Free Hard-Boiled Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles) by Gene Doucette Page A

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