Torch Song: A Kickass Heroine, A Post-Apocalyptic World: Book One Of The Blackjack Trilogy (3 page)

Sipping at the beer, I scrolled through the rest of the new headers. A couple of notes from friends. As usual, nothing from Sylvia. No answer to my last message. Maybe she never got it. That was always a possibility that kept me wondering. But I guessed she had, and was still hiding silently in her safe little house. Hiding from me down in that rash-spot village on the ass-end of Dixie, a million miles from anything.

I punched off and found a wall outlet that shot a spark at me but at least worked, plugged in my charger and hooked the lasers up. No telling how much privacy I’d have on the job, and I wouldn’t stay undercover long if someone saw me charging a state-of the art laser.

I lay back on the lumpy bed. Nothing to do but think about where I was going.

A casino. Sounded like fun. The atmosphere, the sounds, the excitement. I’d done jobs in Sierra before and spent my share of time in the Tahoe casinos, but I’d never worked in one.

I finished the LaCrosse, unwrapped the wrist brace and wiggled my hand. Much better. Back in the mildewed bathroom, I took a long cooling shower in rusty water, colder than my tears, singing a few torch songs for Sylvia. Including my own composition, “Every Day.” I sang that one three times. “You’re only memory and grief… I’ll face the West and say goodbye…” But I knew I never really would. I wondered again if there was a difference between love and obsession, and whether it mattered if there was.

* * *

The rain stopped completely sometime during the night. I woke up sweating in the silence, shreds of a dream forcing me out of bed to the light and the dresser mirror to make sure it was only sweat and not my life bleeding out of me. It took a while to fall back asleep and if I dreamed again I wasn’t aware of it the next morning.

The motel offered stale rolls and weak tea, but it was good enough compared to what I had left: over-spiced chicken jerky of doubtful safety and some hard grain bars that tasted like two by fours. I thanked the sagging woman, who never met my eyes again, and headed out in bright hot sunlight, west on 80, or, as they called it here, the Old Road.

I hadn’t been driving an hour before I saw a big herd of wild cattle, must have been a thousand of them, raising the dust on the plain to the north. I was thinking, I’d hate to get in the middle of that. I heard once about a man driving through there when a plane flew overhead and spooked the cows. A freak kind of thing. I see a plane from time to time but they’re about as common as bandits who can spell. Anyway, a traveler found the trampled wreckage a month later. Of the car and its driver. Hard to know whether stories like that are true, but I could certainly see it happening.

Gran had told me about how the cattle were turned loose in the Twenties when a steer was no longer worth the price of its feed. No people, no demand. And no people also meant they were safe, and multiplied, and it was said they’d soon compete with the growing herds of buffalo, covering the prairies like the waterfowl covered every pond and marsh. Food for the dog and wolf packs and the cats, calico to cougar.

All through Nebraska I saw one bus and maybe a half dozen cars. A few people on foot, but I swallowed the impulse to help. I wasn’t looking to fall into any more bandit traps.

I just couldn’t imagine what things were like out there before the Poison. Cars all over this road. More cars than cattle. Buses, airplanes. People everywhere. They even had space ships. I’d heard rumors that there were one or two of those still around, hidden away by mythically rich people, used to hop continents. I doubted it.

Within sight of the Nebraska checkpoint into Rockymountain, a roar in the sky startled me. An airplane. Looked like a Gullwing Two, or maybe a four-seater. A rich man’s ride. No cattle anywhere in sight, fortunately.

When I pulled up at the checkpoint, the tall blond border guard kept me waiting a full thirty seconds while he scowled at the plane that was getting by him unchecked and fast becoming a speck of tinsel in the west.

Annoyed by his futile rudeness, I snapped, “Maybe you should have shot him down.” The guard turned his scowl toward me and demanded to see my health certificate, then demanded to know what I was doing so far from Redwood. By his accent, he was a native of Rocky. The edge of his speech was western, slow, drawling, full in the vowels. Rounder than the speech of the woman in Nebraska, fuller than the accents of the tight-lipped, sing-song Northland. I wouldn’t be hearing “yah” anymore. I was well inside the land of “yup.”

