The Devil's Bargain: Part Two of Avery Cates: The Burning City

by Jeff Somers

Avery Cates has a problem. In a shrinking, sterile world, the Archangel is marching his army to Castelvecchio, and Cates has the information he needs to access the last remnants of the awesome technology of the despise System. He’s made his Devil’s Bargain with Lucinda Barowel, and now he knows the In order to get to the machinery of war left behind at Cochtopa, he’s going to need a boat—and guns. His ersatz army is quickly running out of ammunition in a world where the factories stopped working long ago. When he learns that a local criminal has been hoarding guns and ammo as insurance against the coming apocalypse, Cates heads off to make a deal. And if he can’t make a deal, he’ll have to use every last resource he has left to secure that weaponry for himself—and hope his bargain with Barowel doesn’t come back to bite him in the ass.

Genres: Post Apocalyptic

38 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 15, 2019

About the author

Jeff Somers (www.jeffreysomers.com) began writing by court order as an attempt to steer his creative impulses away from engineering genetic grotesqueries. He has published nine novels, including the Avery Cates Series of noir-science fiction novels from Orbit Books (www.avery-cates.com) and the Ustari Cycle series of urban fantasy novels. His short story “Ringing the Changes” was selected for inclusion in Best American Mystery Stories 2006, his story “Sift, Almost Invisible, Through” appeared in the anthology Crimes by Moonlight edited by Charlaine Harris, and his story “Three Cups of Tea” appeared in the anthology Hanzai Japan. He also writes about books for Barnes and Noble and About.com and about the craft of writing for Writer’s Digest, which will publish his book on the craft of writing Writing Without Rules in 2018. He lives in Hoboken with his wife, The Duchess, and their cats. He considers pants to always be optional.

Reviews

[Peter Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

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Jeff Somer's Avery Cates lives in a rough, weird reality. Cates started as a "gunner" - a gun for hire - who had climbed the greasy pole of the criminal underworld of New York to the top when society imploded. In his youth, things were easy: the Federated Systems ruled the world and kept its foot on the neck of the underclass. Then the Federated Systems had kind of a civil war that involved uploading human minds and radically depopulating the planet until nothing was left except some scattered populations fighting for the last remaining treasures of the dead civilization.

Cates improbably survived the whole thing, while even more improbably being involved in key moments of the downfall. Now, he is older, with aches and pains, and he is now back in charge, this time of a city-state that is about to be placed under siege.

He needs weapons and he knows where to get those weapons.

This is a very short story. It is, perhaps, slightly longer than a short story. Somers is writing his next novel in installment, which he is putting on the market when he completes an installment. This makes for some choppiness in plot development. For example, I think I've missed some of the earlier instalments and I need to go back and reconstruct the sequence.

Nonetheless, I think it's worthwhile. I enjoy the Cates' character and I would like to get an answer to the question of "what happened to the world?"