by Forbes West
You look at the star-painted ceiling. “That’s, that’s, um, well it’s fourteen Dii-Yaa to the dollar, so that’s, um...” You look at Treena. “It’s thirty-five bucks. You really get so much business here?”
Treena and Winniefreddie look at each other. Winniefreddie speaks up. “Well, yes, yes we do. Yes we do. Yes.”
The Ni-Perchta walks over, waving his hands. “You pay? Is Exeurncalles! Is Exeurncalles!”
“Yeah, yeah, I understand, but I have to pay.”
“Is Exeurncalles!” the Ni-Perchta says, looking at Winniefreddie and Treena.
You peel off the red Monopoly money bills Dee paid you and give them to Treena, who looks all too happy to grab them.
“Yeah, yeah, shut up, ya stupid alien,” you say as you hand over the cash. The Ni-Perchta still yells in the background. Treena nods appreciatively and stuffs the Dii-Yaa away into her cash register.
You shake your head. “Freakin’ alien, huh?”
Treena and Winniefreddie look annoyed at what you just said. You watch as the Ni-Perchta man leaves and goes back to his cooking.
“You girls into drinking? No one else here, and I don’t want to be the lonely drunk,” you say dejectedly, feeling sickened by the last couple of days.
Treena and Winniefreddie look at each other, shrug. “I always love shooting the shit with a new resident,” Winniefreddie says.
“Is Exeurncalles! Okay!” the Ni-Perchta male yells out.
You give him the finger, and he ignores you. “What does “Exeurncalles” mean?”
Treena and Winniefreddie smile to each other. “Means you should, uh, show respect to the festival days. Ni-Perchta have rules against drinking. Forget Tek though, he’s just a little pious, that’s all. Forgive him.”
“Beers on us. You are our only customer,” Treena says, walking behind the counter. “I’m supposed to inform you that you need to have a personal liquor license registered with the Mission Manager. Do you have a liquor license?”
“I…uh, yes, not on me,” you say, meeting Treena and Winniefreddie’s eyes.
“The hell with the Ephors,” Treena says. “Fourteenth century fools trying to boss us around. If it wasn’t for the ori we’d probably never come here except for a curious vacation.”
* * *
“He cheats on you with two different people, and then has the balls to blame you for not doing the ‘hey-hey’?” Winniefreddie mock shivers. She is sitting on one of the bar stools, her chubby figure angling to get a comfortable perch. The storm outside has picked up. “Is he a psycho?” she continues, as you stand behind the bar drinking out of a copper cup you just refilled with the tap.
Treena plays solitaire on another cracked red leather stool. She looks annoyed, since you’ve been belaboring the shit out of this story, and pipes in with her opinion. “Yeah, he sucks and needs to die in a car fire. Now, can we move the hell on?”
The giant dragon head that hangs over the restroom doors watches you and the others with glass eyes that reflect flickers of light from the fireplace you just lit up after you complained to the Page sisters. You find that you like them a lot and enjoy talking to them.
A regular rainstorm is going on outside. It is at a steady, hard tempo. With only a few lights on and with the centered fireplace-stove giving off light from burning logs, the place is both grim and homey at once. A fully decorated Christmas tree is in one corner. You wonder how they got away with the tree. Perhaps since Christmas is such a secularized nothing holiday back home that even the non-religious love, you figure that Christmas trees get a free pass.
You notice for the first time that dollar bills are stapled across the ceiling; people have signed them from wherever they came. A couple of the bills are noticeably red notes instead of green dollar bills—Dii-Yaa money. One says Guy Farson, you think. You realize you’ve been staring at it for a while. If it wasn’t for the Nemo Gate next to the back door of the Benbow, you would think you were in some ancient pub back on Earth.
“That was my feeling, yes, Treena, but then what you were saying... And yeah, he’s, wow,” you say, turning on the beer tap and putting your mouth on the end. “God, I like to drink now.”
You’re joking but there is a bit of reality behind your statement. Alcohol, you notice, makes things feel just distant enough that you can think for a simple moment. It calms your nerves and your stomach enough to make life tolerable, and masks the shittiness you feel. With increasing doses, alcohol makes life fun again. You have noticed this since the Queen Mary. Guy offered you a drink then and you remember how your mind stops racing, slows down and you know you can think more clearly after a drink.
