Lawyers in Hell

by Morris, Janet

  Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  No time to clear it, not now, not with those five in pursuit and gaining. If he had fifteen seconds…. Frantically he jacked the slide, pointing the barrel down: nothing – but, no, it couldn’t be one of those easy ones, could it?

  If I’d brought a squad of Minutemen or some Bolsheviks, or some of Quantrill’s –

  No. No time to think about that. Think about running. Cover. Somewhere he could get the time to clear his gun and shoot back.

  Heavy automatic fire burped from behind him. Bullets clanged into the shipping crates, ricocheted hard against the metal, blowing chips off a cobblestone. The wind was moist and salty and pushed hard at his face as he threw himself into the cover of the crates and swung right.

  His slick and sweaty hands worked at the gun as he ran through the darkness in the containers’ shadow, one foot splashing into a thick puddle of filth. An alley…

  …an alley and safety.

  The first of Guevara’s men appeared behind him, momentarily unsure where he’d gone. It took a moment for them to get their bearings.

  By then, Walker was already through the alley; on a street again; in a doorway, and finally the gun was clear.

  “Where’d he go?” One of the kids.

  “Alley.”

  “He’s got a gun.”

  Six to one. Five to one, perhaps, if the shotgun man was still down. He had a gun and a sword and cover, and these were circumstances where those odds were reasonable.

  They knew it, too. They were hesitating.

  You were a closed book, Guevara. You were no longer relevant. We’d moved on.

  And suddenly it had been Trujillo again, the man taunting him…

  “I’m here,” Walker shouted. Leaned out of the doorway, gun up. Several figures, slowly moving along in the shadow of the containers about thirty feet away.

  “Come out.” Guevara’s voice. “I’ll even allow you to give the commands.”

  Instinctively, not rationally, Walker fired twice at the nearest of the dark figures. The response was a blazing stammer of automatic fire that came nowhere near him.

  No. Get the hell out of here. There is a time to run. You have resources….

  The hell with that.

  He’d take them on personally – except that he’d had eight rounds, and he’d used at least four, and there were five of them.

  The Committee must be told about this. He could deal with Guevara later.

  Carefully, slowly, he moved back along the alley, keeping to the darkest shadows. Another burst of automatic fire, apparently aimed at the doorway where he’d just been, showed that Guevara’s men were buying it.

  At an intersecting alley, a three-foot-wide crack, darker than a cesspit, appeared to his right. Out of their line of sight. Good.

  You bastard. You drunkard, has-been, son of a bitch, Guevara.

  He slipped into the alley, his foot sliding on something dead and rotten. The alley stank like a cesspit, too, and invisible things scuttled away as he moved.

  Guevara’s voice: “Running imperialist dog! We showed him a thing or two!”

  A half-hearted cheer.

  “Viva Guevara!” came a female voice. Followed by a slightly stronger cheer.

  Moving along the alley, ready to shoot (although it didn’t sound like he was being pursued), Walker clenched his lips.

  You were supposed to stay out of the way, Guevara. You’d been a potential nuisance. You’ve now become a real problem.

  Trujillo. Guevara’s gloating about blindfolds and cigarettes.

  And it’s just become very, very personal.

  *

  Eric Blair lit a new cigarette from his old, dropped the old one to grind it under his shoe-heel on the rough concrete floor. Coughed a couple of times. “Guevara’s back,” he repeated.

  “And we need to do something,” Walker growled. The Committee was gathered in the same under-factory basement, although the meeting had taken a day or so to arrange. So had doubling the guard: a company of Minutemen, uncomfortably cradling newly-issued M-16s, was stationed throughout the factory. “He almost killed me. He tried to kill me. He was going to put me up against a wall and shoot me.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Voltaire, the French Enlightenment writer. “You get used to the Undertaker’s halitosis eventually.”

  “No, I agree,” said Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky. “He does pose a certain threat.”

  “Damn right he does! Are we going to do something about it or not?”

