevich’s shoulders and patted them. He smiled again. Li liked it. It was another unexpected treat.

  “Thanks, Mogilevich,” he said. “I appreciate it. And I hope that when I leave, you don’t treat our friend poorly because of my insistent behavior.”

  “Of course not, Zeke. It’s all good here.” Mogilevich offered his hand. Zeke handed over the knife. Mogilevich took it and filtered his way through the growing crowd and back behind the bar.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” said Li.

  “He shouldn’t have talked to you that way,” said Zeke. “He’s your boss. He’s not an Overseer.”

  “I should get back to work,” she lamented. “To be honest, I’m not so sure who he is. Some people treat him like he’s a king.”

  Zeke chuckled. “He runs a bar. Yeah, sure, he’s connected. But c’mon. He runs a bar.”

  “I get the feeling it requires a lot of power to run a bar,” said Li. “I know that sounds funny, but in my experience, the people you least expect to be at the top of the pyramid are the ones who are, and those who flaunt their power have little.”

  “The old religion and money saying.”

  “What’s that?” asked Li.

  “It was an old saying,” said Zeke. “I read it in a book once. It was something about religion and money. The more people profess to have of both, the less they have of either.”

  “You read books?”

  “Sometimes. You?”

  “I have a collection.” Li lowered her voice to above a whisper. “Some of them aren’t legal.”

  “So we’re rebels, then,” said Zeke.

  Li’s cheeks flushed. “Something like that.”

  “I’ll hang out until your shift is over if that’s okay,” offered Zeke. “Make sure you get home safely.”

  “I’d like that.”

  Now, years later, Li sat waiting. A scratching sound caught her attention and brought her back to the present. She looked up, narrowing her gaze to better focus in the dark.

  The vague outline of a rodent sat a few feet from her. It bobbed up and down and then scurried away. The room was bathed in silence again.

  It wasn’t real. Nothing about us ever was.

  Did Zeke know what he’d done to her? Did he understand the torture she’d endured? He had to know they’d come for her, didn’t he?

  That he’d abandoned her for this, to protect himself, was incongruous with everything she thought she knew about him. He’d always put her first. He’d protected her even when she didn’t need it.

  Anger welled in her gut. The man who’d beguiled her was off running free. He’d escaped. He’d left her here. That thought repeated in her mind over and over. She’d never planned on loving him the way she did, but his innate goodness, cloaked in his outwardly roguish nature, had charmed her. She loved him. He loved her. Or so she’d thought.

  He’d left her. And nothing was real. The anger bloomed into a seething desire for revenge. The thought of his boyish charm, of his arms wrapped around her as he promised her a life better than the one they lived, nauseated her.

  As she remained there, stewing, eventually the anger ebbed and hope swelled. She needed something to hold onto. To help her push through. Foolish as it was.

  Zeke will come back. He wouldn’t leave me here.

  If she
could survive this, she would hold him again. He would hold her. The Zeke she knew was loyal to a fault. Yet he’d left her alone and vulnerable. It was a difficult thing to reconcile what she believed to be true and what was. After all, she’d tricked him, hadn’t she? She’d lied to him. He believed she was something, someone she was not. It was her job to lie. She was good at it. Too good.

  There was a fine line between love and hate. While she’d never anticipated loving him, she hadn’t, until now, considered the possibility of hating him. But she had and she did. The emotions teetered back and forth. She wanted to hate him, for her love of him to unravel. But a single thread held that love in place. It was confusing and overwhelming. That made her hate him even more.

  The ripe odor of her own stench overwhelmed her senses, and the throbbing pain of her wounds focused her raw emotions into a razor point. She stared into the darkness, seeing only a clear image of his face. She wanted to scream.

  Chapter Eight

  Commander Guilfoyle stood on the steps of the Fascio, staring up at the three bodies hanging there as a warning to those who might try to undermine his authority in the city. His hands were behind his back, his chin high, as he stood when inspecting his Marines before sending them off to fight the infidels or patrol the city’s perimeter.

