BOB's Bar (Tales From The Multiverse Book 2) Read online

  She took another swallow of her drink. “After the fourth quarter, we called the game. I noticed that a couple of helicopters were coming straight at us, then they started circling the place. I ducked out a side gate into the parking lot and noticed a woman who looked like me rushing toward me, so I slipped behind some bushes and let her pass. I made it down the street before one of the helicopters come in to land on an unused soccer field. I figured my hooky time was over, so I headed in that direction. John Grimes, one of my security guys, jumps out and gives me one of,” she made air quotes, “those looks.”

  Rika managed to nod and take a swig from her growler at the same time before saying, “I hate getting those looks. I usually get them from Leslie.”

  “Yeah, John is good at them.” Bethany Anne nodded. “So, I come along meekly and he is confused by the outfit I’m wearing, so I tell him the story.” She shrugged. “Seems like the senator was replaced by someone with half a clue, so I was going back.”

  “So,” Amanda asked, “who won?”

  Bethany Anne scratched her chin. “Well, our country had gone through a PC phase a decade or two before, and you couldn’t name a football team practically anything that would upset people. So this youth football group had decided to use mythological creatures.”

  “No!” Cain said.

  Bethany Anne smirked and waggled her eyebrows. “Yes. The Vampires beat the Werewolves twenty-one to seven!”

  Interlude

  Ass clearly deserved it, Brutus the Hillcat commented. Too many asses and not enough time.

  “I can honestly say, and I think I speak for the table, that I did not expect that. I’m not sure I really see you as a football mom, Bethany Anne, but if you say it happened, who am I to argue?” Amanda commented.

  “I’ve never understood how there can be so many asswipes in the universe,” Kelsey said mournfully. “Darwinism should’ve fixed that problem by now.”

  “You’d be surprised. They sprout up like mushrooms after the rain. It’s up to us to trim the herd, something I take to heart. I already told you what happened on Iapetus, but there was this other time . . .” Rika started in on another story.

  The construct was designed to encourage each subject to tell one story and one story only, but humans were organic beings, after all, and not subject to hard-wired rules. They couldn’t be and still provide valuable data. They were going off on a tangent, taken there by Bethany Anne’s story.

  BOB had to intercede and get them back on track.

  “May I refresh your drinks?” it asked, moving between Kelsey and Blackhawk, physically encroaching. “Or get you a new one before the next person speaks?” it asked, letting the construct subtly reinforce “next” with imperatives.

  The chatter died down and the humans seemed confused for a moment as they looked down at their glasses, but it worked. The sidetracked conversation died as they put in their orders and waited for the next person to speak up.

  Standish’s Story

  By Richard Fox

  Standish set his glass of whiskey down and peered behind BOB to the bar.

  “Hey, is that a Midori Melon ’33 I see up there on the top shelf?”

  “Would you care for one?” BOB asked.

  “If it’s legit and not some MacDougall knockoff.” Standish tapped his bottom lip. “Midori...the one that got away.”

  “A bottle of green booze got away from you?” Rika asked.

  “A noble sacrifice to help preserve a keystone of human culture,” Standish explained. “A strong drink. Spirits. Firewater. A little nip before bedtime. Chrome Dome groks my mouth music, yeah?”

  BOB swiped a towel against the inside of a glass so hard a crack formed.

  “Sure, he does,” Standish’s eyes flitted from bottle to bottle behind the bar. “Takes me back. It really does. There I was—no kidding, in Phoenix just hours after the Battle of Ceres.”

  “You got from Ceres to Phoenix in hours?” Amanda asked, eyeing Standish’s outfit. “They have that technology in...late 1970s America?”

  “I’ve got style, darling.” Standish raised his nose slightly. “Innovators. Movers and shakers. We all need that air of whimsy to keep the public interested. My statues are all of me in a three-piece. Focus groups said no one would buy booze from a place with a beach bum out front.”

  “You have statues in front of your convenience stores?” Kelsey asked with a raised eyebrow.