I told him I was traveling from one job to another. “I’m an actor. A singer.” I handed over my Redwood Arts ID. The guard looked at the health certificate again, studied the ID, studied me. “I was working in Iowa.” I hoped he wouldn’t check on that part, but if he did, it wouldn’t really matter much once he got tired of delaying and tormenting me. There was no extradition from Wyoming. “You can check with the chief — Graybel— in Truckee, she’ll tell you I’ve got a legitimate job in Tahoe. I’m registered. And you saw my papers.”

He snorted. “Why don’t you stay in your own country?”

And why don’t you go climb a tree, ape-man? “Performers travel.”

“Yeah, I guess.” He scowled.

I stood there, waiting for him to finish his posturing, wishing I could fly over his empty head in that Gullwing. Wishing I could afford one. He’d let me cross eventually. Rockymountain, Sierra, and Redwood had fairly friendly relations. Most of the time. At least this year, so far. When Rocky wasn’t strutting too much.

Staring at me for a moment longer, he jerked a thumb in the general direction of the kiosk. I got out of the car and followed him.

“How much you got?”

I already had my wallet out, counting the rest of the scrip I’d gotten at the Eastern Nebraska border the day before. “460 Lincolns.”

“I’ll need to take 20 percent for the exchange.” Deadpan. Thieving bastard. But why bother to argue? Who would I complain to? I handed over the Lincolns and got their equivalent, minus 20 percent, in Rockie dollars.

The guard bowed slightly, mocking my justified suspicion.

“Thank you, welcome to Rockymountain, and have a nice trip.”

I grunted back at him, got in the car and moved on across the border.

Driving went faster in Rocky. Fewer big holes in the pavement. A road crew was actually working outside Little Cheyenne, something I’d seen three or four times in fifteen years of travel. There were billboards, too, one every 50 or so miles now. They were all the same. A big color drawing of a mother, a father, and a baby, and four words: For You— For Rocky. The Rocky president had ambition, people said. He was gathering power, pushing for population growth and talking about “securing the border.” No one seemed to know exactly what all that might mean, but everyone outside of Rocky knew it didn’t mean anything good. Stockholm had been working that “securing” line for years, busting through its borders on all sides. North Korea had hordes of 20-year-olds grabbing chunks of South Manchuria, or so I’d heard. I wondered how big a horde was. How fast were they multiplying? How fast could Rocky grow?

I did sometimes wonder if fewer people were dying now. If they were, I didn’t think it was because everyone had the vax; I knew that wasn’t true. I’d heard it said that a lot of the hostels weren’t full any more, and more of us seemed to be immune. But I didn’t know how anyone could get real information out of a hostel, isolated and quarantined as they were, and that kind of thinking made me nervous. I would stick with the vax, keep getting it one way or another, thanks just the same.

A couple hours inside the border, I passed a ranch house that looked abandoned, glass missing from windows, porch roof collapsed, an old dusty car in the yard. But as I looked I saw that the place wasn’t abandoned after all. A tall figure— man? woman?— stood in the yard, still, watching me. I looked back as I drove by, slowing, wondering if I should stop, and the person was turning, climbing over the porch debris and crawling back into the house through the open doorway.

In Little Cheyenne, I spotted a hydro station, bought a spare cell and all of their half-dozen packs, relieved that I wouldn’t have to take a chance on Carl’s corn this time around. A few more packs at Salt Lake and I’d have enough to take me all the way to Tahoe and more. The station store had bread, jam, real chicken on spits, and lettuce, beets, apples, and carrots. I bought a wheat loaf, apples, a chicken—I’d eat it for lunch and dinner—and a bag of carrots.

Electra couldn’t do better than 100 easily, but I pushed myself to do a long day, driving a couple more hours beyond the Salt Lake stop. I gave up just inside East Nevada, stopping at a half-demolished motel with no other guests. The next morning I’d cross the high desert. With luck and stamina, Sierra the next night, even taking my usual detour around Reno. Just one big trailer camp populated by killers and thieves. You could hear the screaming from a mile away.

But then I’d be there. A friendly border and a friendly currency exchange. I’d do better than 20 percent in Sierra. Damn Rockies.

Like a friendly blue moon

‘Nation of origin?”

“Redwood.”

“Welcome, neighbor.” She winked at me. Nothing like a tourist country for friendliness and more. “ Let’s see your papers.” I handed them over.

