Here's something I'm working on
Sep. 4th, 2012 03:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficYou wouldn't be able to tell the world had ended at a glance. It hadn't ended with fire or ice, a bang or even a whimper. It ended with silence. That was how you could tell. As the hours slipped by indistinguishably, you'd mark that the sun never glinted off a passing car, no radio being worked up and down the dial to find a companionable blare, no cell phones to replace the silence with custom ringtones or puzzle games or whatever you called a movie when it was played on a screen the size of a postage stamp.
Noise was man's distinguishing characteristic. Every other animal held its tongue; humanity had made music and poetry and Mamet plays/and whatever you wanted to call Randy Newman. And wouldn't they be missed.
Or so Bobby Johns mused. He needed to think of something that wasn't the ground under his feet and the ground that had been under his feet. He'd walked a hundred miles, or something that felt like it, and he was too old. He'd done enough running as a boy and enough walking as a man, now he was a senior, fit for a bed and a disinterested young nurse to annoy. But all there was, was walking. He couldn't even rest in the shade. He gave his body respites, but his mind kept whirring like it was trying to escape his skull. He looked for monsters in every shadow and wind-stirred plant. It wasn't that he'd be able to outrun anything, he just didn't want his death to come as a shock.
He stopped, drank from his canteen, gave his body thirty minutes to stop hurting. His canteen was going dry too. This wasn't the desert, he could refill at any river, but the thought made him neurotic. An ancestral fear of predators at the watering hole.
Something animal sounded nearby. Bobby started walking again. His limbs jogged with renewed pain. He tried to kick his mind away from the pain. He needed to muse on something, but the only things in his head were what he missed. It hurt, but he'd take it over the arthritis. He missed car alarms, crying babies. He missed shitty movies in January. He missed tailgaters.
The voice blew him out of his reverie like a bomb. "No moves. 'Specially not real sudden like."
Bobby did as told. He didn't even turn his head, but rolling his eyes in their sockets gave him a glimmer of a figure to his left. He couldn't make out a face, but it was hard to mistake a bow and arrow.
"Way good call." The Southern accent was thick, glacial, like it had come down from the Ozarks without meeting any warmth on the path. "Now let me hear them dulcet tones."
Bobby took a deep breath to flood his mouth with words. "I'm Bobby—Robert Hewitt Johns. Bobby Johns."
"That'll do." Bobby heard a catgut plink as the bow was eased down. He turned his head, still not daring to face the man head-on.
It was a boy, lean and tall like beef jerky, still young enough to think his hand under a chick's shirt was pretty goddamn grand. But that wasn't enough to make Bobby take him lightly. He held the bow like it was no hard task to use it, and on his fellow man too. And while most everyone still wore the last ensemble of their old life, he wore a sort of uniform that actually seemed to fit their fucked-up new world. From the ground up, he looked both prepared and tested: muddy hiking boots, camouflage pants like men wore back when they were hunters and not prey, a well-laden toolbelt, a heavy flannel jacket, and a black ballcap. Bobby registered the letters FBI on it.
"Take it you're looking for the Gardens?" the boy asked, voice lighter, returning the bow to his shoulder and the arrow to a quiver on his belt.
"I guess… the others were headed this way. I just followed. I'm the last one…" Bobby sat, his legs immediately congratulating him. Even the tiny safety of another pair of eyes gave him permission to be weary. He felt if he tilted back and let his head meet soft grass, that he could sleep so long all of this would become a bad dream.
The boy readied himself for battle with the reassurance of habit. He pulled a pistol half out of its holster to check the draw was unencumbered, tightened the strap on his quiver, turned his cap backward so the bill didn't obscure his vision. "Were you followed?"
Bobby shook his head.
"I said is someone following you!?"
"No! I'm alone."
Satisfied with his check of the area, the boy took his hand off the butt of his gun. His fingers held the shape, like he was pretending to still grip it. "Mighty comfort there. The Garden's where you're headed, because there ain't shit else to go. It's an hour's walk. You'll manage that?"
Bobby nodded, then said "Uh-huh."
The boy patted him on the shoulder. "You wanna sleep, die. You wanna live, up."
Bobby rose. Now it was easy to ignore the pain. Just an hour and he could sit and sleep and maybe even eat something.
"Help me with this," the boy said, picking up one end of a walking stick. He was referring to the other end. In-between, a stag had been strung up, bike chains tying the hooves to the stick. An arrow jutted out of blood-matted fur on its neck: a kill so clean the stag almost looked alive.
