Prospero's Half-Life (10 page)

So much for walking carefully
he
castigated himself.
We must have been
advertising our presence to anyone we walked by
. He wondered if anyone else had spied on them as they passed,
and decided that they weren’t worth the trouble of flagging down.
He followed this up by wondering if that made their current
situation less tense, or more. Samantha seemed relaxed, however.
She was walking arm-in-arm with Callie and they were chatting in a
low voice about something Richard couldn’t quite make
out.

They walked
into the dark coolness of the ground floor and Richard immediately
covered his eyes. He lowered it slowly, realizing how silly he
looked, and waited for his eyes to adjust to the lower ambient
light level. The ground floor of the bar looked as torn up as any
of the other establishments that they had passed. A man hung naked
over the bar, his hair dangling down and his arms hanging limply
against the expensive-looking wood of the bar. Two other men
huddled bonelessly in a corner amongst a jumble of cheap-looking
chairs. They were both as naked as the first man, and covered in
thin red cuts. A serrated bread knife lay near them, crimson stains
soaked along the sharp jagged edges.

“
This doesn’t inspire confidence,” Richard noted with distaste,
stepping over the outstretched arm of yet another corpse, one that
had remained hidden until they passed by it. He found that the
smell had returned to his nostrils, probably due to the close
quarters and the multitude of bodies. He wrinkled his nose, and
felt his stomach grumble uneasily.

“
Oh, it’s a lot better upstairs,” Callie replied amiably.
“We’ve cleaned it out a bit, and brought all the stuff up there”.
She chuckled. “Yeah, sorry. The downstairs is still pretty nasty.
We try not to come down here a lot”.

“
I guess,” Richard said uncertainly. “What have you guys done
about the smell?”

“
Room spray,” Callie replied, laughing her drunken bray. “Lots
and lots of room spray. And those plugin air fresheners. They still
work, for now”.

The climbed up
the narrow stairs and heard the quiet shuffle of a few feet across
the floor at the top. Richard found himself with his hands curled
into fists. There was something off about the situation.

The room at
the top had been a pool room; the walls featured shelves to hold
drinks while playing, and there were four racks filled with pool
cues. The tables themselves were covered in liquor bottles, most of
them open and partially empty. One of the three tables was cleared
and it was apparent that there was a game in progress, although no
one was around the table at that moment. Richard’s first impression
as the mounted the top of the stairs was that the people waiting
for them upstairs were just as apprehensive as he was. Five women
were gathered by the window nervously, while two men were leaning
against one of the liquor-filled tables, eyeing them silently and
aggressively.

The women were
a fairly diverse cross-section of the city population, nothing out
of the ordinary. They were all dressed in expensive-looking casual
wear - sundresses like Callie’s, as well as halter tops and
designer jeans. Three of them were in their twenties, one was an
older woman whose tanned face was beginning to show the leather
qualities of age. The last was a rounder woman whose age Richard
couldn’t determine; she was the only one of the group that didn’t
seem to be ready to run. He took a better look at the two men and
started.

One of them
(whom he figured had to be Ronnie) was a tanned, tall man with a
broad chest and a strong, sharply-lined jaw. He had stunningly
bright blue eyes and Richard could feel that those ice chips were
boring directly into him. He would have worried about the
off-kilter way he was looking at him except that he recognized the
second man. He had changed out of the wrinkled green uniform, but
his face was still covered with an even denser covering of stubble
and his eyes were somehow even further gone than they had been the
last time they had met.

“
Hello Mark,” Richard said flatly after a moment. Mark did not
move his head or change his expression.

“
Hello fuckface,” Mark replied acidly. “How’s
tricks?”

NINE

“
Oh Mark,” Samantha said sadly. “Can’t we just act
civilly?”

“
Probably not,” Mark replied with venom. “After all, didn’t
fuckface Richard over here fire me yesterday?”

“
You were being insubordinate,” Richard said stiffly. Ronnie
snorted out laughter.