  Alinsky looked at Walker. “You propose killing him?”

  “I propose we take these Minutemen, the Bolsheviks Leon has hanging around, everyone else we can gather up at short notice. Head downtown right now and blow him to hell,” Walker snapped. “Oh.”

  “‘Oh’ is right,” said Alinsky. “He’s already in hell – New Hell, to be precise. Do you know how many times that man has been killed? He bounces back. He doesn’t even seem to mind dying all that much. If you kill him, he’s martyred. Again. All these young neo-hippies and whatnot who make up his following? They’ll be dismayed for a few hours, and then all the more impressed when he returns.”

  “We can’t let him live,” said Walker, fighting to control himself. To convince himself that this was professional and operational, and not personal anger about having to retrace old steps and about how the son of a bitch had – knowingly or unknowingly – taunted him with flashbacks of Trujillo. “He’s a problem. He’s going to recruit cannon fodder that we could use. People are going to think we’re him and our revolution is being mounted by Guevara’s bunch of incompetents. He’s going to get the credit for our successes and we’re going to get the blame for – for pretty much everything he does.”

  “You’re angry,” said Trotsky. “But those are legitimate points. Guevara’s return is more than trivial, and killing him won’t solve the problem more than briefly.”

  Blair took another long drag of his cigarette and blew the smoke toward the room’s high and dark ceiling. “Why should we care about killing Guevara?” he asked.

  Walker glared at him. “Were you even listening?”

  “If you want to hurt a man, you destroy what he most values,” Blair went on calmly. “For Guevara, that’s not his life – he knows he’ll come back and the pain doesn’t matter to him. If you want to make Guevara afraid to trouble us again, you need to hurt him where it does count.”

  “And where would that be? Don’t shoot him in the head, kick him in the crotch?” Walker asked sarcastically.

  “Metaphorically, yes. Guevara is egotistical,” said Blair. “I propose we continue Operation Primus as planned –”

  “Ignoring him won’t work,” Trotsky cut him off. “He’ll simply try harder to get our attention.”

  “– with one thing changed,” Blair finished. “I don’t propose we ignore him. Guevara’s built his identity as a romantic legend. Heroically attacking only the most glamorous targets. He likes attention. He likes credit. I propose we credit him.”

  *

  The rally had been at a different performance venue in the same degentrified neighborhood, and it had been packed to the walls with hundreds of Guevara’s new recruits. Red banners and flashing lights, and somebody had blown up large photos of Guevara’s face to focus the decor. An opportunist with a printing press had gone into business, and there’d been damned souls outside hawking badges and tee-shirts.

  Much cheering and shouting of his name. This rally had been the best time Guevara had had in who knew how long. He was back!

  Now, as things died down and the crowd left, Guevara stood smiling on the stage with his hands on his hips.

  “We should have come here a lot sooner,” he said.

  Cobain touched a wet cloth to his eyes. He’d been doing that all day; the shards of glass in the beer Walker had thrown at him hadn’t blinded him, but his eyes still hurt. He nodded. “Coming back here was a good idea. Now what does this joker want?”
>
  The kid Cobain had indicated, coming up to the stage, was gaunt, spiky-haired and tattooed.

  “Hey, Guevara, bossman. Great speech you gave. You ever given any thought to publicity? Like, getting the message out to the wider hells? Convey to them what we’re all about?”

  Guevara cocked his head.

  “Yeah, I’m a communications guy, man. Name’s Boz, and I’m totally volunteering. Real experienced writer, I am.”

  “What have you written? Manifestos?”

  “Graffiti. My tag. More than five thousand times across the greater Los Angeles area.”

  “Anything else?” ‘Che,’ five thousand times…

  “Sometimes I said ‘rules’ or ‘lives’ next to it. I can write yours the same way.”

  Oh yes. That’s all we need and more.

  Guevara extended his hand to the kid. “It’s great to have you with us, Mister Boz. If you want pens, spray cans, anything else, just call on me.”

  “Viva Guevara,” the kid said and headed off.