“Got any fruit in there?” The Sierra border guard leaned down, resting a tanned arm on the window frame, and glanced into the back of the car.

“No. Nothing.” The dried stuff didn’t count. Any bugs that had ever lived in those squashed bits of leather were fossils now and no danger to Sierra’s precious orchards.

She took my word for it, straightened again, checked my ID and certs, yawned, smiled, and handed them back. “Currency?”

“Yes, little.” She opened my car door for me with a gallant flourish. I followed her to the blue and gold kiosk. Between the bandits and the Rocky currency exchange, I was low on cash.

The guard gave me an honest count in reals for my Rockies. We used reals in Redwood, too; the common currency was one of the strongest links in the Sierra-Redwood alliance. The name came from the Spanish word for royal, but the pronunciation had changed when I was a kid to the English “real”—for the real thing. The real wasn’t that much more stable than other countries’ money, but Sierrans and Redwooders liked to believe it was.

Just a short hop to Tahoe, now, from high desert to high Sierra, from tumbleweed to pine and Douglas fir and snowy peaks. I’d be getting there in time for dinner.

I’d stopped at Blackjack for the night once, several years before, but I didn’t remember much about it. The place was easy to find, just a half mile this side of Stateline. They’d kept the old street name for historical color, even though that state line hadn’t existed for nearly fifty years. A few of the old clubs still rose smack against the line, the skyscraper face of a giddier time. Gran’s youth. She’d probably played the slots at that one, braved the poker tables at the one across the street, spent the night with a lover somewhere in that burned out stretch over there.

I strolled between the aisles of slots, past two poker games and a bank of three Twenty-one tables, aiming for the sign that hung over the cashier’s booth.

“I’m looking for the office.”

The thin sixtyish woman studied me for a moment, her face blank. “Who did you want to see?”

I studied her in return. Her nameplate read “Willa”. The gray stripes in her long straight hair were real, the dark ones solid with green dye. “Judith Coleman.”

“What’s your name?”

“Rica Marin. Here about a job.”

“Lemme check.”

She unclipped a sys from her shirt pocket, punched a couple of buttons, turned away, and mumbled something into the receiver. What could she possibly be saying, I wondered, that she didn’t want me to hear? I guessed she was just another one of those people who either was suspicious and secretive all the time or made herself important by acting that way.

I turned too, leaning back against the counter, and surveyed the room. No sign of a lounge anywhere, unless it was the dark room next to the restaurant, but it looked like there was a big enough crowd to support a show. At least one of the upper floors, I knew from the previous visit, included guest rooms, and from the outside, all three floors had showed light.

Quite a few people were still wearing those crazy headstripes. Mostly dealers and other casino employees. Black stripes in light hair, light stripes in dark. Casino people were known for their cultivated glamor. Other people tried to ape it sometimes, but the stripes were never perfect. They never seemed to carry off the swaggering, swashbuckling look of the clothing, either.

Maybe I’d give it a try. When in Tahoe… I’d look good with white stripes in my auburn hair. Or would black look better? But where was the lounge? I needed to see that.

The cashier was talking to me again. “Go on up. Stairs over in that corner.” I swung around to catch the gesture. “Up to the mezzanine. At the back. First door on the right.” A lot of words, and good directions. She had decided I was okay. She was wrong. If she ever found that out it would give her one more reason to be suspicious.

The office door was open a few inches, but I rapped gently anyway.

“Come on in.”

I pushed the door open all the way and found myself facing an enormous woman with striped gray-brown curls, sitting in a very large leaf-green chair behind an oversized wooden desk scattered with papers, some of them under glass paperweights. The front of the desk was edged with another two or maybe three dozen paperweights, all lined up like a wall around a fort, all of them snow globes. Little cabins in the snow. Snowmen. An igloo. A fairy princess, or maybe an angel. Yes, there were the little white folded-up angel wings. A tiny Blackjack casino with snow on the roof. She must have had that one specially made.

The woman was dressed in royal blue and wore lapis earrings that looked like small chandeliers and stretched the holes in her ears to half-inch slits.

“Rica Marin?”

I nodded. “Judith Coleman?”

“Sit down. Let’s talk.” Judith waved at a straight-backed wooden side chair with token cushions. I sat. She glanced at a handwritten note clipped to a single-sheet letter on the desk in front of her.