No Juice

“No Juice.”

Black holes die. Considered -here on good ol’ Terra Firma- to be the final phase of a star’s “Life,” all those protons and electrons and things get pushed up so close together, dense beyond dense, the whole shootin’ match has all it can takes then blows itself to smithereens, homogeneously in all directions, not at all too dissimilar in appearance and cyclical nature to one of those Big Bangs that we’re always talking about, just smaller on the old cosmic scale. When a black hole goes supernova, the appearance on the night sky to any intelligent but insignificant creatures eking out an existence on the very outer crust of a nearby tiny spinning planet is that of a brand new star, and a pretty damn big one. Like all other things, it only lasts for so long before becoming something entirely different.

Chapter One: On Meeting T-Rex

12:01, A.M. 2K22. Ten years Past Peak.

“Nonsense! Good stealin’ is good soldierin’!” she winked and snapped her fingers encouragingly, rifling through my bag as I stood powerless to stop her. She pulled apart my kitbag like it was hers to take and at this point, well, it pretty much was. “The T-Rex’ll drill that into you in no time, soldier!” she smiled at me, a withered toothpick dangling from her lip.

“I’m not Military,” I explained to her. I wasn’t.

“You are now, sugar-bumps.” She turned from me and began walking towards the top of the hill, where an impromptu committee meeting was going on, backlit by nothing less than a perfect Alsace midnight, full moon and everything.

I had thought my quest was over with the meeting of the man who stood at the top of that hill, silent amidst the conversation but in many ways the center of the dialogue. It was his style. He’d just stand there and listen to his subordinates ruminate and postulate, his eyes everywhere but on the speaker. It was not all that unusual for him to mumble somewhat while they parleyed as if he weren’t listening at all. The soldier who’d taken all my earthly possessions as her own walked along ahead me and the two soldiers that had me trussed up like a Christmas turkey. We looked like some otherworldly multi-limbed shuffling life-form, monstrous in appearance yet quite functional.

They dragged me up the hill and placed me before this group, resting me on my knees and I looked at the faces that were around me. The lieutenant was Carmelita Delgato, the T-rex’s second in command.

“Who are you,” she asked me, “what are you doing here?”

“I’m Media,” I responded, trying to get up off the ground. A hand rested on my shoulder, lightly buy firmly.

“I wouldn’t,” a mild French-accented voice drifted over me, “the T-Rex, he don’ like you to move yet, probly,” a dark-skinned French-Canadian fellow informed me with a wink like we were old friends. He saw a cigarette pack in my shirt-pocket and his eyes lit up like the Fifth of July. No, it was the Fourth of July right? Whatever.

“Ho shit! Marlboros! Hey, you don’ mind if I take your cigarettes, right man?” he smiled, and you almost believed he cared, even as he took them. He frowned when he saw that it was a collection of nine library styled shortened pencils with no erasers that I’d picked up during the battle for the Parthenon. And they thought that place was full of ruins before!

“Tabernac d’ estit!” he cursed, “d’as a dirty trick eh?” he said disapprovingly to the man beside him whom I knew to be the number three in command. What can I say? As a child I learned to write with a pencil and paper. As a young man I did my writing on my home computer and as a professional with a laptop and videocamera. As a Great Oil War correspondent I had to learn how to write with a pencil and paper again.

“He must be Norwegian!” he declared, “I had a friend who tol’ me once dey smoke all sorts of shit, the Norwegians.”

“Fsst!” Carmelita chastised him and glanced at the silent commander, whose body was turned edge-like into the night-sky. Thompsen kneeled down to face me, read my eyes or mind.

“Haven’t seen any media around these parts for years,” Thompsen informed me of what I knew all too well. “I thought they’d all crashed.” They had, breaking down near the end to be little more than a recruitment device for an ever-thirsty war machine, shuddering to a heaving, gasping halt from the same affliction that had hit every other facet of PostPeak life: No juice.

I’d taken the assignment to cover the Rogues after their amazing victory against our former allies, the Russians, and had followed them doggedly through battles, skirmishes and drive-by lootings throughout battlescarred Eurasia and the still smoking Middle East. I’d fired off my journals of their adventures with the military mail system until that too came to a shuddering halt. Now I kept it all myself. What else could I do?

Lieutenant Freddie Thompsen had been an all-pro golfer in his Pre-Peak days and is said to keep a full golf-bag attached to the back of his truck like it was some giant armoured and heavily weaponized golf-cart and this was just some vast and ridiculous golf-course in which we all played for the amusement of the gods. Who’s to say we aren’t at this late phase in the game, at the end of the beginning?

“They have,” I nodded, “but I’m kind of on special assignment.”

