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

by Shelley Singer

  He began to play a John Phillip Sousa march, of all things. I can barely tell them apart but I thought it was “Stars and Stripes Forever.” And the fortyish woman, who had put on a straw hat, began to do an odd kind of dance-march to the music, tipping the hat in a salute every time she turned. When the song ended, she tossed her hat high into the air and caught it. The young clown-man cheered. A few spectators clapped.

  The man in the top hat had set up an easel with a badly-drawn poster that featured lopsided bottles of their wares in various colors. He took over once the hesitant applause stopped.

  “We’ve got it right here, folks!” he yelled. “This is the real thing! The real medicine the government’s hiding from you so their dealers can sell the vax— the vax you can’t afford to buy! Selective breeding, that’s what it is— steal from the poor and sell to the rich! Are you going to stand for that?” A few people mumbled “no.” One woman laughed. It was the standard spiel, although his explanation of selective breeding was a little more muddled than most.

  Omnicillin, he said, pointing at each of the bottles on the poster, came in six flavors— lime, lemon, cherry, blackberry, apple and anise. These were all delicacies that any enterprising Redwooder could grow in his yard or pick along the road, but he didn’t mention that. The cherry and apple were the same color.

  At five reals a bottle, he said, you couldn’t go wrong. He began to rave about the curative properties of each flavor, sliding the first poster behind a second one that listed those properties in capital letters with lots of exclamation marks.

  Lime and lemon cured colds, flu, and dengue. Cherry dealt with all kinds of immunodeficiencies, including AIDS and red-rash, and was also used in the treatment of measles, smallpox, and chicken pox. Blackberry was a specific for Ebola and black plague. Apple eradicated viral cancers and neutralized pesticide poisoning. Anise cured all new and as-yet-unnamed viruses as well as several other cancers, particularly melanoma.

  All for five reals a bottle.

  A fat man in a red suit— Santa Claus?— jumped down from the bus and began strumming a banjo. Sounded like bluegrass, but it was too fast. While he played the man in the tux recited weirdly-rhymed poetry— “melanoma, take-it-homa” was my favorite— about his medicine and about the conspiracy to keep vax prices high, and in the middle of all that, two young women, also wearing long flowered dresses, suddenly appeared in the bus doorway, leapt down the stairs, joined the large woman, and they all started doing a speedy can-can, back and forth in front of the audience, while the banjo and the accordion competed with each other trying to keep up with the dancers. It looked to me like they’d all had way too much Omnicillin. The guy in the tux had stopped reciting poetry to do business. The crowd had by now grown to perhaps three dozen people, and they were falling all over themselves to buy the stuff.

  The young man had to put aside his accordion to climb back into the bus and carry down more bottles of Omnicillin. Santa Claus helped him.

  We were half an hour into the noisy show; I was more and more sure that the sheriff was ignoring the scam, and, getting tired of the hysteria, stepped off to the side, into the shade of an acacia tree. That was when I heard the man in the tux say “Hey, there, Waldo.” Sure enough, there he was. My boss. Or one of my bosses, anyway. He didn’t see me, which was just fine, and I slipped farther behind the tree.

  Waldo grabbed the handrail and pulled his game leg up the bus steps, disappearing inside. The man in the tux turned over the sales to his assistants, and followed Waldo.

  I stepped out from behind the tree and strolled casually around the bus, looking for an open window on the street side where the performers couldn’t see me. One was cracked an inch or two. I crouched under it.

  “Looks like you’re going to sell quite a few dozen more before this ends.” Waldo’s voice. He didn’t sound close to the window, but he wasn’t bothering to whisper.

  “Well, I suppose that’s possible.” A grunt. “Here. This should do it.”

  “I don’t think so. You got a good crowd. You’re gonna sell out.”

  Another grunt.

  Waldo’s voice again. “Yeah. More like it.”

  I heard the shuffle of feet heading toward the front of the bus and the exit door. Waldo hopped back down the stairs, shoving a fat wad of money into his pocket, grinning. He limped off through the crowd, slowly, swaggering a little, and considerably richer than he’d been before.

