Final Winter

All right, there was another feeling, the one that gave him a quiet warm glow every time, especially when he was around Charlene, the former Miss Charlene Taylor, second runner-up five years ago in the Miss Virginia USA beauty pageant. For when Monty had started dating that fine specimen of Southern womanhood he had been curious about her past and had done a little checking.

He leaned into a corner, felt the way the tires just gripped that pavement, like the firm touch of a masseuse, never letting go.

Okay, a lot of checking. Monty had always been interested in genealogy and had done a lot of work here and there, trying to trace his family back, which was easy enough until you got into the latter part of the nineteenth century. Then the records became spotty at best — and for good reason, of course, because the black men and women of the South back then had been like survivors in some post-nuclear-war landscape, wandering around shellshocked, trying to scratch out an existence in what was left of the Southern economy, fighting off hunger and cold and the nightriders and the Klan. Keeping good records for a safe and prosperous future would sure as hell have been low on their ‘to do’ list.

Leaned into another corner, really picking up speed, thinking for a moment what might happen if that damn vaccination program didn’t work. What kind of life would it be for his children? Growing up a dead country, scrambling around in the looted and empty cities, hearing tales of what it had been like to be the world’s only superpower, being here and now, starving, wondering what it must have been like to live when you didn’t go to bed hungry at night, every night…

Well, fuck that shit. It wasn’t going to happen to his children.

Then Monty laughed. He knew that he shouldn’t have. But his kids — Grace and Marilyn — wouldn’t Charlene’s ancestors have dropped dead from horror at the sight of those light-brown children? For during his genealogy work on his own side of the family, he had done some investigation into her side and had found out that one of her great-great-great-grandfathers had been a prominent slaveholder and a colonel in the Army of Northern Virginia. Monty had always gotten a big-ass kick out of how that proper Southern colonel would have probably shot himself in the head at the knowledge that one of his descendants would be marrying the descendant of a piece of his property.

And as he rode, the laughter kept coming back, as it always did, loud enough to be heard over the roar of the Harley.

~ * ~

Victor Palmer walked into the store, almost sighing with pleasure as the smell of old paper and ink came to him. The store was in an otherwise unimpressive strip mall outside Greenbelt, with a Pizza Hut franchise, a Jiffy Lube franchise, a bunch of other franchises and this little store, called Pulp Planet. Sometimes when Victor came here he thought the only thing Americans were good for were setting up franchises so that a strip mall in Maine looked exactly like one in California.

He stood on the scuffed-up linoleum, looked around at the open bins set up against the walls. He walked slowly to the nearest bin, just savoring the anticipation of what lay before him. Rows and rows of old magazines in plastic sleeves were stacked in rows and he let his fingers brush over the plastic, looking at the brightly colored and lurid covers of the pulp magazines from the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s. Ah, he thought, that had been the time, back fifty and sixty years ago, when there’d been dozens of pulp-fiction magazines published each month, from westerns to men’s adventure to mystery to science fiction and fantasy. The colors were garish, the stories were often poorly written and the advertisements for becoming a ‘he-man’ or getting rid of blackheads were always hilarious. But there was an energy and spirit to the pulps that had always appealed to him, especially during the grueling days of med school and residency. For he enjoyed losing himself in the spirit of the pulps, written during the Depression and the Second World War and the opening decades of the Cold War when the stories had suggested that, no matter how grim the news, anything was possible. Anything.

Victor rummaged carefully through the magazines, look-ing for his particular favorite, Doc Savage, a pulp character that lived from 1933 to 1949. Doc was the subject of more than a hundred serialized novels, involving adventures all around the Earth, fighting crime, fighting evil, working to make the world a better place. A brilliant physician with the crime-fighting abilities of Sherlock Holmes, Doc kept his offices in the Empire State Building and had a Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic. Ridiculous stuff, Victor knew, but he loved these tales of black-and-white morality, about evil men with death rays and secret poison clouds, not with hijacked airliners and weaponized anthrax.