"Dinner," he explained, grinning, when Bobby helped him lift it. He didn't stop grinning to say "If this is a trick, you'll find out how slow someone can die."
The stick bit into Bobby's shoulder, but the boy pulled his weight, and they made good time sharing the load. The sun shined, birds sang. There just weren't any people. No cars whizzing by, no planes high in the sky. It was a beautiful day, really. It'd been a long time since Bobby had noticed that.
The boy moved like animal, no sound, while Bobby thought he was treading on every twig in the woods. He covered the noise with his voice. "Any reason you packed it this way if you're on your own?"
"Jared was supposed to help me with it."
"What happened to him?"
"What do you think? He thought that as long as he was out, he oughta get a massage. What do you think I mean?"
In no time, Bobby was seeing signs of life. The thick green grass had been tangled into mud, often by tire treads. The horizon was straight and square over fields of tree stumps, when Bobby was used to it hiding behind forests. There were even some empty cans strewn across the ground. They kicked at them as they walked.
When Bobby saw it, it was like a bit of the horizon had broken off. The structure wasn't big enough to be prominent from a distance, so it snuck up on him. Cars, sedans, stacked three high like at a junkyard. Most of them were burnt-out or wrecked, but a few looked like they could've rolled right off a sales lot. It gave Bobby the willies, like seeing patches of healthy skin on a corpse.
"We filled the insides with dirt," the boy said with a punchy smile. "Pig-simple, but it works."
In the middle of the wall was a cargo container, like off an eighteen-wheeler. Buried beneath two layers of cars, it worked as a tunnel. Or a sally port, Bobby thought, eying the bus on either end. When they got to the first set, the boy rattled the point of the stick across the bars. "Honey? I'm home!"
The other set opened. A man came through, big, but his weight was unwieldy. It bulged out over his belt instead of staying up in his chest. But no matter what size his waistband was, his shotgun was just the right weight for its height, and Bobby wouldn't mess with it. When he saw Jared wasn't there, he didn't ask any questions, just shook his head. It looked rote, like a machine programmed to do this at that time.
Cradling the gun in the crock of his elbow, he locked the door behind him and plodded his way down the sally port, eying them the whole way. He unlocked the door, but Bobby followed the boy's lead, staying very still as the fat man backed off. When he was back behind the second set of bars, the boy went through the first. Bobby followed, happy to stay behind someone. He'd seen this before, always from the inside, but he'd seen it. Quarantine. The pleasant fiction that the Turn could be predicted. Men had been killed for having bloodshot eyes. And the smell of soap couldn't cover up the blood splatters Bobby could still see on the walls.
"How long does this usually take?" he asked, anxious to lay off the adrenaline.
"If they don't shoot us, you're sayin'?" the boy chuckled at the look Bobby gave him. "Five minutes, tops. That's as long as I've ever seen a Turn take." He laid the stag down and took a long, cruel knife from his toolbelt. Bobby turned away a second after he slit the thing's belly open. "Longer if they hose us down. They say it staves off infection, which is what causes the Turn—" He showed his support of the theory by driving his knife into something disgusting. "But really, it's cuz we've got some smelly fuckers coming through. They won't bother you while you're with me."
And after another four nerve-wracking minutes where Bobby found himself actually grateful for the distraction of a deer being gutted, the fat man came back and let them through.
The Gardens looked like a trailer park had laid siege to an Old West town. Just inside the walls, there was a ten-foot ring of land parceled off for crops, although nothing seemed to be growing. But once far enough from the walls, cars appeared, parked at nonsense angles to each other like a god was writing something down in an inscrutable language. They'd been retired where they laid, doors ripped off, trunks stuffed with anything soft to serve as cots. Blankets were strung up to protect from the sun, adding 'room' to the makeshift homes.
The boy headed for an RV with purple awnings, carrying what was left of the deer in several plastic bags he'd pulled, wadded-up, from a pouch in his belt. While he haggled through the RV's window, Bobby looked around at the people. They sat on their cars, played cards in the dust, and a woman sucked a man off in the truckbed of a pick-up. They weren't anywhere near attractive enough for voyeurism to offer a thrill.
The boy finished his haggling and took a hefty leather handbag to drop his wares by the side of the RV. As the boy walked, a man came out of the RV, lit up a few firepits, and upended the plastic bags into a collection of pots and pans. Despite the fast, appetizing smell, Bobby stayed with the boy, as they walked deeper into the camp. The boy jiggled the handbag, and it clicked heavily. "We use bottle caps for currency around here. Every sumbitch 'round has grabbed enough dollar bills to stuff a pillow, so that's all they're good for anymore. Sorry if you used to be a Rockefeller."
