Hard-Boiled Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles)

The Immortal Chronicles: Hard-Boiled Immortal
is one of an ongoing series of short stories written by Adam, the immortal narrator of
Immortal
and
Hellenic Immortal
.  Look for more from Adam in future
Chronicle
stories, and get ready for the third book—
Immortal at the Edge of the World
—coming in October, 2014.

The Immortal Chronicles: Immortal At Sea (volume 1)

Adam's adventures on the high seas have taken him from the Mediterranean to the Barbary Coast, and if there's one thing he learned, it's that maybe the sea is trying to tell him to stay on dry land.

The Immortal Chronicles: Hard-Boiled Immortal (volume 2)

The year was 1942, there was a war on, and Adam was having a lot of trouble avoiding the attention of some important people.
The kind of people with guns, and ways to make a fella disappear. He was caught somewhere between the mob and the government, and the only way out involved a red-haired dame he was pretty sure he couldn't trust.

The Immortal Chronicles: Immortal and the Madman (volume 3)

On a nice quiet trip to the English countryside to cope with the likelihood that he has gone a little insane, Adam meets a man who definitely has.  The madman’s name is John Corrigan, and he is convinced he’s going to die soon.

He could be right.  Because there’s trouble coming, and unless Adam can get his own head together in time, they may die together.

Hard-Boiled Immortal

I knew she was bad news the minute she walked into the bar. 

She was a redhead.  I
always had a thing for redheads.  One in particular, actually.  She was dead, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t holding my breath for a second or two every time I saw another girl with red hair. 

This
one was very much alive, and once she walked in she was also the life of the room.   Men I’d been serving drinks to for years, who smiled so little if you told me they had no teeth I would’ve believed it, lit up like a kid meeting the world’s cutest bunny.

The girl’s name was Lucy and she
was there to see a buddy of mine, who we’ll call Al.  That wasn’t his name, but Al turned out to be kind of important, and this story is kind of embarrassing for him, so even though he’s not around any more let’s stick with Al.

The redhead was either going to get him killed, or
she was going to get me killed.  I could tell right away.  Call it gut instinct if you want, but I’m alive today because I know what bad news looks like as soon as I see it.

Also, she was a succubus.

*   *   *

The year was 1942, and there was a war going on.

I don’t like wars.  I try to stay out of them whenever I can, and I give that same advice to other people as often as possible. I’ve even introduced myself that way a couple of times: hi, I’m whatever-my-name-is-in-this-era, nice to meet you and stay out of wars.

The people who most need to hear this advice almost
never do.

Sometimes it’s impossible to stay out of
a war, though, and there are a couple of reasons for that.  For one thing, there have been so many it’s almost impossible to move around without stumbling across one from time to time.  It’s hard to appreciate—from a modern perspective—how very often war broke out, especially if you were trying to make a living anywhere in Europe or Asia.  I’m pretty sure whoever said war was politics by other means had it exactly backwards.

Another reason it’s sometimes impossible to stay out of war is
every now and then the war is too big to stay out of.  Like when they started calling them “world wars.”  This is not to say there were places in the world unaffected by the first or second Big One, just that it was hard to get to those places, and it was difficult to know where those places might be in advance of the actual wars.

Chicago wasn’t such a place.  I’d been in
the Windy City on and off for twenty years, mostly because it was a decent place to drink.  That was especially true during Prohibition, when you needed a city that was big enough and mean enough to support a decent collection of speakeasies if you wanted to get drunk in America and you weren’t a Kennedy or a Capone.  You’re welcome to ponder the merits of trying to get drunk in the States when the States clearly preferred it if everyone got drunk elsewhere, and to be honest I don’t know why I stayed either.  Maybe I just didn’t have the energy to move somewhere else.

Or it m
ight have been that I stayed in Chicago because I had lost something there.  The last time I saw the aforementioned redhead—the apparently dead one—she’d been on the far end of a dance floor in an illegal establishment that burned to the ground about ten minutes later. That was how I had arrived at the conclusion that she was no longer alive.  It was a shame, because I’d only been looking for her for about ten thousand years, and you hate to see that sort of perseverance go to waste.

So I may have
stuck around in Chicago as long as I did to see if I was wrong.  Sure, I was pretty positive she didn’t make it out of that fire, but I never saw a body.  Plus, it was a great excuse to spend all my spare time checking out redheads and hanging out in clubs.

B
ut by ’42 I’d had enough of the wild life and had settled down into a monogamous relationship with a bar called Jimmy’s.  Jimmy was an old prick of a guy, connected, but in a kind of polite way.  He mostly used his family name when he wanted to make someone nervous about their bar tab, but that was about it.  So he was a prick, but a pretty honest one.

Jimmy needed a night guy for his bar, someone who could close up whenever the last drunk weaved out the door, no matter what time that was.  I could bartend well enough to pour
booze, and as long as he didn’t mind if I drank on the job, everything was good.  There was even a little space in the back where I slept after closing on nights when I didn’t get an invitation to sleep elsewhere.  No shower, but there was a sink in the back and a Y up the street.

