Excerpt: Apocalypse Summer

He sat there, nursing what was left of his second drink that morning, a concoction that the bartender swore was a whiskey sour, but actually tasted more like moldy potatoes distilled through a rusted combustion engine, served on the rocks. Two hours ago he was close enough to death to shake his bony hand. But as he sat there, recovering from ill-advised wanderings, the only thing that he could feel was a warm fuzzy sensation that started at the small of his back and slowly wrapped itself up and around his spinal column like a vine, looking to intoxicate his brain.

The bartender saw him walk in just a little under an hour ago. People who came to Arkos Heights often looked pretty haggard, but not many looked worse than the nameless patron nursing his drink in silence at the end of the bar. His long brown duster jacket was scarred from sandstorms, and the leather from on his black boots was cracked and raw. The dark stubble on his face was razor sharp and uneven, filled with sand and grit. His hair couldn't decide collectively which way it wanted to go, and so just went in every direction. He carried nothing with him but a small bag slung over his shoulder, a revolver, and a Geiger counter strapped to his belt. As the bartender saw to a dirty glass, he speculated that whoever he was had been wandering the desert for at least a week, perhaps more, and fought off those glowing monstrosities that snooped about at night with hardly more than a full drum for the .357 and his wits. And yet, when one looked at his face, he hardly seemed the type. He wasn't the fair skinned epic hero, lacking both the steely resolve beneath his squinting brow and the overabundant gesticulations which seemed to characterize the “heroes” he had known before the War. His face was terribly blank, and would have been hard enough to read without the wiry five o'clock shadow he sported so disdainfully, and the countless particles of sand that had wedged themselves into the pores of his face, or just chipped away at it as they flew past.

“How's that one goin' down stranger?” he asked his only customer when he stopped tracing the scratches in the bar with his finger and looked up.

“Whiskey sour? You're a terrible liar,” he croaked as he tipped the glass back and drained what was left of the liquid at the bottom. He set it gently down on the bar, letting the ice clink just once before they sat silent again. “Make the next one taste less like oxidized iron.”

The bartender nodded and grabbed another chipped tumbler from behind the counter. His one customer went back to tracing the scratches on the bar with his finger, and occasionally muttering to himself, an activity that he seemed to find infinitely more engaging than talking to the first human being he'd seen in weeks.

After a long silence with his head hanging low, he finally seemed to catch an idea that had been floating around in his mind, and he looked up at the bartender. “Where am I?” he asked.

The bartender sighed and replaced a long-stem wine glass on a hanging rack before turning to the man at the counter. “They call this little slice of hell Arkos Heights,” he said.

“And why would they call it that?” asked the stranger.

“Fuck if I know. It's a stupid name, if you ask me.” But the barman made no attempt to explain why, and a silence settled in between them again.