Alien Blue

by DeAnna Knippling

“Only beer can save us now.” –Bill Trout, Zymurgist

(Sci-fi, 108K words, ~432 pages) Bill Trout didn’t set out to get involved with aliens. He just wanted to run his damned brewery and heal up from being abandoned by his ex-wife. But that ain’t the way things worked out, and now he has some bodies to bury, an alien kid who’s wanted for murder—mass murder—to hide, and a planet to save. But Bill won’t go down easy.

Fortunately, the aliens, who are a blue ooze that takes over your body and are real hard to kill, have no tolerance for alcohol. So now Bill has a new beer on tap: Alien Blue.

He just has to be careful who he serves it to.

Available exclusively via Amazon.com until May 20, 2012.  If you purchase a copy and need an alternate file type, please contact me at publisher {at} wonderlandpress {dot} com.  The print version is available at CreateSpace, with other online bookstores to follow.  Contact me directly if you want a signed copy.

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Prologue

The door of Bill Trout’s bar opened, and a couple of people pulled their guns out. The aliens weren’t supposed to come till dawn, but hell, who trusts an alien? Then the daughter Bill never knew he had walked into the bar, and his heart just about broke.

He knew who she was, because she looked just like her mother, except for her nose, and she looked about the right age for when her ma had left him. She let go of the door, and it jingled shut, cardboard in the hole where the glass should have been. Without a second glance, she walked past the diorama of the crazy caveman dragging his woman and fighting off a saber-toothed tiger.

“We’re closed,” Bill said.

The young woman’s jaw jutted out, and Bill had a flash of déjà vu of his ex. The bar, as any fool could plainly see, was packed.

“Er, and there’s no room anyway,” Bill added.

The girl spotted the empty booth he’d left at the back of the room. “I’m here to meet somebody,” she said. “He’s supposed to be wearing a cowboy hat with a pink band. Have you seen him?”

Bill couldn’t help touching the Twins cap covering his bald spot. “Nope.”

The girl pointed to a table near the bar. “Isn’t that him?” Bill turned his head to look, and the girl made a break for the back booth.

He cussed at her back. “I shoulda locked the door.”

The Caveman Brewery, built into an old yellow-brick warehouse, looked almost festive with its neon beer lights, upside-down canoe, and garish, handmade beer posters, but the customers looked like hell, half-asleep and mean. Guns and booze were in evidence at every table.

Bill’s daughter switched her purse strap across her chest and braced her feet against the base of the table. “I’m staying,” she said, when Bill followed her.

“Missy, you got to leave.”

She glared at him and said, “I need to meet my dad. I don’t know who he is. He has cancer and he’s going to die and he didn’t even know I was born.”

“Missy—”

But she wasn’t stopping. “Mom wrote him a letter telling him to meet me here today. He’ll be wearing a cowboy hat with a pink band and carrying the letter from Mom, and some dumbass waiter isn’t going to screw this up, so bring me a beer.”

He sighed. “I’m sorry, miss. But this is a real bad time.”

The woman shouted, “I said I want a beer!”

Then the bells over the door tinkled again, and a tall, dark-skinned man—so tall his head brushed the bells—stumbled into the room, almost falling into the diorama.

The room went dead quiet.

“Hang on, miss,” Bill said, and, “God damn it, Anam.” He beelined over to the man, jerking him upright. “I told you to get the hell out of my town!” Anam, whose filthy, ragged shirt and pants were smeared with either wood stain or blood, grabbed Bill’s arm so hard he found smears on it, later. As Bill struggled to push Anam back out the door, his heart shuddered, and he sagged at the knees, wincing, and Anam had to wrap an arm around him to hold him steady.

Then Bill realized what Anam meant to do, and he stopped fighting. “You fool,” he said. “You damned fool.” He pointed Anam toward the patio. “Go. I don’t want you in my sight.”

Anam pulled himself along table by table, until he reached the door. He put his head on it, tried to pull it open while he was still leaning on it, jerked harder, and almost pitched himself backwards on his ass. The springs of the door creaked as it opened, then slammed the door behind him.

Bill passed a hand over his face. There was no going back now.

The folks in the bar started whispering again, and Mimi rushed up to him, twisting a towel around and around in her hands, dripping water. Her lips were almost white, her black-and-purple hair tangled like snakes.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

Bill glanced up at the bar. About a hundred and fifty people were packed inside, ready for violence, and all he could think was that he had to get his daughter out of here. Out. Of all the damned times for her to come to town. Of all the damned times.