  “Standish Liquors! Finest in all the settled worlds. Don’t go for MacDougall’s cheap imitations. I taught that Jessie scrote everything he knows. Besides, if it wasn’t for me, humanity wouldn’t have any fine spirits at all. Reduced to whatever squids had stashed on their ships or what civilians had squirreled away in their luggage after Ceres. Ugh, what a dark time that would have been.”

  “You saved Earth’s liquor supply?” Bethany Anne asked.

  “All by my lonesome too. There I was—the Breitenfeld just dropped us into Phoenix to secure the city; make sure the Xaros hadn’t left anything behind before we brought civilians down.”

  “Xaros? Anyone?” Floribeth asked. The rest of the patrons shook their heads or shrugged.

  “I barely know where Earth is,” Rika said. “Although I do recall hearing that it’s been trashed a few times.”

  “They’re the alien drones that wiped out Earth, except for the Saturn colonization fleet that Ibarra sent on a time skip to miss the invasion.” Standish looked into his nearly empty glass. “I know people drink to forget, but damn. Me and what was left of my Strike Marine team got lumped into a scratch company and told to scout an apartment complex a couple blocks from Euskall Tower where the Ibarra Corp was headquartered.”

  “Ibarra? You mean Mark Ibarra?” Amanda asked. “I met him once.”

  “And how is Mr. Ibarra?” BOB asked. “He’s a different level of...quality patron.”

  “Not talking to me,” Standish replied. “Which is fine, since I don’t want him to think I owe him any money. What does he need with capital anyway? Metal bastard—no offense—can’t even drink.

  “So, we get dropped in and Phoenix is just as dead as the last time I was there, except there weren’t any Xaros drones chasing us through the streets or Armor blowing my eardrums out with their damn rail cannons. Christ, that was a long day.”

  He rapped his glass on the bar, and BOB refilled his drink. Standish finished it in one tip, a faraway look in his eyes.

  “Everything was a mess. We’d just plugged Ibarra’s granddaughter into the Crucible, and Fleet’s going nuts with panicky civilians worried they’re going to run out of air.” Standish scrunched his face. “Which was reasonable. You ever been sardined into a ship and everyone’s thieving your oxygen?”

  “You said there was a colony mission to Saturn,” Floribeth asked. “There were more people than breathable air?”

  “It didn’t start off like that.” Standish shrugged. “Ample room in the ships. Supposed to be a few days transit, then plopped into prefab domes on Iapetus or somewhere. But Captain Valdar got the idea to use a couple of the civvie ships to ram the Xaros defenses around the Crucible jump gate, so they had to pack non-combatants in wherever they could find space. Needless to say, after breathing someone else’s CO2 for a while and everything smelling like ass, they wanted the hell off those ships. Phoenix was the last city on Earth...what was left of it.”

  Cain raised a hand and almost asked a question, but a gentle touch from BOB stopped him.

  “Of course, we could’ve set the civilians down anywhere,” Standish continued. “But Phoenix had the only thing in the way of shelter left. No time for engineers to build something. What the Xaros did was weird. The same lasers they used to burn your face off could transmute matter into Omnium, which they used to build the Crucible. Blocks of Omnium were in neat stacks in intersections. Stuff glowed from the inside.

  “Some butter bar told me to move it to a sidewalk. Just because I was a private at the time! Doesn’t pay to be the lowest-ran
ked Marine, tell you that much. I passed the order on to some wide-eyed PFC, and he moved the Omnium without anything exploding—our first break of the day. So, Phoenix was half there. Buildings missing whole sides. Looked like God took a scalpel to some of the places to take a look inside. We never figured out why the Xaros did things the way they did.

  “So, imagine walking through Phoenix. Last city on Earth. Place used to be wealthy. It was the HQ of Ibarra Corp. Everyone who used to work there made good money. Expensive tastes. I couldn’t afford lunch at any of the automats back before the Xaros showed up. Place was a ghost town after that. No cars moving. No aircars. No nothing. Even had tumbleweeds bouncing around. I went through there when we rescued Marc Ibarra, but the rest of the scratch company were wide-eyed and slack-jawed at the place.