  The dead man to the left, the slender one, was in the worst shape. Even though he’d been there the fewest number of days, the birds had gotten to him. There must have been something tasty about the frayed flesh at his midsection. He looked like what farmers had once called scarecrows, back when there was such a thing as farmers.

  A black crow sat atop the corpse’s hanging head. It checked the sky for competition and flapped its broad wings before returning to its task of picking at his scalp.

  Guilfoyle didn’t know the man’s name or his story. He only knew what his Marines had told him. The dead man had been among the greasy criminals known as bootleggers. They hustled goods, mostly water, for the Aquatic Collective. The Tic.

  The funny thing about the Tic was that it was the worst kept secret in the city. Really, it was a scourge across the entire protectorate of what used to be the continental United States. From the northeastern provinces to the far west, the Tic had developed into a shadow government running parallel to the true power of the Overseers.

  Although the Tic did its dirty work in plain sight, it was smart enough about its business to avoid direct confrontation with the Overseers’ outward authority. Occasional payments to some of the more powerful Overseers didn’t hurt either. They were smart, they were politically astute, and they were brutal.

  While Guilfoyle would like nothing better than to stamp out the Tic, he understood the water cartel’s reach was far too vast to entirely undo all at once. Truth be told, they were two sides of the same coin. Both used fear and violence to consolidate their power, their wealth, and their control. Whether or not he liked to admit it, he held an uneasy respect for the faceless nouveau cosa nostra.

  As long as the Overseers had their thumb on the vast majority of surviving people after the old world ended, Guilfoyle’s superiors were content to pick away at the Tic-like scabs. Eventually, they might weaken them enough to destroy them. Of much bigger concern to Guilfoyle and his superiors were the whispered rumors of a growing resistance amongst the regular people.

  Those were the ones who were most dangerous. If the rumors were true, they posed a far bigger threat to the existing hierarchy than the Tic, which needed the Overseers to survive. The resistance wouldn’t be interested in bribery or oppressive violence to achieve its goals. They would be less predictable. And despite the primal desire for power, Guilfoyle understood that freedom and self-determination were far greater motivators than anything else.

  Guilfoyle pushed the worrisome thought of an unproven rumor from his mind and relished the sight above him. As long as he reminded his citizenry of his power, trapping rats and hoisting them up for display, all was well.

  He whistled at the bird, which stopped its business and cocked its head at him. In that moment of distraction, a larger bird swooped in and claimed dominance. It took the perch atop the bootlegger’s scalp, shooing away the smaller bird with a squawk and peck.

  Guilfoyle commended the larger fowl. It did what was necessary. It took what it wanted. It did not apologize for its position in the order of things.

  He marched the final distance from the steps to the grand entrance of the Fascio. A pair of Marines met him at the large metal doors and swung them open, standing at attention as he passed them without acknowledgment. He crossed the threshold, and a wave of cool air met him in the large ornate lobby.

  Two more Marines stood at the base of a large marble staircase in the space’s center. They looked forward, unmoved by their approaching commander. They saluted only when he passed them on his way up the stairs, his boots clacking on the polished stone. He moved to the right of the wide steps and used the polished brass handrail to guide himself.

  When he reached the top, Theo awaited him. The aide bowed his head. “Commander,” he said, “they’re waiting for you.”

  “As they should,” said Guilfoyle, turning left and marching the first steps along a wide corridor that led to the executive wing of the tower.

  “I took the liberty of pouring your coffee, sir,” said Theo, following at the same brisk pace as his charge. “It should be at the perfect temperature by the time we arrive.”

  “Excellent,” said Guilfoyle. He strode with purpose along the hallway until he reached its end. Then he stood, awaiting Theo.

  “Let me get that for you, sir,” said the assistant, rushing ahead to grab the brass knob and twist.

