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

by Shelley Singer

  “Got some soup left.” She slouched off to the back room, returning with a screw-top mug of something that didn’t smell too good. I took it anyway. As she handed it to me, our eyes met for the first time. There was anger and pain in hers, the look of a dog left tied up in the yard too long.

  A door slammed and a male version of the motel clerk strolled out of the back room. He was wearing jeans that were brown and stiff with dirt and he hadn’t shaved for a while. His hair was pulled back in a skimpy gray ponytail. From the look of his red nose, he’d indulged too much in his own product.

  “You need some corn?” His teeth took up too much room in his small mouth and his protruding incisors turned the word “some” into a whistle.

  He looked like the type who’d raise the price if he thought I was desperate. “Sure, if it’s good enough.”

  “Pure 60 percent. Guaranteed.” If he said 60 there was a hope of it being 50, good enough to replace the barely adequate 100-proof Blackbeard was probably busy throwing up.

  “Okay. How much for a six-gallon tank?”

  He squinted at me, his flat, pale blue eyes all but disappearing in the pouches around them. “Ten a gallon. That’ll be sixty Lincolns.”

  “Make it forty-five.”

  He shrugged and jerked a thumb toward his sister. “Pay her.” I handed over enough for the moonshine, the soup and one night in the motel. She gave me a key. It was an actual metal key, rusty and pitted, must have been seventy years old or more. I slipped it into my pocket. Carl went back through the curtain again; in a few seconds, I heard something rattling around outside and went to look. He was pulling a big rolling tank up to the back of my car. I set my soup down out of the way and tapped the lock, watching while he screwed one end of a black hose into his tank, climbed in, started the siphon by sucking at the hose, spat onto my floor, and stuck the other end in my tank. When he finished, I checked the gauge. Full. I nodded. He made an odd, jerky half-bow and rolled his tank back around the side of the motel.

  I slipped my sys out of the armrest slot and dropped it into my shirt pocket, retrieved my three remaining laser pistols and the charger from their hiding places, and grabbed the pack of necessaries from the back. Clean shirt, underwear, socks. Toothbrush, soap, comb. I shoved a bag of raisins and nuts from the passenger seat, along with the soup mug, into the outside pocket of the pack and slung it over my shoulder.

  The kinks were slipping out of my muscles already, and fatigue was easing into relief and a measure of cheer, despite the headache and the sore wrist. I wasn’t proud that I’d killed a shoot-first-ask-questions-later sheriff or let a brain-rotted hugger wander back to his keepers, but I’d gotten out of Iowa alive one more time and was traveling west. That was worth a celebration. I stopped at the vender next to the ice machine and searched my wallet for more Nebraska paper. Wine? No, beer. I pushed the bills through the intake and poked at the LaCrosse button. A decent import from Northland. The can dropped into the catch-tray, bouncing hard and more than once before it settled.

  I’d heard that someone up in Olympia, Seattle I think, was working on getting that dance bug out of the organic plastic. But then a lot of people were working on a lot of things. They were trying to put together a new web in Redwood, and I’d heard that someone way the hell out in Atlantis was working on it, too, but so far all we had was a ragged and rare mess of spotty egos spiking out of the West. Gran said the leftovers and revived bits and pieces of the old Internet couldn’t compare with the web of her youth, and no matter how close I got to the East Coast I still couldn’t get anything there except netsys email that didn’t work half the time. A few optimists kept trying to blog but more often those addicted to communication or to history had started local newspapers, printed on re-pressed paper and plastic. They came in handy when nothing else was working right. Gran found it funny. Newspapers were practically extinct, made obsolete by the Internet, when she was young.

  It took three tries to get the sticky lock open. The room had water stains on the ceiling but no drips that I could see. The bed was dry. The bathroom was spotted with mildew. A cheap fifty-year-old sys hung from the bedroom wall, a low-speed, unsecure clunker no better than a toy linked to TV, capsule player/recorder, and phone. I tapped its on-button. Dead. This motel could use a fixer. But then why would a fixer hang around here?