  “Well,” said Guevara to Cobain and Rosa, who’d been handling sound for the event. “We’re back in charge. That jerk Walker and his committee fled like the Administration puppets they probably are.”

  Cobain wiped his eyes again. “I don’t know,” he said, shotgun in the crook of his arm. “That little bastard Walker was serious. Got away, too.”

  “Fled like a running dog,” Guevara gestured dismissively. “To tell his friends that we’re back in town, back in charge. The next rebel strike that happens –” his gesturing hand made a fist, pounding upward toward glory “– everyone will know is ours.”

  *

  ‘Totalitarian Club,’ the sign said. ‘Attendance Mandatory.’

  Except, the olive-skinned man in the DeadEx uniform thought, nobody seems to be here. He rang the doorbell again, or at least pushed the button and hoped it was connected to an actual ringer. Around New Hell, you never knew.

  Eventually, the big hardwood door opened.

  “You interrupted a meeting,” said a man in a business suit, beside a casually-dressed companion. “That’s against the rules.”

  “You got a present for us?” asked the guy with him; short and balding, in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. “From who? Nobody ever sends us presents!”

  “From whom,” the man in the business suit corrected him.

  The man in the DeadEx uniform shrugged.

  “I just deliver ’em, boss. You want it or not? This thing’s heavy.”

  The suited man took it. A two-by-two-foot box in festive wrapping paper.

  “Something for us to sign?” asked the man in the Hawaiian shirt. He’d been Administrative Secretary of the Ocawa Meadows Homeowners’ Association, in southern Florida, and his name was Harry Innis.

  “Nothing to sign that the company ever gives me,” shrugged the deliveryman.

  “They should,” said Innis. “All deliveries should be signed for. The rules say so. I’m Third Associate Section Head for Traffic and Parking Enforcement, and I know. Rules are rules.”

  “Yessir,” said the man in the DeadEx uniform. “I just follow mine, sir. Have a good afternoon.”

  The door closed. Free of the package, the delivery man walked down the stairs, past tight brownstones on a slope, along wide sidewalks several feet below the buildings’ entrances, and onto the street. Quiet street, genteel neighborhood. A few cars were parked here and there, and a big tan van, right outside the club.

  He stripped off the stolen jacket and cap and began jogging quickly away.

  *

  “They sent us a present!” Innis exulted, as the two brought the package into the front room. The suited man set it on a table.

  “That is completely out of order,” said the Deputy Associate Director of the Infernal Bureau of Sewage and Drinking Water Management, Fourth Division, New Hell Department. “A motion must be introduced, extenuating circumstances notwithstanding.”

  “I object,” said Max Weber. He was a middle-aged man with a black suit and a bowler hat under his arm; in life he’d been a pioneer of modern social science. “These are very extenuating circumstances. This is the first present anyone’s ever sent us, and I don’t think Robert’s Rules of Order cover it.”

  Brigadier-General Henry Martyn Robert, who’d written those rules, banged his gavel.

  “No, they don’t,” he said.

  “Very well,” said Weber. “I motion that we open the present.”

  “I second that motion,” said Innis.

  “Improper,” said Weber. “You’re not seated appropriately.”

  “I’m seconding your own motion,” said Innis.

  “Rules are rules,” Weber said.

  “You’re right. Sorry.”

  Another man raised his hand. “I second Mister Weber’s motion.”

  “Objections?” asked Robert.

  There were none.

  “Motion carried,” said Robert. “As the presiding member of this recreational gathering, it is incumbent upon myself to open the present.”

  He went to the table, carefully undid the bow and stripped away the wrapping paper. A card was taped to the underside of the box’s top flap. Robert opened it.

  “‘Dear Bureaucrats of New Hell,’” he read aloud. “‘Enclosed is fifteen pounds of high explosives. Die, scum. Signed, Che Guevara.’”

  There was a long, long moment of silence. A faint ticking could be heard from the package.

