Дэвид Нордли - How Beer Saved the World

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.

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.”