The Last Drink was a keg of black powder. All it needed was a spark.
Caly kept the rifle at her hip—the saloon was too small to aim—and Olm’s fist clenched in the Hammer’s glove. But their corner was forgotten; all eyes were on the human, oblivious to what he’d walked into.
Scipio the barman spoke stiffly, as if he was afraid any sudden movements might ignite the spark.
“H-how goes, stranger. What can I get you?”
“Something strong,” the human said, and when the barman’s hand drifted over the tap, the human stopped him with a word, “Stronger.”
A few of the ogre’s cronies turned back to look at their leader, whose grin was halfway to a snarl. Meanwhile, Scipio’s hand hovered over a large bottle labeled RATTLER VENOM with three X’s underneath.
“No,” the human shook his head, “Stronger.”
“All I’ve got is that old jug.” He pointed up at a small, unassuming jug on the mantle, hanging over the bar. The jug might’ve once been black, but it sat untouched for so long that it was covered in a thick film of dust. In lieu of a label, the jug simply had a hand-painted white skull on it. “It’s not meant for general consumption.”
“What is it?”
“It’s called,” Scipio lowered his voice reverently, “The last drink.”
“That will do.”
“Now listen, Mister,” Scipio stammered, his beaks clacking uncertainly as he pulled it down, “It ain’t meant to be sipped, except by those who don’t want to live no more.”
“Then why do you keep it around?”
The whole bar leaned in, listening. Even the ogre’s beady eyes were alight with a burning interest.
Scipio shrugged, “It’s great for cleaning up oil spills in the garage.”
“Maybe it’ll finally do the job, then,” The human pushed two coins across the table, without taking his eyes off Scipio. “A glass, please.”
Scipio swallowed.
“It ain’t my business to tell people, what they can and can’t do, except when it comes to my bar. And I’m not interested in cleaning up no bodies tonight—”
“Pour it,” the human said. Then, cracked a smile, “If you please.”
Scipio was sweating now, his mustache twitching uncertainly. He didn’t even want to open the jug. Olm had seen plenty of people drink themselves to death, but usually, that took a few dozen years—not a single drink. Vaguely, Olm wondered if someone should do something to stop this. Not him, but someone.
Scipio pulled out a heavy mug from under the bar. Not fab-wood, nor cheap tin. This mug hit the bar with an industrial thunk. Scipio covered his beak with a rag before he uncorked the bottle, but even that didn’t prepare him for the stench that poured out. Everyone sitting at the bar started coughing, and the ogre’s cronies leaned back as one. Only the human seemed blithely unaware of the alcoholic reek. Maybe, unless Olm was imagining it, the human was even a little pleased by the scent.
“You sure about this, friend?” Scipio asked, tearing up at the stinging scent.
The human reached across the bar, pulled the mug, and gave it a sniff. He sipped. Sloshed it around his mouth.
The cronies were staring. Everyone was staring, anxiously waiting for the first signs of death. Would he froth? Would he seize up?
“Hm,” the human said as if he was only tasting fruit wine on the sunlit slopes of Vier Valley. Then, he tipped the mug up, drained it, and let out a satisfied gasp.
“Another,” the human said. “Please.”
Someone whooped their delight (OIm thought it was one of the ogre’s cronies, judging by the jealous sneer on the big kell’s face) and for the moment, the tension simmered away beneath this small wonder. They muttered to themselves in disbelief, some of them eyeballing the jug and saying it was just a parlor trick—not full of deadly tongue shiner, but just plain old well water.
“What is he?” Olm whispered.
Caly didn’t answer. Her arms were crossed, and she was sitting back in her chair as if it were a throne, the reflection of the Saloon’s greasy lights warped in her visor. Anyone else might’ve mistaken her posture for boredom. But Olm knew better.
She was calculating.
“So,” he rumbled, “We’re still going through with this?”
“If he’s stupid enough to go to Yole, he might be stupid enough to pay us back.”
