Harold Reddington leaned against one of the surviving walls and sighed. Heaps of rubble; broken glass; shattered walls. Thousands of memories reduced to dust and ash, memories and people that would never again inhabit the old bar: Scotty nursing his rum in the corner, the boys playing a game of poker; Cathy smiling as she fetched more booze from the basement…
Most of the street was wrecked as badly or worse than the Bar and Grill. Collapsed buildings and burned out shells were the norm. Harold’s had gotten off light with nothing but a collapsed front wall and a wrecked interior. Lucky, if you were willing to stretch the definition.
The street was nearly deserted. A few scroungers picked through the snow and rubble looking for food or trade goods, but they were fairly discreet and tended to disappear when a patrol marched by. Sometimes UN police walked the streets, marching wearily, their breath steaming in the frigid air, boots churning the thick snow into a slushy, muddy mess. Sometimes the mud was red. The wise stayed out of their way, especially the women. The police weren’t much better than the bandits.
Harold shivered a bit and rubbed his thick arms. February in Toronto was no joke, even if it was edging into March, and heating oil was as much a legend as the Fountain of Youth. Harold wasn’t sure which he’d pick first, given the choice. Looking at the snow on the ground—a half a foot deep in places—he tentatively decided on oil.
A family of what the government was calling “temporarily dispossessed” walked by: expensive clothes, in the yuppie style, worn and shabby. There was a man with the body of a tennis court athlete, with a strong chin; probably an investor, when there was something to invest in. His wife, lost-looking, with expensive earrings dangling from her bewildered face, followed along behind. Two children, past complaining, stared suspiciously at strangers as they passed. They hurried by the remains of what was once the façade of Harold’s Bar and Grill, scurrying almost, as they tried to avoid being seen.
It was a changed world.
Harold considered having a drink to fight off the cold—after all, alcohol was one thing he wasn’t short of—but he remembered that the warming that came with alcohol was just your blood rushing to your skin, heating the outside of your body but leaving the inside colder than before. Drinking when cold was liable to kill you quicker. A shame: he still had a quarter of a bottle of that Glenfiddich.
He shook himself and went to the basement door, being careful not to impale his foot on a shard of glass, and went inside, sliding a steel bolt in place behind him. The stairs creaked a bit, and the dim interior was only slightly warmer than outside, even with the fire he had going in a metal bin in the corner, old boxes and splintered planks doused in cheap liquor. The dim red flames cast erratic shadows against the stacks of decaying boxes and bottles, doing little to improve the atmosphere of the room. The place reeked of alcohol and beans, along with a faint whiff from Harold’s hastily dug latrine. A single ceiling light, powered by a pair of MD batteries and a prayer, flickered unpredictably, providing barely more illumination than the fire.
Carefully, Harold measured a tiny amount of naphtha into a cup, and then poured it into a Sierra stove next to the fire. Next he rummaged in a box and found a can of baked beans, which he put over the stove. Only then did he light it. He’d have to be careful; he only had a half-liter of fuel left for the stove. If he’d had more he’d have burned it all already as heat, but what little he had wouldn’t have kept him warm for an hour.
The smell of the chemically treated, genetically altered beans smelled indecently good, considering their origin. Harold was literally drooling. When the beans were almost hot enough to eat, he pulled a bag of party mix from another box. It was carbohydrates at least, and some of it was cheesy. Better than just beans, at least.
Better than nothing at all.
A knocking came from the basement door. Harold snatched the gun he’d acquired—and for a good bottle of bourbon, too he thought inanely—and worked the slide with a satisfying snick! It was an antique, firing the ancient 9mm Parabellum round, but it’d kill or wound at close range, and Harold had had lessons in shooting before. The man he’d got it from, a shabbily dressed character in a trench coat, a walking cliché, had told him it was a family heirloom that he no longer wished to possess. More likely he’d stolen it off some poor sod that had died in his home. At least it was well cared for: the action worked with a smooth, well-oiled motion that spoke of regular cleaning.