“Well, why don’t you tell us about your special assignment, Media?” Carmelita advised me in her cool and easy manner. I remember feeling right then that under pre-Peak circumstances I would very much like to have run into her under some sort of social circumstances. She was a statuesque latina, from what was once known as San Salvador, as legend had it. “What story are you covering then?” she asked me, “the Dirty Rogues trek across Eurasia?”

“I’m covering him,” I put it as simply as I could, nodding at the inscrutable commander, “Commander Tycho Rexington the Last. Known to his troops and enemies alike as the T-Rex.”

For the first time his eyes lit upon me for the briefest of seconds, then to a spot on Thompsen’s elbow. The T-Rex was cagey as all hell, and the three lieutenants around me jumped somewhat as I said his name. Though perhaps none of his crew had any way of knowing, T-rex was the most famous of military commanders to arise from the Great Oil Wars of the 2Ks, and if there was anything left worth returning to when the whole thing finished, his deeds and the acts of his Dirty Rogues would be in the history books. Assuming, of course, that we start making books again.

“I know all of you,” I continued, enjoying the full spot-light for the first time. And I did know them all. Had I not trod through the same muck and danger, simply a year, month or day behind until the very moment? “Missed you guys by about a week in Islamabad,” I reflected on that land and it’s remaining people, and the difficulty of a single white journalist following a troop of like-skinned pirates like these. “Lost my camera-man in India in almost the same place where you guys defeated the Russian tiger, Amur Vladikoff…” I glanced at the commander to see for posterity how the name of his now long-dead arch-enemy would affect him. The effect? He yawned and stretched, then scratched his face.

“That was a real stroke of genius, that one,” I admitted. It was. Rumor had it T-Rex had scavenged a good sized collection of Russian outfits from one of the countless marooned vehicles that now littered the land like huge rusting beetle droppings and fit up his Dirty Rogues in them. They came at them from behind their own battle lines and the Russians thought they were getting some relief, but it was a slaughter. Between T-Rex and the other Commander, they’d crushed the Russian line like a pimple.

“Woulda captured their troop transport if it weren’t for da earth-quake,” Frenchie whistled, “a cryin’ shame, dat.”

“It wasn’t an earth-quake,” I informed them, hoping to use the information I’d learned in my travels to impress them, get them to like me even, if the truth be told. “Not a natural earthquake, any way. Word is it was a ground penetrating super-nuke that got shot right into a crack into the Somali sub-plate. An unnatural tectonic shift that still fucks with the whole system, that’s what’s with all the earthquakes lately, supposedly.”

“No shit?” asked Frenchie. “Tabernac estit! Who was stupid enough to shoot a ground penetrating nuke into a tectonic plate? Us or them? Or da udder guys?”

“Never know, I guess.” That one wasn’t something anybody seemed too anxious to take credit for, understandably. All sides lost pretty much the same amount of troops and more importantly, juice. But gone was the capability to blame or to ever truly know.

“We lost a good lieutenant and a lot of troops in that earthquake,” Carmelita mused. She was a bit of a mystery woman to me, all I knew of her was her record on the battlefield, that of the Dirty Rogues. The look on her face when she thought of her lost troops spoke the volumes I hadn’t learned. She was their heart and soul, and they were hers.

Aurora passed my bag over to Carmelita who pulled out one of those old-school, hand-held video-camera, popular in the nineties and early 2ks, now museum fodder, if we still had museums. “What’s this then,” she enquired with a raised eyebrow, holding the camera up for me, “you gonna tell me this thing still actually works?”

“Found that in Belgium,” I informed them. “It’s got about enough juice left for one hour long interview with the man over there,” I nodded at T-Rex. He looked at the one, over-large star in the heavens that brightened the so unnaturally, given the hour. That star hadn’t been there last night, nor any night previous, as far as I know. A brand new star? Is that what they looked like?
“How’s the battery on it?” she asked me, eyebrows raised.

“It works. I’ve protected it like it was the ark of the covenant.” I’d found the camera in a loot-cache I’d discovered while hiding from the locals in, well, I don’t quite frankly know where that was. Europe somewhere, not to far away from where Ireland used to be is my best guess.

In the PostPeak days, any and all money was completely useless, for what is it but a symbol of the finite energy we’d sloshed all over ourselves until it was gone. No juice means no more Yankee dollar, no more Chinese yen, no more Canadian monopoly money. PostPeak, things like food and burnables were the new currency, but people still loved all these gadgets and goo-gaws from those mad, mad, mindless Pre-Peak days. People would show you something like a laptop (no workie workie though, no juice, so sorry) or a lifeless clock-radio and explain what it was and used to do, and we’d all imagine what a world it must have been.

To a Media man lost in the wars, a working video camera was like finding the holy grail to an archaelogist. Remember archaelogists? “Found it maybe six months after you guys had burned through the middle of the third largest battlefield in the War. Without firing a single shot, as rumour had it.”