“What’s the angle?” Olm asked.
Caly didn’t answer, not at first. She was calculating again. Watching the human hunch over the bar, and sink into his cups. Watching him not notice the kell ogre fuming and staring daggers into his back, as if sitting at the bar was a form of disrespect he could not tolerate.
“Caly, the guy just chugged straight poison.”
“I don’t care if he covers his pancakes in fusion fuel. He’s naive. Gullible. Men like him can’t resist helping a damsel in need.”
“What if he’s not, you know, that kind of man? What if he’s not in to girls?”
Caly’s helmet turned toward Olm, all the reflections warping into new positions as she regarded him. “Then it’s your turn to play the damsel.”
Olm groaned.
“Barman!” One of the cronies croaked, and slammed his cup on the bar. A pouch on his throat inflated angrily. “We’re sick of this shit! You gave him the good stuff, while you fill our cups with last year’s piss!”
The barman, for all his discomfort, stood his ground. Even when the crony grabbed him by the collar, Scipio steeled his expression, though the feathery quills running up his scalp quivered with barely-bridled fury. A crony aimed his fist—and the doors to the kitchen swung open. The busser girl stepped out, her legs in a shooter’s stance. She gripped a mouse gun in both hands.
“Leave my uncle alone!” the girl said resolutely. Though she tried to keep a brave face, her trembling hands betrayed her.
The ogre rose to his feet, making the whole floor creak. A skull-crushing grin was plastered on his face. What had seemed like bone decorations on his leather sleeves turned out to be calcified outgrowths from the ogre’s own flesh. He thumped over to the girl, and the floor sagged under his weight.
Thump. Thump.
The girl’s legs actually started shaking. Olm couldn’t believe she was still standing.
The ogre pressed his chest up to the barrel of the girl’s gun. He snarled down at her, slow and ponderous as if it was hard for him to figure out which order the words went, “I … am boss. You do not. I say what to do.”
Then, he reached over and wrapped his hand around her gun, and squeezed until the screws broke, and the gun fell into pieces.
“Don’t you touch her!” Scipio said.
The ogre’s black-veined eyes seemed to bulge as the words entered his skull. The giant xeno leaned over the bar which, and Scipio seemed to shrink under his monstrous snarl.
“You,” the ogre growled, “Don’t tell me. I am boss.”
A slow draw of movement caught the corner of Olm’s eye. Caly was crouched behind the table, her rifle aimed squarely at the ogre’s head. That’s a bad idea, Olm thought, because the only good idea was for the two of them to high-tail it out of here.
The ogre lifted a giant fist and pointed his thumb back at the girl. “She go with us. She is mine now. For fun.”
Scipio’s eyes flicked from the ogre to the girl. The decision was written all over Scipio’s face. Olm braced himself. But before the barman could duck away from the ogre’s reach—probably to grab some weapon hidden under the bar—a loud, sickened groan filled the tense silence. “Uuuuugh.”
Heads turned.
The human, still nursing his second cup, lamented at the ceiling, “Why does it always have to go like this?”
When he was sure everyone was looking at him, the human swiveled off his barstool, and sidled up to one of the ogre’s cronies, who clearly wanted nothing to do with the human.
“Would it hurt,” the human asked, “To be a little nicer to each other? I mean, it’s dry and cold out there. Don’t we all want the same thing? Tell you what, if everyone sits back down, I’ll pay for the next round.” He flashed a smile so broad, his eyes were almost closed. “My treat.”
The cronies looked up to their leader. The bartender slowly slid under the ogre’s arm and tried to get at his niece, who was still standing in her shooter’s pose, clutching the broken handle of her pistol. The Ogre growled, showing the jagged remains of his teeth. With the speed of a hydraulic hammer, he reared his arm back and smashed it into the barman’s face—
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
—or tried to. Olm hadn’t even seen the human move. There was a blur, and there he was, his slender hand clamped around the ogre’s fist, holding it a hair away from Scipio’s shocked face. From shoulder to neck, the ogre’s muscles bulged as he tried to press his fist forward. His teeth ground and his boots slid backward across the wooden boards, which groaned their protest.
