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  MILK

  Adam Millard is the author of twenty novels, ten novellas, and more than a hundred short stories, which can be found in various collections and anthologies. Probably best known for his post-apocalyptic fiction, Adam also writes fantasy/horror for children, as well as bizarro fiction for several publishers. His “Dead” series has been the filling in a Stephen King/Bram Stoker sandwich on Amazon’s bestsellers chart, and the translation rights have recently sold to German publisher, Voodoo Press.

  MILK

  ADAM MILLARD

  Copyright © 2015 Adam Millard

  This Edition Published 2016 by Crowded

  Quarantine Publications

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All characters in this publication are fictitious

  and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead,

  is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any

  form or by any means without the prior

  permission in writing of the publisher, nor be

  otherwise circulated in any form of binding or

  cover other than that in which it is published

  and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchase.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-9954537-4-6

  Crowded Quarantine Publications

  34 Cheviot Road

  Wolverhampton

  West Midlands

  WV2 2HD

  For everyone at Birmingham Children’s Hospital and The Encephalitis Society. I apologise in advance for what you are about to read.

  “Never cry over spilt milk, because it may have been poisoned.”

  – W.C. Fields

  1

  The scorching sun ruthlessly beat down upon Oilhaven, a dot of a town in the middle of a desert no longer possessed of a name. Its inhabitants slunk through the streets, dripping with sweat and grime, fully aware that washing was simply a waste of time. Out here, the water had a tendency to be dirtier than the air. You were much better off leaving it well alone.

  Such unbearable heat was nothing new to Oilhaven, or anywhere else on this godforsaken ball, for that matter. Ever since The Event, the sun’s assault had been relentless, penetrating the stratosphere and troposphere with prodigious ease. Even the most enthusiastic sunbather now covered up, for there was a fine line between a nice tan and terminal skin cancer.

  Out here, if the heat didn’t kill you, the UV would, and if the fiery ball in the sky’s rays didn’t finish you off, a million other things were waiting in line, for life had changed drastically since The Event.

  Imagine, if you will, an ant’s nest. Now set fire to that nest and set upon it God’s most rapacious creatures.

  That…that was Oilhaven.

  And in the middle of that no-named desert, in the centre of that town (twinned, unsurprisingly, with Hell; and also with Sana’a, Yemen) stood a convenience store. The only one within five-hundred miles, LOU’S LOOT was as dilapidated as the rest of the town. The only difference between his building and those surrounding it was the flickering neon light hanging above his door, powered by the battery from a dismantled Ford Cortina. Without said light, one might simply walk right past LOU’S LOOT, none the wiser, which was why he often switched it off and put his feet up…

  Lou was a portly man, something of an irregularity in a world struggling to catch and kill its next meal. If you were to ask him how he did it, he might say something along the lines of, “It’s my metabolism,” or, “Daddy was a fatty, too,” but the truth of the matter was, Lou didn’t go short of food. Concealed in the basement of his ramshackle convenience store was enough tinned goods to feed the town of Oilhaven for the next ten years, but what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them, and what they did know would most certainly hurt him, and so he kept it to himself, lest he be brutally beaten about the head and thrown to the bandits.

  Lou was also a grey, balding man, which made him look a lot older than his fifty years. One might say he had an air of Churchill about him, a soupcon of Eisenhower, but such comments were, at best, attempts at flattery. Lou Decker looked more like the late, great Australian entertainer, Clive James, than any president or prime minister. His head was perfectly round; so round, in fact, that whenever people needed to draw a circle, they asked if they could borrow it.

  One thing he had over the rest of Oilhaven – apart from the vast quantity of canned spam and asparagus beneath his establishment – was his knowledge of the old world, and the artefacts and workings of said artefacts that had survived The Event. Whenever someone salvaged goods in the desert, it was he they brought them to. When one of the ‘haveners stumbled upon a mechanical-looking thingamajig, with whatchamacallits and bobs and bits, it was Lou with the stories of how such a thing had been created, of what it could do (if only they had the right batteries). It was Lou they trusted to put the guts of the object back in – for a price, of course – and it was Lou that traded the item for food when its owner fell hungry a few weeks later.

  He was clever like that.

  His store was lined with mechanical wotsits, lengths of plastic pipe and steel tubing, with cloth and bolts and nuts of every size (in case anyone was feeling creative), with almost everything you could imagine in a post-apocalyptic wilderness. If you were to walk into LOU’S LOOT and not find what you were looking for, a quick word in his shell-like and there was a very good chance he could get it for you within twenty-eight days, including free delivery. In a world gone to hell in a hand-basket, that was quite a trick.

  Undeniably Lou’s bestselling items, though, were his sex toys. Men and women no longer fornicated, at least not in the old sense of the word. Perhaps it had something to do with the heat, or the grime perpetually painted upon one’s person, which was terribly off-putting to the opposite sex. Maybe people had simply forgotten how it went. You put that thing in this thing and repeat until beset with tingliness. How hard was that? The ‘haveners, it seemed, would rather not bother, and it was there that Lou made the majority of his money.