“It’s all part of the plan, darlin’,” he said. “That girl there, she’s here to hear the tale.”

“To what?” Mimi’s eyes went wide.

“We’re all getting erased, one way or another,” Bill said. “She’s been sent to get a true record, so…well, so we can get our memories back later. Only she don’t know that. Later I’m going to have you take her to the bathroom and get the recorder off her…probably in her purse somewhere. Her ma would have planted it there, without her knowing.”

Mimi gaped at him, her mouth open, showing her delicately-disordered teeth. She had become like a daughter to him, or even closer: like an employee. “So that’s what Smart Bart was doing.”

“I better get back to it.” He turned around and limped back to his daughter’s booth. “A cowboy hat with a pink band, huh? All right, missy. I changed my mind. You can stay till your dad shows up. But you got to promise me something.”

Her eyebrows met in the middle. “What’s that?” She was pretty in a in a bad-posture, ugly-duckling way, somewhere between sixteen and twenty-five. Bill hadn’t seen her mother for twenty-two years, which should make her just barely legal to serve. Ah, just look at that nose. It was his nose, before it got broke. He woulda sworn on it.

“You got to try this new beer I been working on. I make most of my own beer, you know. This new one’s called ‘Alien Blue.’ On the house.”

She didn’t let go of the table. “Okay.”

Bill gestured toward Sam, his bartender. The party pump under the bar wheezed like an asthmatic poodle as Sam pulled most of a pint for the woman.

Bill stumped over to the bar and picked up the blue beer. His hands were shaking, but he didn’t spill a drop as Sam handed it to him.

“That’s the last of it,” Sam said.

“Good riddance,” Bill said. He brought it back to the girl. “Come on, try it.”

“Thanks.” The woman took a deep, thirsty gulp. Plenty. Then the taste hit her, and she put the mug down and shuddered.

Bill laughed despite himself. “What do you think? Good stuff, huh?”

She forced herself to stop gagging and gasp, “It tastes like monkey piss.”

Bill flashed a big-ass grin at her. “Aw, didn’t like it, did you? Well, it does have a funny aftertaste.”

She swallowed her own spit a couple of times, trying to get the taste out of her mouth. “So why is it blue?”

Bill said, “It’s a long story.”

The woman sighed. “A long story would be good. And some water. Or something. I need to kill some time until my Dad gets here. Besides, I collect stories.”

“Really? You a historian or something?”

“No, just a writer. You haven’t heard of me.”

Bill laughed. “A writer? Figures you’d be a liar.” Before she could ask Bill what he meant, he said, “Well, I’ll make sure this guy who’s claiming to be your dad’s on the up and up; I know most folks who live within a hundred miles of here. What’s your name?”

“Nina Nesbitt.”

Bill held out his hand. “Pleased to meet you. Bill Trout. I own the place.”

“And I called you a waiter.” Nina put down the blue beer to shake Bill’s hand and winced when Bill squeezed the hell out of her fingers. “Ow!”

“Sorry.” Bill let her go and grabbed the blue beer before she could pick it up again. “How about I just dump this out. Wait. I think I’ll put it in a lead-lined keg and bury it with the radioactive waste out in Nevada.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” Nina lied.

“Oh, honey, it was worse. Sorry to pull such a mean joke on you, but it was for a bet. Now, how about some wheat beer, little touch of clove in it? I call it A Hard Day’s White.”

“Uh,” Nina paused. “I guess I could try it. If you’re done playing practical jokes on me.”

Bill laughed. “I’ll give you the good stuff now, I promise. I’ll even throw in a couple of Reubens and a basket of fried mushrooms to take the bad taste out of your mouth.”

Nina smiled the kind of smile that makes men propose, with dimples. “Please?”

Bill smiled back like he couldn’t help it, then turned his head and bellowed, “SAM, PAIR OF WHEATS, FAT KRAUTS, AND A BASTARD OF HATS.” His voice echoed above the crowd, through the air ducts and the rafters. He confided, “Me and Sam couldn’t remember any genuine diner lingo when we opened, so we made some up. More fun that way.”

Bill walked into the back of the house and poured what was left of the beer in a plastic bucket, then added an equal amount of Everclear that was sitting next to it in a jug. He could hear the people out front muttering at each other, a susurrus that had gone sharp. Well, let ‘em.

