“Just a minute,” the bartender said, continuing to sweep around the sawhorses that supported the doors.
The cup thunked again, louder.
Somewhat irritated, the bartender of Perdition’s finest gaudy house looked up from his broom. The impatient customer was tall, lean and lantern-jawed. The hair on his head was shaved to a gray stubble, which matched the salt-and-pepper scruff that carpeted his cheeks and the front of his neck. His ears were rimmed with what looked like layers of light brown, river dirt. The barman took in the longblaster slung over the guy’s right shoulder, a sniper job with telescopic sights. Worth plenty of jack. It was the kind of blaster a fellow could get himself killed dead over, if he wasn’t careful.
“Who’s the sawed-off little shit running off at the mouth?” the tall man said, hooking a thumb in the direction of the gaudy’s only crowded table, where a dude in tattered BDUs was holding court before a spellbound audience of sluts and hangers-on.
The bartender took an involuntary half step backward. This customer had some of the foulest breath he had ever suffered through. And given the gaudy’s regular clientele, that was saying something. “Who’s askin’?” he inquired, resting his elbows on his broom handle.
The skinhead female who stood beside the tall guy leaned over the bar. The barman’s gaze dropped at once to the low-cut top of her dress and the high, tight cleavage she was showing off, then to the muzzle of the cocked, blue-steel 36-caliber Colt Army blaster half concealed behind her slender, dusty arm. She was pointing the black-powder revolver’s muzzle straight at his heart. “The Right Reverend Gore’s asking,” she said through a feverish smile. “And you’d best be answerin’ right quick.”
“It’s no big secret,” the bartender replied, meanwhile mentally measuring the distance between himself and the sawed off, double-barreled 12-gauge he kept hidden under the bar top. Given that the grinning skinhead bitch had caught him flat-footed, and that counting the tall guy, she was backed by three evil-smelling, road-scum compadres who were lined up on the other side of the bar, he figured the wisest course was to leave the scattergun alone.
“Guy’s name is Grub,” he said. “He’s a scrounger from down Slakecity way. Came in here late last night, tellin’ stories about some strange happenings over to Moonboy ville. Crazy stories. Muties in black armor. Blasters that cut through solid walls like they were made of paper. Mass chillings. Lots of other stuff, too, but I can’t tell you about it ’cause I wasn’t listening real hard. I hear a lot of rad-pure crap around here, usually when somebody’s falling off a jolt high. Anyway, some of the customers been finding what Grub’s got to say altogether fascinating. He even got a couple of the dumb sluts to give him freebies and the local high rollers been buying him rounds all night. If you want to hear his act, all you got to do is feed him drinks” he gave the skinhead female a deadpan look and added “or fuck him a few times.”
Though his delivery was perfect, the bartender’s remark didn’t have the anticipated shock effect. If anybody was shocked, it was he, by the high-pitched, shivery laugh that exploded from the woman’s throat The sound set his teeth on edge, but it was those huge coal-black eyes of hers, absolutely insane eyes, that forced him to turn his gaze from her pretty, dirty little face.
“Give us a bottle, then,” the Right Reverend Gore said.
“Better take you a jug, or you’re just gonna have to come back for more,” the bartender told him. “For a stumpy little scab, he can sure hold his ‘shine.”
GRUB HINTON WAS in heaven. Never before in his pathetic, shit-crossed life had he been the undisputed center of attention. On either side of him at the table sat two of Perdition’s most accomplished and uninhibited sluts, both of whom had already accommodated him free of charge. The sluts hung on his every word, as did the prominent citizens of the ville who filled out the audience and kept his tin cup topped up with white lightning. Four more interested parties, three men in dusters and a skinhead woman in a long dress, started to amble toward him from the bar. Yes, it was mighty fine being the one in the spotlight for a change. A thing to be savored. And all he had to do to keep the ball rolling was talk, talk, talk.