“
Wow, you’re a piece of work,” he said in a nasally frat-boy
voice. “What, you think you guys were in the fuckin’ army or
something?”

“
I was his manager,” Richard said, his fists clenching even
more. “He was acting like an asshole yesterday so I fired
him”.

This caused Ronnie to laugh even more. His eyes turned to
Samantha and he eyed her up and down in a salacious way that
Richard didn’t find particularly pleasant.
This is going to get really bad
he
thought grimly.

“
What the fuck were you even doing there, man?” Ronnie asked
incredulously. “Running a fuckin’ store? It’s the fuckin’ end times
out here, man! There ain’t no more stores!” He seemed to find this
inordinately funny, and he sprayed laughter everywhere. Mark
scowled at him but turned his hateful gaze back to Richard a moment
later.

“
Are we going to have a problem here?” he asked, his voice calm
and lethal. Richard wanted to reach out and drive his curled fist
directly into the man’s nose but he kept himself under control. He
swallowed hard and stuck his pride into a hiding spot in his
mind.

“
No, of course not,” he replied smoothly. “Past is past, right
Mark?”

Mark smiled, a
shark’s insincere smile.

“
Sure, Richard ol’ buddy. Past is past”.

This seemed to
break the ice in the room. The five women who had been waiting
nervously by the window for the exchange to play out relaxed and
went back to what they had been doing before Richard and Samantha
had come upstairs. The pool game resumed, drinks were refilled, and
someone turned music on. The Ramones blasted out of the overhead PA
system, jolting Richard a little and setting his teeth on edge. He
hated the loud, raucous music, preferring to keep music to being
background filler – smooth jazz, light rock, and the like. The
others in the room had to shout to be heard over the pile-driving
power chords, and Richard found himself missing the strange, eerie
stillness that they’d spent the last few hours walking through. He
turned to say (or shout, as the case would be) something to
Samantha, but she had already been spirited away by Callie, toward
an observing position on the pool game and a tall glass of vodka
mixed with something orange. He pursed his lips, a little
distressed, but decided not to press anything. Maybe the drunk
woman was right. Maybe he did need to relax.

He wandered
over to the table of liquor and considered his options. He’d always
been a rye man, and there was ample rye on display – he spotted the
half-full bottle of Canadian Club almost immediately. He passed
over the vodka; he’d always considered it only a short step up from
rubbing alcohol, in both smell and taste. The gin was passed over
as well, although he did enjoy a glass of gin mixed with orange
juice from time to time. There was a number of soft plastic bottles
of various colas on the table near the rye. He chose one at random
and proceeded to mix himself a rye and cola. He kept a steady hand
on the rye as he poured; there was no point in losing any sort of
control, especially in a situation that still made him tense. He
could feel Mark watching him, even with his back turned to the man.
Those cold eyes felt like twin shovels digging into his shoulder
blades. Why couldn’t the man just accept the situation and move on?
Why couldn’t he? He didn’t seem to be able to come up with any sort
of acceptable answer to these questions.

Feeling
awkward, he wandered over to the pool game and stood near Samantha,
who was chatting amiably with Callie. He felt like a third wheel,
but managed to sip at his drink until the feeling began to go away.
It was replaced by a spreading warmth radiating out from his solar
plexus. Four of the women were playing, two per team. The plump
woman was the odd one out, but she didn’t seem disturbed by this
fact. She had a rather large tumbler of clear liquid and ice, and
she was downing large gulps of it at a time. Her warm, inviting
face had deep red blushes forming on the cheeks, and Richard
thought that she might be well on her way to getting quite
drunk.

The woman
caught his eye as he was observing her and winked. Richard looked
away, startled, but she walked slowly over to where he stood and
sidled up beside him.

“
Hey,” she breathed, and there was a length to the word that
spoke volumes about her inebriated state. “My name’s Annie”. She
smiled at him and took another sip of her drink. From the smell of
it, it was mostly gin.

“
I’m Richard,” he replied politely. He took another sip of his
drink to try to quell the nervousness that was still rooting within
him.

