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    All the Retros at the New Cotton Club
    All the Retros at the New Cotton Club
    All the Retros at the New Cotton Club
    Ebook54 pages44 minutes

    All the Retros at the New Cotton Club

    By DeAnna Knippling

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    About this ebook

    Bernice had a good life with Bobby. She mighta been the second wife but to him she was number one. Then he died of cancer--something that not even the modern docs who could treat a ninety-year-old man to look like he was twenty-five again could cure.

    Most of the money went to his kids. She'd get a house and enough to live really good on if she hosted an illegal copy of his A.I. for three years--his "ghost." 

    It was almost like having him back. They could go to underground clubs and hang out with the other A.I.s who were slumming it with the living. She could see him, talk to him, feel his touch--

    And hide him from the people who were lookin' for him. And who mighta just found out where he was hidden...

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWonderland Press
    Release dateDec 22, 2016
    ISBN9781386736561
    All the Retros at the New Cotton Club
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    Author

    DeAnna Knippling

    DeAnna Knippling writes darkly twisty tales that blend myth, history, current events, and the weird and macabre. Her novels The House Without a Summer, The Clockwork Alice, and The House of Masks explore haunted pasts, current nightmares, and future possibilities, in rich and atmospheric detail. A fan of vintage pulp, gothic horror, sharp-minded mysteries, and reality-spanning SF, she crafts mind-bending tales that linger long after you put the book down. Find more of her work at www.WonderlandPress.com.

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      All the Retros at the New Cotton Club - DeAnna Knippling

      Copyright Information

      All the Retros at the New Cotton Club

      Copyright © 2016 by DeAnna Knippling

      Cover design copyright © 2016 by DeAnna Knippling

      Interior design copyright © 2016 by DeAnna Knippling

      Published by Wonderland Press

      All rights reserved. This books, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the author. Discover more by this author at www.Wonderlandpress.com.

      All the Retros at the New Cotton Club

      The top of the bar was solid Brazilian mahogany, the kind that looks like it’s made out of bourbon-colored smoke. The wood underneath the projected illusions of the New Cotton Club was real but it was the far less expensive oak.

      The dame at the bar looked vaguely familiar, like Charlie had seen her before but never at the bar—like it had been a while. He slid her a gin rickey in an Old Fashioned glass and she rolled him a virtual coin across the bar for a tip. He closed his hand around it and made it disappear. She started stirring the ice cubes in her Old Fashioned glass with the tip of her finger. She had the whole getup on—Marcel wave, cigarette in a long black holder, and a black-and-gold striped dress that ended at her knees in black fringe. Voices chattered and forks rattled on china plates. On the stage at the other end of the hall a trumpet player in a penguin suit was using a tinny mute at the end of his horn to good effect. The trombone and clarinet players were trying to keep up.

      Out of the corners of Charlie’s eyes the room looked like it was swirling with smoke, but it was just the rendering overlay. Tonight there was a heavy retro presence in the room and it was causing the servers some headaches. Over the last hour there had been about a hundred minor virus warnings. Somebody was infected. The system was trying to track down the source but it seemed to be coming from every direction. At any rate, some of the finer details up around the ceiling looked cheap and misty but otherwise there was no sign of the heavy server load. The floor was packed and the balconies were filled to the brim. A quick glance showed that the other bartenders were in the weeds but not so bad that they needed to break character. Just another Friday night at the club.

      Later, when the diners finished eating and the amateurs left for the night, they’d clear a space in the center of the room for dancing. Miss Alice and the rest of the swing band would come up on stage and dancers doing the Charleston would take over.

      Charlie mixed up a tray of cocktails for one of Dolores’s tables: a Mary Pickford, a Corpse Reviver, a retro Hanky Panky, and a bourbon on the rocks. Whoever ordered the bourbon was going to regret it. The stuff was authentically terrible. It didn’t contain anything that could kill you like it could have in Prohibition times—then as now, bad for business—but it was about as tasty as drinking an ashtray.

      The dame at the bar said, Charlie, I’m in trouble.

      He didn’t know her; it was just that all the bartenders were called Charlie at the New cotton. He just happened to be Charlie off-duty as well as on.

      Yes, miss?

      Bad trouble.

      Anything we can do to help?

      I don’t know, Charlie, can you do anything about ghosts?

      Saying that word, here at the New Cotton Club, could be touchy. Some people liked to call the virtual presence of A.I.s ghosts. Some people liked to be rude. The more acceptable term

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