Flesh Guitar

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She throws open the door and walks into an end-of-the-world watering hole called the Havoc Bar and Grill, a converted research laboratory somewhere on the outer fringes of the metropolis. She is carrying a guitar. Its case looks ordinary enough. It is scuffed and well-travelled, her name — JENNY SLADE — is stencilled on the side, and it has a few old stickers for amp and effects manufacturers, but there is nothing about the case that gives any hint of what’s inside.

The bar’s decor is early post-nuclear holocaust; exposed pipes and ducting, mutilated concrete, buckled metal furniture. The customers might have been specially designed to match. The crowd is male, drunk, aggressive, misogynistic, and adolescent in mind, if not in age. They all lack a certain something: good looks, teeth, fingers, brain cells. Undifferentiated hostility hangs over them like a cloud of swamp gas. Behind the bar a waif-like barmaid does her best to keep the rabble in check, at least while they’re ordering their drinks. The badge on her white T-shirt says she’s called Kate.

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