  “No motion was put forth, let alone properly carried, that he read the card,” somebody objected weakly.

  Someone else raised their hand: “I motion to adjourn.”

  “Seconded,” somebody added hurriedly, on the heels of that first person.

  “Carried,” said Robert. He ran for the door ahead of the crowd.

  *

  “I thought Guevara was out of it,” Innis snapped at Weber, as the three-dozen club members formed lines in columns of threes, in accordance with the rules that had long ago been established for emergency evacuations. Not that that had ever happened: nobody had ever cared about Administration’s middle-management enough to send mail bombs in the past.

  At least, none that had ever arrived. No DeadEx executives hung out here, but Innis thought he would definitely have a word with Weber suggesting that he talk with Robert about going through appropriate channels of communication (as stipulated by the correct organizational charts) to reach the damned bureaucrats responsible for this kind of thing.

  “Very well,” Robert addressed the crowd. “Everybody is accounted for. We just have to wait for the bomb disposal squad to arrive.”

  “And whine some more about their seventy-two virgins,” an elderly man muttered darkly.

  “Oh, stop bitching,” snapped Weber. “Just because you were one of them. They’re on their way, all right?”

  *

  Walker crouched on a rooftop, across the street and about a hundred yards away from the Totalitarian Club. He fingered the remote control and glanced at Lumumba.

  Lumumba put down his scope.

  “Forty-one. All of them outside, per proper procedure.”

  “Per proper procedure,” Walker repeated. In the back of the van sat forty-five pounds of dynamite, set to blow a respectable fraction of New Hell’s middle management back to the Undertaker. You couldn’t get a sufficiently-large bomb into their clubhouse, but you could bring them out to where a proper bomb could get them….

  “So?” Lumumba asked. “What are you waiting for? A motion to be carried?”

  “Not particularly,” said Walker, and hit the detonator.

  *

  Inside the van, a remotely-triggered spark flashed.

  Nothing happened. In the half-hour since the van had been parked, the nitroglycerine had sweated completely out of the dynamite and leaked across the bed of the van, six inches below the level of the detonator.

  *

  “Something looks wrong about that van,” said Innis. He headed toward it.
r />   “You’re just upset,” said Robert. “Stay where you are.”

  Innis puffed himself up: “I am the Third Associate Section Head for Traffic and Parking Enforcement, thank you very much. I motion that I be permitted to step out of line for the cause of professional duties.”

  “Motion seconded, for the cause of professional duties,” said Weber.

  “Very well,” said Robert. “You may inspect the van as you see fit. And we shall accompany you.”

  *

  “Shit,” said Walker. “Backup detonator. Now.”

  Lumumba passed it to him. The bureaucrats outside were getting agitated. Two were approaching the van, with the rest filing along behind.

  Walker hit the second remote.

  Nothing happened.

  “We put forty-five pounds of dynamite into that van,” Walker snarled. “What the hell is wrong with it?”

  *

  “I’ve figured out what’s wrong with the van,” Innis declared to Robert, triumphantly getting up off his knees. He folded his ruler neatly back into his chest pocket.

  “And?” Robert asked. The other members of the Club were antsy, standing by. None of them much liked the fact that one of them had authority to act while they didn’t.

  Innis drew a blank ticket-form from his pocket, and a pen.

  “It’s improperly parked,” he said. “Almost a full half-inch farther from the curb than is allowed.”

  *

  “Failed bomb,” said Lumumba. “You sure those detonators were right?”

  “Triple-checked. And we had that backup for a reason.”

  Lumumba raised his scope again.

  *

  “Rules are rules,” Innis said, finishing the ticket citation. He pulled up one of the van’s wipers and placed the ticket – careful to align it at a perfect, ninety-degree angle against the base – on the windshield. “Damned rulebreakers. They commit murder or something to get here, and then they expect to continue their misbehavior? Jaywalking, inappropriate expense deductions –” he gestured at the van “– parking almost seven-sixteenths of an inch beyond regulation maximum distance….”