‘A cup of coffee—what it means in these final days, for those few who wish to wake.’

‘So few are these, so many are those who seek the everlasting silence—or so they suppose, not knowng what abyss of endless cacaphony yawns for those temporaries who deny Eternity.’

So Enio mused, as he swirled his second cup, observing the other patron of what had become Martitta’s Cafe. She had been merely the server. Then Costin died of diabetic shock—his nephew Jose of looting, died at the door tryng to protect the last of the corned beef and eggs.

An image of brave Jose, slightly built, bald and with the smile of a diplomat, being stomped into the doorframe, livened and then darkned, Enio’s mind’s eye.

‘My friend, you chose well. Your sacrifice brought down the last of the justice this wicked world has dispensed on Our Beautiful Way.’

The coffee they left, the tweakers who now resided at the airport, which they had happily taken over after the last flights left no more planes in the valley, what was once a sunny valley, eased the languid anxiety that now budded with the dawning day.

‘How did some of the planes fly, take off, while others dropped out of the sky, those boarding unworried, asured!’

Ben, old gray, now bearded, shivering in his white bathrobe and slippers, was over there at the counter experimenting with the powdered coffee creamer gotten from the hotel down the street.

There was pretty Martitta, once beautiful at a sweet sixteen party, he was sure, now thin, lines drawn by sorrow down her face, pacing by the door with the a coffee mug in her hand, hoping, it was clear, for a new customer in this almost dead city, to bring in a waft of fresh air.

Enio was a deeply devote Christian, knew that this was the End Time. But, he did not trust Preacher, not at all, keeping people out on their knees and preaching against, among other things, coffee.

Liquor, shoot, that had been long gone. The first day of the Net Crash everything—everything—exxept for coffee, had been looted.

‘How does it feel now, you tweaker idiots, waking from your drunk with no coffee?’

So Enio indicted the fiends that had stomped the life out of one of his last patients before him, Jose, a kind man with vertigo, from—Enio had diagnosed—being born to a Vaxx Mother, a woman whose very divine code had been tampered with by their earthly shepherds.

The cup shook In her delicate hand as she looked left, towards the new city.

She stammered, said nothing, made little foot steps that weant nowhere, seemed to think of something, and her little white sneakers pranced. Enio noted her legs were too thin to fill out her jeans—recalling that she had been on coffee alone for weeks, long before the canned food had run out. She had said she was watching her figure in case Prince Charming rode up on his white horse. He knew better.

‘I am sure, my dear, that you lost a child once, and what is left of us must your mother mind make due.’

She was wearing a blue down coat, left by one of those women who had been among the first to be dragged away in the general chaos. People had been vacationing from somewhere when the cartel men came and took the women, simply brushing aside their men like nothing. Martitta, not as tall, as fair, as blond, as young, bowed her head, served the invaders a good brekfast as Jose answered questions about tweaker dispositions. The coming Cartel/Tweaker war did not, it seemed, occur. They had sat and listened for gunshots from the airport—silence had reigned in a weird, haunting song, the song of birds.

The da after the woman taking, songbirds of a type Enio had never heard in this valley, some that even sang, “Birdie, birdie, birdie,” had descended en masse on the Valley. He could still hear their song in his mind’s eye as he saw her spin, prance some more, and return to the coffee station to grab another cup.

The birds, except for the gulls and crows, were no gone.

‘Two visitors, aye, my sad-eyed darling.’

Ben still stirred his coffee, as yet undrinking of the mornings experiment in consistencey, color and whatever other asthetics haunted the mind behind those hollow eyes.

She pranced, jumped little skip rope jumps like a little girl, squeeled, “Awee,” and skipped over to the dutch oven turned coffee pot and ladled out two steaming cups of coffee.

By the time she had turned to face the door, Officer Brian, looking like a ghost, meaning that he had not been hugged or acknowledged by his stolen daughter, walked over the threashold… followed by.

How does one categorize HOPE in human form, when it appears as a bodyarmored version of a military train conductor, in Battle Prosthetics, sentient, plastic gargoyles upon his jacket shoulders, inferead smart opticals—everything that had driven Enio from medical practice: automation, transhumanism, Man become god…

‘Oh, and a one-headed, blue puddle Cerebus! What a hideous, four-legged fright!’

Yet, the man smiled softly—for there was a man in there, not a young one—and he smiled upon Martitta, not with the dismisal of the cartel men looking only for flesh, but in a fatherly way.

‘I like you, friend, entombed in your master’s armor that you are.’

Martitta was serving coffee, the men yet standing, the dog bot standing guard at the open door peering about like a periscope of judgement, as the rehab nurse of their broken hopes, chirped like a little girl on Christmas Morning, “Brian, Conductor, welcome! Meet Enio, our doctor,” to which Enio raised his cup, “and Ben, our guest and creamery operator.”

They all looked at Ben mixing his coffee and powdered creamer and tasting.

“Is it right, Ben?” Enio asked, as Martitta grinned at the the building conversation.

Ben gave the thumbs up and Martiita siezed the two cups she had dispensed and brought them to Ben, who, meticulously reproduced his cafe lab experiment. Enio stood and walked over to Martitta and handed his cup over, “I’ll have the approved version, as well, Our Dear.”

She smiled up into his eyes, a glistening beginning there, a fear, he could tell, that if she left—for the cadence of the government man was clear, that she was being evacuated—that Enio and Ben would be lost.

He cried, could not believe that he creied then, like that, something he had not done in some thirty years, “Our Dear, Martitta, Ben and I will be forever glad in the thought that you made it to Refuge. We can take it from here—the coffee has been perfected, has it not, Ben?”

Ben raised his thumb and grinned, he was crying also, silent, dripping tears, not running down the crags of his weathered face, but dripping from that blotched gnarl of nose into the matted beard.

Her nose twitched and she took his cup, hugging him, then announced, “We will all sit at one table—Ben, you too. Enio, Brian, please, slide over that little one,” pointing from the last two-person table to the first diner table.

Within, perhaps 45 seconds, as much time as it took for the net to crash, planes to fall out of the sky and cars to decelerate and die, a table was set. Martitta sat next to Enio and across from Ben. Enio sat across from sad-eyed Brian, who he could tell was not leaving them for more duty, that he was sadly, as the hipsters had once said, ‘Done.’

At the head of the table sat the Conductor, awkward, obviously glad for the company, more obviosuly haunted by multiple failures in past life duties. His manner spoke of a chance at redemtion… through sacrifice. Enio knew that this man was committing a last act, had seen it so many times.

‘Let the man off his hook, Nacho.’ spoke his inner comic.

“Conductor, Maritta has no outstanding medical condition, is in perfect health, though she could use some body fat. She is perfectly fit for Refuge.”

That word, REFUGE, they had for weeks been so fearful of mentioning, as if the word might banish the possibility. The rich had been slinking away in planes, trains and even tractor trailers for months before The Crash. It had all been a government plan. The least they could do was send back this man.

Enio and the Conductor read concord in each other’s eyes. He fealt a hint of giving away his daught to marry that lazy prick—yet it felt good, betetr than that had.

They smiled, smiled with serious resolve over her black wavy -haired head, and he agreed in words with what he saw in those medical eyes, ‘It is a return of sorts, to a better time, when we did not spend years squabbling over what was best.’

Five coffee cups, and Ben’s one good, gnarled thumb, rose to toast that parting notion.