  He had toys of all shapes and sizes. Some were even returnable if they didn’t fit, but only if the purchaser had retained the receipt – in most cases, a small slip of parchment with the item’s description scratched into it.

  Oh, yes, LOU’S LOOT was doing quite well, considering the unfortunate circumstances. News had filtered through shortly after The Event that most retailers had burnt to the ground, or exploded as a result of such an apocalyptic blast. Those that hadn’t perished in The Event had been looted to within an inch of their lives in the following weeks. But LOU’S had survived, due mainly to the fact that out there, in the middle of nowhere, it was awfully difficult to assemble an army of plunderers without people becoming suspicious.

  It was even harder to order the necessary ski-masks to complete the job, since Lou was the only man capable of attaining such scarce objects, and he wasn’t born yesterday…

  “Morning,” said a voice.

  Now Lou was clever enough to know that the voice belonged to the gangly man that had just walked into his store, since there was no-one else around. He had the look of a spider about him. An incredibly ugly spider, with holes where there should have been teeth and an empty socket where there should have been an eye. The one eye he did have darted around the place, as if following a rather excited fly.

  “Good morning,” Lou said, which was the done thing when welcoming a potential customer pre-noon. He placed his mug down on the counter – chai, for anyone interested – and
pushed his not-so-small-frame up from the rat-eaten armchair he called home. “Welcome to LOU’S LOOT, where we have everything you need, providing you don’t need weapons, ammo, posh nosh, thrush cream, soap, or toothpaste.” It was his usual spiel, and each of the ‘haveners must have heard it thousands of time by now, but this guy…

  This guy didn’t look like a ‘havener. Lou certainly didn’t recognise him, not that that meant anything. Out here, people changed from day to day. Beards were grown and shaved overnight (and that was just the women). One minute you could be feeling exceptionally good about yourself, the next you were gaunter than Karen Carpenter during Lent. Wrinkles had the propensity to appear from nowhere, and when you least expected them to. There were three children in Oilhaven (not everyone had forgotten how to make sex, but these three had been the result of unsuccessful withdraw methods) and each of them bore wrinkles upon their faces. It was the sun, you see. The sun…and the amount of frowning that people did.

  The man – if indeed that’s what he was, for his spiderlike affectations could not be underestimated – wandered up and down the aisles, occasionally picking things up before replacing them just as quickly.

  Lou could see where this was heading, and he didn’t like it, not one bit, uh-huh, not today, thank you very much…

  “Is there something you’re looking for in particular?” Lou said, slapping a clay-and-latex vagina down on the counter. “This is Susie. Susie, say hello to Mr…?”

  The man glanced down at the object and grimaced. “She doesn’t look clean,” he said, dipping his head to take a better look at her innards.

  Lou was annoyed at the man’s reluctance to impart his name, but tried not to show it. “She’s cleaner than any walking around out there,” Lou said. “I can give her a quick spit-polish, if you’re worried about catching something, but I can assure you—”

  “I’m not interested in your carnal contraptions,” the man said, pulling from his waistband what appeared to be a very large knife. Yes, so large was this knife that Lou could see his entire face in it, and what an annoyed, round face it was, too… “Tobacco,” he grunted. “All of it. And alcohol, and don’t try to fob me off with that piss-water you fools drink around here. I want the good stuff. The golden stuff. The stuff that makes you go ‘eeeehhhhhhrrrrrr’ as it slips down your throat.”

  The knife, Lou noticed, was trembling in the man’s hand. His long, slender fingers dripped with sweat; the hairs upon his knuckles swayed back and forth, as if the store had suddenly become electrically charged, which was impossible, since electricity was a thing of the past, deader than disco and dodos combined.

  “You don’t have to do this, son,” Lou said, calm as you like. This wasn’t his first run-in with a bandit, and it sure as hell wouldn’t be his last. Or maybe it would. That knife was awfully sharp. He tried not to think about it.

  “Just put everything on the counter,” the arachnoid bandit said, slicing the air in front of Lou’s face with his blade. “And no fucking funny business. I’ve had a really bad morning; it will mean nothing to me to kill you.”

  And Lou saw that he was telling the truth. This was a boy having an absolute shocker of a day, and it was only going to get worse.

  “There is no tobacco here,” Lou said. There was no sense in telling the bandit about the crate of woodbine at the foot of his basement stairs. No, no sense at all. “And when was the last time anyone heard of the golden liquid of which you speak? I assume you’re referring to Whiskey?”

  The bandit nodded frantically. “Yes! Whiskey! That’s the one. Put it all on the counter, along with the tobacco, and I promise you won’t get stabbed in the face.”

  Lou sighed, for it seemed like an appropriate time to do so. “Let me put it another way,” he said, pushing the shaking knifepoint to the side ever-so-slightly, lest his nose be punctured. “There be no whiskey here. There be no baccy here. These things are gone forever. If you like, I know a very good addiction counsellor, though he might not be able to do anything about your apparent mental instabilities.”

  The spiderlike crook visibly shrank, which was good news as far as Lou was concerned, for he was a lanky bastard. “You must have something for me to steal,” he said. “What about guns? Do you have guns, and ammo?”

