Brew

by Bill Braddock

  “Despite reports of reduced aggression, martial law remains in effect, and authorities are asking all civilians to remain inside until further notice. Displaced individuals should make their way calmly and in good order toward the university football stadium, where medical personnel and a battery of counselors are standing by.”

  Yeah, right. She was finished taking orders, finished looking to the world for approval or guidance. Baptized in blood, reborn into a new world, she knew one thing with absolute certainty: she was strong.

  Her whole life, she had misinterpreted her restlessness as weakness. So what if she read more books than the valedictorian? So what if she could out-fuck, out-fight, and out-party any girl she knew? All that mattered was she couldn’t glue her ass to a chair for eight hours of second-rate teachers spouting third-rate bullshit. So she dropped out of school, and after two humiliating years of kicking around Philly, feeling untethered and increasingly feral, she finally headed east to this place, where she hoped she might be able to fool them, might be able to sit up straight and pretend interest and turn in all of her work on time. If she was lucky, maybe, just maybe, she might overcome her weakness and live a normal life…

  Ha!

  All along, her only weakness had been strength. How could someone born without herd mentality succeed in a pasture of sheep?

  She had been too strong for Herbert, too strong for high school, and too strong for her beat-ass hometown, just as she was too strong for this place, this town, these people.

  She didn’t know where she would go. Didn’t want to know. All she knew was that when she got to wherever it was she was going, she wouldn’t waste another second trying to square herself with somebody else’s dull-witted, timid-ass view of the world.

  On the television, they cut to the eyewitness account of an Apache helicopter pilot whose nametag read Bradley and who’d been hovering over the carnage when the madness stopped.

  “It was like flying over hell, everybody down there rioting, going crazy. Then,” he snapped his fingers, “everybody stopped. All at once, just like that. Like God decided he’d seen enough and just flicked a switch.”

  Or like Herbert designed it that way. His idea of a joke, everybody doing the hokey pokey on his count. She wouldn’t be surprised if he’d also designed it to reactivate in an hour or a day, a month or a year. His idea of an even bigger joke.

  Cat wasn’t sticking around to find out.

  Leaving the TV, she went into the kitchen, where sat the backpack full of things she’d scavenged from the house. First aid supplies, matches, and an expensive set of binoculars. Canned food, an opener, and an unopened bottle of Scotch. Sheets of acid, bundled in several three-inch stacks, and nearly two hundred vials of fuse, each unit carrying a dispensable street value she estimated at oh, three or four thousand dollars. Finally, there was the cash itself, over thirty-four thousand in bundled tens and twenties, and a shit-ton of ammunition, the majority of which she stuffed into the pack’s external pouches for easy access.

  A holstered pistol hung at each hip, sensible accessories in this new world, as was the bandolier of shotgun shells draped now across her body like a beauty queen’s sash. She grabbed the sawed-off .12 gauge from beneath the broken window through which she’d entered hours earlier. During the long wait for Herbert, she had considered using the shotgun but settled on the knife instead, wanting it to be close, personal, wanting to feel him go. And she was glad she had. To hell with her left arm. The bullet had fucked up the meat there, but she’d stopped the bleeding. It would heal.

  She took one last glance at the TV, where footage from copter cams and amateur cell phone videos painted a tragic collage of the aftermath. Against a backdrop of smoldering mansions, soldiers in full MOPP gear zip-tied a badly injured man in boxer shorts and bright sneakers. In the next clip, a girl covered in blood squinted as she emerged from the library onto steps carpeted in corpses and books, brandishing a crude blade and wearing, of all things, a pair of Halloween batwings. Next, the screen filled with bobbling cell phone video showing an anonymous black man, looking very dead and very alone, stretched on the sidewalk beside a park bench.

  She turned away as her mind overrode these images, replacing them with personal tragedy. In the memory clip, a tall, once handsome boy lay dead in the arms of a howling girl, his life snuffed out by a single bullet, which, in the pairing of its absurd randomness and irrefutable reality, seemed to her now a perfect symbol of the night’s events taken in total.

  The memory hollowed her out all over again, but she closed her eyes, gritting her teeth and breathing through her nose, until she found the strength to box up her pain and tuck it away for later, when she might again afford the luxury of self-pity.

  “At this point, we can’t estimate the death toll,” some TV announcer said in the adjoining room. “Certainly thousands, possibly tens of thousands.”

  Enough of this. Time to move.

  She lit a cigarette, swung the pack onto her good shoulder, and grabbed the 12-gauge. Stepping into the morning light, she saw them.

  Across the deserted four lanes of University Way, people stumbled uphill in a trickling, intermittent line, like weary travelers on the last leg of a long pilgrimage. Some with mouths stained green, some not, they limped doggedly on toward the stadium, away from which now stretched a sprawling tent city, its olive drab canvas unsteadily dappled in the shadows of choppers hovering overhead. A voice came over the stadium loudspeakers, too faint at this distance for Cat to make out any words, but its tone was nonetheless unmistakable. This was The Voice of Authority, directing the frightened masses, herding them like spooked cattle. What would follow? Spotting the fenced enclosure behind the tented area, she thought she knew. Triage, interrogation, observation. Days, maybe weeks, of quarantine.