Harold hadn’t had to fire it yet, but he’d brandished it a few times to scare off looters and once a family of beggars—who often were just as dangerous as the looters.
A knock was unlikely to be bandits—they were more likely to just kick down the door—but sometimes the trickier ones pretended to be officials. It might be the police, looking for a place to raid for food, of course; in which case fighting was just likely to get him killed. The police were just bandits with automatic weapons and body armor. Or it could be a genuine visitor…
He went cautiously to the top of the stairs and opened the thick wooden door a crack. “Who is it? What do you want? I don’t have anything of value.” He tried to make his voice sound gruffer than it really was. Certainly his ample beer belly wouldn’t do much to scare off a bandit.
”I’m sorry, I’m looking for a Harold Reddington?” The voice was that of an educated man, but not a snob. It sounded familiar…
Harold thought for a moment, then replied, “Harold died in the attack.”
The man was quiet for a bit, then: “Oh. Did you know him? Can I come in? I was a friend of his. My name is James Ortega.”
Harold threw the door open. “James! Hey, oh god—it’s good to see you again!”
James jumped. “Harold? Hey!” His smooth black hair was longer than it had been the last time Harold saw it, and more unruly. He was dressed in blue jeans and a pseudo-leather jacket over a maroon sweater. The frayed military-issue backpack slung over one shoulder was slightly incongruous against James' civilian attire, but Harold had seen odder matches. More noticeable was the large M6 pistol holstered at his waist. Had he been anyone other than a friend, Harold would have fired right then and there.
But James was a friend. Harold stepped back, letting the pistol fall to his side. ”Come on in, I don’t have much, but I might as well share, especially with as good a friend as you. What did they used to say? ‘My house is your house?’”
”Yeah, that’s about right,” James nodded. “Christ, Harold, you really had me going. You don’t sound at all like you used to. Don’t look much the same either.”
”Yeah, well, war tends to do that to people.” Harold shook his head in disbelief. What was James doing here? No matter, a friend was a friend, and you needed friends in post-war Toronto. “Come on in. It isn’t that much warmer inside than out, but it’s at least a mild improvement.”
Before closing the door, Harold stole a glance through the shattered, half-standing brickwork at the front of the building. Clouds were gathering above the streets, thick and black and roiling. Rough weather.
”Gladly.” James was in civvy gear, not naval duds, which surprised Harold a bit until he realized that one soldier marching alone was likely to be lynched. So when they tramped down the creaking wooden steps, Harold helped James with his thick jacket. Harold put the pistol on a crate by the door. James pretended not to notice he'd had it in the first place. A touch of disaster-zone etiquette.
”So… welcome to my humble abode.”
James looked around and nodded. “Well, it’s not much to shake a stick at, but you seem to be better off than most of the people I’ve seen.”
”Most people don’t show off their wealth. Those that do end up without it, or are found dead in an alley with their balls cut off.”
James looked at Harold as if expecting him to laugh, then, realizing it wasn’t a joke, shuddered. Flailing for a change of subject, he said, “Hey, are those baked beans?”
Harold nodded affirmation. “Yeah, but I don’t have much, so you won’t get—“
”Oh, I don’t mind not getting any—“
”—as much as you’d probably like,” Harold finished. They both laughed. It was a release of tension. They sat down on the concrete floor. Harold scooped the beans onto duraplast plates and added a liberal handful of party mix. James produced a ham MRE from his backpack and set that to cooking while Harold nodded appreciably. Sharing food was something one took seriously.
They ate in companionable silence for a while, until finally James asked, “How did you survive?”
Without hesitation, Harold replied: “I just did. That’s all.”
”I know, but how?”
”Well, it all started with a bottle of bourbon…”
”Tell me about it.”

”I was moving a crate of bourbon up from storage when the alarms and public alert systems started banging off. Now, realize that everyone was already on edge because of the whole Kenya fiasco and we were all either about to jump in our bomb shelters or go into hysterics. Well, the alarms set ‘em all off and half the people in the bar started screaming. It developed into a full-blown bar fight within a couple of minutes. Me and a couple of the more levelheaded people managed to calm everyone down a bit and we kicked most of the people out. There was one guy, a big fellah, I took one of those bottles of whiskey and broke it over his head. We carried him out to the street and left him. He’s probably dead now.