He came out, sat down at Nina’s table, and said, “So the beer. It all started with the mayor, Jack Stout. If you knew Jack, you knew that he was full of damned good intentions unmoderated by a lick of common sense. Tonight’s his wake—” Bill broke off and wiped his face.

Nina leaned forward and touched his hand.

Then Mimi showed up with two mugs and a basket of mushrooms. “You okay, Bill?”

Bill put his grin back on. “Just thinking about Jack. I’ll be fine, I guess. Why don’t you check the patio? You haven’t been out there for a while. Somebody might need something.”

Mimi glanced over at the door Anam had gone through. “Sure,” she said.

As Mimi left, Bill said to Nina, “I gotta say, missy, I sure am glad you came along.”

“Why’s that?” she asked. “And don’t call me missy.”

“Fair enough,” Bill said. “Thing is, everybody here knows the story except you, and I got a hankering to tell it one last time. Hell, it’d make a good novel, you ever feel like writing it up. You can use it; just change the names, okay?”

Nina said, “Maybe.”

Chapter 1

It all started last year about four a.m. Call it July.

I was upstairs in my bachelor pad sleeping off the celebration for passing my health inspection when the phone rang down in the bar. I didn’t stay awake for more than a few seconds, just glanced at the clock. The next time the phone rang, I was having this dream about knocking the inspector on the floor and making him eat fruitcake, so I ignored the noise and went back to sleep, smiling.

The next time the phone rang, I wasn’t smiling, because the inspector had turned into a zombie after I fed him the fruitcake. And when I went back to sleep, I dreamed the inspector’s fat zombie wife was chasing me with a hook on a rope, and I was up a tree. The phone rang again, and I’d fallen into a river, but the zombies had floated down after me. I bet you didn’t know some zombies are floaters; depends on how old the corpses are, I guess.

I finally tromped downstairs about a quarter to nine. I felt like some joker had been stuffing flies soaked in battery acid down my throat, to put it mildly.

The phone rang again, and my stomach flopped. All I could think was the sheriff wanted to arrest me for fruitcake and battery, so I let the machine pick up while I tried to figure out how to make coffee out of chocolate syrup and tequila.

Jack’s voice hollered through the little speaker: “Bill!”

I grabbed for the handset and knocked it off the bar. It slid across the tiles and under a table.

“Bill. Get your ass down to the courthouse and—” Jack broke off and started doing some serious swearing.

I hobbled around the bar and bent over to pick up the phone, and my head throbbed so hard I thought I was going to pass out. I grunted and stood up, grabbing the edge of the table.

“Damned bureaucrats.” Jack slammed the phone down like he was crushing a cockroach.

I kicked the phone out from under the table, picked it up, and put it back in the cradle. A second later, the phone rang again.

I reached for the phone, knocked it off the bar, and back under the table again.

I gave up.

I was still dressed, so I pulled on my boots while Jack cussed at the answering machine some more. Then I walked over to the courthouse, because I knew I wasn’t awake enough—let alone sober enough—to drive. I turned onto Main and passed a brick hardware store crawling with retirees talking airplane parts, an empty storefront that used to be a Santa Fe-wannabe art gallery (good riddance), the title office, and a small, sunburnt park with the bronze bust of the town’s benefactor, Jimmy MacTeague. An electric recording of a church bell echoed a few blocks down the street until the chimes ran out of town.

The courthouse looked abandoned, with Jack’s old Toyota parked out front and a big white cargo van parked around the corner. I walked up the front steps, opened the big wooden door, and stepped into chaos.

Now, most people think chaos is loud, disorganized, and inefficient. Not so. Chaos is quiet and still, because nobody knows what the hell to do. That other stuff is just the normal entropy of life, wasted energy, spinning wheels. Bureaucracy.

The lobby held three men in non-matching, one-piece overalls, sitting in a row on a bench with their arms crossed. They wore sunglasses, the cheap ones you buy in gas stations. One of them wore a new Lobos baseball cap; another one had a bald spot so bright shiny red you could see it going piebald as it peeled. The third one had hair. The three of them glared amongst themselves. I wasn’t sure how they decided, but the guy with hair must have lost; he came over for a parlay.

“Hey there, Mister.” I said. “How’s it going?”

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

I got the impression he was too stupid to be subtle. I swear, put a blond gorilla suit on the guy, and you never woulda known when he’d taken it off. I said, “I’m supposed to meet Mayor Stout.”

