How Beer Saved the World Read online

  The footage made it to the station, she didn’t. The Burger Fest traffic cam caught her and the camera man being dragged out of a burning van when they took a corner too fast on the way back to the station. According to the news guy that survived, she was a hero. She looked dead to me.

  The news guy rambled on about camouflage and brave young Amber. Camo my ass. Hops stink fierce, like being in a pot field in August. It made me think. Actually it made me want to be stoned. Of all the shit Angus made sure we had, he never thought about pot. For the first time in twenty years nobody would care if I got stoned and not a freaking bud in sight.

  On other fronts, updates were coming through the emergency channels. It was simple, if you were alive, and safe, stay there. If not. Directions on where to go.

  I grabbed Angus, Sally, the Piper brothers, a chicken, and a growler of cold beer and went to storage room. The hops and grains were in bags against the wall. I shut the door behind us and set down the chicken who promptly found a few grains scattered on the floor and settled in to happy murmurs.

  I cut one of the hops bags open and grabbed a handful of the smelly leaves and shoved it into Angus’ shirt pocket.

  “Feeling lucky?” I asked.

  We spent a day on our Hop Vests. Table cloths had little use in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. Turned out the trucker’s wife could sew.

  Sally and I took a break on the Hops bags. Nobody seemed to care that we were gone. My drummer certainly didn’t. The stigmata of his raised hands, the jerk of the pistol, flashed through my consciousness at wrong times, but Sally and I still left the room with a bit less of whatever pain we went in with.

  We were up with the sun. The trucks still sat idling. The Pipers took their spots.

  The street was clear of bodies. Only stains. Zombies eat dead zombies. Waste not want not. We armed ourselves as before, the plan had worked except the zombies just hadn’t cooperated.

  We gathered in the parking lot and saluted my drummer, each of us with a sixteen ounce mug of Autumn Gold Ale. The hoppiest beer in the brewery. It must have made us a bit relieved because we took a second round. Sally leaned in and kissed me. I kissed her back and she dumped half her beer over my head. “For luck” she whispered and kissed me again. Our lips were wet with beer. Would have made a good commercial without the zombies and all. I poured the rest of mine into her moderate cleavage. She laughed and I wished she wasn’t covered in the hop vest. What was under would be respectable in any wet tee shirt contest I’ve ever been to. The hop vests looked like thick children’s bibs. The Piper brothers called beer foul over the spillage, but repeated the action, as did all.

  I took more clips. I had a truck load of ammunition. That wasn’t a problem, but I sure wished I had something for the Pipers that wasn’t a bolt action. Sally took my 8 shot Luger pistol this time, an easy reload. Not a big gun, but it didn’t need to be big, and she still had her little pocket 32. Angus and the driver took the driver’s side and Sally and I took the left.

  There were a couple of zombies prowling around the truck. The Pipers played their tune and the zombies fell in unison. One was a grandmother looking old woman. Clothes tend to not last long on the zombies. She was no exception. Her pot belly, shrunken breasts, and granny panties made a picture. I’ve still got it. The head shot didn’t drop her completely and she tried to get up. I gave the younger Piper a look. He shrugged and fired again. This time she stayed down.

  I kissed my chicken on the head and threw her over the fence.

  The zombies dived.

  The chicken ran. And it was on.

  Pop. Pop. The gate was open. The waitresses looked calmer. We all looked ridiculous with our beer stained vests packed with hops.

  Like clockwork the pack showed around the corner. I was curious where they stayed. Must be the mattress factory a block down. Made sense, Zombies need sleep too.

  I added my heavier rounds to the steady pops of the Piper boys. The younger, faster lead zombies leapt the dead with ease. I was beginning to feel screwed. A head shot on a running zombie ten seconds from ripping your throat out is not as easy as it sounds.

  Behind me I heard a scream and the scrape of the gate and cook and dishwasher helped the waitresses start to pull them closed.