  So Waldo had performed some service, and the cut was big enough to make the showman grumpy. Could be anything from letting them put up flyers to selling them food, but Timmy had said the Colemans pretty much let Waldo do as he pleased, so my best guess was that he was selling his influence: pay me and no one will bother you. Some of that wad might even be for the sheriff.

  All medicine peddlers acted cheery and devil-may-care, just like this bunch. It was showmanship. But in most cases, you could tell by the nervous sweat, by the way their eyes scanned the street and the crowd, and by the way they stuck close to their wheels and rushed through the sales, that they were ready to toss their wares back into the wagon and take off fast at the first sign of cops.

  Not these guys. No sweat, no nerves, no flickering eyes. They acted like they had plenty of time and nothing to worry about.

  The flowered women were now doing less-than-graceful somersaults and splits, which was neither easy nor attractive in those long skirts, and the accordion and banjo were playing a medley of what sounded like Twentieth Century war songs. I recognized “Over There” and “Off We Go, Into the Wild Blue Yonder” or whatever the title of that Air Force theme was.

  Much as I was enjoying the show, I decided to follow Waldo.

  He hadn’t gone far. I nearly bumped into his back when he yanked open the door of the Blue Chip Diner. I peered in the window to see if he handed the proprietor a wad of reals, but I was so obvious standing there it made just as much sense to go in for a cup of tea and look dumb.

  He sat at the counter, pulled out the wad of money, peeled off a twenty and slapped it down.

  “Gimme a coffee, Xavier.” He slid the twenty across the counter.

  Coffee. Wow. Big deal for a little dive. I didn’t see any signs that said they had it. Probably only for the very special customers. Coffee wasn’t just expensive, it was hard to get. Experiments with growing it in Sierra, Rocky, and Redwood hadn’t produced anything very good, and the ships that brought it up from South America were as likely to fall victim to pirates as make it through. Blackjack had a small supply of it, carefully sealed against the drying air; very few customers were willing to pay the price.

  Xavier looked impressed, Waldo smug. For half a second, I had wondered why he didn’t just have a cup at his own restaurant, but their expressions told it all. Waldo was showing off. Xavier gave me a greasy smile, said he’d take my order in a minute, and went into the kitchen where presumably the precious stuff was kept. Waldo didn’t even turn around to see who’d come in behind him.

  I hadn’t seen Waldo slipping Xavier an extra few reals tucked under the twenty, so if Xavier got a cut from the medicine show, it wasn’t through Waldo. He probably collected from the guy in the top hat, too.

  I sat down two stools from Waldo.

  Finally, he noticed me. The smugness slid off his face, replaced by an irritated sneer.

  “What are you doing here, Rica?”

  “Just stopping in for a sandwich.”

  Why had I said that? Now I’d have to actually eat something there. I’d had lunch a little over an hour before and even if I’d been hungry I doubted I could choke down one of Xavier’s creations.

  When Xavier came back out with a cup and saucer, setting it almost reverently before Waldo, I asked him for a chicken sandwich.

  I took one tiny bite. The bread was stale, the chicken boiled to dust, but I didn’t have to eat it after all. Waldo drank his coffee quickly, without saying another word to me, and limped back out the door.

  I waited a solid min
ute, letting him get a good head start, pretended I’d just remembered a very important engagement— “Oh, darn, got to go mumble mumble”— and said goodbye.

  At Blackjack, Waldo went straight to the restaurant. He passed both the bar, where Jo was talking to the bartender, and the stairs to the Mezzanine, where he might have found Judith. The money seemed to be all his.

  The dealers at the two open poker tables were people I’d seen around the casino— a woman I’d noticed dealing blackjack once or twice, and a man named Quinn who worked in the cashier’s cage. War-games fill-ins for Samm and Zack. It was not quite three o’clock and the army wasn’t back yet.

  I had two hours until my first shift at the restaurant. Just enough time for a mail check, a shower and a nap. I was just about convinced by then that Hannah had told no one about seeing me at the war games.