“Oh shit,” Caly said. Olm couldn’t have said it better himself.
The ogre slammed his other fist into the bar top. It split and launched half-drunk drinks across the bar, spraying beer and shattered glass.
Everyone who had a gun pulled it out. A dozen batteries hummed to life, filling the room with angry lights and the stinging, metallic scent of plasmatic primers. Then, the lights went dark. The humming died. All the cronies looked down at their weapons, alien faces struck dumb with disbelief.
Olm squeezed the contacts in the glove of his Hammer, expecting to feel that tell-tale haptic buzz. Nothing.
Just charged it today. How can it be empty?
One of the cronies with an old black powder rifle realized he was the only one whose weapon was still working—until the human’s hand appeared out of nowhere and wrapped around the barrel. Olm saw flashes of silver, no thicker than a spider’s thread, on the human’s fingers. When he took his hand away, the barrel was crumpled out of shape. The crony fired anyway, and the gun exploded in his hands, the barrel split open, and a hot shell dropped to the floor.
The ogre picked up a barstool and flung it at the human. For the blink of an eye, it looked like there were seven humans, a whole crowd of them, standing in the room. The barstool crashed harmlessly against a wall.
The ogre roared. He wheeled on his own thugs, all of which suddenly studied the floor or the ceiling, trying to avoid his gaze. “Cowards!” he roared. “Useless!” He decked the nearest xeno in the face—one of his own—who crumpled to the floor.
“Hey!” the human shouted.
The ogre threw another punch, and the human stepped into it. Olm wasn’t sure if he imagined this part, but he thought he saw the human snake his arm around the ogre’s and pull it forward. The ogre, thrown off balance, tumbled forward into a somersault. His back crashed through the floor and hit the hard ground below with a painful clap. Dazed, and wedged into a crater of wood and splinters, the ogre tried to pull himself up.
But the human was standing over him, flourishing that oversized handgun.
“Are you done?” the human asked, like a parent nearing the end of his patience.
The ogre roared, spit flying from his cracked lips.
The human tossed his handgun and caught it by the barrel. He clocked the ogre’s skull with the butt of the gun, making a sound like a coconut on concrete. The ogre’s head fell back, his eyes rolled up, and he slouched into the crater.
“Yeah,” the human said. “You’re done.”
“He took down the boss!” one xeno shouted, his throat pouches rapidly inflating and deflating like an asthmatic bulltoad.
Another voice said, “Get him!”
But none of them moved.
The human held out his arms, inviting them to come at him. Then, his smirk broadened. “Now, friends, maybe we’re all feeling a little smart today. What do you say? Maybe you take your boss out of here,” the human put a boot on the ogre’s head, pressing hard enough to elicit a semi-conscious groan, “And we’ll forget this whole mess ever happened. Sound good?”
With his foot still on the ogre’s head, he forced the unconscious ogre to nod up and down. He made a scratchy, comic voice in the back of his throat, “I am boss! I say we do what the good lookin’ fella says!”
The xenos blinked at him.
“Too much?” the human asked.
“He’s making a fool out of us,” one of the thugs said, “Fuck this!” Holding his plasma rifle like a cudgel, the thug came in swinging. The others charged at the same time, a dozen aliens converging on that skinny human-xeno in the center of the saloon. Olm watched as the human went through the motions—his fists smacked into guts, the toes of his boots rammed into alien throat sacs, an elbow thrust into a barely-protected unmentionable—but the way the human moved seemed to defy the laws of causality. It seemed as if the injury came before the attack. In other cases, the attack landed so many times in quick succession, Olm only saw a blur. Xenos flew across the saloon and crashed into tables, walls, and in one case, a thug got his head rammed through the legs of a chair, his body twisted in a complicated knot. His throat pouch inflated and deflated with a pathetic, rattling croak.