  “Naturally, I took advantage of the opportunity. All our power armor comms were offline, dark in case the Xaros were still there and monitoring, so that dummy lieutenant who thought I would move a block of Omnium was a bit lost. I told three different squad leaders that the L-T wanted me reassigned to them and proceeded to get lost.”

  “Why would the lieutenant do that?” Floribeth asked. “Very poor command and control.”

  “He didn’t.” Standish scrunched his shoulders. “But when one squad leader did a headcount, he’d think I was with the other group. Who’d think I was supposed to be with the other group in another neighborhood. Simple trick. The L-T fell for it hook, line, and sinker.”

  “You took off on your own through an abandoned city potentially full of killer drones?” Kelsey asked. “I knew I liked you for a reason.”

  “It wasn’t abandoned, it was cleansed. Xaros killed everyone they found.” Standish’s face flushed with anger for a moment. “Was there a risk? Sure. But I was on a quest for a reward—a boon that would secure my retirement if I got nabbed out on my own.”

  “You mean if they arrested you for desertion,” Rika clarified.

  “Potato, pah-tah-to.” Standish rolled his eyes. “So, I ducked into a mall and broke off from the scouting mission. The plan was for every squad to return to the landing zone in a couple of hours, so long as I made it back in time, no one would be the wiser.

  “Now, as I was walking through the second level of Scottsdale Fashion Square Mall, I had second thoughts. Sections of the ceiling had been cut out. There was sand all over the place, and black shadows on the walls where the Xaros had disintegrated people. Phoenix was our last stand. Wasn’t much of one.

  “So I ducked into a jewelry store and there were all these gold necklaces just laying around, not belonging to anyone.”

  “Why not load up on gold if you were tomb raiding?” Bethany Anne asked.

  “What’s gold worth in an apocalypse? Can you eat it? Shoot it? Trade it? Maybe. But something has to have value if you’re going to trade it. I knew the barter economy from my own ring of black market— I mean my network of Marines who traded needed things. Legitimately. Completely legit.

  “Know what the demand for a diamond-studded engagement ring was that day? Or some platinum matinee-length necklace? Zero. People wanted something more useful. Something more relevant. My contacts and customers would want booze.” Standish jiggled his drink ever so slightly.

  “Not healthy, I admit. Every human in the solar system was dead. Only survivors were on the Saturn colony mission or the Atlantic Union Navy escort fleet, and the fleet had just taken serious casualties in the fight for Ceres. Everyone would want a stiff drink as soon as they could get one.”

  “But what would you take in return? You said it was the apocalypse. If people wouldn’t want gold, they wouldn’t want cash either. Or dollars. Or Mana Credits,” Amanda said.

  “I wasn’t thinking that far ahead,” Standish told her. “We weren’t sure there wouldn’t be more Xaros to fight, and I didn’t want me or my team going to the fight ill prepared. I could’ve traded a few bottles for extra ammo. A little something-something to encourage the repair techs to get our power armor in tip-top shape before another team’s gear got serviced.”

  “Your military doesn’t sound very professional.” Cain huffed.

  “Sounds like the one I was in,” Rika muttered.

  “Best of the best still have needs.” Standish turned his palms up. “And standards tend to fluctuate after an apocalypse. I don’t judge.

  “On I went, through the dead beast of capitalism’s belly. Was surreal, let me tell you. Past leather goods stores full of rotting jackets and purses where they had made the stuff by hand, not the perfectly good material printers put out that clothed most everyone in the Atlantic Union. Rusted-out food courts where I could still smell the cinnamon rolls. Whole place was dead silent, except for the birds coming in and out of what was left of the glass ceiling.

  “I went through some of the city when my team went in to get Ibarra—or that probe thingy with him in it—out of his tower, but that was a tactical move, know what I mean? Had my game face on while the Xaros drones were around. No time to really think about where we were or what had happened. That time…I could feel the ghosts. Billions of people all across the Earth killed by the drones in a matter of days. Not a single survivor. I was the first man to set foot in that mall since the time skip, and it was like everyone who had died there woke up to watch me.”