  “Not even.” Sally’s voice behind me. The scraping sound stopped, the Piper boys fired and two more zombies tumbled. A truck door slammed. I heard the roar of the diesel and the sulfur fumes joined the hops and gun smoke.

  And the zombies slowed.

  The chicken launched itself back over the fence.

  I shot two more, a couple of teenage boys who spent too much time on the X box from the look of their sunburned skin with patterns of white hiding from the sun, the rest a pink mass of teenage fat boy skin.

  I’d never really been this close without a fence. It was like looking into the eyes of a rabid dog. They stopped, nostrils flaring as they scented the hops. We stared at them. I was afraid as hell. By the time we brought the second truck in everybody outside the fence was all but out of ammo. But they didn’t attack. The Pipers kept up the fire, working the edges and when the gates closed, they left.

  The chicken sat atop the fence.

  Zombies hated beer.

  We put out the word.

  Turns out Sally made a decent drummer.

  The army stripped every hop field in Washington.

  We were a footnote in history.

  Angus Grant’s Beer was credited with saving the world. I think the chicken helped.

  Paco’s Home Brew

  Nancy Jane Moore

  It was almost summer but a north wind blew in that afternoon, bringing a touch of chill. Paco Fernandez fired up his wood-burning stove, likely for the last time until fall. No matter how many times his daughter-in-law told him their solar panels provided cleaner heat, he still liked a wood fire.

  Tonight his daughter-in-law and son had gone into Ontario for dinner and a movie, leaving his eleven-year-old grandson, Diego, in his care. Diego aimed his mobile at the stove to get vid to go with the interview of his grandfather he was doing for school. “Abuelo,” the boy said, “How come you like wood fires so much?”

  “Just smell it, hijito. It smells like the forest, like the great outdoors.” The old man took a sip of his beer. Home brew, but as good as the best up in Portland or Seattle, his son always said.

  “But Mama says…” the boy began.

  “Your mama is right,” Paco said, “but a little fire every once in awhile won’t hurt anything much. This is a good stove and it doesn’t take much to heat this little place; it’s not so big as your house.”

  Paco’s cabin was in back of the old farm house where Diego and his parents lived a few miles from town. They had enough acreage for good money crops of potatoes and onions and enough hops to keep them in home brew.

  “Anyway, it takes me back.”

  The boy remembered his assignment. “Tell me about how things were when you and Abuela first came to Cascadia,” he said.

  “It wasn’t called Cascadia back then,” Paco said. “That was before the United States broke up. It was just Oregon. Your abuela—rest her soul—and I worked our way up through California, picking spinach, strawberries, whatever anyone wanted harvested.”

  “Why didn’t you stay in Mexico?”

  “More than once we asked ourselves that, mi hijo. Lots of people here didn’t want us. But people were starving….” He stopped suddenly. “Did you hear someone outside?”

  “Just the wind, Abuelo.”

  Something banged—a car door or maybe someone throwing something into the bed of a pickup. “There’s definitely someone out there. You sit here. I’m going to go look.”

  Paco picked up his flashlight and stepped out of the front door. Several men in combat fatigues were standing in the driveway, each with some kind of weapon slung over his shoulder. He started to ask what they were doing, then thought the better of it and switched off the flashlight.

  Too
late. They had already seen him. “Hey old man,” one of them yelled. “We’ve come to take our property back.”

  “It’s not your property,” Diego yelled. The boy had come to the door behind him, mobile still in hand.

  “Ssh,” Paco said, but that was another thing that came too late.

  The men were close to the cabin now, shining their own flashlights onto Paco and the child. “Shit, it’s more Mexicans. Them people took over all this country when they run us out.”

  “We’re Cascadians,” Diego said.

  “Quiet, child,” Paco said. He wanted to yell at the men himself, but unlike Diego, he knew they were trouble.”

  “You’re Communist Mexicans is what you are and we’re here to get rid of the likes of you,” the man said. He raised his gun.

  Paco dropped to the ground on top of Diego as the man started to fire. Bullets sprayed all of the room. Paco felt blood pouring down his face.