Winniefreddie wiggles some more and then takes out a cigarette. She mumbles something under her breath and looks through her pockets for a lighter, doesn’t find one, and puts the cigarette away.
You stop. “Did you just say he’s a probably a vampire? I don’t think this…wait, there are vampires here, in The Oberon. You think? No, no that’s… I mean, the ancients or what you call ‘em...” You think of the dead city you went through.
Winniefreddie looks away and mumbles something about you about to be educated, so you move on. Treena takes out a small .38 pistol and a blue expandable baton that’s collapsed. It has a single blue orichalcum stone in the handle. She lays it out on the counter. “You should go back there and blow his brains out. This is my gun and my baton, totally untraceable to you. You understand me? Totally untraceable.”
Winniefreddie quietly asks, “Can we have a beer to calm our nerves?”
You nod and bring out a copper cup for each as well as two bottles of home-made beer with tags stating Tokyo Sex Whale. You are running the bar now, for no particular reason. Treena takes the beer bottle without looking and twists off the cap. You look at the bottle again, with its blue whale wearing a sailor’s cap. The name is awfully familiar. The whale is destroying what could be downtown Tokyo, while women in bikinis run away. Tokyo Sex Whale is written in colorful, neon lettering.
Winniefreddie tries to open her bottle with her teeth until she sees Treena make a twisting motion with her hands. “Look at me, Winniefreddie, look at me.”
“Where you guys, I mean, let me say that again. Where you guysss es from?” you slur.
“Seal Beach, originally,” Winniefreddie says. “Graduated Los Alamitos High School in 2006.”
You lick your lips. “You gotta be shitting me! You shit me not! God, that’s me too, me freakin’ too! I graduated in 2011! Jeez, that’s awesome! We’re all from Seal Beach!” You are very happy to hear that and high five the two girls, hard. “This is fate. I attracted this. I attracted this big time. You ever read The Secret?”
They shake their heads.
“What are you guys doing out here?” you ask.
“Selling alcohol, pretty much. We make our own beer. Tokyo Sex Whale. Want to get out there to the Sargasso-3 Free Zone. California Gold Rush time, you know? Sargasso-3 is supposed to be barely hit, and so a lot of flush dayhawks are paying ten bucks a beer. You can’t import alcohol into The Oberon, but we can make it,” Treena says, her face down.
You look at the bottle again. “Tokyo Sex Whale. That’s—you know Guy Farson, don't you? Dayhawker, right?”
Treena and Winniefreddie become very still. “Nope, never, uh, heard of him. Why do you say that?” Treena asks.
You look at the bottle again, thinking, but don’t say anything.
“We really wanted to get into dayhawking ourselves, but we don’t have anyone to teach us, you know? And the license fee…If you want to do it legally and in the daytime, it's a lot of money or special favors to the Bureau agent here,” Winniefreddie says. Treena looks at her as if she has said too much and she quiets down.
“I want to do that. We’re all California girls. We can handle ourselves out there in the big bad empty, can’t we?” you say.
Winniefreddie nods. “Hell yeah. Hell yeah,” she says repeatedly. You put out your sloshing cup full
of cold beer. “Here’s to underage drinking and bad decision making! We got to go into dayhawking, right? I mean you guys don’t want to just own this place, right? You guys got here just a little while ago too, right?”
Treena and Winniefreddie look at each other. “Right, right, and we own this place, right.”
The Ni-Perchta male walks behind you three, shaking his head and yelling, “Is Exeurncalles!”
“Shoo! Shooooo!” Winniefreddie and Treena say. He goes into a back room marked Private. You see a little cot set up for him to sleep on.
“Do you guys want to see something nuts? The book? That the Network Rep brought me back in Long Beach? From my sister. I looked it up online. It's a very rare thing to have, and it’s supposed to be very helpful with dayhawking,” you say.
Treena shrugs. Winniefreddie nods with excitement.
You put down the copper cup and run back to your apartment—which means going through the Nemo Gate again with a crack. You bring out the book, slap it down on the counter and open it up.