”Well, that left me, Dave—you remember Dave—a guy named Rick and his girlfriend, and some old fellah named Paul. They all lived a ways away and didn’t want to risk trying to get home, so they figured staying here was probably the best thing to do.
”Now, we certainly had plenty of food and water—and alcohol!—and I had my stun gun, and Dave had that little .22, so we figured we might be able to hold our own if the Covenant showed up. Heh, yah, I know, bunch of idiots we were. I blame the beer.
”Well, we didn’t get to test our theory on how tough we were. Right when we were starting to get into the swing of things—storing food and beer and setting up crates against the windows—we felt the shockwave from that rock they dropped in Lake Huron. That spooked everyone out a bit, and Rick and his girl took off. The three of us, Dave, Paul, and I, went down into the basement and hid.
”Man, that explosion sure made a hell of a tidal wave. I was watching from the basement door, and we got about two inches of water rushing across the street, like a real heavy rain. Freaky, I tell ya’. Came in under the front door, and about a half an inch poured down the steps. Ruined most of the food in the bottom crates, but we didn’t know that yet. After that the rain from the vaporized lake water started coming down, like God was emptying his bathtub on our heads.
”We stayed in the basement for about two hours after that, until we heard this terrible racket outside. We all went up, and it’s the fucking Marines! They were going down the street with a tank, telling people to evacuate and asking for volunteers for a militia they were setting up. Well, Dave went off and they gave him a rifle. He left the pistol with us, and I gave it to Paul. He was kind of disappointed they wouldn’t let him in the tank, but he was glad enough to be able to fight. They all went off, and me an’ Paul went back to the basement.
”Good choice that was! Right after that they started bombing us. The building started rocking, there were shockwaves, scary as hell. It lasted about fifteen minutes. We went up to see what the damage was.
”It was bad. People dead in the street, the next building over was just gone, all the windows were broken… We just sort of milled about for a while. Then the second wave came along.
”Paul was out in the street when it started. The wash from one of those plasma bombs washed over him, and… Yeah. I ran back to the basement as quick as I could. I must have dropped the stun gun on the way. I went down there and didn’t come up for a whole day.
”When I came up, everything was different. The whole street was covered in rubble, the front of my bar was gone, there were dead people in the street… awful. Just awful. After that, I’ve just sort of been staying in the basement, coming out when I need to. Somehow, that crate of bourbon I’d been bringing up when the alarms went off was still there. I drank one of the bottles right then, that kept me drunk for a while, and hung-over for longer. Eventually, when my head wasn’t about to fall off, I went back outside. I traded one of those bottles for a pistol from some guy in a trench coat. That’s come in handy a few times. So I’ve just been living off of beans and snacks, waiting for this all to be over.”

James was nodding in thought. “Well, you certainly seem to have come off okay, relatively speaking. I’ve passed quite a few bodies… A lot of them are burned or hit by shrapnel, but there are a lot of starvation cases. Frozen, too.”
The basement was getting colder as night fell. Toronto in February had three temperatures: mild, cold, and damn cold. Harold thought tonight was going to be damn cold, and from how early the temperatures were dropping, the weather was probably trying to out-do itself. Yeah, I can understand frozen. Harold shivered.
They sat in silence. Wind howled outside. That it could reach into the recess that used to be Harold’s bar spoke of its power. Harold wondered what it was like for the poor bastards caught outside, then quickly decided he didn’t want to know. It would be snowing too, now, and Harold would have to shovel out the snow that piled against the door. For now the remnant of the bar's ceiling was providing some meager protection from the elements, but it wasn’t much. He didn’t know what he’d do when the ceiling collapsed. Die, maybe.
Suddenly, Harold couldn’t stand the silence anymore. “Well, what’s your story?”