  I headed right for the hallway and the stairs to my room. I was passing the roulette wheel when I noticed Jo walking toward me. The doubt returned. Did she know? Had Hannah told her she’d caught me spying? Was Jo coming after me? Why would she do it alone? I held my breath.

  She smiled, nodded, and passed right by, heading up toward Judith’s office.

  Hannah’s work on the elevator had been interrupted that day for more important things. I wondered how long it would be before she had the time to finish it. Resigned to using the stairs for the rest of my stay, I showed them my contempt by taking them two at a time. At a quick glance, my room didn’t look tossed or even touched. My sys was where I’d left it, rolled up in the pants. I couldn’t see any signs that anyone had been there.

  Shower first. I’d done a lot of sweating that day. As the water ran down my back, I thought about Hannah Karlow. She was an urgent problem. I had no idea where she stood on anything, or what it meant that so far, she’d let me get away with spying on the training session. But I couldn’t rely on her keeping the secret no matter what her reason was. I could say I wanted to join and was watching to see what it was like. Pretty weak, though. I couldn’t imagine the Colemans falling for that one. And I couldn’t imagine them being foolish enough to let a spy live.

  I considered gunning Electra down the road to Redwood and home, but only briefly— a merc who runs away from danger loses the pay for that job and runs the risk of losing that client forever, possibly even losing the reputation that brings in future work and keeps her in vax.

  So I would take a chance and stay, keep the Hannah problem to myself and give her no excuses, and let the chief message me if she wanted the rest of what I’d seen that day— what kinds of weapons, who was involved, where they held the maneuvers.

  I dabbed disinfectant on the blackberry scratch, wrapped a robe around myself, pulled out my sys and punched up my mail.

  Nothing much new. Some Middle chief I’d never heard of who had some kind of problem with godders; his message was pretty vague and he sounded angry, arrogant, and in a big hurry. I didn’t answer him. Gran had sent me a meditation that consisted mostly of repetitious statements about how happy I was. She must have been right because I caught myself smiling as I read it.

  Thinking about my happiness, I went to bed. I had an hour and a half to sleep.

  I got nearly all the way through the first part of my shift at the restaurant with no one coming to haul me away and toss me in a casino dungeon. Waldo was his usual surly self, Lizzie was friendly in a self-absorbed adolescent way, and Jo came in for a quick dinner and didn’t shoot me. On the contrary, she gave me a very sweet smile, asked me to sit with her for a moment, and told me the piano player would meet me half an hour before show time so we could run through the music. Since she hadn’t mentioned an accompanist before and I had been so preoccupied I hadn’t thought to ask, I’d been ready to bring in some instrumental capsules. This was better, if he was any good.

  She also said she’d heard from a lot of customers that they’d be there for the show.

  “Word’s getting around, Rica. You’re bringing us business even before your show opens. We may want to do two shows a night soon.” Timmy— she was sitting at one of his tables— overheard that last line when he brought her a glass of red wine and a menu. He beamed like I was his daughter. Fredo came in and started doing setups at my tables. He was going to be filling in for me during my performance.

  A little while after Jo had left the restaurant, Drew showed up. His clothes were dusty, his face pale; he looked tired and was holding his injured arm stiffly. While Timmy was bringing him his dinner, Samm walked in and dropped into a chair next to Drew. And ten minutes behind Samm, Hannah, who sat alone across the room, at one of my tables.

  The warriors were back from the front— hungry, dirty, and exhausted. Samm looked broody, Drew happy and a little sick. Hannah gave me a sly smile, and asked for a half-bottle of Sonoma Merlot. I studied her eyes, looking for a clue. She smirked and examined the plain white tablecloth as if she were reading it.

  When I came back with the wine, she glanced toward Samm and Drew and spoke softly to me, still smiling.

