***
Hartman arrived at his war-room, listened to the sirens outside, and realized he needed to pick up the pace. He wanted to jot down one last entry in his log.
He flicked on the TV to PBS news while he composed his thoughts. The People’s Movement protesters were bandying slogans like “Not Anti-capital, just Anti-theft,” “The People are Too Big to Fail,” “Land of the Free, Home of the Slave.”
A college student had been bludgeoned by the campus police and the whole thing had been captured on a cell phone camera. The scene of brutality had gone viral to the point where the major media had to show something about it to reassure the masses the regents would not condone such savagery. No doubt the only thing they couldn’t condone was that it was captured on a cell phone.
He made a quick note to himself that higher consciousness wasn’t enough, if it was concentrated in too few, and those few were such poor strategists as to be stymied by the usurping of the media machine. Like it or not, he’d have to supplement his philosophy lectures with strategy games to ensure politics, power, and persuasion in the wrong hands didn’t win out. He reminded himself that the culturally more evolved Greeks, under the tutelage of Plato and Aristotle, fell to the Romans, not for knowing less, just for having less effective weapons at their disposal.
What was it he wanted to write down? Oh, yes, that was it. He needed to isolate the chemical in rats’ brains that compelled them to find a way out of any snare. None of his students could extricate themselves from the locked rooms. Few even tried. The Houdini psychology was fundamental to escaping the confines of history in general. He thought briefly that writers, too, have this knack for writing their characters into corners they can’t possibly escape so they could end each chapter on a cliff hanger. With each successive chapter they thus practiced this very same act of snaking out of impossible situations. Maybe forcing his students to embed their philosophical thinking in narrative form would not only help get it out to the masses; it might help procure the Renaissance mind-set he was after. Alas, hindsight was twenty-twenty, and so it was time to start anew.
He closed the journal, jealously eyed the other tablets. He would make his way back here eventually to retrieve what he was forced to leave behind. Thinking fondly of that future moment, he extricated himself from the room, hastened through the crawlspaces toward freedom.
FIFTY-SIX
Outside Hartman’s home, there were lights flashing everywhere. The police helped Murray into one of the squad cars. Fiona noticed he sported the smirk on his face of someone who’d survived the worst kind of trauma with guile and cunning, and without being the least bit changed. She didn’t think that was the kind of shockproofed psychology Hartman had in mind; that of a sociopath. In that sense, maybe he had changed. He had struck her as a tempestuous child prior to the Hartman-effect. Sometimes, what didn’t kill ya, made you meaner, less human. If the angels of the lord were forged in the bowels of hell, as Hartman professed, so clearly were the devils.
“You say Hartman's still in there?” the cop interrogating Fiona repeated, as if still not hearing what he wanted to hear.
“Where the hell else could he be?” Fiona said. “You have the place surrounded.”
He stuffed his notebook in his back pocket. “That’s quite an ordeal you suffered in there.” He paused to build up nerve. Oh God, here it comes, Fiona thought. “I don’t suppose it’d help if I whisked you away to the south of France. We could rent one of those castles, dress up as lord and lady, hire minions to do our bidding.” She must have been giving him a queer look, as he hastily added, “After you’re all done feeling traumatized, I mean.” He held up his hands in a placating fashion.
She smiled before she even realized she was doing so. “How can you afford all that?”
“I’ve been saving up for the perfect woman. You survived a death-dealing maniac and your hair and nails don’t even look mussed.”
Slowly, escaping from her, a laugh; it built until it was out of control. She could tell he felt ashamed and embarrassed. “Yeah, guess you are way out of my league,” he said.
“I would be happy to accept your offer of trauma therapy, officer. All my life, it’s the only kind that ever worked.”
He brightened.
***
Out in back of Hartman’s home, Winona led the way through a hidden passageway. She helped Hartman up. He was having trouble squeezing his large frame through the egress.
“You learned the maze of secret crawlspaces inside of a few hours?” Hartman asked. “It took me years.”
“Not now, honey. We gotta get you out of here. There's God's work to be done. We can't have these heathens getting their hands on you.”
Moments later, they slipped beyond the line of squad cars, past the police and paramedics distracted by the agitated dogs, the dead bodies being paraded out, and the few survivors looking like “survivor” was a misnomer.
***
Absent Winona’s assistance, Sheriff Brody helped himself to a fire ax on one of the fire trucks, which did just fine for broaching the curiously locked rooms, not one of them sporting an actual keyhole. He was still scratching his head over that one. His quick thinking had led to the expedited exodus of bodies.
Robin Wakefield’s finger pointing was no less crucial to the speedy recovery of the victims. Brody found, to his surprise, Robin could match what had been recorded on the monitors with the floor plans Winona left in his hands. He kept mumbling something about the female hormones already paying dividends, which he had every intention of reinvesting. Brody figured it was on account of shock.