James jerked out of his contemplation and replied rather sheepishly: “Well, mine isn’t as interesting as yours.”
”Come on, I wanna know. Didn’t Reach get glassed? How did you survive?”
”Well, alright…

”I was stationed in a MAC gun up in geo-sync over the equator, the Abraham Lincoln. I was just sitting in my quarters playing gin rummy with a few of my roommates, when suddenly the whole station started shaking like an earthquake, which is insane, I know. It only lasted about two seconds, but it sent the cards all over, so we had to stop playing. A shame that was, I was ahead on points.
”We ran out into the hallway and asked the first person we saw, some crewman, what the hell was happening. He said that the Covenant were in-system and that the shaking was the main gun firing. Then the station started canceling spin—we used centripetal force for gravity, not induced gravity like the Earth stations—and it started thrusting laterally at the same time, changing course, and the gun fired again, and we didn’t know what the hell was going on. The gravity was pulling us towards a corner; it was like the whole place was being tipped on its side.
”I panicked. I ran for the nearest lifeboat station, leaving my roommates, everyone behind. Christ… I got into the lifeboat, by myself, and hit the emergency launch button.
”The lifeboat took me out away from the station, and the momentum from the spin launched me at a tangent, so I was heading in a sort of parabolic orbit past the moon. About ten minutes after I launched, I saw the Lincoln get hit. You could sort of see the laser beam, there was already debris and dust in our orbit, but damn… It punched right through the fuel tanks for the attitude jets, we were using lox and hydrogen, and the whole thing went up like a box of fireworks in just a couple of seconds. I’m glad I got out, but…
”Anyway, apparently no one saw me, or bothered to take me out if they did, so I just drifted for a couple of days. I was… Not doing well in there. I was lonely. Suddenly, though, on the third or fourth day, the radio picked up this transmission, it was like the voice of God. It was a ship that had just come in, popped in and sent out a beacon and asked if there were any survivors. I turned on my beacon and waited. About two hours later I was picked up.
”They took me in through one of the airlocks, and man, I’d missed people. They gave me a shower and decent food—by Navy standards, heh—and gave me a cot to sleep on. They picked up one or two other survivors—they got fourteen of us in all, fourteen out of millions—and then high-tailed it for home. They were low on fuel, they’d been dodging Covenant kill teams as they picked us up, and they were running scared.
”So I wound up in Wunderland, ‘round Alpha Centauri, and got reassigned right away to a system patrol ship. Everything after that is fairly uninteresting. Just normal ship life for several months, then we heard that Earth got hit. Half the warships in the system set off for Sol, but we didn’t get here in time to do any good. I was in orbit for two weeks until I got a pass to visit Earth. Mary’s gone, a lot of the people I knew had evacuated, so I started by looking for someone I knew would stay put: you.”

The wind was ferocious now, screaming like a dying animal. The basement door, thick as it was, was starting to creak. It sounded like a blizzard, probably the last one of the season, though it was hard to tell with the way all the meteor impacts had mucked up the climate.
The trash bin fire was almost out, and the light bulb was flickering more insistently, as if begging for more power. Harold and James sat in flickering darkness, neither saying anything. The elements pounded at the door like furies, eager to claim new victims.
Finally, James broke the silence. “I need a drink.”
Harold grinned slyly. “I’ve still got some of that Glenfiddich you drank last time you were here.”
”Still?”
”I’ve been saving it for a special occasion, something I could say ‘cheers’ to and mean it.”
”Well, does this count?”
”Hell yes.”
Harold rooted around and found the bottle and a couple of shot glasses. He poured them full, almost to the brim, and handed one to James. “You know,” he said, looking at the glass meditatively, “This is probably some of the last Glenfiddich on Earth.”
”Or off it.” They sat in silence a moment longer, then James raised his glass.
“Skaal!”
”Cheers!”
The whiskey went down like cold fire, then settled down warmly in Harold’s stomach. The two grinned at each other, and James held out his glass. “More?”
”Comin’ right up.”