“He’s in a meeting,” the man with hair said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m supposed to meet him. Where’s he at?”

“Up in the courtroom.”

“With who?”

“Whom,” the guy with the bald spot said. I didn’t like him.

“Why don’t you come back tomorrow?” the guy with hair asked.

“Sure,” I said. “I wouldn’ta come at all, except Jack keeps calling me. You tell him to leave me the hell alone, all right?”

“Sure,” the guy with the Lobos cap said.

“Where is everybody?”

“We’re spraying for bugs,” the guy with the Lobos cap said. I sniffed but didn’t smell anything.

“You’re not from here,” the guy with the bald spot said. “I can tell. It’s the accent.”

The other two guys stared at him.

I offered my hand to the guy with the hair. “Bill Trout,” I said.

He smiled big enough to show teeth and pumped my hand a few times. His pretty blond hair, smelling of fruit, flowers, and pepper or something, jangled around his face. I, of course, smelled like a brewery.

“Miss Dewey around?” I asked. “I’ll just leave a message with her, if that’s all right.”

“Is she that the woman upstairs?” the guy with hair asked.

The Lobos-hat guy said, “Yeah.”

“Okay,” the guy with hair said.

I headed up the right-hand stairs with Mr. Hair following right behind me. I get the worst vertigo in that place. There’s this open balcony at the top of the stairs that doesn’t help any, either.

The second floor of the courthouse has the mayor’s offices, DMV, toilets, and the courtroom. To establish the relative importance of justice in Haley, I have to tell you the courtroom’s only about half as big as bar here at the Caveman.

Behind the counter at the top of the stairs, Miss Dewey had her head down as she typed a flurry of words on her computer, the sound echoing around the corridors like it was looking for somebody to talk to. I couldn’t resist.

I snuck around Miss Dewey’s desk. “Boo!”

Miss Dewey flung herself backwards, the wheels on her old wooden office chair hiccupping on the carpet and tossing her backward. I caught the chair and lowered it before she had a chance to fall.

Miss Dewey squeaked, “Bill, one of these days you’re going to give me a heart attack.” She tucked her shirt straight, pulled the pencil out of her bun, smoothed her hair, whipped it back in place, and anchored it with the pencil.

“Hi, sweetie,” I said. “How’s it going?”

“Horrible,” she said. “These people—he’s one of them—” she pointed at Mr. Hair. “I had to open the courthouse at four-thirty this morning, and then I had to call everyone to tell them not to come in for work so these people could spray for bugs, only they don’t have any bug spray, and they put Jack in a meeting except he keeps leaving to call you—”

The guy with hair cleared his throat. “Hey, lady? Just shut up and let the man explain what he wants.”

I eyed him but didn’t say anything.

Miss Dewey tittered and looked at him with her big, hazel eyes behind her librarian glasses. “I’m sorry, did you need something?”

Mr. Hair looked at me, and I said, “I just want to leave a message for Jack, so he’ll quit calling me. I need my beauty sleep.”

“But Jack wants to talk to you,” Miss Dewey said. “What do you think he keeps coming out here for?”

“You can’t go in there,” the guy with hair said. “Just write your note and go home.”

“Mr. Hair says I gotta go, sweetie,” I said.

“Mr. Hair? What an unusual name.” She handed me a stack of sticky notes and a pen, after writing “Mr. Hair—he has hair” on the top one and sticking it on the corner of her monitor with a dozen other notes.

Mr. Hair opened his mouth to say something, but Miss Dewey interrupted.

“I’m sorry, did you need to leave Mayor Stout a note, too?” She dropped a stack of sticky notes in front of him, and gave him a pink pen decorated like a flamingo.

Mr. Hair pushed the notes away. “I don’t want this stuff.”

“Oh, don’t worry, that’s just me being helpful,” Miss Dewey chirped. “Bill? I put a new air freshener in the men’s room. Just for you.”

I wrote, well, I wrote something on the note I don’t care to repeat, the kind of thing that ought not to be repeated to ladies and wasn’t that funny anyway, and handed it to Miss Dewey. “Sam should be at the bar by now,” I said. “Why don’t you give him a call and have him brew up some coffee for these folks? It might improve their temperament.”

“Oh, that’s a good idea. I’ll send Mr. Hair over to pick it up, if he doesn’t mind,” she said. “If you think he won’t get lost.”

Mr. Hair said, “But my name—oh, nevermind.”