It was a sweet little arrangement for a guy who’d just as soon sleep in a bar anyway and didn’t harbor any particular ambitions beyond that, which described my entire existence for pretty much the last three quarters of the twentieth century. 

*   *   *

It was at Jimm
y’s that I made friends with Al, a mostly forgettable guy except that the stuff in his head was the kind of stuff you never end up forgetting even if you want to.

Al worked at the University of Chicago, but it wasn’t really clear if he worked
for
the university, based on some of the things he talked about after he’d had a few.  Like “unlimited free energy”, which is what he used to shout after about five or six beers, sometimes toasting the ceiling.  For the longest time nobody understood what he meant, because he never filled in the details, so we figured maybe he was talking about a new brand of coffee.

It bugged me enough to ask him what he meant by it, but most nights he’d just shake his head and say he couldn’t possibly explain.

My concern
—because I’d heard this kind of talk before—was someone had sold him on a perpetual motion machine.  I’d invested money in enough of those to know to stay away.  Not that Al was someone I’d peg as a sucker for that sort of scheme.  He was a chubby little prematurely balding guy that wore the kind of thick round glasses that made you think he was intelligent.  And he was.  Sure, I’d never seen him wear a suit that fit properly, he had a weird barking laugh and bad breath, and overall came across as a real goof.  But when you talked to him and saw his eyes light up, you realized he looked that way and dressed that way because he was too busy thinking about things nobody had ever thought of before to worry about anything else.

One night he made his usual toast to unlimited energy, and I asked him as I always did what he was going on about,
and for whatever reason—maybe he’d had just the right number of beers, or maybe he just couldn’t keep it to himself any longer—he answered the question.

“Atomic power, Rocky,” he said.
  “That’s what I’m talking about.” 

Rocky was the name I was using. 
It made more sense in the Twenties, I’ll be honest.

“Atomic,” I repeated back.  “Like with the atom?”

“I know a fella named Adam,” said the slightly less drunk guy sitting next to Al.  His name was Federico, and he wasn’t talking about me, he was talking about another Adam.  I hadn’t started using the name yet.

“Not Adam, Freddie,” Al said.

“I get you,” I said.  “Atom.  The building block of matter.”

Al laughed.  “Yes, yes, if you are Democritus that would be correct.”

I actually knew Democritus, but I wasn’t going to come out and say that.  I first heard the word—and the idea—of the atom from Democritus’s own lips.  I might have even been standing next to him when he invented the concept, I couldn’t remember.  There was lots of wine involved.

“So, atoms
aren’t
the building block of matter, you’re saying.”

“Blocks, you mean l
ike bricks?” Federico offered.  “Hey everyone, Al figured out how to get energy out of bricks!”

“What, is he eating ‘
em?” Someone shouted from the other end of the room.  Everyone laughed.

Let me ba
ck up and set the scene, because they don’t make many places like Jimmy’s any more.  This was a poorly lit dive bar that was just about exactly as seedy as possible in a time before enforced health inspections and fire codes.  The permanent cloud of smoke that hung over the room was so thick the bare bulb light fixtures had almost no chance.  There was sawdust on the floor that was mostly there so nobody slipped on spilled drinks, the walls were too thin to keep the cold from the winters out, and there were nights when the rats outnumbered the people.  Most importantly—and this was sort of nice—pretty much everybody there knew everybody else there at least well enough to borrow money from and call an asshole when such a thing was necessary.

The general feeling about Al
, among the patrons, was that he was a decent guy.  Maybe a little weird, and not the person you want next to you in a fight, but decent.  And clearly he was the smartest guy there.  This commanded a kind of respect that kept him out of most of the fisticuffs that might be considered ordinary in this sort of setting.  And if it didn’t—if someone decided to give him some trouble—
I’d
get involved, and by this time everyone there had a decent sense that it was a bad idea to get me involved.  I commanded respect too, but a different kind.

“I am
not
eating bricks, thank you!” Al said, in response to what was some good-natured ribbing.  “All right, all right, I will explain.”

“Everybody shut up,” Freddie said, “he’s gonna explain.”

“But all of you have to keep this under your hats because it’s important but it is also secret.”

There was a collective
ooooooh
from the room.  Nobody there could think of any reason a guy who worked at the university would need to keep secrets, important or otherwise, but because this was the most interesting thing going on that night—nobody was loudly mad at their wife or had a beef with a local boxer, a horse, or a sports team—we tried to humor him.  Sure, the war could pop up again as a topic of conversation at any time, but it was the topic everywhere, so nobody really wanted to bring it up if they didn’t have to.  Sometimes they
did
have to.  Sometimes someone’s kid was in a bad place and we had to talk about it.

But this night was for atoms and how to break them.

It’s pretty much impossible to explain even a simple thing to a barroom of drunk laborers, so Al didn’t have an easy time of it.  The average education level in the place—once you took Al out—was somewhere short of high school, and I’m not even counting me.  I never went to school of any kind, but I got extra credit for being around when everything they taught in schools was invented.