  Theo shouldered open the door and stood back so the commander might enter the space first. This was the council room. Guilfoyle’s top lieutenants all sat quietly in their seats. At the head of a long glass table sat a single cup and saucer. From the cup, fingers of steam rose and twisted until they evaporated into the cool air in the cabinet room. Theo stood at the back of the room, watching and listening silently.

  The man was good at watching, at disappearing into the fabric of a room. He somehow found the imbalance in any space and corrected it with his presence. He had a sixth sense about him.

  It was amazing to Guilfoyle how skilled Theo was at so many things. Theo brought a balance to the business of governance. He was the one who always read the room, knew exactly what to say and do. Guilfoyle knew his servant to be a powerful man whose gentility belied his strength. There were moments where the commander even thought he could see an ethereal glow surround Theo, a halo of energy.

  Guilfoyle thought the man could have been one of his lieutenants. He’d even spoken of it once as he sipped on a faux Beaujolais. He’d savored the sweetness on his tongue and then toasted the servant.

  “I’m not interested in power,” Theo had said. “I’m interested in serving those who wield it.”

  Guilfoyle hadn’t quite understood the man. How could anyone align themselves with those in power without he himself seeking it in some way. Everyone wants power. Good or evil, benevolent or narcissistic, everyone wants to hold sway. It’s human nature, Guilfoyle was convinced.

  But he hadn’t argued with Theo. He’d let the man stand there in his tailored gray suit, his starched white collar, his sparkling cufflinks, and pretend to be happy as a facilitator. He’d toasted the servant and congratulated him on the choice of wine.

  “I didn’t know the Saône River still existed,” Guilfoyle had said of the winding waterway that ran along the Beaujolais vineyards and provided the grapes with their supple and fruity flavors.

  “It doesn’t,” Theo had said. “This is a skilled imitation.”

  “The balance is perfect.” Guilfoyle had toasted again.

  Theo had said nothing. He’d smiled, his pinched eyes almost disappearing beneath his plucked brows.

  Presently, Guilfoyle lowered his coffee cup to the table and spun it so that its handle was perpendicular t
o him and aimed at Catherine. He ran his tongue across his teeth and placed his hands flat on the glass. It seemed all six of the lieutenants were holding their collective breath.

  “Good morning,” the commander said to the assembled. “We’ve a cool front today. I took advantage of it and walked the street this morning.”

  Guilfoyle sat in the high-back wooden chair at the head of the long conference table. While all the others sat in ergonomic ceramic chairs set on casters, Guilfoyle’s seat was an ornately cut oak armchair with blood-red velvet on the seat, along the back, and on the wide arms. It was more of a throne than a chair.

  There were six lieutenants at the table, three on each side of the thick glass slab that served as the centerpiece of their meetings. The one to his right was Catherine.

  She wore a pinstriped black pantsuit, white shirt, and silver tie. The tie was knotted in a double Windsor. Her white hair was pulled tight into a bun and gave her face a permanently surprised expression. She scowled at the commander.

  “That was a stupid thing to do, William,” she said. “We’ve had an increasing number of riotous events. The tunnel is there for a reason.”

  The other five lowered their chins, looking at their laps. It was obvious none of them wanted to make eye contact with the commander or Catherine. Theo, who stood at the commander’s shoulder and behind his throne, stared out the large wall-sized window that overlooked the brown city. Dust hung in the air and clung to the glass’s exterior, exaggerating the depth of the monochromatic cast.

  Catherine’s eyes widened and darted around the room. She settled on Theo. “What? I’m only saying what everyone else is thinking. The Tic is up to something. We can’t be too careful.”

  Guilfoyle, who still hadn’t acknowledged her, picked up his coffee and blew the steam from it. He took a sip. “The temperature is perfect, Theo. Well done, as always.”

  “Thank you, Commander,” Theo said. “I hope it’s balanced for everyone in the room.”