“We fired a few shots,” Thompsen piped up, “believe me.”

“But you never joined the battle. Just cut through it. Didn’t even say hello to General Esposo, much to his consternation.” That was part of the enigma of the Dirty Rogues commander. The battles he decided to fight were won swiftly and decisively in a manner that hinted at strategic genius and yet there were many other battles they had just skipped right by. The enigma arose in that rhyme or reason behind which fights he’d joined or skipped were indiscernible, no pattern at all, from strategic significance of the battle to the troop sizes of the enemy forces, there simply was no pattern. At least, to an observer.

The only pattern I had seen emerge came about in the last six months that I’d followed their path. They’d begun a straight-line that they were still on, and knowing what I knew about the status of the command structure and what little remained of any form of communication lines left, that straight line indicated to me that the commander has an agenda of some sort. I didn’t know what it was, but if he was leading his Dirty Rogues to something it was guaranteed to be big.

“I tol’ you he’d be pissed,” muttered Frenchie at Carmelita. Frenchie then brightened when he reflected on the battle. “You know Thompsen played through that whole battle with a driver, a nine iron, and a one iron.” Frenchie laughed and gave me an elbow like we were old buddies, “an’ a sniper rifle, eh?”

“Ran out of Spaldings on that one,” Thompsen mused sullenly, “had to use range-balls ever since. Piss-poor. Aerodynamics are all fucked on range-balls.”

“But hey,” Frenchie put a hand on Carmelita’s shoulder, “dis guy is legit or what?” he asked her, pointing to me.

“What do you think, Frenchie?” she asked him, but studied me.

“He knows our shit,” he shrugged, “and it explains dose little pencils, estit, even if it is a bit of a dirty trick. I say we keep him on. We’ll be famous!”

“Could be a spy,” offered Thompsen, “I say we kill the bastard where he stands. Fuck him. Another mouth to feed.” My blood ran cold to hear the man say it, though I believe in my heart of hearts he was kidding.

“A spy!” Frenchie laughed, “who has spies anymore?”

“And I say we draft him,” decided Carmelita. “We need a body for Resources and Acquisitions squad. Lost a few on the last run there, when Frenchie couldn’t supervise cuz he had the shits.” Frenchie wrinkled up his forehead and looked pained.

“Oh don’ remind me,” he moaned, “it was that rotten meat from da stew da night before…” His voice trailed off and the trio grew silent. I was about to speak but Frenchie threw me a look, indicating I was to wait. There we all stood, waiting. T-Rex turned his back on us and stood overlooking the town of Alsace. I’d always kind of associated him with Conrad’s Kurtz on my quest to find him, but I began to realize right there that I had been operating under the wrong literary allusion the whole time. He turned and stalked back to the circle.

“We mount up,” T-Rex ordered Carmelita, a voice low and gruff, “tonight.”

“They’ve humped it pretty hard for the last three days, commander,” Carmelita informed him with a degree of delicacy I hadn’t yet heard from her. “I’d like to give the Rogues a chance to rest up, get their strength back.”

“We mount up, tonight,” he added, as if she’d said nothing, “give ‘em another two hours sleep then get ‘em ready. I want to have travelled two hundred miles by this time tomorrow.” His battle-scarred face came into the moonlight for the first time and I noticed his left eye was milky white, probably blind, while the other was the darkest of blacks. He had a grey-stubbled and battle-scarred face and shocks of grey hair at war with his natural brown.

“May I ask where we’re headed sir?” asked Carmelita.

“That way,” T-Rex pointed in the direction of the over-bright star. All the stars seemed brighter these days. Less visual pollution coming from our blackened cities, but this thing was something else. “Ha!” he laughed a forced and vicious laugh, “where else!” We all looked at it as the commander started stalking away. Each of us had our own private thoughts as to what the thing was, what it meant appearing at this moment in time. Maybe nothing, maybe everything. Maybe T-Rex knew and maybe he didn’t.

“And the Media geek?” Thompsen called after him, turning sideways and pulling a bag off his shoulder. It was the famous golf-bag. He pushed the sniper-rifle aside and pulled out his One wood. I confess I feared he was going to brain me with it.

“Media-geek comes to my rover,” the commander called over his shoulder, “and under his own power.” He’d just christened and liberated me. ‘Media-geek’, huh? Beats ‘Another Dead Asshole’ by a country mile, I figured. Thompsen placed a tee and ball on the soft sand on the rim of the mountain-top, stood and addressed the ball as he’d done perhaps a million times in his life, then singled out a target.

“The stained glass window of that church over there,” he called out his shot, ostensibly to his compadres but mainly to himself, then fired a shot. It flew far and high, but missed the mark and Thompsen grumbled. “A bit of a hook at the last second there, where’d that come from?”

Chapter One ends