“
Pretty crazy shit that happened, eh?” she continued. Richard
snorted, and then grinned.

“
This whole thing is pretty crazy, if you ask me,” he replied,
feeling more confident. “I mean, just yesterday I was still trying
to go to work”.

Annie laughed
and it was quite a pretty laugh, pretty and earthy. She flashed her
greenish-brown eyes at him.

“
I gave up on that a week ago,” she confided, “but I work at
Oratel and they wouldn’t have noticed even if there wasn’t a plague
going on”.

Richard nodded and laughed at this. Oratel was one of the big
call centers in town – the only real growth industry in the city,
truth be told. Retail jobs and call centers were the only way to
get employment, it seemed.
Had
been the only way, he corrected himself.
Employment, as a concept, seemed to have completely deconstructed
itself.

“
I’ve heard stuff like that,” he said vaguely. “I had some
friends that worked there, they said that all you had to do was
call in to this number and they would count you as sick. No having
to fake it with a supervisor, no fumbling around for excuses, just
beep beep beep and back to bed”.

Annie grinned
and swayed unsteadily.

“
It was a good racket,” she slurred. She leaned in close to him
and put her mouth close to his ear. Her breath tickled at his skin,
hot and sensual. “Wanna go fuck?” she asked throatily. Richard
blinked at her, surprised.

“
Uh, I, uh, you see...” he stammered. She was a good-looking
woman, curvy in all the right places, full lips, pretty eyes, and
all of a sudden he very much wanted to take her up on the offer.
Then he shook his head.

“
I can’t,” he answered grudgingly. She looked at him with her
head cocked, unable to understand what he was saying. Then she
looked beyond him and nodded.

“
Oh, right,” she said, stumbling over her words with a thick
tongue. “That girl you came in with. She’s a cutie, too. She’s got
a nice set of, of,” she burped loudly, and put a hand to her mouth,
laughing and embarrassed. “You know”.

Richard
grinned weakly and was thankful when she turned her attention
away.

“
Hey, Callie,” she slurred. “You wanna check these out?” She
pulled down the edge of her neckline and exposed a great deal of
tanned flesh. Richard stepped away to give them some
room.

Callie swung her head around and regarded Annie’s breasts with
slowly gathering excitement. Samantha looked over, grinned widely,
and drank back some more of her orange drink. She looked at Richard
and winked. Richard shook his head, but put a smile on to soften
it. He was
trying
to relax. From across the room he thought that he could still
feel Mark’s eyes on him.

He looked over
to where the two men were sitting and saw that Mark wasn’t looking
at him at all. He was hunched over what looked like a cheap flip
phone, hammering away at the small plastic keyboard with his swift
thumbs. Ronnie was staring at him, though, his filled-out
college-jock’s face sculpted into a mask of antipathy. Richard
caught his eyes for a moment and looked away hurriedly. He turned
his attention back to the women and worried at the brief exchange
in his mind like a tough piece of gristle caught in his teeth. What
was the man so upset about? He chalked it up to the lion’s hatred
for any male that entered his territory, but how to explain Mark,
then? Surely the two of them should have fought it out immediately,
if Ronnie was the sort to behave in that fashion. Had they run into
each other before? Richard didn’t recognize him, but that didn’t
mean much. In his (former, he realized sadly) life as a retail
manager he had met any number of people that he would never have
recognized out of the context of the store. He snorted softly.
Maybe Ronnie had tried to get a deal, or sneak past an expired
coupon at some point, and Richard had turned him down. It made as
much sense as any other explanation. He had heard of people holding
grudges for far less.

He saw that
Annie had divested herself of her shirt and that Callie had her
hands all over Annie’s star-spangled push-up bra. His eyes widened
as he saw them drunkenly mash their mouths together, and realized
that there were definitely tongues moving between them. Samantha
had stepped back and was watching them, snickering. The women
playing pool carried on with their game, obviously aware of what
was going on beside them but too engrossed in drinking and shooting
pool to do more than casually observe it.