***
Outside, despite the drawback of a moonless night, Winona picked the lock of a neighbor's car with the miniature tools dangling on her key chain. The Plymouth Roadrunner from the sixties showed wear and tear not even the dark of night could hide. From inside the car, she opened the side door so Hartman could settle into the front passenger seat.
She hot-wired the ignition. The sparks flew, nearly as colorfully as Fourth of July fireworks, before the engine turned over.
“Don't worry, sweetie,” she said. “I know every back-country route from here to Alaska.”
“What made you memorize all that?”
“My mother was on the run from a psycho husband half her life. It was the only way we could stay ahead of him.”
“I guess that explains some of your other skills, as well. God works in mysterious ways.”
She eased down on the accelerator. They made their escape in the car, its lights off, in the dead of night.
***
Officer Billy Bowman crept along inside one of the crawlspaces in Hartman’s mansion. “This better count as my rookie initiation.” He brushed webbing aside.
After taking a left in the maze, he froze like a pointer on a fox hunt. “Screw this!” he balked. He pulled his pistol and fired it at one of the monster rats. “Like ducks in a shooting gallery.” He kept the gun in hand as he continued to crawl forward on all fours. “Be thankful you finally get to shoot your gun, Billy.”
He came to a fork in the corridors, decided to head in the direction of the light.
Once in the light, he was able to stand up. It was a small room, a theater of operations from the looks of it, considering several of the hidden passageways converged here. Lining the dusty walls were even dustier books. Billy pulled one of them out. They were Hartman’s diaries. We’ll take this for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and excuse enough to get to hell out of here.
He grabbed the books on the desk, figuring he could carry those. The ones on the walls could wait for another time, and a more intrepid officer. He might just forget to mention the other diaries, come to think of it, lest they get any cute ideas about having him return for the rest.
***
Billy handed over the books to Sheriff Brody, standing in the gated yard of the mansion, surveying the big picture, and placating himself with his pipe. He cracked open the leather binding
s. “Put these on the detectives’ desks back at the precinct. They can damn well do the paperwork on this case themselves. Might just help them process everything they lived through. God knows, I’ve nightmares enough for one evening.”
***
Exiting the front of Hartman’s house, Robin propped Manny up at the shoulder. He remained in a daze, and unable to stand on his own from all the female hormone pills Robin had slipped him. Robin had thrown a blanket over him; he was shivering, and sweating profusely.
To add insult to injury, Robin had to fight to keep Manny safe from the Bullmastiffs, which had broken free of their handlers. They tackled the cops fighting to restrain them to the ground, pinned them there, growled and barked, and did everything they’d been genetically bred and trained to do for generations.
“Don't say a word, you hear me? Not now, not ever,” Robin said. That much seemed to register. Manny nodded feebly.
Robin passed Manny’s care off to two cops as he slipped away into the shadows of the house. He searched for the guns Winona had dropped out the window. He no sooner got his hands on them than one of the dogs, noticing what he was up to, came charging after him, sure he was trying to make off with his master’s private property. The two cops restraining him didn’t even slow the animal down. They were dragged behind like a pair of water skiers showboating over a ski ramp as they flew over a mound of earth that was part of the garden landscaping.
A policeman’s panning flashlight revealed phosphorescent purple liquid oozing out a drainage pipe from Hartman’s house, and one of the Bullmastiffs lapping it up. Hartman had, perhaps unwittingly, put his dogs on his own vitamin regimen.
Robin climbed into the back of the patrol car beside Manny. He was about to close the door when the dog trotted up and sniffed his holster and jacket pocket, where he’d stashed the guns. The dog seemed to sense these things did not belong to his master, and promptly surrendered the hunt, allowed the cops to manhandle him back towards the house.
“Take us here,” Robin said, slipping the officer a business card through the safety mesh. The same officer who sat oblivious while the dog rushing them in the back seat looked like it was going to make a meal of them.
The officer behind the wheel regarded the address on the card. “Who carries the address of a loony bin around with him in his wallet?”
“A realist.” Robin returned the wallet to his hind-pocket. “Hurry, he's in a sorry state.”
“I guess I'd be too after a night locked up with that guy.” The officer sounded green and shocked by the ugliness of the world, as if this was his first day on the job. But Robin could see it wasn’t; he just saw the world through rose-tinted glasses he’d never have the nerve to take off.
The officer turned the engine over.
Robin gazed at his cell phone. Reading Winona’s file somewhat belatedly, one giant fact jumped out at him: Winona used to be clueless about how others came at the world. She was written up several times for not fitting in at work, and causing others to feel uncomfortable. “Oh, dear God.”
