A Beer at the End of the World Read online

blinked at his astronaut get-up. There were people in every imaginable mode of dress here. At the table immediately in front of the door, a fellow dressed up as a Victorian gentleman – top hat, cane, waistcoat and all – laughed uproariously as he slapped the shoulder of his companion, a dark skinned man wearing a brass chestplate and cradling the helmet of a Roman centurion. Across the room, an old man in a dirty gray smock and heavy rubber gloves, with goggles perched on top of his immense forehead, sobbed quietly into his drink while a woman in a burkha glided past him without so much as a pitying glance. On the floor above, a man in a red flowing cape and a suit of golden body armor that covered him from head to toe swayed drunkenly against the railing and sang along with the Stones.

  There was no greeter, so Marcus headed straight for the bar, where there were a couple of open seats. He slid in next to a one-eyed, bearded midget who seemed to be dressed as a pirate, and set his helmet down with a thump. The midget raised his glass to him, but didn't say anything, and Marcus left it at a nod.

  A glass slid down the bar and right into his open hand. Some of the bright orange liquid inside sloshed out onto the bar, and Marcus looked up to see the grinning face of the barkeep.

  “Welcome,” he said. The barkeep was sixty if he was a day, but it was a healthy sort of sixty. He carried a little extra weight around the middle, just enough to put people at ease with thoughts of their kindly grandfathers, but his arms were thick and powerful. He wore a blue and white checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a dingy towel tucked into his belt. The belt was a wide brown affair, held together with a Denver Broncos buckle that looked like it could stop a bullet. His hair was more white than gray, and a thick beard covered his face, but could not tame the toothy grin that was even now erupting from the middle of it.

  “Hi,” Marcus said. “Sorry, I don't have any money to pay for this. I just wanted–”

  “First drink's free,” the midget pirate said, startling Marcus. “First drink's always free.”

  “Lowbeard is right,” the barkeep said. He had a pleasantly tenor voice to go along with his pleasantly grandfatherly looks. It made Marcus think of home cooking and football on Thanksgiving. The rest of this seemed vaguely sinister to him. He looked down at the drink, still on the bar and nestled inside his spaceman's glove.

  “Is this a...?” he started to ask.

  “Screwdriver,” the barkeep said. “That's what you're looking for, right?”

  Marcus shook his head. “How in the world did you know that?”

  “It's my job to know, pal. I'm the Barkeep.”

  Marcus barked a laugh and pushed the drink away. “Cute, but no thanks. Vodka rips up my stomach.”

  The barkeep looked at him, puzzled, for a moment. Then his eyes cleared and he nodded.

  “Ah, that's right. You're looking for the tool, not the drink. Sorry, friend. Sometimes even I lose the thread of the story.” He stroked his chin for a moment, squinting at Marcus as if he was a book with small type. “Sam Adams Boston Lager, right?”

  That was his beer. Marcus tugged at his glove. “Yeah, why not? Draft if you've got it.”

  “Coming right up.” The barkeep swept the glass and the spill off of the bar with one motion and turned to the taps. Marcus took the opportunity to glance in the mirror over the bar. The old man in the smock who had been crying moments before was now standing on the table, shouting something that Marcus couldn't hear while a trio of brightly clothed teenagers watched curiously. The woman in the burkha had joined the armored man on the balcony, and even though they didn't touch, or even look at each other, her presence seemed to have settled him somewhat. Now he just looked down on the floor of the establishment with eyes partially hidden by his mask. On the jukebox, Angie had given way to Don Henley's Boys of Summer.

  “So what is this place?” Marcus asked as the barkeep set his beer down in front of him. He tried to direct the question at both the keep and the pirate, but the pirate had returned to his drink and would not allow his eyes to be met. “And what's with all that junk outside?”

  “This is the Last Stop Bar & Grill,” the barkeep said. “Says so on the roof.”

  “Yeah, I saw that. What else is it, though? What's the scam?”

  “The scam? There's no scam. Do you know of any scam, Lowbeard?” The midget grunted, and the barkeep took that as a negative. “We're just offering you a seat and a drink, friend. A rest from your worries. This is a scam-free zone.”