  “An overwhelming alien invasion and people took refuge in…a shopping center?” Bethany Anne asked. “Please tell me there was a Coach store, or Louboutin or something like Prada there? No? Pity.”

  “Not like it was a zombie outbreak.” Standish shrugged. “From what little data remained from the invasion, Phoenix was the last major city on Earth. Some of Tucson and St. George remained, but Phoenix pulled in a lot of refugees before the final Xaros push wiped out the city. The walls and floors,” he swept his hand out at about eye level, “had flash burns. Gouges from Xaros disintegration beams. Little later we checked the residue, and it came back with DNA. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had been walking through a massacre.”

  He tossed back a drink and rapped his glass on the table with a trembling hand.

  “What I did know—back then—was that I had a clear shot at the prize. No pesky surveillance drones. No cameras. No partner to take a plea deal and throw me under the bus while she does four months in some minimum security country club while I had to go to Paris Island and get screamed at by some drill instructor until I… I got through the other end of the mall and into the open just as the sun set.

  “I’m at the far end of the parking lot when I hear barking. Not something from your normal dog, but higher-pitched and coming from all over the place. Damn coyotes. Good half-dozen of them came trotting toward me. Prior to this, local fauna hadn’t been a planning consideration. A week ago I wouldn’t have gone down a Phoenix street worrying about pack animals coming to eat my face. Neither would you. Am I right, or am I right?”

  Rika cocked an eyebrow. “Coyotes considered you prey?”

  “Coyotes many generations removed from any human contact did. My smell no longer equated to boom sticks and certain death, as their ancestors had learned. They were big, too. I’m pretty sure they were part wolf or had bred with larger pet dogs that lived through the invasion. Wolf. They were part wolf.” His eyes widened, and his hands started waving around. “So these wolf-coyotes surround me. Snarling. Slobbering. Barking like crazy because they think a two-legged dinner just showed up.

  “I was in my armor, and that get up could take point-blank gauss rounds and hold up. Fangs were more a concern of my caveman brain and less of my modern Strike Marine sensibilities, but I couldn’t just shoot one to show them who was on top of the food chain. That might attract attention, and there was no way I could explain being way out there on my lonesome if somebody heard the crack of my rifle.

  “One of the damn things jumped on me from behind and went for my neck. Armor held up just fine. We used to be Leathernecks, now we were graphenium-composite-necks. Doesn’t roll off the tongue the same
way. Stop distracting me. I grabbed the dire wolf by the scruff of the neck and slammed it against the ground. Took the fight out of that one real quick. You’d think that would get the point across to the others, but no. They got all pissed off.

  “Good thing for me we set down with a breach-and-clear loadout. I activated the flamethrower on my gauntlet and sent a plume at the biggest one. Singed its face. Mutts learned how opposable thumbs and the mastery of fire change the local dominance hierarchy. The rest took off with their tails between their legs. Wasn’t the last time we had to deal with wolves and coyotes. Work crews got attacked several times before we sent out culling parties to clear the city.”

  “Across the highway was a little commercial district with the pot at the end of the rainbow: a liquor store. Not the bulk garbage that carried wine in a box or beer pong supplies, the artisan bottles. I had first noticed the place when driving like a bat out of hell to get away from the Xaros drones that didn’t take kindly to our presence at Euskall Tower where we rescued Ibarra. For some reason, none of my fellow Strike Marines picked up on it.”

  “Because they were fighting for their lives, perhaps?” Kelsey asked.

  “Battlefield is all about seizing opportunities. My superior senses noted the location of Lee’s Spirits…for tactical consideration. Yes. That. Anyway, I got inside and…”

  Standish got off his chair and raised his arms to an imaginary world around him.

  “They had everything. French Cognac. Portuguese port. Sake with labels I couldn’t even read. Basque Patxaran to appeal to Ibarra’s tastes. Cobra whiskey from Thailand, and God-awful coconut rum. And every other kind of rum. I knew where all of Earth’s rum had gone. No kid with the keys to a candy store had anything on me that day.”