  “Jesus Christ, Hank. You just killed an old man and a kid,” one of the other men said.

  “Just Mexicans.” Hank shrugged. “We can move in now.” He stepped over Paco and walked over to the table. “Hey, they got beer here.” He picked up Paco’s glass and downed the rest of it. “Man, that’s good stuff. How come these Mexicans got good beer and all we get is rat piss?”

  “Because we’re living in Mormon country now,” a third man said. “We move back up here, we can get good beer again.”

  “Right on,” said Hank. “Let’s look around and see if they got more beer.”

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” the first man said. “We weren’t supposed to kill nobody. The colonel is going to be pissed.”

  “The colonel can go fuck himself,” Hank said. “Aha. Beer” He pulled the small keg out of the refrigerator.

  “Come on, Hank. We gotta get out of here,” the third man said.

  Hank snorted again. But he let the others drag him to the truck.

  Only after he had heard them peel out did Paco dare move. He sat up slowly, blinded by blood in his eyes. Scalp wound, he thought. “Diego? Hijito?”

  “I’m here, Abuelo. But my arm hurts.”

  The old man wiped the blood from his eyes with one hand and saw the hole in the child’s arm. He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wrapped it around the boy’s arm, for all the good it would do. And then he picked up the child’s mobile and called for help.

  After he disconnected he realized the mobile had caught the whole thing on vid.

  <<>>

  Verity Landsdottir, prime minister of Cascadia, closed her tablet and sighed.

  “That vid is not going to get any better no matter how many times you look at it,” said her companion, a woman in her eighties who sat in a rocking chair near the window, knitting.

  “I know, Mom,” Verity said. “It’s just so hard to believe people act like that.” She got up and walked over to the window. It was a sunny day, giving her a perfect view of Mt. Rainier to the southeast.

  Her mother snorted. “At least the thug was a lousy shot and the people aren’t dead. It could be much worse.”

  “It could be a whole lot better. There have been a dozen similar incidents near Ontario, and other people have been hurt, some badly. We’ve got to do something about it, but outside of sending soldiers out there to beef up border security, I can’t figure out what. I don’t even know if it’s some sneaky trick by the Deseret government or just a bunch of punks.”

  “You’ll figure it out,” her mother said. The resemblance of the two women was obvious. Both had brown skin—Verity’s a shade lighter due to the genetic influence of her other mother—and thick hair, though the mother’s hair was almost white and cut very short, while the daughter’s was long and black. Verity’s mothers had been among the radicals that led Cascadia to secede when the United States began to fall apart. Landsdottir was an adopted name that reflected their politics more than their heritage; neither was Scandinavian.

  A young man opened the office door. “Excuse me, ma’am. The public safety and defense ministers are here.”

  The young man—Verity’s administrative assistant—smiled at the older woman. “Afternoon, Miss Jessica.”

  Jessica Landsdottir nodded.

  A lanky man and a petite woman—Rob Allen, the minister of public safety, and Emily Harrison, minister for defense—followed the aide into the room. They gave polite hellos to Jessica and arranged themselves around a conference table made from a highly polished cross section of a limb from an old-growth sequoia cut down by vandals during the shaky years when Cascadia first declared its independence. Another cross section from the trunk of the ancient tree was used in the official cabinet room.

  “Well, we know who the shooter is,” Rob said. “We ran the DNA he obligingly left on the beer glass. Turns out he is from here, just like he said on the vid. Henry Dawson. He lived out near Ontario until he got arrested for a serious aggravated assault. His father bailed him out and they skipped out to Idaho, which was pretty much ungoverned back then. We didn’t have any luck trying to get him back.”

  “We knew there were some disgruntled extremists out there, but that doesn’t explain why they decided to do these raids now, unless someone is stirring them up,” Verity said.

  “Someone is stirring them up. I’ve got some more news, and while I’d like to take credit for it, it’s pure serendipity. About mid-morning, a woman came into the police station in Ontario seeking help. She’d been beaten badly.” He tapped the screen of his tablet to send copies of the picture to the others.