"Son, I don't even have a nickel for the tour."
"I'll put it on your tab." The boy gestured around. "Losers, losers, more losers. They get rations of the silo's larder, but if you want something don't taste of cardboard, pay for it."
"Silo? We're on top of a missile silo?"
"Know the fucked-up part? It's safer than the outside."
The tents and cars cleared up, leaving a clearing that had begun to be filled by a boardwalk and some multi-story wooden buildings, built fast and simple. Shower curtains covered the gaping windows. "Welcome to downtown. Bar, brothel, and church. Don't get those mixed up."
Bobby followed him onto the creaking boardwalk, passing men who seemed cleaner and busier than the stragglers on the outskirts. The boy greeted a few by name before sauntering into the bar.
It was just four walls and a ceiling, but it'd been stuffed with scavenger treasure. Pictures of old lives barraged the walls, like they could block out the outside world. The furniture was construction material and lawn chairs, while the bar was a Firebird. Bobby guessed he wouldn't have used it as an apartment or fencepost either. With the boy's entrance, someone kicked on a portable generator, and with that, fans started circulating the stagnant air and a boombox played rock music almost loud enough to drown out the genny's slightly more jumbled noise.
The boy took off his jacket and threw it on the bar, where the tender pinned it down with a mason jar of moonshine. The boy basked in the stream of a tower fan before sitting down on a crate. He wore a camouflage T-shirt, maybe a child's, since it clung to his surprisingly thick musculature. He drank, and before he had even gulped, a man had sat down beside him. Raggedy white hair burst from his scalp like it was making up for the skin hidden under layers of worn cloth. "Killian's cheating."
"Prove it, Arthur."
"Aces high, again. Again!"
"Can't punish a man for being lucky."
"Look around! No one's that lucky, not these days."
The boy reset his fingers on his glass. "Never bet what you can't lose. Have you ever met a broke man done that?"
Arthur put a dent in the hood with his fist. "If you don't put a stop to this, I will!"
The boy just looked at him. Bobby looked between the two, from Arthur's cracking resolve to the boy, a stone, his face and eyes just painted on.
"You won't. Because if he doesn't kill you, I will." He went back to his drink, not interested in Arthur's response. There was no sense waiting for what wasn't coming.
He drained his jar in one go, returned it for a refill, and gestured Bobby over. He sat down alongside the boy. In the car's window, he could see his reflection. The depth of the lines circling his face surprised him, and so did the dearth of wool-white hair on his head. Old. Tired old man. Even his skin seemed to have been leeched of its mahogany color, down to a sandy gray chalk.
"You look like you could use a drink." The boy dipped his hand into the bag, tossed some caps on the bar. The bartender swept them away and dropped an applejuice jar in Bobby's lap. Bobby popped the lid and drank. It tasted rough, like liquid gravel, but it was cold. He drank greedily. Over the past week of rationing water, he'd forgotten how thirsty he was.
"You're not a walker," the boy said on the heels of Bobby setting his glass down. "What are you doing in the wild?"
"I'm looking for someone."
"Any ole someone or he have a name?"
"It's a private matter."
The boy took out a couple caps and rattled them in his hand like dice until more moonshine appeared. "Now you owe me."
Bobby savored the temptation a moment before giving in. With a leisurely smile he said "I've heard this man referred to as the Kid."
"Well isn't that a name. So who'd he kill of yours to make you come all the way out here for payback?" The boy sounded amused by the whole idea, like it was the set-up to a joke.
Bobby settled back with a long sip. "No… I have something he'll want to see."
The bartender gave the boy a look. The boy tilted his head and he walked out of earshot.
The boy stood up, turned around, and backed against the car to crack his back. "Why don't you give me a teensy sneak peek and I'll decide if it's worth his time?"
"You know him?"
"For a few years now."
Bobby leaned in, craning his neck to look the boy dead in the eyes. He sniggered like a teenager in the middle of a prank. "You?"
"You're looking for a badass, goes by the Kid, you find a youngun like me showing you the nasty end of an arrow—you're having trouble with what part now?"
Bobby stood. He had a few inches on the Kid. "Boys talk shit. Men do shit. I don't need a boy."