I stifled a laugh. I figured she had him about ninety-eight percent bamboozled. She glanced at my obscene little note and said, “I’ll be sure Jack gets that.”

I pulled up the waist of my pants, which had the tendency to sag at the hind end. “Well, I s’pose,” I said to Mr. Hair. “Don’t mind if I use the can before I go, do you? When a lady tells you to smell her air freshener…”

Mr. Hair shook his head. “All right, whatever. Just get out of here.” Then he followed me over to the restroom to make sure I didn’t go anywhere else. I should mention the men’s room has a back door that opens into the courtroom, so the judge could change clothes and enter with all the dignity of the law behind him. I guess. What we’d do if we had a lady judge, I didn’t know, but it sure was handy right then.

Chapter 2

The courtroom is one of those old-fashioned ones where everything is brass and old wood rubbed up to a gilded sheen by generations of thick women with bulldog faces so ugly you just want to scratch them behind the ears. The cupola lets down light like a blessing on the small claims, bad checks, and drunk driving tickets that are most of what we get around here.

“Hey there, Jack,” I said as I shut the door of the “judge’s chambers” behind me, having first availed myself of the facilities, which smelled like cinnamon.

Mayor Jack Stout was a three-quarters version of a man, only five-foot-one, with mouse-colored hair and a scraggly goatee. But he had these big hands, wide as fancy dinner plates, so he looked like a puppy with another foot of growing to do. Except he never did.

“Hey,” Jack said. “Get my message?”

“Yeah,” I said. “One or two of them. Stop calling my bar at four in the morning, asshole.”

An Asian-looking woman with a jacket and slacks sat at the prosecution table with her face calm and her hands folded in front of her, looking like a Buddha or a rattlesnake. Beside her sat a kid who was shaking so hard his chair rattled on the floor. His head was shaved, his rolling eyes bulged like they were going to pop out of his head, and his lips were dangled like a St. Bernard’s. A couple of drops of drool glistened on the table.

“Jesus,” I said. “What’d you do to the kid, electrocute him?”

Jack Stout was sitting on the table across from the other two, his feet up on a chair, dropping cigarette ash on the floor as he talked. “Bill Trout, this is Martie Washington and Anam Ba’hana.”

I pulled out a dirty glass from behind the bench and put it by Jack on the table. Then I put on my second-best smile, leaned across the table, and offered a hand to Martie. Her hair was ironed straight and streaked with a bunch of different shades of light brown, and she was wearing a big pearl necklace and a shimmery silk blouse. She looked like the world’s biggest hardass except for her cheeks, which were so fat that they probably got bruised from old ladies pinching them so often.

Martie looked at my stained jeans, misbuttoned shirt, matted hair, and red eyes. “This is Bill Trout?” she rasped, without taking my hand. She had a longtime smoker’s voice, and her tone made me feel like she’d sized up my manhood and compared it to a snail freshly ripped from its shell.

“Yes’m,” Jack answered.

“You said he was essential,” she said. “How is this loser going to help protect Anam?”

Jack took a drag and blew smoke. “Martie, this is my town, and I say he’s essential, okay?”

Meanwhile, I’d pulled my hand safely away from Martie and extended it to the kid. He didn’t seem to notice. I tried to figure out what drugs he was on. Crack? Meth? Some kind of withdrawal? I couldn’t get a good look in his eyes; he kept closing them.

Martie grabbed his arm and forced his hand into mine. “Shake his hand, Anam. We talked about this.”

I could feel the bones in the kid’s hand rattling like dice in a Yahtzee cup. His bones rattled so hard his skin rippled.

“Bill?” Jack asked. “What do you think?”

I started to open my mouth to ask a couple of stupid questions. But then I heard this clicking sound coming from Anam’s throat, even though he wasn’t swallowing. I want to say it sounded like a drummer the size of your pinkie, a drummer with about six hands and ten or twelve different drums to work on.

I’m not a real fast thinker, but sometimes I get inspired. When I do, it feels like time stops, and I get a good long moment to weasel things apart, like the time I was at the Cracker Barrel and finally figured out how to jump all the pegs on that triangle game. That’s what happened just then, as I tried to work out what could make that noise and came to the conclusion that I didn’t want to know but had a pretty good guess.

I gaped at Jack. “Don’t tell me he’s—”

He leaned back and took a drag from his cigarette. “I told you he’d get it,” he said. “He reads a lot of science fiction. I told you.”