Winniefreddie looks like she’s just won the lottery. “Oh snap, it’s the Necronomicon! Have the walls started to bleed and are the stars right? Where’s the section where we can raise the dead from their dreamless sleep?”
You ignore Winniefreddie’s ramblings on H.P. Lovecraft, excited about telling your story. “Voice of the Four Winds or something, he said. Not the Necronomicon. I don’t know what that is. You can read stories, look over maps. I’ve read a lot in here.”
Treena finally rouses herself, pushes back her glasses, and looks over the book. “Are you thinking about selling it?” she asks. “It has to be worth something.”
“Yeah,” you say, meaning it but feeling that it will never happen. Looking at the book again gives you a chill. It’s quiet for a long moment with the logs crackling in the background and the storm playing outside the front doors.
“These books are pretty rare, Sarah, so I’ve heard,” Treena says. “These books, these are really strong religious artifacts, too. Like our Bibles or Korans. Sort of a translator/GPS/gospel for the natives, the Ni-Perchta. How’d your sister get it?” She flips through the pages. “And it’s blank, Sarah.”
“And it’s worth a shitload of money, I think…wait, what?”
Treena nods without looking up from the pages. “Oh yeah. You smell that, every time you flip a page? Smells like electrical burn. Just, sort of, drifts up from the page. What is this?”
Winniefreddie spits out half of her beer, spraying the book and you. “Oh man, we can use this! I know what this is. This is a tetrachromatic version of their book—that’s why we can’t see it—but I guess you can. Man, we make money so we can hang out with you and you’ll be like, “Winniefreddie, you want to go places and do things and not work ’n’ shit?” And we can drink Hankakins instead of Budweisers, and the men we hang with will all look like Abercrombie and Bitch models except without the douche factor. Right?” She high fives you hard and you are barely ready. You shake your hand because it hurts. “But wait, you said you can read certain things. How does that work?”
You wipe your front with a towel after spilling some beer on yourself. “Sounds awesome to me, too. The word is Heineken. Not Hankakins.” You look at the book. You can see every hieroglyphic and a map showing the entire Oberon with the four regions—Burzee, Quadling, Super Sargasso Sea, and Nikh-Cunm/Former COMECON Territories.
“Do I look like I’m Russian like Hitler? I don’t speak the language,” Winniefreddie says, chugging her beer and placing it on the counter. “Chalk up another one to the Maniac. I can’t read a thing, though. You must be tetrachromatic.”
Winniefreddie and Treena look at each for a long moment. “Yeah, you must be.” Treena agrees. “You know what that is, right?”
“Seeing extras coloorrs and shit,” you slur.
“Seeing extra colors beyond the normal spectrum, right.”
“Cool.” You start to gargle with beer and dribble some onto yourself. “My future is in beer dentistry... Hey, hey, got a question. Why are we so locked up tight in the Mission? They afraid of the Ni-Perchta that much? I mean, Jesus, what’s the big deal? They are strange but they ain’t, you know, Cthulhu flying up into your face and shit, you know?”
Winniefreddie and Treena smile at each other. “There’s a lot of…creatures… around. I mean, more like in Sargasso-3, but still, you can see things out there, late at night,” Treena says.
You nod as if you really understand this. “Where is everybody?”
The Page sisters shrug. “It’s Christmas Eve. Everyone is with family, Sarah,” Winniefreddie says.
Treena comes up with an idea. “We should go to the Breaks, girls! Hang out at the bars on Moondog Street!”
You high five her hard, making her cringe. Winniefreddie nods her head. “Oh yeah.”
* * *
You and the girls actually walk the green and hilly fields at night, taking a good fifteen to twenty minutes to get over to the walled village of the Funeral Breaks. Walking on a cobblestone path, the three of you are doing a stumble-and-talk to the town’s edge. The high wooden and stone walls greet you with ambivalence and the gate leading inside has a green reflector plate, like a highway sign back home, stating that the walled village of the Funeral Breaks is a designated census spot. A mix of cars and motorcycles and even a few short buses are all over, parked in front of the village, each modified with extra lights, metal plates, and other things to armor them.