Those who hadn’t scrambled out the door, now lay groaning (or unconscious) on the floor.
“How?” Olm asked.
“What in the taining Crowns was that?” the bartender asked. His hands clenched a big pistol, but the fight was over so fast, he hadn’t fired a shot.
One crony lifted his head, blinked wearily, and let out a weak “Did we get him?” before letting his head thump back against the floorboards.
“Their weapons malfunctioned,” Scipio frowned, trying to puzzle out the situation, “All of them, actually. At the same time.”
“Yeah,” the human scratched the back of his head like he had no idea how it’d happened, “I guess we got pretty lucky!”
But Olm knew it wasn’t luck. He just didn’t know how it was possible.
“Sorry about your tables,” the human said. “And your walls. And the bar … ” Taws pulled a thin stack of paper out of his wool-lined vest, “Well, this is all I got, but maybe it’ll help you-”
“Oh no,” Scipio rose to his full height. “Your money’s no good here, stranger” He nodded at the kell ogre, still stuck in the floor, mouth hanging open like a heat-sick boveer. “That brute was the worst I’ve seen in a long time. Don’t think no one will miss him, now he’s dead.”
“Oh, he’s not dead,” the human said. He poked the ogre’s head with his boot, and the ogre snorted, eyes rolling open but focusing on nothing. “Maybe a little brain damage, though. I tried to ask nicely.”
Scipio blinked as if he’d not heard correctly. “You… left him… alive?”
“Of course,” the human said.
“What do you mean of course?”
“I don’t kill.”
“Ah,” Scipio said, cautiously showing his big iron from under the remains of the bar, “And I don’t suppose you’ll let me finish the job?”
“Pardon me, sir, but no I will not. In fact,” Taws picked up one of the groaning xenos by the back of his dust jacket and steadied him on his feet. “Wake up your friends and go. Take the big one with you.”
The xeno, whose teeth chattered so much he couldn’t answer, bobbed his long neck and started slapping the other xeno’s faces and dragging the unconscious ones outside. For the next few minutes, the regular patrons who’d been caught in the saloon watched the awkward shuffle of thugs dragging thugs. The patrons all had the same question burning holes into their minds. And when the last one was gone, Scipio asked it: “Why? I mean, it’s a kindness and all that, good for you. But he’ll come back here. They all will. Look, mister, I appreciate the help, but that ogre is dead and buried, you’ve only made my life harder—”
“I don’t kill,” the human said. His voice was as hard as a jagged stone. “The War is coming.”
“What war?” Scipio said. The lower mandibles of his beak worked bitterly at the air, like he wanted to be more forceful with the human, but was holding himself back. He put his hands on his hips, surveying the wreckage of his saloon, “Look, I don’t mean to sound ungrateful or nothing, but what am I supposed to do now? I can’t exactly hole up here and pray that bandit doesn’t come back, now can I?”
“Probably not a good idea.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?” Scipio asked.
Olm cleared his throat and sheepishly cut in to their conversation. “You should leave is what you should do.”
“And what is Scipio’s Crossing gonna do without Scipio? I built this place. Well, I built on top of it. Business might be drier these days, but I still got the crossroad from Yonder to Ocotiyo—”
“Enri’s dead,” Olm said.
“How?” Scipio’s feathery mustache quavered suspiciously.
“Zyroc moved in. Burned down half of Ocotiyo when he did.”
“But the Long Peace—”
Olm shrugged.
Scipio considered this for a moment. Then sighed, and sagged against the wall of bottles (many of which had fallen off the shelves) as his mind worked to accept this twist of fate. “Guess it’s out of my hands. Yonder, then. Always back to Yonder.”
Scipio glared around with a sour expression. Taking in all the smashed tables, the bar snapped in half. The floor, littered with glass and stains, and that one hole where the ogre had fallen through.
