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The bar used to be a dentist’s office.
Peter Schiff figured that out from the tiles (pale green, cracked in neat little fault lines) and from the way the counter sat too low, like it had been built for reclining bodies. Someone had spray-painted LIQUOR over the ghost of ORTHODONTICS.
Outside, the sky was the color of old rust. Not sunset exactly...more like something burning far away and nobody bothering to put it out.
Peter slid a working ballpoint pen onto the counter. Blue ink. Miraculously smooth.
The bartender didn’t look impressed.
“And the thumbtacks,” Peter added, producing a small cardboard box. Half full. Steel. Sharp.
The bartender grunted, accepted the trade, and poured something amber into a chipped glass. Then he topped it off with water. A lot of water.
A radio on the shelf crackled, coughing up sound like it was sick.
Woke up this morning…
got a blue moon in your eyes...
Rob Spragg's voice dragged itself through the static, defiant and tired.
In the image on TV (the speakers weren't clear enough for the sound to come through), men in welded scrap armor rode dirt bikes through what used to be Iowa, now a wasteland. The chyron flickered: GRAIN SILOS SEIZED. Somewhere else, a city burned. Maybe the same one as yesterday. Hard to tell now.
Peter drank. Didn’t flinch. He’d learned to lower expectations.
The bartender finally looked at him.
“Hey,” the crusty bartender said, flatly. “You’re that money guy, right? The one who said all this would happen?”
Peter smiled. Not proud. Not bitter. Just…familiar.
“Something like that.”
The bartender wiped the counter with a rag that had given up years ago.
“Huh,” he said. “Funny.”
“Why’s that?”
Bartender shrugged. “You don’t look happy.”
Peter glanced at the TV. At the red sky bleeding into night.
“I didn’t predict it because I wanted to be right,” he said quietly. “I predicted it because I thought someone might stop it.”
The radio fizzed. The song limped on.
The bartender poured himself a drink. Didn’t water it down.
“Yeah,” he said. “Nobody stops anything.”
They drank in silence while the world outside kept ending - not with a bang, but with bartering, static, and the dull ache of being correct too early.