  “Damn,” said Emily. “She looks like she was in a war.”

  “She says she’s Mrs. Dawson.”

  Both women made faces. “Mrs.” was not a title used in Cascadia.

  “Well, that’s how they do things in Deseret and she seems to be happy enough with it. Anyway, this guy Dawson came back from his raid stinking drunk, woke her up for sex, and beat her when she resisted him. She slipped away when he passed out, said this time was the last straw. According to what she told our local authorities, some guy the men call the colonel has been coming around and giving them instructions on where to go and what to do. According to her, this colonel ‘wasn’t one of them’. From the interview notes”—he clicked on another file—“I gather he was probably somebody official from Deseret. She said he didn’t wear a uniform, despite the title.”

  Jessica spoke up. “Those mountain men always liked to say they were independent, but it was always easy for someone outside to rouse them.”

  “Mountain men?” Verity asked.

  “That’s what we called them back in the day,” Jessica said. “The people who believed all that ultra-right crazy survivalist stuff. Homegrown terrorists. They were in these little militias and had hordes of guns and didn’t want anything to do with the cooperative society we were building in Cascadia.”

  Emily read the transcript. “From this it sounds like there’s a whole community of Miss Jessica’s mountain men just across the border. A lot of them who lived in eastern Cascadia andv moved into the Idaho mountains after our independence. But Southern Idaho is part of Deseret now. I don’t see that kind of people being willing to act as pawns of the Deseret government, though.”

  “Except that, according to Mrs. Dawson, Deseret has promised them some homesteads in our eastern territory if they’ll help to take it back,” Rob said.

  “Oh. Do you suppose they mean it?” Emily asked.

  “Maybe,” Verity said. “Or maybe they’ve got something else in mind. Either way, now we know we’re dealing with Deseret and not just a bunch of thugs.”

  “It’s not enough for a declaration of war.” Emily had served in the military during Cascadia’s many battles to preserve its independence and was not inclined to go to war lightly.

  “No,” said Verity. “War is not the answer, whatever some of the more excitable people in the Assembly have to say.” Several of the younger members had called for invasion of Deseret on the ground
that they were harboring terrorists.

  Rob nodded his head in agreement.

  “Let’s not release this information just yet. We need to see what else we can find out.”

  “Well, I’ve got one more piece of information from Mrs. Dawson that might be of use. She says her husband is planning to cross the border again and go back to the Fernandez home. She heard him talking to his friends about it when he first got back, before he beat her up. He figures there’s more good beer there and he should go get it. If we can nab him there, we might get some information out of him.”

  “His taste for that beer is proving to be mighty useful,” Verity said. “I think we might be able to set a nice trap for him.”

  Rob grinned. “I’ve got some folks who are just waiting for the chance.”

  “Meanwhile, we need to call up the volunteers and increase the number of soldiers on the border up by Ontario.”

  “I’ve already started on that,” Emily said. “Though it’s possible that they’re using that region as a blind and are planning something elsewhere.”

  “Yes, but that’s the only place on our border with them that has significant population. And I don’t think they want an all-out war. My guess is they’re looking for some way to put us in a bad position, so that we’ll give in on their petition to let them transport stuff to Longview for shipping at very favorable rates. Being landlocked is killing their economy and they don’t like paying our truckers to take it to our port.”

  “I hope you’re not going to agree to that,” Emily said. “They don’t just want access; they want the port. If we let them drive across our territory, they’ll find a way to take it—or at least, they’ll try to.”

  “Which is why we’ve been saying no,” Verity said. “They must have a plan that will put us in a position where we have no choice but to say yes.” She paused a minute. “Emily, I want as many troops as we can get in the Ontario area, but I think it might be best if Deseret thinks we’ve only sent a few people down there. Can we do that?”

  Emily grinned. “Leave it to me. We know who most of their spies are; we can feed them some juicy false info.”