  I set the bounced beer down to rest on the nightstand—I wanted it in me, not all over me— the food next to it and my own sys beside that, and tapped the on-button hopefully.

  “New Mail.”

  Hallelujah. Back in service. Most recent message:

  “Rica Marin, by order of the…” The bored male voice said the Iowa General was demanding that I appear in his offices by ten a.m. that day for questioning in the death of blah blah blah. Eight hours ago. Well gee whiz damn, I’d missed the appointment. If things stayed true to form he wouldn’t be the Iowa general in a week, anyway.

  As always, a message from Gran:

  “Why does the mercenary cross the road? To get home, dummy. I miss you. See you after Sierra?”

  I punched the talk-back: “Yeah. Getting homesick for the fog.”

  She wouldn’t expect more than that and there was no need to tell her about my day.

  I damped the mike and shot the screen. The holo shimmied for a second and resolved, backdropped against the stains on the dirty beige wall. I needed to do some searching and I do that better with my eyes than my ears. Headers scrolled to the unread messages.

  What I was looking for first was a message confirming a three-day gig in Rocky, a quick catch-a-bandit job for a local chief that I really wanted to do. He was offering a one-night acting undercover as Lady Macbeth at a Denver amphitheater that I knew attracted crowds of a hundred or more. A great gig. I’d always wanted to do The Lady.

  No such luck. A short message from the chief.

  “Godders wrecked the theater, bandits bribed my cops, I’m on my way to Desert. Phoenix I think. Maybe see you there some time.”

  So much for Lady Macbeth. Well, that just meant I’d get to Sierra and the Tahoe job sooner. I unscrewed the soup lid. Split pea. Sniffed close up. Not spoiled, anyway. I tasted it. Oniony, but probably not dangerous.

  I realized suddenly that I hadn’t let the Sierra chief know I was on my way. After a quick send to her, I scrolled to the earlier messages we’d lobbed back and forth. The case had grown vague in my mind.

  It involved a group of people— a clan, really, mostly related— who Chief Graybel said the neighbors suspected of a conspiracy to grab some kind of power. They were accusing them of several different kinds of illegal activity: everything from skimming taxable profits to murdering the mayor of Tahoe to smuggling bootlegged vaccines to plotting secession from Sierra. Maybe even running antibiotic medicine shows to sucker the mountain people. They owned a casino called Blackjack, one of the two big ones left, and pieces of more little Tahoe shops than the chief could be sure of. Graybel said the matriarch, Judith Coleman, was very smart and very slippery. The cover job involved working in the restaurant but they were also looking for a singer and I might be able to negotiate a show a night in the lounge. Was I interested? That had been message one.

  My answer: “Might? Negotiate? Send more data.” I knew the pay would be good. Graybel was an old friend who never cut corners. But she was being awfully fuzzy about the rest. The answer had come back in a few hours. Blackjack needed a server in the restaurant. They always did. That didn’t sound good. But they were opening a new lounge and were looking for a singer. The chief said she’d pass on the word that I could do both and she was sure I’d get a chance to audition. No promises about the lounge, but she’d gotten me a fake reference, had been willing to wait for me to finish the Iowa job, even spend a couple days in Rocky if that worked out, offered me a bonus on completion, and we’d struck a deal.

  By the time I’d finished the soup, dabbed some salve on my scabby head-bump, laid my stuff out on the dresser and checked the bed— not
hing walking or crawling or hopping on the sheets— and opened my can of LaCrosse, the new mail icon was dancing through the air. First in line, the chief was responding.

  “Good that you’re coming, Rica. Go right to the casino and ask to talk to Judith Coleman. Your reference from Riverboat Queen’s already there, waiting for you. It says you worked in the restaurant and sang in their lounge. Once you’re in at Blackjack, the person you need to talk to first is Newt Scorsi. The Scorsis own the other big casino. They’re the accusers. Just keep in mind there’s some kind of feud between the two families, so it’s hard to tell what’s really going on. Don’t contact the local sheriff in Tahoe when you get there. He doesn’t know about you and he may be tight with Coleman.”

  Fine with me. I’d had enough of local sheriffs for a while.

  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.

  Chapter Three

  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.