The Kid's eyebrows flickered in annoyance, but he smiled it away. "You don't believe me." With a slap against the car, he stopped leaning. "Know what the motherfucker is? I don't have to prove shit to you. Before the day's out, you'll believe me. It's that kind of town." He went. Bobby stayed, nursing his beer. He didn't think the Kid would be buying him another.
Noise was man's distinguishing characteristic. Every other animal held its tongue; humanity had made music and poetry and Mamet plays/and whatever you wanted to call Randy Newman. And wouldn't they be missed.
Or so Bobby Johns mused. He needed to think of something that wasn't the ground under his feet and the ground that had been under his feet. He'd walked a hundred miles, or something that felt like it, and he was too old. He'd done enough running as a boy and enough walking as a man, now he was a senior, fit for a bed and a disinterested young nurse to annoy. But all there was, was walking. He couldn't even rest in the shade. He gave his body respites, but his mind kept whirring like it was trying to escape his skull. He looked for monsters in every shadow and wind-stirred plant. It wasn't that he'd be able to outrun anything, he just didn't want his death to come as a shock.
He stopped, drank from his canteen, gave his body thirty minutes to stop hurting. His canteen was going dry too. This wasn't the desert, he could refill at any river, but the thought made him neurotic. An ancestral fear of predators at the watering hole.
Something animal sounded nearby. Bobby started walking again. His limbs jogged with renewed pain. He tried to kick his mind away from the pain. He needed to muse on something, but the only things in his head were what he missed. It hurt, but he'd take it over the arthritis. He missed car alarms, crying babies. He missed shitty movies in January. He missed tailgaters.
The voice blew him out of his reverie like a bomb. "No moves. 'Specially not real sudden like."
Bobby did as told. He didn't even turn his head, but rolling his eyes in their sockets gave him a glimmer of a figure to his left. He couldn't make out a face, but it was hard to mistake a bow and arrow.
"Way good call." The Southern accent was thick, glacial, like it had come down from the Ozarks without meeting any warmth on the path. "Now let me hear them dulcet tones."
Bobby took a deep breath to flood his mouth with words. "I'm Bobby—Robert Hewitt Johns. Bobby Johns."
"That'll do." Bobby heard a catgut plink as the bow was eased down. He turned his head, still not daring to face the man head-on.
It was a boy, lean and tall like beef jerky, still young enough to think his hand under a chick's shirt was pretty goddamn grand. But that wasn't enough to make Bobby take him lightly. He held the bow like it was no hard task to use it, and on his fellow man too. And while most everyone still wore the last ensemble of their old life, he wore a sort of uniform that actually seemed to fit their fucked-up new world. From the ground up, he looked both prepared and tested: muddy hiking boots, camouflage pants like men wore back when they were hunters and not prey, a well-laden toolbelt, a heavy flannel jacket, and a black ballcap. Bobby registered the letters FBI on it.
"Take it you're looking for the Gardens?" the boy asked, voice lighter, returning the bow to his shoulder and the arrow to a quiver on his belt.
"I guess… the others were headed this way. I just followed. I'm the last one…" Bobby sat, his legs immediately congratulating him. Even the tiny safety of another pair of eyes gave him permission to be weary. He felt if he tilted back and let his head meet soft grass, that he could sleep so long all of this would become a bad dream.
The boy readied himself for battle with the reassurance of habit. He pulled a pistol half out of its holster to check the draw was unencumbered, tightened the strap on his quiver, turned his cap backward so the bill didn't obscure his vision. "Were you followed?"
Bobby shook his head.
"I said is someone following you!?"
"No! I'm alone."
Satisfied with his check of the area, the boy took his hand off the butt of his gun. His fingers held the shape, like he was pretending to still grip it. "Mighty comfort there. The Garden's where you're headed, because there ain't shit else to go. It's an hour's walk. You'll manage that?"
Bobby nodded, then said "Uh-huh."
The boy patted him on the shoulder. "You wanna sleep, die. You wanna live, up."
Bobby rose. Now it was easy to ignore the pain. Just an hour and he could sit and sleep and maybe even eat something.
"Help me with this," the boy said, picking up one end of a walking stick. He was referring to the other end. In-between, a stag had been strung up, bike chains tying the hooves to the stick. An arrow jutted out of blood-matted fur on its neck: a kill so clean the stag almost looked alive.
"Dinner," he explained, grinning, when Bobby helped him lift it. He didn't stop grinning to say "If this is a trick, you'll find out how slow someone can die."
