The bell over the pharmacy door chimed—a thin, tired sound that didn’t quite finish its own ring.

  The man who stepped inside looked like he’d almost turned around twice before finally coming in. He lingered near the counter, wringing a folded prescription between his fingers like some kind of stress ball, the paper getting soft like tissue.

  The receptionist—late twenties, hair pulled back in a tight bun—finished typing on her old terminal before looking up. The screen cast a sickly blue light over her face.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, voice flat but not unkind.

  He gave a jittery half-smile. “I’m looking for… uh… Solazapin. The long-acting one.”

  She nodded. “Do you have a prescription?”

  “Yes,” he whispered, then leaned in, eyes flicking toward the door as if someone might be listening from outside. “But, uh… I don’t have enough stamps to pay; I hear you’ll also take U.S. dollars here. Is that—”

  He didn’t finish.

  The receptionist’s face drained. Her mouth opened, then closed. Her chair creaked.

  A deep voice behind him answered instead.

  “Well now,” it drawled, slow and syrup-thick. “That’s the problem, ain’t it?”

  The stranger turned.

  At the back of the waiting area stood a man in his late fifties—clean denim shirt tucked into pressed khakis, polished boots, silver hair cropped tight. He held a bag of peanuts in one hand, cracking shells one-handed and dropping the nuts into his mouth. Shell fragments rattled softly against the paper bag. His presence filled the room like rising heat—CRUNCH, CRUNCH, in time with the motion of his chiseled jaw.

  “Name’s Noah Calhoun,” he said, stepping forward with a practiced smile. “Folks around here call me the Mayer.”

  He extended a hand.

  The stranger’s eyes widened. He stepped back instead of forward and raised his hand in a gesture that looked more like self-defense than a greeting.

  Noah grasped and shook the man’s weakly suspended hand nonetheless, with good cheer, as he smiled.

  “Now, rules are rules,” he went on. “And the rules say I’m supposed to ask why, on God’s green earth, you’re offerin’ greenbacks in this town. Hmm?”

  The stranger’s gaze darted left, then right.

  Two men rose from their chairs in the waiting area—broad-shouldered, calm-faced. They didn’t rush. They just stood, ready. The room suddenly felt smaller.

  The stranger swallowed. Hard.

  “I need the medicine,” he choked. “Please. I need it.”

  “For who?” Noah asked. “Let me guess. Dying mother? Ailing wife?”

  “Da… daughter,” the man whispered.

  “Daughter,” Noah repeated. The word softened at the edges. “Knew it’d be somethin’ tender.” He cracked another shell, tossed a nut into his mouth. “Well now. I sympathize. Truly.”

  He wiped salt-dusted fingers on his slacks. “But you know greenbacks got consequences. Every U.S. dollar spent props up the system that’s been bleedin’ us dry.”

  “It’s… it’s only medicine,” the stranger stammered.

  “Only medicine?” Noah said. “This ain’t aspirin. This is some damn expensive medicine.”

  “It’s not a big deal…” the stranger tried. “Just this once.”

  “You couldn’t use local currency? Couldn’t trade some of your stuff for stamps?” Noah asked.

  “I didn’t… didn’t have enough,” the stranger stammered.

  Noah watched him for a long second, weighing him. Then he stepped to the counter, patted the man on the shoulder, and spilled some peanuts onto the laminate countertop. He hunched over, moving them around with one finger.

  “Let me explain somethin’ to you.”

  He lined up ten nuts. “One, two, three…” He slid five to one side. “One, two…” He slid five to the other.

  “Ten peanuts,” he said, glancing up. “Let’s pretend all the food in the world is these ten nuts. You followin’?”

  The stranger nodded warily. A bead of sweat tracked down near his temple.

  “Now let’s pretend all the money in the world is ten dollars,” Noah said. “I ain’t no Harvard economist, but I say those peanuts cost one dollar apiece. Ten nuts, ten dollars. Sound right?”

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “Yeah… yeah,” the man said.

  “Good.” Noah tapped the pile. “Now here’s the problem. Those ten dollars? They ain’t in our pockets. They’re in the pockets of some assholes up in New York City.”

  He paused, letting that hang in the stale pharmacy air.

  “They send down their order for these ten peanuts? Our townsfolk send ’em off and give away the only leverage they got.”

  He slowly swept five nuts aside, picked up two. “So I step in and say, ‘Instead of that horse shit, here’s what we’re gonna do—I give two to the man who planted these nuts. Seems fair, wouldn’t you say?’” He set them down, picked up two more. “Then I give two to the man who dug ’em up with his bare hands.” Last nut. “I give one to the woman who kept ’em watered while they worked in the heat.”

  He patted that little group. “These five nuts ain’t for sale. Ever. They belong to the good people who made ’em.”

  He looked the stranger dead in the eye.

  “Now. How much do the five nuts here”—he circled the untouched nuts—“how much do you reckon they cost now?”

  “Two dollars?” the man guessed.

  Noah’s palm smacked down on the remaining peanuts, crushing a couple of shells. Bits of skin and salt scattered, and the stranger jerked back. “That’s right!…”

  “The New York assholes still got ten dollars. But there’s only five nuts left on the market. So now they pay two dollars each. Ten dollars, five nuts. Their money buys half what it used to—half,” he emphasized.

