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There are any number of ways for a town to begin. The oldest cities can trace their roots right back to a flag, heroically jammed into some piece of random wilderness by an explorer who had decided if he was going to wander through miles of fierce underbrush he damn well wasn’t going to be carrying a flag the whole way. (This is why one always finds so many cities within miles of a river or coast (The whole Atlantis incident was just a case of ditching the flag BEFORE getting off the boat))
Downtrod was not such a place. It had not been founded. It had simply come to exist. It had begun as The Bar For The Weary Downtrodden Or Similar Leaders Of Imperfect Lives (Market research had indicated a direct approach would be best) but as buildings went up nearby the sign had succumbed to time, weather, and vandals.
In it’s heyday, the town had included all of twelve streets. It had had shops and restaurants and a mall. There had been a bank. It had had houses, and apartments, and flats. Now, after the war, it included mostly flat apartments. It’s population, depending on where the line was drawn, came to seventeen dozen.
Anson Caard, on some level, knew all this. He hadn’t learned it and he hadn’t thought about it. He didn’t know he knew. Well; that’s an untruth. He didn’t know anybody didn’t know. As he fumbled in what remained of his jacket, he reflected on what nice people this ball of dirt must have. It was important to know who you could and couldn’t trust ahead of time. His line of thought was cut short by the complete lack of anything in his pockets.
There was nothing for it but to head into town. He wouldn’t normally have done so; he was a firm believer in Osmosis: Spend a night in a rat-trap and you tend to walk out more like a trapped rat. Today though; he’d appreciate a promotion to trapped rat.
The difference between the Welcome To sign and any actual signs of civilization is always one of miles. This is so that the lone wanderer can pause and lean against the sign while the wind artfully billows his long coat. Then, a small smile can creep across his face, and if times are sufficiently prosperous (by wasteland standards) he'll have a cigarette to flick aside and stomp out before heading off towards town.
True to form, Anson stopped and did all of these things. It helped him stay in character. As the camera pans way back and the clouds of dust begin to obscure our view, we see him start to laugh.
---
We’re in a bar now, and there’s an extraordinary sensation in the air: bona fide jolliness. In most taverns, the primary demographic is a combination of those who regret something and plan to forget by becoming incredibly drunk, or those who’re drunk enough that they’re going to do something they’ll regret. Today though, the place is almost a caricature of itself. There’s a steady, upbeat piano rhythm going, and occasionally the chatter will pause for a moment while everyone enjoys a hearty laugh. The bartender has caught the vibe and is scrubbing absentmindedly and arbitrarily on the table, just to look the part. The overall appearance is one of a people who are poor, tired, know it, but at the moment, don’t mind.
At this point the door opens, and Anson enters. Not everyone is paying attention to the door, of course, so it isn’t so much an instant silence but rather the noise dying down; a slow death by strangulation as one by one people either realize what’s happening, or simply notice everyone else is quiet and hop on the bandwagon.
The first to speak, technically, is a young man in the back, whispering, “Who’s this? What’s going on?” to his friend, but he doesn’t count because he isn’t important and starting with random comments from the crowd is very untraditional. The correct first speaker is the bartender.
“Well. Never thought I’d see you again” the bartender said. He was by nature a listener rather than a talker (and listening to drunks builds few speech skills) so while he would’ve liked his sentence to be described as something like “He put enough venom into the word “you” to poison whole cities and still have enough left over to cause serious illness in an area roughly the size of northern Bulgaria” or “He spat the words out like they were a mixture of vomit, feces, and dead children and he was a world class spitter who’d been practicing extra hard this year” the actual effect was that he said the word “you” with the intonation and facial expression of someone undergoing a bowel movement. Anson noticed all this.
“I thought I might drop in, but then I remembered I didn’t like heights, so I decided I’d walk in” said Anson. The audience was not amused, but his goal had been to lower their expectations rather than buy sympathy. A young man (not the confused one mentioned earlier who didn’t speak first) in a blindingly red shirt steps forward and speaks.
“Maybe you should try a drop. Say, three feet and a piece of rope sound about right?” He grins with that special facial expression that’s as good as sitting down and explaining exactly how things are going to go and why it is you won’t like this course of events at all.
“Bernard old friend! I see you still have that pretty pretty shirt you stole from your mother. Charming woman. How is she?" Anson was quick enough to see where things were going: Bernard wanted to rile the crowd, build up some hatred. It takes very little angry drunken mob to do terrible things. Bernard didn't even need that; he would do it himself and get away with it unless he acted fast. Bernard was just getting around to responding.
"Still dead. Cause of what you done." Anson was caught off guard by the accusation in the same sense that a trained assassin is caught off guard when his target is defended by children with nerf bats. This was going to be easier than he thought.
"What? I was a dirty rotten no good lying pigstealing swindler, I know. But even I, the lowest possible form of life, even I never saw fit to sink so low. Man who kills a man ain't worth fly dirt." The crowd was confused now. None of them remembered any murder, but they did distinctly remember whose side they were supposed to be on and so a few self-reassuring cries went out.
"It was the grief that killed her. The grief over what you
Yes, I'm aware it ends midsentence, I got cut off when the bell rang.
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Topic: Short story I'm working on... (Read 1142 times)