The stick bit into Bobby's shoulder, but the boy pulled his weight, and they made good time sharing the load. The sun shined, birds sang. There just weren't any people. No cars whizzing by, no planes high in the sky. It was a beautiful day, really. It'd been a long time since Bobby had noticed that.
The boy moved like animal, no sound, while Bobby thought he was treading on every twig in the woods. He covered the noise with his voice. "Any reason you packed it this way if you're on your own?"
"Jared was supposed to help me with it."
"What happened to him?"
"What do you think? He thought that as long as he was out, he oughta get a massage. What do you think I mean?"
In no time, Bobby was seeing signs of life. The thick green grass had been tangled into mud, often by tire treads. The horizon was straight and square over fields of tree stumps, when Bobby was used to it hiding behind forests. There were even some empty cans strewn across the ground. They kicked at them as they walked.
When Bobby saw it, it was like a bit of the horizon had broken off. The structure wasn't big enough to be prominent from a distance, so it snuck up on him. Cars, sedans, stacked three high like at a junkyard. Most of them were burnt-out or wrecked, but a few looked like they could've rolled right off a sales lot. It gave Bobby the willies, like seeing patches of healthy skin on a corpse.
"We filled the insides with dirt," the boy said with a punchy smile. "Pig-simple, but it works."
In the middle of the wall was a cargo container, like off an eighteen-wheeler. Buried beneath two layers of cars, it worked as a tunnel. Or a sally port, Bobby thought, eying the bus on either end. When they got to the first set, the boy rattled the point of the stick across the bars. "Honey? I'm home!"
The other set opened. A man came through, big, but his weight was unwieldy. It bulged out over his belt instead of staying up in his chest. But no matter what size his waistband was, his shotgun was just the right weight for its height, and Bobby wouldn't mess with it. When he saw Jared wasn't there, he didn't ask any questions, just shook his head. It looked rote, like a machine programmed to do this at that time.
Cradling the gun in the crock of his elbow, he locked the door behind him and plodded his way down the sally port, eying them the whole way. He unlocked the door, but Bobby followed the boy's lead, staying very still as the fat man backed off. When he was back behind the second set of bars, the boy went through the first. Bobby followed, happy to stay behind someone. He'd seen this before, always from the inside, but he'd seen it. Quarantine. The pleasant fiction that the Turn could be predicted. Men had been killed for having bloodshot eyes. And the smell of soap couldn't cover up the blood splatters Bobby could still see on the walls.
"How long does this usually take?" he asked, anxious to lay off the adrenaline.
"If they don't shoot us, you're sayin'?" the boy chuckled at the look Bobby gave him. "Five minutes, tops. That's as long as I've ever seen a Turn take." He laid the stag down and took a long, cruel knife from his toolbelt. Bobby turned away a second after he slit the thing's belly open. "Longer if they hose us down. They say it staves off infection, which is what causes the Turn—" He showed his support of the theory by driving his knife into something disgusting. "But really, it's cuz we've got some smelly fuckers coming through. They won't bother you while you're with me."
And after another four nerve-wracking minutes where Bobby found himself actually grateful for the distraction of a deer being gutted, the fat man came back and let them through.
The Gardens looked like a trailer park had laid siege to an Old West town. Just inside the walls, there was a ten-foot ring of land parceled off for crops, although nothing seemed to be growing. But once far enough from the walls, cars appeared, parked at nonsense angles to each other like a god was writing something down in an inscrutable language. They'd been retired where they laid, doors ripped off, trunks stuffed with anything soft to serve as cots. Blankets were strung up to protect from the sun, adding 'room' to the makeshift homes.
The boy headed for an RV with purple awnings, carrying what was left of the deer in several plastic bags he'd pulled, wadded-up, from a pouch in his belt. While he haggled through the RV's window, Bobby looked around at the people. They sat on their cars, played cards in the dust, and a woman sucked a man off in the truckbed of a pick-up. They weren't anywhere near attractive enough for voyeurism to offer a thrill.
The boy finished his haggling and took a hefty leather handbag to drop his wares by the side of the RV. As the boy walked, a man came out of the RV, lit up a few firepits, and upended the plastic bags into a collection of pots and pans. Despite the fast, appetizing smell, Bobby stayed with the boy, as they walked deeper into the camp. The boy jiggled the handbag, and it clicked heavily. "We use bottle caps for currency around here. Every sumbitch 'round has grabbed enough dollar bills to stuff a pillow, so that's all they're good for anymore. Sorry if you used to be a Rockefeller."