  No thanks.

  Herbert’s car tempted her. Seeing its blocky bulk, she imagined barreling north at a hundred-and-ten-per, blowing straight through the inevitable roadblock…

  But no. That would be suicidal. And she did not want to die. It was a thing she had never really questioned, persisting as a matter of course, but now it was a thing known. She wanted to live. Really live…

  No car, then.

  Instead, she would hike downhill, wait for a break in the stream of straggling refugees—they seemed passive enough, but she wasn’t taking any unnecessary chances—and then cut across University Way. On the other side, she’d descend the embankment and disappear into the scrubby field of sumac and briar, which eventually gave way, she knew, to real forest perhaps half a mile east of town. She would move slowly, and if she saw or heard anyone, especially perimeter guards who might try to quarantine her, she would simply hide. If need be, she would fade into the brush, lay low until nightfall, and slip through the perimeter under cover of darkness.

  Rounding the corner of the house, she lurched to a stop. A girl sat in the dewy grass, looking up at her with eyes as wide and empty as those of a newborn calf.

  "You okay?" Cat asked.

  The girl blinked at her, mouth slightly ajar. No green there.

  Cat extended her hand. "Do you want to come with me?"

  The girl looked at the hand, looked at Cat, and shook her head.

  "Suit yourself," Cat said. She racked the shotgun and started downhill. "But you’d better get off your ass.

  This is a hard, hard world."

  Acknowledgements

  I owe thanks to many people for their help with Brew and am doomed to acknowledge only a portion of them here…

  Thanks to my family and friends for your love and support.

  Thanks to Jacob Kier at Permuted Press for taking a chance on Brew, to all the Permuted authors who have welcomed me so warmly, and to editors Felicia Sullivan and Trish Ledoux for their hard work and for making this a stronger brew.

  Thanks to my excellent agent, Christina Hogrebe of the Jane Rotrosen Agency.

  Thanks to Michael Kelly, with whom I coauthored “Everybody Burns!” the s
hort story that triggered Brew. Thanks, Michael, for taking the time write with a newbie, and thanks for encouraging me to run with Brew. I owe you a pitcher of beer, buddy.

  Thanks to Horace Jonson, my oldest friend, who once broke my nose and knocked out my tooth and another time left me to fight three guys alone when he spotted some discarded library books in a nearby dumpster – true story! – but who also saved my life, made my childhood worth living, and helped me to develop Brew from the earliest stages. Without you, there is no Brew. Hell, without you, there is no me…

  Thanks to brilliant writer and amazing friend Adam Browne. I’m much happier for your friendship, and this book is much stronger for your suggestions – including the title Brew.

  Thanks to Jack Ketchum, who ten years ago took a first-time Necon attendee under his wing and stayed up until the sun rose, drinking and shooting the shit. Thank you for your friendship, your stories, your generous help with Brew, and for teaching me so much about writing, publishing, and life.

  Thanks to Jonathan Maberry, for your assistance, advice, enthusiasm, and for encouraging me to sacrifice that goat by moonlight. It worked!

  Thanks to Doug Clegg, for your friendship and all the hours you’ve spent teaching me about storytelling and publishing. I will never forget your kindness or your willingness to drop everything when I needed a hand.

  Thanks to my Necon family, especially the smartest guy I know, Matt Schwartz, for way too many things to list here but most significantly, perhaps, for making me feel like a “real” writer; Mike Penncavage, my perpetual roommate, who read the first forty pages of Brew and encouraged to keep pounding the keys; and James A. Moore, who threatened to kill me if I didn’t finish this book.

  Thanks to all my friends at Seton Hill University, especially Bill Fay, Chris “Meatpunk” Shearer, and Tim Waggoner, who is a great friend, a wise mentor, and a fantastic writer.

  Thanks to everyone at Borderlands Boot Camp, especially Jaime Levine, John Hornor Jacobs, and Gary Braunbeck, for your encouragement during the early stages.

  Thanks to readers Brian Bortnicker and Elaine Prizzi, for your time and advice.

  Thanks to mad chemist and webmaster supreme, Andrew McLean, for your help with research and the website.

  Thanks to The Troublemakers, The Inkbots, and The Brandywine Valley Writers’ Group.

  Thanks to Richard Laymon, for providing countless hours of rip-roaring fun and for showing me I didn’t have to color inside the lines. I wish I had met you.

  Finally, thanks to my best friend, first reader, and most honest critic: my beautiful wife, Christina, who has never let me down – not even once – and who has always believed in and encouraged me, even when I was ready to burn this book to ash. You have sacrificed so much for me, and I know I’ll never, ever, ever be able to settle the score. You’re the one, Sweetie. You always were and always will be, and I’ll love you forever.