“What did you let those gorillas kick everyone out for?” I shouted. “The whole town is going to find out.”

“It was Jack’s idea.” Martie glared at him.

One of the big doors at the other end of the room opened, and the guy with the hair stuck his head in. Martie turned around and hissed, “Shut the door.”

The guy with hair disappeared. Jack took a drag and held it while he worked his jaw back and forth, chewing on the smoke. I think he was trying not to grin.

“I called the staff this morning and told them we had to fumigate.” Jack tapped ash into the glass. “I tried to talk Martie out of bringing him, but she wouldn’t listen. That’s when I thought of you.”

I did me some choice cussin’.

“You’ll do it?” Jack asked.

“Do what?” I asked.

“Help hide him.”

I closed my eyes. “Sweet Jesus,” I said. “He’s on the run, isn’t he? I knew it. What’s he done?”

“He was falsely accused,” Jack said.

“All right, then. What’s he supposed to have done?”

“Killed about fifty thousand of his own people and run off with a ship.”

“Shit,” I said.

“But he didn’t do it,” Jack said.

“Sure,” I said. “So you want to hide a mass murderer in Haley.”

“He didn’t do it,” Jack repeated.

“I don’t give a flying horse crap whether he did or not,” I said. “You want to hide an alien in Haley, which, incidentally, has a hospital run by the biggest alien cult in the United States. It’ll be like trying to hide a Jew in Hitler’s basement.”

Martie said, “You must be stupider than you look. I belong to that cult. The MacTeagues sent us. We’re on your side.”

I snorted. “The MacTeagues are a bunch of fruitcakes. I don’t want you on our side. No offense.”

“Nobody else knows we’re here but the head of the MacTeagues,” Martie said.

“Bill—” Jack said.

I burst out yelling, “What were you thinking? I’d just keep him at the bar? Make him wait tables?”

Jack looked up at the roof. A beam of light from the cupola was edging its way closer to him on the table. He budged a bare half an inch. “Of course not,” he said.

“Where, then?”

Jack shrugged. That was Jack. He was all about leaving the details to the little guy, even if I was a foot taller than him.

“Tell you what,” I snarled. “Let’s ask Mr. Killer from Outer Space. Why do you want me to hide you?”

“This is a waste of time,” Martie told Jack. “We don’t need his cooperation.”

“He’s essential,” Jack said.

The kid mumbled something.

“Speak up,” I snapped.

“I…need to…look for rocks.” His voice was ugly, like he didn’t know how to swallow to keep spit from going down his lungs. He wouldn’t look at me, either. “And bones.” He turned his head from left to right until the other ear was pointed straight at me, and I realized he wasn’t ignoring me—he was listening, not looking.

“He’ll be safe out in the desert,” Martie said. “His background is in paleontology. Or rather, it was.”

“Whatever,” I said.

“I will work,” the kid said. “I will hide and not say who I am. I will find rocks. I will leave.”

The leaving part sounded good; maybe I just needed to reprioritize the boy. “Whatcha looking for?” I asked.

“I agree leaving Anam here is a bad idea,” Martie said. “But he insists on it.”

Jack raised his cigarette. “Try to see it from Bill’s perspective, Martie. All we have is Anam’s word to go on. We don’t know what he’s capable of. We don’t know what the, uh, dowsers following him are capable of. Who knows?”

Martie shrugged. “Anam’s harmless,” she said. “And I’ll make sure he isn’t found.”

I muttered something under my breath.

She looked at me without blinking. “You have something to say?” Her knuckles weren’t white, but they were deliberately not white, if you see what I mean. “He gave us his ship,” she said. “His interstellar ship. Do you know what that means?”

“Yeah.” I almost spat on the floor, but I remembered it was, in a way, my floor. “Even if he gets everyone in Haley killed, it’ll be worth it.”

Anam, still looking off to the right, crept his hand low across the table until it was a fraction of an inch from mine. “I am ready to die,” Anam said. “But first rocks.”

“Tell you what, kid,” I said. “You tell me why I should risk my life for you. So you’re bringing fire to the apes. That doesn’t tell me why I should help you.”

He said, “I will say secret after I find rocks.”

Jack choked on a laugh.

“Finding rocks ain’t too hard around here,” I said. And then I had one of those long moments of inspiration and came up with a clever plan to get rid of the kid without bruising anybody’s ego too much. “But nevermind that. I don’t give a shit whether you’re a good guy or not. What I really want to know is, will you drink my beer?”

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