  “Rica, you need to be more careful.” Sly and conspiratorial. I handed her the menu, she passed it back to me without looking. “I’ll have the chicken.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The parking lot will be private enough

  Drew was worn out. His arm hurt; he was hungry and sick to his stomach all at once. He’d tried to take it easy, not push too hard, do more observing than fighting, but during the last attack on the outpost he’d forgotten he was wounded, thrown himself on a Red soldier and fallen right on his bad arm. It hadn’t stopped throbbing ever since. Blue had won and Zack had complimented him on that last run for the shed, but maybe Mother was right and it was too soon to be out there abusing his messed-up body.

  Lizzie came to his table with a basket of bread.

  “You look like shit, Drew.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re an asshole. You should have waited.” She slammed the bread down and marched away.

  She was just jealous. It was really chewing at her that everyone said she was too young to be a soldier. And she was getting more snappish every day.

  She’d always been edgy, prone to trouble, but it seemed like killing the merc had cut something loose in her. Something that went deeper. She was fierce. Wild. Had she always been that way, underneath? She’d been upset enough when she’d killed the man, but then she seemed to settle in and accept it. She could be dealing with guilt by making it normal to be violent. Or it could be pride. Maybe she felt she had something to live up to. If everyone thought she was a killer, she had to be one. He knew that sometimes people took their own reputations too seriously.

  He wished he could make her understand that she’d killed because she had to, and leave it at that, but she absolutely refused to talk about it.

  Rica was still working, not time for her show yet. He’d sat down at the first table he came to, sick, unthinking, and instantly regretted it. He’d sat at one of Timmy’s stations. That blew his chance to have a casual word or two with Rica. Oh, well. He didn’t feel too dashing anyway. Not up to impressing her. Still, he couldn’t help but wonder what she’d think if she’d been able to see him training that day. He’d run fast, knocked down several opponents with a staff, shot a pistol with some accuracy. All with one arm. All with pain weighing him down. But when he’d landed on the bad arm tears had poured down his face, and he was glad she hadn’t seen that.

  He sighed. Who was he kidding? She probably thought he was way too young for her, if she thought of him at all. She smiled over at him, a beautiful smile, just a moment before Samm came stumping in and threw himself down next to Drew.

  “Good work today, Drew. How’s the arm?”

  * * *

  I stared at Hannah, willing her to say more. She didn’t. And I couldn’t drag her out of the restaurant and demand she tell me what was going on, what kind of game she was playing. I’d have to talk to her later, somewhere private.

  “You want chicken. Sur
e. Fine. I want to talk to you.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  More games.

  “Meet me at my car in the parking lot after my second shift. About one o’clock.” I described the Electra and where it was parked.

  She gave me another coy smile. “Your car? What about your room?”

  I shot her my best glare. What did the bitch have in mind, sexual extortion? “The parking lot will be private enough.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  World on a string, ass in a sling

  The long midnight blue sequined dress was not one I wore often. I preferred to perform in a light, floating blouse and pants, usually. But I thought my debut at Blackjack, and the debut of its lounge called for something slinkier. I was doing mid-20th Century standards, including World War Two. It wouldn’t hurt to look like a chanteuse from a noir film.

  Of course, those chanteuses were always in big trouble and sometimes got murdered.

  Gran had started her movie collection when she was a teenager and the noirs were already creaky with age by then; she’d pushed me to watch some of them when she thought I was old enough. Art, she said, the art of black and white cinema.

  At first I’d hated them. They were, as the name implied, dark. I was a sad little kid to start with and I didn’t understand why Gran, whom I loved absolutely and who I knew absolutely loved me, would want me to be even more depressed. The clothing in the movies was strange and formal, with the men in those baggy suits and the women wearing spiky-heeled shoes and tight skirts that must have made it hard to walk. The language was archaic, so I didn’t always understand what the characters were saying. But gradually, the eerie combination of low-key passion, bitterness and danger took hold of my imagination, and the crowds of people on the streets, the miles of huge buildings, none of them in ruins, the easy and casual movement through a world that was treacherous and primitive and civilized at the same time, worked on my imagination and helped me to understand Gran’s sense of loss. I fell in love with the sleaze and the music and the stars. Lupino. Stanwyck. MacMurray. Ladd. Bang Bang you’re dead.