Late Night Whiskey : A Reactor City Story

 

A excerpt from "The Reactor City Stories", a collection of cyberpunk tales I've been working on.

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... In the corner booth a couple of scrappers were looking at Deep Web footage of the combat along the Mississippi, on a half broken holo-tablet. A young woman, no older than 25, was nervously trying to flirt with an old timer, her awkward attempts told me she was new to the prostitution game. This was a scene repeated time and again in countless bars and taverns in the dirtiest corners of New Baltimore, more "lovingly " known as Reactor City.

J.W. swished his drink around, looking down into it, staring through it into his own past. 

The screen above the bar was streaming the recycled news feed from the last 6 hours, reports on the riots, the fires, the food shortages, and the acts of desperate men.

J.W. never even looked up at it   He had certainly had enough propaganda and government approved sensory input.

"We're all desperate men. Every one of us. Desperate for money, or Desperate for power, or just Desperate to make it through another day," he said , as the smoke of his menthol cigarette curled and floated on the air like some old half forgotten memory. 

" Theroux said we lead lives of quiet desperation and go to our graves  with our songs still inside of us," I replied, not really trying to make a point or counter-point. 

J.W. took another sip from his scotch, the tremble in his hand, more noticeable now.

He turned slightly towards me, but never looking right at me. I could see the stippled grip of his Colt Government Model peeking out from underneath his left arm, the leather strap on the holster hanging loose.

"My desperation ain't all that quiet, son.

It screams in my head in the early hours of the morning. It whispers to me every day as I try to survive this warped, rotten world. It's always there, never giving Me a moment's peace.. My desperation is a wild dog that's been nipping at my heels for a long time now." 

We sat there for a few minutes in silence, J.W. nursing his whiskey and taking long pulls from his smoke, while I tried to convince myself that the cheap bottom shelf booze I was drinking was actually worthy of the title  "bourbon ". Those days, you took what you could get. Even the lowest grade hooch would cost you some real coin. In the end, if it numbed the pain, that's all that mattered. I preferred "Elijah Craig", but "Federal Standard" was all the house had. 

J.W. reached the bottom of his glass, and finally spoke again. His words were heavy, you could hear the same tremble from his hands now in his voice.

"My boy, you want some advice?"

"....sure. lay it on me."

"I was gonna give it to you anyway. 

 Find your song. Even in this hellhole of a world. Find a reason to rebuild this place. I'm not trying to sound trite or cliché, I'm deathly serious. Men like us built the world,  and then some others came along and tore it down. Or , maybe...we were the ones who tore it down and we tell ourselves the lie that we were the ones trying to save it. Regardless, its a dying world... 

And we can sit around and mourn it, or we can get up and pick up the pieces. 

I can't do it, son. I'm too old and broken and bitter. My song is gone, I don't even remember the tune. Everyone I loved is either dead or I'm dead to them. But it's not over for you. You still have a song. "

We sat there, drinking, and smoking. It was after midnight and tomorrow was today and today  was the same as yesterday. 

A new day in the Age of Hard Times.

We were hard men who did hard things. 

We were the ones that soft fancy people despised, while knowing they needed us in their world. We were a necessary inconvenience. 

I tossed a Coaltion silver piece on the bar.

"Drinks are on me, old man."

He never spoke,  never once looked me in the eye. 

I walked out of the bar, into the dirty street. The rain did little to wash away the filth of this place, this town was grimy all the way to its core.

Somewhere in the distance, I could hear the lonesome sound of a FedSec patrol siren. The streetlamp flickered and popped, as the electrical grid stumbled along , like the rest of this wounded animal of a city.

Find my song...

Find my song?

The only song I could hear was the symphony of rain, sirens, the electric hum of neon signs, and the gasps of a civilization on its way down the staircase of history.

I instinctively touched my Beretta through my jacket, making sure it was still there, and turned my collar up. 

I turned away from the sirens and walked into the shadows of the night in Reactor City.