  “Did you not hear my little patter as you came in?” Lou said. “The Vatican has more guns than me. Feel free to try there, but for now, I suggest you run very fast in any direction.” And with that, Lou straightened up to reveal a pair of pistols. Very nice pistols they were, too, with filigreed barrels and wooden grips. Once upon a time, they might have cost a bob or two, but now…well now they were absolutely priceless.

  The bandit glared down at the pistols, incredulous. “I thought you said you didn’t have any guns,” he said, tucking the knife back from whence it came. The colour had drained from him, which only served to make the dirt on his face stand out even more.

  “Don’t believe a word I say,” Lou said. “Other than this: I will shoot you in the kneecaps and feed you to my dying mother if you don’t piss off, right now.”

  And piss off the bandit did, running from the store so rattled that it would take Lou several hours to get the stench out of the air.

  “Fucking bandits,” Lou said, lighting a cigarette and holstering his pistols. Pistols that hadn’t been fired in over a decade. To the faux pussy sitting atop the counter, he said, “Looks like it’s just you and me again.”

  He picked her up.

  He closed up the store and took her through to the back room, where sweet love was to be made.

  2

  In an office one street over from LOU’S, a suited man sucked languidly on a cigar. The room was drenched in a grey-blue fug; you could hardly see the tropical aquarium that made up one wall of the office. Inside the aquarium, the fish moseyed back and forth, espying the smoking man with no small amount of suspicion, for he was the type of fella one was best keeping an eye on, fish or not…

  Kellerman was his name, and mayor-ing was his game. While the rest of the world had fallen apart, leaving the majority of The Event’s survivors crying into their now-dusty cornflakes, Kellerman had sensed an opportunity. He’d always fancied himself an authoritative figure, and so he had wasted no time in seizing control of Oilhaven. It didn’t take long – three days, give or take a few hours – as most people were too busy coming to terms with the apocalypse to notice him slip into office. By the time they did notice, it was far too late. Kellerman was mayor.

  He had the suit and the cigars to prove it.

  A good mayor? An honest mayor with the people’s best interests at the forefront of his agenda? Not on your nelly. Kellerman was a rogue, the kind of guy that, if he was in a James Bond movie, would have a British accent and stroke a fluffy, white pussy. The suit he now wore had been torn from the back of an investment banker less than an hour after The Event. He would have had the shirt, as well, had it not been plastered in blood and viscera. The cigars he now smoked had been procured from the back of a fleeing Mexican’s Prius the day immediately following The Event, and the Mexican buried in the desert, where by now he would be nothing but bones, a torn and bloodied sombrero and, perhaps, a moustache.

  Oh, Kellerman was a scoundrel of the highest order, but that, he thought, was what Oilhaven needed. You couldn’t just put any blockhead in charge of a surviving municipality; you needed someone with a little oomph, a little – how did it go? – va va voom…Someone not afraid of making the important decisions, such as ‘should I shoot him in the kneecaps or the spine?’.

  The people of Oilhaven knew where they stood with Kellerman; usually as far away as possible. While many of them disagreed with his policies on taxation (‘you give me three quarters of what you make, and I won’t pick-axe you in the nethers’) and his ability to make people disappear (and not in a cute David Blaine-Dynamo-David Copperfield way), they knew better than to rebel, lest they find themselves with a hole in the head or waking up in the desert next to a ciga
rless Mexican.

  A knock upon the door startled Kellerman, who had been partaking in a staring-match with one of his more courageous angelfish. “Come in,” he said, blinking tears away before resuming the battle.

  Two burly men entered, which was fine as he knew them both very well and had been anticipating their arrival. If Kellerman was the head honcho – and he most certainly was – then Smalling and Harkness were his footsoldiers. As ugly as they were big, Smalling and Harkness (never Harkness and Smalling! Oh, no, that would never do) bore more scars per square inch than most burn victims. The bits that weren’t scarred were tattooed, and some of the tattooed bits had since become scarred. Both men were bald, and neither of them had ever considered wearing a toupee, such was the stigma that came with it.

  “Give me a second,” Kellerman said, lifting a hand to his subordinates. The angelfish was really going for it now, and there was no way Kellerman was backing down. If he lost…well, the fish would be supper, but then all the other fish would start getting cocky, and the last thing he needed was an aquarium on the brink of revolution.

  Smalling shrugged at Harkness, who arched his eyebrows in response. They would wait, and as it turned out, they didn’t have to wait long as the angelfish finally gave up the ghost and swam under a rock.

  “Ha!” Kellerman said, clapping his hands enthusiastically. “Did you see that? Fucking fish has been giving me evils all morning!”

  “You sure showed him, boss,” Smalling said, tapping at the aquarium’s glass frontage with a stumpy, grimy finger. There was a childlike innocence about his expression, as if he’d never seen a fish before, or indeed one so embarrassed that it had hidden itself away from the rest of the tank in fear of derision.

  Kellerman whizzed across the room on his castor-wheeled chair, landing almost perfectly behind his desk. He had to drag himself the last few inches, but you couldn’t nail it every time. “I take it you’ve brought me some money,” he said, rubbing his hands together so fervently that something sparked.