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Personally, Jeremy hated Drexel's. He had nothing against hookers or massive amounts of recreational drugs, but Drexel just made them seem sad. Besides, he didn't think it was safe for his ass to sit on anything.
Miles, however, loved the man. Probably because Drexel laughed at his jokes. Oh, and because he could get rat-arse drunk without anyone taking the bottle off him when he passed out.
'Sit down,' Miles ordered, whiskey slopping over his fingers as he gestured to the nearby chair.
'Yeah, no,' Jeremy said. 'I just got my hideously scratchy trousers worn in, I don't want to have to burn them just them.'
Miles just grunted and took a swig of the rotgut, grimacing as it hit the back of his throat. He turned the tumbler in his hand, watching the piss-yellow liquid swirl against the clouded crystal.
'People aren't scared of me,' he said.
'Sure they are,' Jeremy said bracingly. 'You're Miles Matheson, General of the Republic. Sometimes you make me want to wet myself.'
Miles shook his head. 'They're scared of me after, not before.' He rested his hand on his knuckles and closed his eyes, looking sick and tired. 'That encampment today? They hadn't a hope in hell, but weren't scared of me so they pushed me. Now they're scared, but it's too late to do any good. Fix it.'
'Fix what?'
'My reputation. Make sure everyone knows I'm coming, Major Baker, and that they shit themselves at the thought of it. I don't want to have to burn any more towns.'
Orders given, Miles went back to drinking himself into insensibility. Jeremy would be glad when Bass caught up with them. Maybe Miles would still be a miserable git, but he'd be sober for it and that's when he kept it to himself.
One Beer
Before the Blackout it had been a Starbucks at a motorway rest area, now it was a bar for any traders passing through the order. Jeremy bought himself a glass of beer and leant on the bar to wait for someone to strike up a conversation.
The lucky girl was a grey-haired woman with tattooed in curlicue eyebrows and a taste for tequila. She gave Jeremy a jaundiced look when he sidled over, casually resting her hand on a hammer threaded through her belt.
'I'm married,' she said, wriggling the appropriate finger. It wasn't the usual finger he got. 'And I'm a lesbian.'
He gave her his best charming smile. 'Ah, come on, you could give dick a try, and mine's really small.'
She opened her mouth to snap at him and stopped as his words caught up with her irritation. Closing it, she gave him a dry smile. 'Very funny.'
'I try,' he said.
She glanced down him, from ragged necked t-shirt to scarred, shit-kicker DMs. 'Be careful. The militia in town don't have much of a sense of humour.'
'Yeah, I've heard,' Jeremy said. He nodded to the barman. 'Can't blame them though, can you? Working for Matheson. Do you want a drink?'
The woman studied him for a second, weighing him, and then nodded. She got a beer too, rolling the bottle between her hands. One of her tattooed brows cocked.
'You know Matheson.'
'Of him,' Jeremy hedged, scratching his jaw. He'd not shaved and the stubble itched. 'I live down near Trenton. Miles 'Murdering' Matheson, they call him.'
She snorted. 'Really.'
'Yeah,' Jeremy insisted. 'Not all the time, he can be perfectly sensible, but if he's crossed he just starts stabbing the fuck out of anything around him. Can't be reasoned with, s'what happened in Benton.'
The vague amusement hanging around the woman's face lifted, leaving a concerned set to her lips. 'I heard about that. Is is he that unbalanced.'
Jeremy hid his smirk in his beer. Propaganda was easier than he'd thought.
Four Beers
Jeremy gestured with one hand, bottle danglingly precariously from his fingers, and grinned loopily at the cluster of merchants and itinerants hanging on his every word. By this time next....year – even gossip had to work these days – everyone within 100 miles of the Matheson republic would be appropriately scared of Matheson.
'...then he cut off this guy's fingers,' Jeremy said and hesitated, brain drawing a blank on how to top the fingers. 'And he, ah, stuffed them up his bum.'
Everyone looked gratifyingly horrified. One fat man, a tartan scarf hanging over his broad chest, folded forwards over his whiskey. His blood-shot eyes squinted in an attempt at concentration. 'Did Matheson stick them up his own bum, or the bum of the guy whose fingers they were?'
'Guy whose fingers they were,' Jeremy said, mildly indignant. 'It's not 50 Shades of Matheson.'
'Yeah,' Eyebrows, who was playing interlocutor by virtue of being the first to talk to Jeremy, scoffed. 'He's not going to stick severed fingers up his own ass. How'd he get them out?'
'Precisely,' Jeremy said. 'Matheson is far more likely to stick something up someone else than up himself. After a battle, if he ain't already killed it? He fucks it.'
Eight Beers
'...so he decided to take it as a personal challenge from Terry Pratchett,' Jeremy said. 'Course, it ain't easy to find a hedgehog round here. So he got people to catch a porcupine.'
An acne-pocked lad with big, knuckly hands scratched his close-cropped, crawling head. 'But...porcupines can fire spines backwards from their ass,' he said, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. 'You'd get all, y'know, stuck.'
Jeremy blinked and tried to stitch his thoughts back together in a new story. '...that's why he's such an evil bastard,' he said. 'It got all swole up and infected, looks like a...an...octopus down there.'
Ten Beers
'Just wedged into the tree,' Jeremy said, nodding earnestly. 'Sap all glued up in his pubes. They had to chisel him out.'
'Sick fuck,' Eyebrows said supportively. 'People eat that syrup.'
'The militia has to send people ahead of him, spackling up the trees.
Fifteen Beers
'So they were like, take our virgin daughters! But please, god, spare the goats!'
What did I drink?
'It was a rhino!'
One Hangover and a Week Later
Brushing aside a stack of maps and reports, Jeremy pointed to the forested spot where their informant claimed the raiders were hiding. 'It's an old mill,' he told Neville. 'There's two ways in, but the main road is blocked. That just leaves this dirt -'
The tent flap slapped in and Miles stormed in, dark, lean and sober for the first time in weeks. His face was pale and smudged with stubble, but his eyes flashed furiously.
'Goddamnit, Baker!' he roared, brandishing a rolled up paper. 'Is this down to you?'
'What?'
Miles mouth twisted for a second, then smoothed out into a tight, angry line as he shook the paper out. He held it up and read the headline.
'Hide your Goats,' he spat and dropped the paper to glare at Jeremy. 'Murderin' Matheson is in Town.'
That actually did sound vaguely familiar. Jeremy scratched the corner of his jaw with his thumb. 'Well-'
Miles wasn't finished. He turned the pages angrily. 'Matheson's temper is, unfortunately, explained,' he spat the words out, 'by the sexual dysfunction caused by reputed naked encounter with a porcupine. What. The. Fuck, Jeremy.'
Still at the table, pretending to be engrossed in his reports, Neville coughed into his hand.
'You said you wanted people to be scared,' Jeremy pointed out. 'I'd be scared of an angry, dickless man called Murdering Matheson who molested porcupines. Who wouldn't be?'
Miles stared at him. How long had he had that tic by his eye, Jeremy wondered.
'Too much?' he asked.
That was the second time Jeremy got demoted.