A single yellow Karmann Ghia stands out amongst all the other cars—clean looking, snub-nosed, a 1970s hipster-mobile. A Ni-Perchta kid, maybe thirteen, sits on the hood of a ’55 Chevy that's dying of rust, smoking a Valis pipe. He waves to you and points to his pipe. You ignore him. A slight drizzle falls from an overcast sky, creating a mist.
Just steps away from passing through the gate, a Ni-Perchta in simple, medieval-style armor steps out and asks what your business is. Next to him is another Ni-Perchta in a blue military uniform, human style. Winniefreddie responds, “Going to Moondog Street, sir knight.”
The Ni-Perchta frowns and lets you pass. You look him up and down, still a little weirded out by seeing a true alien up close and personal.
The village itself is a good size, with winding and narrow streets snaking off in all directions. You walk on mud and cobblestones, avoiding the stares of the few Ni-Perchta still on the street. Their homes and shops are shuttered closed and all street lamps are doused. You walk in almost pitch darkness with only a few Coleman lamps left in windows and on street benches to guide your way. Ads for bars and restaurants dot the street, pasted onto Ni-Perchta homes.
Coming around the corner after avoiding a couple of fat, drunk humans munching on carrots, you and the girls make a beeline down the street where the music, the shouting, and the yells are coming from—Moondog Street. Electricity is on in this section of town. The whole street is lit in neon. Women with green and red body paint covering their breasts appear. A couple of homeless human street musicians thump their musical shit through the air. Multiple bars, and what you assume to be strip clubs, dot the street. Ni-Perchta women alongside human women call out to you for lap dances and make obscene gestures. Cigarette smoke and the smell of food blow by with every gust of wind. You even hear firecrackers—or what you naively think to be firecrackers—popping off. Christmas lights are piled on buildings that look like they were built in some medieval Lord of the Rings world.
“I’m so far away from home,” you say, bumping into a girl with no top who’s using body paint as a bra. In the distance there’s the guitar riff of Money for Nothing. You spot signs stating Human Only and Both Races Allowed in many of the shops.
Winniefreddie and Treena look at each other. “Green Man?” Treena says. They stare at each other for a good moment and then nod.
“The hell is this place? Did we just wake up in that part of Back of the Future Part Two where Biff controls everything?” you say over the yelling and people shouting th
ings to each other.
Treena shrugs. “Shit, basically. Thunderdome meets the village of Bree.”
You see Livesey’s Green Man. It’s a very large stone tavern standing in a field of high grass that perhaps was a common area or park at one time. Old wooden picnic tables dot the bare ground in front of the tavern. An odd yellow, red, blue, and white flag flies from Livesey’s Green Man—you’ve seen that flag once or twice since coming off-world and you try to make a mental note to discuss it sometime. A wooden statue of a person, well done and very intricate, stands outside the tavern, seven feet tall, painted a dark green. A string of Christmas lights, reds and greens, is strung around the statue. People are all over; the place is busy this hour.
Each man and woman, all pretty young, has one of those orichalcum batons, with maybe a couple or more stones set into it, and each has a crossbow on them as well. Everyone has a red or yellow plastic tag on his or her chest or arm. They all look tired. Men and women talk in pairs and in groups. Some have metal chainmail armor on, others thick, leather, padded motorcycle jackets and even old riot gear helmets.
You walk up the front stairs and swing open the heavy wooden doors. The Green Man is one part roadhouse, one part casino, and one part place to get stabbed. Stepping inside as a twenty-year-old girl, you feel very alone and very overwhelmed in this dim, partially lit place.
Passing a cardboard sign that says Check All Weapons! NO EXCEPTIONS!, you come across an odd scene. There are roulette tables—those big wheels that spin so you can bet whether or not the tag will land on a 1, 5, 10, or 20. Men in bowler hats are dealers in probably rigged card games, and salvagers with stacks of money are laying down bets on craps tables left and right or duking it out over poker. A thick smell of cooking meat, cigar smoke, and sweat permeates the entire open space. A salsa and chip bar is off to one side, looking appetizing if unhygienic.
“Oh snap,” you say, seeing something that turns you on like nothing else. The two girls watch you as you drift over to the casino.