Afterworld (The Orion Rezner Chronicles Book 1) by Michael James Ploof

Author:Michael James Ploof [Ploof, Michael James]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Michael James Ploof
Published: 2014-10-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter13

A Whiskey Moment

Father Killroy left and I cleaned up. I felt like I hadn’t bathed in a month, though it had only been a few days. Showers are a luxury in the Afterworld. I could’ve caught one at Harvard, but driving all the way there for a shower is a pain in the ass. A towel bath would have to suffice.

Once I was as clean as I was going to get and had brushed the fuzz off my teeth, I put on a clean pair of jeans, my orange Bob Marley T-shirt, a pair of old army boots, and grabbed my knee-length pea coat.

Dude and I took my solar-powered scooter to Mushi’s apartment but found no one there. I left a note in the door jamb saying I’d be at the library. I had a lot of time to kill before I needed to see the council. The old farts wouldn’t be available until morning, and the headquarters was just across the road.

The night was uncommonly cool for June, and Dude clung to my back for heat as we cruised at a serene twenty miles per hour. I passed a boarded-up coffee shop and felt a pang of loss. God, how I miss having coffee. There is still some around, what with military MREs and our stockpile of storable food, but that stuff is now a finite commodity and very expensive. Hopefully, with the expansion of greenhouses throughout the city, we’ll start growing coffee soon—assuming anyone has green coffee beans. The Elite likely still have coffee. With places like the Doomsday Seed Vault, off the coast of Norway, it’s likely they’re still living like kings. We Bostonians, on the other hand, only have what was already in the city or what was brought in by survivors. I haven’t seen a banana in about seven years.

I parked in front of the library and cast a wary eye on Hancock Tower, down the road. The spell shield hummed softly, shooting up from the tower and spreading out like a big umbrella above the city. Dude and I made our way into Bates Hall.

The library was chilly, but not half as bad as it was in the winter. On most summer nights the cool stone building was a reprieve. In the winter months the torches and fireplaces burned steady, fueled by the magic of the Wizard Council. They said it was a gift to the people of Boston to facilitate and encourage learning. The gift of knowledge was something the old-world Elites had ever tried to keep from the people. I’m not sure if it was the cold or a thirst for knowledge, but these days, the library is always packed during the day with people pouring over the old tomes from times past. Between the covers of those thousands of volumes, humanity might find its way once more.

At this time of night, though, there were only a few other people at the dozens of tables, and finding an empty one was easy. It’s one of the reasons I go there so often in the small hours.

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