  He swept the crumbs off the counter with the side of his hand. “I just swept half their wealth away. Didn’t fire a shot. Didn’t steal a damn thing. Just kept what’s ours—by the laws of nature. The real laws. The fair laws.”

  “Then they send in their robots and AI programs to farm the nuts themselves,” he said, shaking his head. “Clever. Nice try—thinkin’ they’ll cut us out of the process entirely.” He smiled. “But anything with an on switch has an off switch. You know what I’m sayin’?”

  His voice hardened.

  “Why should we send the fruits of our labor off to somebody we don’t know, who wasn’t even involved? But that’s what we do. Every damn day. We take their money and call it normal.” He muttered, “Trained like damn monkeys, we are,” under his breath.

  He straightened, suddenly louder. “That’s why we don’t take their money here. No good for buyin’ nuts. No good for buyin’ medicine. No good for buyin’ nothin’.”

  The man’s face crumpled. “I didn’t mean—I just—you can’t get this stuff on Fairness.”

  Noah’s tone shifted again—eerily calm. He tossed another nut into his mouth. “Oh, I know. I know, friend.” He stepped closer. “That’s ’cause those are ‘rich-people’s drugs.’ If you can’t get ’em with their damn ‘Fairness’ checks, it means they ain’t meant for you.”

  The smell of peanuts and floor cleaner mixed in the narrow space between them. “Fairness…” Noah shook his head. “Put a word like ‘fair’ on what they doin’—that’s a whole ’nother kind of theft. Stealin’ from the damn language itself.”

  Chomp—his jaw chewed a nut to oblivion, that one sounding like he took it with the shell on.

  “But see, this is a battle. And battles take commitment. We got to hold the line.”

  The stranger said nothing. His shoulders trembled against the glass of the door.

  “If we marched up north and tried to steal their money like savages,” Noah went on, “half of us would end up dead. Insurance would cut a check to the rich. Government’d print new dollars. They’d be whole again by Monday.”

  He lifted a finger and brought the words out slow, like hammer blows: “Stop. Using. God. Damn. Greenbacks.”

  The stranger stumbled backward until his shoulders hit the door. His breathing went quick and shallow.

  Noah’s voice turned almost gentle. “Now… I can tell you ain’t no troublemaker. And I believe you love that little girl of yours.” He shook his head. “But I think the folks in this town are committed… committed to the cause. It would be irresponsible of me not to let our people know that you ain’t… so committed… that you’re play’n both sides… use’n dollars… and use’n nuts. What side you’re on matters here. Be’n on a side matters more.”

  He let that sink in.

  Calhoun turned to one of the men who’d stood up earlier to block the visitor.

  “Larry, could you kindly go get it?”

  Without a word, the man stepped through the door to the interior of the pharmacy and then returned almost immediately with a small device. It looked like a cell phone that had two large accessories attached to it. It looked homemade.

  The stranger said, “What’s that?”

  Taking the device from Larry, Calhoun said, “This,” he turned the device in his hand, “plugs a hole—using both currencies leaks what we earned back into THEIR hands. Folks need to see you for what you are.”

  “Hold him,” Calhoun said to the two men.

  The two men quickly grabbed one of the man’s arms and pushed him back hard against the wall.

  The stranger resisted but was no match for the strength and size of Calhoun’s two men.

  Calhoun looked around the office and then set his eyes on a small painting hung on the pharmacy wall. It was cheap décor like you’d find in a thousand low-end hotels and dentist offices, but it had a solid wood backing.

  Calhoun picked the painting off the wall.

  He then held it up to the man’s face. “This will do,” he said.

  The stranger struggled.

  “Hold him still now,” Calhoun commanded.

  The two men held the man’s upper body hard against the wall, the man on his left grabbing his hair as well to hold his head steady.

  With his left hand, Calhoun held the painting up to cover the left side of the stranger’s face, touching the man’s nose. With his right hand, Calhoun held up the strange device to the right side of the man’s face. A beam projected from the device. Calhoun slowly panned the device from the top of the man’s head to his neck while continuing to hold up the painting like a mask. The right-hand side of the man’s face darkened, like a deep suntan.

  They released the man.

  “What the hell did you do?” he asked frantically.

  There was a smell similar to a charcoal grill with some chemical mixed in—almost like a mix of lighter fluid and bleach. There was also a faint crackling sound that was quickly fading away.

  The stranger didn’t seem to be physically hurt or in pain, but now the right side of his face was prominently darker than the left, with perfect vertical symmetry. He looked two-faced, like there was a seam running vertically down the centerline of his face.

  Looking at the stranger, Calhoun said, “I made your choices clear to the world. You been play’n in both worlds, my friend, the old and the new. Now everybody will know. It’s as clear as the nose on your face.”

  The stranger held his face with his hands.

  “That will last at least a year, maybe more, but not forever,” Calhoun said. “Everybody deserves redemption… but you’re gonna have to convince your neighbors that you’re somebody they still want to do business with. I think people on both sides are gonna hesitate. They might not find it in their hearts to trust you… they might feel you dishonored their sacrifices.”

  The stranger bolted out the front door, nearly crashing into someone who was entering.

  The man stepped to the side, thrown off balance by the fleeing stranger.

  “You let’n leakers in here now, Mayer?” he said.

  Calhoun tossed a peanut to one of the men who’d helped him. He caught it in his fist.

  “Nope, just mark’n them, Mike.”