“What?”
“Hartman’s success with Winona must have been why he bothered to continue his experiments in the first place!”
“I’m sorry. Is that supposed to mean something to me?”
“Not to you.” Robin retrieved one of the hormone-pill bottles from his pocket, studied the label, then clenched the jar until his hand blanched white. It was probably just one pill, Robin, and it was administered a long time ago.
This meant Robin had to revise his thesis regarding Hartman’s medical breakthrough. It did not create random changes in Hartman’s test subjects, as Hartman himself suspected. It gave them the perfect escape from their former selves. Just not the escape Hartman had in mind.
Robin watched absently as the last of the Bullmastiffs escaped the clutches of the police, vaulted over the fences and disappeared into the night.
He glanced down at his knees bobbing anxiously. “Keep it together, Robin. Losing it would just be far too fashionable.”
As the car wended its way through the estate, he occupied himself with the vista. His bobbing knee refused to settle.
Maybe it was for the best he didn’t know then what he’d come to know, after digging deeper into Hartman’s students’ lives:
That the best and brightest had fallen in spite of the entire gamut of get-over-themselves schemes, powerless to undo the PTSD symptoms of modern life.
Like so many others making headline news, they had failed the game of continuous improvement, and of employing best practices to stay afloat of the rising tide of expectations of the global economy.
The Renaissance types, one and all, were succumbing, if not to impatience with their own unfolding process, then to the men in black, or to rogue factions of their own element, like Clay Hartman.
If he’d known all that, he might have been tempted to ask: So who was he? What one thing did he have in spades the others did not? Was it what Drew said it was, or was it something else? Or was he just fooling himself?
***
Ardel materialized in time to see Robin hand the business card to the officer at the wheel. He sucked on his cigarette, and watched the car drive off moments later. “You have no idea, do you? Well, few do at the beginning of their journey.”
A young police officer, Billy Bowman, bumped into him pretty hard in his zeal to get away from the crime scene, looking behind him instead of in the direction he was running. Ardel brushed him off as he fell to his knees and vomited.
Ardel helped him up. “Sorry, pal,” Bowman said, his bad breath blowing into Ardel’s face. “Guess I’m a little shaken up.”
“Most people are at the sight of a birth.”
“A birth?”
Ardel smiled. While still holding on to him, to steady the man, he started dematerializing in slow motion, just to mess with the guy.
Bowman’s eyes went wide. “I think this is one more thing that’s not going in your report, Billy.”
“Best to face your demons, kid, befriend them. You’d be surprised the doors that one key alone opens.”
He finished his disappearing act. There was an entire universe falling apart in need of his skills. One lowly planet’s instabilities riding out a Renaissance age was, in many ways, beneath him. But Robin Wakefield certainly wasn’t. Though at the rate he was going, Ardel was going to have to hold out a lot longer than intended while his replacement came up to speed.
RENAISSANCE 2.0
BOOK 2
“Karma Chameleon”
CAST OF CHARACTERS
LEADS
Robin Wakefield
Drew Harding
Clay Hartman
MAJOR ENSEMBLE
Mort
Gretchen
Santini
Manny Breakman
Saverly
Winona
MINOR ENSEMBLE
K.A.C.
Just Drew (robot)
Just Robin (robot)
Cliff Masters
Piper Shiftly
Faraday
Epstein
Crychek
(hospital staff)
Stephanie
Jim (the orderly)
Moses
Microwave Man
(Berkeley P.D.)
Ethan
Emmett
Paolo
Lance
Crumley
CAMEOS
Laura Bradford
Wilfred Grimes
Coren Gallagher
BIT PLAYERS
All other named characters
ONE
Drew had decided to jaunt off to DC to peddle influence. As to what cause she was promoting exactly, to avoid jinxing herself, she wouldn’t say. Just that she would be gone six to eight weeks. She’d catch Robin up when she got back. She evidently played with time the way DNA replicators played with base pairs to avoid unseemly political mutations.
She’d left the note regarding her departure on the
fridge the night he’d gone to Hartman’s. Probably for the best she was out of the loop on what had happened since then, leastways, until she finished her business in Washington.
Her absence meant Robin was on his own to contend with their cavernous kitchen which looked better prepared to swallow him whole than spit out a cup of hot soup.
“I don’t suppose there’s anything as simple as a frying pan around here,” Robin groused, talking to himself to fill the empty space. The house seemed that much bigger without Drew. It didn’t help their flowing interior-design allowed him to see into infinity from virtually any vantage point, with views into the yard that was also landscaped to play up depth of field. He was lightheaded from the “center of the universe” effect.
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 41