  Marcus' aggravation with this situation had been held in check by his curiosity since he'd opened his eyes in the junkyard. Now, for the first time, he felt the balance tipping in the other direction. He pulled his time machine out of its holster and set it down on the bar.

  “Okay, fine. I don't need answers, I just need a way out. Do you have a screwdriver, the kind that drives screws, somewhere back behind the bar? I just need to fix this and I'll be on my way.”

  Lowbeard chuckled, mean-like, and Marcus looked at him sharply. “Something funny, pal?”

  “You just reminded me of a joke, that's all,” Lowbeard growled.

  “Yeah? Does it start with, 'A guy walks into a bar full of assholes', because I can see how you'd make that connection.”

  “Okay, boys,” the barkeep said, putting his hands up and cutting Lowbeard's response off. “Tuck your teeth back into your gums. Ain't no such thing as enemies here.”

  “Do you have a screwdriver or not? Just say so. If not, I'll go back to looking in the junkyard.”

  The barkeep gave the time machine a glance and nodded. “I can get you a screwdriver, but it's not going to do you any good.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because there's nothing wrong with your machine. It works perfectly. That's why you're here, in fact. If it didn't work, you wouldn't be here.”

  Marcus stared at him for a moment, then put a hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose. He forgot he was still wearing the pressure suit and clubbed himself with the bulky glove. Lowbeard was too busy drinking to notice and the Barkeep was too polite to point and laugh, for which Marcus was grateful.

  “How can you even know what it is? I built it in my garage.”

  “It’s a time machine,” the Barkeep said. He reached for it, then paused. “May I?”

  Marcus was too flabbergasted to object. He gave the bearded man a “carry on” wave of his hand and the barkeep picked the time machine up by the handle.

  “You press this button here, and the machine finds a tachyon stream and transmits you up and down it, depending on whether you’re going backward or forward in time. It doesn’t have a lot of range, so you built a relay algorithm into it that allows you to jump from one tachyon stream to the other. It’s pretty damn brilliant considering what you had to work with. And the fact that you went to public school.”

  “Thanks,” Marcus said absently. A thought had suddenly occurred to him, and he was looking around at all of the people in the building who were wearing period dress.

  “Of course, that relay algorithm was off by a couple of quintillionths of a decimal point, which means you might have shown up at your destination with only half a head or something, but you would have gotten there.”

  “Am I dead?” Marcus asked suddenly. “Is that what this is?”

  “No, you’re not dead,” the barkeep said, setting the time machine back down on the bar. “But I do get that question a lot, so you shouldn’t feel foolish for asking.”

  “Then where am I?”

  “At the end of the world,” Lowbeard growled. “We’re all at the end of the world.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Marcus demanded.

  “Means he’s God,” Lowbeard said, pointing one grimy finger at the Barkeep. “And he don’t like time travelers.”

  “Now that’s not true,” the barkeep insisted. “I love all my children equally, Lowbeard. How many times do I have to say it?”

  Lowbeard swung a dismissive hand up, took his beer with the other, and leapt
down off of the barstool.

  “You had the option of leaving, you know!” the barkeep called after him. “You can go home any time you like, Lowbeard!”

  The little pirate didn’t answer, just found an empty chair at an empty table and crawled up into it. Marcus ran a gloved hand over his short hair.

  “Help me out here,” he said. “I built a time machine, which you say mostly works, and the first time I use it, I end up in a bar with a bunch of people in period costume, surrounded by the strangest junkyard I’ve ever seen. And you’re God. But I’m not dead.”

  The Barkeep blew out his cheeks. “Well, that is pretty much it in a nutshell. Hold on a second, would you?”

  He turned to the tap again, poured a beer Marcus had never heard of called “Moon Tea”, and sent it sailing down the bar into the hands of a woman wearing a strange leather helmet with an antenna sticking out of the top. He waved at her and she waved back uncertainly.

  “I’ll get to her in a minute,” he said. “Look, Marcus, here’s how it is. I guess I am God, if you want to call me that. I’m the one who wound up this big old universe and sent it expanding out into the nothingness. I’ve been here since the beginning and I’m gonna be here at the end.”

  “You understand why that might be hard to swallow,” Marcus said.

  “Says the guy who built a time machine in his garage,” the Barkeep replied. “Look, I’m obviously not the God they taught you about in Sunday school, but that’s because I never put a