He gave a bitter laugh. “You know, you fall in love with an idea. You think you’re gonna have a grand piano, and dancing and pretty people coming through every night. Dreaming makes it easy to forget what kind of customers you’ve really got.”
A couple of the salooners grumbled in response, grim and surly and not denying a word he said.
“I always hated this town,” Scipio said. Then threw his head back and squawked, “One last drink, you bastards! Fire sale—everything goes, half off! And you,” he pointed at Taws, “You did save my life tonight. And my niece’s. Even if I got to leave, it still counts. You’re drinking for free.”
***
Scipio and Taws stood on a shaky table in the middle of the saloon, crooning out a song to which neither of them knew the words, while some steel instrument shrieked through the scratchy speakers. The whole town, as it was, must’ve heard about The Last Drink’s last drink, for there were so many xenos in the saloon, the floors shook with their stomping and clapping. It smelled like beer and sour ale and sick and stinging liquors and, inexplicably, fresh-baked pretzels, all warm and salty.
Caly could just make out the top of Olm’s head, bobbing above the crowd, wheeling and hopping and taking swigs from a glass jug.
Meanwhile, Caly sat in the back corner under the head of that stuffed boveer, sipping from the tube in her suit (water from the tap well, and nothing else), and replaying the footage from the fight over and over again. One moment, the human was standing there with the ogre’s fist sailing at his face. Then, there were three of him. No, four. Some images, crouching. Some jumping up. All of them, too fast to see. Too fast for her visor’s cameras to catch. She froze it, frame by frame.
He catches the fist. Then, he’s standing still while the ogre goes flying over his shoulder.
How did he move that fast?
She scrolled back to just before the start of the fight. All their energy weapons had malfunctioned at the exact same time, she was sure of it. In the exact same way. If the human was carrying an ECM, It would’ve been obvious. And he’d need time to set it up.
How?
She’d never seen anything like this. Never even heard of anything like this.
The dancers jumped and laughed and made the rafters creak, but Caly sat in frozen repose, not daring to move, lest the plan forming in her mind escaped her. Forget the damsel in distress. There was something different about this one.
The reason most Mayors didn’t last long on New Nowhere was simple: if you had a big name, chances were, you had a big bounty. Mayor Enri had a price tag on his neck. Zyroc’s would be greater, still. But Yole, the Mad Queen, had been Mayor for longer than either one of them. What’s more, she had a legend. She was known beyond the planetary border of New Nowhere. She was wanted by the Synod itself.
Not enough for them to send a big military force down here. But if a small band of intrepid hunters went looking… say, three of us…
It was mad. More than mad. Which was why no one had ever tried it.
She picked up her gear. Someone had left a few coins on a nearby table, and Caly pocketed them. She detoured toward the back kitchen, and placed them there for the busser girl to find. A pittance, but it was something. Then, Caly wove back through the gyrating, hopping, drunken mass of xenos, and found Olm swooning in a circle around the dancing table.
“What?” Olm shouted over his own deafness.
“It’s time,” she said. “And try to look tough.”
“Tough?” he shook his head to clear the daze from his thoughts, “Caly, come on. I thought we were done fighting for today—”
Caly walked up to the table, shaking and bouncing under two pairs of boots. She put both hands on her hips and waited, unmoving, like a rock in a drunken river. Olm sighed, and folded his arms, standing next to her. The parade of xenos slowed around them, breaking apart and moving to other less intimidating parts of the saloon. Even Scipio quit his dancing, becoming a little self-conscious under the gaze of her black visor.
But the human, leaning heavily on Scipio, was still laughing, flailing his head and his long, black hair back and forth, trying to keep up with the rhythm of the music.
“You,” she said.
“Me?”
“You owe me money,” she said.
“I owe—” he said, leaning forward so deep he started to fall (Scipio reached out and caught him) and just kept talking, “—a lot of people a lot of things.”
“Good,” Caly said. “Because I’ve got a deal that will make us both richer than Death. You in?”