Lodestone TLR-99

The final holdout

The Holdout was about the only place in the Crater - what used to be the Sunnr-Kerlaugar border fortification - that anybody could agree was worth being in. It was the mother of all seedy bars, outwardly, but by some miracle, they'd always have fresh goods to eat, drink, or be merry. Not bad for being built into a repurposed bomb shelter briefing room.

Nobody quite knows who started the tradition, but each of the seats at the bar was named after the person who sat there when it was a conference table - and what happened to them in the attack. Half the table had been carved away to make it function better as a serving space, but the chairs were still bolted to the floor. Some of them still had badges affixed to their backsides, indicating for whom it was reserved in wartime. Most people avoided sitting in the one marked "Sievertsen" - "The Banished Baron," the regulars had taken to calling it - out of superstition. Only once was that seat ever filled. Nobody had any idea who the man was that occupied it, but he had ordered one shot of honeyed mead, tipped handsomely, and vanished into the night.

In the small handful of years since the Crater had been occupied by refugees and turned into what could amount to a decent home, the Holdout was the one place that centered everyone. The regulars would take to just about anybody who walked into that door, and treat them like an old friend. That included the bartender, who would - more often than not - give out the day's supply of food for free, and one good drink on top of that. It took a brave soul to ask the bartender why he did it. "You need it to live," he'd said, "the drink especially. Maybe the stuff'll kill you eventually but it eases the tension, and most of us could do with a bit of that with what's going on."

One day, the citizens of the Crater piled into the Holdout to find that the bartender simply wasn't there. He wasn't among the crowd, nobody'd seen him leave, nobody had any idea where else he could have gone. Few people had ever seen him anywhere other than the bar. No explanation could be found. Not even the notice board had anything new on it.

One person took the initiative and stepped behind the bar, and started pouring drinks. Before anybody could question it, they handed out glasses full of whatever was on tap, then personally pulled a wad of cash out of their own pockets and shoved it into the tip jar. It was on them tonight. The first person to receive a glass followed suit, grabbing an uncounted stack from a coat pocket and slipping that into the jar. Half of the patrons left tips. Nobody drank. The person behind the bar grabbed a cocktail fork and rang one of the glasses hanging above the bar, to call for attention and silence. We may not know where things will go from here, they spoke, loudly enough to be heard across the bar, but tonight, we raise a glass to the man who made it all possible. The patrons all raised a collective huzzah.

Dedicated to Scampir, the runner of "Making up Mech Pilots" on Cohost and ultimately the inspiration to begin the Lodestone series. -ww