"Son, I don't even have a nickel for the tour."
"I'll put it on your tab." The boy gestured around. "Losers, losers, more losers. They get rations of the silo's larder, but if you want something don't taste of cardboard, pay for it."
"Silo? We're on top of a missile silo?"
"Know the fucked-up part? It's safer than the outside."
The tents and cars cleared up, leaving a clearing that had begun to be filled by a boardwalk and some multi-story wooden buildings, built fast and simple. Shower curtains covered the gaping windows. "Welcome to downtown. Bar, brothel, and church. Don't get those mixed up."
Bobby followed him onto the creaking boardwalk, passing men who seemed cleaner and busier than the stragglers on the outskirts. The boy greeted a few by name before sauntering into the bar.
It was just four walls and a ceiling, but it'd been stuffed with scavenger treasure. Pictures of old lives barraged the walls, like they could block out the outside world. The furniture was construction material and lawn chairs, while the bar was a Firebird. Bobby guessed he wouldn't have used it as an apartment or fencepost either. With the boy's entrance, someone kicked on a portable generator, and with that, fans started circulating the stagnant air and a boombox played rock music almost loud enough to drown out the genny's slightly more jumbled noise.
The boy took off his jacket and threw it on the bar, where the tender pinned it down with a mason jar of moonshine. The boy basked in the stream of a tower fan before sitting down on a crate. He wore a camouflage T-shirt, maybe a child's, since it clung to his surprisingly thick musculature. He drank, and before he had even gulped, a man had sat down beside him. Raggedy white hair burst from his scalp like it was making up for the skin hidden under layers of worn cloth. "Killian's cheating."
"Prove it, Arthur."
"Aces high, again. Again!"
"Can't punish a man for being lucky."
"Look around! No one's that lucky, not these days."
The boy reset his fingers on his glass. "Never bet what you can't lose. Have you ever met a broke man done that?"
Arthur put a dent in the hood with his fist. "If you don't put a stop to this, I will!"
The boy just looked at him. Bobby looked between the two, from Arthur's cracking resolve to the boy, a stone, his face and eyes just painted on.
"You won't. Because if he doesn't kill you, I will." He went back to his drink, not interested in Arthur's response. There was no sense waiting for what wasn't coming.
He drained his jar in one go, returned it for a refill, and gestured Bobby over. He sat down alongside the boy. In the car's window, he could see his reflection. The depth of the lines circling his face surprised him, and so did the dearth of wool-white hair on his head. Old. Tired old man. Even his skin seemed to have been leeched of its mahogany color, down to a sandy gray chalk.
"You look like you could use a drink." The boy dipped his hand into the bag, tossed some caps on the bar. The bartender swept them away and dropped an applejuice jar in Bobby's lap. Bobby popped the lid and drank. It tasted rough, like liquid gravel, but it was cold. He drank greedily. Over the past week of rationing water, he'd forgotten how thirsty he was.
"You're not a walker," the boy said on the heels of Bobby setting his glass down. "What are you doing in the wild?"
"I'm looking for someone."
"Any ole someone or he have a name?"
"It's a private matter."
The boy took out a couple caps and rattled them in his hand like dice until more moonshine appeared. "Now you owe me."
Bobby savored the temptation a moment before giving in. With a leisurely smile he said "I've heard this man referred to as the Kid."
"Well isn't that a name. So who'd he kill of yours to make you come all the way out here for payback?" The boy sounded amused by the whole idea, like it was the set-up to a joke.
Bobby settled back with a long sip. "No… I have something he'll want to see."
The bartender gave the boy a look. The boy tilted his head and he walked out of earshot.
The boy stood up, turned around, and backed against the car to crack his back. "Why don't you give me a teensy sneak peek and I'll decide if it's worth his time?"
"You know him?"
"For a few years now."
Bobby leaned in, craning his neck to look the boy dead in the eyes. He sniggered like a teenager in the middle of a prank. "You?"
"You're looking for a badass, goes by the Kid, you find a youngun like me showing you the nasty end of an arrow—you're having trouble with what part now?"
Bobby stood. He had a few inches on the Kid. "Boys talk shit. Men do shit. I don't need a boy."
The Kid's eyebrows flickered in annoyance, but he smiled it away. "You don't believe me." With a slap against the car, he stopped leaning. "Know what the motherfucker is? I don't have to prove shit to you. Before the day's out, you'll believe me. It's that kind of town." He went. Bobby stayed, nursing his beer. He didn't think the Kid would be buying him another.
